Three Reasons Why Summer is NOT the Time to Slow Down Promotion

Call it what you will – the summer doldrums, the dog days of summer, the summertime blues. It really doesn’t matter what you call it, but most all of the statistics show that businesses slow down during the summertime.

Now, if you’re content to follow the crowd, by all means, feel free to follow suit. But, I certainly can’t run my business based on seasons of the year – and as a marketer and CEO, I can’t understand why other businesses would, unless they’re seasonal in nature. So, if you’re able to disagree with the crowd logic (or as I see it, “illogic”), then while everyone else is following the trend, you could be spending your time and energy transcending it.

But, don’t take my word for it. Just ask Dan Fellman, head of domestic distribution for Warner Brothers. Just last week, the latest Harry Potter film chalked up a record-breaking $476 million for its opening weekend. And, Warner Brothers is also spending advertising dollars promoting its summer 2012 blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises, the last chapter in director Christopher Nolan’s Batman film trilogy. The release of the trailer trended high on all the news search engines over the last two weeks, and according to some fans, added more reasons to see the Potter opening weekend debut.

Granted, summer loves the movie industry, but it’s not so much about the industry as it is about one glaring fact: people and businesses don’t stop spending money over the summer. So, in defense of summer, let me offer a few important reasons why now is the perfect time for a full-court promotional press.

• People Still Spend Money - According to the U.S. Census Bureau, retail sales rose .01 percent in June, maintaining a 20-month streak of monthly increases in consumer spending. In fact, despite a lackluster recovery, the U.S. is barely .02 percent away from breaking the record for consumer spending in a single month. That’s not half bad for the summertime. And wait until they calculate a few hundred million dollars worth of movie ticket sales for July.
• Opportunities Abound - While others are sitting back, you could capture the spotlight. One of the truisms about the media is that it never sleeps. It never takes a single day off. And, with iPads and smartphones enabling people to take the news with them, the media is more and more becoming a moveable feast. Consumers don’t have to be home anymore, listening to the radio or sitting in front of a TV, to receive your message when it’s delivered by the media. If things actually do slow down for your business during the summer, then factually, the only answer to turning them around IS promotion, promotion and more promotion.
• Planning Smart - In the event that the summer isn’t a good time for you to promote, it is still a good time for you to prepare to promote. One of the pitfalls in promotion is that you don’t realize you need to do it until it’s too late, and then you’re constantly behind the 8 ball trying to get it done. You wind up behind schedule and you settle for something less than perfect because of the short timetable. Whether you are actively promoting or simply using the summer months to prepare to promote, one thing is for certain – summertime can be the most productive time of the year for your marketing effort.

The summer doesn’t have to be slow. It can be a time when you recharge your promotional efforts and move yourself forward. But feel free to take a break to go see Harry Potter, so you can see how the big boys use the summertime to do more than just take in a little sun.

Just last week, I showed you an interview I did with Lisa Hess, our TV campaign manager, about a typical day in her life here at EMSI. In it, we learned a lot of the different things she does in order to get our clients booked. Although I can always count on Lisa to arrange good TV bookings each week, last week she outdid herself with 4 national TV appearances and 5 local TV appearances on network affiliate stations. So I thought it might be helpful as a follow-up to share with you how she got these bookings.

In her world, there are two kinds of pitches that she uses to garner the interest of national TV producers. While national news programs and talk shows tend to follow the news cycle and seasons, they also sometimes respond to a pitch that is more evergreen, a message that’s not tied to the news but is one that’s timeless. However, in order to generate interest on the evergreen pitch, it has to be creative and really offer the viewers some serious added value.

For example, one of our clients is a world-class certified investment advisor and so our challenge was to make him more attractive to a broad audience that may not have a large portfolio. So, we developed a simple pitch called “Finance 101,” in which we had our expert break down the complexities of the financial markets into short, basic lessons to help people understand how the markets work.

After we sent the pitch out last week, a producer from a FOX Business Network show called back and booked him for the interview. The idea is evergreen, and all we did to make it work was figure out how to take the experience of a guy who helps his clients juggle millions of dollars in investments and boil it down to something that would be applicable to Joe Six-Pack.

