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Feature

Selling Books at the Safeway

Authors must market their books AND themselves creatively AND tirelessly

by Larry Baker, author of THE FLAMINGO RISING and ATHENS, AMERIC

And I got attention. The column was bounced around by other websites, and several major print publications contacted me as well. Everybody had their own angle, and my story became its own doubloon, whose meaning was always in the eye of the beholder.

Some focused on the refusal of Barnes & Noble to stock the book because it did not like the cover. Others fixated on my troubles in getting a second book published after my first did not earn back its big advances. The One and Done syndrome. Others were entertained by my selling books in groceries, competing with broccoli for customers.

But there was an underlying theme in almost all the responses I got: being a writer requires more than the ability to write. You also have to be able to sell. Your book and yourself. If you’re lucky, or have a proven sales record, your publisher will do the work for you. But most writers aren’t that lucky. And the market itself is less and less friendly to most writers, and mid-list serious writers most of all. If you’ve been paying attention, you can’t miss the signs. More books being published while more readers spend less time browsing.

So, how does a writer, especially one with minimal publisher support, find readers? Let me suggest three models: Walt Whitman, Franklin Roosevelt, and spaghetti.

Whitman was a shameless self-promoter: writing his own reviews, quoting other writers in praise of his own work, and there are even stories of him wearing a sandwich-board hawking himself. But the essence of Whitman is his poem “Noiseless Patient Spider.”

A NOISELESS, patient spider,
  I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
  Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
  It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
  Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.
   And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
  Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
  Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
  Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
  Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

Is there a better metaphor for the writer’s isolated life? Filaments launched over and over, till the gossamer thread catches somewhere. The key is in the repetition, the ceaseless multiple efforts.

Roosevelt? When asked why he had so many relief programs going all at once during the early days of his administration, his reply was pragmatic and simple. If one thing doesn’t work, do another, but the important thing was to do something, to keep trying. Never assume that the first time will work, and do not wait to see if the first program works before you try another.

Spaghetti? Throw those hot noodles on the wall until something sticks.

The common filament in these three models? Never assume there is a single way to sell books.

In my case, I knew I had a built-in audience for ATHENS in my hometown, and I also knew that my small publisher could not compete with big publishers for national media attention. So I asked my publisher to release the book only in my hometown near Christmas, betting that large sales figures here would become part of the media campaign later when we released the book nationally.

To set up the local release, I arranged to have the first two chapters excerpted in a local alternative newspaper, whose 15,000 copies are distributed free. I worked the local media, getting one newspaper story and some radio and TV interviews. When Barnes and Noble refused to sell the book, I went to the grocery stores. But I made a special deal with them. 65% off the cover price for their cost, but ONLY if they sold the book for $15.00 or less. Revenue wasn’t the goal, sales figures were. Broccoli shoppers were not going to pay full price for literary fiction, I knew that, and I also required that they place the book near an entry way on a separate table, not as part of their magazine display. LOCATION. A lot of small decisions to be made.

But that was Iowa City. The national market is a tougher nut to crack. My publisher could not afford to buy advertising, but they supplied me with lots of review copies. Since ATHENS is a political novel, in addition to the usual national media I made sure that dozens of political figures received copies. I did not ask for reviews or blurbs from them; I just wanted to count them as a reader. Wherever I was scheduled for a reading, I made sure that the mayor of the town got a copy and an invitation to the reading.

Did all this produce stellar results? Well, about as much as a mass mailing does or telephone solicitation: perhaps a 3-5% positive response. But, once again, the goal is quality distilled out of quantity. You want somebody thinking and talking about your book, and that won’t happen unless they know the book exists. That’s the writer’s responsibility: put book and readers together. In my case, since I had 100 extra copies of just the cover---those were sent out as well. Great blurbs on the back from Haven Kimmel and Bob Inman, I thought, might interest a few people to take the next step and look for the book itself.

Did I leave copies on buses and subways, as some writers have been reported to do? Did I go into a store, look for my book, not find it, invent a name and address and then order a copy from a helpful clerk, as one writer told me he did, at dozens of stores in a large city, assuming they would not bother to return a single copy? Do I read my own book on airplanes?

