Myths of Book Marketing Part II
Doing a video interview only takes a few minutes. That’s
true for the actual video when it’s aired, but prep time can be daunting. Today
I was lucky. I spent only an hour prepping: showering, shaving, selecting the
right attire that included a blue instead of a white shirt, stopping for a
haircut on the way to the interview, driving to the interview location,
practicing what I wanted to say. The interviewer/camera person was almost right
on time. Setting up the equipment took no time at all, finding the right
background with minimal background noise and good lighting was slightly more tricky,
but Abbye Garcia—affectionately known as “the girl with the camera”—proved an
expert at what she does. She started off with asking the right questions,
promising to edit out all but the essentials. I forgot I was on camera and I
answered her questions as if I were speaking directly with her. We did two
interviews and a couple dozen publicity stills. We wrapped up the entire
session in less than an hour. I had time to drop off some mail-order book sales
at the post office before heading home to write. Total time away from the
keyboard: less than four hours.
Is all
this necessary? you ask. Yes, it is, if you want to sell books.
I’m naturally
a shy, retiring kind of guy. There was a time when I sold most of my stuff
using pseudonyms. Name recognition didn’t seem important to me at all. I was
wrong.
Kevin
J. Anderson reminded me, in his wonderful Million
Dollar Professionalism for the Writer, that Dean Koontz also wrote many of
his early works under pseudonyms. Stephen King wrote a few books under the
Richard Bachman name. But it was only when they got their own names out there,
where people could recognize them, that they wrote best-sellers.
King is
as much a master of marketing as he is a master of the macabre. People ask for
his works by name because they know his name and know the quality of his
writing. People are willing to pay money for his grocery lists.
I want
people to read what I write because they know my name and recognize the quality
of my story-telling. Writing a good book is only part of the process. Getting
the books into the hands of readers is equally important.
Do
interviews sell books? Yes, a few. But a lot of interviews over a long period
of time can add up to a significant number of books reaching readers who’ll
want to buy more.
A by-product
of having your own name on the cover of your books is writing a better book
because you own the story. When I ground out down-and-dirty novels for
packagers, I didn’t care about the quality. I did it for the money (plus the
practice of fast-paced story-telling with minimum characterization). Nobody
knew who wrote those novels. I didn’t care if anybody ever knew.
But the
marketplace has changed, and I have changed as I’ve aged and grown as a writer.
I care about what I write, carefully crafting every word, and I want people to
read what I write and to know who wrote it.
I’m
proud to be a horror writer. I write in other genres, too, and I’m proud of
those stories, as well. I do mysteries, police procedurals, suspense thrillers,
and occasional fantasy and science fiction. I have a few cross-over novels.
Okay, more than a few. But I want to be known as a horror author.
But
what makes me a horror writer isn’t the interviews I do nor the name
recognition. What makes me a horror writer is what I write. It’s writing the kind
of stories I like to read and putting them into the hands of other readers who
also like my kind of stories. Reading and writing always comes first.
To be
continued….
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