My 8-year old daughter may be the only reader I know who hasn't yet tackled The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's mystery that features a Harvard art historian and semiotician as its sleuth. The book has sold millions of copies since its publication last March, and continues to crop up regularly in my conversations with friends and colleagues.
The astonishing sales record of the book, and its seeming omnipresence during the past year, did not come about by good luck. Doubleday, Brown's trade publisher ("trade" books are aimed at the commercial market, as opposed to academic or scholarly audiences), sent out 10,000 free review copies of the book before it was published, and sent the author on a grueling promotional jag in support of the book.
I have even read speculation that Doubleday set out to determine whether a book by an author with modest prior sales could, with such a massive marketing campaign, become a best seller. Obviously, the answer is yes.
When I set off on my own adventures into the trade-publishing world a year ago (as I chronicled in a previous column), I was humble enough not to expect the Dan Brown treatment. My book, like the vast majority of trade books published today (including Brown's previous books), will be counted a grand success if it sells 10,000 copies.
But I did expect that my main responsibility as an author would be to write a book of the highest literary quality; I assumed it was the publisher's job to market and promote it.
My first clue that I had some serious misconceptions about this division of labor came a few months after signing my contract with an independent trade publisher, when I struck up a correspondence with another author whose book had just been published by the same press. She felt insulted about the lack of promotional efforts that her book had received from our publisher, and warned me to expect similar treatment.
After hearing this, I wondered whether I had made a mistake, so I set about reading every essay or article I could find, from both editors and authors, about the successful promotion of trade books.
Almost every article repeated the same basic principle: For the vast majority of successful trade books published today, the responsibility for the promoting, marketing, and selling of the book breaks down somewhere into this neighborhood: The publisher does 5 percent; the author does the rest.
That may seem ridiculously disproportionate at first. Shouldn't the publishers be the ones to sell the books they put on the market?
Maybe they should. But the reality is that they usually don't, and aspiring trade authors -- including those academics toiling away at the crossover book that they hope will vault them into the public sphere -- soon realize that they are on their own in the conceiving and drafting stages of their manuscript and proposal, in their revisions of the book with their editor, and in the promotional work they do after it has been published.
Armed me with this new knowledge, I spent lots of time last fall and winter brainstorming every possible means I might use to help sell my book. Then I set to work, trying to follow up on every idea for which I could make time in my academic schedule:
I worked with my brother-in-law, a professional Web designer, to construct a Web site for the book and register it with search engines. Like many Web advertisers, I paid a small monthly fee to ensure that my site would land as high as possible on the list of returns for certain key word searches related to my book's topic.
I wrote many e-mail messages and letters, and ghost-wrote many more for my editor, to various individuals in the national nonprofit organization that raises money and public awareness for the illness I have (Crohn's Disease) that is the subject of my book. That letter campaign eventually led to a conference call between my publisher's marketing team and the nonprofit's publicity person that produced a strong joint marketing plan.
I wrote an essay for the major trade magazine aimed at doctors and patients with my illness, and agreed with the editor to let the magazine run the piece free in exchange for mentioning the book in my article.
I submitted an excerpt of my book to another magazine with which I had previously published a few essays, and again let the excerpt be published free in exchange for a mention of my book in my author byline.
I sent review copies to all of my university alumni magazines, and wrote letters and sent copies to several periodical publications to which I regularly contribute.
I wrote letters to book editors in the cities in which I have lived, begging them to consider reviewing the book.
I wrote an op-ed commentary about an issue related to my illness, and submitted it to newspapers around the country.
I wrote letters and sent copies of the book to the Web masters of several sites dedicated to my illness.
I compiled an e-mail list of everyone who has ever sent me an e-mail, or thought about sending me an e-mail, or sent an e-mail to anyone I know, and sent a message to all of them announcing the book's publication.
I worked with the publisher to arrange a schedule of readings and signings this spring that will have me visiting bookstores throughout New England for the next couple of months.
I requested a course reduction from the college, and took a pay cut in exchange for it, to allow me to do that traveling and promotion as effectively as possible.
All of those efforts took, and continue to take, both time and money -- and I have no guarantees that I will be repaid for those efforts with additional book sales. But I am confident I have at least given my book a chance to succeed in an overcrowded market.
Fifteen years ago, when I was banging out my first imitation Hemingway novel on my parents' typewriter, I would have been righteously indignant at the expectation that I would have to work so hard for my book after I had finished writing it. I would have been especially disgusted at the thought that the market would have any influence on my book, or on the way I presented it to people.
These days I understand a little more clearly that publishers have to sell books to survive, that they can sell books most effectively when they can plug them into existing market categories, and that authors can facilitate that process -- and hence sales -- pretty dramatically.
While I understand these realities, I still don't like them. I count all of this time I am spending shilling my first book as time I should be spending revising the manuscript for my second book, or starting my third.
Even were I to turn to a new project, though, my experiences in trade publishing thus far would not allow me to write without the specter of the market looming over my shoulder, occasionally nudging my manuscript in this or that direction. If you ever want to see this thing in print, the specter would say gruffly, you'd better pay me mind.
I know I'd better pay him mind, but that doesn't erase the feeling that I am compromising my principles by thinking about the marketability of a work, and engaging in these shameless acts of self-promotion, instead of focusing exclusively on ensuring the highest literary quality of my books.
Maybe if I were a real artist, I would write my next book without any thought to the market, and then let the chips fall where they might: If I got published, terrific; if not, I would still have produced a work of art, even if no one else appreciated it.
But that idealistic author in me fights against the part of me that likes to see my name in print, that wants to know that people are reading my work, and that takes great pleasure in the idea that my words might change the world and its inhabitants in some tiny way.
It fights now, too, against the simple but intense pleasure of having seen my book launched into the world a few weeks ago, and of holding that first copy tightly in my hands.
I will probably always hold this book more tightly in my hands, and more tightly to my chest, than anything else I might write, because when I wrote this one I wasn't thinking about the market. I didn't know anything about it at the time.
That ignorance on my part created a long and extended struggle to find a publisher -- an experience I'm glad I won't have to repeat. I have the knowledge now to conceive and shepherd future trade books into print more efficiently, and I am grateful for that knowledge, and plan to put it to good use.
But this newfound awareness of the market makes me feel a little bit like my 8-year-old daughter must be feeling these days -- aside from her deserved shame at not yet tackling The Da Vinci Code -- in the long wake of the winter holiday season. Although she hasn't spoken to us about it openly yet, I saw and heard some things this past Christmas that told me she's figured out the truth about Santa Claus.
Part of her no doubt feels smug and a bit wiser at her admittance into this new community of nonbelievers; she shares a secret with the adults, one that she can lord over the naïve and innocent, like her younger sisters.
But I'm sure another part of her laments the loss of that childhood fantasy, the belief in something pure and good, untainted by the adult world of hard truths and the laws of the universe or the marketplace.
And I'm sure that, like her father, she feels the occasional tug of nostalgia for those days of ignorance and innocence.
Alas, those days are gone for good. Exit innocence, purity, and Santa Claus.
Enter the market, self-promotion, and The Da Vinci Code.
