What makes a book sell?
That is perhaps the publishing question of the age. Within the houses, debates range over the value of reviews, the importance of off-the-book page attention, the effectiveness of radio appearances vs. TV.
With the newspaper industry in an economic crisis (the Times last week laid off 500 employees), publicists fear the worst for book coverage. Agents no doubt will continue to complain that whatever the house did for an author, it wasn't enough.
And so begins the pining for the "good old days" when publishing was creative, a time before there existed the obnoxious expression "thinking outside the box" but, ironically, a time when people actually did just that.
While I'd be among the first to point out that many publicity campaigns are uninspired, and that the prevailing promotional philosophy seems to be an only slightly more sophisticated version of "throw these galleys out there and see what sticks," on occasion I'm impressed. Workman, for example, has just published a how-to book called Putting Your Passion into Print, the campaign for which will include a contest in which would-be writers submit a book pitch and a team of industry professionals judge them; the winner gets a year's representation from the Levine Greenberg agency.
But then, Workman has always been a little offbeat, both in the books they publish and the way they promote them; they tend to release ultra-practical titles (read: What to Expect While You're Expecting) that have major backlist potential. Usually, the books have rolling pub dates, not firm ones, and they rely much more on tours and grassroots movements than on, say, reviews.
So, maybe it's not surprising that Workman counts on somewhat gimmicky promotional tricks; they're not burdened, like many traditional publishers, with the notion that somehow hard-selling is, too, well, hard, and that it's also unseemly. But, the thinking goes, you can't play this way with "serious" fiction.
Just don't tell it to Riverhead editor Sean MacDonald, who has just released The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, a 130-page $13 paperback novel on a 1984-ish theme from George Saunders, author of the well respected but heretofore not blockbusterish Pastoralia. In most other hands, this oddball offering would languish in all the usual ways; but MacDonald—whose title, tellingly, is both senior editor and online creative director—has embarked on a grass-roots, anti-hype hype campaign geared at the 20- and 30-something audience he knows well: smart, hip, Internet-savvy readers suspicious of any marketing campaign that seems too slick. His promotions include hand-screened (by him and his art director) T-shirts designed by cultish graphic and fashion designers, temporary tattoos, a Web site, blog outreach and a very, very unusual letter from the author to booksellers.
Whether Phil will become a bestseller remains to be seen, but potential readers' consciousnesses have definitely been raised—at a recent Saunders reading at a New York B&N, over 200 people showed up.
If only such creative thinking would wake up the sluggish and entrenched among us, many of whom still believe that it's somehow uncool to admit that books, like any, forgive the expression, consumer product, need to be marketed.
Face it, folks: Gone are the days when all you have to do is get your author on TheTodayShow or reviewed in the Times—and, presto, bestsellerdom. Today, it's not enough to put books out there for readers to find them. Sometimes, you have to find interesting ways to bring the readers to the books.
And vice versa.
