Consumer Behaviour

So, having written my book, and to be honest a question I pondered whilst I was writing it, how should I try and get it published.  I say ‘try’ because we’ve all heard stories about people trying to find an established publisher only to discover that they receive a billion manuscripts a day and only think about looking at a couple; OK a mild exaggeration, but no doubt it’s a tough route to go.

What are the options?

Self-publishing sounds like one option, but in fact it covers a multitude of possibilities (and let me say right now that I’m no expert on any of them).  These range from essentially paying a company to publish your work for you to sending it to an on-line company who do nothing more than print one off (or send it electronically) when a request arrives. 

Paying to be published strikes me as a risky route to go.  You have no way to know how effective the support you’ll receive will be, and with the publisher earning all their revenue from your business with them (rather than from the sales of the book) they don’t have a compelling need to market it aggressively on your behalf.

The print on demand type services are an interesting way to go.  My friend Jay Wright wrote a book on Guitar Acquisition Syndrome and lodged it with Lulu.com.  He’s sold several thousand around the world through his own marketing efforts, through guitar shows, guitar stores and EBay.  With a print on demand service there’s no major risk; you can order a large number of copies to get the average cost down slightly, but you can order small numbers too.

Self-publishing offers the attractive potential of  receiving a higher profit per sale.  With no publisher’s profit to consider the sales model is a very simple function of volume and price.  What’s more, the print quality is excellent and you don’t have to fight with anyone about pricing, marketing, the cover design or anything else!

With so many advantages to the self-published route why look for a publisher?

I think there are several potential advantages:

• It’s easy to look at publishers as the enemy, but they should be the people with the knowledge and expertise to help make the most of your (and their) product.
• Being master of your own destiny is all well and good, but if you respect someone else’s opinion having someone care about your all the elements of your book should help make it better, not worse.
• Publishing works like an implicit endorsement; yes, there are many lousy books that have been published, but nevertheless anyone can self-publish.  At least a published book has found one person who thinks enough of it to bring it to the book-buying market.

Downsides?  Not finding a publisher who wants your book is probably the biggest!  And once you have one they may suggest changes you don’t agree with, fleece you with a contract that is unfair, not lift a finger to market your work, and probably a thousand other things I’ve yet to encounter!

I’ve decided to try and get a publisher for my book.  I want the expertise, I want someone to help make my book as good as it can be and I think that the added endorsement will enhance its status.

But I know finding a publisher won’t be easy.  I’m willing to be persistent.  But it’s a big publishing world, how the heck do you decide where to start?

I’ll discuss that next time, when a big stroke of luck shines a bright light on the murky world of publishing!

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Getting a Book Published book, getting published

I pondered whether to use this blog on consumer behaviour to detail my book-writing journey and have decided that, since the book is (of course) about consumer behaviour and market research, it’s fair enough.  And I’ll be explaining elements of psychology that crop up along the way too, so I hope it will be interesting from a number of angles.

So, I’ve written my book. 

And writing a book is quite hard.  Between making the decision that I wanted to write a book and sitting there thinking, “Bloody hell, I’ve finished” there were weeks of sitting and researching and typing and hoping and wondering.

The wondering is quite preoccupying.  Writing is a very solitary process and you occasionally wonder if what you’re writing is worthwhile, whether anyone would be in the least bit interested in what you’re writing about and, perhaps most worryingly, whether you’re capable of writing at all.  The problem is that there’s no easy way of answering any of those questions until you’ve finished, and even then you probably don’t really know.

The best writing advice I received was from published author Kevin Hogan who said that I should never go back and edit before the book was finished.  Too many people end up with a perfect first chapter, or first page, but nothing more.  You just have to write until it’s done, then make it better.

For me the best writing aid was the Microsoft Word ‘word count’ feature.  I’ve always found numbers reassuring and it was comforting to track the progress I made (which I did on an old envelope).  This provided me with the most astonishing discovery; if you write at least a little each day the word count increases and you get closer to your target (I know, astonishing isn’t it).

What I discovered, psychologically-speaking, was that if you want to become a writer you have to pretend to be a writer for a couple of months, after which time you forget you’re pretending and the ingrained habit of writing becomes something you find yourself doing.  Fairly soon the serotonin buzz of seeing the word count tick over another 5,000 word threshold was significantly greater than the low doses available from watching re-runs of Friends or some other TV show that I wasn’t really that bothered about.

