I first
thought of business creep as the dance of an author between creative work and
the business side of writing, especially promotion and marketing. Then I
started paying attention to the genuine creepiness that can slip in on the
business side, as in the
carjacking of a literary agent perpetrated by a writer that she’d rejected. How
had the crazy guy tracked her down? Her frequent postings on Twitter and
Facebook told where she was and what she was doing.
Creepy in
a different way are writers who’ve paid for good online reviews of their books,
and the freelancers who’ve paid their bills writing those reviews. I understand
about the free market and all, but there’s still something chilling about
a guy making $28,000 a month providing fake reviews. Google and Amazon
eventually agreed, pulling the enterprising Todd Rutherford’s ads and reviews.
Now he’s selling RVs while on the side running a business that creates book
buzz via blogs and Twitter.
For as
much as we hear about buzz, there must be limits to what we’ll do to get
noticed. At the same time, we can’t abdicate completely the marketing side of
the equation. “I can’t self-promote,” I’ve heard writers say. “That’s just not
me. If my book can’t sell itself, then I just won’t write.” Harper Lee did it;
J.D. Salinger did it, they say.
A handful
may be able to duck out on the business end of writing. But for most of us it’s
a reality: we have to find the right balance between what we want to do –
create – and what we must do – help sell our books.
Much of
the marketing legwork, though not all, is electronic. With more than ten
million members, Goodreads is the largest site in the world for book
recommendations. Compiled using data gathered from a title that launched with
three Goodreads giveaways, a Goodreads post titled The
Anatomy of a Book Discovery uses a color-spiked graph to show how one
thing leads to another when it comes to book buzz. What’s harder to quantify is
how good the book was to begin with: how timely, how well-conceived, how
brilliantly rendered.
Beyond
the scope of the Goodreads analysis: how a “following” built before a book is
published, or even before it is written, plays into its eventual success. Among
the advice passed around to emerging writers these days is that they must make
a name for themselves: get a website, get on Facebook, get on Twitter, start a
blog, get a following. At best, this advice can be overstated. At worst, it’s a
gigantic distraction that will keep you from writing the book you must write.
Yes, buzz
sells books. Yes, your Facebook friends and Twitter followers and blog
followers will be among the first to buy your book when it comes out. And yes,
a website shows you’re a professional. But you must absolutely guard your time.
Even when you’re up and running and you’ve got a book or two under your belt,
you should aim for spending no more than a quarter of your writing time on the
business part. If you’re an emerging writer who’s still pushing out that first
million words ahead of your real publishable work, you should spend a lot less
time on promotion. The exception: if you write for a specialized nonfiction
market – growers of heirloom tomatoes, for instance – you’ll need to be
recognized as an expert within the field in order to successfully pitch your
book, so you’ll want to spend a larger chunk of your time getting recognized.
While
electronic buzz is huge, huge, huge, don’t forget that in the end what we’re
really talking here are relationships. In that way, writing is no different
than any other business. Your online presence must project the real you and
your real book, because that’s what gets outted one way or the other. Fake
reviews may sell a few titles, but if the book stinks, the readers won’t be
back.
The
profile of Emma Straub in Poets and Writers brings
this point home. After her first four novels were rejected, Straub got serious
about the quality of her work, putting herself under the tutelage of Lorrie Moore. A small
press, Five Chapter Books,
published Straub’s first collection of short stories. She has more than 10,000
followers on Twitter. She posts regularly on the Paris Review Daily and on New
York magazine’s culture blog Vulture. Yet she says it’s her job at an
indie bookstore in Brooklyn that really taught
her how to market her work, which now includes her novel Laura
Lamont's Life in Pictures, published by Riverhead Books and selected by
Barnes and Noble as a Discover pick when it came out.
“I see
how some writers have really great relationships with bookstores and with
booksellers, and some writers don’t. I see what happens when a writer is a kind
of dick to people who work at a bookstore. I am never going to recommend that
person’s book,” she says. “Nowadays it really is the role of the writer to make
sure that you have these personal connections with everyone you can to help
things go well—and not in a gross, networky, slimy way; in an actual, genuine
way. Relationships matter.”
As you
consciously, purposefully, strike a balance between creativity and business,
consider that relationships are at the heart of both. What you do with and for
your fellow writers along with what you do with and for your readers will come
back around in the best of ways to you and your work. And there’s nothing
creepy about that.