A Little Support
Monday, June 15, 2009 (An admin note: there was a tiny kink in the new blog publishing, so I had to switch the title of this page to http://www.allisonwinn.com/ask-allison/. I'm sooooo sorry to ask this of you again, but if you link to the blog from your blog, can you amend it? SO SORRY. But this should fix the Google Reader problem of the RSS showing up as a generic blog feed. Thanks again!)
Okay...Question of the day: My publisher doesn't put a lot of marketing money behind my books...so orders & print runs are small, which begs the question: why even publish them? And I do hustle my ass off continuing to hope that will make a difference in demand and orders. A girl can dream, right?
You know what? I really don't know the answer to this, but wanted to pull it out of the comments section because I think it makes for such an interesting discussion. My husband and I chat about this fairly often. He's a finance guy, so I can't tell you how many times he's looked at the publishing industry and said, "What the hell are they doing?" If it were up to him (and like-minded individuals), which, I should say, it's not and probably for good reason, they'd only buy books for good advances with strong print runs. Why, he says, as you do, would you buy a book only to leave it dying on the vine? Either you support a book or you don't.
And I have to say, part of me agrees with him. I've seen how brutal this industry can be. I've seen how WONDERFUL it is for a writer to get published, only to also see, yes, how gutted that writer can be when the book falls in the proverbial forest without making a sound. Raising the question: if a book is published and no one reads it or buys it, is it really published at all? (Yes, obviously, it is, but to what end?)
On the other hand, and I know some of you will argue this, who's to say what books will succeed and what books won't? (I'll argue that the marketing dept is the one to say it, but that's a whole different post.) Yours could be that break-out book, or yours could sell 100 copies but truly touch the 100 people who read it. I guess maybe it comes down to different goals: if you only want to reach readers, regardless of the number, then publishing your book is indeed worth it, regardless of print run or advance size. If your goal is to really make an impact on the book world, well then, yeah, these other factors matter.
Maybe publishers buy these books and then offer little support simply because they want to saturate the market with a variety of options for readers; maybe they do so because they have a certain number of books they need to publish each year. I don't really know. I do know that authors can feel awfully let down if they're not offered the support they're hoping for, but that this is an industry lesson that I'd say 99% of authors have to learn: whatever your expectations, they're likely to be dashed in some way. Maybe that sounds cynical, but whenever I talk to author friends who are on their second or third or fourth book, this is the consensus. Push for as much as you can get, hope for as much as you can get, but don't be surprised if it all doesn't come your way.
Anyway, I've gone on a tangent. Why do you guys think publishers buy books and then don't support them? Who here gains and who here loses?
Reader Comments (5)
Regardless of what the publisher does (I think publishers do many things that do not make sense, and I used to work for one editing and rewriting many of the manuscripts they bought), I think writers today have to aggressively self-market, long before the book comes out. They need a blog and Twitter and Facebook, and need to be on writers' sites so their name starts to be recognized. If their publisher doesn't do it, they need to organize a blog tour the month their book is released. If there's no book tour budget, they need to set up book events in whatever towns they can easily visit and stay with friends. Of course it's better (and makes more sense) if the publisher promotes the book, but if not, you can do many things on your own and for low cost.
I would definitely say that "fulfilling a need' is probably a large reason. Think of the chick lit glut...the regency romance glut, the erotic romance glut (though not like they did chick lit which they ran into the ground) and of course, paranormal romance and UF which despite the complains I hear from some readers, are still selling in strong numbers!
Maybe TPTB figure if it's reasonably decent and they think they can turn at least some profit on it, they pick it up. *sigh* Whoever asked the question I feel you pain because this is definitely the category that my ER books fall into. I'll NEVER break out with erotic romance esp in trade--though I knew that going in and had no intentions of writing it forever (that doesn't make a lack of support any easier).
their name starts to be recognized.
Cuz I have a big mouth LOL....Gotta agree w/Sara. There's not much we can do as authors to make a big impact on sales but there's plenty we can do as authors to build name recognition and eventually those do transmit to sales :D
Ok off to write!
This topic is very timely for me. My memoir was released on May 5th and it is not even on the shelves in B&N. I wanted to write my story to inspire and help others going through similar circumstances so in that sense I just want people to be touched by my story no matter how many read it. To that end though I have to admit that a small part of me would like to make an impact on the book world.
It has been tough to get my book out there especially with it not on shelves but thankfully there is the internet! And I spend alot of time looking for opportunities to market myself and get my name out there.
I have to wonder though why put so much into creating a book only to not have it on a shelf where the public can see it?
Thank you Allison for your blog! As a new unknown author I am learning so much about the publishing world and am glad to have a place to chat with other writers! :)
My book, Children and the Internet: A Zen Guide for Parents and Educators, came out in October, 1996, coincidentally about a week before I found out I was pregnant. I did two book signings in the San Francisco Bay Area and wrote three draft proposals for my agent. Then I fell off the map. More specifically, I spent 12 weeks on the couch sick as a dog with morning sickness, then I had my son and raised him for ten years, during which time my *book* fell off the map.
Was it worth it to have been published? When my foot in the door stopped mattering after a few years of inactivity? And considering that my other publishing credits were poetry and my real strength is fiction? I wrestled with this question for all the years I was home with my son, debating it with my writer friends (published and unpublished), and asking myself in all honesty, What did I expect to get out of publication, now I knew it wouldn't be either money or regular work?
I have only recently gone back to considering publication a real goal, and that only for one reason: because working in fiction introduces me to wonderful fiction writers. Two of my all-time favorite publishing authors are personal friends whom I would never have met if I hadn't given the search for publication a chance.
I now freelance as an editor for fiction authors and blog on the craft of fiction, not because it's a path to fame and fortune (boy, is it not!), but because it introduces me to wonderful fiction writers. And that is what I love. Fiction. The art of it. The people who create it.
Please feel free to drop by and share your own experiences in the life of fiction: http://victoriamixon.com.
Victoria