Words and Coffee

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I have to admit, I love free stuff. Not the junky stuff you get in your bag at the student bookstore or the casserole dish you get when you open a checking account, but the kind of stuff that is substantial — free audio-books. I used to commute an hour each way to work and listened to a lot of books on tape from the library. Then I changed careers and reduced my commute to five minutes each way, hardly a prime scenario for listening to books on tape. Now, I listen to books on tape while I mow. I ditched the music. I’m a freakin’ genius (not really, if I was a genius, someone else would mow my lawn).

It takes about an hour for me to mow. I used to lament this time and couldn’t wait for it to be over. Now, I wish I had my old mowing situation – An acre and a half that took about two hours from start to finish on a riding mower. Now I push a Neuton mower about my yard and lose myself in audiobooks. I just wrapped up listening to American Gods, by Neil Gaiman (received free by signing up for a trial membership with audible.com via an Pioneer XMp3 promotion. See–FREE).

Knowing how much audio books go for (usually around 30-40 clams, US), I don’t buy them. I’d much rather read a book than listen, but, in a pinch audio books are sweet. A friend of mine turned me on to Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magical Kingdom via a disc of the story he had downloaded from Doctorow’s site–for free. Doctorow did the reading himself and the book was enjoyable. I’ve been mining Doctorow’s stuff since and telling everyone I can about his books.

Cory Doctorow, in a 2003 interview with Katherine Macdonald at Strange Horizons, explains how his downloads for Down and Out in the Magical Kingdom took off and what that meant for subsequent books.

KM: Speaking of the mass movement, what do you think that has to do with the current mad downloading of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom?

CD: Yeah, it’s a good parable for it, a good parallel to it. Tor increased my print run on the strength of advance notice to 8500 copies — so this means that the average first novel from Tor gets fewer than 8500 copies, and I believe that there’s probably a good reason for that, which is that I think first novels probably sell fewer than 8500 copies in hardcover. This says that the audience for science fiction in book form is dwindling, or is in some ways so small as to not be an enormous political or social factor anymore.

There was a time, I think, when first science fiction novels, or all science fiction novels, had a larger audience; certainly this is true of the magazines, which have been in a sad and steady decline for a long time. I don’t know if you’ve seen the latest Locus yet, but it’s got the round-up of all the magazines, and their circulation is plummeting — it looks like the dotcom bust in slow motion. Increasingly, people are getting their information online, and increasingly people are turning to other forms of entertainment. You see this in WorldCon attendance and everywhere else. The thing that is amazingly interesting about the download experiment is that 75,000 people have downloaded this book, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the final total will be in excess of 100,000 people; in fact, I’ll think it’ll probably be larger than that, so the number of people who will download the book exceeds the number of people who could be reasonably expected to read it by more than an order of magnitude — and that’s read it in hardcover, and that’s a pretty stunning statistic.

Patrick [Nielsen Hayden], my editor, when I told him how many people had downloaded it, which at the time I think it was 30,000, said, “Jesus Christ, do you realize that you now have an audience of 30,000 people for your next novel?” It was like, yeah, shit yeah, that’s totally killer.

Andy Shackcloth weighs in with his blog post today breaking down why podcasting, or serialized audio books, can be beneficial.

Podcasting a free serialised audio book gives

1. Passage past the agent/editor barrier to public readers
2. Diminishing of the grammar/style hurdle
3. Free distribution to millions of listeners
4. Removal of the barrier to ‘try’ a new author
5. Ability to find your ‘personal’ audience
6. Develops curiosity for future (hopefully better) work
7. Maintains an audience whilst your writing develops
8. Direct contact and feedback with audience
9. Meet fans of your work

I’ve been considering recording some of the short material I’ve completed or am completing just to get it out there for anyone who is looking for something to listen to on their way to work, while they work out, sipping coffee on a Sunday morning, whatever. I love the idea of serializing novel-length works if the publisher’s okay with that as an effort to compel people to spread the good word (that would require me to actually have a book published, too). I probably would not use it as a self-publishing tool, unless it is something that I was not trying to get an agent for and didn’t intend to sell to a publisher.

Andy has the right of it when he says:

Podcasting your novel as a serialised audio book is no guarantee of easy success. The numbers game providing the potential of a dedicated and loyal fan-base also conceals that same fan-base inside a gigantic haystack of an internet. Your personal audience can be found, it will take time, it will take a sustained effort, it is possible and the method is open to all.

Dive into the writing community on the web. If you start to sink, look at all the help waiting nearby!

I read this post at The Magic District blog and thought it captured the essence of marketing, whether done by the Big Boys on Madison Ave. or Bob C. Author on his Mac. I touched on this topic here, looking at the efficacy of book trailers. Really, that’s the tip of the iceberg.

I worked for about 5 years as the person in charge of sales and marketing for a small whitewater rafting company in WV. When we were bought in 2008 I got to sit in on marketing meetings with our sister company, which was much larger. The saying that came up frequently was that 20 percent (or 25 or 50, the number’s not important) of marketing doesn’t work, but no one knows what 20 percent that is, which means we were dumping 80% of our marketing down the toilet.

Sure, this is oversimplified, but there is a kernel of truth in there somewhere. Unfortunately, the guidance is not clear because there is not one answer. Throw in the fact that we are trying to predict how people will respond to things and it gets even harder. Other times, we convince ourselves to use marketing methods because either that’s the way it has always been done, or it’s new and shiny and cool (which is more than I can say for me).

So where do you even begin?

Having a web presence is a great start. Getting involved with the writing community in forums, commenting on blogs, posting your own comments, posting links on social media — it all helps. I would argue that these are probably the most effective ways we can market our work. We have a built in community (facebook friends, blog subscribers, twitter followers) that we have demonstrated that they are willing to hear what we have to say. Is it perfect? No. Is it easier for an author to have some control over publicity than 20 years ago? Yes.

Of course, you can tweet and update statuses and blog until your fingers bleed, but at the end of all things, you’ll still need that polished manuscript and a dynamite query. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to mine.

The Tip of the Iceberg

Yesterday I took a brief look at book trailers. Uninvoked stopped by and relayed her experience with trying to get the word out and how if a trailer looping endlessly in cyberspace is all well and good, but worthless if no one sees it. Here is her comment:

I don’t think many people know to look for the trailer. I’m finding my biggest problem with Uninvoked isn’t keeping my readers, but finding them. The idea of placing a book online is almost unheard of in itself, even though there is a rather large community of blogging novelists—if you know where to look.

Anything that draws attention to a book can be useful in the right circumstances, but a book trailer isn’t going to do you any good if no one ever sees it. To see it they have to find it. -.- See what I mean?

I would agree, but I think there is hope. It involves the harnessing of social media. I’m sure everyone has been bombarded with blogging, Facebook, Twitter and all the rest. HOWEVER, they can work for you with minimal effort. If you already blog, you are ahead of the game. If you respond to comments in a timely manner, all the better. You can have your blog post directly to your Facebook page using the notes application (This works for any blog, not just wordpress blogs). You can use Twitterfeed to have your blog feed right to your Twitter account (make sure you read the help section for putting the right URL in the feed).

Have a trailer? Look to the usual suspects for posting it (You Tube, Viddler, Google Video), then pimp it all over your blog and Facebook and Twitter and anything else in which you are active. If you don’t take an interest in your own work, why should anyone else. It’ll take a little while for your efforts to gain momentum, but once they do, you’ll be grinning a whole lot more when you check your blog and web stats.

It’s all about casting a wide net and being involved. While this is a form of marketing, it has the element of engagement–of dialogue–that traditional wait and see stuff can never hope to have.