After posting about some interesting movements in the music industry, Colleen at Loose Leaf Notes asked me to look into book publishing.
Inspired, I set out to answer her question.
At little background first.? Book publicity has changed drastically in the last seven years. When we started the Open Grove in January, 2001:
- In-house publicists from hundreds of publishers sent dozens of copies of books. I received 12+ books a day.? I heard that Oprah received over 50 books a day.? Yikes!
- Almost every author went on some form of a multi-city book tour.
- I received telephone calls, letters, and a few emails (2001) from publicists hungry to get their clients on the Open Grove.
Within two years:
- publishers began to merge into multinational conglomerates,
- the tide of books became a trickle, (Thank God)
- authors financed their own book tours,
- some savvy best selling authors began publishing their own books, and
- small book presses were growing.
By 2007:
- many of the major book publishers had closed their publicity departments,
- authors whispered that they spent their entire advance on a publicist – some where helpful, most were not, and
- the publishing industry lost 17%!? Book publishers closed left and right.
Walt Whitman sold his book door to door. What’s an author in 2008 supposed to do to sell his or her book??
- What works?
- What doesn’t work?
- What are people doing to promote themselves?
- What was the data? Which marketing endeavors increased sales? What had no effect at all?
- Self publishing? Big New York Publisher? No advance publishing? E-book publishing?
I asked my favorite Marketing forum and came up with some good ideas, but no data. I sat through ridiculous seminars run by sharks and charlatans. (No, Janet, I didn’t kill them, I only WANTED to kill them.)
What sells books in 2008?
No one knows.
I mean, I have some ideas? But I’ve already written about them.
Unsure of what to do, I did nothing. Then I noticed a little project of Brad Feld’s (Liz, he’s the venture capitalist I was talking about).? I decided to steal his idea.
I’m sending out an SOS.
Let’s collect our information and experience. We don’t have to toil alone. Together, we can create a resource for authors. With information, we wrestle our creative efforts from the mouth’s of sharks.
(100% of these proceeds will go to Wounded Warriors. )
What I’m looking for:
- Direct experience marketing a book, selling a book or even getting a book published.
- What is working for you?
- What hasn’t worked for you?
- What do you believe is the single most important factor in selling your book?
- You book can be a self-published book, an e-book, a New York publisher.
- Did your book tour work?
- How much publicity help did you get from your publisher?
- What sells your book?
I’m thinking a short (100 – 300 words) this worked, this didn’t.
In return for participating, you will receive a free copy of the book. I’m hoping to collect 100 authors to participate in this project. If you are interested, please send me an email at: opengrove@gmail.com or leave a comment at On a Limb with Claudia.? If you know a published author, please let them know about this project.
Help an author out.? Please repost this call for entry.
In exchange for re-posting this on your blog, I will enter you in a contest for either a honey lover’s package – 2006 (dark brown spicy), 2007 (minty, light colored) honey and 2008 honey (yet to be determined) – or a $25 gift certificate to Amazon, Starbucks, Target or whatever – or a cool seed kit like I made for my friend Van.? Hell, if you want some tomatoes I can send those along too! 
Make sure to leave a link to the post in the comments. I’ll draw a winner from the comments to this post.
‘What do you believe is the single most important factor in selling your book?’
I want to say a funny ass cover letter, but I know the single most important thing is catching the editor on a day when they had good sex, a great light meal and underlings that kow-tow to their every whim, so as to not upset the fragile balance of their universe.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
The single most important thing for ME in publishing OG is to give it away, free expression of free thought. Blame it on Berkely.
While I respect the hunger in most writers to get published, as a nod to their talent, I decided a few years ago to opt off of that particular road. I had a piece or two picked up by White Pelican Press and self published an anthology and that was the thrill of publishing. *Shrug* After that minor accomplishment publishing beyond TWM simply does not mean much to me.
Peace
i wish i’d finished something marketable. someday . . .
ask she wednesdays #5 is up. stop by!
thank you so much for the seeds again amiga, i can’t wait to plant these with the kids
I think this is a good project but I’m not a writer. I’m a reader. So I guess I can’t help.
TWM – Great suggestions! I will indeed include you! You’re our first author… well, excluding me!
She – You could help out by reposting this post!
FuriousBall – I hope it’s very fun!
Dr. John – I hope it works! If you have a chance, you could help by reposting this bulletin.
man! makes me wish i was a writer so i could win, too!! books and gift cards?!?! sigh.