Seasonal topics are also important to producers, so we recently put out a pitch for a client of ours who is a dentist and an expert on bad breath, as he has his own line of branded bad breath cures in national chain pharmacies and supermarkets. We pitched the top barbecue foods that cause bad breath, and booked him on local shows in cities he’s traveling to. Seasonal pitches are almost always sought by producers, as they will often dedicate airtime to summertime issues like sun burn and weight loss and holiday stories in the winter. Our success with our dentist client has been built on seasonal pitches, as well as pitches focusing on holidays like Valentine’s Day and New Year’s, when people want their breath to be kissably fresh. I’ll stop there, because I am now sounding like a commercial.

The hard news cycle is also very important to the national news guys, and there is one story in the news cycle that dominated over the weekend – Jaycee Dugard. Her interview with Diane Sawyer and the launch of her book was big news this week, and we knew it would be. So last week we pitched a client who had written a memoir focused on his experience being kidnapped by his estranged father when he was 8 years old. For a six-month period, his father held him in captivity and subjected him to physical and emotional abuse until he was rescued. Our client’s book was part of his healing process, so in that respect we felt he could comment on why someone like Dugard would want to write a book about her ordeal. Last week we pitched him as a guest to all the big networks in the U.S. and Canada, and as a result he appeared Monday morning on A.M. Canada (the Canadian equivalent to the Today Show). The interview went so well that the CBC reached out to him on Twitter to ask him to be live in studio for their nightly interview show Connect with Mark Kelly, the highest rated evening talk show in Canada. The moral of the story is that you never know who is watching. We’re also in discussion with a CNN news show for this client.

So while all of these pitches were successful, they all staked out a different territory – seasonal, evergreen and the hard news cycle. It’s the strategy we use to get our clients on the air.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Did you know that Sarah Palin hasn’t given a media interview in months?

It’s true. She doesn’t talk to reporters at all. Outside of her commentary stints on Fox News, she has no direct contact with any journalists in print, on radio or on TV. So how is it she constantly stays in the headlines? One word: Twitter.

Palin lets the world know what she thinks through Twitter feeds and then comments on them through other social networks, like her Facebook page. She is still mentioned as a potential presidential candidate and her name appears in the news almost every week.

Is there any better evidence that social networking is not a fad?

But don’t take my word or even Palin’s word for it. Just look at the stats:

Twitter

• Since April, Twitter has gained 40 million users and a 62 percent increase in mobile use of the platform. (Source: ClickZ)
• Now, there are more than 175 million registered Twitter users. It is unclear as to how many of these are regular, but the number of Tweets per day has rocketed to 95 million – an increase of 250 percent. (Econsultancy)

LinkedIn

• LinkedIn has grown by an impressive 100 percent from last year; it now has more than 100 million users across the globe. Interestingly, 56% of these users are from outside of the US. (Econsultancy)

Facebook

• Back in January 2010, the site had 350 million active users across the globe. It now has in excess of 640 million – half of which log in daily. Based on this figure, Facebook has seen a 40 percent increase in daily usage over the past 12 months. (Econsultancy)
• People are sharing more content on Facebook now too. On average, there are more than 7 billion pieces of content shared on the site weekly. This figure has risen from last year, when it was 3.5 billion. (Econsultancy)
• 75 percent of brand “Likes” on Facebook come from advertisements. (Mashable)
• More than 250 million people use Facebook Connect every month. (Facebook)

General

• The average American Internet user watches 30 minutes of video online per day (comScore) compared to 5 hours of television per day.
• Social networking site usage grew 88 percent among Internet users aged 55-64 between April 2009 and May 2010. (Pew Research)
• In 2009, social gamers bought $2.2 billion in virtual goods, predicted to increase to $6 billion by 2013. (NPD Group).
• 22 percent of Fortune 500 companies now have a public-facing blog that has at least one post in the past 12 months. (comScore)

From the stats, a few key trends are quite clear:

• Corporations are using social networking to extend their branding efforts.
• Real commerce is taking place through social networking sites.
• Social networks are no longer a trend. They are a fact of life for millions of Americans.

This all stands to figure as Americans are being forced to do more with less. They have to make ends meet with less money, get more work done in less time and take care of their families despite the growing demands of earning money through more than one job. Social networking allows Americans to get news, stay in touch with friends and promote their business interests.

