Some free advice about publicity for novels

Authors - particularly novelists - often fret about publicity, and recently one asked me if he should hire his own publicist, because his writer friends were telling him that the publisher wasn't really going to do that much for publicity.

Novels are hard to publicise, it's true - but they're going to be as hard to publicise for a freelance publicist you hire as for your publishing company's publicist. Having a personal publicist won't necessarily make the difficulty go away. In my experience Australian book publicists, working in publishing houses, are highly competent. They know what they're doing. Yes, they have a lot of books to publicise but they do the best they can. There are so many books competing for publicity and review space each month that I can consider it a small miracle any time one of my authors gets anything.

Publicists need 'hooks' in order to get decent publicity, and most of the time novels just don't have the hooks, unless the author is already famous or has an interesting personal story. So what's a novelist - especially a first-timer - to do? The answer is to not try to do the job that your publicist - who is a professional in their field - is trying to do. And it's not to hire a personal publicist either.

Your personal campaign needs to start early - well before publication. These days you should have an online presence, probably a blog. My own feeling is that Twitter has probably jumped the shark so you could possibly forget about that, but it's also possible that I'm an idiot. What you want is a Google-able result. When someone searches on your name, it needs to come up prominently. How do you do that? Well, having a Blogger/blogspot blog helps, because it's owned by Google. Or you can namecheck famous writers in your blog - review their books, refer to them in your posts - so that whenever someone searches on them, your blog comes up.

Then there's the in-person stuff. If you have a day job, take as much leave as you can around your publication date. Tell your publisher that you'd like to meet with some booksellers in your area, and do they mind if you do that? Can they help with that? Even better, can you travel to rural and regional areas? Many country bookshops never see an author. If you go and visit them, don't you think they're going to remember that and perhaps mention you to their customers? It's all about building goodwill. And if you want to know how it's really done, read a biography of Jacqueline Susann, author of Valley of the Dolls.

At all times, inform your publisher of what's going on. They probably can't send a sales rep with you on each visit, but the rep may be able to give some advice about who to visit. And getting in touch with a sales rep will also help you understand how the sales side of things works.

The most important thing to remember is to act professionally. You are a published novelist - you don't need to feel insecure and you don't need to beg. Respect the role that each person you meet may play in your success. Don't feel that it's wrong to want to sell lots of books. Don't feel that it's not 'artistic' to want to make lots of money. Money buys you freedom. An earned-out advance buys you the ability to determine your career.

The publisher needs to take a lot of the responsibility for selling your books but you can certainly kick it along - if you want to. So the real question you need to ask yourself is: How successful do I want to be? And then you'll probably work out what you need to do. Jacqueline Susann was not a great writer but she sold a hell of a lot of books, because she wanted to. She wanted it - fame, money, adoration. She got it. And you can get it to, if you want it. Just be professional, be respectful of others, keep your eyes on the prize and don't ever lose faith in yourself. But, again, it keeps coming back to that question: How successful do I want to be?

Turning water into wine

For the past four years I've been writing my own humour column for a street magazine with a monthly readership of around 70,000. I've also contributed similar writing to other magazines with a weekly readership of around 90,000. Within those numbers, the readership of the column has to be worth taking notice of.

The column was said by one of my editors to be 'like a less gay version of David Sedaris', which sparked the idea of compiling the columns into book form.

I put together some samples and a proposal which outlined prospective, established readership, my previous writing achievements in both short fiction and national magazines. Promotional editorial would be dead easy to organise given my contacts.

I felt the proposal was solid and I have received much feedback from readers over the years, so I know the writing is popular with a specific audience and could be popular with a wider one, given the chance.

In spite of this the first two standard rejections have come in, and it's a little disheartening. I understand that humour is subjective and I accept that the David Sedaris comment could have been misguided, but I also can't help thinking that publishers and agents might be simply going to dismiss this idea because it doen't fit easily into the norm. It's non-fiction, it's humour, it's a collection of short pieces.

My question is: do I knuckle down and keep trying agents and publishers or do I look into self-publishing and books on demand? I'm not sure how to go about these last two but I have been hearing more and more mention of them.

It's pretty clear to me why you haven't been picked up by agents or publishers.

1. Everyone who knows who you are has already read your columns.

2. You have no means of establishing a readership outside of this without a publicity hook - or, as the Americans call it, 'platform'.

3. A collection of columns is difficult to publish even when you have a public profile - can you think of any Australian writers who have successfully published books of columns in the last few years? And by 'successfully' I mean 'sold more than 2000 copies'.

Before you consider self-publishing or books on demand - before you submit your manuscript to anyone else - ask yourself this one, very important, question which all writers (whether they're on book one or book ten) should ask themselves: who is my reader? You say the manuscript could be popular with a wider readership - why? What's it got that is going to catch the eye of the radio and print journos/producers who will need to notice it in order to give it the publicity it will require to get some new readers? True, some books succeed through word of mouth - but you still need some publicity. What's your hook? Funny writing alone won't cut it. Being 'less gay than David Sedaris' won't cut it either - women are the biggest book buyers in this country and, as un-PC as it is to say it, they don't tend to buy stories about the gays, or the less-gays. They want stories - and columns are little stories - that relate to them somehow or are so out-of-the-box unrelatable - like fantasy - that they can escape.

