Our guest blogger this week is multi-published, hard working Ian Irvine, who’s going to give us an insight into book promotion. Take it away, Ian…
(Watch out for the give-away at the end!)
Picture me back in 1998, a (relatively) young, bright-eyed, keen new author, about to be published for the first time and not having a clue about how it was going to work …
It’s February; in another 6 weeks A Shadow on the Glass, the first book of my Darwinian fantasy The View from the Mirror is due to be published by Penguin Australia. And I’m more than a little worried.
Why, I hear you ask? After writing this quartet for ten years, and thinking about it for ten years before that, you’re finally about to be published. You should be over the moon.
And of course I am. After receiving the publication offer for my quartet, I floated for at least six months. Penguin is a great publisher but … at this time they don’t have a fantasy list in Australia. I’m their first such author, and I’m actually being published through the Children and Young Adults section even though my epic fantasies are for the adult market. What if it goes horribly wrong?
Then, browsing in a bookshop in February 1998, I discover copies of A Shadow on the Glass on the shelves, even though it’s not due to be published until April. Why have they put it out six weeks early? Why didn’t they tell me? I’ve not been asked to do any promotion and I’ve read all about books disappearing without trace. Help!
The View from the Mirror is one 800,000 word novel in four volumes, so if the first book flops, it’s all over. I’ve got to do something to promote it, but what? I don’t know anything about book promotion and at this time the net is in its infancy. I can’t find anything useful there via my 28K dialup.
I decide to get thousands of large postcards printed, showing the front and back covers of A Shadow on the Glass. It’s a beautiful cover, based on artwork originally done around my kitchen table, and I print the titles and publication dates of the other three books on the back of the postcards. It’s expensive, but I have a big extended family to spread the word, and lots of contacts. By the time Book 2, The Tower on the Rift, is published seven months later I’ve given 3,000 postcards away.
Did it work? I don’t know. That’s the problem with traditional means of promotion – there’s no way to determine if it’s been effective or a waste of money. What about sales? A Shadow on the Glass had a big print run for an unknown author, 7,500 copies, yet it had reprinted three or four times by the time the final book in the quartet appeared eighteen months later. I suspect its success was mainly due to word-of-mouth, that readers just liked the books and told their friends. But it felt good that I’d done my best to help it along.
Now it’s late 2000 and things have changed. Amazingly, I have several overseas publication deals (this was still a rarity for Aussie authors at the time) and my books are going brilliantly in the UK. My first eco-thriller about catastrophic climate change, The Last Albatross, has just been published in Australia by Simon and Schuster, so why am I really worried now?
The thriller market is the most difficult of all to succeed in, and I’ve just been told that local readers rarely go for thrillers in Australian settings. Eco-thrillers are even worse – hardly anyone wants to read them. Now they tell me! And The Last Albatross has a terrible cover, a good idea gone badly wrong.
Postcards aren’t going to sell any books this time, but targeting specific interest groups might. In my working life I’m an expert in marine pollution and at this time I’ve been a consultant for 20 years. I put together a tantalising publicity sheet about the book (and my fantasy novels, of course) and do a mail-out to all my business contacts, then every environmental and pollution consulting firm and conservation group in the country. Between myself and my publisher, we send out thousands of letters.
There was a significant spike in the sales of my fantasy novels over the time I ran the mail-out, enough to pay for the postage, which showed that it had been effective. The Last Albatross itself racked up modest sales, though without this promotion they might have been dismal.
My new fantasy quartet, The Well of Echoes, which began with Geomancer, also sold well. So has my trilogy The Song of the Tears, which ended with The Destiny of the Dead, and through this period I did not need to do a lot of promotion on my own behalf. Nonetheless, I concentrated on the following things.
I put up a big web site with a huge amount of useful content – for example my long article The Truth About Publishing, which aims to tell beginning writers everything they need to know about writing and publishing. It has been republished a number of times and I still get a lot of mail from writers who have found it helpful (though scary).
Other things I do: whenever I’m in a big city with some free time I go to the largest bookshops, give them a swag of my bookmarks or postcards, and sign as many of my books as they want. Bookshops love signed books because they increase the sales rate by 30%, and one time in Melbourne I signed 700 books in a couple of days. Staff in bookshops rarely meet the authors they sell; it’s nice to chat with the specialists in your genre, and afterwards they’ll hand-sell lots of your books or sometimes make a special display for them.
