The Author's Journey

December 5, 2009

Oceanview has hired a new person to handle book signings with the chains. I give her a welcome call and, “since we’re talking” she suggests that it’s as good a time as any for her to collect information about me and my book. It’s one of about twenty books she will be working on in the next few months.

It’s a discouraging conversation. She reminds me – and I know I’ve said this about others – of a real estate agent or perhaps a printing company rep. Of course, her job is ultimately selling books, and she probably should have that superficial perky brightness that so many women in sales cultivate. However, I must say she doesn’t strike me as particularly knowledgeable. And our conversation about book signings revolves entirely around local independents, and by local I mean the San Francisco Bay Area. She asks me if there are any bookstores that would be good locations for signings. She asks me. I say in so many words, “I write books. I don’t make lists.”

I do learn from the conversation that there is rather intense competition for the privilege of setting up a card table in a book store and sitting behind it, hoping somebody will come by and buy one of your books. (These are called “meet-and-greet” signings, in contrast to readings.) You have to work at it even to get the opportunity.

There’s a term in sales: low-hanging fruit. These are the sales opportunities you go after first, the easy ones. I don’t fit into that category. Given my “platform,” or lack thereof, I’ll be lucky if I get any help from her at all.

I realize that if I’m going to get any results from the Oceanview marketing organization, I need to sell the wonderfulness of Fortuna much more effectively. I think the key is getting them to understand the significance of the trend towards online gaming as an alternative to watching TV. It’s huge. Millions do it. And it’s a phenomenon that hasn’t been well covered in the media.

I think what I have to do is launch the book in Second Life. That will attract some interest.

December 4, 2009

Friday afternoon, just as I’m locking up my home office to run an errand the phone rings, and it’s Charles Stillwagon, the Director of Events for The Tattered Cover, which I have now learned is a legendary bookstore in Denver. It is a coup that he even returned my call, but I’m not too surprised, as I managed to hit just the right note when I left a voice mail message for him the other day: “I’m a first-time novelist, my publicist tells me it would be impossible to do even a meet-and-greet at your store, but I thought I ought to confirm that and maybe just get a little advice.”

He’s a nice guy and we immediately hit it off. I learn a ton of valuable information in about ten minutes. If you want to do a signing at Tattered Cover, you have to have already sold some books to the store. Also, you have to pay an advertising fee. That gets you a listing in their Sunday Denver Post ad in the book section. (We laugh about the fact that the Post still even has a book section.)

I get the name of the buyer that Oceanview has to hit on to make a sale, and heartily thank him for his help. Then I send off an e-mail summarizing the conversation to the saleswoman at Oceanview, with a copy to the president. I include the key names, as names are important to people in sales, and I specify that she can mention my conversation with Charles, but can’t say or imply he said okay to a signing.

This morning, it occurs to me what we can do to take the next step: Get a review in The Denver Post. It’s not impossible. I have already figured out a way to hit on those book reviewers who are still left and make an impression, basically using a direct marketing approach. I know I can get them to read the first page. There is a question of whether or not the Post will even review a thriller, but there are ancillary issues that make it more relevant, such as the addition angle for online gaming.

There are three Borders outlets in Denver, and three Barnes & Nobels as well. This could be a perfect secondary market. As I type these words, I find myself wondering how much radio costs in the Denver market….

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.

November 19, 2009

The initial designs for my web site simply don’t look anything like what my designer and I talked about. There are issues about the size of various items that I don’t fully understand. (It’s very complicated. If you have two pictures that start out at different sizes and you shrink them down to the same size, they may not have the same resolution, which will make the site look amateurish.) I realize that I haven’t thought through what information needs to be there, at least as clearly as I should have. In other words, it’s a mess. We’re going to have to go back to square one.

Meanwhile, I’m in despair about the lack of a winning game plan. The way K has formulated the problem, the only way to get distribution is to show up at book stores for a signing even, and book stores will only schedule signing events for authors a) that are known or b) are local. In other words, my only shot at selling any books is in the San Francisco Bay Area. As I think about that, I can imagine that Bay Area success could be leveraged. Distributors will listen if a book is doing well regionally. So if K can say, “Fortuna is a best-seller in San Francisco, buyers in Boston, Chicago, Austin, etc. might listen. But then the question arises, How will she get that data? Does it even exist any more, now that metropolitan newspapers are shrinking down to zero and no longer have the resources to tabulate local best-seller lists?

