promotion sickness

how to sell a book without losing your mind

Photo by Debora Bacheschi on Unsplash

The most terrifying response for any author is no response. No matter how excited your editors, agent and/or publicity team is, no matter how objectively good the quality of the work itself, irrespective of the effusive “first readers,” your past publishing record, prizes and accolades or lack thereof, this is always a real and present danger. And this is especially true in the current landscape which shifts like sand under a rip tide.

Brilliant books just vanish. Poof! It happens all the time. Sometimes the reasons are obvious (lack of publicity resources, a single withering review, bad timing, ill-thought-out marketing or design) but just as often when a book disappears it’s just a mystery, one that that haunts the author and her publishers forever. The grief of the book’s unexplained disappearance is magnified by uncertainty, the lingering wake-up-at-three-am horror of but why? WHY?

I don’t know why. All I know is, it happens. And I am enormously relieved to say this is not what seems to be happening to my memoir so far (knock knock). There have been media requests. And the process of “doing the rounds” has and continues to be a revelation. I have learned a few surprising things which I think are worth sharing here.

The lessons that follow are based on anecdotal observation. They may be of some use or great use or no use at all. I don’t pretend to be an expert on book publicity, but frankly at the moment, nobody is. Any marketing executive, publicist or self-styled bookfluencer who tells you otherwise is a self-regarding idiot or (more likely) feathering their nest. But I figure if I can help mitigate even one more good book from being added to the long list of the missing and presumed dead, it’s definitely worth my time.

My first novel was published in 2005 in Canada and “did well,” by which I mean it was an instant national bestseller. The promotion was exactly what you’d expect. A big splashy party followed by cross country book tour. TV and radio. It got reviewed all over the place and while not all of the reviews were good, it didn’t seem to hurt sales. It was taken up by a major US house, which isn’t easy after the fact. My Canadian publishers loved me and signed me up for another book straight away. It took me the better part of a decade to deliver — I got distracted by other things. Journalism, a TV project, a baby. I had a few false starts. When I finally published my second novel I was enormously proud. Unlike the first it sold in advance in three countries (Canada/USA/UK). I knew it was better than the first, my editors and agent knew it too. Way better. I’d grown as a writer and it showed. I had two launch parties— one in London UK, the other in Toronto. When the reviews came in there were fewer of them, but the ones that appeared were almost universally warm. Plus there were fewer book pages. I did not go on a tour. I was not flown out to read and sign at festivals. I did a bit of radio but no TV. The landscape has changed, I was told over and over again. My book did not vanish, it wasn’t a disaster, but…. it sure wasn’t like the first time round. I was stunned.

The second book was better than the first. Objectively, by any measure — story, character, sentence by sentence — I felt it should have been a success. And yet somehow the world failed to notice and reward me with glory. My great leap forward had gone unnoticed. It was outrageous! Unjust! An outrage!

But here’s what it also was: A common story.

Them’s the breaks.

So what happened? I’m still not entirely sure. There was, on reflection, a certain degree of authorial complacency on my part. Creative destruction in both the publishing and media industry were also huge contributing factors. But really who knows? My second book didn’t fail exactly, but compared to the relative success of my first it felt like a failure. This confounded me because I knew it was better, qualitatively speaking, and it was better because I’d worked harder.

I spent ages pondering my logic and wondering why it didn’t add up. Surely I reasoned if:

Early Success + Hard Work = Better Result.

Then:

Better Result + Publicity = More Success.

But somehow the equation was wrong. To be fair, math has never been my strong suit.

What bothered me wasn’t so much the disappointment. Set backs and rejection I was well used to, it was the sense that this particular sting had nothing to teach me. If we can’t learn from our failures, I wondered, what the hell is failure for?

But even in the miserable, uncertain aftermath of my second novel, when I felt as confused as I’ve ever been, I was in fact grasping an essential truth, one that every self-knowing writer needs to reckon with at some point in his or her career. The truth is this: It’s naive and dangerous to assume you can control how your book is received, either by the media, the general public or your Great Aunt Bev.

Once your book is launched, it exists outside you. That’s the whole point of a book. If it wasn’t there would be no authors, we’d all still be sitting around the campfire telling stories asking folks to throw a few coppers in the hat. The fact that you wrote and published a book and are now charged with promoting is ultimately incidental to the writing process. After publication, the only relationship that really matters is the one between the reader and the book. Everything else is window dressing. How it sells or is critically received might affect your bottomline, your track record and your ego, but ultimately it has very little to do with you or your work. If you take it personally, if you stew and rage at the heavens, if you spend years asking Why WHY? You’re throwing good creative energy after bad. The faster you, as the author, learn to let go and get on with the next book or poem or the gardening or making the bed or baking a cake or whatever it is you want to do with the next ten minutes or ten years of your life, the better. Meanwhile your book, the one you wrote and launched like a truth-seeking missile from your heart, will be having a life of its own, one that has nothing to do with you. In fact the less it has to do with you the better. This is the beauty of art.

Whether your book finds five hundred readers or five million is incidental as well. I’m not saying it’s irrelevant or that you shouldn’t promote it or do your best to “get the word out.” What I’m saying is that, ultimately, it’s really none of your business. What happens with your book is a private interaction between the text and the reader. That’s where the magic lies. Your work, your magic, is done.

Having gone through these two very different publication and promotional experiences what fascinates me about the third book experience (ongoing) is that it’s been totally unlike the previous two.

The most obvious reason for this is the fact that my third book is a memoir and memoirs fall into the non-fiction category. While the technical craft of writing a memoir has far more in common with many semi-autobiographical literary art forms like auto-fiction or roman a clef than it does with writing, say, a diet book on intermittent fasting or a heavily researched treatise on global economic impact of China’s rising middle class, all three have one major commonality: They are much easier to market.

