Book Publishing: Don’t Give Up The Day Job
Two posts at Grumpy Old Bookman - Truth in numbers and Long-term career prospects for writers which provide independent backup to my speculation yesterday about the Macmillan New Writing publishing deal.
Basically i) you can make your book a success with an awful lot of effort promoting it, but effort will not guarantee success and ii) even if you do manage to publish a fiscally successful book, don’t give up the day job.
Hmm. Another publishing blog I’ve been enjoying recently is The Average Joe, a consistently interesting blog from Joe Wikert, a publisher working at Wrox Books, one of the computing books divisions of Wiley. Joe has recently done a great series of posts about the whole process of a book getting accepted, edited and marketed, and how the author’s proposal needs to anticipate all of those areas to even get a look in. Computers, fiction; different markets, similar rules for publication.
There’s also the Girl On Demand blog, which has some useful discussion and analysis about print on demand publishing; but I think the whole “POD books versus big publisher books” divide is a total waste of time. It’s an increasingly false distinction - readers don’t care who published a book, they care what’s in it. Promoting books solely on the basis of being POD is a dubious stance. It’s like only linking to blogs that are published with Wordpress rather than Blogger or whatever. POD is just a technological format - a potentially revolutionary one, but not the defining moment of a book. Saying “hey wow, it’s a POD book that’s actually good” is becoming deeply tired as a book review hook. The debate has to move on to how we (that’s us as in “readers of books who want some level of intelligence and wit and beauty and all that good stuff”) FIND these good books, whosoever is putting them out.
Because I tell you what, I am the editor of a supposed literary website that’s fairly well known, and I get sweet FA in terms of info about new books. Maybe three or four press releases a week if I’m lucky. Certainly I can get books by asking for specific titles, but there’s little actually being pushed my way. There’s no agents saying “oh yeah, spike, they like Maurice Blanchot and boobies. Then they’ll probably like this!”. This mystifies me. Not just because I want the free books - I want good free books - but because publishers seem to be not making any effort to reach out and find the audiences that they continually bemoan they cannot find. If you don’t tell people about it, how will they buy it?
More on book publishing:
Spike | Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia | Open Directory
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Free New Books
- Publish And Be Damned
- Completely Free Print On Demand
- Publish and be damned
- Book Promotion and Macmillan New Writing List