I use social networking as a key way of reaching out to my potential clients as well as those in the marketing community who want to use my columns for their Web sites, invite me on their shows as a guest, and even hire me as an expert speaker – all of which drives my business. As a marketing communications professional, I would never dream of eliminating social networking from my outreach arsenal. Each day it grows more important and even helps to drive my revenue, so when I recommend social networking to my clients, it’s not because I am trying to follow all the media hype. I’m living it daily and I see how it helps my bottom line.

But here’s probably the most compelling reason for you to dive into the world of social networking. Based on the stats, your competitors are already using it.

Now, forgive me. I have to go place this piece on my Twitter feed.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

In every business, there is always a need to hire an outside vendor. Whether you need a carpenter to build an office partition, an accountant for tax advice or a public relations firm for raising awareness, executives will need to seek outside expertise from time to time.

The success or failure of those engagements relies a great deal on a company’s ability to manage those vendors. Being in the client service business myself, I live in both worlds. My agency is hired to consult with other businesses, and as a business owner I sometimes have to bring in professionals to service my company. While most of my experiences on both sides of the fence have been mutually beneficial, I find myself learning from those few that have not. That’s why I thought it might be helpful to offer a few tips on how to make your vendor engagements successful ones.

• Vet Them – Before you hire anyone from outside your firm to work for you – whether it’s a plumber or an accountant – vet them well. Don’t accept braggadocio; instead, look at their past experiences. Do all that you can to ensure, to the best of your ability, that these people are everything they say they are. Find people you can trust to do what they say they will do. If you’re not reasonably sure, don’t hire them. It’s that simple.
• Trust Them – Now that you’ve made the decision to hire them, give them everything they need to do their job, including your confidence in their expertise. Allow them to do their job and perform as promised. If they don’t perform, it will be readily apparent to you and that would be the time for questioning, not before. Until then, treat them with confidence and trust.
• Respect Their Expertise – The irony about this tip for me is that every so often a potential client will come along because he heard from someone else that my team and I are experts in our field. But soon after, we’ll get questioned on the strategy and tactic we recommend to the point of disagreement. As you would never dream of ignoring an attorney’s, surgeon’s or accountant’s advice, similarly once you’ve made a decision to hire a vendor, respect their professional expertise and the counsel they provide.
• Keep Out of Their Way – If your pipes burst, you call a plumber, but if you stand over him with a wrench in one hand and a length of pipe in the other and insist on directing him on how to fix your pipes, you’ll only wind up with pipes that were not expertly repaired. Some people actually do that, and when the pipes break again, they complain to the plumber that he did a bad job. Don’t create artificial roadblocks to your vendor getting the job done because you want to micromanage a project. Hire them, give them some direction based on the goals you want them to meet, and then keep out of their way and let them do their magic.
• Play Ball – When you choose a vendor to work with, be it your ad agency, web designer, marketing consultant or PR specialist, recognize that you’ve hired that expert to help solve a problem or achieve a business goal. Therefore, you need to play ball with them and be ready to change your direction if their expert opinion is that you’re headed down the wrong road.That said, you are fully within your rights to reject that expert’s recommendations. If you do, however, you lose the right to complain that you didn’t get your money’s worth. When you hire an expert, you aren’t paying for what they do as much as you’re paying for what they know. If you discount it, then it’s as if you’re taking half of the fee you’re paying them and throwing it away.

  Remember, you hired them for a reason. Let’s face it, if you could have done it yourself, you’d have done it by now.

Hiring good vendors is a key to business success. You’ll get the most out of your money by hiring smart, and then managing them even smarter.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

One of the key paradigms that is shifting in today’s PR world is the influence of bloggers.

Keeping in mind there are hundreds of thousands of bloggers on the Internet today, there are some who drive opinions far better than even celebrity endorsements. According to the 2011 Social Media Matters study by BlogHer.com, women who read blogs routinely trust implicitly the advice and recommendations they receive, especially if it is from a blogger they follow on a regular basis.

“We find this is true in every study conducted over the past four years and the effect never diminishes,” according to the study’s report to the media. “In this year’s Social Media study, 88 percent of the active blog readers in the U.S. general population trust the information they get from familiar blogs. Asked why they have this level of trust, nearly half (48 percent) say it’s because they had made purchases in the past based on blog recommendations and were satisfied with the results. More than 50 percent of the active blog readers in the general U.S. online population have made a purchase based on a blog recommendation. That number jumps to 80 percent in the BlogHer network community.

