Almost without exception, everyone in publishing speaks of marketing and selling a book in terms that are, let’s be honest,
anathema to most creative writers. The fact is, I doubt very much my fictional
works are going to give you anything of value. I’ll go further and suggest that
they are going to cost you time and maybe some small expenditure of money, and, in
the worst extreme, if you despise the thing, I’ll have earned your wrath. You
will only grow richer in terms of getting whatever value I might have imbued in the novel, however that is possible. I will go even further and say what
most of the writers who attempt to heed sage marketing advice do not say, that my writing
is basically a selfish endeavor. But I have always
tried to write what I find interesting—and hope the reader also finds it worthwhile.
So it is that a writer pursues
the dream, humbled by a bunch of publications under my belt, and almost always
surprised when I can come up with something to say that I can put down with the
ease and freedom I don’t take lightly, onto the web where possibly one or 1000
people might read it. At times I wonder, would Thoreau have had a blog? Tolstoy? Barthes? Most definitely. Ignoring the myriad technical questions such a thought
implies.
Because of the ease and speed of
the internet, the volume of written stuff must have grown exponentially each
year in the last fifteen or so, to where I can now be reasonably assured that,
because there are so many people attempting to put out their little darlings--which might be better off dying gentle suffocating deaths in file cabinets
everywhere--that few, if any, will read mine. I have made some peace with it, possibly by having taken the matter into my own hands. Still, in the effort
to drum up some old fashioned, even arcane technology for my own marketing
campaign, I have produced a bookmark which I began distributing this past few weekends
in a couple of bookstores in Los Angeles, and a bunch in the Bay Area. In L.A.: The
Skylight Books staffer was kind enough to stick a stack on the gimme counter,
among a variety of Xeroxed flyers and such—I’m relying on the appeal of the
ubiquitous book mark presence—its utility, its necessity, its minor novelty. At
Booksoup, I was told by the manager that “We have no room for them.” In most cases,
booksellers were more than happy to allow me to leave a stack (which they may
have left on the counter—though in some cases, I saw they were putting them in
the gimme card section). Still, any visibility was good to me. Will this have
any impact on the target audience for such a work of fiction as Impossible Lives of Basher Thomas? I’ll
admit I have faith in my own ability to produce a graphically striking, hopefully
iconic, book cover, because I couldn’t think of anything else, other than
bombarding unsuspecting individuals in my e-mail address book and potentially
wiping any good karma I might have established by resisting such “Ten things
you must do to get your book sold,” tactics in the past. My method relies on a
personal approach which I’m still not entirely at ease with, though I know I
should be.
For anyone who wishes to purchase a
copy of Impossible Lives of Basher Thomas, I am offering it at a discount of
25% ($12.64 after taxes and shipping). Just click on the buy button below the cover image at left. I will ship orders as soon as I receive them
from the printer. Also, through Goodreads, I'm doing a giveaway campaign, also at the left.
Many thanks to generous fellow blogger Jim at Wisdom of the West, who over the years has left insightful comments on items in this blog. Jim is publishing a serial interview with me about my novel, Impossible Lives of Basher Thomas. This complete interview is available here. The interview took place last month, and covers a variety of items, mainly concerned with character development, themes in the novel, politics in literary production, and the curious question of whether a reader should like or find a protagonist sympathetic.
