promotion

One of the hardest lessons for any author is that getting a book published is only half the job. Or one-fourth of the job—you have to write the damn thing first, and then revise and perfect it, and then get it published. And once you’ve got it out there, you have to promote it.

Different writers will approach promotion differently. You might concentrate on social media, or you might make videos, or you might go to cons and other events in order to meet real, live people and try to hand-sell them some books. I’ve done cons before—ComicCon and the Writer’s Digest Annual Conference, for two—and this month I found myself at Book Expo America and BookCon at the Javits Center in New York City. My publisher, Writer’s Digest Books, asked me to stop in and do some book signings, and it reminded me of a few book promotion lessons I’ve learned at these things.

Be Prepared

Be prepared for two things at these sorts of events: One, the sheer scale of it—there will be a lot of people, most of whom have no idea who you are. Two, the psychology of it. Unless you’re super famous, chances are no one will have heard of you, and you have to be ready for the vaguely interested looks and the blunt questions about why anyone should care about your book.

Be Active

If you’re not famous, don’t assume people will just be drawn to your booth by the sheer animal magnetism of your talent, charm, and fashion sense. Get crowd wranglers out there—people who will walk around with your book and go up to folks and say “Hey, want a free signed copy? This guy’s awesome and he’s right over there!” No need to get fancy about this—trickery, like having folks pretend to be just plain old fans, won’t work. But wrangling the crowd is the difference between sitting alone, silently crying, and having a robust line of people.

Have Fun

Probably the most-forgotten bit of advice is to always have fun when promoting your book. Enjoying what you’re doing will make other people enjoy it as well—and the opposite applies, believe me. If you force yourself to deal with crowds despite wanting to vomit at the thought of it, that flopsweat is going to be obvious to everyone and they will run away. Stick to whatever it is you enjoy. Me, while meeting 200 people in half an hour is a bit stressful I do kind of enjoy bantering with people. I like the folks who challenge me—they walk up and say, why should I read this? Or, what’s your favorite part of the book? I like the glint in their eye as they challenge me to prove to them that it’s worthwhile.

But not everyone enjoys that. If you don’t, don’t force it.

Have Merch

It’s a basic thing, but it’s essential: Have bookmarks, or business cards, or candy, or something to give people with your name and website on it. Like I said, a great majority of these people don’t know you and are only barely interested. Slipping a bookmark into the book you just signed could be the difference between them forgetting all about you and remembering something you said a month later when they’re in their local bookstore.

Also: Be prepared for awkward conversations. There will be many of them.

BookCon was a blast. We gave away ~200 copies of Writing Without Rules, I met a bunch of cool people, saw some old friends, and got to meet people from my publisher I’d only emailed with before. Plus the sheer scale of the event and the energy in the air was incredible. And I managed to keep my pants on the whole time, which surprised more than one person, let me tell you.

As I write this I’ve been pushing Writing Without Rules in one sense or another for about 2 years. Promoting a book can be exhausting, and slightly humiliating; when every other tweet or post is essentially “HEY BUY MY BOOK” you start to feel a bit like a charlatan. But the grim truth is, if you don’t remind folks about your work, they might forget you. If you don’t mention your books often, you might miss any number of serendipitous moments when someone passing through your social media might see a cover, or a quote, or a snip of a review and decide to check it out.

But it is exhausting. And it can wear you down because so much of it seems to be useless. The trick to promoting a book, friends, is simple: Don’t think about it.

Set It and Forget It

So much of life, I’ve come to realize, lies in being able to keep your thoughts off of something. Your own impending death, certainly. The cycle of horror that is the New York Mets season. And your spastic, unhappy book promotion efforts.

The trick to it is, set things up and then forget them. I set up tweets about my books every week, and then I forget all about them. I don’t check to see if they get any response. I’ve got a half dozen appearances set up to promote Writing Without Rules, and I am not thinking about any of them at all when I’m not preparing materials or getting the logistics worked out. If I allowed myself to think about these events and tweets and contests and giveaways and started comparing them to bumps in sales, I’d be pretty depressed. Because the simple truth about book promotion is that most of it doesn’t actually accomplish much.

It’s like those 419 scams where you get an email informing you of millions of dollars in a bank, and the corrupt government official needs the help of some American citizen to get it out. Sure, 99.9% of the people who get those emails are gonna laugh and ignore it. But they just need that 0.01% to make the scheme profitable. So it is with your book promotion efforts: 99.9% of people will just ignore you, but if you do enough of it, that 0.01% that don’t ignore you can make all the difference.

Doesn’t make it any less humiliating, of course. Just remember, every day that you don’t buy one of my books, you’re ruining my life.

Self-promotion is horrible. There might be a few people in this world who feel otherwise, natural salesfolk who love nothing more than a chance to Instagram their own wedding, or an afternoon free when they can spend several hours coming up with new and unusual hashtags. Those people are not me, and, I suspect, not you.

Still, not only is self-promotion necessary, it’s also to a certain extent expected and tolerated. Anyone who clicks FOLLOW on an author’s Twitter feed knows they will be reminded several thousand times that said author has books for sale. It’s part of the deal. But you have to resist the urge to spam your social media constantly with sales pitches—and you should put in some time developing your networks before you start dropping Amazon links.

