Fiction Writers Review » publicity

Where’s Alice Bliss?

Celeste Ng — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 13:00:24 +0000

Earlier this summer, we looked at BookCrossing, a website that allows users to “catch” and “release” books around the world and track where their books have gone. Now author Laura Harrington is using BookCrossing in an unusual promotion for her novel, Alice Bliss. Writes Harrington:

Where’s Alice Bliss? is a campaign to send copies of the novel Alice Bliss to as many countries and U.S. states as possible. Through bookcrossing.com, copies of Alice Bliss will be registered and tracked as they travel around the world, passing from one reader to the next. [...] We want to send Alice to four continents and all 50 U.S. states.

As of late September, Harrington’s novel had reached 30 states and five continents. Not bad!

This particular project strikes me as an interesting mix of new technology (the magic of the internet! hi-tech book tracking!) and old technology (after all, we’re tracking physical copies of print books here). Have you seen other ways for authors to use new technologies for old-school book promotions?

Further reading:

Learn more about Book Crossing in our blog archive
As publishers cut publicity, writers have to find new ways to promote themselves. Here’s how some have done it.
Is faking a kidnapping taking book promotion too far?

How far can book promotions go?

Celeste Ng — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 13:00:47 +0000

My friends who are literary agents have told me about the many ways authors try to catch their attention: packages of cookies sent with their manuscripts; queries tucked into oven mitts shaped like sunflowers (of all things). But this might be the ultimate guerrilla book promotion: faking a kidnapping to promote your book.

Yes. Mark Davis, a thriller writer, did just that. Reports the News Advance of Lynchburg, Virginia:

His main character, Perno Morris, is a failed novelist who has grown weary (and, perhaps, been pushed over the edge of sanity) by a discouraging series of rejections by publishers. So he finds an uber-successful agent, kidnaps her daughter, and gives her 90 days to get his latest novel in print. [...]

“I went on as many Internet writers’ boards and chat rooms as I could, as Perno Morris, and vented about how unfair the publishing business was,” [Davis] said. “Then I told them I had a plan, and started a countdown to when I would reveal it. That sent a lot of traffic to my website (www.thelastrejection.com), where I had posted the first three chapters of the novel.”

But that was just the beginning. Davis staged and filmed a kidnapping (“I checked with a lawyer first to make sure I wouldn’t get in trouble”) to post on the website, then sent an e-mail to a wide variety of agents. It began: “By the time you receive this, I will have already kidnapped your child.”

“The first phone call I received the next day was at 7:30 in the morning, from an agent,” Davis recalled. “She was yelling at me, saying, ‘Are you crazy?’”

We talked for a little while, though, and I told her: “The most important thing for any novelist these days is to stand out, to attract attention. Based on the fact that you’re calling me this early, I’m assuming I’ve accomplished that goal.”

Is this a brilliant idea—or a cruel one? As a parent, I can only imagine how traumatized I’d be if I got an email claiming my child was kidnapped, even in jest. (Maybe even especially if it were in jest—or in the service of a promotion.)

And here’s the thing: the scheme worked. Davis landed a book deal. I’m not surprised.

But I wish he hadn’t.

Control your own book tour destiny

Lee Thomas — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 18:00:57 +0000

We’ve written several posts over the years about the emergence of DIY book tours, marketing and self-publicity (read them here, and here, and here). Not only do self-published authors need to get their hustle on, but writers who publish with small presses, or find themselves mid-level (or lower) on a big house’s list can find their book off the radar within months of a debut. Yet many writers find they’re woefully unprepared to find the right venue in Kansas City or drum up buzz ahead of time so they don’t show up to an empty house at an Austin coffee shop. Enter: BookTour.

Kevin Smokler, CEO of the site, formed the idea for BookTour in 2007, along with editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson. Back in graduate school, Smokler had grown frustrated that looking up an author biography necessitated an actual trip to the grad school library. Why wasn’t that information available somewhere online? Even as the internet grew and tools like Wikipedia emerged, finding the stops on a favorite author’s book tour proved difficult, in some cases impossible. Forget about discovering a new writer, unless you happened to have the time to visit all the local bookstores and keep tabs on events. BookTour provides a centralized, easy-to-navigate online location for that information.

Image Credit: Flickr

BookTour’s core segment? Mid-list authors down to self-published newbies, basically anyone with a book, but without a publicist who can champion that book for the author. “You know immediately if a book is going to be big,” says Smokler. But for all the worthy books that won’t make the best-seller list, BookTour provides a way for the author to extend the buzz around a new work for six months, a year – even longer.

