June 28, 2005
One of the 4 or 5 blogs that I regularly drop in on is author JA Konrath's. Today's entry was about doubting Thomas, and Joe's doubts about long-term success in the writing business. Joe's just about to have his second novel in the Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels series, "Bloody Mary" published by Hyperion. He reportedly received a 6-figure advance for his 3-book contract, and managed, I believe, to sell about 90,000 copies of the first book, "Whiskey Sour," in hardcover. Joe's also the most aggressive marketer I've ever seen in book sales, and many of his ideas are novel and great. And, by the way, the guy can write, though I'm willing to admit he's probably too gory for many, although he mixes the gore with raucous humor, which may be jarring for some. I like it quite a bit, though.

So Joe goes on to talk about how hard it is for authors to hit the bestseller lists, and how some successful authors' careers have fizzled, and how even bestsellers sometimes have problems keeping their numbers up and are forced to be more aggressive in their marketing. One of Joe's math puzzles that I thought was illuminating was this: if an author does a book signing at a different bookstore every single day of the year for a year and sells 20 books per signing (be pretty good in my experience), they're still only going to sell 7300 books. Now if that's not a sobering number, I don't know what is.

There's a part of me that really wants to kick Joe's ass just about as hard as I can. He got hit by lightning. He was the right guy at the right place at the right time with the right book, right agent, right publisher. Sure, he's got talent, but he told me face-to-face at Magna cum Murder that the book he wrote before Whiskey Sour was better. Yes, it's luck. Ride the ride, man. He's so far ahead of the rest of us in terms of publisher support and marketing energy that it's like he's in the Major Leagues and we're playing pickup softball for our church league.

At the same time, I'm sure it's also a case of nerves. The problem with starting out so high is there's a lot of space below you to fall into. I would be quaking at the notion of trying to sell that many books. Dirty Deeds had a 2000 copy first printing, and I've found them hard enough to sell, though I think overall we're doing pretty well. I have no real specifics about the numbers Midnight Ink expects to print of The Devil's Pitchfork, but they said somewhere from 10,000 to 15,000 probably. A lot of books, but they've got distribution and national advertising, etc., that High Country, the publisher of Dirty Deeds, does not have. So for me anyway, I thought selling 2000 copies of DD was do-able. Selling 10,000 to 15,000 of Pitchfork, though a bigger challenge, seems do-able as well, especially by hiring a publicist and having support of my publisher, etc. And as my editor at HC said, "Distribution is everything." Amen, sister. Don't doubt it for a second. If you can't get your book into the bookstore, it's 10 times more difficult to sell.

There are advantages to starting low and working your way up, as daunting as that can sometimes seem. I envy Joe his success in many ways, but in many ways I don't envy him at all. My own take on him and his books is he's going to be enormously successful in a very short period of time due to talent, a hell of a marketing hook, publisher support, and an amazing--and I really, really mean this--amount of marketing savvy and energy. He's also a good guy who's very supportive of other writers. I wish him the best of luck, I really do.

Check out Joe's website at www.jakonrath.com. It's got a lot of valuable material on marketing and hell, the books are great, too.

Best,
Mark Terry