The Cost of Self-Publishing, Part 4
The Cost of Self-Publishing, Part 4
If a book drops and no one hears it, does it make a sale? Some thoughts on marketing, publicity, and the hidden costs of free advertising.
Prologue | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
In previous parts of this series, I laid out the editorial, production and fulfillment costs of publishing my 2015 memoir, The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary. This week we’ll look at how much cash I dropped to get the word about the book out to the world at large.
So, you’ve written the great American novel—or in my case, the great American memoir. (Please allow me to keep deluding myself on that point.) You’ve polished it to perfection and poured it into whatever packaging you prefer, be that in print or in pixels or both. Congratulations! Give yourself a pat on the back. Those are huge accomplishments all on their own, and you deserve to pop a cork and celebrate.
But unless that’s all the reward you want or require as a self-publisher, you still have a lot of work ahead of you. You won’t move many copies of that masterpiece without figuring out how to connect with potential buyers. If a book drops and no one hears it, does it make a sale?
In the case of The Accidental Terrorist, I had a bit of a head start in that department, in that fans of my podcast were already primed to want the book. Unfortunately, that was a relatively small group of readers. For the book to truly succeed, I needed to get the attention of a much larger audience. And to accomplish that, I would need to harness the power of marketing and publicity.
Marketing and publicity may seem like similar ideas. Is there a difference? Your mileage may vary, but personally I think of marketing as advertising you pay for, while publicity is advertising you get for free.
But since free things rarely come free, it might be more accurate to say that marketing is advertising you pay for directly, while publicity is advertising you pay for indirectly. Perversely, that second kind of advertising can often end up costing more than the first. It certainly did in my case.
Playing the Marketer
But first things first. My marketing plan for The Accidental Terrorist was never very extensive. It consisted mostly of registering a domain name and building a website. As early as the summer of 2014 and got busy trying to drum up buzz with blog posts, book excerpts, and a glossary of missionary jargon.
When my “Close the Book” campaign got underway in 2015, I cobbled together a Mormon missionary name tag generator that I hoped would bring more eyeballs to the site. It let users create a custom shareable ad by choosing from a dozen different slogans and supplying a last name. It wasn’t a runaway success, but visitors did eventually create more than 5,000 different name tags.
Otherwise, I ran a few experiments to see how effective online ads might be for me, buying limited campaigns on Amazon, Facebook and Goodreads. Answer: not very. I ran a few book giveaways too, using tools at Amazon and Goodreads. Those worked better, but they didn’t yield the kind of broader attention I hoped they would.
Finally, I placed one print ad in the program for a Mormon history conference. I hoped maybe it would catch the interest of regional booksellers. It didn’t work.
We Built This Publicity
My publicity plan, on the other hand, was much more robust. My aims for the summer of 2015 were to gather cover blurbs, to get copies in front of potential reviewers, to secure interviews with reporters and podcasters, and to come up with as many other ways as possible to make people aware of The Accidental Terrorist.
I was too inexperienced and just too darn busy to think about tackling all this on my own. That’s why I contacted a publicist friend, Eleanor Lang, who had many years of experience working in the publishing industry. The first thing she did was generate lists of places for me to send advance reading copies. She supplied letters and press releases as well, which I dutifully printed out and mailed with the book.
Early reviews and blurbs began to trickle in, along with requests for interviews and even requests for copies for prize judges. I ended up doing several radio and podcast interviews and getting quite a number of enthusiastic reviews. Our publicity effort was bearing some fruit.
One of our biggest coups, though, came a few weeks before release day, when David Barr Kirtley invited me to appear on his popular Wired.com podcast, Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. Previous guests had already included a head-spinning roster of luminaries like David Cronenberg, Margaret Atwood, William Gibson, Malcolm Gladwell, Naomi Klein, George R.R. Martin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ursula K. Le Guin, Chuck Palahniuk and Paul Krugman.
The hour-long interview ranged over topics that included not just my new memoir but also my short fiction, Mormon church history, the relationship between Mormonism and science fiction, and my experience at the Clarion Workshop. Dave is a charming, generous interviewer, and I had a great time doing his show. The episode actually came out the same day my book debuted. Great publicity, right?
