Graham Storrs

A survey of book promotion tactics was conducted by The Savvy Book Marketer in December, 2009, and is reported today. It asked a number of authors what their book promotion strategy would involve in 2010. You can check the method and the outcome there. I just want to look at the list of tactics they came up with and try to get a feel for how appropriate they might be for marketing an ebook. The list, most popular at the top, is this:

1. Social networking and social media
2. Blogging
3. Seeking book reviews
4. Seeking testimonials and endorsements
5. Press releases
6. E-zines or email marketing
7. Radio and television talk shows
8. Speaking or teleseminars
9. Article marketing
10. Book signings

There are some obvious things to say about this, so let’s say them first. The people surveyed clearly included a lot of non-fiction authors. So I can eliminate items 8 and 9 as not really relevant for a novel. I can also eliminate 10. With an ebook, there is nothing to sign, and, for that matter, no reason why a bookshop (the traditional venue for such things) would let you in the door. So that leaves:

1. Social networking and social media
2. Blogging
3. Seeking book reviews
4. Seeking testimonials and endorsements
5. Press releases
6. E-zines or email marketing
7. Radio and television talk shows

1 and 2 are no-brainers. Anybody with a book to promote in any format and little or no money to spend, will be all over the social networks and blogsphere.

Seeking book reviews (3) might also seem obvious but it isn’t an avenue that is open to ebook writers in most genres. Where ebooks have been popular for years – in erotica and romance – there are dozens of popular and authoritative review sites on the Web. In all other genres, book reviewers will almost never review an ebook. Only rare exceptions exist among the popular review websites and online magazines. I am unaware of any exceptions among the major offline reviewers. So we can scratch that one. Over the next decade, as it becomes normal to release ebook-only novels (and as more reviewers buy ebook readers!) this will change. But in 2010, ebooks just don’t get reviewed.

4 is an interesting one. I have read a number of advice blogs saying you should do it and telling you how to go about it, but it is an amazingly difficult thing to bring oneself to do. You have to approach famous writers you admire and respect in your own genre – complete strangers, of course unless your damned lucky – and ask them to read your book and say something quotably nice about it. Given that many such writers have already come out and said, on their own blogs, that they hate being pestered this way, and some have said flat out that they won’t do it, I just can’t bring myself to ask it. I screwed up my courage in one single instance and asked a very well-known writer I’d had some slight dealings with, if he would look at my book. I then waited, cringing in embarrassment, for a reply that never did come.

5 is also interesting. I could put out press releases but who, really, would be interested? Not the national press, certainly not the international press. Which leaves the local press. Since I live out in the boondocks, my local press is full of reports on farming and country shows, and letters to the editor complaining about the global conspiracy to fool us into thinking there’s such a thing as climate change, or explaining, with Bible quotes, why God dislikes liberal politicians. I’m pretty sure I could get into a local paper but who in my area has even heard of ebooks? Who, in a town where they play country and western music in the supermarket, is interested in sci-fi?

Many e-marketers advise you to convert your social networking successes into cash by creating mailing lists. You get everyone to sign up for your regular magazine or newsletter and then, cunningly, blast them all with spam emails when the book is released. This is the strategy I assume is meant in 6. Well, I think such practices are evil. Sadly for me, I think most marketing practices are evil. Like a lot of writers, I just don’t have the personality type it takes to sell things.

And as for radio and television talk shows (7), the idea seems to suffer the same drawbacks as sending out press releases.

So, for an author with an ebook to promote, who is squeamish about marketing, and doesn’t live in a major metropolis, 1 and 2, and to a very limited extent 3, seem to be the only options available. Of course, ’social networking’, ‘blogging’ and ‘reviews’ can mean a lot more than is obvious. Blog tours, viral promo videos, Twitter parties, online competitions, and so on, are all in the potential mix. The online activity around a new book can be quite vibrant and exciting. And, as for reviews, even if the big-name sci-fi magazines won’t review ebooks, ten kindly bloggers with readerships of a thousand or so, might easily reach more actual readers than a major print review magazine could ever hope for.

Please say hello to the newest member of The New York Journal of Books‘ reviews team. And, while you’re at it, why not nip across and have a look at my first review for this new, online book review journal. (Actually, if you read my recent review here of Dawkins’ Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, you could skip that step, since it is almost the same. Almost, I say, but not quite. When you write a review for a review mag, you can’t adopt the same chatty, personalised, approach that I do in my blog reviews. And if that difference intrigues you, you might like to go and take a look anyway, to compare them.)