[...] Comments jameil on Sending out an SOS… (or Book Marketing? What?)Open Grove Claudia on Sending out an SOS… (or Book Marketing? What?)Dr. John on Sending out an [...]
*shrug* ha ha ha ha ok OG.. I went ahead and reposted your query. Funny thing is your so good at this internet thing that all of the links in the post seem to have traveled hot and working.
Hell I can’t even make a link hot.
Now I am going back to my regularly scheduled experimental broadcasting…hey you’uns come on over so I can pander some more opines from people.
Peace
Linking to my writing blog, and offering to post about this, to catch the attention of published book authors for you. I could contribute, but I have not yet sent a boo for publishing yet, have to complete one of the 3 in process. I am however a published author for the web, and magazines. Let me know if you are interested in my thoughts.
I’m multipublished.
You can contact me, and I’ll try to help the best way I can.
I’m published through E-publishing.
a post will appear by 4pm CST today hopefully, using this to test the scheduled postign feature. Hope it helps love, and do let me know if you’d like my thoughts.
Web presence is huge.
When I began my journey to publication, I made a “Five Year Plan”. Start small, move up.
I started with smaller epublishers. Though I sold, I had few sales. I promoted on blogs, forums and Yahoo groups.
But the longer I kept at it, blogged consistently, updated my website etc. the more sales increased.
Also, once I moved to a publisher with higher traffic, sales jumped.
Name recognition is the only way I’ve gotten increased sales.
That’s my two cents. Is it okay if I post this on a writer’s forum for more input?
My post is up now, and I emailed you with some relevant information.
Ian
I reposted your appeal here. I’ve been worrying about this issue for a while now. I’ve tried to get people interested, but most of the response has been “there’s nothing we can do”, or “publishers worry about that stuff” – ha!
I have self-published, but that was too long ago to be any help to you now. I have spent a lot of time looking and thinking, and if you don’t mind a few suggestions:
Check out Cory Doctorow’s blog – Craphound – he seems to have been very successful in marketing his books. If you approach him, he might consider sharing his wisdom.
Building name recognition seems to be the key to selling anything in the Internet age. Writers may have to learn social media marketing techniques…
Holly Lisle is pretty busy, but she does try to “pay it forward”; if you approached her, she might share her experiences – which aren’t all that hopeful in themselves, but she has some good ideas for writers to keep going.
Many published writers have written, here and there (see Cory Doctorow, or Baen Books site) to say that giving away free e-books helps sell published copies. As an extension, I have considered giving away free e-books (perhaps anthologies of short stories, which won’t sell for much, anyway) in the hope of building name recognition.
I understand, and appreciate, your desire to find out what works from published authors. I do suspect, from my own reading, you won’t find that many different ideas. Things have changed too much. I posted some thoughts, very raw, just brainstorming, on one writers’ site – and nearly had my head ripped off by those who don’t want to think about how different the world is becoming. If you’re interested in discussing untested ideas (and I suspect writers are going to have to discuss, and consider, a lot of ideas before figuring out the best approaches), I’ve been thinking about things for a while, including potential future changes and how those might affect marketing. My ideas aren’t worth much on their own, they need to be discussed, kicked around, cross-pollinated, etc. But if you want to start that type of discussion, please let me know. You have my blog link in this comment…
I’m not sure if comments are moderated (no message to that effect came up) or if my last comment was just eaten. Either way, I won’t be annoying and try to rewrite it right away, but I did notice one other point: this post would be more ‘visible’ to search engines if you followed basic SEO techniques in how your blog generates URLs. (Title or subject of post in URL, to be specific, not an enigmatic number: Google and the others will be less sure what this post is about, and it will rank that much lower.) Writers, when trying to gain notice / build name recognition, need to learn these types of things as well. (And no, I don’t do SEO, so I’m not trying to sell you anything – I just know a bit about it as I work in social media.)
Your post has sent me scouring the web, and I’ve found an incredibly interesting concept from Kevin Kelly: 1,000 True Fans. You can read it here: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php. I think this is an idea many authors could adapt to their own use. I hope it helps!
Note that there are caveats; each author would need to figure out their own details, or perhaps a new type of ‘agent’ will spring up, managing ‘True Fans’ for those who are unable or unwilling to do so directly (of course, that would increase the inherent costs).