Authors can create a page, find venues in a given city (Visiting friends in Albuquerque? Book a reading.), see what’s working for writers in their same segment, even find media contacts using “PressFinder” and become your own publicist. Readers, in turn, can keep tabs on which writers have readings scheduled in their city, and discover new authors making live local appearances. Many authors on the site use it in tandem with an author website, Twitter, and other forms of online connection with readers.

If you’re contemplating a DIY book tour, or even trying to market your new collection without leaving town, BookTour might be the perfect place to start.

Writer, Sell Thyself

Lee Thomas — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 13:00:03 +0000

Peddler, 1849. Photo Credit: Flickr

On the NYTimes‘ Opinionator blog this weekend, Dick Cavett reflects on the role of author as salesman in “I Wrote It, Must I Also Hustle It?” Cavett writes:

I just did 12 — or was it 14? — back-to-back radio interviews from New York to Seattle and, so it seemed after five of them, all points in between.

Somewhere around number eight you begin to lapse into a kind of dream state, wondering if what you just said was something you had said to the same person 10 minutes ago; or was that said to the previous host? Maybe he is the one you said it twice to? Or do you think you just said it now but in fact only thought it?

You want to go back to bed.

Writers with far less name recognition than Cavett are very familiar with the importance of providing a public face to their books. The competition for review space, speaking engagements, radio gigs – you name it – is fierce, and agents, publicists, friends and the authors themselves work together to get the word out about a book. With even table space at the bookstore is up for sale, a coordinated strategy is key to giving a new book a shot at finding its audience.

Writers, and their agents and publisher, have been getting creative. Eco book tours, promoting a new novel by sail boat, creating an app for a book (separate from the e-book version) for use on the iPhone and iPad, and the list goes on. Have you seen an unconventional, innovative way an author is getting the word out about her book? We’d love to hear about it.

Quotes & Notes: The Double-Edged Sword of Creative Community

Steven Wingate — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 23:41:43 +0000

Ad Reinhart / photo by Robert Lax

“Stopped hanging other people’s art.”

– a journal entry by Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967)

About twenty years ago an artist friend mentioned this quote to me in a moment of liberation. He’d been doing a lot of reviewing of art shows, getting his name out in the Colorado art community, writing a column (not unlike Quotes and Notes) for a local paper, etc. But he got tired of writing about other people’s work and having to evaluate their shows because it stole attention from his own work. He quoted Ad Reinhardt’s simple, one-line journal entry as he announced a personal moratorium on reviews, interviews, community-building efforts, and other such activities.

It was a declaration of independence, a separation of the self from the art-world machinery, and it struck me because I wanted to do the same thing. At the time I ran an art-house film series and was constantly “hanging other people’s work,” mostly by trying to get media attention for their movies. I longed for a life in the arts that didn’t require so much administration, that showcased my work instead of other people’s. After his announcement my friend had a terrifically fertile period in which he produced a lot of new work, but then he got lonely and a little bored and reached out to the community again—doing reviews, building communities, etc. When he did that, it seemed perfectly natural—a development rather than an about-face. It made me wonder if Ad Reinhardt ever went back to hanging other people’s art, and if so, how many times he reversed poles over the course of his career.

It also makes me wonder if Reinhardt would (or could) declare a permanent moratorium on “hanging other people’s art” in today’s world, facing a vastly different socio/creative landscape. New York in the mid-20th century bustled for artists like few places in history, but it seems quaint and provincial compared to the Internet-fueled, endlessly interwoven creative world of today. When Ad Reinhardt was an up-and-coming artist in the 1930s, he had a different game to play because his scene was predominantly local (though with global ramifications). Now we have global scenes, with people who’ve never met interacting across continents, and this has changed the nature of creative life and careers entirely.

So when I think about Reinhardt’s decision to stop hanging other people’s art, I simply can’t put it in today’s context. Can an artist of any stripe realistically build a career now without, in some way, doing a bit of that hanging? This question is especially apropos for writers, since the medium through which we increasingly publish (the Internet) is also the medium through which we build our communities. The landscape of our endeavors is, in this way at least, narrowing. The writer’s job description is fundamentally changing so that fewer and fewer of us will have the option Reinhardt described. We are no longer merely in the business of creating content, but in the business of sharing content (a.k.a. “hanging other people’s work”) as well, whether the “hanging” we do takes the form of doing reviews, writing blurbs, or simply flagging a friend’s book as TO BE READ on Goodreads. The idea that one can cocoon in the isolated creative life and then surface into the public one at will has largely been destroyed by the very same online communities that we build—including, for instance, the online community you belong to as you read this column in Fiction Writers Review.

