Danny Kofke doesn’t have a big platform, nor does he have a lot of time. He teaches full time in a public school (special education) and is raising two young children. Yet, he’s selling far more books than your typical author, largely through his own publicity efforts. On his media page, I find four radio shows and one book signing that are booked for the next couple of months. And it’s not a brand new book. It’s been out over two years. It’s called How to Survive (And Perhaps Thrive) on a Teacher’s Salary.
Here are some tips I picked up from him in a phone conversation this morning:
1) Face it, it takes time and effort to sell books. They don’t sell themselves.
2) Book marketing is fun! He’s been at this for over two years and still gets a charge out of doing radio interviews, TV and other media. He still fondly recalls the excitement of doing his first radio interview.
3) He takes advantage of both large and small opportunities. You never know what might pay off. He had one interview he did for Bank Rate that got picked up by the FOX site. Another went secondarily to AOL’s home page. The point? Just get out there and do something, even if it’s small. Do something enough and cool things start to happen.
4) His main method is to research viable media and send e-mails to them.
- He starts with a Google search for such topics as “radio stations about teachers”, “financial radio shows,” etc. Then, he finds them on the Web and studies the show. If it’s all about, for example, recommending stocks to buy, he doesn’t pursue it.
- Next, he finds the contact person on the site. E-mail them a pitch. The pitch must be powerful. Remember, it’s not about your book, it’s about their audience. With the first paragraph, share a startling statistic or something to grab them, demonstrating that their audience wants to hear what you have to say. If you’ve gotten publicity before, link them to your media page so that they can see or hear past interviews.
5) Follow-up and keep good records. Danny emphasized this over and over. He’ll pitch anyone and everyone, then write on the calendar to follow-up in a month or so if they haven’t responded. If they still don’t respond, he may e-mail again several months later, saying something like, “Hey, I just spoke on this station and was mentioned in this article. If you’d like to interview me….” And he keeps following up until someone says that don’t want to hear any more.
As you can imagine, good record-keeping is vital. He calendars items that he needs to do at a later time. He keeps a notebook as to who he’s e-mailed, how they responded, and when to follow-up. If someone declines and wants no further pitches, he notes that as well.
Example: He contacted the “700 Club” early in his marketing. They declined to interview him. But recently he e-mailed again, telling them what other events he’s done and linking them to his author site so that they can see his other interviews. This time, they booked him!
6) Interest can build over time. The media isn’t just interested in new books. Once you get one interview and put it on your media site, this can leverage more reviews. Now the media has something to judge whether or not you’re a fit for their program. The more interviews you get, the more impressive you look. It’s called building a platform from scratch. It’s called leveraging one opportunity to get other opportunities.
Danny sent 10 e-mails over time to CBS about getting on their early show. Finally, he could say in an e-mail, “Hey, I was just on CNN.” This time, they replied and asked to see his interview from CNN. That’s progress! Hopefully, he’ll let us know if it comes through!
7) Danny uses HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to give his expertise to journalists who need to interview experts, or regular people with specialized experiences. Responding to a HARO request got him into the Wall Street Journal.
Set up your media page. We’ve already mentioned how he’s using it. I like it for two reasons:
- It gives the media exactly what they want to know, all there on one page where they don’t have to waste time searching for information. They can click on both articles and interviews and see that Danny can handle himself well on interviews.
- It’s free and takes minimal time to maintain. I can hear marketing experts saying, “You need to post a blog every day, or at least a few times a week. You need to get links from other prominent sites. You need to post on other people’s blogs.” To which I’d respond, “Danny doesn’t have time for all that crap. He’s got something that works for him. Why ruin it?”
Danny’s blog is free and functions well for his purpose. He set it up on blogspot.com and didn’t even bother to buy a distinct url. Apparently, he doesn’t need a url, so why pay $10 a year to get one? That goes along with his book on how to live on a teacher’s salary. You don’t buy things you neither want nor need.
9) It’s easily up-datable. You don’t have to use DreamWeaver or ExpressionWeb or have to hire a webmaster. Blogspot gives you all the basic tools you need.
10) You don’t have to do everything. If I understand Danny correctly (I’ll let him edit this), he isn’t putting his book in book fairs, sending it off extensively for review, going for book awards, writing articles for magazines, and traveling extensively. While he has his eye on other opportunities, like presentations to school faculty, he’s hung in there with something that’s working for him – doing radio shows. I’ve heard that one of the hardest things for entrepreneurs to do is to stick with a winning formula once they’ve found one. Danny’s making it work, and for that, I greatly admire him!