I’ve heard people say that you should stop watching TV if you want to make time to write.  Undoubtedly that’s a great idea, but in order to want to do something else like writing you have to push yourself to the point where that something else is more rewarding.   Just like with dieting, wanting an outcome is unlikely to be enough for most people, you’ve got to force the behaviour first.  It’s easy to be smug and say, “Stop watching TV and write”, but it doesn’t work that way for most of us.

So having written my book what now?

Over the coming weeks I’m going to share my experience of trying to get a book published. 

Some of what I’m going to write about has happened (but over such a long time period that you would have undoubtedly lost interest if you’d been living through it in real time – I nearly lost interest and it’s my book!). 

You’re going to meet some interesting characters, a few villains and perhaps even a hero or two. 

One thing is clear, no one knows what the ending will be.

Next time I’ll talk about the different routes to getting your book into print, what I believe the benefits are of each, and which route I plan to take.   I’ll hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Getting a Book Published consumer behaviour, consumer research, getting published, market research, psychology, writing a book

The man walked onto the station platform very casually.  Most of the other people around me paid him little or no attention at all, but I found my eyes drawn back to him repeatedly.  In fact, I had to work hard to make sure that he didn’t catch me looking his way a little too often.

I tried to size up the situation.  The group around him were standing too far away to be friends, but they were close enough to suggest they weren’t strangers either.  I guessed they were fellow commuters, familiar with one another, but not with each others’ lives.  They didn’t know what I knew about him.  Instead they had been taken in like so many others by his relaxed air and general bonhomie.

I considered what it was that had first made me recognise him; what unconscious reference had caused me to notice him, fixate my attention on him and trigger that feeling of fear. 

It was several factors, I decided.  Like a simple jigsaw puzzle any one of the elements would have been insufficient, but together they fired up that recognition I’d experienced and made me instantly wary and attentive.  It was the distinctive coffee-coloured hue of his (Asian) skin, his height, the strong physique softened by a considerable paunch, and the back-pack, worn with both straps over the shoulders.  I recalled I’d only ever seen him with that distinctive back-pack.

My unconscious mind had filtered the situation and, within microseconds, made its judgment.  This was the murderer Maninder Kohli!

Except it wasn’t.

I knew that because at the end of the television programme I’d watched about Kholi’s viscious crime and the manhunt for him in India, the police had caught him and he’d been sent to prison (for a very long time).

But primed by the programme. and the powerful emotions it evoked (particularly given that I’m the father of a daughter and he raped and murdered a teenage girl), my unconscious had new data to use in protecting me.

In evolutionary terms this mechanism makes great sense.  It can keep me safe and help me protect my family.  But, as I knew within moments of ‘recognising’ the man at the station, it can also be wrong.

Had I known someone who looked like Kholi I doubt I would have looked at the man in the same way.

So what does all this reveal about consumer behaviour?  Well, the unconscious mind can be easily influenced.  When emotion and uniqueness are combined, particularly if it’s through a recent event, it creates a prime.  The unconscious mind is then on the look-out for elements of the event that have caused that emotion.  When enough are encountered, or sufficiently close approximations of them are, it triggers the emotions experienced on the first occasion as a warning (or incentive in the case of something pleasurable) to act.

Where you can create an emotion and attach your brand or product to it the sensory associations at the time will be mapped onto it and can be deployed to recreate the intended emotions.  That’s how brand logos work.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Advertising, consumer behaviour Advertising, brands, logos, marketing communication

I was lucky enough to be invited to Spinal Tap’s recent “One Night World Tour”.  Naturally they played two gigs because they also played at the Glastonbury festival.

For those not ever so familiar with the work of Spinal Tap, or who would enjoy a reminder, here’s a brief taste of guitarist Nigel Tufnell being interviewed about Stonehenge (a subject that has been something of an obsession for the band and about which they wrote a song):

The guys from Spinal Tap put on a hugely entertaining show…

Had some special guests like Keith Emmerson…

Invited a selected part of the audience to join them…

And had several people join in playing bass on ‘Big Bottom’…

At the aftershow party Justin Hawkins and I discussed the balance on the “Bass Shuttle” he’d designed and he was good enough to let me test it for myself (it’s very well balanced, surprisingly)…

Very little consumer behaviour-wise (I was a guest, so I didn’t even buy the ticket), but if they tour again in another 25 years I heartily recommend revelling in the wonderfully entertaining world of Spinal Tap’s tour!

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Uncategorized