All of this is what’s called “push” in marketing lingo. Push strategies are designed to get product on shelves – to push it out to consumers. There’s a second strategy, pull, which attempts to get consumers to seek out the product, e.g. to order it from a web site. That, I gather, can come from reviews. Who will review Fortuna? How can I get on the air? On the crucial blog? It’s hopeless.

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.

November 18, 2009

New, and again discouraging exchanges with the people at Oceanview in charge of promoting my book. I have to admit that part of my negativity results from being lectured about how to present myself in a sales situation by a cheerful, bright woman who is nonetheless younger than my daughter and doesn’t have one tenth the experience that I have selling things. “You have to be outgoing, etc. etc. etc.” But there’s something else. It’s the math.

I asked K. what the best-case scenario would be in terms of book appearances for me: number of appearances and books sold per appearance. Her response was 65 appearances in one year (best case) and 25 books sold per appearance (also best case). So… 65 appearances x 25 books = 1625 books x $25 = about $40,000. My commission is based on gross revenues to Oceanview. Say that they get $12.50 on each book, which is a generous assumption. So, maybe the gross comes out to around $20,000. Of that, I get 8 percent, or $1,600, or $24 per appearance, about $8.00 per hour. Oh, and by the way, I get that about a year after I earn it.

That’s annoying. But the fact of the matter is, I don’t mind doing the signings. In fact, I can’t think of anything more fun than personally selling my books to the people who want to read them. Actually meeting my audience!

What drives me crazy about the above is that nobody has a game plan to win. The way sales works is this: You set a global (i.e. overall) target of x many sales this year. Then you break it down into a) quarters and b) regions or sales units. Then, ultimately, you assign every sales person a quota. You can also assign targets based on activities that aren’t person-specific, e.g. so many sales from this direct mail campaign, so many sales from participating in this trade show and so on. But one way or another, you figure out in advance exactly how you’re going to reach your target. And we don’t even have a target

I suppose if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.

As a first time author with a book about to be released, I have asked myself more than once whether I would have been better off self-publishing. I have a unique perspective. My day job is marketing, which not only involves figuring out how to sell products to a target market, but also the designing and printing of brochures, “white papers,” direct mail pieces etc. that actually do the selling. I also do quite a bit of consulting for PR firms. And of course, I’ve designed and/or written the copy for dozens of web sites and blogs. I’ve also written and pitched stories to the media. I’ve even run companies somewhat larger than my publishing house.

In other words, short of literally operating a printing press, I have the skills to self publish. And, were I to succeed, I would make about ten times as much money per book sold.

Today I’m going to share my analysis of what I’m getting by following the conventional publishing path instead, along with some rough estimates of what these publisher-provided services would cost if I had to pay for them. The bottom line: For a novelist, following the conventional path makes sense.

Editing. It’s my belief that, no matter how good you are, you need an editor. At minimum, you need a copy editor just to find the dozens of typos in your manuscript. I personally got a lot more than that – from my agent, Kimberly Cameron. She made numerous substantive suggestions, many of which made the book more salable and, I would argue, quite simply better. The cost if I had hired someone: About $5,000.

Cover design, page layout and  printing. In theory, you could design your book cover yourself, which is what I did (with a significant contribution from George Foster who designs covers for Oceanview). But, realistically, most people will need to find a designer. There’s nothing all that tricky about it. You could get a decent result for under $1,000, perhaps less. There are plenty of software programs that would enable you to convert your manuscript to a printable file. Most of the formatting is automatic, although it’s still a substantial project, as you have to double-check every page. I’m guessing that I could get someone to do that work for about $1,500.

Finding a printer is easy. I found one in about fifteen minutes in central Washington (a relatively rural area where I figured the overhead for a printer would be low). If they had printed 3,000 hardback copies of my book it would have cost between $15,000 and $18,000. For me, that would not be a trivial sum. Of course, Oceanview footed that bill.

Public relations. There are plenty of PR companies and individual practitioners who specialize in publicizing books. A typical package, which would include a press kit plus distribution of press releases, interview offers and the like would cost between $3,000 and $5,000.

The sub-total here is somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000. There’s more – notably the warehousing, selling and physical distribution of the book, but I’m running out of space. And even with all sorts of cost-cutting, e.g. printing a paperback instead of a hardback, doing the PR yourself, the costs are substantial, and with a publisher, all the work is done by experts.

