HERE’S A PASSAGE from my novel Shriek: An Afterword about connectivity. It’s from a sister writing to her brother, who she thinks has lost his way:
Every human being is a puppet on strings, but the strings do not ascend to some anonymous Maker, but are glistening golden strands that connect one puppet to another. Each strand is sensitive to the vibrations of every other strand. Every vibration sings in not only one heart, but in the hearts of many, so that if you listen carefully, you can hear a low hum as of many hearts singing together…When a strand snaps, when it breaks for love, or lack of love, or from hatred, or from pain…every other connected strand feels it, and every other connected heart feels it — and since every strand and every heart are, in theory, connected, even if at their most distant limits, this means the effect is universal. All through the darkness where shining strings are the only light, a woundedness occurs. And this hurt affects each strand and each of us in a different way, because we all hurt and are hurt. And all the strings shimmer on regardless, and all of our actions, no matter how small, have consequences to others…
The word “network” means “a complex, interconnected group or system,” but writers often forget the “interconnected” part in their zeal for self-promotion. If you build a “network” that is all about you, that isn’t about people, then you don’t really have a network. Instead, you have a way to send electric telegrams, and you may be perceived over time as white noise or as always carrying a megaphone. That’s why you often see writers engage in ineffectual communications — like emailed requests for some sort of action sent indiscriminately to everyone on their contacts list or yet another Facebook request to attend some arbitrary event. In doing so, you ignore the cardinal rule of new media. Every contact is about community, about personal relationships, and the impact of that connection often produces all kinds of unexpected collaboration and creativity.
Here’s another way of putting it: If you are on task 24–7 getting your “message” out rather than using your message to meet interesting people, then you’ve got a backwards idea about “networking.” The best networkers, and thus the best promoters of their own work, love people and love to communicate with people — and love to find talent in other people. I cannot tell you the number of times my query to someone to tell them about one of my books resulted in something remarkable unrelated to my original purpose. This process of discovery lies at the core of what makes the Internet so wonderful. Being open to it is paramount.
If writing is a kind of sustained creativity, then inspired networking is as much about sustained creativity in building relationships. It is also, admittedly, as the writer Brendan Connell has called it, “a drop of dew on a blade of grass” compared to the actual task of creating a short story or a novel.
Sustainable relationships may sound like a wonderful thing, but how do you go about building them? At its core, networking is about recognizing opportunity and potential — finding sometimes unlikely connections. Yes, you can research contacts for various media outlets on the Internet. Yes, this information can be useful to you, but it’s also useful to every other person who can perform an effective search in Google.
If you truly want to form an effective network, if you want “networking” to be personal and your efforts to last, consider this:
• EVERYONE YOU KNOW IS A POTENTIAL CONTACT. This advice applies now more than ever, because everyone is literally connected to other people in a myriad of ways not possible before.
• EVERYONE YOU KNOW IS MORE THAN ONE THING. Always listen to what other people are saying. This advice pertains to networking because you won’t understand a contact’s potential without some sense of who they are beyond the narrow role you may have assigned them during initial contact.
• EVERY BOOK OR OTHER PROJECT YOU CREATE IS ABOUT MORE THAN ONE THING. Find relevant subcultures. A quick Internet search centered around the genre of your book will reveal a wealth of forums and communities that you can join. Increasingly, too, you can search on topics relevant to your book and find communities with members who don’t self-identify as readers but do still read books. They may well be interested in your book because of the subject matter. (For more on this subject, refer to “Nodes and Influencers” in the appendices.)
• EVERY PERSON YOU KNOW KNOWS HUNDREDS MORE, AND THEY KNOW HUNDREDS MORE AS WELL. The cliché “six degrees of separation” is more like “three degrees of separation.” Sometimes you’ll be approached by a reader who loves your work and they have connections of use to you. Nothing helps more than having an enthusiastic advocate of your work approach a potential contact.
• EVERYONE HAS A DIFFERENT COMFORT LEVEL WITH TYPES OF CONTACT. I’ve already mentioned that on Facebook you don’t have to give a user your private email address to communicate with them; this makes some people who are otherwise inaccessible more willing to talk to you. However, other people may prefer the telephone or Instant Messenger. Try to approach people in the way that gives them the greatest sense of comfort.
Take, for example, Tia Nevitt, who runs a typical mid-tier blog that serves a specific niche audience by only posting information about new fantasy writers. Nevitt’s experience with writers is typical of the creative and professional effects of positive networking:
I run a blog called Fantasy Debut, and in my interactions with authors, it is usually an “all about them” sort of thing. And that’s fine; my blog is about debut fantasy authors, not about me. However, every once in a while, one of those authors will ask me about me. It’s always surprising when they do. And it makes the author more memorable to me because they didn’t want to make it all about them. Whether they really give a damn or they’re just being good communicators — it doesn’t matter. They took the time for a personal touch. Such authors will always have a fond place in my memory. And because I remember them, they’ll get more coverage on my blog. I understand authors who want to keep a bit of distance. If you have thousands of fans, you can’t get close to them all. I respect authorial boundaries. However, in two or three places — perhaps four — true friendships have emerged. I am now even in the position of providing feedback to an author as he writes his book. Which, to me, is very cool.
A contact creates a two-way conduit, not an arrow pointing in one direction. If all of your networking is about the point of that arrow nudging someone else, you’re doing it wrong. Or as new writer Natania Barron puts it:
Consider giving before you get. Has a published writer on Twitter asked for a critique on a new short story? Offer your set of eyes. It’s not magic; you have to give to get. Just like any good relationship. Many new writers are looking for handouts and publishing miracles, but aren’t willing to do the legwork when it comes to nurturing their network.
At any level, the person you’re talking to can usually tell the difference between someone who sincerely wants to communicate and someone who just wants to manipulate a contact. Finding people sympathetic to and interested in what you’re doing, who may have something to offer you as well, and communicating with them in the way they’re most comfortable with will result in a wider success — and be much more fulfilling than being cynical and just trying to get something from someone. Expectations of reciprocity may result in getting what you want in the short term, but don’t build long-term relationships.
Are there dangers to successful networking? Yes. You can become addicted to the thrill of meeting new, dynamic people. Be careful not to develop a network at the expense of your writing. Otherwise, what you have is not a network but a social circle. Suddenly, you’re spending more time “networking” — translation: “chatting with my friends” — than being creative.
By engaging with the world on behalf of your book or short story or blog, you will come into contact with a wide variety of people — bookstore owners, reviewers, magazine publishers, website editors, etc. True, your goal is to get these people to review or promote your book in some way. But there has to be an element of honesty to the relationship. Many of these contacts will develop into friendships, possibly even into a romance or two. I met my wife when she came to town to ask my advice about starting a magazine — and that was back in the 1980s, when I still did layouts with an exacto knife, glue, and blue grid paper!
To be a true steward of communication, remember these five rules (which probably apply to life in general, too):
An additional tactic that I learned from my publicist, Matt Staggs, is to introduce your contacts to each other. Matt likes to host what he calls “virtual cocktail parties” where he sends an email to two different people and introduces them to each other. Sometimes these introductions go nowhere, but often that initial contact leads to unexpected partnerships and new synergies. This tactic speaks to a larger strategy: Resist the temptation to hoard your contacts. If you connect people, they’ll remember you for it.
Even with clear rules to follow and an idea of the best way to network, you may experience fairly intense anxiety or fear about contacting people. Sometimes this feeling is caused by your assigning an exalted status to the people you’re attempting to contact.
When approaching people you believe are unapproachable, try to stop thinking of them as either larger than life or somehow inhumanly devoid of their own insecurities and foibles. Unfortunately, the writer-reader culture, especially in the United States, has a habit of elevating the creator behind beloved works rather than just celebrating the work. As a result, many of us cannot divorce the work from the person. This then manifests in non-concise communication with our heroes — or even just those we see as further up the food chain. In emails, phone calls, Twitter messages, Facebook messages, or face-to-face meetings, we then prevaricate, add disclaimers, and in general undermine the contact’s belief in our professionalism. In a sense, we dissolve our true personalities right in front of them as a kind of offering to their reputation.
At one of my first writer conferences, I found out one of my favorite authors was in attendance. I really wanted to meet him, but was too shy. Somehow he found out, and he walked right up to where I was sitting on a hotel lobby couch. He said hello and my first words were “I was expecting someone taller.” Now, this writer was very short, and although the intent behind my statement went something like “In my imagination you are ten feet tall, I love your work so much,” he did not take it that way. Making matters worse, the next time I talked to him, on the phone, I was so nervous that I laughed maniacally at every little thing he said. After awhile, he paused and said, “Jeff, none of what I’m telling you is funny.”
The only antidote for such behavior is finding a way, much as an actor would, to project quiet confidence. Your contacts will respect that approach much more than flattery or any variety of nervous twitches, no matter how endearing when told later in anecdotal form.
How do you project confidence where little exists? I find these three rules work for me:
Always remember, too, that everyone has insecurities, including the person you’re contacting, and that most people will be kind enough to try to put you at your ease if you are nervous.
I’ve set out the ways in which you can proactively approach networking. Proactive networking best helps you reach your Booklife goals, but the truth is, once you’ve set up your public self using online platforms, you’re going to have trouble not making contacts. We make more contacts in the modern age, in a wider variety of ways, than ever before. Every day you potentially make contacts you didn’t even ask for — through Twitter, Facebook friend requests, emails, or text messages. Information comes roaring at us in a cloud of glittering particles. Which bits are actually valuable, and which are just glitter?
The real problem isn’t making contacts — it’s identifying and paying attention to the people who really matter. That may sound cold or calculating, but it isn’t. Preservation of the self is an important part of not becoming too fragmented in our modern world. To better manage your contacts, you should identify the following groups (some people will fit into multiple groups):
These are the people that you should keep in a database of some sort. A simple address book in Microsoft’s Outlook or its equivalent might suffice, but for more powerful ways to group, sort, and collect information, consider buying a program like ACT (available from most computer stores); you can also use an online database if you prefer.
For the most effective results, update your contacts list every three or four months, and add new information as you receive it. Our database includes reviewers, bloggers, artists, writers, readers, media outlets, bookstore managers, reviewers, and several other “types,” keeping in mind that one person can be tagged as several different types. It’s a robust list from which we can call up, for example, “all U.S. reviewers who have previously covered Jeff’s books.” I even try to keep a log in the notes on reviewers to indicate which books of mine they’ve enjoyed and, er, which they haven’t enjoyed as much. This helps us help our publishers identify who to court and who to ignore for a particular project.
It’s worth noting that it took over fifteen years to build this contact list, so be patient. The usefulness and connectivity grows over time. You also need to be willing to devote the effort necessary to keep such a list updated and fresh. In some cases, you might be able to find someone you feed contacts to for their benefit and yours, without the responsibility for maintenance falling to you.
On the negative side, you should also identify and avoid people who have, over time, revealed themselves to be active time-wasters and time-takers. It’s never a selfish act to shield yourself from people who waste your time without giving anything back. These types include emotional vampires; sycophants who just want you to validate them; and the guy who every time you get a freelance gig writing for a newspaper, magazine, or online venue emails you to ask if you can get him an “in” too.
There’s an uncomfortable truth lurking here. We may think we’re truly connecting with other people through the Internet or in the “snail” world, but many of those connections are superficial, and many of them can be seen, from at least one perspective, as moving each of us a step closer to death without any spiritual or creative gain on the individual’s part. As Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher and statesman (4 B.C. to 65 A.D.), wrote so many centuries ago, some complain that they “have no chance to live. Of course it is impossible! All those who summon you to themselves, turn you away from your own self.”