My next big promotion was for Runcible Jones The Gate to Nowhere, the first of a children’s fantasy quartet. Promoting children’s books is different; my contacts were little use to me here, and five years ago social media promotion was in its infancy.
Nonetheless, I wanted to do something different and innovative, and my son Simon, who has qualifications in both graphic design and digital animation, had just finished uni. I asked him to design some posters for me, featuring scenes from the first and second Runcible Jones books. The posters had to be effective from A1 right down to postcard size, and I also wanted a couple of brief animations to use in a book trailer about the Runcibles.
Simon designed several of the poster images in 3D in Maya, the movie animation program. I had each poster printed at A1 or A2 for use in school talks (one of the most effective ways to promote children’s books), plus lots of A3 copies for competition giveaways, 4,000 copies of each printed at A4, and 5,000 of each at postcard size. This is, of course, a very expensive promotion. It would not be worth it for a single book but could be justified to promote the number of titles I had out at the time.
I used the A4s and postcards in a mail-out to 4,000 school and public libraries in Australia (also including info about all my other books, of course). This was highly effective in raising awareness about my books. Many libraries put the posters up, and it also resulted in over a thousand additional library sales.
Small version of these posters can be seen here. And the book trailer, which contains two of these animations.
I have several other book trailers up on YouTube. I’ve raised awareness about them by emailing my fan email Inbox, several thousand people.
To promote my little Sorcerer’s Tower books in 2008, I did a week of school talks during one of Scholastic’s Book Fairs, speaking to about 1,900 kids from 10 schools. This was exhausting but effective – they sold 99 of the first Sorcerer’s Tower book, Thorn Castle, after one talk. Every primary school child wants the speaker’s autograph so I brought enough signed postcards and bookmarks with me to hand out to everyone – a graphic reminder of my books to show their parents.
This brings me to my latest books, The Grim and Grimmer series of humorous fantasy novels for children, which are being published in 2010 and 2011. The first three titles are The Headless Highwayman, The Grasping Goblin and The Desperate Dwarf, and the following will give you an idea of the style:
“It’s not easy being a hero when your bum is the size of an airship and you’re bobbing around the ceilings, mocked by a host of angry dwarves.”
The explosive success of social media sites over the past few years, especially Facebook, has changed the promotional landscape forever. Young people are huge users and they don’t want to be marketed to – they want to have a two-way dialogue with the authors they love.
To this end, I’ve set up a business page for my books on Facebook. Business pages are different to personal pages and are much more customisable via thousands of different Facebook applications. The paths to success here are – have a lot of interesting content about yourself and your books, add to it regularly, and interact frequently with people who post on your wall or contribute to discussions about your books.
My Facebook page is here, and it’s huge. I’ve included cover images, blurbs and key reviews for all 27 of my books. Also first chapters, audio readings and links to samples from the audiobooks. I will put up more audio and video files frequently, as these are of great interest to younger readers. They also love quizzes and competitions, so I have both, and there will be new ones every few weeks.
To drive traffic to this site I’ve begun a huge book give-away entitled 300 BOOKS IN 200 DAYS. Every week from January 1 until late July there’s a new competition where about 10 copies of my books or audiobooks will be given away. Later on I will also do Facebook advertising, which can be carefully targeted (eg, to everyone who likes Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl books, or the Harry Potter books, or Tom Clancy’s).
Social media marketing has another great advantage, terrific metrics. You can tell very quickly if the promotion is working, and if not, redesign it.
These are just a few of the ways to promote your books – in the end, promotion is only limited by your imagination. And being writers, our imagination is unlimited, right? Good luck.
Giveaway question to win a copy of The Headless Highwayman and The Grasping Goblin:
If you had magic, would you use it for good, for evil, or for your own selfish purposes? What would you do first?
If you had magic, would you use it for good, for evil, or for your own selfish purposes? What would you do first? I’d like to say good but being human probably selfish. Right now I would cast a spell to magically pack and move all my stuff and a always clean house spell, oh and of course magic away the flood damage for all those poor souls affected.
