Barrington author discusses his new book and his unusual marketing methods

Barrington author Jeremy Robinson has decided to employ a groundbreaking method to advertise his third science fiction novel, “Antarktos Rising.” The book, which goes on sale through Amazon.com on Aug. 1, follows Robinson’s two previous novels, “The Didymus Contingency” and “Raising the Past.” Robinson hopes to make his latest work an Amazon bestseller. In order to achieve this goal, he is launching 10 homemade, online videos that show him being abused in various ways while reading the new book. He remains so engrossed in the novel that he is impervious to people beating him, robbing him, screaming at him and even farting beside him in an elevator. “Viral videos” have been used as a marketing tool for other products, but Robinson claims he is the first author to market a book with the method. “It’s absolutely never been done,” he said. As of July 18, about 25,000 Internet prowlers had checked out at least one of the videos. The author recently sat down with The Wire to talk about the new book and his viral video campaign.

Tell me a bit about the plot of the new book.
It starts off with 2.5 billion people dying, including a very detailed description of Portsmouth being destroyed. Basically, it starts off with a phenomenon known as crustal displacement, which is the entire crust of the earth shifting all at once, kind of like if you peeled an orange and had the whole shell of the orange on there, then it would shift around the core. So North Dakota becomes the North Pole, and Antarctica is brought up to the equator, and basically, in the wake of all the destruction, the majority of the world is now unlivable and the survivors are displaced, so everyone is looking towards Antarctica as a new promised land. Crustal displacement is a real theory. They believe it happened 12,000 years ago, and it’s what put Antarctica on the South Pole. They’ve discovered dinosaur bones down there, and some people are looking for the remains of ancient civilizations ... After the destruction, the main plot is that the world is kind of racing to claim Antarctica, which is thawed and now livable.

Does this represent a departure from your previous works?
It’s better (laughs). It’s definitely the best book that I’ve had published so far. It’s actually more of a combination of the previous two novels, with “The Didymus Contingency” being a religious thriller, and “Raising the Past” being more of a traditional science fiction thriller. It kind of combines the two, where it has a very mainstream storyline with lots of carnage and all sorts of nice stuff like that, and then a quasi-religious aspect where the antagonists of the story are straight out of the Book of Genesis.

You have a unique way of marketing this book. Tell me a bit about the videos.
The idea behind the videos was to find a unique way to get attention for the book that hasn’t been done before. If Hillary Clinton can do a viral video, then, really, books should be, too. It’s become a popular form of marketing for other things, like soda or Mentos—all sorts of things. It seems about time that publishing keeps up and does the same kind of stuff. The publishing industry is starting to come onboard. They’re starting to make video trailers for books and putting them on YouTube, but they don’t get that much exposure. But when you create something that’s funny or violent or even sexual, which is not what I did, it gets a lot more attention and people share them and want to see them and seek them out and send them to their friends over e-mail. So far, the videos have been seen somewhere around 25,000 times, which is great, and it’s exposure that most books don’t get beforehand.

How would people stumble upon these videos, primarily?
I’ve uploaded them to about 15 different file sharing networks—YouTube, Tubaroo, Metacafe—there’s all sorts of them. The first group of people that see them are just people that check out what’s new. Then they rate it, and the videos that get high ratings get shown more often. The other most frequent way is that people search for certain things. They might search for keyword “funny,” or “lawnmower” would bring up one of my videos. All sorts of things like that. The best way that you want people to find them is through it being shared with them. I want people to e-mail them to their friends, to put them on their blogs or on their Web sites, and people are doing that. It’s kind of an advanced way of getting word of mouth going without actually having read the book yet.

The angle on your videos is humor. What’s the theme of the videos?
The theme is basically me being abused in some form or another and being so enraptured in reading the book that I don’t notice until I finish, and then I react to what has been done to me. I’ve been doused with water, kicked, hit in the head. My partner in crime in this is a guy named Stan Tremblay. He’s in the majority of the videos and is the one doing the abuse to me.

