Empower Your Writing with NewView, Part III—Promoting Your Book

By Bill Drew - Jun 23 , 2008

Three weeks ago in Part II of this series, I showed how the NewView Empowering Grid can help you write an ad.

This week, I’ll show you how to use the NewView Empowering Grid to generate ideas for promoting your book. Actually, though, I won’t work with a made-up situation through guessing about someone’s else’s book. Instead, I’ll make this walk-through experience truly realistic for you by using it on my own book-in-progress about NewView, which (for now, anyway) I’m titling, THE Secret of Writing: What Your Teachers COULDN’T Tell You.

First, as a quick review, let me remind you that any NewView depends on the OldView. And when thinking of OldView, it helps to focus on the following categories about what is “old” or already shared and familiar between the potential writer and the potential reader:

• Values
• Experiences
• Expectations
• Reasoning
• Language

As you know from my previous post, what you can do to the shared OldView categories to give them a quality of newness is covered by the 5 NewView Options (5NVOs):

• Reverse
• Add
• Subtract
• Substitute
• Reorganize

By using the NewView Empowering Grid, as I showed you in Part II, you can tweak OldViews with NewView Options to create interesting, attention-grabbing, and interest-holding NewView content for your advertisements, and for your book promotions, too, in fact, as you’ll see shortly.

For generating new ideas for promoting my book, I’ll just show you what I’ve filled in on the NewView Empowering grid, now, and discuss that briefly with you:

You’ll recall that everything in the far left column is a breaking down of the main point of the OLDVIEW, “Writing is hard—so many pieces & experts disagree on what’s important,” into OldView subset categories. For instance, “Writing is hard” is a negative value. So the content for the subset categories of the Oldview—Values, Experiences, Expectations, Reasoning, Language—are essentially negative, too, such as the “Values” category indicating “dull and traditional” forms. So what the Values category is saying is that here are some specific negative values associated with the negative OLDVIEW of “Writing is hard.”

In the Values row, what I’ve filled in on the Reverse column, “NewView makes writing easier & fun w/what’s new to reader” can clearly be seen as the opposite or Reverse of the OLDVIEW statement about “hard” and the Values statement about “dull and traditional.” In like manner, you can see the other 4 NewView Options in the Values row doing their own special process on the OLDVIEW broad statement and the OldView specific subcategory statements.

Skipping down to the Expectations row, all 5 NewView Option columns relate to the specifics of the OldView Expectations subset category that makes writing hard, “lots of editing & many rewrites = a long downer.” And I’ve supplied a reverse of that in the Reverse column: “5NVOs make edits shorter and way less painful.” The other 4 columns provide their own treatment to the specifics of the Expectations category.

So that’s all good, right? You’re right—it’s not.

Did you notice that the entries for both rows I’ve filled in are rather general? How am I going to get some promotional spots or ads out of that level of generality? Here’s the missing ingredient: I need to add a level of imagery-scenario to each statement (actually, you’ll notice that in the Subtract column I said, “5NVOs reduce stresses of edits & rewrites to a snowflake in hell,” which is fairly close to the level of imagery-scenario I need; also, in the Substitute column I put, “5NVOs replace edit headaches with Peter Pan ‘happy thoughts,’ is really close, too). To keep this from getting too wordy, let me show you what I came up with as I looked for imagery-scenarios for those first generalities:

Notice that I took the “hell” part of the “snowflake in hell” idea under the first Subtract column and used it as part of an opposition imagery-scenario in the Reverse column. That’s the kind of adjustment you’ll find yourself making when you use this Empowering Grid. (Normally, though, I try to stay away from religious imagery-scenarios, but that juxtaposition of heaven with hell works okay and shouldn’t offend anyone.)

How did I make that jump from the generalities to specific imagery-scenarios? There’s a set of 7 categories that help me come up with ideas (I’ve got a set of “categories” for just about everything):

• Science
• Machines/Gadgets
• Education
• Politics
• Families/Friends
• Hobbies
• Literature/Movies/Music

Matching these 7 categories with the 5 imagery-scenarios I came up with, you can see that Reverse used a category not in the 7 above, Religion (as I noted above, I stay away from Religion pretty much, except for maybe an occasional Hell-Heaven type of Reverse NewView). In the Add and Reorganize columns, you can see that I used cars to provide imagery-scenarios, from the Machines/Gadgets category. And in the Subtract and Substitute columns, I used the Science (medicine) category.

For our discussion here, I could have added the imagery-scenario change to my initial NewViews for the Values row—but this is already getting a bit long.

Well, there you have it—a sort of paint-by-numbers method for coming up with some really good, new ideas to promote my book. And it’s based on an OldView of the main point of my book-to-be that most people can relate to—writing is hard.

But, as I’ve shown, it doesn’t have to be so hard if you use my NewView system that focuses on the most important principle in any writing: What’s New to the Reader. Even that, however, isn’t a whole lot of good without the 5 NewView Options.

The 5NVOs provide the processing power for the NewView engine, which applies to any communication, teaching, or writing situation.  If what you’re saying is not news, what’s the use? 

Copyright ( C ) 2008 by William R. Drew Jr. All Rights Reserved.