As I seem to keep saying today, yes and no.
Controlling the Narrative … or Not
The problem with what I’ve been cheekily calling free advertising is that you can’t always control the message being advertised. You can try, but you’re rarely the one who ends up, say, writing the headline that accompanies the summary of your interview.
A few days after the podcast episode dropped, this is what visitors to Wired.com saw as a headline:
The problem here is twofold. First, this headline collapses a nuanced argument about fantasy world-building into clickbait intended to spur controversy. I did, in fact, say in the interview that the Book of Mormon and The Lord of the Rings share certain characteristics, but that context is lost in the bold type. Much of the commentary this headline stirred up didn’t dig any deeper into what I meant, and people on both sides of the issue went away thinking I was an idiot.
The second (and bigger) problem is that the headline does not in any way mention the book I was actually promoting.
I want to be clear that I don’t blame Dave Kirtley or even Wired.com for this. They all had a job to do, and they did it. And I did get good publicity from the interview, which I’m sure helped sales. It’s just that the message many casual visitors took away from this headline was at best, er, unhelpful to my goals.
Fee, Fi, Fo, Fumble
A more vexing example of how difficult it can be to control the narrative is what can happen when your book gets reviewed. Under Ellie’s guidance, I had submitted The Accidental Terrorist to the three giant purveyors of book reviews: Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly. (Kirkus has an option that allows you to purchase a review, but that’s not the route we took.) I remember how thrilled and apprehensive I was the morning I discovered that Publishers Weekly had actually taken the bait and reviewed it. For a self-published book, this was a major stroke of fortune.
Or it could have been. They say it’s never good practice to respond to critics, so I will only remark that the anonymous reviewer clearly came in expecting a different sort of book from the one I wrote. Both my publicist and my agent spent time that day assuring me that no one pays attention to Publishers Weekly and that reviews there have little practical effect in the marketplace.
I’m not so sure about that. Fortunately Amazon does not include it, but many other online retailers, including Apple Books, feature this review more or less prominently on their product pages for my memoir. It’s hard to imagine that anyone considering a purchase is going to be favorably swayed by a paragraph that announces “Shunn fumbles this account” in its opening sentence.
This is the chance you take when you plunk your money down on the roulette wheel of publicity. It can work out well or it can backfire spectacularly.
Or—as happened with the majority of our submissions—it can just go quietly nowhere.
The Task I Tried to Shirk
Around midsummer, my then-wife had started asking me what I wanted to do about a launch party for The Accidental Terrorist.
“I don’t know,” I said. I thought about some of the parties friends of mine had thrown for their book launches. “Find a bar, rent their back room, invite a bunch of people, I guess.”
“You need to have a strategy,” she said. Strategy was her job, after all. “There needs to be a social component, a call to action.”
So, in the midst of all the other hats I was juggling, I added the additional task of party planner. Or rather, I became party chairman, and I hired (for a flat fee of $750) a party producer my wife recommended.
By this point, publishing my book had become much more than a full-time job. I was able to spend so much time on it because I did not have another job. For the preceding seven and half years (and at her own suggestion), my wife had been the earner while I tried to get my writing career moving. I could sense the clock ticking down toward the end of that particular experiment, so I was desperate to make my memoir a success. I didn’t realize how close to the end I was.
My wife had a week in Cancún planned with two of her friends that summer. She was on her way to the airport when she checked her credit card and noticed she was carrying a balance of about $10,000.
I was the one who handled the finances and made sure all the bills were paid, so naturally she had questions. Angry questions. As I struggled to explain how and why I had let this particular obligation slip, she had only one solution in mind. “Get a job,” she said.
“But there’s so much left to do on the book,” I said. There were still final revisions ahead of me, publicity to run, production and fulfillment and interviews and travel and more.
“Get a job.”
“Please. Just give me two months. That’s all I ask.”
“Start. Looking. Now.”
And just like that, I had one more giant task on my plate—job hunting.
The Life of a Party
I didn’t sleep much or well that summer. As the book wound its way toward release, I submitted dozens of résumés and went out on all the interviews I could. By some miracle, despite having only worked occasional freelance jobs for years, I soon landed a job as a software developer at a distinguished financial analytics firm in midtown Manhattan, an easy commute from our house in Queens. I started in mid-August, still three months away from the November 10 release date.
