After The Party

 

Terry here, with our question of the week: After your book is released and the publicity campaign for its grand entrance nears completion, how do you keep your book on the red carpet and in the spotlight? 

 If there was ever a topic I know nothing about, this is it! I see ads for books published months ago and their authors are regaled as if their books just came out. How do they do it? First, by writing a good book. But second, by using every available means to keep their names out there. And I'm not even sure what that means. What are the available means? Do they hire publicists to help them, or do they do the publicity work themselves? Have they had success with ads keepint their name our there or is there some other magic at work. For sure, it takes persistence.

 High-volume, high-recognition authors can go for long spells between books without losing momentum. I’m thinking of someone like Deborah Crombie, whose books come out sporadically, and yet they are snapped up immediately when they are published. (That’s because they are so damn good!) She’s not the target of my questions about keeping books in the spotlight. 

 I’m talking about the many mid-list authors whose books I think write amazing books, and who publish only once in a while, and whose books languish. They have to fight for every inch of review space, for every inch of bookstore shelf space, for every dollar they earn. How can they keep their books front and center? 

 I fall in a similar category: authors who come out with two books a year, and yet in between the roll-out, the books go into that never-land where mid-list authors flail. For the first eight books of my Samuel Craddock series, I consistently got positive reviews, bookstore signings, and invitations for speaking events. But gradually the reviews have disappeared, I can’t interest bookstores in hosting me for signings, and the speaking events are few and far between. I still get great fan mail, and have a good, consistent base of readers, but the advertising dollars I spend don’t seem to move the needle on sales. I know I'm not alone in this. And it's happening at the same time that most publishers seem to spend resources only on their top-tier authors. 

 A couple of years ago, I started a new series, the Jessie Madison thriller series featuring a scuba diver. Although I’ve had great response from readers, and I sell enough so my publisher contracts for another book, but reviews, signings and speaking events haven’t materialized. I suspect it’s because my talent for self-promotion is low-grade. I’d rather be writing. 

But… There are authors I admire who seem to have unlimited energy for self-promotion (and I do not mean that in a negative sense). I’m dazzled at their ability to come up with snappy tag lines, clever ways of displaying their books, and interacting with their readers. For their ability to entice bookstores to host them. And for their unrelenting persistence. Plus, they still have time to write books! 

 I’ve spent money putting ads in crime fiction magazines, in social media, and in websites designed to boost authors. And I honestly can’t say any of it ever seems to do any good. I recently had an idea for a promo, and I mentioned it to a fellow author. She was highly enthusiastic and said, “Just slap it out there on Amazon for x$.” I knew she would have done that in a heartbeat, but it made me tired just thinking of what had to be done to “just slap it out there.” 

It’s possible, just possible, that I am a throwback, who should have been writing in the days when publishers said, “Just bring me a good book, we’ll do the rest.” But more likely, I’m like many, many mid-list authors who have no talent for and no energy for self-promotion. And no unlimited budget to pay for someone to do it for me. 

 So, if you are looking to me for advice about keeping a book in the spotlight, my advice is to ask someone else!