It’s a damn good story. If you have any comments, please write them on the back of a check. — Erle Stanley Gardener
I interviewed a photographer recently who took first place in a local art show. He found his success relatively late in life, after many years refining his art.
I asked him what advice he would give to beginners — one of those standard questions reporters ask artistic types when doing a quickie profile. He surprised me by saying, “Learn to do business.”
He said he spent decades in a day job working for a clothing retailer, and learned how to run a business. He learned about marketing, advertising and sales promotion; he learned about getting and keeping customers.
This was different than the usual answer I get from artists and writers, usually having to do with following your inner muse, not giving up the first (thousand) times you are rejected, believing in your talent, etc.
The photographer told me that he finally achieved success when he focused on where his true talents lay, and determined how to separate business and creativity. “Always make business decisions for business reasons, and make creative decisions for creative reasons,” he said.
In short, take the picture because of the art. Then sell it like a businessman.
That combination of art and business helped create the Literary Underworld, and the other author cooperatives of which I am proud to participate.
In this modern world, authors only survive by working together. If there was ever a time when an author could simply write a book, send it to the publisher and sit back waiting for the big fat royalty checks, that time is not now. If you’ve been a published author for any length of time, you know that the single biggest determining factor for your book’s success — besides its inherent quality, of course — is the effort you put into selling it.
Oh, publishers do what they can for us. A good publisher will market your book, get it on the shelves as much as they can and spread the word as far as it will go. But even the New York publishers only have so much money for marketing, and for reasons passing understanding, they spend the majority of their marketing dollars on the top five names on their lists — in short, the authors who really don’t need the help.
And most of us are not with New York. Most of us are signed to small- to mid-size presses, and the money they have for marketing is scant.
It’s on you, the time I spend talking up my book. It’s my presence at conventions, book fairs, author dinners, book clubs and other such places. It’s the shoe-leather method of selling books.
Consider this math, friends: If you buy a book from Books-a-Million that cost $10, about $4 went to the store. The remainder is chopped up between distributor and publisher according to contract. On average, the author got 70 cents of your $10. (Under especially evil contracts, it could be as little as 40 cents.)
However, if the author sells the book directly to you, you still pay $10— but the author gets to keep as much as $4. Thus, it’s in an author’s best interest to sell the book himself— if he can.
The problem is, we all have lives. We have day jobs and kids, we have only so much money and time and soul to spare. Sure, you can make your whole life about selling your book, clock out on Friday and hit the road. But then you’ll be broke from endless hotel rooms and fast food, and your spouse will forget your middle name.
The Literary Underworld began, like so many ideas, because I was bored in the dealer’s room. I looked around and saw five or six other authors just like me at separate tables, each with one or two books in front of us. It clogged the room, all those one-book authors — and anytime someone had a panel, they had to close up.
So three of us started sharing a table. We split costs, covered for each other and — best of all — now we only had to make back one-third the outlay in order to make a profit on the show. We were making business decisions for business reasons.
In time, other authors wanted in on the deal. After all, for a speculative fiction author, a convention is a) the best place to sell your book, and b) the most expensive place to sell your book. Figuring your cost for getting to the show, your hotel room, the cost of your table and food, and you may have to sell $500 worth of books — after the publisher’s portion is paid — just to break even. Good luck.
What about online? Sure, Amazon carries everything. These days, a cat with above-average dexterity can type up a short story and sell it on the Kindle. That universal availability is also the worst thing for an author trying to get her book out there: she’s competing against every book in the known universe. It’s nearly impossible to get attention for your book without some other X-factor.
So the Literary Underworld launched its web store to offer speculative fiction from small press in one place, an online dealer’s room for those who missed us at the shows. We carry over 100 titles (rotating in and out of the store) from dozens of authors and small presses. We travel to conventions as often as the budget will allow, hawking our members’ books in order to help them keep a larger portion of the money.
Of course, not every author cooperative handles the retail end. In fact, nearly all of them don’t, because they’re not as crazy as I am. Imagicopter has been running for a few years now without touching a dime, setting up author events — what I call speak-n-signs — and coordinating convention appearances for its membership. In fact, Imagicopter has done such a great job promoting its authors that it spawned a chapter in Mississippi and we’re working on a St. Louis chapter for those of us up here in the chilly Midwest.
My publisher and good friend, Frank Fradella, made a point in a convention panel once that has stuck in my mind as I steer my little ship through iceberg-infested waters. He said that the great artists of the Renaissance are not necessarily remembered because they were each great artists on their own, although many of them were. They are remembered instead as the artists of the Renaissance, because they lived in a time when the collective quality of the art shot upward, when new ideas were formed, and they learned from each other, supported each other and formed a movement.
That isn’t necessarily to say that we are in a renaissance now, mind you. This is the age of Twilight and Pride, Prejudice and Zombies. But I think we are in a unique place, at this focal point of technology, business and art, to form our own vision of how our stories will be sold. We work together, promote each other and collectively can do much better things than any of us could on our own. We help each other with the business, so we can make our creative decisions for creative reasons.
That may not seem as important as the brushstrokes of the Renaissance painters, but it should be obvious that work that is not sold is work that is unread.
And what good is a story if no one reads it?
Elizabeth Donald is a writer fond of things that go chomp in the night. She is a three-time winner of the Darrell Award for speculative fiction, including one for her short-story collection, Setting Suns. She is the author of the Nocturnal Urges vampire mystery series and numerous short stories and novellas in the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres. She is founder and head zookeeper of the Literary Underworld, an author cooperative helping small-press writers promote and sell their work. By day she is a reporter in the St. Louis region, which provides her with an endless source of material, and writes CultureGeek, a pop-culture column and blog. Her latest releases include The Cold Ones and its sequel Blackfire, a zombie invasion story that will conclude in 2013.
http://www.elizabethdonald.com
http://www.literaryunderworld.com
http://literaryunderworld.blogspot.com
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