I would love to say that I’ve found a balance between creating and hanging, but I haven’t and I don’t know if I ever will. Almost everyone I know who lives a literary life spends a fair amount of time bouncing between those two poles, usually focusing on one and doing the other in crammed, spare time. One month there isn’t enough time to work on the novel because of the reviews we’ve promised, the teaching we do, etc; the next month, there isn’t enough time to generate even a paragraph-long blog posting about a mentor’s latest book. When I think about my ideal job description as a writer, I picture a perfect, continuous balance between those poles. This balanced me will set aside enough time to delve into my characters without worrying about what time it is, and after he’s satisfied with that he’ll write a column like this one, do one of the reviews he’s promised, or write some queries about an editorial project. He’ll figure out the formula someday, find the perfect balance that will allow him to be productive in his writing room and still participate meaningfully in the literary community.

But this best-of-both-worlds scenario is almost guaranteed not to happen. Instead I’ll spend most of my writerly life feeling out of balance, like I’m leaning too far in one direction or another. I’ll cocoon until the pile of community-building work gets too big for me to ignore, then plunge into it so fully that I’ll forget where I was in whatever creative project I’d been pouring my energy into. Sometimes I kick myself for trying to find a balance at all, instead of finding some solace in the rhythm of these alternating currents in my life. Ultimately it may not be a balance that’s meant to be struck at all—not an ideal equilibrium point that one achieves and maintains, but a series of push-pulls, of sometimes jerky adjustments to one’s creative mojo. Maybe we’re not meant to be comfortable with this dual life at all, but meant to struggle with it and continuously find an always-new path through the two poles.

Or maybe it’s just me, being a stick in the mud about the Internet and pining—self-sabatogingly—for some imaginary “good old days” when I could do what Ad Reinhardt did and declare myself done with hanging other people’s work entirely. But nobody can get away with that anymore; it smacks of arrogance and selfishness, of a star system that places some artists above the fray and others directly in it (with the ones “stuck” in the fray struggling to prove themselves worthy of rising above it). I don’t think the writing community works that way anymore, if it ever did. As the Internet “flattens” the landscape, converging the ways we publish our work and the ways we hang other people’s, readers are going to assess us based on how we participate in the community. So are publishers and publicists, who seem hell-bent on quantifying our potential markets based on the size and demographic nature our platforms, as well as the number of “clicks” we can generate.

But more importantly, our fellow writers will assess us based on our level of participation and on whether we place ourselves above the fray or within it. Can anyone really afford to act above the fray anymore, save the most established writers out there? Yet as I say this, I have to face my own failings in this regard. I haven’t logged on to Goodreads in over a year, though I’ve read plenty of books in that time. (Having to assign “stars” to everything doesn’t help.) I haven’t taken the time to navigate Fictionaut, a dynamic online fiction community, and I haven’t become an online reviewer on Amazon. I fail to leave comments on almost all the literary blogs I read, fail to respond to (and sometimes even fail to notice) what people say about the things I’ve written.

What’s stopping me from doing all these things? I look around at writers who do a lot of “service work” by staying involved in online communities, and sometimes that work seems more like politicking—building up “clicks”—than community building.

Then a moment later it looks selfless, participatory, and part of the new model of the writer’s job description that we need to accept and embrace. It looks like people engaging in the kind of aesthetic discussions that Ad Reinhardt might have come to blows over during his heyday, and I feel like I’m missing out. I find myself envying people who to the community thing naturally and effortlessly, and I wonder how they have the time and energy to do it and still be creative.

So I ask you, readers of Fiction Writers Review. How do you strike your own balance between cocooning and surfacing, between creating work on your own and hanging the work of others? Tell me your secrets. I’ll read the blog posts. Teach me.

Quotes and Notes is a craft essay series by Steven Wingate. His short story collection Wifeshopping won the 2007 Bakeless Prize in fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008. In 2010-11 he will be Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.