I Want a Lover with a Slow Hand

Your best strategy when thinking of ways to promote yourself on social media is to not promote yourself on social media, at least at first. Ease into it and have some fun at first. Make people happy they followed you instead of scrambling for the Unfollow button.

Once you have a bit of a following, it’s perfectly OK and understandable to promote your writing and your books or blog or website, but mix it in. Don’t go from Tweeting kitten photos to 24/7 BUY MY BOOK OR I KILL THIS KITTEN. Try to breathe a little, because people didn’t come to your social media for the boom promo—they came for entertainment and connection and they tolerate book promo.

What it boils down to is, your book promo will be more effective if you relax a little and have some fun. Plus, everyone wants and needs more kitten photos, so get on that, STAT.

Promoting a book can be a confusing, demoralizing process. Many authors spend a lot of time and energy and money crafting a comprehensive but affordable book promotion campaign, only to feel like they’re shouting into the wind, and no one is paying any attention to them. Some spend a lot of money and feel similarly, wondering why some books seem to just get a lot of attention naturally.

Along the way, you’ll no doubt play around with various free modes of book promotion, because why not? If it doesn’t amount to much, it was free, so nothing lost. And with social media platforms it’s pretty easy to do some basic book promotion using just your personal accounts and a little mental elbow grease.

But how do you decide what’s worth doing? Every week finds another social media trend, after all, another viral quiz or game that everyone is passing around, or a sudden wave of rhetorical tricks that other authors are suddenly engaged in. How do you decide if something on social media is worth jumping onto for the sake of maybe selling a book? You could use my simple guide, which pretty much serves me well in every situation: Simply don’t do things that make you feel like a jackass.

Jackassery: The Problem of Our Time

Look, social media can be fun. Dumb quizzes, memes, and trending hashtags can pass the time and connect you with your audience—that’s more or less the whole purpose of social media. Great! But sometimes people start doing things just because everyone else is, and then they try to layer on their own special brand of arch sarcasm, or ironic appreciation, or just general assholery, trying to simultaneously engage with the viral moment and be above it. And sometimes you’ll be tempted to do dumb things on social media that make you feel like a bit of a jackass, and my advice is: Don’t.

Everyone’s Jackass Limit is different. What you might see as jackassery of the highest kind might seem like hilarious clean fun to someone else. Don’t worry about everyone else. When you see all the other authors in your social media garden doing the same trendy thing, something likely born in a book promotion listicle the week before, don’t worry about whether they’re being jackasses. That’s between them and their readers. Worry about yourself. If you feel like a jackass just thinking about it, then the answer is simple: Don’t do it, no matter how many other people are.

Because, for one thing, if every author is doing it then people are gonna notice that it’s just promotion, artificial and grasping. For another, you can’t differentiate your brand by doing what everyone else is doing. And finally, feeling like a jackass is never going to be the right decision. Take it from someone who spent about 10 years in his youth being a jackass: It’s no bueno.

The classic question of an author’s existence is, if you write a novel and no one ever reads it, does it exist? I think most of us would be relatively unsurprised to discover one day that all of our terrible buried novels had simply disappeared, as if the universe had decided to give us a pass and burn their thread from the pattern, setting us free.

But what about the books you do like, once you’ve written them? Generally speaking you’ve got to get out there and try to sell them. Whether this involves finding an agent and a traditional publisher or self-publishing that sucker, the next step is to, you know, try to sell them. Which means promotion and marketing, which means, very likely, someone will suggest to you that you organize a reading. or will announce they’ve already done so.

Punch them. Punch them hard. Readings are terrible. And what’s more, they don’t accomplish much.

Welcome Back My Friends

Look, in theory Readings are perfectly reasonable. They give you something to advertise and promote, they offer your fans a chance to meet you and hear you read your novel, and you might sell some copies.

The reality is somewhat different. Now, if you’ve got a lot of fans you’ll likely get a decent showing, and they might buy your book to get it signed, or because it’s launch day and they couldn’t buy it beforehand. That’s all good! And yet it’s not worth it, because Readings are awkward horrorshows and you will never sell enough books to make them worthwhile, for a number of reasons:

• The probability that the people who will come to your reading are already fans and would buy your book anyway is at least in the high 90s.
• Chances those same people would buy a copy just to chat with you and have you sign it even if you didn’t bother doing a reading is about 100%.\
• The chances that a person who has never heard of you will choose to attend your reading and then be persuaded to buy your book is very, very close to 0%.

So, what you get is a stressful performance conducted by people who were not put on this Earth to perform (most writers are the sort, like me, who hiss and spit whenever sunlight hits them), all in the service of selling books to people who would buy it anyway.

You might enjoy doing readings. Certainly they can offer promotion beyond the actual physical event, if you get some press coverage and the like. But don’t imagine for one moment that they’re really worth the effort, because they are soul-killing humiliation pits, and everyone who comes to laugh and jeer at you would have bought your book anyway.