Can Zach Galifianakis Sell Literary Fiction?
If you created a Venn diagram of Zach Galifianakis fans and readers of literary fiction, I suspect the overlapping area would be very small. Maybe I’m wrong, though, in which case the recent promotional video that comedian/actor Galifianakis shot with novelist John Wray is marketing brilliance.
Wray’s third novel, Lowboy, was just released in paperback. When issued in hardcover last year, it received rapturous reviews (which were well deserved). But plaudits don’t pay the rent. Hence the three-minute video, in which Galifianakis, pretending to be Wray, is interviewed by Wray, pretending to be Galifianakis.
As you’d expect from Galifianakis, the video is funny in a dry, ironic, slacker kind of way. The book, however, isn’t. It’s about a 16-year-old schizophrenic off his meds who is wandering throughout the New York subway system on a mission to lose his virginity so that he can stop global warming. (I did mention that he’s a schizophrenic off his meds, right?) It’s not the sort of thing you’d read while waiting to catch The Hangover (Galifianakis’s breakout film) again on cable.
Does Picador, Lowboy’s publisher, really think the video will sell books? The promo has received attention from media outlets ranging from Huffington Post to Paste, which is all to the good. For the most part, though, the articles, like the video, don’t tell you much about the book itself.
Wray is no stranger to guerilla marketing. When Lowboy debuted last year, he filmed himself reading an excerpt while riding the subway. The first and most popular of the three videos that captured the reading had, as of today, 1,758 views. The Galifianakis video had just shy of 30,000 views.
But as any marketer worth his spreadsheets and database models will tell you, the size of the audience matters less than its quality and predisposition toward the product. Certainly the comments on Huff Post and YouTube about the video suggest that the overlap between Galifianakis fans and literary-fiction readers is slim. “good one. o wait that was the dumbest f**king thing ive ever heard. You are trying to say u have to be dumb to think this is funny but zach if fucking hilarious and u dont get it cause ur obviously an ignorant piece of s**t c**t ass m***** f***** that deserved to get curb stomped,” wrote one YouTube cognoscente. (And yes, that quote should have a huge [sic] after it, except for the asterisks, which are mine.) “I have nothing to say,” wrote a more restrained Huff Post commenter.
Of course, if I knew what impelled people to buy books, I’d be running my own publishing house—or at the very least I would know the best way to pitch my own, as-yet-unrepresented novel. In fact, when I bought Lowboy last year it was because I had just started shopping around my novel, in which one of the two narrators is also schizophrenic, and I wanted to see how Wray’s approach differed from mine. (Considerably, fyi.)
Maybe what I need to do is put together a video of my own. Hey, Zach, if you’re not busy, do you want to come over one day and chat? The beer’s on me. Or perhaps I should reach out to Andy Richter instead. I loved Andy Richter Controls the Universe, and he might have a bit of free time on his hands.
March 19th, 2010 at 8:41 pm
you might wanna check out this article and stuff if you like Zach Galifianakis. good stuff http://bit.ly/bVknke