Follow-Up Interview
Steve: Out of 20 first contacts that you make, how many do you estimate end up actually booking you?
Danny: I would say maybe 4-5 even replied to my message and maybe 2 would book me.
Steve: Now that you’ve got interviews on your press page that they can look at and realize that you’ve been in major media, is it easier to book interviews? If so, how many out of 20 responded at first and how many out of 20 now?
Danny: Yes, it’s easier to book interviews now. Most producers want to see how you can fit into their show and help their listeners/viewers out. It is not about you or your book most of the time – it is about your message. Since I have been on numerous TV and radio shows, producers can take a look at these and see if I would be a good fit for them. They no longer have to guess what I would sound/look like since they can see first-hand. I would say I now get 5-6 responses (still not half) from the pitches I send out.
Steve: Is 90% of what you’re doing going after radio?
Danny: No, I would say about 60% radio, 30% television and the rest various print outlets. At first, before I had any television exposure, I was mainly going after radio but now, since I have had exposure in all three areas I mentioned, I pitch appropriate people in all of these areas.
Steve: How many contacts (new and followup) do you think you average each week?
Danny: I would estimate 100 or so. Some weeks it is more and some less but, overall, I would say that is the average.
Steve: How much time do you think you average marketing your book each week?
Danny: It is an endless job since there are so many ways to market. I have come up with a balance to be the best husband, father, teacher and marketer I can so I limit myself since I could probably work on marketing 10 hours a day! I would say I spend an average of 15-20 hours a week working on book related stuff.
Thanks Danny! That’s great information. Thanks for being so generous with us!
Monday, August 2nd, 2010,
by J. Steve Miller,
Filed under: Sell Your Books| book authors, Book Marketing, Book Sales, CNN, HARO, how to sell books, Media, Publishers, Teachers, Today Show|
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Too Much Competition to Sell Books?
Someone on a forum lamented that, with so many books on the market, the competition makes it nearly impossible to sell books. So let’s say that there were 400,000 new books published last year. Many are by big-time publishers and big-time authors. Are we small-time authors crazy to compete in this game?
In the end, perhaps it makes little difference whether there are 100,000 books published next year, or 2,000,000 books. Our real competition is against books that are #1 – well-written and #2 – well-marketed. Sure, there are exceptions that get a lucky break and make it big, but typically those that lack #1 or #2 (the vast majority of books) are buried so low that they’re not really competing with us.
In marketing my non-fiction book, I’ll e-mail (this week) about 20 popular financial blogs or financial magazines, asking if they want to look it over to bring out tips for graduates. About 4 typically respond. If I follow-up well, I get reviews out there, with links pointed back to my book on Amazon. Another small-time author friend likes radio and is finding this response rate when he queries radio. I interviewed him last week.
When another friend who writes novels puts his book into local (not chain) restaurants, he’s not typically finding any competition. He’s the only book there. It doesn’t matter if 150,000 novels were published last year. The people in line at the restaurant don’t have the 150,000 before them; they see my friend’s novel.
That’s all to say, although it’s gonna be very difficult to get into the channels that everybody’s competing for, like Publisher’s Weekly or Kirkus, once you go to other channels, there’s lots of room to sell good books. We just have to be creative in how to get the word out there. We’re not competing with all the books that are published, just all the books that people are aware of, which may be no larger a group than we were competing against 20 years ago.
Monday, July 26th, 2010,
by J. Steve Miller,
Filed under: Uncategorized| Amazon, Amazon.com, Book Marketing, book publicity, Book Sales, Bookstsores|
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Learning From a Successful Teen Novelist
As a 10-year-old, Christopher Paolini started reading fantasy books, but became frustrated because he didn’t feel they were good enough. So at 14 he began writing his own book, but quickly found out he didn’t know what he was doing, so he began reading everything he could get his hands on about how to write.
At fifteen he wrote his first draft, which took him about a year. Then he took about a year to re-write it. His parents read it and thought he should publish it. They took a third year to prepare it for publication (proofing, typesetting, etc.) and self-published it through print on demand with Lightning Source. It’s name: Eragon (he took the word “dragon” and substituted an “e” for the “d”).