Moreover, familiar bloggers are preferred over celebrities, a finding that will certainly find some ad agencies cringing.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

This information is key in the book marketplace, especially because 48 percent of all books sold in North America are sold online (44 percent through Amazon and 4 percent through BN.com). With consumer trust in familiar bloggers at such high levels, it’s a fair assumption that bloggers are influencing more of those sales than in the past. Circulations on key book review publications like Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews – which drive opinions with book buyers for the major retailers – are becoming increasingly irrelevant, as more consumers choose to buy online instead of the brick-and-mortar stores serviced by those buyers. Before Amazon was a force in the book industry, those buyers had a lot more influence over what consumers bought by deciding to stock certain books at higher levels. Today, much of that influence has been transferred to Amazon and the reviews posted on that site. And, many of Amazon’s regular reviewers also have their own book blogs, doubling the influence those bloggers have over readers.

It’s a trend we’ve followed, and to which we’ve responded, by including more than 650 of those key bloggers in our media databases for our print campaign clients. It’s something every author and publisher should also consider when approaching any book PR campaign. In the past, bloggers weren’t recognized as thought leaders; they were sparsely read voices in the wilderness. But, today’s crop of book bloggers serve millions of readers who trust them and are opinion leaders in a marketplace that is more Web-based. In fact, Examiner.com hosts one of the most popular book blogs on the Internet with a recorded 7 million visitors per month. That’s 2 million more sets of eyeballs than sees the Sunday New York Times. That’s why we treat bloggers with the same importance that we treat any other print or online journalist from the mainstream.

Think back 10 years ago when a PR campaign yielded an online article. Many agencies wouldn’t even report it to the client thinking, “Oh, it’s only a Web hit.” Today, those Web hits place consumers one click away from making a purchase. So if you’re planning a PR campaign to promote a book – and you don’t include a heaping helping of book bloggers in your outreach – you’re missing a boat the size of a few of the larger states in the Union.

The Internet is changing the way we do just about everything, including selling books. Smart authors and publishers will change with those trends if they want to stay relevant to the only audience that matters – their readers.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Unless you’re Oprah, a former president or a major celebrity, there is one question you will likely never be asked by the media when promoting a book.

“So why did you write your book?”

They won’t ask it, not because they don’t know you’re an author nor because they’re being rude. They won’t ask because the media doesn’t exist to help authors sell books. The media exists to create content that informs and entertains its audience, so that their audience stays tuned in. The more audience they have, the more advertising dollars they can charge for their print space and air time. Audiences are what make them money.

This is one of the most common disconnects we usually see with those who are new to the game of PR. Authors expect they can use the media as a venue to talk about their books, while the media is only interested in them for their expertise and the information or entertainment they can offer their audiences.

But, there is a wide gulf between using an interview to wax philosophic about why you wrote a book and giving an information-packed or fun-filled interview aimed at holding the interest of the audience. So here are a few things to remember when preparing for media interviews:

1. “What’s In It For Me?” – The success of your interview, whether your audience stays tuned into you or tunes out, will depend largely on whether or not you tell them how your information will help them. No one knows this formula better than producers, hosts, editors and journalists whose livelihoods depend on keeping their audiences tuned in. They’re slaves to the audience – they know if they can’t hold them, they’ll lose them. And, if the audience goes, so does the advertising revenue and possibly their job.

2. Make it Fast – Today, the media has far less time and space than it ever has in its history. Ratings and readership figures are transmitted electronically, tracking not only what media you are consuming, but how much, for how long and when. They have it down to the minute. That doesn’t mean that we are reading less or have shorter attention spans. It means there is a lot more competition for our attention than ever before.

   We have radio and TV shows, movies, the Internet as well as content for our smartphones and PDAs. Media is delivered to us on plasma screens in the checkout line at Wal-Mart, in the airport as we wait for our flights and even at the pump as we gas up our cars. As a result of the competition for our attention, the media gives us much more information, in a variety of ways, faster than ever before. For the media, it’s as much about how much content as it is about how fast they can give it to us. Most TV interviews are in the 3-5 minute range, and radio interviews are in the 5-10 minute range. In print, a 500-word article is about the medium length most people will find. In USA Today, only a handful of stories ever break the 500 word mark. They want to give you more, faster. So when an author is offered an interview with the media, they better be able to provide helpful information that will leave an impression and be able to do it quickly, because their air time is so limited.