Why favour the New York Journal of Books with my erudition, you may ask. Well, I’ve been looking for some non-fiction projects to become involved in, lately, the kind of project that is both writerly and related to my interests, that will involve me more in the writing world, and which will raise my profile in literary circles. I’ve come to being a published writer from a long, long time of wandering in the wilderness. My name is much better known in other, completely unrelated spheres of life. Now I need to change that.

And by great good fortune, I came upon the NYJB. It’s a new venture (it started last month!) and, I think, an exciting one. As Editor-in-Chief and founder, Ted Sturtz says:

In light of the shift from print to online content, there is an opportunity to establish a purely online book review positioned to capture the ongoing growth of the online audience. Moreover, by gradually assembling a broad panel of highly-credentialed reviewers the journal is positioning to offer far more comprehensive coverage of new books than any other book review. While it will be critical to review major new titles as they are released, the Journal aims to review more books in niche or non-mainstream genres than are covered by the current major review publications. The NYJB aims to also review more books written by first-time authors and books published by smaller independent houses, providing respected reviews for authors and independent publishers that are generally spurned by the major review publications. The review also intends to review books in niches that are generally ignored by mainstream publishers. In short, the aim is to establish NYJB as a review widely recognized to be on par with the most respected traditional reviews, while reviewing a far larger number of books.

With so many highly respected review sources either folding or being drastically cut back, I’m very pleased to get behind the NYJB and to help create a top-class online review site in the tradition of (the struggling) Kirkus and the great New York Times Book Review. Authors and publicists, you should seriously consider adding the New York Journal of Books to your list of review sites for your next release.

The Queensland Writers Centre is touring blogs again. This time the tour has a theme: Writers’ Desks. For some reason writers’ desks are fascinating and pictures of same are hugely popular. So QWC is probably onto a winner here. However, when they asked me to put up a picture of my own desk as part of the tour, I was painfully aware that I’ve only recently done that.

Fascinating as my desk is, I can’t keep posting pictures of it. It’s not as if it has seasonal changes or anything. So I’ve taken the opportunity to correct a glaring omission from my last picture and show you my computer ‘desktop’. This should be just as interesting as the wooden one since, for me at least, the computer is where 95% of the work gets done.

The desktop that really matters

For those without broadband (or using Telstra NextG, which is almost as bad) I apologise for the size of this picture. Even so, it isn’t big enough for you to recognise all the icons. That’s why the animation provides labels for the following groups.

• Group A: Various mobile device managers (phone, camera, MP3 player and so on.)
• Group B: Internet stuff (browser, email, Skype, Twitter, and FTP client)
• Group C: Office software (mostly Open Office but also PowerPoint)
• Group D: Music score editing software. (Yes, I write music. It’s a little hobby of mine.)
• Group E: Image editing software (Paint Shop Pro, IrfanView and IconEasel)
• Group F: Media players (Windows Media Player and WinAmp)
• Group G: HTML editors (HTML Kit and Komodo Edit)
• Group H: Sundry utilities (antivirus, encryption, DVD writers, backup, 3G wireless client, and Celestia, which lets me view the universe from various perspectives)
• Group I: Various ebook readers and ebook creators.
• Group J: Stuff to do with my current writing project (the Open Office file itself, my multifunction tracking sheet, and a program called StoryBook that I’ve been trying out as a way of organising the background info – I’m not getting along well with it.)
• Group K: Games (basically, the only computer game I ever play is Freecell – a patience-style card game.)

I should also mention the background picture. I change my background quite often and it is usually an astronomical theme. This one is a long-exposure shot of the space shuttle taking off in Florida last year. I love pictures of astronauts on EVAs, Hubble deep field shots, and the ISS. Images like these help keep me inspired.

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening February to April 2010. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog.

If I wanted an ebook reader, would I buy an Apple iPad? I don’t think so. Would I accept one as a gift? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t.

The only ebook reader I know well is my 6″ Kindle 2 (foreigner’s edition). It cost me $256, and there are no ongoing costs. It’s a great reading device. I love the e-ink screen (especially because it means I can read in the garden) I love the physical size, weight, and ergonomics, the battery life (it goes for weeks!)  the 3G wireless connection, and the dead easy Amazon shopping experience.

With the iPad, 3G is an ‘optional’ extra, so the base model starts at $629 (2.5 times the Kindle price!) plus, you have to pay a monthly fee for it, which (currently, in the US) starts at $15/mo – so another $180 per year (about 3/4 of a new Kindle each year!) That the Kindle bundles the price of a 3G ISP connection into the price of its books is, in my view, one of the best things about it. Say you buy 20 books a year from the Kindle Store or on the iPad’s new iBook store. The Kindle’s books will cost you just the cover price. The iPad books will cost you the cover rice plus a twentieth of $180 (i.e. $9 !!) each. For identical $10 books, that means you’re paying $10 on the Kindle and $19 on the iPad! Where is the sense in that?