Cels, I’d love a ‘keep my house clean’ spell!
I gasped with delight to see Ian’s name. For years I’ve been directing as many other writers as possible toward “The Truth About Publishing”, and for a couple of years I’ve been building my own pre-publication presence online with moderate success. I’m so grateful for the detail of the article, and for the reality check.
Q: If you had magic, would you use it for good, for evil, or for your own selfish purposes? What would you do first?
A: If I had magic, I’d use it to find out how much longer my book will be at Big Publisher (it has been “progressing” with the relevent 2IC for over twenty months. . . but who’s counting, right?)
Of course, that’s technically non-sanctioned mind control over long distances, so that makes me eeeeeevvvvviiiillll.
The first step is to admit I’m evil. The second step is to TAKE OVER THE WORLD! The third step is to laugh maniacally. I already have a cat, so that part of the mandatory job description is sorted.
Louise Curtis
Louise, that’s entirely justifiable. Now if you used that power to get your book published and have it sell 20 million copies, and score an advance bigger that the national debt of Ireland for your next 10 books, that’d be a bit evil, but I’m sure most of the writers reading this are with you. I know I am. Besides, evil guys have all then. Ian
Louise, that’s entirely justifiable. Now if you used that power to get your book published and have it sell 20 million copies, and score an advance bigger that the national debt of Ireland for your next 10 books, that’d be a bit evil, but I’m sure most of the writers reading this are with you. I know I am. Besides, evil guys have all then. Ian
All the fun, I meant to say. Ian
The thought had occurred to me, Ian. . . but I’m so curious to see whether all my online (and real-life work) has actually been a viable strategy that I’d want to hold off on the magic for a little while.
Ooh! And since I write fantasy, I could also use the magic for Totally Legitimate Research (along with sailing on the Young Endeavour* and riding in a hot air balloon**).
Louise Curtis
*for pirates
**for steampunk
Hi Ian,
Great post. It’s hard to read this sort of thing because it would be nice to think that once the book is accepted, edited etc and published, the writer could then turn to the next project and let the publisher deal with everything else.
I’m coming to understand that isn’t how it works, especially for new writers like me. I’ll check out your “Truth About Publishing” post as well, but I’m getting a lot of this sort of thing from ROR and Mad Genius Club as well.
It’s hard to know what I’d use magic for. When I write, I’m pantser, and I kinda live my life like that too. One thing I’d like to do is get into people’s heads, especially people who are very different to me, and try to work out why they act the way they do. I suspect this comes under the banner of EVIL, however only on an urban-scale.
Also, I’d like to slay and evil dragon, or at least fight one off. I’ll give you the backstory. When I was a kid I was a sf/f nut (so nothing’s changed). My parents went on a trip to Europe and brought me back a shortsword. It was ultra-cool, but I couldn’t do anything with it so it sat in the back of my cupboard untouched.
Then, when my kids were mucking about one day years later, they found it and came running. “Dad, there’s a sword in your cupboard. Why? What’s it doing there?”
“Well,” I said, thinking quick. “I use it at night when the dragons come.”
As I told them the epic tales of my dragonslaying feats, their eyes got wider and wider. It was priceless.
They’re too old now to beleive in that sort of stuff, but they often joke about Dad the Dragonslayer. It would be cool to revisit the joke with a bit of magic up my sleeve.
Cheers.
Dads always slay dragons for their kids!
I mean that in the best possible way.
Er, what does ‘pantser mean’? I don’t get out much, I’m afraid. Not the first meaning that sprang to mind, I’m sure.
Ian, a ‘pantser’ is someone who writes ‘by the seat of their pants’ as opposed to a ‘plotter’ who has it all planned before the start.
I’m a pantser.
If you had magic, would you use it for good, for evil, or for your own selfish purposes? What would you do first?
Hmm magic use has the tendency to come back an bite you on the backside if you’re not careful and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
So no, you can keep your magic,I’ll stick to my herbs and potions. Besides the wizards guild are a bunch of neo-facist control freaks.
LOL, Sean.
If magic is so dangerous, not wonder the wizards are a bunch of neo-facist control freaks!
