Book Promotion and Macmillan New Writing List

Posted on May 2, 2005 by Chris Mitchell

So I'm still trying to get BookBoost.com off the ground, my little service for providing cheap websites for authors. Getting a fair few pageviews a day but no one's come to me as a direct result of the site. But it's only been a couple of weeks. Plus I think the site could be a lot better. And I am also really beginning to think that maybe cheap online book promotion is what's important to authors. Most writers these days have a website or blog. That bit is relatively easy. But promotion...that's more difficult, time-consuming, and tedious. Especially when things like the Macmillan New Writing list set a new precendent for publishing amongst the big boys.

Macmillan has kicked off a storm with the announcement of its New Writing publishing deal. If I understand The Graun's article correctly, writers who get signed up to this list by Macmillan get no advance fee, 20 per cent of royalties and may have to pay for their own book editing if their work needs substantial rewrites. Crucially there will virtually no marketing for these books.

"According to Michael Barnard, Macmillan executive director: "We won't be spending as much on marketing and promotion as on novels that have had big advances; but we believe we can find new ways of promoting and selling these books." He said the books would appear in the main Pan Macmillan catalogue and would be "very posh books" with ribbon markers, sold at £15. He expected them to become "collectors' items"."

It's easy to see what Macmillan are doing here: they're looking to sign up new talent on the cheap in the hope that one out of the 100 authors they get on the books will go supernova. But perhaps this will be Macmillan's undoing too: here they've effectively created a publishing deal that has no benefits over a publishing your own book with a print-on-demand company like PADB.net or iUniverse.com. With someone like PABD.net, you can pay 70 pounds and get your book published. That's not vanity publishing, that's a whole new economic model for publishing.

Appearing in the PanMacmillan catalogue certainly means sales reps and bookshops will look at your book - but the chances of it receiving any prominence or real sales through bookshops is remarkably slim. (I'm speculating completely here, but given this is the experience of so many authors already, I don't see what will stop the New Writing list books suffering the same fate).

And with no other marketing going behind the book financed or organised by Macmillan, the author is still out on their own in terms of promotion. If you have any savvy towards book promoting - if, crucially, you accept that promotion is a necessary part of the bookwriting process, because if you don't do it, no-one will read it - then you can probably manage to shift quite a few copies off your own back. Certainly more than if you sit back and expect your publisher to do it for you.

This last point is perhaps the key. A lot of writers want the validation of being published by the big name publishers. Fair enough. But the best thing about that validation is probably a) the people you get to work with, because publishing companies are full of people who are good at their job and b) THE MONEY. Even a five grand advance is something to celebrate. (It's free money - if you were writing a book to make cash in the first place, you'd have to be clearly insane. Or Jeffrey Archer.)

Take away the advance, and the invaluable process of working with an editor and publicist who personally take an interest in your writing and doing the best they can with it, and you don't have very much at all. You have a big publisher logo on the spine of your book and that's it. But there are a lot of authors who are still entranced by being published by big name publishers not because of validation but because of vanity. They want their ego to be stroked that they are clever, intelligent - they are an artiste. They are the same authors who are to be found everywhere on the Net plaintively wondering in obscure interviews why their book sold no copies and why their genius has not been recognised by the world.

There is a dangerous whiff of self-entitlement to these sorts of writers. They feel because they've gone through the grief of the "creative process" that somehow that entitles them to other people's attention, praise and money. That they, in essence, want life to be fair. These are the people that feed the illusion that big publishers will look after you. And frankly, if a big name publisher is giving you no advance, barely any marketing and a skeleton staff edit of your manuscript, and you roll over and accept it, then you clearly can't have very much self-respect for yourself or your work.

If you do your own book promotion, then it strikes me that you could create a buzz around your book and then get it picked up by the big names with an advance and all the trimmings - and that you are in a far better position to negotiate your terms i.e. a fuck-off grandiose marketing campaign - rather than take whatever they offer. The big publishing companies still have a vital role to play, indeed, they are the lifeblood of publishing - but they are not necessarily the best way for real success (i.e. lots of readers and at least a smattering of cash) for writers. And writers need to begin to realise that rather than being like a 16 year old being offered a record deal.

To abdicate responsibility for how your work is promoted is, in the end, the greatest crime you can commit about yourself. If you really believe in what you've done, you have to be the one who tries to get it noticed by other people - and find other people who can help you genuinely do that. Because, the bottom line is: no one will ever know as much about it, or care as much about it, as you.