Photobomb Emergency Marketing Plan
from 2 preorders to.... ?!?!
Cross-posted from AI Marketing for Storytellers.
Photobomb is basicially the murder journal of a narcissist sociopathic teen. She does nothing redeemable through-out the book, except figure out ways to get *her* way, and she never gets a commuppance. This is the “too dark” book my agent and I parted ways on back in… 2014-15 ish?
BUT I LOVED IT.
Because…honestly, the bitch does what she wants to, and she doesn’t always have to have good (or rational) reasons, and? Sometimes that’s fucking life.
Let’s hop back a scootch and let me tell you about my Maleficent snowglobe collection.
I’d show you more of this one, but my house is messy — but I have three more of these around my house, plus Maleficent t-shirts and sweatshirts and almost every decent Maleficent purse/wallet Disney has ever come out with.
I have always loved Maleficent? And I never could really quantify why, for a long time — and honestly, should I have had to? Can we not just like things without thinking about them too hard, literally ever, in this day and age?
But — look — she does what she wants, she has bad ass magical powers, and she can turn into a dragon.
She’s perfect, so there.
I was so dismayed when the movie Maleficent came out, because even though Angelia Jolie was impeccable for the part — they felt the need to go and give her ‘reasons’ which they then proceed to beat you over the head with for how she acted. (She lost her wings? It’s a rape metaphor! Did you get it? DID YOU GET IT? gah.)
Can’t a girl just have strong feelings sometimes?
Can’t a girl just…exist?
I’m always emotionally torn between what fiction requires (or appears to require) vs what reality presents, and I’ll go into that at much greater length at another time.
But back to Lara!
I just wanted her to *be*. Damaged, irrational, too smart, too self-aware, and yet on some level utterly incapable of introspection. She knows she doesn’t belong to the world even as she’s forced to move through it, and she’s unapologetic about wanting what she wants and breaking who she breaks.
As someone who’s entire job (and much of my writing career) revolves around putting broken people back together, writing her was very freeing, and just a fascinating place to be — and I think now is the time for her to make her grand debut.
Except….
I was a little psychologically hindered by the whole, “I’m not gonna take this out” thing. Then my agent put me in touch with another agent at her agency, who wanted huge changes, which I made, and then they also passed, and then I tossed it into an Erewhon press open call, and by then, I was pretty convinced I’d just wasted another year of my life — you know, standard #writerproblems.
Until earlier this year, when I was making good money putting AI audio of my Nightshifted books over on Youtube (another topic I’ll talk about later!) and I was looking for other trees to shake to feed the beast….which is when I realized I had two books that were, IMO, publication quality, left.
Electricity — which was a YA book — which my agent did take out, and it didn’t sell, and I put out quietly two months ago and it did nothing.
This is its lifetime sales:
(sharing here in case you’re ever like, “well it must be nice to be you, Cassie, you just fart up a book and of course your readers love it”.)
Yeaaaahhhh no — only things I *market* sell. (Which is why I use AI, to market them so aggressively.)
It’s a fantastic book but I’m not sure it speaks to today’s experience as a kid, especially with the twists and turns society’s taken since I wrote it….
But…Photobomb?
It’s firmly set in 2007.
And?
It’s got some crazy ass shit. Like, you start off thinking Lara’s normal, and then you realize you’re reading the journal of an EXTREMELY unreliable narrator — in that she’s not lying to you, she’s just lying to herself — and things go WILD.
So I just had to have one of those moments where I was like…. “What do I do? Do I try this? Do I give it all I’ve got?” Even though that hadn’t been rewarded for this book in the past?
But — I know who I am as an author now, way more, with a decade’s worth of hindsight. And I like to think I know what sells (or what can sell!) and what’s worth pushing.
So I decided, “Fuck. Yeah.”
I’d already pre-paid my copyeditor for a future copyedit back in Dec, so I sent them Photobomb and then they emailed back and said, “Very Hannibal!” which is like the highest praise you can get…which emboldened me to send it to my narrator Bunny Warren, and she did a GREAT job (let’s keep track for money’s sake — the copy edit was $850? The narration & edit was around $3k?)
So now I’m 4k in the hole on this book ALREADY and I haven’t even put it out there yet….
And — shit like this is one of the reasons why it has an AI cover.
I was still thinking about the dumb “AI slop” comment I got on Bluesky the other day, and while I’m glad I responded w/snark rather than trying to explain my rationale….
I think a lot of anti-AI people don’t understand that USING AI enables me to pay for OTHER HUMAN THINGS.
*ahem*. (Cover, courtesy of Ideogram. Actual prompt = A photo of a modern psychological thriller book cover titled "Photobomb" by Cassie Alexander. The title is written in striking, dramatic, and intense large typography. The subtitle is "Mia is gone. But Lara still has the negatives." The tagline is "a psychological thriller". The cover features a beautiful teenaged girl's face, with red lipstick and hair pulled back into a severe bun. The background is a blurred image of a party with people taking photos.
Go to town!)
But — just because I’ve got some sense of taste (I think!) and some marketing ability (same-same!) doesn’t mean I always have *time*…. and I had to bust my ass last month to get Love Her done so I could get it to Bunny before she left the country for a long trip.
So I totally dropped the ball.
Until this past week…when I picked it back up again — and now hopefully I’m running it into the end field.
I’ve spent the past few days off teaching myself all the creepy-ass video settings I can, and experimenting with all of the different lip synching programs out there! I’m learning, I’m having a blast — and I kinda wish I could go back in time and write every single shitty horror film I’ve ever watched off, lol!
My Tiktok girl is warming up an account for us to post these on — I’m gonna make like 40 of them total (I have seven right now!) and they’re going to become increasingly unhinged.
Over time you learn, as a writer, to trust yourself.
I can’t really explain all of the magical things that go into writing a book, or how the back end of my brain does the Pepe Silvia joke from It’s Always Sunny without me knowing, tying all of the little free flowing strands of stories into bows.
But I knew when I started off Marketing Lara’s journey that I wanted to make it Be Bad…and what’s more bad than stalking someone without them knowing? And taking pictures? And getting closer, and closer, and EVEN MORE CLOSE?
So that’s why I called her IG the BoyWhoNeverWoke —
And started my friend Maluridae off making images I gave her creepier (another human, paid!)
And I figured out what’s going on the other day, so these videos actually have A Theme — the guy that she’s chasing down the whole book is the same guy in these photos is the same guy she’s talking about in the videos, is the same guy she killed because she didn’t want him to read the book (her book!) that Cassie put out, without her permission.
The seeds of that happening were there all along!
And because at the end of Photobomb, she can’t bear to part with her journal and so she puts it into a bookstore, now she’s “mad” at me for publishing it, and yeah, here we are, LOL.
Ground zero.
A whopping 2 pre-orders.
But I’m starting up the Facebook ads today — and there’s a QR code at the end of each video to her carrd site —
Where people can talk to her and email her and she’ll respond, AS LARA, with the magic of AI…
And so?
WE’LL SEE.
MUHAHAHAHA.
Cassie.
PS: I could fall on my face. If I do that, I’ll document it too. Learning is learning!