promotion sickness
how to sell a book without losing your mind
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.