Another way of putting it: whenever possible, only deal with nice, friendly, generous people. Don’t sacrifice your well-being or peace of mind for the sake of a “connection.” When you can’t avoid dealing with a jerk, make sure you’re doing it because it’s of use to you and not because an email just popped up in your inbox. (See also Matt Staggs’ new media essays in the appendices.)
Although new media has changed the platform-content paradigm forever, relationships with gatekeepers like editors continue to be the most prevalent type of contact for professional writers. In the future, this relationship will remain the same on the creative side, but in terms of the professional relationship may morph into something much more like the paradigm in indie or Do It Yourself (DIY) music, where a band hires a producer, creates the CD, and then puts it out on their own label. In a writer context the parallel would be creating the book, hiring an editor, and then releasing the book through his or her various platforms.
Regardless, the general rules of conduct are often the same as for any type of communication covered in the section on Networking. But because the nature of the relationship can take on many permutations, it’s important to deal with editor-writer issues separately. Falling into the same category as “editor” for our purposes is “publicist.” Your publicist at a publishing house doesn’t fit the technical definition of “gatekeeper,” but he or she definitely has control over flow of information, and a good relationship with your publicist is in many ways tantamount to having a good relationship with your editor.
A couple of years ago a writer who used to be a close friend of mine posted a long rant about editors on his blog. In this rant, he tried to justify his inability to find a publisher — and thus explain why he had to post a free PDF of his novel on his blog — by going off on editors and the entire publishing industry.
Now, it is true that publishers can be eccentric, lacking in imagination, and risk-averse. On the other hand, they’re absorbing the cost of printing the book, getting it into bookstores, and promoting it. They’re also, usually, paying you some sort of advance against royalties.
But the thing about this writer’s rant that bothered me the most concerned its assumptions about editors and the creative process. I won’t quote it directly, but the gist was: Editors have no role in the process of making a manuscript better — all they do is try to put their frustrated-writer imprint on a book or mess with peripherals like copy edits. Writing is a solitary exercise, and any writer who thinks their editor helped create a better book didn’t put in the work on the front end — in fact, bailed on making the tough decisions well before an editor ever saw it.
This rant engendered much debate on my own blog when I linked to it, including this observation from writer Seth Merlo:
I totally agree with sticking to your creative integrity and vision, [and] I suspect the essence of his argument is that an editor should bring the writer’s vision to fruition without interfering with it, but he never actually says as much, and if he does, it gets lost in arguments such as “the writer is always right.” It almost comes across as if the writer is/should be his or her own best editor, which would clearly never work.
But the view expressed in the rant isn’t as uncommon as one might think, in part because it’s one of those received bits of wisdom you hear spouted by people posing as experts at writers conferences. Many times I’ve heard a so-called expert say something like “Once you get a major publishing deal, you’ll need to hire an editor, because no one is actually editing at the publishing houses anymore.”
This statement is simply not true. With few exceptions, every editor I’ve encountered has made invaluable contributions to my work. A good editor shares your vision and wants to bring out the best in your work. To accomplish this, they must first understand and empathize with what you are trying to do — and through edits on the developmental and paragraph level make sure that the version in your head actually made it to the page. This process can be time-consuming. It reflects a level of caring about your work that you may never get from any other source. In that context, you should at least calmly consider the changes, not reject them outright in the heat of passion.
As new writer Alex Carnegie puts it:
The ideal of the good editor is the kind of thing I look for in creative writing instructors as well: somebody who can grasp and appreciate what you’re trying to do, and yet also look at it with a certain amount of detachment. They won’t pull any punches [and bring new] insights and ideas.
Eventually your text becomes black sticks poking out of a snow storm, no matter what you do. Your gaze cannot get a grip on the page. Sometimes this is true even after you’ve had time to reflect. A good editor, even just with general questions about the narrative or characters, can allow you to re-imagine and revisit the text in useful ways.
Editors also understand that you may accept a change by finding a third way that neither you originally, or the editor in revision, thought of. Often, this third way creates the bond of collaboration with the editor, because the writer would never have thought of this third way without the editor’s prompting. I also can’t ever remember getting an editorial suggestion I thought was given in a spirit of making something more commercial. Obviously, there are bad editors and editors who don’t really understand the book they’ve bought, but I’ve found it’s rarely that way.
Besides, ultimately there’s going to be a collaborative process going on with your book anyway, because readers are hopefully going to pick it up. Your personal vision is going to be re-interpreted, changed, and riffed off of as soon as it becomes public. An editor is just there to make sure when that time comes the reader understands completely what you meant to do.
Keep in mind as well that a writer-editor relationship may be long-term, and that person often becomes a good friend. Certainly, in the intense crucible that is a campaign for a book, you come to develop intense respect for these people, who love books as much as you love books, and who must deal with dozens of authors each month. Often, too, they don’t get much praise or appreciation for their efforts.
That’s why you should always start out from a position of trust and respect that includes an unspoken covenant of communication with your editor — and with your publicist, who will most certainly pop up along the way. The terms of that covenant should read as follows:
I will be courteous, generous, professional, considerate, empathetic, and timely in my communications with my editor and my publicist. I understand that both of them are busy people who may not be able to respond to my email immediately. I acknowledge that they tend to be as passionate about my work as I am, and have my best interests at heart; at worst, they are not out to get me…
If you require further clarification of words like “courteous, generous, professional, considerate, empathetic, and timely,” you may need another book entirely.
One useful quality of the Internet is how quickly you can bring people together. When I ran a feature on my blog about “What Editors Hate About Writers” and “What Writers Hate About Editors,” everyone got involved, but in a respectful way. It probably helped that I noted in my introductory comments that “The word ‘hate’ here is not the white-hot hate of a million suns but closer to the disgusted or frustrated ‘oh I hate it when that happens’ or ‘I really hate it when my husband forgets to clean the kitty litter box.’” Besides, there’s a certain catharsis in a frank bitch session, or as I put it: “We’re a family, and there’s a constructive element here in terms of making one family member see another member’s point of view. Followed by a group hug.”
Time and again, the resulting discussion came back to basic human values, often distorted by impulsiveness, stress, or just being too busy.
• WHAT EDITORS HATE ABOUT WRITERS
An “editor” can be many things, from a gatekeeper at a communal blog to a first reader of nonfiction for an educational website or a professional hired by a New York publisher to acquire books for an imprint.
One type of editor, like my wife Ann, who serves as fiction editor for the magazine Weird Tales, may primarily read short stories all week, every week. This job puts her on the front lines with writers every day, and means that many of her reasons for “hating” writers have to do with inappropriate communication. Here are her top five:
Almost all of these issues reflect a lack of respect on the part of the writer — and emphasize the negative ways in which the Internet has affected communication. It is entirely too easy to fire off an email that a second before was just a burning little thought in your head. By the time you realize what you’ve done, it’s too late. Of course, some people never realize what they’ve done. Make sure you’re not one of them.
On a more general level, having been an editor, here are three things I hate about writers:
Victoria Blake, from Underland Press, shared a few more with me for this book:
Then, of course, there are the writers who make us all look very, very silly. “I had an author once who wrote his proof marks in red crayon,” Victoria writes. “This made every mark exceedingly difficult to read.”
• WHAT WRITERS HATE ABOUT EDITORS
On the other side of this issue, writers have their own complaints about editors (and the publishers or other entities they’re associated with). It’s important that you, as a writer, understand that these are not trivial matters and that you deserve better treatment in such cases. My pet peeves include:
My readers provided many anecdotes based on similar situations. Kelly Barnhill, one of my favorite short story writers (who also creates instructional books for children), complained about:
Mushy instructions, mushy concepts and mushy feedback. Is clarity too much to ask for these days? Also, when people use jokes in their letters explaining why my check is going to be three months late. Not only jokes, but lame jokes. Honestly. Say what you mean and move on, none of this foot shuffling, cheek reddening, aw-shucks stuff. Besides, some things just aren’t all that funny, yanno? Especially when my kid’s orthodontics are at stake.
Jess Nevins, author of The Encyclopedia of Victoriana, wrote in to say his pet peeve is “Anyone who isn’t interested [in your query] who doesn’t send a ‘No, thank you’ e-mail. It takes about five to ten seconds to type and helps the recipient immensely, but far too many people in the industry, from writers to editors, can’t be bothered.”
And, finally, the ultimate example of lack of communication, ironically from a commenter who only identified “himself” as “Zsetrek”:
Once, a journal published one of my stories without actually telling me as much. I submitted it, a friend on the editorial committee let me know that they loved it, and I didn’t hear anything more until the check/complementary copy turned up in the mail. Of course, because they’d never actually gone to the effort of getting into touch with me the whole editing process had been skipped, and the story was a complete mess — up to and including an error in the title that sets my teeth on edge to this day.
Sometimes the writer and editor have an uneven relationship, with the editor having much more power. However, this doesn’t mean you should excuse bad behavior on an editor’s part. Everyone deserves respect and consideration. If you’re not getting it from one editorial source, you’ll have to decide if it’s worth the stress of continuing to deal with that person and the publisher, entity, or company they represent. As the Internet provides more and more viable ways to bypass gatekeepers (editors among them), you may find alternatives to enduring an unpleasant situation. Remember: if you become so certain that this deal or that assignment is the be-all and end-all, you have lost the perspective necessary to maintain a healthy Public Booklife.
Hopefully, though, you’ll rarely be in one of these situations. The number of positive editor interactions far outnumber the negative.
There’s a larger issue concerning editor-writer communications that I haven’t seen touched on much, and that’s the push-me, pull-me aspect of editors not providing writers with enough information about the process of publishing a book — and writers, sometimes as a result, inserting themselves into that process in inappropriate ways.
The truth is, there’s very little institutional knowledge in publishing industry. Too many people in the business never realize that the knowledge in their heads, especially information particular to their institution or entity, does not automatically go by way of Vulcan mindmeld into the head of the person they’re dealing with. Thus, a lot of time is wasted because of assumptions made to the contrary. Being able to either see things from the other person’s point of view or to document your process (and the writer’s responsibilities within that process) goes a long way toward preventing communication breakdowns and stress during the lifecycle of a relationship.
Will Hindmarch, an Atlanta-based writer and game developer for White Wolf, shared this alarming story on my blog, one that exemplifies real consequences of the problem:
A friend of mine…was passed over for a job at a publisher only to learn later that they missed the edits he made on their mock manuscript because they didn’t know how to view comments in Word. I suppose that’s an example of both parties assuming the other would do things a certain way (e.g. “normally”), but still.
Hindmarch also made the important point that every publishing house has a slightly different process:
I worked for a publisher whose practices were largely unlike those of every publisher I’d worked with on staff or freelance, but they didn’t educate me as to company practices because they figured they just did things the way things were done. Worse, to me, is that these practices were made habit (not chosen) without any intellectual curiosity about how things work in other places. Walking that fine line between appearing informed and doing it right is a curious thing for a freelancer. The fact that asking how a publisher wants something done can ever be seen as a weakness to a publisher boggles me.
Time and again, I’ve also encountered this attitude. As a freelancer, you can lose a potential job by asking too many questions. Ask too few questions and you may not produce a satisfactory product.
When it comes to book publication, even agents seem to assume a new writer already knows the whole process — including timing issues, like when copy edits or page proofs will arrive, and when to expect a publicist to be in touch. The result? Often, a complaint like Kelly Barnhill’s, that “editors fall all over themselves about an unrealistic deadline, and my piece then sits on their desk for four months, and then when they ask for changes, they need a four-day turnaround.”
In addition to confusion and stress, not having knowledge of a particular publisher’s process means it’s more likely that you as the writer will make demands or insert yourself into that process in ways that do not make sense to your editor.
Exacerbating this problem, writers today are taught to be aggressively proactive, which means most editors probably experience more “meddling” now than in the past.
