August 29, 2005
Eric Mayer was blogging this weekend about how he was reading a lot of blogs that dealt with problems in the publishing industry and how tiresome it was becoming because there was little he could do about it. I agree. And I've been following Joe Konrath's blog intensely, and Joe deals almost exclusively on his blog with book marketing, a subject I'm interested in and annoyed by simultaneously. And an awful lot of writers' blogs are dealing with marketing issues. And today, I'm going to, too.

Here's why:

My agent, Ashley, is marketing Bad Intentions, the follow up to Dirty Deeds. It's summer, so the NY pub industry is slow, and I'm impatient to hear rejections, er, acceptances, just so I know that something's going on. That's because, over the years, the best way I've found success in any area of writing is to keep up a constant pressure of marketing efforts.

BI is at several publishers, and one of them was Berkley, and I commented to Ashley that I had a short story, "Murder at the Heartbreak Hotel," that was in last year's Berkley anthology, SHOW BUSINESS IS MURDER. I didn't know if that was of interest to her and editors, but she seemed to think it was.

And it occurred to me as I've got 6 signings and book talks scheduled over the next 2 months with more in the works, that I'm making a number of marketing efforts to sell my books and would-be publishers might want--or should need--to know what those are.

So I wrote up a marketing plan, describing my website, my plans to have it professionally revamped, the fact that I'd hired a publicist, that I had given and would expect to give radio and TV interviews and do book signings, library talks, and have been setting up talks with Rotary Clubs, that I'm attending Magna cum Murder and would again, as well as other conferences, that I've put together mailing lists as I promoted other books, that I continue to do so, that part of the new website design would be to work on collecting e-mail addresses and Internet book marketing efforts...

I haven't heard back from Ashley on this, and I don't know if she'll use it or not, though I suspect she will. And I think publishers will be interested, though I don't know that for a fact.

And it occurred to me this morning that if I were a manufacturer of widgets and I went to a venture capitalist looking for money to manufacturer MT's Wonderous Widgets, I would have prepared some sort of marketing plan. Presumably my VC has marketing ideas as well as ways to support my efforts. I also knew that in terms of nonfiction book proposals agents and publishers place a huge amount of weight on the marketing outline and competition analysis aspects of the book proposal. So why leave that out in the fiction proposal?

A lot of aspiring novelists apparently still think all they have to do is write the book. That's naive. I published my first books not naive in the need, but wondering how little I could get away with. Then I discovered how unsuccessful most marketing efforts actually are. Sorry folks, it's true. Marketing people know this. It's that "50 cents of every dollar on advertising is wasted, but I don't know which half so I'll spend the whole dollar" thing. Direct mailings typically have a 1% to 3% success rate, and if they're not targeted, probably even lower. Book signings don't do a great job of selling books unless you're really hot or there's been a lot of marketing around them. My most successful book signing was a mystery book fair with a regular clientele--the book was new and they were the kind of people who came to buy books, especially from new authors. My least successful? A chain store at a university on a summer Friday afternoon. Zero books sold, though we're probably going to try it again this fall. The point being that it's finally sunk into my head that not only must you market, you must market smart and you must market a lot just to make a dent. And hopefully you'll build some momentum.

Well, we'll see.

Best,
Mark Terry