Got an Extra Three Grand--Whoops, Make that Four Grand?

That's what I figure it's going to take--minimum-- to get a character named after you in the novel Michael Connelly will be writing in 2014. Connelly emailed an offer today using Ebay to take bids on getting a character named after you in his upcoming novel (not the next one--The Gods of Guilt--which is scheduled to debut this fall).

Connelly put out an email this afternoon advertising the promotion. When I logged into EBay the highest offer was hovering around $2,500, with a little more than five days left in the bidding. An hour later the highest bid was more than $3,000. The proceeds of the sale will go to FairWarning.org, a nonprofit investigative news organization focused on public health and safety issues, and related topics of government and business accountability. 

I have followed Michael Connelly since his first Harry Bosch novel--Black Echo--hit the paperback racks back in 1993. He has two series novels: Harry Bosch, an LAPD Homicide detective, and the Lincoln Lawyer series about Mickey Haller, a Los Angeles attorney who uses a Lincoln Towncar as his office.

One of the quirks I like about Michael Connelly is that he intertwined Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller by making them half brothers. Turns out that Mickey Haller's father had a soft spot for hookers and Bosch was the result of one of the indiscretions. Connelly has also written several other one-off novels, but all of his characters walk in and out of each other's lives. I find it entertaining, sort of like deja vu all over again.

Connelly also has trivia quizzes based on his novels, photo albums of various Los Angeles locales featured in his novels, advance chapters and a lot of other unique marketing tactics.

Better than all of that, though, he was one of the first ones to do it, and as marketers will tell you, the first one out there with a product or promotion has a big jump on everyone.   

It pays to be original.

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.