Quote:
Originally Posted by J. Strnad
There was a bit on the original Bob Newhart Show where Bob, a psychiatrist, was treating a shy door-to-door salesman who would go up to people's doors and, too shy to knock, would just wait for them to come out.
Writing a book and not letting people know it's out there is like being that shy salesman. You gotta knock on those doors.
Non-fiction writers have it easier. They can talk about the subject of their book and not seem to be pushing their book every time they open their mouth. They can do interviews about the subject, give lectures, the whole works.
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First, awesome analogy! I'll definitely be quoting you on that.
Non-fiction writers do, indeed, have it much easier. In another lifetime, I was in charge of marketing for Scientific & Academic Editions, a division of the now-defunct publisher Van Nostrand Reinhold. My job was to sell books with titles like
Neogene Planktonic Formanifera, and to be honest, it wasn't all that hard even in the pre-Internet stone age. You did direct mail campaigns to members of certain professional organizations, attended certain academic conferences... It was easy to figure out who your audience was and how to reach them.
With fiction, even professional publishers blunder around doing ineffective things a lot of the time, so it's no wonder many authors end up making mistakes that alienate the very readers they're trying to court. The problem is, if authors don't promote their books somehow--especially self-published ebooks that don't appear in publishers' catalogs or in bookstores--readers simply won't know they exist. If "ALL PROMOTION GOES TOO FAR," how are these books supposed to show up on their prospective audience's radar?
As I've said before, I'm not convinced that social networking venues are where authors should be concentrating their promotional efforts, for several reasons. I agree absolutely that promotional posts don't belong anywhere other than the promo threads, and that inappropriate promotion should be policed. But I value the self-promo threads as a reader, because they help me to see what's being self-published out there. As for sig lines, I love them. I click on them all the time, and have bought books as a result. And they're pretty easy to ignore if you want to.