But editors hate it when writers with no idea of what public relations or marketing means make demands that are silly and time consuming. Editors are also frustrated by writers who have no experience with or eye for art or design but still want to have a say in those decisions.
So how can you integrate your efforts and energy into the editor’s and publicist’s process? Here are some tips that should help during “first contact” with your editor and, later, with your publicist:
First time novelists or authors especially suffer from not being proactive. Yet the impact of that first book is extremely important to your career. Many authors don’t fully understand the process until they’ve already lived through a book’s life-cycle once, or even twice. Although nothing can replace that experience, if you can shorten the learning curve, you’ll be better able to take advantage of opportunities. You’ll also build a better relationship with your editor and your publicist.
After having gone through this “discovery phase,” to get a sense of the publishing company and how it all works, you should then be able to respectfully suggest ways in which you can help the editor and publicist with the book. An editor will appreciate a helpful but not intrusive writer.
Victoria Blake even advises writers to be ambitious in this situation:
I’m a big fan of free and open idea generation. Practically speaking, that means thinking big and then scaling back for budget and time constraints. If you have a great idea for publicity or for some sort of marketing tie-in, suggest it in a spirit of open idea sharing, and don’t be offended if the idea, for some reason or another, doesn’t sprout wings. Think about phrasing your emails along the lines of, “Dear X, I was thinking about the publicity for my book and came up with a few ideas that I thought I’d run by you. If these appeal to you, I’d love to talk more about them. If not, no worries.” It never hurts to ask.
With the proper knowledge base, you can work alongside the publisher to give your book the best possible shot at success. The keys are the same as they ever were: understanding, respect, and good ideas.
New media allows for amazing interconnectivity and cross-pollination of ideas. Because the primary purpose isn’t for PR, new media has also changed the nature of PR forever. However, some things will always be the same:
• YOUR SINCERITY AND HONESTY MAKE A HUGE DIFFERENCE. Try not to act like a telemarketer or a walking infomercial. If you can have fun promoting your book or other creative project, all the better, because that means readers will probably have fun as well.
• THE QUALITY OF YOUR CREATIVE PROJECT MUST BE HIGH TO GAIN LEVERAGE. A high-quality creative project could be anything from an esoteric experimental science fiction novel to a heartbreakingly tragic literary novella posted on a website, a book of poems about your neighbor’s talking chicken or a techno-thriller about zombies. The genre is irrelevant. All that matters is creating a great book. If you don’t create a good book, most of the advice in Booklife won’t help you.
• THE FORM OF THE CREATIVE PROJECT AFFECTS YOUR ABILITY TO PROMOTE IT. Currently, it is still easier to get leverage for a “book” that has a physical presence in the world. An electronic version of the book provides opportunities for leverage as well, but despite all of the ways in which the physical book has been put into competition with other forms of itself, it is still, as of this writing at least, the anchor and the goal sought by writers and given the most respect by the highest number of gatekeepers. Also remember that although I am defining “book” generally as a creative project, it will always be harder to create ongoing or “permanent” leverage for a short story or an article (and yet simpler because of the limited options) than for the bulwark that is a novel or story collection or nonfiction book.
• THE INTEGRITY/QUALITY OF YOUR BRAND ACROSS PRODUCTS AFFECTS YOUR ABILITY TO GAIN LEVERAGE ACROSS YOUR CAREER. Inconsistency from creative project to creative project breeds indecision among readers. Variety between projects, so long as quality is high, may slow your progress but result in rewards that are just as great. But, again, for the long-term, your work must be high-quality. (Your “brand” across time also refers to your public image and other elements that may not always have much to do with your core creativity. However, these elements have impact because reader perceptions are so often driven not just by their opinion of your writing but of you.)
A writer usually has little effect on marketing or sales, but can have a huge impact on publicity. To be most effective, you must:
• UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE AND THE COMMERCIAL OR NONCOMMERCIAL APPEAL OF YOUR CREATIVE PROJECT. Selling a thousand copies of a nonfiction collection might be an excellent result, while selling a thousand copies of a mystery novel might be seen as a huge failure.
• UNDERSTAND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PR EFFORTS AND SALES, PR, AND YOUR REPUTATION. The simple fact is, your PR efforts can greatly enhance your reputation without having as large an effect on your sales. Good PR is as much about setting you up for future opportunities and making sure you stay in the public eye as it is about readers making purchases. Studies show that readers may need to hear or read about a book as many as seven times before deciding to purchase it. Thus, a strong PR effort will influence sales over time, but the primary impact is to position you in other ways.
• MAKE SURE TO FIT THE SCALE OF THE PR TO THE SCALE OF THE PROJECT. You don’t send copies of your saddle-stapled 42-page chapbook on armadillo farming to Publishers Weekly. Nor do you send a techno-thriller to the book reviewer at Armadillo Farming Quarterly. (Except, of course, in the remote eventuality that armadillos play an integral role in the plot.)
• MAKE SURE TO CREATE QUALITY, PROFESSIONAL-LOOKING MATERIALS FOR YOUR PR EFFORT. You would be better off not creating that website banner ad if it isn’t up to professional standards. Similarly, you will do yourself more damage putting out a boring YouTube book trailer that’s four minutes too long than if you did no trailer at all.
• TEST OUT NEW IDEAS THROUGH RESEARCH AND BY FINDING OTHER EXAMPLES BEFORE IMPLEMENTING THEM. You can waste a lot of money putting an effort behind “bleeding edge” PR ideas that are in some way faulty in conception or execution. Make sure that someone, somewhere, has been successful with a similar approach. Be very careful to avoid doing anything that makes you look silly or amateurish.
You might be surprised by the kinds of things writers have done to attract attention, only to find that the attention attracted wasn’t what they wanted. One writer used to send nude photos to magazine editors along with her stories. Another would review their own work online, using their real name, and describe its brilliance. The worst reading I ever saw — and a reading is a type of PR for your work — included one poor soul who stopped in mid-sentence to reminisce on the glorious day when inspiration came for a particular phrase, making things worse by also stopping to read reviews of the story. One writer’s website used to include an image of himself in a stereotypical velvet-Elvis style, with a halo above his half-bald head. Doesn’t sound as bad as the other examples? If you’d seen it, you’d put it at the top of the list.
Less heinous crimes include what I call useless PR — like sending readers buttons advertising a book. This is the kind of PR effort that writers often want to focus on — a campaign that actually has little relation to reality. How often have you personally asked someone about a product based on a decorative button they were wearing? And how many times have you been handed a button and thought, “I really don’t want to pin something to my clothing.”
How did some of these people arrive at such bad places? Horrible advice. Always keep in mind that advice, especially advice on promoting yourself, is often anecdotal or a Received Idea — received from a time machine from the Distant Past. Sincerely-given but idiotic career advice can be a shiv in the side, an icepick through the eye. Worse, it can result in a slow malarial fever from which you never recover, performing actions you later have no good rationale for doing. The worst career advice attempts to separate you from your work, you a shucked oyster wondering what happened, and why.
On the other hand, despite this warning, don’t be afraid to test out new things on a limited basis (limited in terms of time and money spent). I’ve done all kinds of experiments with online media. I’ve even used talking greeting cards to send out announcements about my books, because nothing gets past a person’s defenses like being addressed by an animated squirrel. I’ve also tried anti-publicity, surprising reviewers and bloggers with an anthology project that was top secret until the day of publication. I’m not saying you should emulate these admittedly risky approaches, but playing around with PR concepts and having some fun isn’t always a bad thing.
It’s important to understand the elements of a book’s “lifecycle” prior to engaging in promotion of your project. Although several graphical depictions of the lifecycle of a book exist in print and online, I recommend the version found in the Chicago Manual of Style. A typical textual breakdown of the process — from conception to completion, and based on the traditional model of seeking publication from a New York publisher — might read something like this:
PRE-PRODUCTION DEAL
BETWEEN EIGHTEEN MONTHS AND NINE MONTHS BEFORE PUBLICATION
BETWEEN EIGHT AND SIX MONTHS BEFORE PUBLICATION
BETWEEN FIVE AND FOUR MONTHS BEFORE PUBLICATION
ONE MONTH BEFORE PUBLICATION TO A YEAR AFTER
This breakdown provides you with useful information, especially in the context of a prior section of Booklife (Dealing with Editors and Publicists). However, it doesn’t approach the “book” as a mutable object that can take many different forms in the modern era. If you boil the process down, stripping off the detail and making a “book” a more fluid creature, the lifecycle roughly becomes:
In creating your plans for your book, always keep this simplified version of the lifecycle in mind. It helps focus your efforts by reminding you of what’s important. For more information on “marketing” versus “publicity” and a writer’s duties in the context of publicity, please refer to Colleen Lindsay’s excellent essays in the appendices.
Without sound rules of engagement — literally the context within which you approach your PR campaign — nothing you do in support of your book will be graceful, artful, or that effective. Many writers live in a world of tactics, in which their PR efforts represent a kind of thrashing, spiking push-and-pull that may seem like progress but is actually disorganized, foundering, and doesn’t support strategic goals. Here are some things to remember when putting together your PR campaign.
• ALWAYS COORDINATE YOUR EFFORTS WITH YOUR PUBLISHER’S PUBLICIST
Hopefully, you begin to create your plan after you’ve had at least some initial conversations with your publicist (if you are working within the traditional model rather than some form of self-publishing). Making a list of the things the publicist plans to do for your book will allow you to fill in the gaps.
If your publicist’s entire plan consists of sending out review copies, you have a lazy or overworked publicist — or your book isn’t considered a priority. Regardless, though, you’ll want to take their plan and, consulting with your editor, develop your own plans of action to present to publicity. (In the appendices, you’ll find an example of an effective presentation.)
Because many publishers, especially independent publishers, have limited resources for publicity, this book includes discussion of several elements that traditionally would not be handled by the author, just so you have the information if you need it.
• FIND WAYS TO ALLOW PUBLICISTS AND OTHER THIRD PARTIES TO COMMUNICATE for you
Even though we live in the age of the individual content provider, many media outlets frown on a writer contacting them directly. In addition, some gatekeepers will think this personal contact confirms your low status; if you had “people,” you wouldn’t need direct contact with the gatekeeper.
Keeping in mind the rules set out in Colleen Lindsay’s article on dealing with publicists (see appendices), provide contact information to the best person to make the initial contact, whether your publicist, editor, or someone else assisting in your efforts. If you don’t have a publicist or this kind of access to your editor, you may want to make sure none of your friends or colleagues have a connection with the gatekeeper or gatekeepers before you contact the outlet directly. If you ask a friend or colleague to contact a gatekeeper, provide them with a script of what to say and how to say it, to avoid any miscommunication of your message.
As the Internet continues to erode certain kinds of hierarchies, more and more writers will be in direct contact with more and more gatekeepers. However, this will probably increase not decrease the need for third party liaisons, since gatekeepers will need some way to prioritize the flow of incoming information.
• ACKNOWLEDGE THE LIMITS OF YOUR SKILL SET
The skills that led you to write a book or story or article are not the same skills required to leverage it in the public world. That is a separate skill. Not everyone has it, and only some people have it in genius-level quantities. This can work for you in areas where an element of inspired amateurism — the Do-It-Yourself impulse — is appreciated, even expected. However, even in areas previously the domain of amateurs, like YouTube book trailers or podcasts, more and more sophisticated, professional efforts have started to become the standard.
Therefore, to avoid stress and be more successful: Recognize your own limitations and find others with the required skills and experience.
You may need a budget to hire someone, but you may also be able to barter for services. The barter system has become more and more common as creative individuals collaborate across the Internet. The best way to find the right people to work for you is to find existing examples of what you want to do, and approach whoever created them — whether it’s a banner ad or a website or a short film. In all things remember that a combination of mimicry and your unique vision provides the best chance for success.