Mind you the Associated Apothecaries Collective (Or is that the Apothecaries for Collective Association?) can be just as bad, if you know what I mean comrade?
LOL, getting obsessive here.
Oh, I’m definitely using my magic to bring Gliese 581g into orbit somewhere between Mars and Saturn. Maybe design a kind of interplanetary flock of phoenixes for transport. I just don’t see how we are not going to completely waste this planet. It would be nice to have a back-up.
Always thinking ahead, Thoraiya.
A backup is good, but I already see one problem. Since Gliese 581g’s gravity is around 4 times ours, even an anorexic supermodel is going to weigh 250 kg. Imagine what the diet industry would make of that. They’d probably take over the government.
However, with judicious use of magic (solely for the greater good) I dare say both the industry and the supermodels could be overcome …
Truth be told if I had magic, we’d be getting seven seasons of Firefly.
YES!
Wonder which dimension I have to go to, to buy that!
I’m afraid my magic use would be very prosaic. I’d simply pick the lottery numbers, then tell my publishers i’m taking a couple of years off.
The real sorcery, though, would be explaining to my long-suffering fans that the next Three Worlds instalment would be even further in the future. How would i face them? I’m starting to realise how George RR must be feeling …
Hi Ian,
Fascinating post! I can’t tell you what an eye-opener your “Truth About Publishing” post was, I’m constantly directing people towards it since it’s hard to find reliable, firsthand knowledge about the Australian publishing industry. I can definitely see this being another post I’ll direct people to!
One thing about this post that really made me go ‘ah’ was what you said about offering to sign books. It’s interesting to hear the flipside with you saying signing books increases sales, because I’ve worked in a few different bookshops, both indie and chain, and the general feeling is usually that signed copies don’t sell any better than unsigned. If anything, the popular opinion of booksellers that I’ve encountered has been to NOT get authors to sign copies, because this unfortunately makes them firm sale… which I guess is good for the author, but can sometimes cause a bit of an awkward moment when the author is told ‘thanks but no thanks’. I recently asked a publicity person for a Melbourne publisher if they suggest their authors go in to sign books, and she answered with an emphatic no.
So I guess what I’m asking is, have you ever received any negative responses when asking to sign books? And do you get a better response from larger/smaller bookstores? Or has your experience been mostly positive? Do you contact a store before going in to sign copies, or just show up?
Thanks for sharing your wealth of experience Ian! I love your Grim and Grimmer series, it’s great seeing Aussie kids authors writing horror themed things!
P.S. I’ve definitely seen the selling power of your bookmarks at work. We had a stack of Grim and Grimmer bookmarks on the counter and a kid grabbed one and left. Five minutes later he was back with his mum and they bought both Grim and Grimmer and Grasping Goblin. She was so happy about how enthusiastic her son was about getting home to read them!
Hi Holly,
Only once in my book signing career has a bookshop said no (a small chain bookshop in a big shopping centre in Sydney), whereas some hundreds of bookshops have said yes over the years. The sales manager at the main Dymocks in Melbourne CBD once told me that signed copies increase sales by 30%, and I’ve been in many Borders stores where they’ve said ‘Yes, Please,’ and asked me to sign everything in the store. I’ve also been told many times, in bookshops large and small, ‘We love signed books,’ and there a a number of bookshops around the country where they grab me when I come in and ask, in apologetic tones, if I’d mind signing their stock. I’ve also done this in the UK and Scotland and had the same good experience.
I don’t call ahead, I just drop in, though I check if they have plenty of stock before I ask. When they do, I introduce myself, tell them that they have oodles of my books and ask if they’d like me to sign some. If they only have a few copies I often don’t bother, such as in a small independent shop.
But of course, I’m a reasonably well known writer, bringing out books regularly. It may be different for a beginning writer trying to break in.
Thanks for the feedback about Grim and Grimmer, by the way. It’s nice to hear.
That’s fantastic to hear, Ian, thanks! It’s nice to know that it actually does make a difference and that most stores are still eager to get signed copies!
Stephen King apparently likes to drop in and sign his books by stealth. He nearly got chased out of my local until the bookseller realized who it was.
LOL, good one, Sean!
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