Here’s the writing process in a bit more detail from Christopher:
“By the end of 1999, I had completed the first draft of ERAGON. At last I was able to read my own book from start to finish … and I was dismayed by how amateurish it seemed. The story was fine, but it was mired in atrocious language and grammar. I was like a musician who has composed his first aria, only to discover that he can’t perform it because he has not yet learned to sing. I set out to rewrite ERAGON with the goal of raising the language to a professional level.
I did not entirely succeed. My second draft—which took a second year (2000)—was larger than the first and bloated with far too many words. At that point, I turned the manuscript over to my parents, both of whom are published authors.
Finally, I began to benefit from real editing. Editing and revision are two of the most important tools for forging a great book. With my parents’ advice, I was able to clarify my descriptions, streamline my logic, and quicken the pace of the story so that ERAGON read the way that I had intended it to. This consumed the bulk of 2001.
My parents and I had decided to self-publish ERAGON for financial and creative reasons.” ( http://www.teenreads.com/authors/au-paolini-christopher.asp )
But here’s where he deviated from most authors. Instead of sitting around waiting to see if anyone would discover his book, he went out and started selling it. I don’t get the impression that he did 1001 different things to market his book. He found one method that suited him and worked for him: doing a presentation in schools. And he worked hard at it.
“We started by doing book signings in bookstores, but quickly learned that no one shows up for an author they have never heard of. I was very determined, and would stay for eight hours straight and talk to every person who came in the store and try to sell them a book. On a good day, I might sell forty books. That’s not bad for a signing, but it’s a lot of work.”
I then learned that if I went into a school and did a presentation, in one day we could sell 300 books or more, and inspire students to read and write, so I concentrated on that. We also started charging a fee for the presentation, to help cover travel expenses.
He did most presentations dressed in a medieval costume.
“My dad and I made two trips to Houston, where my grandmother lives. I called numerous school librarians and spoke to them about my book and presentation. They didn’t know who I was, so it took a bit of persuading, but I managed to arrange to visit several schools, along with a few bookstores, that first trip. One of the librarians posted an enthusiastic recommendation of my presentation to an online teachers’ forum (pop quiz: so what does getting on this forum do for him? sm – that’s called a platform for other schools), so by the time we returned home to Montana, my mom already had a second trip to Texas planned, and I didn’t have to do any cold calls. That second trip was a solid month long, with three or four hour-long presentations every single day.”
He and his family ended up doing over 135 talks.
In the summer of 2002, American novelist Carl Hiaasen was on vacation in one of the cities that Paolini gave a talk in. While there, his stepson bought a copy of Eragon that he “immediately loved”.[1] He showed it to his stepfather, who brought the book to the attention of the publishing house Alfred A. Knopf. Michelle Frey, executive editor at Knopf, contacted Paolini and his family to ask if they were interested in having Knopf publish Eragon.” Knopf re-edited it and published it in 2003.
He got two big-time reviews, but they were both rather mediocre, calling it formulaic, not that well-written, but hey, not bad for a young person. But the public voted with their dollars and Eragon placed on the New York Times Best Seller list for 121 weeks.
Then the movie came out in 2006. It tended to get lousy reviews by the critics, but I’m sure Paolini and the publishing company cried all the way to the bank since “the film’s $249 million total worldwide gross was the sixteenth highest for 2006.”
Today Paoloni continues to write books.
Takeaways for authors:
1) Take your time in writing your book. Writing is rewriting. Get input from professionals.
2) Writers without platforms can make it.
3) Market your book. I don’t think any of this would have happened had Paolini never contacted his first school to see if he could do a presentation.
(References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eragon, http://www.teenreads.com/authors/au-paolini-christopher.asp , http://inheritance.wikia.com/wiki/Christopher_Paolini)
Monday, July 19th, 2010,
by J. Steve Miller,
Filed under: Uncategorized| Christopher Paolini, Eragon, fiction, Novelist, Teen Author|
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Book marketing guru’s all speak highly of getting book reviews, even to the tune of sending out 500 or so books to get the word out
I’ve found the top 500 blogs in my subject area (I write nonfiction) and am spending a couple of months going to each one and asking if they’d like to do a review and a giveaway. Some don’t reply. Some say they’ve got too many books beside their bed, or they don’t do reviews. But about 1 in 6 request a copy for review. (I’ll tabulate later just how many come through. Some need reminders.)