No, none of those, but I do always make it a point to go into a bookstore and look for my book, and if it is not there I go introduce myself to a clerk or manager and tell them about it. Unless you’re Grisham or King or Rice, you don’t have the luxury of humility.

And that’s the most important goal: make sure the bookstores know you’re alive. Especially the independents. Have you got friends in other towns with independent bookstores? Ask them to alert people they know in those stores. Indies have a natural inclination to favor good books from small presses. Something about us all being in the same proverbial small boat, fighting the sharks: chain stores for the indies and big publishers for the small presses.

One important admonition at this point: If you do not believe in yourself, don’t bother. And here’s the crucial thing -- you have to work for your book because you want people to read it. That is not the same thing as wanting them to buy it. Readers will eventually generate buyers….if the book is as good as you think.

Of course, the brutal truth is that readers also buy a lot of crap. Each of us has our own favorite example of “THIS is a bestseller??? Just frigging shoot me!!!” But, for writers of serious literary fiction, crap is harder to sell book by book. Crap gets sold through advertising and puff reviews and having just enough of a gimmick to get the attention of some morning television show. All those venues sell good writing too. No doubt about it. But at that upper level of media attention, the competition for oxygen is much more fierce.

How do you get one of those puffy and/or insightful appreciative reviews? I wish I could tell you how my publisher did it. They sent out almost a hundred review copies and press kits to all the usual suspects of major media. Not one nibble. It would make some sort of sense if the major media simply chose to ignore minor publishers as a rule, but exceptions abound. Small presses do get reviews. Authors with major publishers tell me how they do NOT get reviewed. You can go crazy(ier) trying to find the key to a print review. Short of killing yourself (or killing somebody else) and having an established writer become your champion, you will sleep better if you assume that newspapers and magazines will initially ignore you.

Do you have an email account? Access to the web? Can you figure out how to get email addresses for bookstores? Then you need a short note, pithy and intriguing, an attachment of blurbs or cover art….and a soul hardened for disappointment. Send those filaments out. Announce yourself. Do not take silence too personally.

Finally, never under-estimate the power of radio. My greatest pleasure has been the sympathetic response of various local NPR stations. Start on the ground floor. An interview with Terry Gross or Diane Rehm would be nice, but start with the NPR station nearest you. They are themselves swamped with proposals, but most of them have local news programs, some coverage of local arts stories. All you need is one interview, using the radio voice somewhere inside you, and ask for a copy of the interview on CD. And then you are ready to approach other stations.

You know, I write all this, and I believe it, and there are a lot more promotion ideas I could offer, but on any grey morning I still find myself back on that promontory with Whitman. Sending out filaments, hoping that ATHENS finds the bridge. Enough!…I celebrate and sing myself too much. I’m working on another book now, all about the publishing business, a dying editor, his last manuscript, secret lives, and the act of self-creation.

You know the story.

* * * * *

Larry Baker was raised an air force brat and spent much of his childhood traveling with his family all over the country and then overseas. He started elementary school in Louisiana, went to junior high in the Azores, and graduated from high school in Texas.

Baker, who holds degrees in English from the University of Oklahoma and a doctorate from the University of Iowa, put himself through college by managing movie theaters. He once ran the Admiral Drive-In in Tulsa, Oklahoma, one of the world's largest outdoor theaters and the inspiration for the Flamingo Drive-In Theatre in his first novel. During his "movie" career Baker was robbed four times, shot at once, stabbed once, beat up by a motorcycle gang, sold sex education books at intermission, found a dead woman sitting on a toilet at his drive-in, and caused a thirteen-car pileup on an interstate highway nearby with windblown fireworks.

Baker lives with his wife and two children in Iowa City, Iowa, where he teaches history. His novels, Flamingo Rising and Athens, America can be purchased at fine bookstores everywhere and select Midwestern grocery stores.

Contact Larry Baker at athens@avalon.net.