3. Walk the Tightrope – The media knows the dance. You are offering your time and expertise to their audience in exchange for exposure of your book. But if during the interview you say things like, “In my book, I wrote…,” it will be a short interview. However, if your interview fills the host’s need for delivering an entertaining and informative interview, they will do the promotion for you by mentioning your book and even your Web site on the air.

   But, even more important than the media’s perception of being overly promotional when interviewed on the air, is the consumer’s perception. It is a universal truth that consumers don’t like being sold. They don’t like commercials (which is why they fast forward past them on their DVRs), or shopping for cars at a dealership. They don’t like banner ads, spam, or a landscape cluttered with billboards. So the clue here is – don’t sell! Instead, inform, entertain and, in doing so, you’ll build the audience’s trust. And, one thing is for sure – no one puts their money on the counter without there being some level of trust that they are getting something of value in exchange for whatever it is they are purchasing.

The bottom line is that in order to get value from your media exposure, you have to offer value to the media first. Otherwise, you will forever be on the outside, looking in, as your competitors get the air time and media exposure you want for yourself.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Usually, I like to dispense advice from the standpoint of having been in the media for 20 years, but this week’s advice is more in the land of common sense.

When you go to the store and you can’t find the exact product you’re looking for, what do you do? Do you just go home empty-handed? Or do you ask a manager? Most of the time, I ask a store or assistant manager if they carry the product, or if they can order it. And, most of the time retailers want to work with customers, so they’ll find a way to get what you want. After all, if they can service your needs, hopefully you’ll keep coming back.

Whether you know it or not, when you ask for something special, you are participating in a phenomenon one of my clients called, “reverse distribution.” Your request triggers a call to a manufacturer or distributor, specifically to get that product for you. On the other end, there is a business that is now going to fill an order they would not have received, had it not been for you asking for that specific product.

Now, reverse the roles. YOU’RE the business getting the unexpected order. That order is golden, because it’s gravy. It’s like finding money you didn’t know you had. Now wouldn’t it be great if you could get more customers asking retailers for what you manufacture?

You can actually make that happen. Public relations campaigns are frequently the spark that fires up reverse distribution, because effective media exposure educates consumers about your product, which motivates them to go into the store and ask for it by name.

To explain how this works, I love sharing this story from one of our clients, Stephen Grubb, President of SoyNut Butter Company. It really illustrates this concept extremely well. He said:

“The media exposure you got for us resulted in kind of a reverse distribution process. In other words, instead of waiting for stores to carry our product, this publicity campaign created such demand that stores are calling us to order our products – just to satisfy their customers!”

I loved getting this feedback!

But, another reason to consider a publicity campaign for your products is because it can help open doors with store buyers. Retailers will be far more likely to order your products if they know you’re planning a publicity campaign that will drive consumers into their stores.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

In the age of the Internet, everyone has a blog.

According to BlogPulse, there were 152 million blogs on the Internet at the end of 2010 and the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Many of these bloggers have become opinion leaders in their particular areas of expertise, while others have next to no following at all and blog just to let off steam. So how do you know which bloggers to target when you’re promoting yourself or your company and which ones to ignore? I have a few tips that might help you weed out the followers from the leaders:

• Check Their Bios – Many of the top independent bloggers didn’t start out as bloggers. They came from the ranks of the traditional media. Over the last 10 years, as advertising revenues have dwindled for newspapers and some broadcast outlets, veteran journalists and media personalities have either been laid off or they took the early retirement that was offered to them as part of the downsizing. These guys are the top dogs of bloggers, so check their bios on their blog pages. If it reveals that they once wrote a column on finance for the Dallas Morning News, then they probably have a pretty good following and they are influencers in their area of expertise.
• Check the Web – If you’re unsure about a blogger’s credentials, Google them. If your search turns up old articles they may have written in print publications, then you’re probably on solid ground adding them to your list. If your search turns up nothing, chances are they are one of the voices in the wilderness who isn’t a high percentage target for your media list.

