From the moment of conception until you present your work to the market, every decision you make — whether conscious or not, whether active or passive — is a marketing decision. This relationship is inherent in the process, not an affectation. People who study marketing with seriousness are not attempting to impose a theory on the process of production and sales, they are attempting to reveal how each decision at each step in the production process relates to sales.

The biggest problem with marketing theory and practice is in proving the causality of a particular choice or decision. As with stock prices it’s always easier to draw compelling conclusions from results than it is to make profitable predictions. In publishing such past-performance generalizations are useful to the marketing department and critic, but to the creator they have limited utility.

Why? Because at the molecular level every key press is a marketing decision. Every verb you use (or don’t), every comma you use (or don’t), every paragraph you write (or don’t), has a theoretical impact on the market’s acceptance of your work. At the same time it should be obvious that trying to understand and control these causal relationships can lead only to madness. As a practicing writer you must accept that there’s only so far marketing can take you, even if you devote yourself to it completely.  [ Read more ]

The rolling premise in this series of posts is that marketing and selling should prompt internal as well as external debate. Unless you give your entire brain over to the demands and preferences of the market I believe you have a responsibility to protect the part of you that cares about what you write, because it’s your authorial neck on the line. If you don’t want to accept that kind of risk, or you’d like to have others to blame for any failure while you share the credit for any success, then you should quit writing and become an agent, editor or publisher.

Marketing and Selling: a Case Study
The forces at work when taking a book to market are intrinsically complicated. Managing motives and expectations can be as important to the reception of a title as the work itself, and it’s always beneficial if the author, publisher and audience are on the same page. Quite often, however, they are not.

As an unknown author you’re not going to be able to dictate terms to anyone. But even celebrated writers can have trouble avoiding the machinations of those who are determined to profit from their labor. To see what I mean, consider the case of Steve Martin, who appeared in person late last year at the 92nd Street Y in New York City to discuss his new novel, An Object of Beauty.

As a famous celebrity in his own right, the draw on that evening was not so much Martin’s book as Martin himself. That’s one of the advantages of celebrity, and the main reason publishers are willing to sign almost any D-list notable to a book deal. Celebrity can always be repurposed to draw attention to other things, including worthy charities, thigh-building exercise devices, or books you’ve written or had written for you. From a marketing and sales perspective celebrity is a product in its own right apart from whatever product a celebrity might be hawking, and the 92nd Street Y certainly understood that when they sold tickets to Martin’s appearance.  [ Read more ]

Because you can never, ever have perfect knowledge of a market, and because as an author you have a limited amount of time to write, and because people with more market experience than you obviously exist, it can be tempting to look to others for help with your marketing decisions. Not surprisingly, those others have identified you as a potential market for their services, whether they have anything useful to sell or not.

The Publishing Establishment
Publishing talks a good game about cultural stewardship and the importance of literature, but what it cares about is profit. If you can make the publishing industry money as a cultural steward or literary star, that’s great. On the other hand, if you can make the publishing industry money as a cultural cancer or illiterate moron, that’s great too.

While speaking in generalizations is usually a bad idea, and there are plenty of wonderful agents, editors and publishers who would love you even if you weren’t the root source of their livelihoods, the following statement cannot be disputed. Agents, editors and publishers don’t eat if they can’t sell your book. On an individual basis they may recognize good writing when they see it, and there may be limits to what they’re personally willing to do to make a buck, but their jobs are premised on making that buck over and over and over.

As a writer you may share that objective in whole or in part. But you’re also the primary (if not sole) custodian of whatever artistic or craft standards you believe in. If you don’t protect the integrity of the book you’re writing it’s likely nobody will. That doesn’t mean you should be a diva or insist on getting your way every time, or that your instincts will always be correct, or even that artistry is antagonistic to sales. It simply means you’re going to have to assume and commit to the responsibility of mediating between everybody’s profit motives, including your own. And that’s true whether you’re an independent author or a professional writing in the belly of the beast.

The publishing industry’s default position is that it knows everything there is to know about marketing books, including how books should be written to best take advantage of any market. And it’s hard to argue against that premise. Unfortunately, all of that comprehensive data and institutional knowledge is of dubious predictive value in any particular instance, (That’s something you won’t be told.)

Even if every agent, editor and publisher who expresses an opinion about your work does so with both eyes on the market, and even if you yourself have one eye on the market, there’s still room to advocate for making the work the best it can be apart from any sales metric, and for realizing your personal authorial vision. But you have to be willing to fight for those things.  [ Read more ]