While working at a creative company I noticed that the employees working there who were in the marketing department usually didn’t make as much sense to me as the artistic people did.  They were definitely business people who wore suits and were concerned about money and didn’t seem to have as much of a sense of humor as the creative types. I started out in the marketing department and branched out to other departments so I get to experience all types of employees.

One of the things I liked about my job was that the company had a progressive attitude about learning.  I started working there doing a marketing project and then finally got some work as a production assistant and then I changed departments to testing.  I was a natural at it but I didn’t have much education or experience in that area.  My manager at that time gave me a budget and let me go shopping for testing books.  This was helpful and necessary because it was kind of an unusual field that most people at that time just fell into.  I was good with computers but I never expected I’d be testing video games for a living so I needed all the outside help I could get.

While I was looking at testing books I also tried to find a marketing book for an online writer.  This was because I did special projects for the company for the marketing department where I compared their products with other similar successful products from other companies.  I wanted the marketing book too because I needed to understand some of the things I was supposed to compare about the competing products.

The job was actually really fun because I got to play children’s video games from other companies as well as working on them for the company where I was employed.  I never expected I would do such a job so this was the main reason I found myself exploring bookstores trying to find a marketing book and good books about testing.  I fell into it initially because I had done writing projects in the past, a friend of mine was working for this creative company and he thought I might be a good match.  It turned out I was, and I stayed with the company for about two years.  I learned a lot on the job, because I definitely needed to and the books I bought really did help.

One form of free advertising around right now that can really help you to book marketing on the internet is the informal reader review on bookselling websites.  I have a couple of friends who have published books and they have gotten people they know to write reviews for them on some of these sites.  One man wrote a book about his experiences in Antarctica.  It’s a hilarious book, but I think the initial printing was small partly because it was his first book.  He utilized some of the larger online booksellers to help him market book by using their handy reader review feature.

We worked together at a creative company where we both made many friends.  He got several of these friends who were all literary people or animators to write reviews for him.  I thought about writing one myself because a mutual friend gave me a copy of the book for a gift, but I was too busy right then to sit down and read it.  I didn’t want to write a fake review of a book I hadn’t really read so I let other people help him out.  I have read the book now because it’s years later.  I don’t know if he ended up selling enough books to have a second printing because our mutual friend moved to San Francisco and it’s harder for us to stay in close touch.  I did think that it’s a clever marketing idea to try to pull in people who will want to read your book by utilizing online reader reviews.

The author of the book about Antarctica has other irons in the fire anyway.  He made a short film about his Northern experiences as well and I believe that he’s gotten some good exposure through that too.  When I first met him, he was writing homemade zines about sharks.  So I guess he grew a lot in his scope of who he would reach through his writing anyway.  I am sure he is still involved happily in creative adventures.

Knitting is a popular arts and crafts activity.  I have tried it several times myself.  I learned the basics when I was a child, and then I took it up again as an adult.  It’s a meditative activity.  I used to do it sometimes in the mornings when I was still groggy as a way of waking up gently.  It is very relaxing.  My Mom taught me more about knitting and if I stay with her and we knit together she always fixes my mistakes.  I have another friend who is a tremendous knitter.  She can knit anything.  She knitted me a little mouse out of red yarn one year for Christmas.

She and I used to meet at a local pub twice a month and drink beer, talk and knit.  It was great fun and she also fixed all my mistakes.  I had a Japanese friend whose Mother had been a knitting teacher.  I lived close to my friend and she taught me knitting for a while too.  She said I was her best student.  I would walk the block over to her apartment sometimes and she would fix my mistakes.  I don’t know if I will ever be great at fixing my mistakes so I have been lucky in knowing fantastic knitters.

My Japanese friend lent me a bunch of knitting books once but the problem was they were all in Japanese.  They had pictures but I still couldn’t completely follow what was going on.  This got me thinking that I wished they were in English and that for any interest there is a writers market out there.  Especially there is a writers market for online writers open to you if you are good at something and can mingle writing words and taking pictures.  I returned my friend’s knitting books after some time because I got much more from having her show me things since she spoke English.  I didn’t speak Japanese.  I told my friend who liked to drink and knit that she should make a knitting book and earn herself some extra money.  She is also a photographer.  She said no to that though, she is in school to become an epidemiologist so knitting is just her stress relieving hobby.

