If you’ve published a book,
either the traditional way or on your own, you know what I mean by business
creep: the way the business side of writing, especially promotion and marketing,
can take over your life. For as much as we hear about buzz, there have to 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.” Like Harper Lee, they say, or J.D. Salinger. But today’s
writers who think like this have for the most part will fail to thrive. A
handful may be able to duck out on the business end of writing; Haruki
Murakami, for one. 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.
These days, much of the
marketing legwork, though not all, is electronic. With 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 is how a “following” that’s 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 is overstated. At worst, it’s a
gigantic distraction that will keep you from writing the book you must write.
Yes, buzz sells books.
Yes, some of 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 time on the business part of
this grand adventure.
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 whole 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.
A profile of Emma Straub by
Eryn Loeb in Poets & Writers magazine
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 ten thousand 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, one reader
at a time.
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 benefit you and your work. And there’s nothing creepy
about that.