Mailbag: Paperbacks, Platform, and Pushing Copies

A response to an often-asked question about marketing one's fiction.

Photo by David Salamanca on Unsplash

Before we get into today’s mailbag, I have to declare a small victory. For those that didn’t know, the ridiculous prank Change.org petition we started in the wake of my customer service call with Kindle — the one where they rejected my mermaid from the mermaid category for having too few mermaids — actually was successful almost immediately. Amazon folded like a paper chair:

My best guess honestly is that it dominated that specific chart so thoroughly that they were gaming it a bit to keep it off of other charts, but who knows why they did this? It’s Byzantine by design like everything at Amazon: I find it hilarious that we’ve had to fight them on something for literally every release. In any event, make sure you have your copy:

• Order Overmorrow directly from me for $3.99

• Order Overmorrow for your Kindle for $3.99

• Preorder the Paperback

Today’s mailbag is a frequently asked question I get about marketing, paperbacks, and related issues. Like other regular mailbag questions, I added it to the FAQ.

Dear Lancelot —

I hope the end of spring/beginning of summer is being kind to you.

I want you to know that I still often think of the essay you recently posted about your father. I may use it next year as an example in an essay-writing class I teach here in [locale].

I am looking for some advice and I think you might be the best person to give it. Feel free to decline.

Some backstory before the request:

About 8 years ago I, almost on a whim, wrote a novel which I knew had no marketability. It was a hollow earth pulp fictiony thing with gobs of dinosaurs, sort of an homage to the stuff I read as an adolescent. I wrote it just to see if I could do it, then threw it up on Amazon as an ebook with little to no fanfare. The results were, as you can expect, meagre, but I did it just to do it, not make money.

Cut to today. In the time since, I have been toiling over a fantasy novel and am ready to put it into the world. I could do the same as before, just throw it on KDP as an ebook. But I have a few different feelings about things than I did when I did the hollow earth book. In the time since, I see Amazon in a more negative light and would like to give people other options. I also have been collecting vintage paperbacks and kind of, for maybe just vanity's sake, would like to have the book available in the paperback format.

I know some options I have, various companies that cater to self-publishers. The physical books you make are the quality I'm looking for. When I ordered my physical copies of G&G3, I ordered them on the German Amazon because the shipping was cheaper to Slovakia. The book itself reads that it was printed Poland by Amazon. So, do you just use the Amazon print-on-demand? Or do you utilize a number of resources? (The copyright page of the book says it was printed in the US, oddly enough.)

Another question: I am perfectly happy just releasing the book into the world like the last one ("Just put it out there. Eventually someone will read it and maybe say something nice about it.") without fanfare or advertising. I am not a salesman. I loathe plugging my stuff. At the same time, at the time I published the hollow earth book, I had an active blog that may (or may not) have attracted readers to the book. That blog is dead because the platform owners wanted to feed the contents of the platform to AI to generate revenue. I am vehemently against generative AI, so I didn't want to feed that machine and stopped posting there. (This was on tumblr, back in the day.) I also abandoned twitter because it became a cesspool of depression. So, I have no active online presence anymore. I have toyed with doing a YouTube channel about the vintage paperbacks I collect, but I know I would just be feeding the machine again. Maybe there's no question here after all aside from "What do you think?" Is an online presence worth the effort, tears, sweat, &c, despite all the ills that the internet fuels? I feel so conflicted about that one, and I have no one around me who works creatively to discuss this with, so I turn to you.

Anyway, like I said, you can ignore all this, but I value your opinion/experience if you're willing to share it.

Dear Hollow Earth Sentient Dinosaur Novelist—

Thanks for the encouragement and glad you liked the piece about my father.

For starters, there’s no such thing as no marketability. You are never the only person who wants to read your book or you would never have written it. A public is the culmination of the idea — the end in the beginning — of inspiration and the perspiration and exsanguination involved in the activity of having written it. The culmination of the audience — of finding its public — is what remains. The key is finding any given book’s public and sometimes that’s the work of a lifetime or even several lifetimes when it involves your children or the children of your closest things. Lord of the Rings was allegedly unmarketable. Gatsby was rediscovered posthumously. The sheer size of Harry Potter books was considered noncommercial within the young adult novel sector. I could go on.

So I don’t believe that for an instant. The trick is finding enough of the right people that they pass on your work to the next generation of readers. Sometimes that’s an unbroken chain of one or two readers every generation until the book finds its public.

As far as marketability goes, there are plenty of subterranean adventures selling well, not least of which is Jules Verne himself.

