The difference between advertise and publicise...

# "Tell me where is fancy bred? In the heart or in the head?" # - William Shakespeare

I think I may have been getting a little too obsessed with advertising the website for Moon Crater... There's a motto I read online of the filmmaker Ted Turner who says, "Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise" and I think recently I've been living by that motto a bit too closely.

As I said the other day I've been monitoring my site with google analytics and have been posting my web link onto lots of forums and sites just to advertise, advertise, advertise...




But as the sage Twig pointed out to me yesterday, the site is there at most to complement the actual book. The site isn't a stand-alone thing. Its purpose is to help spread the word that "hopefully this good read is due out soon, so watch out for it!" I think it's good advice sometimes to step back from something you've gotten so close to you're kinda losing sight of the reason you started it in the first place.

Anyway, to that end, I'm trying to redirect www.findthemissingreel.com more towards it and Moon Crater's target audience - namely kids (in roughly the 8-14) age range. There's nothing much on the site right now to hold their attention other than a cool picture, but soon clickable bits will appear, so if you're reading this and have any relatives around that age, it'd be helpful to the story if you could point them towards my site, please! (That's presuming they're allowed to use the net of course) - Lainey C has started the process for me already and I'm grateful for that, but it's set me onto the track of realising if I say I'm writing for that age group, I had better start doing some hard market research of them, rather than hoping adults will enjoy it too.

I've heard it said in the past that it's impossible to set out to write a "cross-over novel" (one which appeals to both kids and adults), it's just a thing that sometimes occurs naturally once a book is published and buzz about it disperses widely on its own - I think I'll have to bear that in mind as I continue writing Moon Crater so that I can do justice to the audience I originally set out to create this enjoyable story for...