Book Marketing For 21st-Century Authors
Almost three years after the deal got made with Crown Publishing Group, my travel memoir about my time helping to start a radio station in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan has hit the shelves. Hooray! But there’s little time to celebrate, and there hasn’t been much downtime for months—even though the actual book was complete well over a year ago.
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WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A MODERN AUTHOR
Now, I’m in hard-core modern author mode. I’m blogging, I’m Tweeting, I’m Facebooking, I’m editing video, constantly tweaking my website. I’m preparing photos and mastering the Mac version of Powerpoint to go along with the presentation I hope to give a zillion times to any bookstore or club who’ll let me. (Such a presentation requires a certain amount of theatricality and dramatic flair and will challenge my ability as a performer. Which I am not. Which means I have to pay a certain amount of attention, after sitting around for last few years in my pajamas, to what I’m wearing and how I appear and sound. Another skill.) I’m also convening a team of friends who to work together to raise money to build libraries in Bhutan, so I’m something of a philanthropist, too.
These days, it’s not enough to have an idea, find an agent, write a proposal, sell a book, and then actually write it. I’m one of the lucky ones, the very lucky ones, who got to this point, and I thank my stars every day. Briefly. Then, I get back to work.
The year it took to actually write the book once my fabulous agent sold it was a blissful thing, a year for which I’ll always be eternally grateful. (Since you’re reading this, you’re obviously a writer, so I don’t have to explain to you how essential loving hours and days alone to think and mull, those essential and often under-recognized parts of writing, are key components of that.)
THE MARKETING MINDSET
Long before the publisher assigned me a publicist, I was compiling lists: 1) Of media friends (I’m fortunate to have them, after years of work as a journalist), whom I might hit up when this day arrived. 2) Of blogs and publications who might be interested in the themes of my book. There are many: media, democracy, midlife crisis, southeast Asia, globalization, Buddhism, women. More people to contact means more work, because you're preparing something for everyone. 3) Of bookstores and speaker series and festivals, particularly ones located where I had friends or family, and that might have a tiny budget to offset the cost of travel.
Though I didn’t have much of an income this past year (various personnel changes and strategic planning led the publisher to delay publication by a year—in other words, don’t think just cause you make your deadlines that the schedule stays on course and thus your advance), I decided to invest in a trip to Bhutan in October to collect video with a borrowed FlipCam. I hadn’t taken many photographs in all the time I’d lived and spent there, and realized illustrating the subject of my book would be a good idea.
NEW SKILLS WE MUST LEARN
Not wanting to lean on my friends to sift through hours of the footage I gathered, I also realized that paying someone to do so would have been prohibitive. Staring at the screen of my trusty old MacBook, I realized the solution was right in front of me: iMovie. I took a free class and started editing away. I’m not going to put anyone out of business, but now I’m comfortable with this new skill, and I actually find it fun.
A few weeks ago, I ran into a writer acquaintance at a nearby coffee shop; she politely asked whether my book was on schedule, since the last time we’d met, it had been delayed. I told her yes, thankfully, I was in hard-core guerilla marketing mode. She rolled her eyes; she’s far more experienced and knows the demands.
“Don’t you wish you didn’t have to worry about that, that you could just write?” she asked. I thought about it for a second. It hadn’t occurred to me that any of this stuff was a nuisance. It just all seemed part of the package (and privilege) of having sold a book.
“Actually,” I said to her, as politely as possible, “no.”
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