At CONduit I spoke with an author friend who thought that marketing was indeed a bad thing, especially marketing for YA, because said author felt it didn’t build an audience based on the merits of the book. It built one based on hype and buzz.  Instead of buying a book because it delivered a wonderful experience, readers would be buying only because it was what everyone else was doing. Furthermore, publishers only have so much money, and by choosing to put the dollars behind some books, they choose to let other books, which might deliver a better experience, languish.

I understand wanting to build a readership that’s based on love, not hype. But what I think my friend is overlooking is that you can’t love something if you don’t try it. And you won’t try it if you don’t know it’s there. Marketing and PR help make sure people know the book is there.

Yes, some readers might try it the first time because it’s what everyone is doing. But if the book is really that good, i.e. it actually delivers a wonderful experience for the target audience, then those readers will come back for another serving. They might look initially because everyone else is, but they’ll stay for love.

One of my editors just forwarded a link to “Not Quite a PR Campaign” by Sherry Thomas. Lots of interesting details there about what she does for PR, but probably one of the most important ideas she shares is the fact that marketing & PR don’t build an audience. A great story experience does that. However, marketing & PR can get the book in the audience’s hands.

What we all want to happen is word-of-mouth. PR doesn’t really create word-of-mouth, love does. But readers won’t read a book until they know it exists. So then the point of a PR campaign, if a PR campaign has any point at all, is to create awareness and hope that awareness will translate into love, once a critical mass of readers have read and enjoyed your book.

Readers may miss many high quality (i.e. they deliver a great experience to the intended audience) books because the lion’s share of the publisher’s marketing budget is being spent on a small group of books, and the author who gets the leftovers just doesn’t have the cash or know-how to do it themselves. But that doesn’t mean marketing is bad. It means that getting a big marketing push is like any other lucky break or opportunity.

I just started reading Guide to Writing Fiction by Phillys A. Whitney (a huge seller in the 1970′s and 1980′s). It’s a wonderful, slim, down-to-earth volume. She opens the book with a chapter called “Opportunity is Like a Train.” She maintains that her success did not come from starting with loads of talent. In fact, she says her ability was “modest.” She certainly wasn’t as gifted as many other authors she’d worked with in the writing groups of her youth. Nor did it come from immediate initial success. It came from being ready when opportunity knocked. 

Of course, I have been lucky. I’ve had extraordinary breaks come my way–along with some pretty bad blows and disappointments. There’s been bad luck too, but that doesn’t always show. Good fortune and unexpected opportunities are always coming along. Perhaps opportunity is like a train on an endless track. Now and then it makes a stop at your station, often without fanfare, and without warning.

…What is important is not the lucky break, the stopping of the train–that’s only part of it. Life is full of trains that stop. What counts is what we are doing with our lives when there is no opportunity and not a train in sight.

James Dashner is someone who is getting a big promo budget from Random House this year for Maze Runner. A very big one. But if you read his story about how he got published (links to all nine parts of the story are in his sidebar) and what got him to this point, you’ll see this promo train was a long time coming. 

Meanwhile, if the big promo budget ever stops at my station, I’m going to hop on. Until then, I will keep writing the best stories I can and make my current marketing budget (part publisher, part mine) go as far as possible. I’ll do the one for the love, the other because I can’t share the love if nobody even knows it’s out there.

CONduit is a conference for speculative fiction writers. This year’s conference was great. I was able to see and talk to a bunch of writer friends (Dave Wolverton, Dan Wells, Brandon Sanderson, Howard & Sandra Tayler, Eric James Stone, Ami Chopine, Darren Egget, Skipper Ritchotte, Mette Harrison), make some new ones (Lee Modesitt, James Dashner, Julie Wright, Aprilynne Pike, Larry Correia), plus chat with a multitude of others who are trying to break in. I also got to record with the Dragon Crawlers Radio guys. Nothing better than spending a weekend with a swarm of friendly and talented folks.

I’m amazed at the success some of these people are having:

• Aprilynne Pike had an initial print run of 200,000 hardback copies and was #1 on the NY Times Best Seller list.
• James Dashner is going to be one of the main events from Random House this fall. I’m expecting an equally large print of his Maze Runner.
• Brandon Sanderson just signed a contract that was announced on Publisher’s Lunch for somewhere around 2.5 million for four books. Folks, this is amazingly large for our genre.

Of course, we already know Dave Wolverton and Lee Modesitt are some of the biggest sellers for Tor. Dan Wells is going to be big as well. And the Taylers have already got tens of thousands who read them regularly. They threw a great release party at this con.

Larry Correia has had some interesting success as well and came at it from a side alley. He self-published Monster Hunters International. He sold a few thousand copies (no mean feat, especially for a self-published book), with many of the readers coming from the armed forces in Afganistan and Iraq. The book was so good the owner of a large independent store in Minnesota, Uncle Hugo’s, called the editor of Baen Books up and told her that she was an idiot if she didn’t buy Larry’s book because he could sell the heck out of it. So she took a look, agreed, and Larry’s now under contract with a real publisher. It’s coming out in July.