You had to do a bit of acting in these videos. Did you have prior experience with that?
Not really. Part of the reason I’m comfortable doing this is because throughout the last 10 years my friends and I occasionally make short films for fun, so I’m comfortable in front of the camera. I’m not necessarily a gifted actor, but I can act like I’ve been kicked. For the majority of it, the real challenge was not reacting at all, which was actually very hard. In one of the videos, a group of guys get angry at me because I’m ignoring them, and they kind of let loose of this foul-mouthed tirade. Having to sit through that and not react at all was near impossible, to the point that we had to film the end—where Stan is right in my face screaming a totally nasty slew of words at me—we had to film it from behind because I couldn’t sit through it and not smile or laugh. If you look at the video closely you can see my shoulders kind of bouncing up and down because I was cracking up. I was in tears by the time he was done. So, not reacting to that stuff, not reacting to getting a bucket of water in the side of the head, was really hard.

What are some of the more conventional methods for marketing books?
Really it’s just reviews, which are still helpful and I still do those, but they can’t be the end-all, be-all, especially for an independent book. For “Raising the Past,” I did do a video trailer, and it was seen by 5,000 people, but that’s not nearly the exposure that the viral videos get. Mostly what I do is online tricks that the large publishers don’t do. Things that you can do on Amazon—getting people with blogs to endorse the book, getting famous authors to endorse the book, which I was able to do more than the other two books combined with this one. I have four New York Times bestsellers endorsing this book. When people get to Amazon and see those, that usually seals the deal. But with the videos, the trick is getting people to go to Amazon.

Not only does this video method give you lots of exposure ahead of time, but it’s also a lot cheaper, correct?
Yes. Much, much cheaper. I had considered doing TV spots, just locally, which I think would have reached around 30,000 potential viewers, and that’s really affordable, I think. It’s $5 for a 30-second spot. But if you figure in, out of those 30,000 people, maybe only a fraction are watching TV, and then a fraction of that are watching the show that your 30-second spot is airing during, and then a fraction of that are actually paying attention during commercials and not using TiVo to get rid of commercials. You’ve got maybe a few people per 30 seconds. With the viral videos, I’ve reached 25,000 people with a minute and a half to three or four minute long commercials, who aren’t just waiting for commercials to finish. They have found them or been sent them by friends, so you know they’re paying attention. If you do the math, I’ve spent $20 on tapes and everything else was free. I did the editing myself. We did the filming with cameras we already had. So, $20, and to get that much exposure with 30-second spots on just local TV would have been something like $150,000, which is insane and quickly changed my mind about doing TV spots.

Do you think it will become a more common tactic, since more and more people are turning to the Internet for their entertainment?
Definitely. With other industries, they’re starting to consider it a mainstream outlet. And like I said, Hillary Clinton and all the other candidates are doing videos that aren’t just advertisements, they’re meant to be funny and shared. I hope publishers catch on and start doing it. It’s fun.

Books have struggled for a long time to compete with television and radio and movies for an audience. Do you feel like that’s becoming even more of a challenge now that the Internet is so prevalent?
One of the reasons I chose to do this is that the Internet has become America’s number one pastime, more than TV, way more than reading. To reach the majority of people, you kind of have to meet them where they are the majority of the time, and that, right now, is the Internet. We’ve traditionally done that through having a Web site. A few years ago we all started having blogs. But now, really, the new thing is doing videos, because people are all moving away from regular modems to cable and DSL, so they have the speed to download these things where they didn’t a few years ago. Competing with the Internet is impossible. And authors are finding other ways to do that through podcasting, podcast novels. I’ve been considering doing a reading of the novel on video, but that would really take a long time. It’s 300 pages with a small font.

Do you feel like there is a long future for hard print publications like novels and newspapers and magazines, or do you think it’s going to get phased out?
I think so. I think people like holding the book in their hands. There’s a small demographic that can read it on their PDAs, but I’m not one of those people. The screen bothers me. I like having the book. I like having my book signed by authors. So I don’t think it will go out of style. I think the technology of how books are printed will change. Rather than doing massive print runs, I think you’ll eventually see machines in bookstores, or even in cafés like this that will print and bind the book on the spot. I think that technology will change, which will save the industry tons of money.

Jeremy Robinson will sign and read excerpts from “Antarktos Rising” at the Barrington Public Library on Wednesday, Aug. 15 at 6:30 p.m. and at Waldenbooks at the Lilac Mall in Rochester on Saturday, Aug. 18, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.