Posts tagged "promotion"

How To Write A Bestselling Book

Occasionally I’ll get an email that reads something like, “Congrats on your bestseller! How did you do it?”

As if I really have any fuckin’ clue!

I usually just send them over to this John Scalzi post, which seems about as clear-headed as you can get: “How to Build a New York Times Bestseller (or Maybe Not).”

If they want to know about the publishing business, I send them to Ted Weinstein’s workshops.

If they’re really interested in trying to manufacture non-fiction, I send them to Tim Ferriss:

I keep any “secrets” I’ve collected in the following tags:

But mostly, I just want to send them this:

promotion
writing
marketing
publishing

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“We started a Web site, but NBC refused to let us put the address on any of our ads because they didn’t want people to know the Internet existed. They were worried about losing viewers to it.

— Judd Apatow, “The Oral History of Freaks and Geeks”

(Source: amandalynferri, via parislemon)

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“Artists and salespeople are fundamentally different people. It’s the nature of being an artist to be always consumed with doubt. That’s the nature that fuels your exploration. And it’s the nature of the salesperson to suppress all doubt and to speak in exclamation points. Now those functions have to exist in the same person.

— William Deresiewicz in his Creative Mornings talk on “Generation sell.” There’s some truth in this, but it underestimates the ability of us all to play multiple roles — especially if those two roles are delegated to different spaces (studio/office) and times (morning/afternoon.) As John Waters says, “I make stuff up in the morning and I sell it in the afternoon.”

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Cheap book promotion tips

Eric Nelson, @ericatwiley, Executive Editor at John Wiley and Sons, tweeted out some book promotion tips today under the hashtag #cheapbookpromo:

I don’t agree with them all — as much as I hate book trailers, my trailer for Steal has been viewed about 30,000 times, and I think a decent landing page for your book is a good idea (my landing page and for Steal is my second-visited page on my site) — but the rest are pretty solid.

And I love, love, love the last one:

If your book impresses everyone you hoped to impress, it doesn’t matter what it sells. It should open doors for you.

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10 Things I Learned On Book Tour by Austin Kleon

I wrote a little something about the lessons I learned on the Steal tour…

austin kleon
book tour
lit
publishing
promotion

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“I wrote a book that didn’t suck.

— John Scalzi, on “How to Build a New York Times Bestseller (or Maybe Not)”

career
john scalzi
publishing
writing
promotion

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“We sell soul. It’s not content. It’s called music.

— the Pere Ubu website (cf. The Spades’ “We Sell Soul”)

business
content
music
selling
soul
promotion

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“The pitch you’re making when you pitch to a publisher is a financial one. You’re saying, ‘Here’s my argument for why if you give me this many millions of dollars I’ll return thirty-five times that.’ That’s really the calculation they’re figuring out. If you’re making a pitch to the fans, you’re saying, ‘Hey, I’m gonna do this creative thing that’s gonna be awesome, and who wants to help me?’ It’s not even an argument, it’s more like an invitation to a party.

— Tim Schafer on Kickstarter in a wonderful On The Media interview about his work

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mlarson:

Steal Like An Artist Reviews - What People Are Saying. A stream of tweets, photos, and blog posts from happy customers. Why aren’t more writers/publishers doing this?

Thanks, Mark! It’s a great question. Two points I’d like to make:

When it comes right down to it, the burden of marketing a book falls on the author. Even if you’re lucky to have a great marketing/publicity team, as I do at Workman, it’s still up to you to feed them information and guide them towards who your audience is, who’s talking about you, who’d be good contacts, what the natural outlets would be, etc. No one knows what you do better than you. It helps to have a mind for this stuff (and the skills to alter your website whenever you want / build things online) but of course, it also takes away from your writing time, i.e. what you do best.
Having worked for an actual interactive marketing firm, we’re still stuck with this idea that you can plan for marketing online — that you can have some sort of social media calendar or something that has everything pre-planned for you. WRONG! You can have a general idea, but most of good marketing online is about monitoring and listening — actually fucking paying attention to your audience and what they’re saying, and then responding. (I didn’t plan that praise page, I just realized, seeing the responses, that I should keep them somewhere, and remembered the Storify service.) The reason this isn’t done well by big firms is because it’s incredibly time-consuming, and therefore, expensive.

PS. Steal Like An Artist is on sale everywhere tomorrow — if you buy a copy before midnight tomorrow, you can enter to win one of my framed Newspaper Blackout prints.