I will never be a famous, wildly successful author. I know that because I know what all famous, wildly successful authors know: In order for your book to get attention, you must generate it yourself. That's something I hate doing.
When I was an editor, I would tell authors, once they had submitted their final manuscripts, that now the hard work would begin. I was referring to the tedious tasks of reviewing copy edits, reading page proofs, creating an index. It's kind of like washing the dishes after a great dinner party. You just want to go to bed, but there's more work to be done, and it's no longer the fun part.
That's all just to get the physical book produced. The really hard work, the job that is more taxing than writing or producing a book, is promoting and marketing it. Increasingly, especially with academic presses, the promotion is left up to the author. As an academic, you've been trained to do one thing—to write and do research in your discipline. But now you have to learn a whole new set of skills. Believe me, it makes writing the book look easy.
Once the bound copy is in hand, many authors have fantasies about having a book party. Book parties are always fun, but unless you can get Ariana Huffington or Oprah to come, it won't do much for sales or promotion. You'll spend money on wine and cheese and enjoy some hangout time with friends. There's nothing wrong with that. A party is an opportunity to celebrate what was, no doubt, a long and arduous ordeal—not only for you, but also for those who had to put up with you during the writing (and editing) process.
It's important to mark the achievement because, on the actual publication date, nothing is likely to happen. There will be no fireworks, probably no splashy article in The New York Times Book Review, no appearance on The Colbert Report. The scholarly-review process moves very slowly. For many academic books, it can take more than a year before any mention of the work appears in print. Sometimes it can take two years. Or longer.
So go ahead and party down. And then prepare to get to work.
The easiest way to market a book is to write it with a readership in mind. If there are only 14 people in your sub-sub-discipline who might be interested in your topic, consider yourself fortunate to have found a publisher. If you want to be read more widely and well, you must write well.
As I've mentioned countless times in this column, steering away from disciplinary jargon (when you can get away with it) will help readers from other fields make use of your research. Not all economists are going to be read by sociologists and political scientists, but some will be. Why not work a little harder on the prose to invite new audiences in rather than shut them out? Why not start out writing with as large a readership in mind as possible?
That's difficult. You may not be able to accomplish it in the first few drafts. After you've completed your manuscript, but before you send it to your publisher, it is a good idea to have people from contiguous fields look it over. Is the argument clear to them? Does the language draw them in or put them off? Have you spun out the implications of your argument so that readers can understand the importance of the work? Is it written in such a way that an upper-level undergraduate could get it?
Putting your manuscript to a test before a few trusted colleagues seems, I know, like an extra step in an already long process. Most of us are up against deadlines and are reluctant to ask similarly overburdened friends for help. But I can't stress enough how essential it is to produce a book that will be readable.
Assuming that you have written the best book you possibly can, and have had a throw-down, blowout book party, what then?
The main thing is to realize that you are the master of your marketing fate. A good publisher will support your efforts—it will print posters and postcards, make fliers offering discounts, link to your Web site from its own, and work with event coordinators to ensure that copies of your book are available for sale at meetings and conferences important in your field. But the initiative will have to come from you.
Some people will take to that chore as if they were born to it. Sometimes family members or entrepreneurial friends will lead the publicity charge, doing the grunt work for you. But you are the best person to know: Whose work are you in conversation with? Who will be most interested in what you've done?
Think first about your own discipline. What are the main meetings? What are the most important journals? What specialized conferences are most relevant to your work? Your publisher will ask you those questions but will have limited resources to follow up. It is in your best interest to buy a boatload of copies (you will get an author's discount) and send them out yourself to people who may be in a position to help market the book. While your publisher will send review copies to editors of the journals you specify, you might want to widen the circle. Send a copy to an assistant editor at a journal or to a member of its advisory board. Give copies to people in your field who might be asked to review it. Send your book to bloggers. Generally publishers are good at supporting those kinds of efforts but you never know when slipping someone an extra copy might pay off.
Introduce yourself to journal editors at conferences, but don't try to hand them your book there; they already have tons of stuff to lug home. Collect business cards and then follow up.
Go back to the reader's reports commissioned by the publisher. They always ask questions about the market. Now that you're no longer worried about adjusting the content, reread the reports and pay attention to what the readers said about things like how the book would be used in courses and whether it would be of interest to other disciplines. Often publishers will create direct-mail promotions that offer a discount on a book when it's purchased directly from them. They can provide you with PDF files that you can spam out to long-lost cousins, friends you haven't seen since graduate school, and people you met on airplanes.
We all know about the influence of social media. Increasingly, authors and publishers are using Facebook and Twitter (and other outlets that I'm not cool enough to know about yet) to get information out. They're easy, free, and can be effective. For the seven of you who aren't on Facebook, it's probably worth checking out.
Due to the changes in bookselling, it's no longer so important that stores stock copies of your work. Because books are so widely available on the Internet, it's less important that they get shelf space in the store. That is good news for academic books that might have a wider readership and whose publishers don't offer booksellers the deep discounts. But if people are going to read your book, they have to be able to find it somewhere in the morass that is the Internet.
There are zillions of blogs dealing with academic subjects. Identify those that are close to the one you've written about and get copies of the book into the hands of those bloggers. This is what publishers used to do with reviewers.
And while your publisher may send copies to a few places, you will have to be responsible for getting the book to the more specialized—and, therefore, more likely fruitful—sites. No one is going to turn down a free book. But it's worth your time to write a letter demonstrating that you know something about the site and giving the reasons you think it would be interested in your work.
Of course, spinning off the juiciest pieces into essays that can be placed in venues like The Chronicle Review is always a good idea. But there, especially, you must write so that readers in a broad array of disciplines will be interested.
When people ask, as they invariably will, "How is the book doing?" you might not really know, but you will have only yourself to blame if the answer is "Not great."
