If You Have Any Love Left In Your Hearts For Me At All, You'll Do This One Thing...

So, Love is the Law has been out for a week, and I've been gratified to see people on Twitter and Facebook—people I don't know, or don't know that well—buying the book and starting to read it in the first week. Some Thelemites have been looking at the book thanks to the recommendations of a couple of prominent members of that community. If there are similar tummlers among Trotskyists, they're invisible to me. Anyway, this early enthusiasm is great because...

Let's talk about marketing. Marketing isn't a science, nor is it an art. It's basically a series of stories marketers tell themselves. One story marketers tell themselves that is that there are four "Ps" to marketing. They are product, place, price, and promotion. As marketing for books is of great concern on the Internet these days, thanks to ebooks and self-publishing, it might be worth looking at Love is the Law based on these four Ps. First thing to realize: authors really have very little control over product marketing. Publicity, on the other hand, yeah, that we can do. Publicity is all about getting to know me, and if you're here, you do. But marketing and those four Ps, that's largely up to the publisher. So how has the publisher been doing?

Product: By now you know. Trotsky. Crowley. Punk rock. Murder. A good book for Dark Horse, as it's not a typical mystery or noir—the competition is keen there—and the countercultural themes are of interest to DH's core audience. Quirky versions of genre material is the DH bread and butter, after all. There are a few infelicities I'd fix in the product, but mistakes happen.

Place: Well...it's a little fucked up. As mentioned before, at Powell's the book appears to be in the graphic novel/comic book section. At Barnes & Noble, it's in the Science Fiction/Fantasy section. Of course, most comics shops have it in their relatively small non-comic book section. This, despite the main BISAC code for the book being FIC022040—FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths. Not that the "women sleuth" audience would be especially thrilled with LitL. (I would have gone for the BISACs for "hard-boiled" or "thriller/crime.") Anyway, place is all over the place, plus comic shops. The advantage is that many comic shops don't return books so readily as normal bookstores—they also don't order so many up front for this reason.

Price: $7.99, cheap! But this was a last-minute price change. The book was pre-sold and solicited as a $14.99 book, so the sell-in reflects the more expensive price. The price drop also played havoc with ebook pricing, with the NOOK version still priced at over $10. I like the price—it's easier to sell a book for under ten bucks, obviously—but price confusion has been a problem.

Promotion: The sad fact is that this book was orphaned when the editor left the company back a few months ago. The replacement editor was able, but new and had never promoted or even edited a prose novel before. So, promotion has been virtually non-existent. It was solicited along with all the other DH products for the month, it was placed on NetGalley, and I did a brief Q/A for Diamond Bookshelf (which I just remembered to check to see if it's live as I was typing now). Everything else has been me: I got the CriminalElement.com review because I wrote a query and sent in an e-galley. I got the NPR.org review because Jason Heller knows me and I got him interested in the book at Worldcon. I have a LitReactor Q/A next month because I appealed to Paul Tremblay for help. The other couple of reviews, this podcast interview, and most of the rest of what might be coming down the pike promotion-wise is due to my own contacts and query letters and offers of review copies.

Anyway, this is pretty much a recipe for the destruction of a book. Relatively uncommercial product, scattered placement, confusing price, marginal promotion. Imagine a durian-flavored candy bar for sale for fifty cents sometimes and a buck sixty-three (exact change only) other times, available largely at gourmet food shops and gas stations, sold in a plain brown wrapper as "Food Product Beta" via commercials that air exclusively on the Golf Channel at 3am.

Which brings me to the subject of this post: if you happened to be one of the people who got a copy of Love is the Law, and if you have the urge to do so, please review it sooner rather than later. You can review it on your blog; or amazon or bn.com or goodreads; or as a series of incomprehensible tweets; or if you have access to one, maybe even a real live genuine magazine. Or just tell the one weird friend you have that might like the book more than you did.

Thanks.