• Check Their Traffic – There are plenty of Web sites like www.statsaholic.com that will tell you the traffic a particular Web site is receiving. You simply go to the home page and type the URL for the Web site you’re curious about into the search field and you’ll get the stats for that page for the last few months. When I look up a site to see if it’s viable, I’ll rate the traffic against the circulation typically associated with an enthusiast publication in the same field.

  For instance, when I searched paulocoelhoblog.com, a popular book blog, I discovered the site averaged around 60,000 unique visitors per month. That’s a healthy range and worthy of being on my media list. Then, I searched artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com, the New York Times portal for entertainment reviews in general, and I saw they averaged around 400,000 unique visitors per month, which I thought was a little low for a NYT branded site. Considering that site isn’t just about books, but about the whole range of entertainment topics, the smaller book site compared nicely against it.

• Check Their Other Media – Readership of the blog isn’t the only benchmark. For instance, John C. Dvorak is the dean of consumer technology reporters. He reviews products, comments on the industry and has been a contributing editor for PC Magazine for the better part of two decades. His blog at www.channeldvorak.com only receives about 8,000 unique visitors per month, according to the stats I saw. However, he is everywhere.

  Based on a Google search, he also has another blog called www.dvorak.org, which receives an average of 70,000 unique visitors per month. Plus, he has a radio show at www.crankygeeks.com and an online TV show, tech5.mevio.com, that received 7 million unique visitors in March of this year. Plus, he still writes for PC Magazine, a top newsstand publication with several million in circulation. So, don’t discount a blog just because it may have low traffic. Using the blog as a way to contact a key guy like Dvorak is not a bad bet for consumer technology companies.

Of course, there is a little legwork involved to find the top bloggers. But, as bloggers are here to stay, the key is to use the information available and make sure to include them in our PR plans.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Have you noticed how Charlie Sheen has quieted down? It’s not that his public meltdown has slowed or that he’s run out of things to say. It’s just that he isn’t saying it on radio anymore.

I was actually surprised when I realized that Sheen’s daily presence in the news wasn’t just from his tweets or his videos that he posted online, but rather his radio interviews. The meatier comments the media used for their stories about Sheen actually came from his constant calls to national radio shows like The Dan Patrick Show, The Alex Jones Show and a wide variety of morning shows in different cities.

In fact, Philadelphia’s Wired 96.5 FM station – recognizing Sheen’s penchant for phone-in radio rants – flew a banner over Sheen’s house inviting him to call the station. He did and another news cycle ensued.

The interviews then fueled more tweets on Twitter and provoked TV and print outlets to seek out Sheen for other interviews. Now does that mean I’m saying that a public meltdown in radio interviews is a good PR strategy for drawing attention to your message? Of course not, but make no mistake, talk radio was the fuel behind his media engine.

And that’s a lesson that should not be taken lightly and it proved one thing that advocates of other, more technologically-driven media, seem to want to downplay: people are still listening to radio. They are listening to radio and paying attention to what they hear. That’s why I feel very strongly about the value of talk radio as a key component of any well-balanced media campaign.

A good radio interview can fuel social media, because it gives you something to tweet about. It also works well in conjunction with print coverage and appearances on local and national TV, because it provides a longer form format for your message. Whereas an article may only be 500 or 600 words or a TV appearance only 3 to 5 minutes, a radio interview can run anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour, depending on the show and how interesting you are to the host and the listeners.

What I love most about talk radio is that it provides a forum for guests to demonstrate their expertise in their field, making them attractive to customers, clients and also decision-makers from other media outlets. It’s also the one place in which they can communicate their message in their own voice, in their own tone and their own words – unedited – to listeners within the range of the radio show’s signal. If it’s a syndicated show, their message can be heard nationwide.

So, if you’ve been thinking about doing PR, be sure to include radio as a key venue for your campaign. People are definitely willing to listen to you, if you’re willing to speak to them.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

How a high-school dropout became a Hollywood success with Back Draft, Moll Flanders and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

One of the things I love about my business is I get to meet the most interesting people who are luminaries in their industries. One person who fits that bill to a “T” is Pen Densham. You may not recognize his name, but I guarantee you’ve seen his work.