The closer that date came, the busier I grew. The launch party with its myriad moving pieces took up more and more of my limited free time. For ease of access, we chose a bar on West 26th Street in Manhattan called the Black Door. With input from my wife, my publicist, my agent, and our event producer, the elements had grown to include:
Catered food and wait staff ($1,803.19)
Specialty bomb and maple leaf cookies ($346.00)
Selfie station with four-color-printed vinyl backdrop ($145.89)
Rented P.A. system ($255.86)
Book sales table with paid staff ($140.00)
There would be a cash bar for three hours, including a specialty cocktail called the Jack Mormon (essentially a White Russian, but hey—alcohol plus coffee!). Confirmed guests would receive pre-printed name tags at the door, and everyone would be encouraged to post selfies using the #accidentalterrorist hashtag.
Despite the fact that none of our press invitees showed up, the evening turned out to be a success. (I know this is true because our marriage counselor was there, and she told us so.) We had about sixty people attend, and according to my records we sold 23 copies of the book. Best of all, the cash bar easily reached its $1,000 minimum, leaving no deficit for us to make up.
Still, including the producer’s fee, staff tips, and sundry other expenses, the total bill for the launch party ran to $3,881.76.
My Three Minutes of Fame
When you have a book to promote, you should be ready to pitch it at a moment’s notice. An unexpected opportunity to do so cropped up the next day after the launch party.
My literary agent also represents Michael Ian Black, who happened to be taping a standup comedy special that night at John Jay College on the Upper West Side. My agent invited me to tag along. Neither of us had any idea what we were in for.
Black’s set was screamingly funny. The audience of mostly college-age folks loved it. I loved it. And then, about 45 minutes into the show, in the middle of a story about getting arrested for a lapse in his car insurance, Black asked the audience if any of us had ever been to jail.
“Put your hand up!” my agent hissed at me.
I was terrified, but I did. And after taking two other audience stories, Michael Ian Black pointed at me.
In short, our three-minute exchange brought the house down. It couldn’t have been scripted any better. Years of practice telling my story at parties, around campfires, in bars and on paper, all at different lengths, had taught me which details were important in which settings. I nailed it that night.
It went so well, in fact, that dozens of people came up to me after the show to ask if I’d been a plant.
“No,” I’d say with a smile, “I was as surprised by this as you were!” And then I’d slip a business card out of my wallet and say I’d just published a book telling the full story.
Come to think of it, those cards might have been the best advertising money I ever spent. I still carry them on me at all times.
The Marketing Tally
Okay, let’s add all this up. As I said, the marketing side of the equation was not very extensive, though the website-related costs are ongoing and continue slowly to grow over time. Here’s how it all breaks down as of today:
Domain registration: -$311.80
Web hosting: -$204.71
Print ads: -$355.00
Online ads: -$339.89
Giveaway programs: -$100.11
Marketing subtotal: -$1,311.51
The Publicity Tally
Oy vey. The numbers below show how easy it is to go overboard chasing that vaunted “free” advertising. I freely admit this was a ridiculous and unnecessary amount of money to spend, especially for what it achieved. If I had it to do over again, I might still have spent as much, but I know I would have applied it differently.
Publicist: -$3,071.24
Books (195 units): -$2,075.69
Mailing supplies: -$123.06
Postage: -$437.77
Launch party: -$3,881.76
Online PR services: -$293.60
Business cards and stickers: -$255.48
Rehearsal space (4 hours): -$48.00
Publicity subtotal: -$10,186.60
So, taken together, we’re looking this week at a total outlay of $11,498.11. Even more demoralizing, when we add this to the deficit we’re already running from previous weeks, we find ourselves a vertiginous $19,739.33 in the red.
Is there any climbing out of a hole this deep? We’ll get closer to an answer next week when we tally up our travel and legal expenses. But like a black eye swollen shut, it’s not lookin’ too good out there. ∅
My memoir, The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary, is available from all the usual sources online, though I would encourage you to order it either from your local independent bookstore or from Bookshop.org.