Andy Free's Blog - Posts Tagged "publishing"
The Better Mousetrap Fallacy
I’m continuing on my mission of disagreeing with well-known authors who know more than I do. Why not? It’s more interesting than bland agreement. Fame of the person I am disagreeing with doesn’t matter to me anyway – finding what’s true matters, and no one has an exclusive license on that activity. So, here goes…
Wally Lamb is a well-known author with at least two best-selling novels (She’s Come Undone and This Much I Know is True) that skyrocketed their way to success after being selected by the Oprah Winfrey Book Club. He wrote: “If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.” I disagree unless a major caveat is inserted. My edited version would read: “If the book is true, and you promote the hell out of it, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.”
Lamb’s most successful books were written in the early and late 1990s, before the massive explosion in media quantity that eBooks brought. Even in those days, I have to believe that Lamb, his publicist, or his publisher, put in extensive effort to get Oprah Winfrey’s attention in order to get a Book Club recommendation. This is not meant as a criticism. It doesn’t matter how good something is, it takes effort to get it in front of the right people. The explosion in media quantity and pervasiveness of the Internet, with its insidious ability to distract people and shorten their attention spans, combine to make the challenges in book marketing greater than ever before. As an author, don’t ever be misled into confusing “ease of posting” with “ease of promoting.” The hard work of writing a book and editing it is followed by the brutally difficult (and many times relatively unrewarding) marketing effort. Or perhaps it is more correct to write that the experienced author combines promotion with writing and editing, in order to get as successful a book launch as possible. Then the marketing effort continues.
Let’s first debunk the “better mousetrap” analogy. (By the way, as a humorous side note, when I first typed that it came out “musetrap,” which seemed eerily appropriate for a writer!) The idea goes that if you create a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Okay, so let’s talk rodents: Wily little beasties. Hard to catch. Smelly and disease-laden. So a better mousetrap sounds pretty good, and would appeal to a vast number of people. But first you have to design it, patent it, and manufacture it in enough quantity to meet demand – a significant challenge. Second, you will still have to promote it, probably pretty heavily. Why? Because people probably will need to be persuaded that it really is better before they shell out money for it. Eventually, if it really is noticeably better, word of mouth might reduce or even eliminate the need for heavy promotion.
So now let’s shift to the realm of books and my better, er, musetrap. Here we are facing a hidden but very significant challenge that our mousetrap in the last paragraph did not face. This challenge is prevalent in the eBook and music markets – lots and lots of free competition! Worse yet, many of the potential audience members are not even interested in your little musetrap (maybe it’s not their favorite genre). Just about anyone who has a home will be interested in your mousetrap. Not so for your literary musetrap.
Let’s close with a depressing but accurate analogy (which I will follow with an optimistic word of cheer so I don’t leave anyone discouraged). When you post your eBook without having done a lot of prior promotion, as I did, you will notice that it immediately begins to drop in the rankings (such as Amazon’s rankings). It is as if you are magically transported with your manuscript into an open grave, and people immediately start shoveling dirt in your face. Desperately, you try to claw your way out, but the dirt just keeps coming, so it takes a lot of perseverance to keep going and not be buried alive. What is the “dirt” in my analogy? It’s the continuing stream of books by better known authors that come flooding in on top of yours, pushing it down in the rankings.
I published first and promoted second partly through ignorance and partly through “wanting to get the damn book out there” after years in the hopper being subjected to my endless perfectionistic maunderings. “Either put up or shut up,” I said to myself, and I felt I needed to focus on finishing the book and publishing it. I have a full time day job, write part time and also have a part time music studio, with an occasional sleeping hobby, so sometimes these priorities must get set.
And here is the optimistic note of cheer I promised to offset my depressing and melodramatic “open grave” analogy: So far, though I am struggling to stay optimistic some days, it has been worth it. I’m getting useful feedback from readers and reviewers on Book 1, Avalon: Companions. It is starting to sell (though I am holding onto the day job!) I am writing Book 2 of the series and hope to publish it in February 2017 if all goes well. I’m getting the hang of book promotion and social media. I’m doing some killer graphics and art along the way (an older interest that I had to dust off hastily in order to do the book promotion).
In the end, life is just plain hard for almost all of us, but I plan to beat the ever-loving hell out of it before I exit the arena and am carried out on my shield, maybe even to some accolades one fine day. Right now, the sky is blue, my sword is sharp, my eyes are keen, and the blood runs hot in my veins. I was meant to be a warrior, not a lamb, and this is one of my battlefields. (I really do have to apologize for that last pun at Mr. Lamb’s expense, but there was absolutely no way I could resist once I thought of it. I am JUST KIDDING. Oops, another lamb-related pun!) Okay, I’ll shut up now.