When I was a child I started to write the Japanese form of poetry called haiku. My teacher had our entire class do this one day and I found that for me it was a great way to write poetry. I liked the syllable counting aspect that I had to fit my words to. My Mom thought that my sister and I should make a book of our poems and give them to our extended family as a holiday gift. This was my first foray into how to publish my own writing.

My Dad’s work place had a copy machine we could use, so we went there and created our own booklets and sent them to our relatives. After that point I was always interested in making books out of my writing. When I was eighteen I met others who were zine writers, and who were publishing chap books, poetry and their own literary magazines. We all did these works by going to Kinko’s to make the copies and then using staples and glue.

I started going to poetry slams almost every week. The other poets I met in this environment were all extremely interested in doing anything themselves, and this included putting out books or booklets of their writing.

My boyfriend of that decade was a musician but in his free time he would spend hours making a bunch of small, funny books that he said were kid’s books, thus teaching himself how to publish. He had a whole randomizing process for making creations out of a collection of clip art. Then he’d randomly pick words from a dictionary and randomly select which sets went together.

His book, ‘A is for Walrus’ masqueraded as a harmless alphabet book for toddlers. If you read it, you would find that it was not really a children’s book but a dark and interesting art project which most parents would never want to read to their children.

His hobby moved me to continue my own learning process about book marketing. I really liked taking my pieces of poetry and combining them together into an organic, home made book.

Ten years later a friend and I decided to create hand made journals to use as our personalized holiday gifts that year. We had a hole driller and using discarded paper, and string to tie the books together, we created a journal for each person on our gift list. We decorated them with spray paint stencils and origami paper and they turned out great.

It is a good thing for writers to get exposure.  This is my premise.  Today, if you go online and do searches on just about anything you will get to see a writer getting some exposure.  Online writers vary from lay people writing about subjects that mean a lot to them personally such as people who have a disorder, or parents of children with disorders like autism and the like. Or creative writers from various ilks who go online and write blogs or write poems and share them with others, or whatever.  Or even relatives just saying hello to each other.

If you do searches you can find many pieces of writing that you are looking for.  They are free mostly, and it is a fact that someone will have liked something enough to spend time transcribing it for others to read.  I have done searches on my favorite poets to see what I could find, and have come up with a pretty amazing amount.  It’s free to read online writers unless someone has figured out a scam to charge you, or it’s on a sales site where you have to do something like order a book that will then be shipped to you. And then you would receive something for your money anyway.

I have searched for poetry books written by my favorite writers and I have found them.  I got all kinds of results. I got official results such as published books, that someone put on the web, and shorter sections of some writers’ writing.  I understand that there is a device you can buy these days that is like a mini computer that is full of hundreds of books. I like using the internet to find information but I have to say that even though it’s quite a feat to make a machine that can hold so many books, I still really prefer to read the old fashioned way, holding the book in my hand.  Books become like old friends to me, but I can’t say I have ever felt that way about my computer though I am glad to have it.  Computers and the internet are great tools for helping you to locate writers and writing, but I will always love books the best.

If you have a good internet connection at your home and some free time you can do all kinds of fun things.  If you like to read a lot you will find that there are many online authors these days.  This includes famous authors who have either posted their writings themselves, or had a big fan spend time posting their writing.  I was really happy to find out that one of my favorite poets had been included on one of these sites where there are a lot of online authors and their work.

His poetry books were not widely available and had been out of print for a long time.  I could find them in my favorite school library but that was the only spot I ever saw any.  A wonderful person who had access to all of this writer’s poetry collections had taken the time to transcribe them all onto the internet.  I was so happy to find these poems.  I saved a few of my favorites by printing them out and I got to savor them later for years.

The internet is a fantastic tool for people to share writing.  There has never been anything like it.  Think of how an internet site like the popular video sharing sites get so many thousands of hits on the most popular videos.  This is truly amazing.  Almost anyone can have their project become public, or become one of thousands of online authors by posting their writing on their own website or on some of the wonderful public writing sites.  Everyone has heard a story about at least one person who has become well known because of the internet.

In past times when publishing was confined to the world of books, it was much harder.  People didn’t get to experiment nearly as much with information sharing and the only way to effectively do research was to go to a library.