I talk about passion a lot with regard to PR and Pen is a guy whose entire life was based on his passion for movies. He quit school at age 15 and then spent his formative years doing everything he could to conjure himself a career in film and television. With no formal education and the odds against him (almost sounds like a movie plot in itself), he forged a career writing, producing, consulting on and directing some of the most-loved movies and television shows from the last 20-plus years. His string of projects included Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Backdraft, Moll Flanders, Rocky II, Blown Away, as well as the TNT movie Houdini and the successful reboots of the classic TV series The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. He has worked with Oscar-winning talents like Ron Howard, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Costner and Jeff Bridges, and some of his projects have also won Academy Awards. And just for irony, the high school dropout now teaches courses at the University of Southern California’s film school.

He recently released his definitive guide to screenwriting, Riding the Alligator (www.pendensham.com), one of the most honest and inspiring books for writers that I’ve read in a long time. While Pen’s primary discipline is writing for the screen, his process is to filter it through an individual’s passion. That is such a match with my philosophy and I felt that much of his advice is applicable for all writers, regardless of whether they are book authors, screenwriters, speakers or business people in general.

I asked Pen if he’d consent to do a Q & A with me, with the idea that there isn’t a field, profession or discipline that doesn’t require some level of skill with the written word. I had hoped Pen could help shed a little light on the writing process in general, starting with the blank page and going from there. Well, not only did he say yes, but he also didn’t disappoint me with his message. Just read on below and I think you’ll see why I was so happy with what he had to say.

MF: Pen, let’s start with talking about the blank page, which is the scariest thing to many writers, myself included. What’s your advice on slaying that dragon?

Pen: One of the most vital things any creative person can do for starting their work is to commit a murder. The victim will pose as your best friend, but in reality, he’s your worst enemy when it comes to initiation anything artistic. It’s your own inner voice, the critic that we each seem to have, who so helpfully tells us that our work is probably a waste of time, that someone else has already done something better than this, that people will line up on the streets and point at your car as you drive by, laughing at you for even attempting to do something original.

This inner critic thoroughly deserves to be assassinated, because its opinions are patently wrong, destructively useless and seem to be part of every human being’s psychological equipment. It has many names. I call my personal one “The Golem” but it can also be called “Perfectionism” or “The Voice of Writers Block.” We don’t invite this character into our lives. He or she seems to have slipped in through some evil side door and taken up an obnoxiously self-confident residence in our brain, sitting in judgment of us.

In order to eliminate this parasite, one has a gigantically potent weapon…don’t try to make your work perfect. In fact, deny this character any power by choosing a mindset that says you are just writing a piece of crap. Yep. Crap. This decision frees your true soul from the clutches of Mr. Vanity (Golem), because there is no power to criticize crap, and the strange thing is, as you write without self-criticism, letting whatever comes out of your head fall onto the page, you are probably writing something of superb quality that, with a few tweaks and tucks in a rewrite, will surprise you with what you accomplish and thoroughly route it around our creator of procrastination, our internal critic.

MF: I can’t agree more about the effects of self-criticism and where it can take us and I love your solution!

Many authors feel insecure about writing, because they may not have been formally trained as one. You dropped out of high school at age 15 to move to Hollywood with an aim of getting into the movie business. How did you overcome your lack of education to become an award-winning screenwriter?

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Pen: When I was at school, I was always fed that the real writers—the Shakespeares, the Dickens, the Steinbecks—were beyond my ability. They were saints of literature and I was unlikely to ever accomplish any thing of consequence because I had terrible grammar, awful handwriting and, from my teachers’ perspective, a wildly uncontrollable desire to use my imagination rather than their formulas.

While my teachers thought they were doing their best for me, I felt they were clipping off parts of my personality, so I fled the education system at 15. Their feeling was it was my funeral and, to be honest, it was my father’s feeling too. He tried to force his untamable son into a job at an electric blanket factory, so at least I would have a future. Luckily the owner of that establishment saw through my feigned interest in thermal bedding and rejected me, probably saving several of his customers from electrocution.

Since the age of 4, literally from when I was a little child riding on an alligator in my parents’ theatrical short films about people who kept strange pets, I knew I had to be in the creative arts… preferably film. This dream completely impassioned me. I lived to use cameras. I loved to read trashy stuff like adventure stories, science fiction and strangely had a giant fascination about human nature, along with a lust to take photographs.