The iPad is very pretty, it has colour and a touch screen and so on, but try taking it outside to read a book during your lunch break and you’ll soon see the benefits of e-ink, and the Kindle’s small size and light weight. What’s more, because the Kindle is designed for ebook reading, you can easily hold it in one hand and turn the page with the same hand – the buttons are just where they should be – so you can eat a sandwich with the other hand. Try doing that with an iPad.

You may argue that it’s not a fair comparison, the Kindle is a dedicated ebook reader, the iPad is, essentially, a PDA on which you can also read books. I say, so what? I don’t want a PDA. (And, if I did, I’d buy one with a proper, non-modal operating system, not a souped-up iPhone OS.) I’ve already got a smartphone that does useful things that the iPad doesn’t (like taking pictures and making phone calls) along with useful things that the iPad does, like displaying maps, managing a diary, and so on. If I had an iPad, I would still need a phone (with a camera). I would also still need a good ebook reader – because a bulky, LCD-screened, expensive, heavy iPad just doesn’t cut it.

I’ve got to say, Apple, I feel pretty disappointed.

A book to treasure

Sometimes, as you near the end of a book, you start to feel sad that there isn’t much more of it left. Sometimes, a book is such a pleasure to read that you wish it could go on forever. Well that’s how I felt about The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, by Richard Dawkins (ed.).

I know it’s not a prepossessing title and the cover is pretty dull but this book is full of wonderful, marvellous things. It is written – and written well! – by some of the greatest minds of the 20th and 21st Centuries. It is a joy to read.

The book is a large collection of short extracts from the writings of many, many great scientists. There are scores of extracts and every one of them (barring just one or two) is a gem. Every one of them made me wish the extract were longer. Every one of them made me want to go to the original book and read the whole thing. (Fortunately, I already have a good many of them in my library, or have read them already.) But what a collection! Think of a big name in any field of science and they are likely to be represented in this book. Dawkins has done an excellent job of discovering and collating some beautiful, fascinating, and inspiring pieces of writing from a very broad spectrum of scientists. I wish that more writers of fiction could write as well as these scientists! My personal favourite scientist-writers were all there, from Edward O. Wilson to David Deutsch, Loren Eiseley to Peter Medawar, along with all the most popular and gifted scientist-writers of our age (including Stephen Pinker, Donald Johanson, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Roger Penrose, and so many others.) What’s more, Dawkins introduces each and every piece with a few comments of his own, setting it in context, explaining its inclusion, or simply reminiscing about the author – more than compensating for the fact that Dawkins has, modestly, not included extracts from his own brilliant corpus.

It’s not a perfect collection – it could have run to four volumes – or ten! – and never have done full justice to the wealth of great science and science writing that is out there. It could have included more scientists (it was sad that Max Born wasn’t included, for example) and, perhaps, had more from fields such as psychology – there was a slight biological bias, I must say. There is probably scope for a companion volume to include only science writing for young people, since little of that was included in this book.

Yet it was a book I will always treasure. One that will become well thumbed over the years as I dip into it to savour again some of my favourite pieces (the last three were very well chosen.) Books like this should always have ebook editions so that they are easily searchable. An ebook edition that linked to all the source texts, writer biographies, and writer bibliographies, would be a treasure indeed!

I now have the galleys of my novel TimeSplash and they have prompted me to say this to all aspiring novellists.

When you write a novel, make sure it is as rich, deep and subtle as you can possibly make it. Make all the characters complex and interesting, in fact, make them fascinating. Make sure that the book you write has enough wit, wisdom and intricacy that you could read it over and over again and still go on loving it and believing in it’s value. Because, even after you have edited it and polished it for months before delivering your final draft, if the book is accepted by a publisher, what with the copy editing, the line editing, the proof reading, and the marketing (hunting through the text for suitable extracts and so on,) you will find yourself reading it end-to-end another ten times before it is published. If you are not to find yourself hating it, or embarrassed by it, it better be one hell of a good book!

Writers are pretty nice people on the whole. The amazing response from writers in support of Haiti has been very gratifying to see. Australian SF writer Marianne de Pierres today recommended Medecins Sand Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) as an effective group to support if you want to help people over there. John Scalzi also recommends them. It’s one of the charities my wife and I support all year round and we were more than happy to help them out over Haiti too. Their international donations page is here: http://www.msf.org/msfinternational/donations/ If it doesn’t load, keep trying as it is very busy just now.