Books mentioned in this blog post:
She's Come Undone
I Know This Much Is True
Avalon: Companions
Wally Lamb is a well-known author with at least two best-selling novels (She’s Come Undone and This Much I Know is True) that skyrocketed their way to success after being selected by the Oprah Winfrey Book Club. He wrote: “If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.” I disagree unless a major caveat is inserted. My edited version would read: “If the book is true, and you promote the hell out of it, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.”
Lamb’s most successful books were written in the early and late 1990s, before the massive explosion in media quantity that eBooks brought. Even in those days, I have to believe that Lamb, his publicist, or his publisher, put in extensive effort to get Oprah Winfrey’s attention in order to get a Book Club recommendation. This is not meant as a criticism. It doesn’t matter how good something is, it takes effort to get it in front of the right people. The explosion in media quantity and pervasiveness of the Internet, with its insidious ability to distract people and shorten their attention spans, combine to make the challenges in book marketing greater than ever before. As an author, don’t ever be misled into confusing “ease of posting” with “ease of promoting.” The hard work of writing a book and editing it is followed by the brutally difficult (and many times relatively unrewarding) marketing effort. Or perhaps it is more correct to write that the experienced author combines promotion with writing and editing, in order to get as successful a book launch as possible. Then the marketing effort continues.
Let’s first debunk the “better mousetrap” analogy. (By the way, as a humorous side note, when I first typed that it came out “musetrap,” which seemed eerily appropriate for a writer!) The idea goes that if you create a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Okay, so let’s talk rodents: Wily little beasties. Hard to catch. Smelly and disease-laden. So a better mousetrap sounds pretty good, and would appeal to a vast number of people. But first you have to design it, patent it, and manufacture it in enough quantity to meet demand – a significant challenge. Second, you will still have to promote it, probably pretty heavily. Why? Because people probably will need to be persuaded that it really is better before they shell out money for it. Eventually, if it really is noticeably better, word of mouth might reduce or even eliminate the need for heavy promotion.
So now let’s shift to the realm of books and my better, er, musetrap. Here we are facing a hidden but very significant challenge that our mousetrap in the last paragraph did not face. This challenge is prevalent in the eBook and music markets – lots and lots of free competition! Worse yet, many of the potential audience members are not even interested in your little musetrap (maybe it’s not their favorite genre). Just about anyone who has a home will be interested in your mousetrap. Not so for your literary musetrap.
Let’s close with a depressing but accurate analogy (which I will follow with an optimistic word of cheer so I don’t leave anyone discouraged). When you post your eBook without having done a lot of prior promotion, as I did, you will notice that it immediately begins to drop in the rankings (such as Amazon’s rankings). It is as if you are magically transported with your manuscript into an open grave, and people immediately start shoveling dirt in your face. Desperately, you try to claw your way out, but the dirt just keeps coming, so it takes a lot of perseverance to keep going and not be buried alive. What is the “dirt” in my analogy? It’s the continuing stream of books by better known authors that come flooding in on top of yours, pushing it down in the rankings.
I published first and promoted second partly through ignorance and partly through “wanting to get the damn book out there” after years in the hopper being subjected to my endless perfectionistic maunderings. “Either put up or shut up,” I said to myself, and I felt I needed to focus on finishing the book and publishing it. I have a full time day job, write part time and also have a part time music studio, with an occasional sleeping hobby, so sometimes these priorities must get set.
And here is the optimistic note of cheer I promised to offset my depressing and melodramatic “open grave” analogy: So far, though I am struggling to stay optimistic some days, it has been worth it. I’m getting useful feedback from readers and reviewers on Book 1, Avalon: Companions. It is starting to sell (though I am holding onto the day job!) I am writing Book 2 of the series and hope to publish it in February 2017 if all goes well. I’m getting the hang of book promotion and social media. I’m doing some killer graphics and art along the way (an older interest that I had to dust off hastily in order to do the book promotion).
In the end, life is just plain hard for almost all of us, but I plan to beat the ever-loving hell out of it before I exit the arena and am carried out on my shield, maybe even to some accolades one fine day. Right now, the sky is blue, my sword is sharp, my eyes are keen, and the blood runs hot in my veins. I was meant to be a warrior, not a lamb, and this is one of my battlefields. (I really do have to apologize for that last pun at Mr. Lamb’s expense, but there was absolutely no way I could resist once I thought of it. I am JUST KIDDING. Oops, another lamb-related pun!) Okay, I’ll shut up now.
Books mentioned in this blog post:
She's Come Undone
I Know This Much Is True
Avalon: Companions
