Writing was easy; selling is hard

So here I am, on the publicity side of book publishing, and I have to say, things look quite different from over here. I've been the books editor at the Strib for two years. Every day I get dozens of books in the mail, and every day I have to make fast decisions as to which ones might get reviewed. The odds are grim: I get about a thousand books a month, and I have room in the paper to review about nine per week. This means that an awful lot of wonderful books go unmentioned.

And, of course, my own book could be one of them. It is not even published yet, and I am fretting. Because I know how this business works; I know those odds.

I was offered the books editor job at the Strib the same week the Press offered me a book contract. Whoa--two dreams come true, but did they have to come true simultaneously? What this meant was that for the next 18 months I was constantly, constantly busy with two very demanding obligations: learning a new job, which required reading massive numbers of books on my own time, and writing a book in whatever odd bits of minutes were left over.

I juggled like mad and never felt like I was doing any of it quite right. Whenever I was writing, I felt like I should be reading, and whenever I was reading, I felt like I should be writing. (So I'd give up and go write a blog post instead.)

And all the while, I watched with a curious eye to see how publishers marketed (or didn't market) books, and paid attention to what seemed to work and what didn't, and wondered how it was going to all play out when it was my turn.

Some publishers just send the book. By the time I get it, it's already technically too old for me to review in the paper. (We like to time the review to publication day, and if I don't get it until then, there's no way I'd have time to find a reviewer, send it out, have it read, have a review written, and edit the review--all for a section that is printed in advance. This is why I tend to work months ahead--I'm already sending books out to be reviewed in October and November.)

Some publishers send galleys (advance copies) and follow up three months later with the completed book. Some also send e-mails. Some carefully time their e-mails to show up the same day the book does, to make that connection. Some call me up. Some put together elaborate press kits, and some include little gifts that have something to do with the book's topic: chocolates, or balloons, or rolling pins (really) or packets of flower seeds, or voodoo dolls (truly) or t-shirts or velour blankets or scented talcum powder in pretty pale blue cardboard tubes.

One publisher sent three little airplane-sized bottles of liquor, which I unwrapped, immediately rewrapped, and hid until I could figure out what to do with them. I cannot have alcohol at work! Good Lord! I could be fired!

Actually I can't keep any of this stuff, much as I would love to keep the chocolates. We are not allowed, after all, to be bribed, and I hope you think that makes sense.

Anyway, now, as I have said, it is my turn. It's time to get my book noticed. In some ways, I've already had success: The book had a very nice advance review in a local online arts journal. Publishers Weekly wrote a review, and then, two weeks later, published an interview with me. (They are here and please don't laugh at the whiteness of my choppers. It's a trick of the light; I have not been bleaching my teeth.)

My book has a web page, or I do.

You already know about the Facebook page.

At the top of the page, you'll see an annotation of the cover--a fun thing the folks at the UM Press asked me to do to explain all the accoutrements in the photo. (And if that image is too small to read, you can click here and see a larger version.)

And now I have a book trailer, too, on YouTube. YouTube! What would Jane Austen think?

A more practical question is, will all this make a difference? I have this underlying fear that we are talking to the same 300 people, over and over--they visit the blog, which sends them to the Facebook page, which links them to the YouTube movie, which sends them to the Press Web page, which has links back to the blog and Facebook again. You could click on my stuff all day long, in a big endless loop. Sometimes I do.

Doug says, relax. You've written a book. Enjoy it! And I do, of course, but I also fret because I am the Queen of Fretting.

I am surprised at how protective I feel of my book, how deeply I love it and want to give it a good start in life. This doesn't mean I think it's great; it means I feel responsible for it. I want to wash its little face and comb its unruly hair and send it out into the world with clean clothes and a nice knapsack and hope in its heart.

I do not want it to get buried under a pile of thousands of other books that nobody ever looks at in the basement book room of newspapers across the country.

Funny, isn't it, how I had thought that writing the thing was the hard part?