Luckily, too, online platforms like blogs come with ready-made templates, and a blog platform like WordPress allows you to turn a blog into something very much like a website. Make sure to let standardization and templates do the work for you where appropriate.
If you cannot find someone to do something you know is not your strength, you may need to decide whether it’s worth the effort. An ugly or clunky website or book trailer can be worse support for your efforts at leverage than no website or book trailer at all.
• DEFINE THE LIMITS OF YOUR EFFORT
There are only so many hours in a day, and you have only so much stamina across a day, a week, or a longer period. Before entering into a campaign for your creative project, decide how much time and energy you can afford to spend on it. Ask yourself these questions:
These questions and their answers exist in the context of a wider space: your creative life. Some writers can easily promote their work and continue to create by separating “creative” and “career” efforts into separate daily blocks of time. Others require the immersion of total concentration on the act of creation and must acknowledge (without guilt) that focusing on their careers will require not working on creative projects during that time. My own level is that I can’t work on a major creative project while also doing PR for one of my books, although I can still focus on blogging and writing nonfiction. Therefore, I adjust accordingly.
Whatever your personality and approach, make sure you know the personal consequences of your decisions in this area. Be prepared to go weeks without working on your fiction, and, if possible, try to make sure those weeks coincide with a time period you planned on recharging your imagination anyway. Given the introvert/extrovert difference between creativity and PR, you may find that the time spent on promoting your book actually helps you get back into your writing afterwards.
• DEVELOP A MESSAGE AND STICK TO IT
Every creative project has two stories to tell. One of them is about the project itself and the other is about you. When you’re lucky, both stories are compelling, and both allow you to get leverage with media outlets. When you’re extraordinarily lucky, both messages are, in a sense, the same message.
For example, when I used to run a publishing company, we released The Fourth Circle, a surreal novel by a Serbian writer named Zoran Živkovi?. Živkovi? lives in Belgrade and had survived the NATO bombardment. His house wasn’t far from the Chinese Embassy, which took a direct hit. The Fourth Circle was written as a way of distracting himself from a horrible situation. We had a compelling story about the author, and a compelling story behind the book. That The Fourth Circle only indirectly dealt with the war actually enhanced the meta-story by demonstrating how the author used writing the book as a coping mechanism, and as a partial escape from his situation.
Make sure you know what your message is, and stick to that message throughout the PR campaign for your book. (A good press release written by your publicist or by you can help in getting your message across. Press releases are dealt with in the appendices.)
• UNDERSTAND THE INDIRECT BENEFIT OF YOUR ACTIONS AS WELL AS THE DIRECT BENEFIT
A single PR action may only sell a few books, but if there is a peripheral, or secondary, benefit that either supports your strategic goals or results in some tactical advantage, then that one action may be more worthwhile than another action that “only” sells more books. Most writers, except for those who are bestsellers, need to explore and exploit all indirect benefits of an action, because your best chance of success lies in diversification and reputation as much as in sales. When creating a plan, try to think of all of the indirect advantages of a particular task or action. An advantage might be as small as the opportunity to meet a gatekeeper who can be useful to you.
• Do not overestimate the value of local coverage
New writers tend to value local coverage because it provides a nice ego boost with their friends and relatives. However, such coverage tends to be of limited value unless you live in a major media market like Boston, New York, Seattle, or San Francisco — or a slightly smaller city that’s a hotbed of the arts, like Austin. With falling circulations for newspapers and local magazines, the amount of effort you expend on local coverage should not exceed the expected return.
Also keep in mind that unless you have achieved a huge success — the kind that cannot be ignored — your book or other creative project tends to be invisible to gatekeepers. There’s a certain truth to the idea that people respond to the exotic and ignore or take for granted what’s right in front of them. For years, I found it much harder to get coverage by the local Tallahassee Democrat than from all manner of international media. For a time, I was better known in Helsinki, Finland, than in Florida. A good way to drive your publicist crazy is to insist they spend time trying to talk some overworked, underpaid features editor at a newspaper with a circulation under twenty thousand to run a feature on you or your book.
Leverage always creates exceptions, though. If you’ve achieved huge success — like winning a major prize — your efforts will be rewarded. Similarly, if you are doing a reading or signing at a legitimate brick-and-mortar location, you may be able to get some limited coverage. It doesn’t hurt if a mention or article is also posted online, as this allows you to reap additional benefits from that initial effort throughout the blogosphere.
• RECOGNIZE THAT THE TERM “BOOK TOUR” HAS A NEW MEANING
Due to the influence of electronic media, the idea of a book tour has changed radically. Just doing readings and signings at a brick-and-mortar location is a small part of the total tour. In fact, the online media coverage, fan comments, and your own blogging about readings may be of more value than the actual readings. In addition, your “book tour” might include a series of guest blogging stops, an interview session in Second Life, stopping by the message board devoted to a particular topic or type of writing, and any number of other constantly evolving “events” that have nothing to do with our physical world. Thinking about the book tour in this way may help you to organize your thoughts on the form and timeline of your own unique promotional efforts. (For more thoughts on this subject, refer to the examples in the introduction to “Creating a PR Plan.”)
In this section, you’ll find a list of effective PR opportunities to help your cause. Your task will be to combine the ones that work best for you, creating an effective, unified plan that integrates opportunities with the tools discussed in the next section, and that includes leverage across your platforms.
I generally define “opportunities” as publicity on platforms to which someone else controls access, which you can then leverage across your own platforms. Along with the creative project you’re promoting, many of the tools associated with your publicity efforts help you to convince gatekeepers to offer you opportunities.
That’s a rather clinical definition for a category that includes conventions and readings, but for strategic and tactical purposes it’s a clarifying way of looking at the battlefield. In the real, flesh-and-blood world, of course, there are many different perspectives at work here. For example, a reviewer doesn’t think of him or herself as a “platform” for publicity. Nor should you, as a writer, think of reviews as just a way to get information about your work to the public. But for now, put on your PR hat.
An opportunity tends to accrete a certain amount of leverage to itself; this is an intrinsic quality of an opportunity. For example, an interview on a website has a built-in audience. The primary value comes from exposing readers who have never heard of you to your work — and reminding others who do know you but may not read your blog or Facebook status that you have a new project out.
You can get additional benefit out of any opportunity, large or small, by sharing the link or information with other gatekeepers (bloggers for media outlets, etc.) and thus magnifying the effect. Writers who, for example, complain that their interviews are always ignored by Internet gatekeepers while interviews with “X” always get additional coverage don’t understand that in all likelihood “X” or “X’s” publicist proactively sent out the link or information. You’d be surprised at how effective this simple effort can be at generating coverage. Content providers for news feeds in particular are always hungry for links — not because they’re lazy but because they’re overworked.
That’s a tactical example of an advantage you can gain. On a strategic level, remember to integrate new media efforts with more traditional approaches. Why?
If you maintain a foothold through several of the platforms we’ve discussed (blogs, Facebook, etc.), you already have ready-made conduits through which you can send information related to your books and other creative products.
On the one hand this means you don’t have to do as much work to reach some form of an audience from project to project. On the other, it means you run the risk of running a “perpetual campaign,” in which you are sending out the equivalent of “PR bursts” across the Internet through multiple platforms on a regular basis. Without finding creative or selective ways to manage, disguise, or “mix up” these bursts, you’ll soon find that new media becomes much less effective for you.
This is one reason to mix traditional approaches to PR with new media solutions. Another reason is that not all potential readers of your work like or use new media. If you want to diversify your audience and widen your efforts, explore effective use of traditional approaches, most of which have more to do with the physical world. (An email is not a handshake, and a conversation in a bar is not a chat on an instant messenger.)
Your challenge in promoting any book or other creative project will be to find your comfort level, mixing and matching new and traditional approaches so that you create a plan that fits your personality and doesn’t fragment you so much that you cannot get creative work done.
In the old days, soliciting blurbs praising your book was almost exclusively the domain of your editor or possibly your publicist. Now, though, blurbs serve a wider function than simply decorating the front or back of a book. Editors and publicists still make the majority of these contacts for you, but asking for a blurb can also be seen as a kind of opportunity, especially since social media has made the “cold call” less of an intrusion. Anyone who has a high enough profile for you to receive a blurb from them probably has an online presence, and may be willing to help you promote your book online.
How do you go about soliciting a blurb?
A good author blurb helps sales of the book by functioning as a “word of mouth” that targets the blurber’s core audience, as opposed to the broader definition of “word of mouth” that refers to all potential readers. However, it also helps you with reviewers who like the author, and it will help you get more blurbs from authors who are friends of the author who blurbed your book. You can also use it as leverage with bookstores for readings, etc. In short, the right blurb can make people sit up and take notice. If you can’t get one blurb from a well-known author, aim for several endorsements from lesser known writers and let the quantity of quotes help you. Sometimes, too, you may be entering a new market in which you are unknown. In that case, seeking out a hot new writer from that genre who may be more approachable can be a stepping stone to acceptance from the giants in that market.
Never underestimate the value of face-to-face time with readers and influencers who have gathered in one place for the purpose of celebrating a particular type of writing. Whether you write fantasy or realism, science fiction or mystery, poetry or manga, you can find a conference or convention worth attending. As you become more established, you will also begin to receive invites to such events, perhaps even offers to be a guest speaker, making it easier to promote your creative projects at them.
SELECTING AN EVENT
Here are a few pointers for selecting a conference or convention.
When you’re just starting out, all events look like opportunities. However, you will need to make sure as you progress that you begin to turn down requests to attend events. If you’re a freelance writer, you may decide you only attend events where you are receiving a speaking fee or at least reimbursement for all expenses. Or, you may decide that you will only attend a certain type of event. For two years, to get out of my comfort zone of attending fantasy conventions or conferences, my wife and I instead accepted invites from literary festivals and organizations wanting us to deliver a keynote speech or workshop. This allowed us to make contacts with many new and interesting people outside of our main circle of acquaintances. This also led to additional opportunities that would not have materialized otherwise. Always keep in mind your long-term goals when deciding on public appearances, and understand that sometimes saying “no” is a way of saying “yes” to something more important.
ATTENDING AN EVENT
Whether you’ve attended one event or ten, I may be able to save you from making a few basic mistakes, while also priming you to take advantage of opportunities.
First, if you are new and don’t know many people attending the event, try to find a more experienced writer who will go with you. Otherwise, you may wind up wandering lonely as a cloud — especially if you aren’t good at meeting people on your own. A convention attended in this context may be a waste of time and money. Similarly, if there are people you would like to meet at the convention, email them ahead of time to let them know you enjoy their work and hope they might have time for a drink. While most will not respond, some will, especially the ones who hold court in the convention bar.
If you aren’t on a panel and don’t know anyone at the convention, attend as many panels as possible and turn the event into a purely educational experience that aids your Private Booklife.
For most writers conventions may be most valuable for networking, but don’t forget that such events also offer unique promotional opportunities. Take PR materials for your project, along with copies of your book. You can usually find a freebies table for the promotional materials. The copies of your book should be given out to attending reviewers, bloggers, and other influencers. Small postcards with your contact information on them are as effective as business cards. Push against the trend toward tiny “strip” business cards, however, as they’re easily lost by the recipient.
While conventions and conferences provide wonderful opportunities for making the personal acquaintance of other professionals in your field, don’t insert yourself into the ongoing conversations of other attendees. Observe proper etiquette even when itching to do otherwise. Proper etiquette doesn’t mean you have to remain at a distance, however. As a new writer with a book out, I did sometimes walk up to my hero — if they weren’t otherwise occupied — and say something along the lines of “I know you’re busy and I don’t want to hold you up, but I love your work and here’s a copy of my new book as a thank you for so many hours of great reading.” The truth is, the recipient can always toss your book later.
