MARCH 13, 2024 – (Cont.) Several months before my inaugural signing event at the Barnes & Nobles store in the heart of downtown Minneapolis, I happened to be in the store for another lawyer’s book debut. The book itself was flimsy in form and substance and smacked of a DYI project. I knew full well I was judging it by the cheap cover with its unimaginative graphics, but the opening couple of pages read like an insomniac’s antidote. The author’s profession as a colorless legal scrivener was a dead giveaway.
The store had set up numerous rows of chairs for an audience, but when I strolled by at the appointed “showtime,” the thin, white-haired bespectacled author faced an audience of three. They were of his vintage, probably his wife and the couple’s next-door neighbors. It was pitiful. As I rushed out of the store, I vowed that I would not subject myself to such public humiliation. I had confidence in my story and writing and following Vince Flynn’s advice, I’d committed to a high-end finished product but all for a signing event drawing only three people? I winced at the thought.
As matters unfolded, I derived as much pure fun marketing the novel as I had writing it. The local version of my target readership—bankers and lawyers—spent the majority of their waking hours in the office buildings surrounding the downtown Barnes & Noble store. Accordingly, I’d make that ground zero for my marketing kick-off. If the store had accommodated Sleepwalker, Esq., surely they’d give me a similar platform, except I intended to fill every chair that could be crammed into the space and all standing-room surrounding the seats.
After the book had gone to press and I’d retained a distributor, I set up a meeting with the manager at Barnes & Noble. Handing her an autographed copy of the book, I gave her a complete overview of my marketing plan to draw a stampede to her store. I convinced her that it would be like no other book signing event her store had ever hosted.
Having promised the moon, I had to shoot for Mars.
I’d attended enough book signings at which the usual occurred: the author stood in front of the audience and . . . read from the book. Why do the usual? I thought. Instead, I envisioned bringing excerpts to life by way of short skits. I called my friend Bill Orth, who in my first-year classes had sat on the other side of my good friend Ray Peterson.
In a previous life, Bill had taught high school English and led headed up the drama department. Since law school he’d become a preeminent criminal defense attorney, focusing mostly on federal felony cases. He was a master of the courtroom and courtroom theatrics. When I told him about my idea for acting out scenes from Severance Package, he jumped at the chance to be involved. I put him in charge of actor recruitment, rehearsal, and direction, and with his usual intensity, he ran with the project.
Before I knew it, he was holding auditions in one of the main lecture halls at our law school. As a member of the board of trustees, he’d had little trouble commandeering the space and advertising the “opportunity.” To his considerable surprise and mine, he had to turn away auditioners, given their numbers. Among them were a number of judges before whom Bill had tried cases. Bill’s theatrical production was such a hit among the participants that the show was replicated several times at signings that followed the inaugural event at Barnes & Nobles.
But I wanted to do more than feature dramatizations of excerpts from the novel. I wanted to “tell the story of the story”; that is, what had motivated me to write the novel, something about the process of writing a novel, and then, the real work—trying to get the damn thing published—and along the way, how life wound up imitating art when after finishing Severance Package, I received a real one. For visual effect, I drew five 4 x 6 cartoons featuring the various stages of the enterprise and mounted this on exhibit boards which I displayed at each of the signing events.
Yet a party isn’t a party without people. While Bill Orth was working on the theatrical side of things, and amidst my art project than now filled the dining room, I developed a mailer . . . and more. The mailer was a miniature facsimile of the book cover art. Inside was the vital information about the inaugural signing—time and place—along with the marketing slogan that I’d adopted for the book: “Ask not what you can do for your company but what your company can do for you.” It was a play on the famous line from President Kennedy’s inaugural address “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” On all my marketing materials I attributed it to the novel’s protagonist, John Anchor.[1]
Each mailer envelope bore the ink stamp, “PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL – SEVERANCE PACKAGE.” And serendipitously, the U.S. Postal Service had just come out with a new stamp featuring a stylized American flag and the inscription, “Honoring Those Who Served.” The official honorees were veterans, but on my mailer the honorees were corporate soldiers.
I sent over 600 of the mailers to officer workers in downtown Minneapolis, the majority of whom were bankers and lawyers. I knew many of them, and I figured that the rate of attendance among them would be far greater than the standard 1%.
But I took nothing for granted. Late on the eve of the signing, I called the office phones of over 100 people and left a VM: “Hi _________. This is Eric Nilsson calling. Say, just reminding you of the book signing event at Barnes & Noble on Wednesday, starting at 12:15. It will be a celebration you won’t want to miss, and if you do, you’re going to hear about it and wish to heck you’d been there in person. Anyway, I look forward to seeing you there! Thanks. Take care.”
Also, I hired several people adorned with sandwich boards to walk up and down Nicollet Mall in the vicinity of the Barnes & Noble store, starting about a half hour before the signing.
Finally, I gave my lawyer friend Ralph Mitchell a copy of the book and at 11:30 on signing day sent him and his wife Mary Jane (also a lawyer, who a year later wound up working for my firm) up and down all the elevators of the tallest office buildings in downtown Minneapolis. The script I gave them was this:
MARY JANE: What do you have there?
RALPH: Uh? Oh, a book that just came out by a local author—Eric Nilsson. Ever heard of him? A lawyer downtown.
MARY JANE: Is the book any good?
RALPH: I can’t put it down. I bought it yesterday, read a couple of chapters last night and got totally hooked. Say—I think there’s a signing at Barnes & Noble downtown here, starting at 12:15 today. Wanna go?
MARY JANE: Sure!
Ralph and Jane later reported that they lost track of the up and down elevator rides and had to quit early because they started feeling sick. But the effort was effective, they said. The lunchtime crowd packed all the down rides.
An hour before showtime, I set up my cartoon exhibits, checked with Bill Orth and his players, then repaired to an employee breakroom at Barnes & Noble. There I waited, wondering what effect my efforts would produce. (Cont.)
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
