WHAT’S AN AUTHOR TO DO?

Help! I’m drowning in promotion!

We mass market fiction authors are taught from the get-go that self-promotion is vitally important to our career. We compulsively track our sales numbers, Amazon rankings, and other list positions and scream to the heavens: What can I do to affect those numbers? And so we go forth into the abyss, trying to carve our names and book covers into the consciousness of the masses.

Back in the day, bookmarks were the golden child of promotion. Relatively cheap, easy to transport, and if you put a provocative picture on the front, all the better. Then one day, bookmarks became the red-headed stepchild of promotion.

Next came advertising. Taking an ad in any major magazine was a huge chunk of money. For a few hundred, you could advertise in magazines like Romantic Times Book Reviews, and I remember spending a whole $40 on an ad in the now-defunct Gothic Journal. Advertising, though, was iffy in terms of visible payback. The ad came and went in a month. Well, sort of like our books.

Then the Internet became the new frontier, offering endless opportunities to obsess and promote. The warning sounded over writers loops everywhere: All authors must have a website! So, now most authors and even wannabe authors have websites. And if you’re going to have a website, might as well host a contest, too. Oh, and an e-newsletter. Recently the hot discussion was whether to blog or not. Don’t even get me started on MySpace, Podcasts, and Amazon Plogs….

If you can’t handle good, old-fashioned promo sweat, how about a gimmick? Was it pressure or just the dazzle of the holy grail of bestsellerdom that pushed authors to scandalously buy their way onto the New York Times list? But that’s so old school. Now there’s a public relations firm that charges a chunk of cha-ching to push your book up the Amazon rankings list.

The brand-new shiny way of promoting books is the book video. For the as-of-yet-uninformed, these are essentially movie trailers for books. They run from twenty-seconds to over five minutes long and can show either static images that float around the screen all the way to live-action videos with actors, cameras, and locations. I jumped on this wave, because this one looked exciting and visual in a way no other promo did. Writers-in-Motion® created a Book Short® for my July 2007 suspense, UNTIL THE DAY YOU DIE with actors and a script that captures a few scenes from the book in full dimensional form. I can’t wait to start showing it off to potential readers who spend too much time watching YouTube and not enough time buying and reading books. Like much of the promotional efforts authors undertake, I’ll probably have little sense as to whether it worked. But it was a heck of a lot of fun to make, and I’m hoping it will generate enough additional sales to justify doing another one.

I have to ask, though, where does it end? Will authors start cold-calling random phone numbers begging for a chance to read an excerpt of their book? Will we start barging in on book club meetings hawking our tome as next month’s selection? We could go back to the past and paste bills over walls like so much graffiti. Hmm…graffiti. Imagine Tina Wainscott’s latest book rocks! spray painted on overpasses everywhere!

Will the madness stop? Let me consult my trusty Magic 8-Ball: “Outlook not so good.” Yeah, that’s what I thought. With more avenues for promotion springing up every day: “Very Doubtful.” With reports of dwindling book sales: “My sources say no.”

So it appears we’re stuck in this era of must-promote. I made a promise to myself: I’m not going to jump on every bandwagon; only the ones I enjoy doing. For my money, I’m liking the book video. It will be in existence for as long as the Internet is, and I actually enjoyed creating it.

Now the big question: Will I stop obsessing over promotion? “Reply hazy, try again.”

Tina Wainscott is the best selling author of 13 suspense books from St. Martin’s Press. Please, watch her book video! It’s at her fully-functional website: http://www.tinawainscott.com

There is a middle ground. I promise. You know what they say: we have the technology…

There again, if I’d seen an ad for something like The Memoirs of Hadrian ten years ago while I was watching a History Channel programme, I would have bought that, too. I didn’t even know that book *existed* until relatively recently.

There’s got to be a middle ground somewhere on this stuff…

I absolutely agree that the best advertisement for a book is a book. If I were to confess the number of times I’d been seduced by cover art or clever cover copy (or, yes, an interesting author bio), I’d probably be embarrassed. I mean, I buy books because they have just the right shade of green.

That being said, something has seduce the reader into the bookstore (and convince her that the wine is secondary — though, let’s be honest, wine and books are like the perfect couple). Something needs to suggest to that person that there’s a book that will rock her world (or his world, I shouldn’t be sexist). While I agree that the gazillion galleys is a great approach, as someone who is ashamed to admit that she gets far too many books, I think that approach needs to be coupled with traditional (in a manner of speaking) advertising.

And speaking of book trailers — have you seen any that have knocked your socks off? I’m curious because I haven’t really paid as much attention to this phenomenon as I should. Mostly because my preferred mode of inbound information is text.

Advertising, it seems to me, is all about desire. If you can make a subway user or a motorist or Lost-watchers look up, see a picture of a book, and think, “Oooh, I want that,” then it works.

The book itself triggers the I-want-this cascade: the smell, the heft, the juicy hints in the flap copy, the photo of the author, the opening paragraph. Until publishers are willing to write ads that come out and say, ‘Hooh, baby, this book will change your life! You need it! You need it more than wine, more than sex, more than that six-pack of diet coke! Buy it now now now!’ there’s no way an ad can compete with the book itself…

…unless it’s a video book trailer, complete with music and salacious images , which *can* trigger that book lust. In a manner of speaking.

The exception, of course, is the really good book trailer, b Just my two cents