Why? Because strictly speaking, even the most arty non-fiction titles are technically “about something,” even if that something is just the story of one traumatised single mother and her feral daughter growing up in Toronto in the 90s (as is the case with mine).

While a memoir might be received by the reader as art (by which I mean enjoyed for the pure pleasure of the narrative itself) it’s easier to sell them more widely to specific audiences on an issue or a topic which exists outside of the book object itself. Any intelligent reader understands that fiction “means” just as much non-fiction, but it’s much harder to talk about what it means because of the simple fact that it’s made up. This is true even of fiction that isn’t made up, because once you slap the word “novel” on the cover you are asking the reader to agree to receive it that way. The people become characters. The events become plot. The inverse is truth of the memoir, a form in which a remembered story, subjectively told, becomes “truth.”

So after that rather long-winded preamble here are a few of the things I’ve learned in the past few weeks of promoting my memoir:

1. Don’t kid yourself. Reviews still matter.

   Yes it’s true there are far fewer of them now, and that’s a shame. But if anything this makes book reviews in major publications matter more, not less. The good news is, you are far less likely to get a bad review anywhere but Goodreads or Amazon, because there’s so little space allocated to professional reviews in the so-called legacy press that what little there is tends to be devoted books the reviewer or publication deems “worthy.” So for most authors these days it’s either good news or no news. And yes, the death of the hatchet job is a loss to our critical culture but don’t blame book editors, blame big data. The death of the hatchet job is the natural result of a mediated critical culture being replaced by an unregulated toxic one. With any luck this will change.

2. The internet can be confusing and panic-inducing, especially for writers, but if you take the time to use it correctly it can also be an invaluable tool.

   In the past month I’ve done my fair share of old fashioned TV and radio interviews — but I’ve also participated in a bunch of webinars, podcasts, Zoom forums, phone-ins, online town halls and virtual fireside chats, open-threads and hashtag events. I’ve Instagrammed and Facebooked Live with celebrity shrinks, academics, experts in enmeshment and mother-daughter relationships, book bloggers, vloggers and readers and writers of memoir. While I’ve lost my shit at several points trying “leverage” all this new tech, I’ve also come to see how incredibly helpful and (yes, sorry!) connective it is when it comes to facilitating fascinating and meaningful conversations with people I’d normally never encounter on a traditional book promotion circuit. As a writer I normally turn off alerts and try to insulate myself from the distractions of social media, but now that I’m promoting a memoir I get it. Flying around in airplanes, staying in hotels and getting up on stage is exciting and glamorous — but it’s also exhausting, expensive and hard on my family. Plus contrary to popular wisdom, doing an “event” IRL isn’t particularly intimate. You’re so exposed, on display. The idea that I can meaningfully interact with hundreds of interested readers then go into the next room and tuck my kids into bed is, for me, a revelation worth its weight in carbon off-sets.

3. Self-loathing is part of the process.

   The other day, after a series of minor book-related panic attacks, I texted a super-successful author friend to say I’d become so sick of myself I was nauseated by sound of my own voice. “I don’t how legit famous people do it,” I wrote. “You’d have to be a malignant narcissist to actually enjoy this.”

   She responded almost immediately a long lovely voice note. Her advice was so comforting it melted my face into a warm river of snot. Essentially it boiled down to this: Nausea and panic are normal, especially with a memoir. Go easy on yourself. Break it all down into pieces— don’t try to do too much promotion in one day. And for god sake, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, never ever give into the temptation to go back and watch or listen or read over what’s been said. What’s done is done — you can’t control or improve it. Move on.

   Brilliant advice.

4. Promotion might feel like the most important part of your job but really it’s not.

As a journalist you’d think I’d be a natural at promotion but in fact the opposite is true. When you’re used to being the “Q” in the Q & A, it can make for weirdness and discomfort. Silence makes me anxious. I’m prone nervous laughter. In interview situations I’m used to being in control and when I’m not in control I like to be alone in my shed with all my alerts off blasting music and typing away like a smug busty secretary on Mad Men, which is really just another version of being in control. I’m comfortable with personal disclosure but only on my terms, by which I mean in my words. When I first began promoting the memoir I found myself getting irrationally defensive and indignant in interviews. I’d be smiling and nodding and chatting amicably away but underneath I’d be thinking, “How dare you? What gives you the right? How would you feel if I asked you about your teenage affair with your mother’s married colleague? How about we talk about your bad anal sex experiences instead, huh? How would you like that?” Then I’d remember I was being asked about this stuff in public because I wrote a book about it and I’d feel like a hypocrite. I’d written about it so now talking about it was my job. Suck it up Buttercup.

Last week the cognitive dissonance was threatening to overwhelm me so I texted another celebrated author friend (in case it isn’t abundantly obvious I have LOADS of famous friends because I’m FANCY) and laid it out. She responded by saying yes, she knew exactly how I felt and then added the following: “It’s not really your job to talk about it. Writing is your job. The talking about it is just a chore that makes the real work more possible.”

On that note, I’ll leave you with this recent clip of me on a daytime TV show. Afterward I was such a mess I stumbled out of the studio onto the street and had to sit down on the sidewalk and press my cheek against a brick wall to avoid throwing up. Two very kind women from the studio audience noticed me and helped me up. They asked if I’d sign their books which I did. Then they took turns telling me all about their crazy narcissistic mothers and loveless childhoods and by the time they were finished we hugged and I felt sooooo much better.

What a life.