A book is one thing. A manuscript is another. Under no circumstances should you ever try to give a professional attending one of these events your unpublished project. If you have a conversation where you make a personal connection, you can always send an email follow-up after the event with a polite P.S. mentioning your manuscript and asking if the person is willing to take a look at it.
Finally, if the event has a dealer’s room with publisher and bookseller tables, be sure to strike up conversations with anyone whose table interests you. Feel free to mention your book. Anyone sitting behind a table is there to sell books and make contacts. I’d advise against buying a table and sitting there with your books, as for an individual writer this is usually a lonely chore self-assigned to the self-published. It can be useful to you, but it also ties you down.
The creation of the LongPen™ famously championed by Margaret Atwood allows a writer to stay at home and still do bookstore events. According to the website, the LongPen “has an interactive image and voice, as well as the ability to sign. The author will be there, in real time. So the exchange is with the author, not the signing device…In fact, it’s quite possible that the screen exchange will be more personal than what exists now.”
Despite this cheery sales pitch, I’d argue that you can’t really have a meaningful exchange with a robot that creates signatures, even if the robot has an interactive image and voice. Sometimes there’s no substitute for getting out there and meeting people. Most of our existence, thankfully, still occurs in the physical world. And, although many brick-and-mortar bookstores are in financial trouble at the moment, readings don’t seem to be going out of fashion.
There are several factors you’ll need to consider before you decide to commit to using readings as part of your PR plan. Please note that a “reading” might consist of just a signing with a question-and-answer session, or it might be as complex as a presentation of some kind. A “reading” might also be part of a larger book tour that includes both physical and virtual events. A reading might also have a virtual component, such as a nearly simultaneous podcast. At the very least, you can leverage any event by asking your audience to blog about it.
SETTING UP AN EVENT
The mechanics of getting a reading and signing in a bookstore can be murky. First of all, many publishers no longer send any but their best-selling authors on book tours. Secondly, there is a kind of “which came first, the chicken or the egg” aspect to getting a reading or signing. This issue concerns leverage. If you have a substantial body of work behind you, you may not have any problem setting up events, especially with independent bookstores. However, if you are new, bookstores may only greenlight a reading/signing if you can guarantee coverage in local media (a feature or book review). At the same time, local media outlets may only cover your book if you’re doing a reading.
This timing issue requires nudging both parties along the path if there’s resistance. When just starting, I often went to the bookstore manager and told them that I thought I could get local coverage, only for them to express skepticism. Then I would contact the features editor at the local newspaper, tell that person a little about my book, and indicate the local bookstore was interested in holding an event. If the features editor expressed interest in covering the book in the context of a local event, I would then go back to the bookstore with that shaky reassurance. Several times I got a reading as a result. From that point forward, it’s just a lurching dance of shoring up the details on both sides and hoping the covenant holds…
There are easier ways, if you have luck and publisher support. On some projects, my publicist has set up events using time-honored contacts. On one project, I dealt directly with the events organizers for the entire Borders chain and they arranged for a dozen individual stores across the United States to host events. Still, with exceptions pertaining to your outrageously high sales across many projects or the fluke of a high-flying individual book, you will probably wind up doing most of the heavy lifting yourself.
BRICKBATS AND BENEFITS
It’s important to note that most people in the book business are deeply divided over the value of in-store events, and many writers find them time-intensive for little gain. Colleen Lindsay, a publicist-turned-agent who runs a blog called The Swivet, even crunched the numbers and declared that it’s impossible for bookstores or writers (other than the Stephen Kings of this world) to make a profit from an in-store event.
It’s hard to argue with Lindsay’s numbers (and you may not want to), but other factors do come into play, even if we put aside the idea of promoting the arts as irrelevant to a discussion of book promotion (but especially because the aim of book promotion is not always direct sales).
From a new media perspective of interconnectivity, in-store events have the following potential benefits:
You may decide that focusing on readings doesn’t make sense for you, and in this increasingly electronic world you may have a point. But if you do decide to set up a series of in-store events, here are a few tips to maximize your efforts.
In addition to bookstore venues, there are many local, regional, and national reading series across the country, receptive to both new and established writers, that you should investigate.
ELEMENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL EVENT
Beginning writers, so often starved for attention, often view readings as an opportunity to cram in as much material as possible. However, out of hundreds of readings, I have only ever encountered two people who could hold my attention for more than twenty minutes: Seamus Heaney and Stephen King.
A reading of no more than fifteen minutes allows you to give your audience an effective sample of your work, without overstaying your welcome. This brevity also allows more time for questions, which is important since many people come to a reading as much out of curiosity about writers and their world as they do to hear you read. While a reading provides you with your identity as a writer, most readers will respond even more emphatically to the wider context of you as a person.
Humor is important in a reading because it engages the audience and allows them to connect with you. If you can read a humorous passage, you should do so ninety percent of the time. But remember that what’s humorous in New York City may not be humorous in Huntsville, Alabama, and that what’s humorous to an audience of budding writers may not be humorous to the general reading public.
That said, sometimes you must, as they say, stand and deliver. In important venues, or in situations in which you need to assert your authority as a writer, always select something serious that will blow your audience away.
Being aware of your context extends beyond noting the locale and taste of your intended audience. If you are reading with other writers, make sure to research their work and try to create a contrast from that work with the material you decide to read. Understand that a reading is a performance, and attempt to animate your words in that context — just don’t overdo it. For example, creating additional voices for different characters, unless you have acting experience, usually backfires on the reader because it distracts from rather than enhances the experience.
Some members of the audience for a reading won’t be there to see you specifically — they just want to see a writer because they’re curious. A writer in this context is like a five-legged calf or a frog with three eyes. This is one good reason to bookend a reading with anecdotes about the writing of your book or any other interesting or amusing story connected to the book. In doing so, try to emphasize your central message.
Also, as I’ve emphasized before, take honest stock of your strengths and weaknesses. If your friends and colleagues agree that you aren’t a good reader, stick to signings, anecdotes, and answering questions. Answer any and all questions with honesty and without snark, unless you know every member of the audience personally and can guarantee that your sarcasm will be interpreted as benign.
I used to be uptight about readings, because I always read serious material and you cannot predict an audience’s reaction to such material. I also chose long segments to read, giving readers no relief from my seriousness. Since I began reading shorter excerpts, weaving in anecdotes, and found humorous passages to present, my readings have become an asset rather than a liability, and I have a lot more fun, too.
Then, too, maybe you might want to be more extravagant. If so, you could do worse than follow writer Catherynne M. Valente’s example:
Our most recent tour has incorporated a phenomenal amount of performance art including belly dancing (with and without live python), aerial rope suspension, fire-spinning, and burlesque. We take a small circus with us, all over the country. I have heard it said that book tours don’t make money, in terms of net copies of books sold. And that’s true. But you can’t put a price on a lifelong fan, and that’s what we’re creating as we travel — readers and listeners who will stick with us through thick and thin.
For more on these topics please refer to James Crossley’s “Booksellers” in the appendices.
Many of the most visible blogs (or LiveJournals) in your area of emphasis entertain guest bloggers from time to time. In my experience, if approached courteously, most bloggers are open to being contacted about such opportunities. A blog’s readers tend to like being exposed to different voices and points of view — as long as they know the blog’s creator will be back soon. You can even make several “stops” as part of a so-called “blog tour,” during which you post entries on consecutive days on a series of blogs. (Another approach is to have other bloggers all talk about your book on the same day.)
Having your own established blog provides a huge advantage when you approach other bloggers with promotional ideas. As Matt Staggs notes, “At best, they’ll see you as one of them — someone with a genuine interest in the online community — and at worst you’ll at least be able to better understand the time and effort they take in their own blogs.” If relevant, having guests on your own blog post about subjects related to your book may also be beneficial.
If you’re interested in pursuing guest-blogging spots on popular and relevant blogs, following a few simple guidelines will make the experience run more smoothly, and minimize any possible friction with the blog’s owner.
After you guest blog, find some way to pay back or pay forward the opportunity. This isn’t quid pro quo, but simply being considerate. Even if you’re a small fish and the platform you guest blogged on is run by a big fish, that person will appreciate the gesture.
Perhaps the best way to pay back the favor is to garner so much attention due to the quality and relevance of your guest blogging that you actually enhance the status of the big fish’s blog.
The release or impending release of most creative projects usually sparks some kind of response, whether across the blogosphere or in mainstream media. Thus, you may not have to do much work to get interviewed — a few journalists and bloggers may come to you. If not, however, apply the same standards of research that you would to conferences and guest blogging. Also familiarize yourself with your targeted market, be courteous, and remember that the onus is on you to prove that your story or project has value to them.
FORMAT
An interview can be conducted in many different ways: via email, telephone, Skype, Instant Messenger, webcam, video, etc. It can be live or taped. You should try to become comfortable with all of these methods. However, there are compelling reasons to use email when you have the choice:
CONTENT
Although the content of an interview is largely determined by the questions asked, you can also help shape that content through careful preparation. This isn’t a problem with interviews through email, Instant Messenger, etc., where you have a chance to gather your thoughts while answering the questions. But for video or audio captures, here are a few pointers:
However, regardless of the method of interview, you should go into an interview with a clear plan of what you want to say and how you want to say it. The simpler your message, the more effective, given short attention spans and the vagaries of how your interview may be edited by the interviewer. Judicious use of humor also goes a long way toward making the end reader, viewer, or listener want to pick up your book.
THE RIGHT WAY TO BE SELECTIVE
Satellite radio, webcams, and podcasts have all created new venues for interviews. When you’re first starting out, you may want to take advantage of every request. However, over time, as you become better known, you will want to be selective with regard to interviews. If you’ve just been interviewed by the Los Angeles Times book blog, do you also want to do an interview for a personal blog that averages one hundred visitors a day?
It’s not just a rhetorical question, because the answer might be “yes.” Those hundred visitors might all be bookstore managers or professional journalists, for example. I recently answered reader questions for Joseph Mallozzi’s blog. When I agreed to the opportunity, it was an off-the-cuff decision. I wasn’t busy and readers of his blog had bought one of my books. After I answered the questions, I discovered Mallozzi is an executive producer of several TV shows and that his blog gets heavy traffic for this reason. I’d inadvertently exposed a large, fresh group of readers to my work. It could as easily have gone the other way: I could have discovered I’d spent a lot of effort for little gain.
To echo the discussion of fragmentation and networking, while you can say yes to every interview opportunity if you want to, make sure that’s your decision and not just a response to stimuli.
Most publicists advise writers not to contact reviewers or send books to them directly. There are at least two reasons for this advice: first, writer interference may clash with the publicist’s efforts and, second, many reviewers don’t take seriously direct contact or a book sent from the writer because they’re used to an established hierarchy in which a third party does the contacting. Direct writer contact implies self-publishing, among other negatives.
While generally good advice, the no-contact rule has some exceptions. First, the publishing world is changing and more writers are taking promotion into their own hands, especially writers with independent and boutique presses. This means more reviewers have become used to at least some writer contact.
Second, the definition of “reviewer” has changed over the past few years. It used to mean a writer for a local, regional, or national newspaper, magazine, radio program, or TV program. Now that term might include a Twitter baron with a following of five thousand or a guy named Zanzibar76 who podcasts out of his basement and has an audience of fifty thousand listening in every week. The Twitter baron doesn’t care where his information comes from. And Zanzibar76 doesn’t know the protocols of contact — he’s much more like the guy in the indie rock scene who came out of writing for fanzines to do reviews for Rolling Stone.
Third, experience and the length of a writing career eventually come into play. Over time, you will meet reviewers in your virtual and physical travels. Some of them will have already read and enjoyed your work. At the point where you have forged a cordial personal relationship that stops short of being a clear ethical conflict of interest, it’s your call as to whether you contact that person about your book.
