Live Fire with Chuck Holton

This video is about the International ALERT Academy in Big Sandy, Texas.  I highly recommend it.

I’ve been thinking hard recently about out-of-the-box techniques for marketing my new book, Meltdown.  See, publishers typically don’t have a lot of money to dump into any but their top-tier authors, and everyone else is relegated to radio interviews (I mean, who listens to radio to find their next novel?) and the over-hyped “blog tour.”

Problem is, I think blogs (even this one) are already on the decline in the hyper-fast moving world of internet media.  People are becoming more and more reticent to “do the rounds” of their favorite blogs every day to see if anything new has been posted, and I still find few non-geeks who use things like aggregators to get their news all in one place.  Couple that with the fact that many bloggers who participate in a blog tour simply post the boilerplate review provided by the publisher, and they can actually do more harm than good.  Because if anyone searches for a book, they find a few pages of word-for-word identical reviews, which is more frustrating than helpful.

But I recently saw an absolutely ludicrous video by the Jonas Brothers, where one brother danced like an idiot to a Beyonce song while wearing leotards to bring attention to their new album.  Even though the album had nothing to do with Beyonce OR leotards, the video went viral and has had more than 8 million views.

Good marketing idea – fresh, and out of the box. But I’m not dancing around in leotards for anything.  So the above is my first attempt at designing a viral video that will catapult Meltdown (in stores August 18th!) to instant stardom.

Enjoy.  And bring a few million friends.

Meltdown (Task Force Valor Series #3)