pbray | Book promotion, it's not for the faint of heart

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A friend is working with a new house publicist on their 2014 book release. For obvious reasons I will not name either friend or publisher, but the marketing plan seems to have missed the point that this essay was meant in jest Our Marketing Plan by Ellis Weiner.

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From:

tryslora

...publicity terrifies me.

And that article was hysterical. And it's also terrifying that it's that close to reality in some cases.

From:

pbray.livejournal.com

It's hysterically funny because it rings all too true :-)

From:

tryslora

Yes it does! Listening to all my friends in the publishing world (and the exhaustion of blog tours, etc.) is one of the things that terrifies me about publishing in general. It amazes me how much energy authors need to (and DO) put into getting the word out about their work.

From:

sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com

Yeah, me too, officially terrified O_O

From:

pbray.livejournal.com

Publicity is exhausting, especially because no one really knows which bits work and which don't. What works for one author doesn't work for another, the things that seemed fresh and interesting when the first authors did them are now trite and boring... So you get these publicity guides which basically say "Do everything anyone has ever heard of."

I've seen multiple guides to getting published that urge unpublished authors to blog every day and build an online blog brand so they can use that to launch their book. And meanwhile I'm thinking "Maybe instead they should use their energy to write a book worth launching..."

From:

sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com

Yeah. (My employer publishes an online guide to the self-promotion of scholarly journal articles, which is toned down a lot for the target audience but, within those parameters, does pretty much say "Do everything anyone has ever heard of.")

If there's one thing working in the publishing industry for nearly two decades has taught me, it's that nobody really knows why anything anywhere in the process works or doesn't work (except for the machines and the code: those, we understand).

From:

vespican.livejournal.com

Not knowing what works sometimes reflects on what we post on line. We post something that we think we be of enormous importance and draw comments from all over, and yet it appears that no one sees it. The next day we put up something trite, just to fill space, and the comments flood in. Go figure.
Dave