Nobody acts like I’m bothering them. It’s a win/win and they’re grateful for getting a free book on a subject area they’re passionate about. And some of these blogs get major traffic. One that reviewed my book yesterday gets 80,000 visitors per month, has 250 incoming links, an Alexa rank of 94,000 and 900+ subscribed RSS readers.
Again, I’ll tabulate results later (like how many came through with reviews and how many of my books actually sold as a result), but it seems at this point to be a good campaign.
By the way, I do take the time to read some posts on each blog, and read the “About” section so that I can see if we’re indeed a match and I can personalize my request to each one. I think it’s better to take a slow, personal approach than just try to see how many blogs I can hit in a day. A couple of the bloggers mentioned how much they appreciated that I took the time to check out their blog before suggesting a review.
Has anyone else had success/failures in getting reviews from bloggers?
Monday, July 12th, 2010,
by J. Steve Miller,
Filed under: Sell Your Books| Blogs, Book Reviews, sell more books|
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I recently listened to Steve Harrison interviewing Dr. John Gray, author of the best-selling (over 30,000,000 copies) Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. It’s worth a listen for any author. Here some of my takeaways:
1) There’s value in sharing your ideas in seminars before sharing them in books. Typically, authors think the other way around – “I’ll write this book and then sell it at my seminars.” But Dr. Gray started with counseling and seminars. For him, this was valuable in that over time he could observe the audience response and discover what connected and what didn’t. It also gave him time to develop key analogies, such as “Mars and Venus.”
Here’s how it happened:
He’d been teaching relationship seminars about how understanding gender differences can improve relationships. Another seminar leader used a striking analogy which compared the man-woman relationship to a cross-cultural experience. (Dr. Gray knows he’s hearing a great point when the hair on his arms stands up.)
But he knew he needed an analogy of his own. So one day he began to imagine what it would be like if men were Martians, but were unhappy, and contacted the inhabitants of Venus to try to find happiness. Then, they move together to earth. Since Martians and Venusians do things differently, they must come to understand those differences to get along and thrive
The point: Sometimes your seminal points and analogies can come out of years of working with people and leading seminars. “To be successful you need a perspective that has been honed and sanded down.” (None of my quotes may not be exact.)
2) Dream up a unique perspective. If it’s just another book on relationships, with chapters on each of the main points that everyone else lists, that’s not news. Why would radio stations want to interview you? But Mars and Venus presents a fresh perspective. The media is all about fresh perspectives.
3) Utilize your life experiences. For nine years, Dr. Gray lived as a celibate monk. There, he learned to be content and happy on his own. Thus, he could relate very differently than people who were hoping to find purpose and happiness through a mate.
“It’s your life experiences that give you the power to pull people in.”
4) If you’re wanting to educate and inspire others, don’t depend on selling books to them for your revenue. Support yourself in other ways, so that you can get out and share your ideas. Supporting himself as a computer programmer gave him the time to write and promote his book, without having to depend upon them for income.
5) Don’t be discouraged if your early books aren’t great successes. Publishers didn’t want his first book, so he self-published. His second book was with a small publisher, so small that it took him a year to get a distributor.
6) Smaller books can often communicate better than bigger books. After writing a large book on relationships that said everything he wanted to say, he honed it down to ten concepts for his Mars and Venus book. Most people read only the first two chapters of self-help books.
7) Make it fun and lighthearted. This was another change he made from the larger book.
It’s okay if it’s not an immediate success. Some authors feel that if their books are good enough, that reviewers will instantly rave and word of mouth will immediately take effect. Not for Venus and Mars. He went on a book tour, which indeed landed him on Oprah. Yet, he was relegated to the last three minutes of the program, and it didn’t produce sales. After that, his publisher gave up on publicity for his book, saying, “Well, that was our chance and it didn’t work out.
9) Keep pressing forward with your own marketing strategy. After his publisher quit publicizing, he took it upon himself to advertise in the Radio-Television Interview Report (RTIR) and did radio interview after radio interview. After doing those for a year, he got best-seller status. Then, he wrote Oprah again and she devoted an entire show to him. After that, his book stayed on the New York Times Bestseller List for seven years.
What struck you about this interview? Anything I missed? Anything you’d like to add from your own experience or knowledge to my nine takeaways?