In general, I tend to avoid emails on such subjects because it feels intrusive, but have no qualms about dropping signed books in the mail to reviewers I know are sympathetic to my work and haven’t minded the practice in the past. They are then free to open a line of communication with me or not, whereas a direct email to a reviewer seems to require a response.
As for the established hierarchy and protocol at those citadels of established traditional media, a good rule of thumb is that if a media outlet has a books or reviews editor and doesn’t divulge contact information for its reviewers, you should assume you need a third party to contact the editor for you.
If your creative project has a unique story behind it, don’t just put that information in a press release. Use that angle to pitch an article, essay, or opinion piece to the appropriate newspaper, magazine, or website. A piece that allows you to mention your project, even just in a short author’s note accompanying the text, can be a powerful advocate for your work with readers who might otherwise never be interested. You can also release your article for free online and encourage everyone to reproduce it on their own platforms. (The Creative Commons website provides many different ways to release text for reproduction elsewhere, with varying levels of protection for the author of the material.)
If you decide to research possible venues for a pitch, remember that magazines tend to have much longer lead times than most online outlets. Schedule your pitches accordingly, and weigh the relative value of online versus hardcopy possibilities along with other variables like payment, audience, and relevance to your book.
Also consider having someone else write the story. Pitch the idea to a freelancer that you know writes for certain publications or websites. You’ll give up the possibility of getting paid, but you may also be able to bypass the relevant gatekeepers. (For additional advice, read the applicable information in Matt Staggs’ “Nodes and Influencers” in the appendices.)
In this section, you’ll find a list of effective tools to help your cause. Your task will be to select the ones that work best for you and integrate them into an effective, unified plan that links use of tools with the opportunities discussed in the last section, and that includes leverage across your platforms. Every tool has some application not yet thought of or rarely used for book promotion purposes.
I have divided PR tools into the following categories: Artifacts, Information Retrieval, Objects, and Samples. It’s impossible to list every permutation of, for example, “artifact” related to promoting your creative project, especially since the possibilities change every year due to the creativity of new media entrepreneurs. But I can make you aware of some of the tools and briefly discuss how they enhance and feed into your overall effort. I’ve largely avoided discussing tools like magazine, radio, or TV advertising because (1) it’s expensive, (2) it’s superfluous if you can get free coverage through a review or feature, and (3) you can find information on these traditional approaches in many other books.
In the context of your PR campaign, “artifacts” are tangible physical or virtual creations that can be leveraged through a platform or an opportunity. An artifact often enhances your ability to acquire leverage by providing added value to readers or to the gatekeepers who decide whether or not to grant you an opportunity. They also, either directly or indirectly, support your message about your book or other creative project.
Artifacts possess their own aesthetic integrity and can be powerful expressions of the imagination in their own right. Sometimes, they transcend from adjuncts to your main purpose into their own creative projects, and thus support your Private Booklife as well.
Let’s explore some examples of artifacts.
BOOK TRAILERS
An effective book trailer is short and to the point. A trailer longer than a minute or two must do more than present the book — it must tell a story. Good book trailers also make some attempt to be cinematic rather than static, include music, and mix in humor when possible. Because the classic leverage model is to upload your trailer to YouTube, viewers will tolerate a certain level of amateurism. YouTube is still the home of DIY video.
As both my publicist Matt Staggs and I have discovered, some book concepts better lend themselves to video than others, especially because you have to be realistic about your resources. For example, books with a strong visual component make it easier to create a simple video even if you have little video experience because you can build your narrative around one or two images.
One easy way to start building a video is to make a list of those images, as well as any other elements you think are important. Then search the Internet for public domain still pictures, video, and audio. You should also check with the cover artist for the book, who might well be willing to share more images to help construct the video.
Once you have as much material as you can find, separate it all into high-quality and low-quality buckets, keeping the low-quality images, video, and sound just as back-up. Review the high-quality material and begin looking for the elements you need to put together a coherent video that also matches the story you want to tell about the book. Try to create at least a rough sequence before you begin to put together the trailer.
Even if you only have Windows Movie Maker or some other rudimentary software, you can then begin importing the elements you want to use and arranging them according to your rough order. Depending on how organized you’ve been this part of the process might take a few hours or a couple of days, especially since you’ll need to add additional effects and title cards.
Depending on the book, you can either downplay the amateur aspect or play it up. Both approaches have hidden dangers. On the one hand, people may find your trailer boring. On the other hand, they may find it laughably bad. For example, Matt took a big chance with James Morrow’s Shambling Towards Hiroshima, a book that mixes satire with spoofs of Japanese monster movies. He found public domain Godzilla footage, interspliced it with passages from the book and images of the book’s cover art. He didn’t have to deliberately aim for camp in the final product because his core elements already achieved that effect. These very elements might’ve seemed like weaknesses in a video for a more serious book — in fact, he might not have been able to take a DIY approach for a more serious book.
But the personal aspects of certain types of DIY can also work to your benefit. One way to get around this is to deliberately embrace and emphasize the amateurism. For an anthology my wife and I edited called Fast Ships, Black Sails, Ann had contributors dress up as pirates and send in video clips of them reading from their stories. The personal connection with the viewer created by these very short readings, combined with the charm of seeing the writers with eye patches and, in one case, a parrot on the shoulder, led to the video being picked up by the official Pirates of the Caribbean fan website. Did the video fall into the pitfalls of an amateur approach? It’s open to debate. We were able to leverage the video to a wider audience, but at the same time some viewers found the approach too uneven.
The fact is, even inspired amateurism can only take you so far. Leveraging a video requires gatekeepers to link to it or embed it. As homemade online video grows more and more sophisticated, you may have trouble getting attention for an amateurish book trailer, even with the anecdotal evidence I provided above. The question you’ll then have to ask yourself is: Am I willing to pay to have a professional create a trailer for me? If you are willing, then you need to make sure you have a good plan for how to use the video.
What’s an appropriate context in which to leverage a book trailer? One possibility is to create a trailer for a second release of your book. If your book comes out in hardcover and then trade paperback, consider delaying a book trailer for the trade paperback edition. The trade paperback edition of a hardcover has more limited potential for reviews and other types of PR, so generating attention through this option can help with leverage. A good example is Toby Barlowe’s recent book trailer for his novel Sharp Teeth. It supported the release of his book in trade paperback, it reminded everyone who didn’t pick up the book the first time about what created such buzz around its initial release, and it’s a beautiful little artistic statement in its own right. The trailer hit the Internet about a week before the trade paperback’s publication. Barlowe not only leveraged it across his own platforms, he found ways to get gatekeepers who had loved the hardcover to feature the video.
FILMS AND SOUNDTRACKS
Sometimes, a book trailer turns into something more, although admittedly, the demarcation between “trailer” and “film” is getting blurrier and blurrier. For example, the three-minute trailer for my novel Shriek: An Afterword grew into a fourteen-minute independent short film with a soundtrack by the rock band The Church (a good example of creative networking, as I’d used the opportunity of a visit to Australia to meet with them, and we’d hit it off).
Although created for the Internet, the film was shown at various independent theaters and other venues around the country and the world, at events promoting the novel. One of my favorite photographs of all time shows a double-billing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show and Shriek at the Clinton Street Theater in Portland. The film was also used by Borders to promote the novel to their subscribers and received Internet exposure far beyond the dedicated website I’d created for the title. The trailer for the movie also wound up being featured on news sites such as Mediabistro’s GalleyCat.
But after book promotion was over, the film — experimental and definitely its own entity by that point — engendered a soundtrack for the novel. The Church decided to take the instrumental music they’d created and flesh it out into a full CD with lyrics. I had written the novel while listening to The Church, which only deepened the synergistic relationship. In late 2008, The Church released the CD simultaneously with a deluxe edition of the novel. At this point, it was no longer clear which creative object was subservient to the other. This example also demonstrates the powerful effect of the Internet, as members of The Church lived, at various times, on three different continents during the making of the CD, and the project would not have been economical without access to the Internet.
Sometimes, too, this process can be even more immersive. Remember Catherynne M. Valente from the section on readings? She has a close working relationship with the musician S. J. Tucker. Together, they’ve collaborated on three full-length CDs intended as soundtracks for Valente’s books.
They stemmed from our friendship and mutual love of each other’s work, and have taken on lives of their own. S. J. suggested an Orphan’s Tales album in my Ohio living room in 2006 and wrote the first song while I made breakfast — and thus everything began, because if there is music, there is obviously a tour, and we began to figure out how to perform as a reading-concert, alternating readings from the novels and songs from the albums into a single experience. We have traveled all over the country doing this, and have pushed each other as artists in new directions.
How does the process work? Valente delivers the manuscript to Tucker when completed “and I give her complete freedom to write the songs that she wants to write, whatever inspires her within the book. By her music, I often learn a great deal about the book I wrote — each of her songs is a crystallization of part of the novel, and I see it from other perspectives.”
From a PR standpoint, Tucker and Valente have, as Valente puts it, “cross-pollinated our fandoms — those who read my books discover her music and those who are avid fans of hers find my books through her songs.” They’ve also built a dedicated audience for their performances, as well as for limited-edition perfumes and jewelry tied to the books. The collaboration even led to a journey of several weeks, across several states, culminating in a special event for “superfans”: an intimate multi-day train trip down to New Orleans with both performers, readings, and songs planned the entire way, ending in a sumptuous group dinner at their destination.
ALTERNATE REALITY GAMES
The idea of using the Internet as a kind of meta-notebook across which you scrawl your own choose-your-own-adventure or other kind of alternate reality game, and in so doing engage new readers, still hasn’t reached its full potential. Writers keep trying, though, and some day soon the very nature of social media may change to the extent that it makes such efforts easier. Until that time, or unless you perfect some method yourself, you have a couple of possibilities: to work within an existing online reality or to create your own via various platforms.
As mentioned earlier, Second Life — a kind of virtual reality you access through the Internet after subscribing — hasn’t been used much as a platform. It also remains underdeveloped as a way to create a PR artifact. For this reason, it may be fertile new territory to explore in the future. Writer Caitlín R. Kiernan has had a presence in Second Life for almost two years and hasn’t yet found a way to tap into the potential for creating potent artifacts:
I’ve been a “resident” now since May 2007, and I’ve tried, mainly, to use it for the purposes of roleplay as a writing exercise. Upon discovering Second Life, my first reaction was that it is perfectly suited to this end. And that I could use various roleplay scenarios to work out bits of story for print, or, better yet, to create stories in an entirely new medium…So, at the start, my hopes were very, very high. After all, this is the closest thing we’ve seen yet to a “holodeck.” Within SL, I can be anyone, any species, any gender, exist in any time, in realistic and in fantastical worlds that, with a little work, time, and money, I can customize to my specific needs. Almost any imaginable interaction can be acted out in SL. Its potential for simulation, full-immersion improvisational theater, and interactive storytelling is enormous. Sadly, it’s also mostly untapped. Because, in truth, most users approach SL as nothing more than a chat room/social networking site that just happens to offer very fancy avatars that you can move about within very fancy virtual environments. Even those few corners of SL set aside specifically for roleplaying and storytelling are usually overwhelmed by users who are actively hostile to roleplaying, who purposefully disrupt it, or who simply cannot grasp what it means to be in character.
The hindrance to use of Second Life for Booklife purposes appears to be that success hinges on your audience not only being receptive to the message but also not actively disrupting your attempt to deliver it!
Juliet Ulman, a consultant and editor who used to work for Bantam Books (and the developmental editor for Booklife), provides a view of Second Life from a publisher’s perspective. She notes that Bantam even established its own cafe and connected virtual bookstore “where they hold virtual readings and Q&A sessions with such established authors as Dean Koontz and George R. R. Martin — after which those who’ve chosen to attend virtually can purchase the author’s works in the attached bookstore.”