Book Covers in the eBook Era

Celeste Ng — Thu, 06 May 2010 13:37:56 +0000

Imagine you’ve walked into a bookstore, browsing for something new. Besides an explicit recommendation, how do you decide what to read? If you’re like most people, you reach for a book that looks interesting… based on the cover. Mokoto Rich of the New York Times discusses how the e-book era may prevent us from judging a book by its cover and the ramifications that has for authors:

Among other changes heralded by the e-book era, digital editions are bumping book covers off the subway, the coffee table and the beach. That is a loss for publishers and authors, who enjoy some free advertising for their books in printed form: if you notice the jackets on the books people are reading on a plane or in the park, you might decide to check out The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or The Help, too.

“So often when you’re thinking of a book, you remember its cover,” said Jeffrey C. Alexander, professor of cultural sociology at Yale. “It’s a way of drawing people through the visual into reading.”

More on the DIY Book Tour

Celeste Ng — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:46:24 +0000

photo by Omad

Jeremy recently posted about Allison Amend’s tips for a do-it-yourself book tour. Author-arranged promotions are becoming more and more common as publishers cut back on marketing and publicity, and the L.A. Times has some firsthand accounts of what such a book tour can be like:

A cat peeing in an author’s bag? A writer waking up to discover that a complete stranger has left him four jars of delicious homemade preserves? Such things are not traditionally part of book promotion. But they happened to Bill Cotter and Annie La Ganga, an Austin, Texas-based couple who celebrated the simultaneous release of their debut books this fall by jumping in their car for an 8,500-mile, 27-day, do-it-yourself tour. [...]

La Ganga, 41, a cake decorator, and Cotter, 45, a rare book dealer, relied on many kindnesses: Relatives bought them new tires, and friends gave them Starbucks and McDonald’s gift cards. They spent only one night in a motel, staying instead with family and friends and in the crash pads they found on couchsurfing.com. The benefits: shared meals, new connections and (mostly) friendly pets.

For the whole story—complete with pros, cons, and how other authors have handled the DIY book tour, read the whole article here.

FWR readers, have you been on book tour? If so, share your best tour stories—or your tales of horror—in the comments.

How to Boost Your Book’s Sales

Celeste Ng — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 19:23:31 +0000

Step 1: Wait for a celebrity to buy your book.

Step 2: Be sure the book is in the celebrity’s backseat when he crashes his car in the middle of the night.

Step 3: ???

Step 4: PROFIT!

New Lit Site: The Nervous Breakdown

Celeste Ng — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:11:55 +0000

Have you met The Nervous Breakdown yet? Founded by author Brad Listi, this new website is intended as a new space for authors to promote their work. The fiction section’s aim, as explained in an open letter, is

not only akin to that of all good literary magazines–to showcase some of the most vibrant writers working today–but also to help provide these writers with a vehicle to market their books. This is why we provide links to authors’ websites and sales pages: to help directly connect the writers we love with their audience–TNB’s large, loyal and growing readership.

But don’t worry; you will not be bombarded with sales pitches. There’s plenty of good old-fashioned content here. TNB, as it refers to itself, offers short stories from recent collections (like “Where We Must Be,” from Laura van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us) as well as new stories from emerging writers. For those who prefer the longer form, there are novel excerpts (such as the prologue to Greg Olear’s Totally Killer), and weekly installments of a novel by J. E. Fishman, Cadaver Blues.

In addition to fiction, the site has interviews, essays, opinion pieces, and appreciations on everything from Infinite Summer to the family fridge. Lest “appreciations” seem too positive, there are also plenty of rants. Several columns address writerly concerns: for example, LitPark runs interviews with writers, agents, publicists, and the like, and will feature a “Question of the Month (involving everything from obsessions to rejection letters)” for reader discussion, while Three Guys One Book provides “short reviews of stories and novels, publishing news, photography, and the popular 3G1B group discussion.” Podcasts feature readings and author interviews.

But TNB’s most original offering is author “self-interviews,” in which writers, well, write both questions and answers. So far, there are only three, but I’m excited to read more of this unusual format.

If you’re looking for somewhere to start, may I suggest the section of writing on writing, and the essay “It’s Kind of Like Creative Herpes”?

How to Get a Book Deal Using the Internet

Celeste Ng — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:49:19 +0000

First came blog-based books like Julie and Julia. Then came books based on Internet memes like LOLcats. Recently we’ve seen a spate of Twitter-based books, ranging from Matt Stewart’s novel The French Revolution to TwitterWit to Justin Halpern’s Shit My Dad Says.

How far will the trend go? Now, even your Facebook status can land you a book deal–at least in the world of The Onion.

Via.