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010,
by J. Steve Miller,
Filed under: Get Published, Sell Your Books, Writing| Book Marketing, book publicity, Dr. John Gray, Men are from Mars, NY Times Bestseller, sell more books|
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Brick and Mortar Bookstores vs. Amazon for Authors
An experience, a stat and a reflection on brick and mortar vs. Amazon:
An Experience
I write resources for those teaching character and life skills in public schools. When the two Superbowl contenders are decided, I immediately find out who the highest profile athletes are so that I can research them for character stories (what led them to such a high level of success.)
So Kurt Warner was quarterbacking in the Superbowl a few years ago and I decided to read his autobiography. He’d led his team to the Superbowl several years earlier in a spectacular bag-boy to Superbowl hero story and I thought, “This is as high a profile person as you can get. The Superbowl’s a week away, the most watched media event of the year; so I’m sure his autobiography will be in my local bookstores.”
I called Barnes & Noble, Borders and Books a Million. None carried it. One said they couldn’t even order it. I ordered from Amazon.
A Stat
A few experiences like this one and people begin defaulting to Amazon. Here are the stats from 2008:
Barnes and Noble.com = $466 million
Borders/ Waldenbooks = $3.11 billion
Barnes & Nobel/ B. Dalton = $4.52 billion
Amazon.com = $5.35 billion (book sales only)
More importantly in 2008, Amazon’s sales grew by 16% while each of the other bookstore chains lost money. If this trend continues, Amazon will rapidly become a bigger and bigger player for authors, and bookstores will become less and less – particularly for small-time authors who can’t be guaranteed to get into bookstores and be continually stocked there.
A Reflection
Don’t get me wrong; I love bookstores! But after a couple of experiences like that, I began defaulting to Amazon. I support bookstores. I hang out at bookstores. But I depend on Amazon. It’s a time issue. A local bookstore can carry only a small percentage of the millions of books in print, even of books that are recognized classics in their fields – like a Psychology text on “Persuasion” I couldn’t find locally. After signing up for Amazon Prime, we never pay postage. And books come quickly to our door.
If you’re a major selling author like Sue Grafton for novels or David McCullough for biographies, traditional brick and mortar bookstores, Walmart, etc. are wonderful sales outlets. For the rest of us, they are a useful outlet that people can order from, but not likely to carry us long-term.
If a person with as high a profile as Kurt Warner’s (incredibly “high platform”, which all publishers are looking to publish) can’t keep his autobiography in the bookstores several years after it was written (and it was truly a well-written, inspiring book), then what chance do us low-profile authors have of keeping our books in bookstores over the years? At best, for low-profile authors, I’d suggest that brick and mortar bookstores are typically a short-term rather than long-term strategy.
I have a book on church music, published 17 years ago with a traditional publisher, with no marketing done for it in the past 15 years, that still sells steadily on Amazon. It probably lasted only a couple of years in bookstores.
Monday, June 28th, 2010,
by J. Steve Miller,
Filed under: Sell Your Books| Amazon.com, Book Marketing, Book Publcity, book publicity, Book Sales|
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I love my publishers!
Tyndale House believed in me and my first book, The Contemporary Christian Music Debate, back in 1993. They were professional, responsive, respectful, and landed me lots of radio interviews for publicity. But after a couple of printings, they questioned whether it would keep selling strongly for the long-haul. Every time a traditional publisher prints 5,000 copies, they risk having to store those babies and sell them cheap if they don’t sell. I completely understand their concerns.
But I felt it could keep selling. So Operation Mobilization did a reprint and distributed it more globally. Other publishers picked it up in Spanish, German, Romanian, Dutch and Russian.
After OM ran out of copies, Cherie (my wife) urged me to explore self-publishing options. I resisted, assuming that I’d have to charge an exorbitant price per copy, since they weren’t printing in large quantities. But four things made me look deeper:
1) Even Amazon ran out of used copies. Somebody was trying to sell a used one for over $500!
2) I realized that churches still struggled to determine their optimum style of music in worship, and that my book offered a sound, researched approach that could help.
3) I read a book that gave me a vision. In Damn! Why Didn’t I Write That?, Marc McCutcheon showed me how he makes a living off writing books that stay on the publisher’s backlist. They’re not flashy bestsellers, just profitable workhorses that keep making their impact and leaving a check in his mailbox at the end of each year. And he profits enough to make a darn good living as a writer. “Intriguing…”, I thought.