Freed from the academic world’s choices, I blossomed as a reader, literally constructing my own way of thinking and learning that, even after leaving school at 15, there were outlets that would buy my photographs and articles. As I learned from the “school of hard knocks,” I kept discovering that my imagination could create things that, with some effort and adjustment, there was a market for. It took years for me to trust that I was an artist and to value what I had to say, but my passion never left me and the search for my creative destiny felt so sacred and so special that I frequently took on impossible odds, and won enough times to feed myself and my family.

MF: Great story Pen. I admire the insight you had at 15 to recognize how stifled you were by the school system and mostly I admire the “courage” you had to leave it!
Tell us, what do you consider to be the role of passion in writing?

Pen: What has amazed me, as I came to discover, was that working in Hollywood, the studios paid me lavish amounts to write screenplays that seldom seemed to get to the screen. And yet, when I stole time from that effort to write something for myself, some story that my gut instincts wanted me to write, these screenplays got made much more frequently. I created the story for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves after three studios rejected the idea, because my soul wanted to tell that story in a new way, and my partner, John Watson, supported me by co-writing the screenplay. My movie about Moll Flanders, which Robin Wright and Morgan Freeman starred in, was a script that poured out of me in a fascinating torrent of words that I could barely write down fast enough to capture. My love for the unique character of Harry Houdini turned into another self-inspired screenplay that also got made.

These made me think that writing the stories that come naturally to you may well mean those stories are more powerful, that you will fight for them longer, and that others recognize their uniqueness and depth, and are attracted to them. I’ve come to call these “Life Scripts” because they are so much a part of me.

MF: What advice can you give aspiring authors who want to turn their stories into screenplays?

Pen: In Hollywood, I describe screenplays as the enemies of people’s weekends. Frequently decision-makers go home with five or even ten screenplays. The first thing they look at is the last page to check the number and see how much they are going to have to read. Shakespeare once said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Brevity is certainly the secret to screenplay writing. Screenplays are condensed passion.

Books and novels are the complete reverse, an opportunity to luxuriate in a warm bath of words, day after day, as one explores the complex, thematic storytelling that only books allow. To translate a novel into a screenplay, one must bear in mind that if you took out all the white space in a script and combined all the words together, there’s probably only 40-50 pages of text. Essentially, a movie running an hour and a half or two hours is a short story and seems to follow an almost invariable rule of beginning, middle and end.

So to translate a novel to the screen, one must find the essential bones that give the story strength and structure, and compact only what you need to keep the audience knowledgeable of your characters, the tone and the plot’s goals, and streamline it so that it fits the structure of a feature film. The great thing about working from a novel is one has already established the entire canvass and you are now picking out the strongest points of the composition, which is in many ways an easier task than imagining something brand new.

MF: You’ve sold a number of screenplays and concepts to studios over the years. Is there a formula to selling something you’ve written?

Pen: There is a terrible, but possibly highly accurate, perception that Hollywood executives have the attention span of a gnat. Not wanting to insult gnats, one might explain that both have much shorter life spans and deserve to live in this way. Actually, Hollywood buyers are this way because there is so much material being pushed at them, and original and different material is very hard for them to trust. Thus we frequently see sequels and remakes instead of new and original material, even though the marketing analysis people tell us that audiences desire fresh and different stories.

The tools to capture the attention of your film buyer are to explain your material to them in terms of successful previous hits, thus Jaws in outer space = Alien. North by Northwest meets James Bond = The Bourne Identity. The Haunting meets The Blair Witch Project = Paranormal Activity.

Every executive is looking for a hit. That is their goal in life. So by defining what you are selling in terms that have already succeeded, you give yourself a large advantage. When a movie is being sold, frequently it comes down to a poster or a selling line like “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water” that must motivate tens of millions to go to the theater. It’s unfair, yet rational, that our art has to come down to a catch phrase; we are asking the studio to invest an enormous quantity of money and maybe we have to hold their hand a little to help them through the scary parts.

MF: Pen, as you know, your book was such an inspiration to me as a writer and I can’t recommend it highly enough. But this interview inspired me again and I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to share your insights, counsel and advice with our readers!

cforms contact form by delicious:days