In one conversation I learned the following about the Science Fiction & Fantasy genre.

• 4,000 hardback copies for a title in a year is the rough break even point for Tor. You sell more than that, you’re okay. You sell less and Tor might have to drop you.
• 10,000 hardback copies would be considered a very good seller.
• 15,000 – 30,000 hardback copies and you are hitting the top of the midlist
• Robert Jordan sold around 600,000 of each of his titles in hardback.
• Depending on the time of year, 4,000 – 5,000 hardbacks sold in a week will put you in the top ten, even the top three, on the NY Times bestseller list.

As for me, I printed up some posters and book marks using Swanland’s art. The cover got a great reaction there. And that’s huge for me because, looking at that Gallup Poll blog I wrote, the cover is going to drive a lot of sales for a new author. I had a wonderful time giving my workshop. And I think I finally figured out which part of my novel I can use for readers. Oh, and if you get a chance to hear Eric James Stone read any of his short stories, take it. I’ve listened to him twice now and both have been well worth the 20 minutes.

Tor Books’ production department has moved my book’s release date out one month. I’m getting so antsy to have it hit the stores, but October’s actually a better month, it being closer to the holiday season.

You still might be able to get it earlier if you pre-order. The books actually start shipping in the second half of September. But it takes a few weeks to get them out to all the stores.

I will conduct The 3 Things You Must Learn to Write Killer Stories workshop at CONduit this year. It’s being held at the downtown Raddison hotel. Here’s my schedule.

Friday, May 22nd

• Culture-Building in F&SF:  3:00  PM  (with Lee Modesitt, Roger White, Dave Wolverton, Elisabeth Waters, & Brandon Sanderson)
• The 3 Things You Must Learn to Write Killer Stories Workshop: 8:00 pm – 10:00 pm

Saturday, May 23rd

• Mike Oberg asks questions from the audience: 4:00 PM (with Dave Wolverton, James Dashner, & Larry Correia)
• Reading of Servant of a Dark God: 6:00 PM

I just got this from my editor. My first reaction was what?–No bronze brassiers, naked thighs, or gravity defying breasts?! I’m ruined! Then I remembered I’d given up writing books about bimbos with swords (alas, I really had some terrific mosquito scenes). 

Folks, I think Swanland’s style is gorgeous, and I hope readers find this particular cover compelling. Click on it to see it full size. There are many things about this cover that I like, but one cool thing about the content of the illustration is that he worked in Sugar with the raveler. Those are, to date, my favorite weapons ever. In fact, Sugar herself looks, well, strong, beautiful, smart. Dang! Who wants to write about a bimbo when you’ve got a woman like that?

(Of course, a bimbo with a sword could make a very good Legally Blonde meets Lord of the Rings. Humm. I’m tempted…)

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Gallup did a poll in 2005 asking readers how they selected the books they read. Here are the results.

What this says to me as an author is that the most important thing I can do to help my career is write the best dang story I can, seeing that almost 60% of what readers select is driven by the experience they or someone else had with the book.

The next most important factor has to do with helping my book stand out for browsers. This would include the cover, store placement, blurbs, flap text, and the opening pages. The only part of this an author can really focus on is the opening pages–again, writing the best dang story I can.

So it seems authors, especially debut authors, can’t do much to affect sales. But not being able to do much doesn’t mean they can’t do anything. Somewhere, somehow the first readers have to be enticed to give the book a go. Robert Sawyer talks about some of the methods to do that here.

I found this a fascinating talk. It’s Ira Glass who is the executive producer of the This American Life radio program from Chicago Public Radio. It’s a show that merges true stories (and some short fiction) of everyday people, surprise, humor, and meaning. There’s a structure to the types of stories that they produce. It’s not a new thing. It’s used all the time in a venue many of us are familiar with. Maybe you’ll identify that venue immediately. If not, it doesn’t matter. Watch and listen. This is a fascinating talk and it highlights just how much humor, curiosity, and insight depend on surprise.

Ira Glass at Gel 2007 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

The latest issue of Intergalactic Medicine Show just hit the net. Of course, I don’t have time to read. But how can I help myself when Mark Rainey’s “Somewhere My Love”  starts with this line: “She lived in our town’s one and only haunted house.”

What a hook!

And soon I found myself reading a wonderful story about a boy and a teacher, who happens to be a witch.

But the kind of witch Rainey writes about is not some gal with warts and a black hat. Nor is she some kind of Alice Hoffman Practical Magic type.

She’s a Rainey witch.

And this tale is about a boy caught in her class in school. I loved it. It evoked perfectly how some teachers affect us boys. I haven’t read any of the other stories in this issue yet. But I can still say the measley $2.50 subscription for issue 12 is worth it if only so you can read this one story. Besides, even if you don’t have time to read it, scroll down on the TOC and you’ll see you don’t have to–you can listen to Scott Card read the thing to you.