I would hardly say that self-publishing isn’t viable. In fact, for non-fiction it may be the best path, particularly when combined with a well-designed web-based sales strategy. But the traditional route, for all its aggravating moments, is still a pretty good deal for fiction writers.

Ellis Weiner has written a hilarious piece in the “Shouts & Murmurs” section of the New Yorker (October 19, 2009) called “Subject: Our Marketing Plan.” The piece is in the form of a memo from Gineen, a fictional promotion director at “Propensity Books” to the author of a book that Propensity has bought. If you have recently sold a book, hope to sell a book one day, or just want to know what it’s like, this is must read material. The only problem is that, for real writers, it’s not funny. It’s painful.

It would be wrong to give away Ellis’ jokes. But I’ll quote briefly to convey an impression of the whole.

“To start: Do you blog? If not… It would be great if you could post at least six hundred words every day until further notice.”

The theme of the piece is that today’s publishing companies expect an enormous amount of work from authors, everything from creating web sites and writing blogs to hitting on celebrities for blurbs to planning their own schedule of personal appearances.

Every writer I’ve talked to has complained – or at least taken note of – how much of the process of selling a book has been transferred from the publisher to the author. As I’ve noted earlier, publishers have also transferred a lot of work from their internal acquisition staff to literary agents, e.g. the substantial amount of initial editing that is typically required to get a book to the point where it’s publishable.

The question that is bound to eventually arise has to do with what the business community calls “value add.” In a tight economy, anyone who’s doing business with any other entity – a publisher, a distributor, a retail outlet – is bound to ask the question: What value is entity X adding to the process? Just to make sure the concept is clear, here’s an example: Distributors in the manufacturing segment add value by providing manufacturers with a sales force. You sell your valves to half a dozen distributors, and they in turn go through the hassle of selling those valves to the hundreds upon hundreds of companies that will actually use them. In addition to providing a sales force, distributors also keep inventory in stock (which costs money), handle the mechanics of quoting, invoicing and collecting the money, and deal with the endless details of any sales transaction, including post-sale complaints.

So, in this light, what value to publishers add to the process. The answer from this writer’s view is, plenty. In my next post, I’ll share some of the math.

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.

I got a call out of the blue the other day from Susan at Oceanview letting me know the ARCs  (author’s review copies) were on their way, and yesterday the pages arrived. The are what we used to be called galley proofs or, more commonly, “gallies.” It is very difficult to read them carefully, I have been over this ground so many times. This morning I managed about ten pages. And I found the kind of little errors you’re supposed to find: a line that is indented one extra character; a paragraph that is not indented; a space missing in an ellipsis. I also find that I am very happy with the book, and frankly amazed that I was able to create the many little details that give the book its unique ambience.

Meanwhile, the web site is progressing. And I have written a script for a movie-like “trailer.” One of my neighbors is a professor in the drama department at St. Mary’s college, which is about ten miles away from Berkeley, and he will line up actors. I think I can get a shooter from the Berkeley public access TV station, or maybe it will be a student from St. Mary’s. Christopher St. John, my former protégé who is now a very successful creative director, will assemble the clip in Final Cut Express, which I don’t know how to use.

I don’t mind all this extra work. In fact, it’s fun. But I wonder how writers who don’t have my kind of background manage. While I can’t do online promotion perfectly, I can get by. I understand the tools, and I have been extremely lucky in finding people to help me.

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.

August 5, 2009

I am furious. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I was furious. Not I am only mildly pissed.

Yesterday I received a call from ______________ at Oceanview –  I won’t name her – congratulating me on joining the ranks of published authors. I guess a have more of a delicate ego than I’d like to think, because this instantly pissed me off. What she should have said – at least, if she wanted to win me over – was something about how happy the folks at Oceanview were to have such a promising property. Anyway… after congratulating me on my good fortune, she referred to a “Welcome to Oceanview” booklet I had been mailed some time ago,  hinting that there were some tasks I needed to accomplish “to move Fortuna towards publication.” Of course, I hadn’t bothered to read the book, but I did immediately call back.

I finally reach her this morning. After a few minutes of syrupy chat, she finally gets to the point: Where are my blurbs? I explain that I don’t have any, that I have told Susan (the CEO) that I don’t, and won’t have any, that I just don’t read that many books, that I often don’t remember authors  names, and since Susan has a good relationship with Lincoln Child (the one author whose name I could come up with who writes “books like mine”), she has agreed to chat him up at Thrillerfest for our mutual benefit.

