It’s no secret – I live on Facebook. I admit it, I’m a Facebook junkie.
As an Independent Author, I find Facebook a great place to market myself. It reaches millions of people and it’s free – can’t beat that with a stick.
Even though I use it as a marketing tool, I try not to come across like a used-car salesman. Everybody has their own methods…some of my other author friends post links to their books daily.
Me? I’d rather post a picture of a guy wearing a Batman cape and mask along with rainbow stockings standing in a fountain. Something to make you laugh.
Occasionally I will post something philosophical, just to make you think.
But I hardly ever (not never – but rarely) post anything that asks you to buy my books.
Why not?
I guess I don’t want to be a nuisance.
With all that being said, I have come up with, what I think is a clever marketing gimmick.
I’ve started taking iconic photos from movies and TV and inserting my own “Ike-isms” into them.
Here’s an example:
The idea came to me after I created one for my friend, author Armand Rosamilia. It was from the movie The Breakfast Club and, after I made it, I thought, Hmmm – I need to do something similar for myself.
So I started with a Mother’s Day themed one. It was an image of the most iconic TV mother I could think of – June Cleaver – and I inserted text that said something to the effect of “Give your mom what all moms want – a healthy dose of Ike.”
Before I knew it I had made about 25 of them and had to create a new folder on my jump drive to hold them so I could post them at various times. After about the 3rd or 4th day I started getting private messages from people asking me “Who the hell is Ike?”
The plan was working, I had raised curiosity about Ike (and by default, my books) without becoming a pain-in-the-ass.
So – let me tell you about Ike:
Ike was written into my first book Living the Dream as a minor character. His role was intended to be strictly support, in fact I think he only appeared in three or four chapters. I didn’t know much about him then, other than that he lived on a boat and worked as an “enforcer” for a local bookie named Ralph.
In Water Hazard, I brought Ike back as the best friend of the protagonist, called in for assistance with a deadly scenario. This is where Ike’s personality really began to grow. Here it was revealed that Ike was an ex-Navy SEAL. He is 6’-6” tall and weighs about 275 lbs. He has long hair that is beginning to gray and he wears it in a ponytail. He is a ladies man and afraid of nothing. But most importantly – even though he has a tendency to bend the rules and he works for a known felon, he has a very strong moral compass.
Physically Ike is a guy built like The Rock…with the looks and bad-ass-itude of Sam Elliot’s character Wade Garrett in the movie Road House, and with the charm and personality of Sam Axe (played by Bruce Campbell) from Burn Notice.
Throughout the next three books, Ike remained a key figure—sort of a knight-in-shining-armor. He was always there to make sure bad things didn’t happen to good people. By the time Pump It Up was released it was especially challenging (and a lot of fun) to see how Ike would fair in the world of transsexuals, transgenders and transvestites.
Ike is such a strong character that Armand Rosamilia, who writes zombie/horror stories, asked if I’d be willing to co-write a zombie novella with him and put Ike in it. At first I was skeptical, because Ike lives in (are you ready for this) “the real world”. There are no zombies in Ike’s world…so I was a little unsure, but eventually I decided that fiction is fiction so what the hell.
The book, Dying Days: The Siege of European Village, was a ton of fun to write and I have received lots of feedback from fans who loved Ike’s role in it. Adding further to the myth…now he even kills zombies!
So that’s about it on Ike – at least as far as I know.
There is not much doubt that I will eventually have to write a pre-quel to get the full story on Ike, but at this point, it’s a mystery to me.
*Update – Read the riveting sequel to this post here!!
As always – Thank you for reading.
blindoggbooks 