But throwing anything up on Amazon with naught but a prayer goes well for almost no seller or business. It’s good “just to do it” of course, rather than not do it, for the sake of a generative spirit and to experience of becoming, but why not throw some other effort into it? Why not give it a shot to become generative to as many folks as possible? Why not make money so that you can afford the time to make more books?

Do you believe in yourself so little?

If so, borrow my faith in you for awhile: you can do this. I have unconditional confidence in you.

As Tim Grahl says: marketing is (1) creating lasting connections with people through (2) a focus on being relentlessly helpful. That “helpful” might just be giving them more of the fiction they want in instalments. Or it might be helping them in their own careers such as this response here. But that’s what marketing really is: meeting needs in the marketplace with real people you know and building a community of trust wherein we exchange things. It’s far, far more than commerce. In fact, my hunch is that you hate marketing solely for commerce, but the true marketplace of ideas entices you.

Therefore put effort into finding said public. Said αγορα.

That said, you wrote the novel. Has anyone beta read it? Have you hired a ghost editor? Have you swapped either with your local critique circle or with a working novelist? Have you hired a competent cover designer who works with bestselling books on the regular and knows the keys to different genre trends?

All of these you’ll need to do prior to pitching it or self publishing it.

Why not pitch it first? There are probably 125-200 agents currently accepting pitches in this genre, internationally. Why not give it a shot at selling traditionally?

It’ll buy you time to write something else for a while as the rejections roll in!

Then, if that fails — and even if it succeeds you’re still responsible for all of your own marketing — you can still self produce.

Either way you’re going to have to treat it like a business if you want to make any money at it. And you don’t have to! There are more things in life than making money, acquiring power, experiencing pleasure, garnering fame, or receiving lauds. I’ve signed traditional and indie contracts both, have licensed my rights — any way you keep selling a work and earning money, it all starts to snowball if you reinvest the time, money, mailing lists, etc.

Not that money is the end. It’s only a means for making more art.

As far as covers go, I generally use Damonza as I said in my guest post for Damon “Playfulness Makes the Best Book Covers.” But I have also hired (as was the case for Gods and Globes III) actual illustrators and done the typography myself. The typesetting is all me via Vellum, though Atticus is a sufficient program as well.

For printing and distribution I use everyone I can, every medium I can, every distribution channel that I can. So yes Ingram’s backend and yes Amazon and yes to several other outlets, printers, whatever. I have a buddy that did POD long enough that he started bulk ordering from China. Then he bought his own printer and now goes straight to the distributor. He makes thousands for every author visit just for showing up and handsells thousands every year. He’s not on Nielsen’s bookscan with anything close to his actual numbers. Why would he be? So basically his model just makes it easier for folks to get. I want the person who wants my book to get it as soon as possible. Why worry about who has access to my real numbers unless I’m desperate for an agent?

I’m thinking of doing a longer post at some point that will offer a Sell What You Write cheat sheet, like a white page. If you’re interested in that cheat sheet, please say so in the comments. It’ll help me decide whether or not to release that:

As far as “feeding the machine” goes, at some point you should watch the documentary Forget Shorter Showers:

Any decision to participate in civil society is a decision to embrace the evils that are always-already enmeshed with its goods. We’re caught in the middle of cosmic battle from the moment we’re born into the world until the day we die. This is why the rich young ruler was asked to sell everything: he’d never murdered, but the systems that made him rich did. The second phase of being a good man — if you’ve mastered personal piety — is to divest from said systems.

I get it.

So at some point — unless you’re growing a tree from seed in your backyard, pulping it, reaming paper, hand-printing with a letterpress made with metal you founded from ore you mined and inking it with charcoal-plus-gum arabic you sourced, pressing it, and hand stitching it and binding it — another human or tech will get involved in the process. And there are positives and negatives to that, just ask Ben Franklin, author of Fart Proudly. When it comes to platform, post own site and syndicate everywhere. You’ll notice my site is (generally) a permanent archive of this newsletter and others.

So that helps. But you need a rolodex: own the info of your audience, don’t let some third party get between you and your relationships, whether parasocial, social, intimate, or inner circle. If nothing else, it’s unfair to your readers to make sure that Facebook or whoever else is the middle man. I’ve migrated email systems probably four times, but it’s the same list.

An online presence need not be compromising in biometrics or family info or whatever. It’s not necessarily smarmy sales.

It’s not even necessary to let a “medium” into your “social” spheres: you can own the data that folks want you to own.

The book Your First 1,000 Copies by Grahl would help with this, but so would the white page if there was interest in me offering Sell What You Write to folks (comment below, if so).

Does that help?

unconditional love, respect, and confidence from here at The End

Lancelot