If you’d rather donate through UNICEF (another of my favourite charities) there is a link to a Google-operated donations page in the right-hand column.

And just to prove how nice writers are, I was absolutely astonished to find a plug for my new novel, TimeSplash, on Marianne’s blog too. People can just be so kind sometimes! If you don’t know Marianne de Pierre’s writing, I’d say the best place to start is with the Parrish Plessis novels. ‘Nylon Angel’ is the first in the series. There’s an ad for it in the left hand column of this page. Click through and see for yourself.

POST SCRIPT: As soon as I’d published this post, I went off to read a few more blogs and found this amazing piece of outrageous flattery from fellow writer Terry Hornby. I’m beginning to feel overwhelmed with kindness. I’ve mentioned Terry before as being a funny and clever blogger whom everyone should read. (Yes, that was ‘blogger’ not a typo.) Now I can only conclude that he’s about to touch me up for a very big loan…

Tara Moss is running a series of posts over on her blog on writers’ desks and what they look like. So I took a snapshot of my own, to see what it might reveal about me. Well, what do you think?

It was the maid's day off.

Looking at it with an outsider’s eye, I suppose it looks rather scruffy. Even looking at it with my own eye, it looks that way. Well, if I’d have known you were coming…

Just out of shot on the left is a filing cabinet so full I can’t get another sheet of paper in it – yet I can’t bear to throw out any of the junk it contains, which I never look at. Over on the right, again out of shot, is a bookcase and some drawers. The drawers are full of rubbish and the bookcase is full of books, CDs (mostly software), souvenirs, and a collection of mugs, each of which has its own story.

Left to right on the desktop are:

• Some unattended admin (receipts, letters, etc.)
• My pens, pencils , post-its and what have you
• My notebook (with the only pencil I actually use lying on top of it – a beautiful, lacquered, Waterman propelling pencil that my wife gave me over 20 years ago)
• A small weather station, ironically placed right in front of the window (shades of Subterranean Homesick Blues) The window, by the way, has a fabulous view across hills and forests.
• My Asus EeePC netbook, with a music CD lying open on top of it (a Christmas-themed collection of rock songs, compiled by a friend in Switzerland.)
• Tissues, spare ink cartridge, printer…
• The round white thing is a Stargate Atlantis coffee warming pad. It is, perhaps, the most useless thing I own (my Airedale excepted), but it lights up in neon blue when you switch it on and looks cool.
• Behind the coffee warmer is a collection of family photos (so I don’t forget who they are), a tray filled with flash memory sticks, acquired here and there, a phone and, out of sight, a bunch of chargers, USB hubs, transformers, and such. I actually have the wiring for 13 electronic devices on this desk. You can see some of it dangling attractively down the back.
• Then there’s my external hard disc drive (for backups)
• My dear old computer (actually, my original dear old computer died a few months ago but I got a new dear old computer with the exact same specification for $300 on eBay)
• To the right of the computer is a hideous but extremely reliable and accurate clock
• Another USB hub and an MP3 player
• A copy of Advice to Writers by Jon Winokur, which I won recently in a competition and which I dip into while my machine is booting, or I’m waiting for software updates, or whatever.
• Just visible at the top right is the corner of my whiteboard. This has the ranges of various instruments and voices written on musical staves, phone numbers, passwords, and Linux shell commands.

Just to complete the picture, the room also contains the gutted remains of my original dear old computer on the floor, a guest chair, a pile of wires of various kinds, pictures around the walls that are mostly from work-related events, a small collection of poker dice, a box full of music CDs I keep meaning to give away, and my guitar.

If you can imagine me slumped in that big, black chair, typing with three fingers at this blog post, you pretty much have my working life in a nutshell. It’s a good room and, I have to say, a good life.

My perception of the Web has changed. I used to think it was full of people like me, ordinary folk, going about their business, finding things that interested them, chatting to friends and acquaintances, but I was wrong. Oh, there may be such people – millions of them – but they don’t really matter. What matters are the eyeballs. The eyeballs float above this solid mass of ordinary people, surging in flocks from one site to another, drawn there by ‘optimised text’, pausing only to graze on the ‘5 ways to increase your traffic’, or the ‘7 ways to maximise newsletter registrations’. Then they are off again, swarming to another site with tasty ‘keywords’ or juicy ‘anchor text’.

To the Web marketing gurus, the cattlemen (and women) who can herd eyeballs around the Web at will, none of this talk sounds strange. Eyeballs, to these expert manipulators, are like floating voters to the politician, free electrons to the elecctrical engineer, mum and dad investors to the financial advisor. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is their equivalent of election promises, electrical potential, or a glossy prospectus, respectively. Eyeballs are a crop to be harvested.