I can’t get ______________ to back off, and when I finally say, “What is it about ‘no’ that you don’t understand?” she comes back with, “Well, if things don’t work out, we’ll have to put our heads together.” In other words, she’s not taking “no” for an answer, but rather pushing everything into the future.

I say, “Fine, I’m happy to participate in any meeting. But I want to make it absolutely, positively clear that I will not take responsibility for obtaining blurbs. I have been in business a long time, and I’ve learned that it’s not a good idea to make a promise you can’t keep. Is that clear?”

She responds with ten seconds of stunned silence. Then, finally, “Well, let’s move on to the other issue. Do you have a web site?”

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.

May 26, 2009

The first proof of the cover arrived yesterday via an e-mail from Chris, the project manager. My first reaction: It’s a home run. George has stayed true to my original idea, and he has added exactly the element it needed to “say” high tech: an arrow-shaped cursor that’s about to click on the coin. It couldn’t be better… but one thing bothers me slightly: the coin itself.

It appears to me that it’s what’s called an FPO – an image (“for position only”) that’s not precisely what’s going to go into the final design, but close enough to get the idea across. I’m still troubled. Even in its blurry, pre-production state, the image on the coin doesn’t clearly and unambiguously say Renaissance. It could, for example, be a figure from American revolutionary times. I decide that we need to discuss this… and then it occurs to me that maybe George actually intended the pixilated look. In that case, it just doesn’t work at all. Well, that’s my opinion, and I have been very successful over the years trusting my gut.

I send an e-mail directly to George, and since it’s negative, I don’t copy anybody. We go back and forth. It turns out that he couldn’t find a high-rez (high resolution) image and was putting out the pixilated coin as a potential final look. I think: What kind of budget are we working with? In today’s market, it would only cost a few hundred dollars to shoot a coin. You just tell the photographer what you want. He/she finds the coin, and takes a simple table-top shop. In fact, I know someone really good who will do it for me for free.

But before going down that road, I do a little googling. I quickly find a high rez Florentine coin. It doesn’t feature the profile of a merchant prince like my original design. It’s a real Florin! Which is even better. I send a jpg to George as an attachment. He loves it, and in spite of its being a jpg – usually a low rez format – it’s so big that it will work.

We have a brief discussion about rights, and then we’re done. Problem solved. If the design flies with the rest of the committee, I have exactly the cover I want. But… will it work in the marketplace?

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.

May 18, 2009

I have crossed over a line. A friend from high school attends some sort of literary function and connects with Louise Ure, who has just published her fourth novel. My friends shares the news that I have recently sold my first novel, and Louise says, “Have him get in touch with me.” On the same day that we connect via e-mail, I get a response to another e-mail I sent a couple of weeks ago to to Lisa Unger, who has published several novels. She is apologetic about being so slow to respond. Can I call her in June when she’s finished with the initial promotion of her new book?

It dawns on me that these two women have Been There, still remember what it’s like to be a first-time author, and feel a sense of kinship. Why should I be surprised? When I was working as an advertising copywriter – not the easiest gig in the world to obtain – I always took time to help people who were starting out, looked at their work, told them where I thought they could fit in, etc. Still, I am truly grateful… but I can’t help but wonder if writers who have achieved a higher level of success – Tess Gerritsen comes to mind – will respond to my e-mails.

*   *   *

I call up Louise and she is incredibly helpful. I learn that I should absolutely join International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America. The both “do a great job” of promoting first novels. I also learn the names of the two book stores in the San Francisco Bay Area (where I live) that contribute their statistics to the New York Times best seller list. One of them is a lock for a book signing, as my agent is a close friend of the owner. The other I will have to work on.

Louise also shares the names of a couple of chat rooms I can visit. All together, I can get access to about 50,000 sets of eyeballs, to use the lingo of Web marketeers.

In my mind’s eye I see a Web-related to-do list that is getting longer and longer. Not only do I have to worry about Louise’s lists (as I have come to think of the various groups I should join) but also the chat lists associated with multi-player online gaming, not to mention the news feeds I have set up via Google alert.

It’s a lot of work. And, of course, there’s the small matter of paying the mortgage every month.

To be continued

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.