However, Ulman believes that Kiernan’s experience is “not unusual” and that “the direct effect of these virtual events on actual sales is difficult to assess and almost certainly less than one might hope.” She also points out that unless you are a “brand-name” author like Koontz or Martin, it’s difficult to entice users away from the many distractions of Second Life to engage with what is essentially an old model of author interaction simply transported to a shiny, pixelated stage.”
Even Kiernan admits, however, that “Second Life does have a lot to offer writers, in theory, but only if they are willing to invest a tremendous amount of time and energy, endure an unspeakable amount of stupidity, and possess great patience.” Potentially, then, a writer could use this advanced form of roleplaying to create interesting PR artifacts while also stimulating creativity in his or her Private Booklife.
On the other hand, you might be better off trying to “go viral” by being a mammal rather than a dinosaur, being small rather than large. To promote her novel Palimpsest, Valente built an alternate reality game out of the equivalent of a piece of string, two trashcan lids, and a plastic bag:
This was [a kind of virtual] “novella” in the world of the novel, accessible by readers through blogs, Twitter feeds, forums, and Facebook profiles. Hidden in the text were links to puzzles, digital art, audio files, video, and music. I created a video trailer for the novel which also served as a gateway to the game. We funneled several thousand readers through the linked sites in the six weeks before the novel came out, and it ramped up the excitement for the book considerably. It was a huge undertaking that involved many writers and artists working in tandem and anonymously, but its success in terms of [establishing an] online presence [for] the book before the book ever existed in the world cannot be overstated.
I find the implications of this experiment exciting because Valente provides a great example of how to create something that enriches both your Public and Private Booklife. From a PR point of view, however, success depends on more than just reader participation.
For example, what kind of press coverage did the ARG experiment get? In other words, the PR value of an artifact lies not just in its connection to a core creative project, but in its uniqueness. The added dimension to an effort of this kind is how you leverage that uniqueness to get the word out to people who never even access the game. Theoretically, three people could “play” the game and if you received coverage from, for example, one major media outlet like wired.com, the benefit to your book would be greater than if three thousand people had played the game and no one had written about it.
Artifacts are alluring because they promise to scratch your creative itch even as they help your Public Booklife. However, always remember that creating an artifact can divert time and money away from other, more direct efforts on behalf of your book. It can also skew your efforts toward promotion of the artifact rather than your book if you let it. Make careful assessments of the career and creative value weighed against the depth of the required effort. Also make sure before creating an artifact that you have an effective way to leverage the results.
In my case, creating a short film for Shriek: An Afterword raised my profile and led to many other opportunities. In Valente’s case, the game she created also raised her profile and reaffirmed her willingness to take risks. However, in both situations the direct impact on the profile and sales of the novel the artifacts were built to promote is hard to determine. Perhaps the most valuable benefit associated with a daring artifact is to establish a brand for the author, and that brand may come to be more valuable over the long-term than the impact on the sales of any individual book.
Your own database of contacts, as discussed in the Networking section of Booklife, provides a valuable source of intel during a PR campaign. You can use your contacts database to target various types of gatekeepers and reviewers, or target various parts of the country. Over time, you can use it to identify key concentrations of your fans, which can help you plan book tours. Always supplement your existing contacts database with information from Google searches and RSS Feeds. (Rather than providing a full exposition of a very technical subject here, please refer to “Sipping from the Fire Hose” in the appendices.)
Unlike artifacts, objects have no real intrinsic value as creative projects. Imagination is required to envision and create them, but they more directly serve the purpose of promoting your book. Moreover, there is less differentiation between objects than between artifacts. All banner ads look more or less the same. All postcards must follow the same rules about where to put address information. Here are a few examples of objects that can help support your PR campaign.
DEDICATED WEBSITES
With the right leverage, a good website can direct hundreds or thousands of readers a month to your work. Find a way to make it different in content or look by researching other author sites. Mimic what you like functionality-wise and then do your own take on it. Use someone with Web design experience, not just someone who knows a little HTML coding. Even if you write the content, use third person for static author biographical notes and other incidental/informational text. Reserve first person for your blog entries and other updates in which you directly address your audience. Make sure the design and functionality is clear, clean, direct, and modern. A website dedicated to your book should include the following basic information:
I also recommend investing in a book specifically devoted to the mechanics and methodology of website creation, like the excellent Web Design in a Nutshell by Jennifer Niederst Robbins. It’s worth noting, too, that more and more writers are creating a page for their latest book that resides on their blog. This has the benefit of being easier to maintain and having a more concentrated effect, at the expense of diversity and complexity.
POSTCARDS
There are several advantages to postcards. They’re inexpensive, seem less tacky than bookmarks, can be mailed, or can be used as an oversized business card. Unlike a business card, they provide the recipient with concise information about your book. Unlike the abomination that is the button, they serve a practical purpose. You can use them at conferences, but you can also send them to readers willing to pass some on to friends and family. Simple and straightforward, postcards make excellent emissaries for your book in the physical world. I don’t even bother leaving space for mailing information, as I leverage postcards as part of a press kit or during public appearances. Several companies have an online presence, the best of which is modernpostcard.com. (One example of a riff on the postcard is to put the same information on a beer coaster or a pack of playing cards.)
WEBSITE BANNER ADS
Of all types of paid advertising, website banner ads strike me as being the most valuable. You can pay to leverage a single advertisement across many sites, but you can send the same ad to friends and supporters who will post it on their sites for free.
One decision you’ll have to make is whether viewers click through to your site or to the sales page for your book on Amazon, IndieBound, or other online retailers. That decision should be based on whether your effort is primarily to support the current book or to support your overall brand. As for what makes someone click-through from the ad to information about your book, publishingtrends.com notes that one of the most effective approaches is to create an ad that leaves you wanting more at the end. Therefore, an effective technique is to entice the viewer to click at the end to answer a question or “learn more.”
Keep your banner ad simple but intriguing. Make sure it is designed by a Web design professional. Avoid complicated animations that may not run on all computers or all sites.
Not only are objects usually simpler to create than artifacts, they also tend to have a one or two targeted purposes. For this reason, they’re like the foot-soldiers in your campaign. They perform a necessary function, but they’re not particularly maneuverable. There’s a kind of static quality to them. For this reason, don’t try to make objects perform complex tasks. An anvil is not an apple, just as a banner ad is not a book trailer and a website is not an ARG.
One of your most effective tools will always be a sample of your creative project. These samples can take many forms, from the entire text to a selection created in another medium. Presentation and ease of use determine how useful sampling will be to your efforts. However, as Juliet Ulman points out, always check with your publisher first: “Unless you’ve specifically negotiated it in your contract, you will not have the right to provide a full free download of your book. And, if you haven’t retained First Serial Rights, you cannot provide an excerpt without your publisher’s approval.” Also, if you don’t have a publisher and haven’t built up at least a modest reputation for your writing, be careful that your offer of a sample doesn’t come across with a whiff of desperation, even though the traditional idea of a hierarchy for writers is crumbling.
FREE DOWNLOADS
A download of your book should be in an easy-to-read format that approximates the published iteration. While a simple, easy PDF format works fine for most laptop or desktop computers, it won’t translate well to most e-readers. The ability of e-readers and other portable devices is always changing, however, so you’ll need to research the current standards before deciding how to release your book.
You can use the information at the Creative Commons site to decide on the level of reader access to the text. Creative Commons just provides a pre-built, universally agreed upon structure to communicate your wishes about access to readers. You can release it for download and printing only, or allow much more interplay with the text.
Cory Doctorow championed the free book download through the culture website Boing Boing a few years ago, and he’s had great success. However, a word of caution: his success doesn’t mean you too will be as successful unless you have access to many readers. One theory of book downloads is that those who champion them as effective tools already have hugely successful platforms through which to leverage them. It’s also still unclear whether most readers who download a novel actually read the entire novel. Presumably, though, most people who download a book at least sample it.
The link between increased sales and book downloads that some writers claim also isn’t clear, but even if you assume the worst — that there is little or no link for most writers — leveraging a book download “event” creates all kinds of useful peripheral publicity. Nor is there any evidence that free downloads negatively affect book sales. As Doctorow has rightly pointed out, too, timing is extremely important: you won’t generate as many book sales if you release the free online version prior to publication. (Although peripheral to this discussion, pick up Doctorow’s excellent Content, a collection of essays about copyright and other subjects relevant to the new digital age.)
You can also, of course, offer a download of part of a book if the idea of a full download makes you nervous — or even podcast all or part of your book, if you own the rights (see the appendices for more on podcasting). Free samples can be offered on several sites. Amazon, for example, allows anyone to sell ebooks for their Kindle store. You can offer a free sample there as well as at Scribd and Issuu. Both Scribd and Issuu offer an online interface so readers don’t have to actually download the book or sample.
As I discuss in the Leverage section below, book downloads are no longer new and haven’t been for a couple of years, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t find effective methods of using this approach.
PUBLISHED EXCERPTS
If part of your book is self-contained, consider sending it around to applicable magazines, websites, or blogs for publication or posting. Depending on the circumstances of physical publication, a serialization may even be possible. If you want to get creative, you could even do a fictional blog tour, in which different blogs post interlocking excerpts. (Refer to the section above on Writing Your Backstory, as the advice there also applies to fiction excerpts.)
PRINT-ON-DEMAND “CATALOG.”
Most writers think of print-on-demand (POD) technologies as a good way to cheaply self-publish a book, especially since celebrity authors like Wil Wheaton have been so successful using online services like Lulu. However, you can also use POD for PR if you have multiple projects coming out and want a kind of catalog that includes information and samples from all of them. In the past, I have created little ninety-six-page books when I had four or five projects either in print or soon to be in print.
The best use I’ve found for them is when you’re introducing yourself to a new type of audience. When I attended my first Associated Writers Program conference in Vancouver, Canada, a few years ago, I had few contacts in the academic world and knew only a couple of people. I used my panel appearance to hand out about two hundred copies of my little sampler as a way of introducing the audience to my work. That “supplement” resulted in a number of new contacts, two invitations to submit material to literary journals, and at least one speaking engagement. The per-unit cost of the book was about three dollars, so I spent a total of six hundred dollars, but in terms of the long-term value that was incredibly cheap. This is just one example, of course, and you might find some other viable use for the idea — like sending signed, numbered copies to select booksellers.
(EXTRA) REVIEW COPIES
Remember to get a list from your publisher of everyone who received review copies of your book and find any gaps in coverage. Library journals, newspapers, major online review sites, and major traditional magazines that publish book reviews should be covered by your publisher’s efforts. The average publisher will send out anywhere from fifty to four hundred advance copies. The contact and the types of venues vary depending on the nature of your book.
Acquire additional review copies to cover any places your publisher deemed too small or not influential enough but that you still want to see covered for your own strategic or tactical reasons. Even with my books from major publishers, I always make sure to have extra copies (at the author discount) so I can personalize them and send them to places not covered by my publicist: mid-level bloggers, smaller media markets, and those peculiar drifters, unassociated with any particular organization or publication, whose opinion tends to influence the opinion of others behind the scenes.
It may seem obvious, but you’ll also need extra copies of your book to give to people who helped you on the particular project or during your career to that point. This easy way to say thank you may result in additional coverage if recipients just happen to include people who blog or write for media outlets.
Tools help you get opportunities and can be leveraged across your platforms. Opportunities provide leverage, and generate additional leverage across the Internet, including through your platforms.
Getting leverage, then, is the fundamental difference in the public arena between a successful and a failed creative project. Often, I receive emails about tools rather than leverage, however. For example, a question like “Should I do a video promo for my book?” Or, “is a podcast a good idea?” My first question in reply is usually, “Who is going to host it and how are you going to guarantee an audience for it?”