4) My wife got tired of waiting on me and called BookSurge, a subsidiary of Amazon, telling them to call me and explain their services. (It’s now called CreateSpace.)
I went with BookSurge and so far couldn’t be more pleased. Here’s what I got:
- Extremely fast results. From that first phone call to the time it was available for purchase on Amazon was seven weeks. Basically, I sent them the book, they scanned it, printed it, sent me a proof, got my approval and it was done.
- Professional-looking print.
- Good pricing. Sells for $15.99 on Amazon. I receive 35% for every copy sold.
- Reasonable up-front cost. I paid a total of $378 for them to set everything up. (Today, I believe it’s down to about $35 if you upload finished pdf’s of your cover and content.)
- It’s available online. People can order from www.booksurge.com, www.amazon.com, www.abebooks.com and www.alibris.com. It also appears in www.booksinprint.com and www.globalbooksinprint.com.
- They help me to learn marketing skills. I attend their regular webinars, typically by book marketing guru Brian Jud. Extremely helpful.
So if BookSurge is so great, why do I sometimes still new manuscripts to traditional publishers?
- Respect. Many institutions and individuals know that a book with a reputable publisher has endured a huge selection process, making it more likely to be quality.
- Distribution to bookstores. Traditional publishers market well to bookstores. You’re much more likely to get into bookstores with a traditional publisher.
- Publicity. Tyndale House set me up with nice brochures and got me around 30 radio interviews.
- Up-front money. Traditional publishers pay authors an advance to publish the book. They take the risk that your book might not sell and they might lose money.
I’ll keep you posted on my publishing experiences over time. What have been your experiences?
Monday, June 21st, 2010,
by J. Steve Miller,
Filed under: Get Published| Booksurge, Create Space, Operation Mobilization, Publishers, self-publish, Traditional Publishing, Tyndale House|
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The first three agents I pitched my current book to turned me down flat, saying, “Publishers of financial books usually want only people with strong platforms, like a radio show.”
Recently, on a professional publisher’s discussion group, someone asked,
“Which part of a formal book proposal do you feel is the absolute “clincher” to make the sale to a major book publisher?”
A literary agent responded, “For non-fiction, it’s the marketing section. This is assuming that the author is a legitimate expert, the subject is newsworthy and unique, and the writing is well-crafted. The compelling description of a national platform from which an author can promote the book is hands down the (dare I say?) obsession of the major trade publishers.”
You’ll also see it on publisher’s sites. Example: Rick Frishman, the book-marketing guru who wrote Book Marketing 101 and publishes a popular newsletter, was just hired by Morgan James to be their publisher. In his blog announcing the event, he states: “We focus primarily on publishing non-fiction books and are looking for authors with a ‘platform’ (isn’t everyone!).” »» Getting Published Without A Platform
Monday, June 7th, 2010,
by J. Steve Miller,
Filed under: Get Published, Sell Your Books, Writing| Get Published, Nonfiction, Publish, Self-Publishing|
2 Comments
A recent Wall Street Journal article, entitled “Vanity” Press Goes Digital, told of how many writers are bypassing traditional publishers and publishing their own e-books. Some are finding great success by taking a much larger cut of each sale than they would have by publishing through traditional channels.
But why label them “vanity” publishers? The term blatantly implies that someone wrote a book that wasn’t good enough for the traditional press to accept, so out of vanity, she paid a company that would publish any kind of trash to make a buck.
Let’s start by admitting that, yes, many people self-publish junk, and yes, some of these do it out of vanity, so that they they can attract attention at dinner parties by calling themselves authors. But to throw all self-published and pay to publish authors in this category is very inaccurate and very unfair.
Very Inaccurate
1. Publishers have many reasons for rejecting manuscripts besides “poor writing.” Today, mainline publishers only accept manuscripts from literary agents, who won’t submit a manuscript unless it’s well-written and well-edited. Yet, what’s the rate of acceptance today (15 years ago it was about 1 in 30), perhaps one in forty? Other reasons they reject manuscripts, besides poor quality:
- “We don’t believe it has a large enough market.”
- “This is the author’s first novel and she has no following. Thus, no matter how good the book is, we can’t risk printing 5,000 copies.”
- “The author has no platform. No matter how good the book is, the author needs a platform (like a national radio program) to attract buyers.”