Why do I care? Because I’m a writer. And that makes be a small businessman. And that makes me a marketer with no budget and only one place to look for customers: the Web. So I’ve been reading lots and lots of Web marketing articles lately. I’ve been learning how to structure my Web presence so as to funnel eyeballs to my main site. I’ve been hearing about how to woo eyeballs with value-added commenting and by taking a ‘genuine interest’ in their lives. All the marketers’ not-so-subtle tricks of language and persuasion, are now mine. I’ve read and absorbed them. My own eyeballs have flitted hither and yon like butterflies, alighting here and there to sip the sweet nectar of marketing wisdom.

“Most of this is just common sense,” the gurus tell you, disarmingly. In fact, most of it is. Most of it, given the uniformity of the message, is probably just what they’ve read on each other’s blogs. The rest is a tiny dollop of personal experience (no-one has been in this game too many years), the ability to drop names (names like ‘Google Blog Search’, ‘Alltop’, and ”TweetMeme’), and a sprinkling of graphs.

Proof that doing nothing clever also produces spikes in site visits

The graphs are an especially nice touch. They don’t actually present real evidence. There is no science behind this. No-one is publishing academic papers on the effect of guest blogging on RSS feed subscriptions. There is no ‘marketing theory’ that generates testable hypotheses that lead to solid facts. What there is is guru A showing a graph of how using a particular search term on one site over a few days last year produced an apparent spike in visits (which, may look impressive, but is statistically meaningless) or guru B showing a graph of how guest blogging on a popular site led to a sudden increase in Twitter followers.

In fact, the graphs reveal something very profound about eyeball herding. The people who do it for a living are the same kind of people who sell soap. Once you’ve absorbed the common sense from the message, you should try to forget the rest. There are some people who can sell soap and there are some people who cannot. If you’re not one of life’s soap salespeople, there is no graph in the universe that will help you become one.

And the point of all this eyeball herding? To get eyeballs to a place, physically and mentally, where the marketer can finally make his sales pitch. If the marketer ‘owns’ enough eyeballs and the pitch will yield a high enough ‘conversion rate’, he or she will, at last, make some money.

So let’s cut to the chase, so I can stop reading all that stuff. What I’m selling is my new novel, TimeSplash, a near-future sci-fi thriller. If you’re an eyeball a lover of great stories, go to the TimeSplash website and sign up so I can tell you when it’s available to buy. No obligation. No pressure. And a free bar of soap with every ten purchases.

Well, thank God that’s over.

I’ve been looking at 2009 to check how I’ve been doing against my writerly ambitions. It’s pretty good, overall. I got eight shorts stories published and placed in two competitions. I also won a write-a-quote competition! I also had my two first print publications (both short stories in anthologies). Although I actually made money by selling stories last year, it didn’t amount to much. The biggest single return for a story was $68 (which amounted to 4c/word). On average, I earned about 1c/word last year. One trip to attend a local writing conference wiped out the whole lot many times over. If you count my time, trips to my writing group (which is 300km away and involves an overnight stay) and consumables, I doubt that a lifetime of selling short stories will ever compensate me for just this year!

Yet, strangely, I feel I’ve had a successful year.

More exciting by far was signing  my first book deal. Unspeakably wonderful as this is, sadly, it isn’t likely to make me much money either. As an unknown writer, trying to sell an e-book in a world where no-one has an e-book reader, with no publicity except what I provide for myself, in a genre that people keep saying is dead, I expect sales to be embarrassing at best. However, I will probably be happy with anything above crushing humiliation. (So please, buy the book and then tell your 5,000 Facebook friends how great it was – even if you have to lie through your teeth. You wouldn’t want my utter failure on your conscience, would you?)

The book, TimeSplash, took hundreds of hours to write and scores of hours to edit. I’ll make about $2/book on sales, so, even if I paid myself minimum wage, I’d need to make many thousands of dollars to cover all that time – and that would involve selling many thousands of books. Unfortunately, because almost nobody has ever published their first book as an e-book with no print edition, especially their first sci-fi novel – there are no good stats to suggest what sales might be. Even my publisher is working in the dark here. I’m a bit of an experiment. It could be zero. It could be a few hundred. If it goes as high as 1500, I’ll be blowing that month’s royalty cheque on a bottle of champagne.

So, it has been a good year. In fact, it’s been a great year. But there is as yet no prospect of making a living from writing. To do that, I’d probably need to be publishing four books a year, or more, and selling really well – and I’m not sure I want to be that guy. Publishing one has been hard enough!

Maybe I need an agent?