The fact is, you can create any number of wondrous promotional tools for your project, but if you can’t find a way to bring people to “it” or take “it” to the people, you might as well not have bothered — unless you’re getting some kind of creative satisfaction out of it that is its own reward. The existence of a creative object or artifact does not guarantee an audience for “it.”
The humorist Charlie Hills puts it nicely: “If you build it, they will come is not a proverb that applies to writing, music, art, or any other creative object or artifact. I believe at one point or another, to some extent or another, every creative person falls into this trap. We come up with a brilliantly creative idea. We work on it, feed it, nurture it. When complete, we announce it to the world and hope (or even expect) people will immediately line up around the block to see it. ‘It’s brilliant!’ we tell ourselves. ‘Why wouldn’t people flock to it?’”
The situation reminds me of times back in the day, when I was running a literary press that mostly focused on poetry. For the first few issues of the magazine Chimera Connections, and even the first couple of chapbooks, we’d get it printed, send it out to what subscribers we had, and then…well, then, we’d relax for a couple of months. With big boxes of magazines in the living room. But it’s worse now, because as Hills says, “People have about two thousand other things to think about, people to talk to, and places to visit. If you don’t appear along any of those paths, you are invisible. Which is technically the same as not existing at all.”
The great thing about the Internet is also the bad thing: it’s a crowded arena, in which more and more people have access to cheap tools that allow them to be creative, along with the ability to also make them public cheaply (a different thing than making them public to a large number of people). From an artistic standpoint, this is wonderful. From the standpoint of getting the word out, it’s a problem.
How can you leverage even a small project into something longer? I’ve got a good example. In 2008, PS Publishing in the United Kingdom planned on bringing out my novelette “The Situation” as a limited edition book. They planned to print five hundred copies and make review copies available via PDF. The story — like a combination of Dilbert and New Gothic in its mix of the surreal and contemporary office drama — had been blurbed by Kevin Brockmeier and others. Having a story released in book form, no matter what the print run, can guarantee more review attention than appearing in a magazine, under the right conditions.
At the time of publication I was also being interviewed by wired.com’s GeekDad blog. Since GeekDad gets about thirty thousand visitors a week, I asked my contact Brad Moon if they’d like to run a PDF of “The Situation” as a free download for their readers. When they said yes, I did two things at the same time: I contacted the huge pop-culture blogsite Boing Boing to ask if this was the kind of thing they’d mention and also made the case to PS Publishing about why having a free download of the book would be a good thing.
When Boing Boing said they’d probably do a short feature that included the link to the GeekDad feature, PS Publishing agreed to the free download. As a result, a book with a print run of five hundred was downloaded by an additional twenty thousand readers. Because Boing Boing linked to the feature, many other online media outlets also linked to it. This increased the impact of the story, the visibility of my own blog, enhanced my reputation as a writer, and in general turned a single story into a powerful part of my web presence in 2008. It also helped PS Publishing sell out much more quickly than they would have otherwise.
However, the connectivity continued past that point. In part because the GeekDad feature received so much coverage, “The Situation” is now being turned into an e-comic for another major website. Not only has that led to the story generating extra revenue and, in time, additional attention, it means I will be learning how to write for the comics. It may even lead to a book deal. Thus, what started out as an effort to get a little extra attention for my story in book form has ended up feeding back into my personal creative growth.
What’s the secret to this entire cycle of events? It’s simple: I spent a lot of time writing a good story that people enjoyed when they encountered it. If I hadn’t focused first and foremost on the creative side nothing else I did would have mattered. The publicity would have stalled out or even backfired, resulting in a magnified negative effect.
How you combine tools, opportunities, and platforms to create leverage will be unique to your book, your personal commitment, your publisher’s commitment, and the competition for attention in your area of emphasis, among other factors. Many writers choose to think tactically and use tools for leverage or use opportunities for leverage, but they don’t create a strategic plan. Sometimes, this is because they are working in concert with their publicist, who creates the strategic plan. Other times, it’s because the writer doesn’t have the time to do more than be proactive in one area and reactive in most others.
What does this mean in real-world terms? Here are two scenarios based on real-world anecdotes.
Writer A has an event that draws one hundred people to a library in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The writer did a lot of the legwork and made sure that the people he knew who lived in the area got information about the event. The library itself handled getting a listing in the local papers and online guides. The writer sells thirty-five books at the event, blogs about her experience, and travels to the next gig.
Writer B has an event that draws twenty people to a bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina. She didn’t do much legwork and relied on the fact the reading was part of a series that attracts a regular crowd. The bookstore managed to get not just a listing but a sidebar with her photograph in the local paper. She sells five copies, signs stock for the bookstore manager, blogs about her experience, and travels to the next gig.
Which writer had the more valuable gig in terms of her career, Writer A or Writer B? On the face of it, Writer A had the more successful event. She sold more books. But the truth is more complex. For example, it would depend on knowing the details of the individual plans each writer had created for their book. Five books sold with a small feature in the local newspaper might mean more in terms of Writer A’s plan than thirty-five books and no feature might mean in terms of Writer B’s plan. Writer B’s blog audience might be much larger than Writer A’s blog audience. Writer B’s plan might have included inviting a writer from some national media outlet — and if that one person came, a gig that netted five copies sold might in time turn out to be much more valuable. Maybe Writer B also managed to get attention from a major news site because her plan specifically stated that she wouldn’t do readings from her book but instead a unique presentation based on its subject matter that then would be videotaped and posted on YouTube.
I’ve raised a lot of hypotheticals in defense of Writer B only selling five books, but what I’m trying to do is make clear the value of planning in not only having a clear vision for your efforts but also a way of measuring your success.
Doing only what you can because of other commitments or because you don’t want to do more is a legitimate reasons for sticking to a largely tactical battle plan. You should not feel pressure to put yourself in situations that will result in failure.
However, if you decide to coordinate your efforts and look at them holistically, you should create actual planning documents. These documents should consist of a high-level plan, followed by a more detailed plan that fleshes out details, opportunities, and other tactical elements.
A high-level plan should include all possible elements you plan to leverage, as well as the standard elements of any plan from your publisher’s point of view. Make sure the reach of your plan exceeds its grasp. Don’t put limitations on yourself. You want your plan to be bigger than the potential success of the book, so if the book is very successful your plan already anticipates that success. And, unlike the plan you may present to a publisher’s marketing department (see the example in the appendices), the audience for this high-level plan is you. Referring back to this plan should allow you to maintain balance and focus throughout a book campaign.
The high-level plan should have a simple, easy-to-follow structure. I like to organize mine chronologically:
• PRE-PUBLICATION. This section pertains to everything that needs to happen before publication, in the order in which it should occur. For example, soliciting blurbs, finding early adopters, and sending out advance copies. It should include specifics where possible, including the names of potential “blurbers.” A section on advance copies should include any special considerations regarding format and the accompanying press release.
• ON/AFTER PUBLICATION. This section pertains to everything that will be made visible to the public on and after publication, acknowledging that the due dates for creating or organizing elements of these artifacts, objects, and events must occur, in some cases, well in advance of publication. Everything from disposition of published copies of the book and book release parties to bookstore events and anything special, such as a soundtrack or book trailer, should be included in this section. Include an “Additional Leverage” section as a catch-all for information that applies across multiple elements; this section will be useful when creating your detailed plan.
• OTHER IDEAS. The first two sections of your plan should include only those elements that you have established through preliminary communication with your publisher (or, in the case of self-publication, any collaborators or helpers) that are feasible and you’re ninety percent sure will be implemented in the service of your book’s release. However, a third section titled “Other Ideas” should be used to document elements that seem less possible because they require additional resources of money, time, or labor that have not been acquired or allocated by you or the publisher. In some cases, these other ideas may become possible later — either for the current book or a future book.
Your high-level plan more or less gives you an idea of the disposition of the resources at your disposal, and some preliminary ideas of how you might deploy them. Depending on your personality and your particular book, you may find other ways to structure such a plan. The plan will also not be complete until you finalize details with the publisher, getting their input on every aspect of the plan. (Please refer to the example of a high-level plan in the appendices, which also includes the initial back-and-forth communication between me and my publisher.)
Once you’ve finalized your high-level plan, you can create your detailed plan. Please note that if the high-level plan for your book includes several complex elements, you may need to create more than one detailed plan, each covering a few of those (related) elements.
The document or documents should consist of the following:
Your opportunities should be matched with the tools you plan to use for leverage.
Your platforms should be matched with the appropriate opportunities and tools you plan to leverage through them.
A start-date and end-date for the effort.
Specific dates for completion of tasks and actions to occur, along with who is performing the task. Typically, you, your publicist, and gatekeepers who have agreed to give you an opportunity complete the tasks. (Some of these actions will be things that are beyond your control, like a review appearing in the Washington Post. However, in this example if a review hasn’t appeared within a month of the book’s publication it will probably never appear).
If you have created multiple PR artifacts or other variables, you may need to break out separate timelines to create specificity of detail.
I can’t stress the importance of “If-Then” statements enough, in a plan created before you have to actually implement them. Once you get into the flow of a detailed PR plan, with the book actually out, you’re going to be re-active, not pro-active. There just won’t be time, and new requests/opportunities will overload you.
What do I mean by “If-Then” statements? There are thousands of connections between your contacts and the different elements in your plan. As your plan progresses, as the reviews and successes accumulate, your plan as written cannot possibly foresee all the possible permutations and cross-pollination created by your efforts. But you can foresee the initial ramifications of certain types of success. Therefore, If-Then statements act as predictors that allow you to more easily ride the wave.
Also, some actions or tasks are not worth expending energy on if certain other things don’t happen first. To give a couple of mundane examples, “If so-and-so blurbs it, then I can send it to Stephen King, a friend of so-and-so,” or “If I get a reading at Borders, then I can set up a feature with the local newspaper.”
Of course, at a certain point — a point that usually resonates in an instinctual way — it will be time to take your foot off the gas, and just let things happen. The reason for this is that because of the DIY, everyone-is-a-content-provider nature of the Internet, you will reach a point at which being proactive will be seen as intrusive. The secret behind viral videos, for example, is that after the initial push, they become viral because of electronic word of mouth, not because of nudges from someone in a PR campaign.
There’s also an element of self confidence involved — you have to believe that the book is going to do well, and act accordingly. It’s like an actor who pretty much becomes his character and lives it for months, becomes another person. If you act “successful,” the gap between acting and being successful may eventually close completely. Just make sure you don’t mistake “acting successful” for “acting arrogant” or you’ll soon be “acting contrite.”
What if you don’t have time, money, or inclination to do any of what I’ve mentioned? You’ve slogged through the entire Building and Communicating Your Booklife sections with a growing sense of numbness and horror. If this continues to be your reaction after absorbing all of Booklife, then you may want to put in what I’d call the minimum effort to have a shot at success. What are those elements?
If you have the budget or time for it, add a sixth element:
Two additional essentials should be covered by your publisher, but if you have an unconventional publisher or no publisher at all, you will need to address them yourself. First, you must get your book listed on Amazon.com, INDIEBOUND, and on barnesandnoble.com, including a cover image. Although online instructions on how to accomplish this are convoluted, you just have to clench your teeth and work through it. Second, you will also need to try to get coverage in one or more of the library journals that influence book sales: Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist. These publications provide the advance blurbs from media outlets you see on the actual book, since most other reviews come out around the time of the book’s release. The library journals are important because a single library system buyer might be acquiring fifty copies for their area. You can conceivably sell thousands of copies just through library sales. Again, refer to instructions on the websites of the library journals. Unfortunately, if you’ve self-published your book such coverage may be impossible.