Over the past two weeks, we’ve looked at how book projects begin and how manuscripts are transformed into books via the production process. This week we’ll continue by looking at what happens after a book is published. As before we’ll be using our example of Sarah Connor and her potentially world-saving book Resisting the Rise of the Machines: Will Skynet “be back”?
Sarah’s spent many an hour writing her manuscript while hiding out in safe houses from time-travelling android assassins and/or commissioning editors chasing her contracted deadline. We’ve risked the wrath of the machines by preparing the final book files and making print copies available. Now, however, it’s time to make the world aware of this book, and to ensure supply lines are maintained in the face of mechanical belligerence.
Post-publication in detail
To expand on my analogy of the funnel from my description of the Origination process, this part of the process is rather like attaching a sprinkler head to the end of a hose. The aim is to disperse the concentrated and perfected material as far and wide as possible. As we touched on in our introductory overview, this is a question both of attention-seeking and logistics.
Look at me! Look at me!
Promoting a book effectively is in some ways the hardest part of publishing. There is no perfect formula, but as a rule success depends on collaboration between author and publisher. This can be complicated by the fact that each very often wishes the other would do more. It also doesn’t help that even in a world of data-driven analytics, the fact is we rarely know exactly why any given book is successful, and why another that — on the face of it — should have similar prospects, is less successful.
The promotional element of post-publication divides relatively neatly into the routine and the bespoke. There are things that we should be doing for just about every book — and that will be more effective for us doing so – – and there are things that make sense for a particular book, due to specifics around its subject, author, or other factors.
The Rise of the (Marketing) Machine
One of the ways in which having a publisher to sell your book is advantageous, is that they will place your book in predictable places in the ecosystem, benefitting from economies of scale but also from the strength in numbers of their publishing programme. The extent of these benefits will depend on factors like the publisher’s size and brand identity, but at its most basic level this means your book is likely to be discoverable in places where your prospective readers are likely to be looking.
As her publisher, we ensure Sarah’s book will appear in a series of fairly obvious places, particularly our website and the major online booksellers’ sites. We will feature it in relevant catalogues, and on our own site it will appear under the relevant Theme, in the same way other publishers might use a subject area or series to curate their collection. In this way browsers of the relevant section of our site can stumble across it, as well as it being easy to find for those who have come specifically to look for it. Then there are the routine channels, which are effective precisely because they are routine and so people check them or subscribe to them in order to hear about new books. Principally in our case these include our updates — which go out on all our social media handles — as well as our email mailing list. We also provide Sarah with a flyer that she can share with all her friends and contacts in her underground network.
There’s No Fate But What We Make for Ourselves
The other key elements to promoting a book are the unique things that are effective because they are not the same for every book. By their nature they are bespoke and impossible to fully enumerate here, but they will be led to a significant degree by Sarah’s ideas about what is possible and what might work. This is the space for book launches, interviews (whether written, or as audio or video), Op Ed’s, handing out flyers at conferences, and any number of other things that don’t occur to me right now, but might occur to Sarah, or to you. There are very real constraints on this, both because of budgets and more nebulous things like whether we have access to the right gatekeepers in a given scenario. Sarah might want to promote her book with interviews on local news stations, but that’s only going to be realistic if she already knows somebody who’s going to be prepared to give her the airtime. If so, fantastic, we’ll leverage that for all it’s worth, but it isn’t something that can be conjured up from nowhere.
Promoting books in such a way that they stand out is difficult, and there are no easy answers. That said, usually authors do know their prospective readers well, as they tend to come from the same interest communities. If there are any tricks to this, they are to be creative, and to focus on what will catch the attention of the particular type of people you are trying to reach. Practicality is important here too, it’s not smart to spend a lot of money, time or effort on promotions that are unlikely to yield significant results, and most publishers (especially small ones like us) can’t often afford to. It’s also worth keeping in mind how valuable organic word of mouth exposure is, and to concentrate on finding authentic ways to stimulate it.
Reviews
Reviews can also be very helpful in getting the word out about a new book — and hopefully spreading positive verdicts too. They are a bit of a special case because they are not wholly routine in nature, but they are something we try to do for every book. For academic books, the most realistic outlet for a review is usually going to be an academic journal, although if there’s an opportunity to get a review in a specialist trade magazine, or even a literary supplement then of course we’d want to go for it. Reviews editors at journals are busy people often overwhelmed with requests to review books. Thus the most effective means of getting a review published in a journal is often to have a prospective reviewer reach out to the reviews editor and volunteer to review our book. This is all above board and of course their review should be impartial, but having someone prepared to do the work really helps to get things moving.
Logistics and Stewardship
While there is little point in writing and producing a book if nobody ever hears about it and wants to read it, there is also little point in convincing lots of people they want to read your book if you cannot then get copies to them. As most publishers, including us, rely on third parties to manage their stock and distribution, this is mostly a question of setting up and maintaining relationships with suppliers, and troubleshooting whenever something goes wrong. It might also mean anticipating challenges ahead of time and taking action to prepare for them. For example, if books will be needed for an event like a book launch or author talk, we might need to get these ordered well ahead of the deadline, to ensure that they are printed — and wherever they need to be — in good time.
Another element of this stewardship is managing corrections. In a world of ebooks and print on demand, it is theoretically possible to continue correcting a book, in major and minor ways, indefinitely. It’s worth noting that this is not without cost, both direct and indirect. Suppliers will tend to charge a fee for editing “published” files after the fact, but also (as we touched on when talking about proof reading previously) making changes can cause chain effects. Most obviously, if we make a single sentence a bit longer or shorter, we could affect the pagination for an entire chapter, and in particularly unfortunate cases for the rest of the book. This then means our index and possibly our table of contents (and any other elements with page references) will need correcting. Even just checking to see what the effects of a change are can be quite time-consuming. None of this is to say we should make necessary corrections where errors are spotted, but it does mean we are wise to be restrained in doing so.
These aspects of maintaining supply lines, and making corrections if necessary, are often underestimated in importance, but are crucial to maintaining the success and shelf-life of a book. It’s a vital element of the service that publishers provide to authors and readers. They absolutely must not stop! Ever…
Hasta La Vista
That’s it for our walkthrough of the publishing process. Hopefully we’ve both made it digestible and demystified it somewhat on the one hand, while giving you an appreciation of just how much is involved on the other. Next week we might try and cover a whole topic in a single week, we’ll see how that goes.
As always, if you have a book project you would like to discuss with us, please drop us a line on proposals@tbarnpress.com.