2. Authors have many reasons to self-publish or pay to publish besides “I can’t get a real publisher.”
- Some are attracted by the higher “royalties.” Publish a print book through CreateSpace and you’ll receive about 35% of the Amazon selling price, as opposed to roughly 8% if you’re traditionally published. It’s a very legitimate route for authors who think they can market their own books.
- Some want to control all their own rights, as they would through CreateSpace or LightningSource. If they want to re-publish individual chapters as pamphlets or publish e-books, they can do it without having to seek permission.
- Some want to publish now, rather than wait around for a year for publishers make their decisions and another year to prepare it for publication.
- Some want to write a very unusual book that publishers might not see the appeal of. That’s why A Wrinkle in Time was almost never published. It seemed too risky.
- Some want to write books for a very limited audience, like a family history for their relatives. They’re certainly not self-publishing out of vanity.
Very Unfair
Why are self-publishers and pay-to-publish authors labeled “vain,” when the same designation isn’t applied to other industries?
- If you’re a filmmaker and you make your own film, outside of the big industry, you’re not labeled a “Vanity Filmmaker.” You’re “Indie,” and are considered cool.
- If you’ve got a band and you decide to pay someone to produce your CD, you’re not a “vanity musician.”
Many great writers of the past chose to self-publish some of their works. Among them are Lewis Carroll, who paid to publish Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, E. Lynn Harris, Zane Grey, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Bernard Shaw, Edgar Allen Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Henry David Thorough and Walt Whitman.
Vanity publishers indeed.
Origins of the Term
As you might guess, the one who claims to have coined it , back in 1959, was a publisher. Since he assumes vanity on the part of self-publishers, I think I’ll assume vanity on his part. I can imagine him attending a formal dinner party, awing pretty young college students with his respected position, when a dapper young man remarks, “So you’re a publisher! I’m an author myself.” And all the girls turn to young author, known to the “real” publisher as a self-publisher. “He’s not really published,” the publisher bitterly mumbles. ” “It’s vanity, all vanity.”
And all the while, he fails to notice that his bitterness was fueled by the very vanity that he ascribed to the author.
It’s quite amazing to me that, in a culture that claims to despise prejudice in all forms, that a derogatory term like “Vanity Publishing” could be applied to the entire group of people who choose to self publish or pay to publish. If we label all self publishing “vanity publishing,” then do we imply that all traditional publishing should be labeled “humble and legitimate publishing,” — always, always choosing the publishing high road, accepting manuscripts solely because of their literary and scholarly merits, rather than commercial appeal? I don’t think so.
(Note: I’ve been in both worlds, traditionally published and self-published, and have enjoyed the benefits of each.)
What do you think? Should we continue to use the term “Vanity Publishing?”
Saturday, June 5th, 2010,
by J. Steve Miller,
Filed under: Get Published| authors, Self-Publishing, Traditional Publishing, vanity publishing, writers, Writing|
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The recent New York Times article on James Patterson (James Patterson, Inc.), was instructive regarding how publishers, and thus bookstores, cater to the big-time authors. A couple of paragraphs told about how the big publishers now put most of their marketing efforts behind their best selling authors, much more so now than the past. The result is that best-selling authors sell even more books, but the mid-list authors get very little marketing dollars. Publisher pay thousands of dollars to reserve top-placement sections of bookstores for their best-selling authors. Thus, the best-selling authors keep selling more copies while the rest of us may initially get into a bookstore, but will soon be sent back to publisher if we fail to sell, never to return.
Thus, even if the smaller authors get into the bookstores, if there isn’t a strong marketing campaign (either by the author or the publisher), then people won’t come to the bookstore looking for the book, and it will get returned.
I’m a small-time author, and am glad that my books are offered through Baker & Taylor and Ingram, but the bulk of my sales come through Amazon. And yes, in a sense, Amazon is just passive, but isn’t that the current revolution in marketing – from “interruption marketing” to “I’ll help you find me marketing”?
By optimizing my Amazon pages, posting articles on popular sites and blogs, getting reviews on popular sites and newspapers, and by having all these linked back to my Amazon page, I get regular sales. And I get 35% of each sale on Amazon – much, much better than the percentage of my sales to bookstores through the big wholesalers.
So for me it’s both/and, but Amazon is becoming the bigger and bigger player.
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010,
by J. Steve Miller,
Filed under: Sell Your Books| Amazon.com, book publicity, james patterson, Marketing, sell more books|
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