Cute Babies Sell Clammed Up

by Barbara Ross
whose feet are cold. Winter must be on the way.

Given all the advice new writers get about marketing their books, you must be wondering about my Facebook campaign, Cute Babies Sell Clammed Up!

The genesis of the campaign was twofold:

• As many have observed, put something on Facebook about your book, people are warm, encouraging, polite. But when you post a photo, particularly a cute kid or a pet, people are all over it.
• One holiday, as we all stood around snapping photos of our adorable offspring, my brother-in-law somewhat cynically stated, “Man, if you want your picture taken around here, you have to stand next to a kid.”

So, on the weekend after Labor Day, as my husband and daughter snapped hundreds of photos of my baby granddaughter (and I am not even slightly exaggerating about the number), I said, “What I need is a picture of this kid with my book. That’ll be the ticket.”

So we took this photo, and I posted it to Facebook. And the crowd went wild.

Tell me, is she not adorable? And from the time she was about two months old, like Pavlov’s dog, the moment she hears the whirr of a camera or a cellphone, she gives us a big, model-quality smile.

Later, my daughter-in-law sent me this photo of my son reading Clammed Up with his daughter.

One thing I have no shortage of right now is babies. In addition to becoming a grandmother for the first time this year, I also became a great aunt.

My sister-in-law sent me this photo of my brother with his new granddaughter.

Here’s a photo of the two second cousins meeting. I love that both babies look so cynical about the whole enterprise, like “I can’t believe these jamokes are our dads.” Of course, since I’ve known both guys since their infancies, sometimes I feel the same way.

Keeping with the theme, recently, my mother’s first cousin’s wife sent me this photo with their new granddaughter. So tickled to get this from so far away.

Anyone who wants in on this, send me a photo!

Has my Cute Babies Sell Clammed Up campaign worked? Let’s put it this way, you can look forward to Adorable Puppies Sell Boiled Over, and Fluffy Kittens Hawk Musseled Out.