So, yeah, maybe self-publishing is for you - but again, who is your reader? Who's going to buy it? And, in this age of blogs, why do you want a book so badly? Sometimes I ask authors what they want: do they fundamentally want their writing 'out there' or are they really attached to the book? Neither answer is incorrect; it just helps me work out how they see themselves. If what you want is to get your writing 'out there', there's this great new-fangled invention called Teh Internets that can help you. If, however, you're attached to the artefact of the book, that's fine too - but it may not be the right medium for this particular project.

The short and short of it

I teach writing and I have a student who is in a South-east Asian jail for life. He writes short stories and they are the most beautifully written, thought-provoking stories. He has given me permission to try to get them published. I’d really like to help him, to give him something to live for. Do you know if any publishers in Aus would be interested in something like that? I couldn’t help thinking that if some of the Bali Nine contributed to an anthology it would be more marketable and an important thing for young people to read. I must stress I’m personally not interested in making money out of this, but I feel these are important voice to be heard.

Here's the bad news: short story collections are the orphan children of Australian publishing. They have a couple of foster parents (Scribe and the University of Western Australia Press) and 'Aunties' (the Girls' Night In collections) but have largely been abandoned by the tribe. It's hard to know why - short stories are great for bus trips and the like. Many great writers of recent times cut their teeth on short stories; I fell in love with Truman Capote's writing through his short stories, which I discovered in the local library while I was researching a school essay on Plato and Son of Plato. And I just completely digressed ...

If you're looking for an Australian publisher, try submitting to one of the two I mentioned. Americans love short stories more than we do, though, so if you're serious about getting this collection published, try submitting the stories to American agents.

Here's the other news: Australians may want to read about the Bali Nine but I suspect they wouldn't want to read anything written by them. Schapelle Corby was the only Kerobokan prisoner whose own story was going to sell books, and it did, but she also had a co-writer. Schapelle was also famous enough for her publisher not to have to worry about the fact that she couldn't do publicity for the book, which is a concern with your student. This will sound quite cold and businesslike, but publishing is a business.

If what you really, really want is to get these stories out into the world - if money is irrelevant - then set up a website to publish the stories and then look into ways of getting publicity for them, starting with telling your other students.

Call your publicist

Beyond contract negotiations and the selling of international distribution deals and or rights, what does the literary agent do after the book has hit the shelves? In other words: after the marketing machine of the publishing company has shifted towards another writer’s book, how actively involved is the lit agent in maintaining some momentum in keeping the public’s interest in the work – as in readings, signings, panels at festivals, interviews and so forth.

What you're describing is a publicist's job more than an agent's - we don't tend to have expertise in organising signings and getting authors onto panels at festivals. We have expertise in giving you editorial advice, getting you published and keeping you writing; we provide advice on writing and other stuff, usually, that has nothing to do with writing but which may be stopping you writing; we're here to sort out any problems that may arise with you getting interviews etc, but we can't organise them. We may be able to rely on our contacts to get you a foot in the door but, again, we can't organise them.

There's a good reason for this, beyond the fact that it's not our core competency: it takes a lot of work to find you a publisher, to negotiate a contract and to handle foreign rights. In most cases, it takes many more hours than the commission actually covers. Once the book is out, we'll liaise with your publicist if the need arises (although in my experience most book publicists do just fine), and handle anything else that needs handling, but if we added publicity to our list of duties, we'd only be able to take on about two clients a year. As far as I know, there's only one agency in the US that provides those sorts of services - Folio - but the US is in a different stratosphere.

Publicity for the self-published

I have a fabulous 'how to' book which (through my own sweaty efforts) is now in five small bookshops on consignment, and (through my own sweaty efforts) has been reviewed in a major newspaper and a major national magazine. How do I make the next big jump to be on television? It seems that the morning shows and current affairs shows are only interested in shock and controversy, not helping the public with a 'how to' book. (I was interviewed by Channel 7 but the story never went to air.) What will get my book onto TV and still maintain my integrity and dignity?

This is somewhat related to the earlier post about self-publishing, but does highlight the particular difficulty of letting people know that your book exists, and the conundrum contained therein.

The difficulty: if you're not already famous, how do you get the sort of TV coverage necessary to promote your book? The answer: hire a publicist. Publicists have the contacts necessary to ease your way into the media. They can't guarantee anything, of course - there are over 1000 books published each month in Australia, so there's a lot of competition for publicity - but they can cut out all of your sweaty efforts. Yes, a campaign will cost money - that's the danger of being self-published, you have to bear all those costs yourself. But the alternative is you cold-calling every media organisation in the land and probably getting knocked back (and this process will take you months). Closed shops are only closed to those outside the door; publicists are inside the building.

The conundrum: your book is only stocked in five bookshops (presumably all in the one city). If you do secure a spot on national TV, how can you supply enough copies to meet potential demand? What if there's someone in Hobart who wants to buy it but no bookshop there has ever heard of it? Most bookshops won't take orders for a book they can't easily locate on Bookscan or Books in Print. Even if they did, the impetus from your national TV appearance will be lost within a couple of days, and potential customers would lose interest. The answer: once you've hired the publicist, call other bookshops and tell them about the campaign he or she has organised for you. That will be an incentive for them to order stock.

A possible final solution: there are companies who distribute books for small and self-publishers, who have sales reps and might even help with publicity - call the Australian Publishers Association for some advice.