Author, Sell Thyself

by Sara Nelson -- Publishers Weekly, 10/3/2005

"If I am not for me, who will be for me?"

That's a line found in prayerbooks read by a lot of people at this time of year.

It's also the mantra for writers, whatever their religion, pretty much anytime and anywhere. Amid complaints that publishers and booksellers don't do enough to get their books into readers' hands, writers—for better or worse—come up with their own plans to get noticed.

There's the type who goes into a store, locates her book, and turns it face forward if the bookstore powers-that-be had left it spine out (And then meet her sibling—the writer who happens to "drop" a back-shelf book onto the front table.) There's the one who calls her local independent and orders the book—several times under several different names. Recently, a former bookseller told me about the author she caught high up on a ladder, pulling down his books, presumably, to leave them on the front table, the one for which his publisher did not pay co-op. "I didn't really mind," she said, "except that I was worried about our liability if he fell."

And then, of course, there was the famous case, a few years ago, of the anxious author who bought up hundreds of copies of his own book on Amazon.com because he wanted more than anything to break the Amazon 100. Like most authors, he believed that once he got there, he would stay there, and bestsellerdom would be his across the land. (Agents, please note: don't write to tell me, as you tell your clients ad nauseam, that Amazon isn't the be-all and end-all of book sales. I know it's only about 10% of the business but, like Marc Jacobs and, yes, PW, its influence is far greater than its numbers might indicate. Just ask all those authors with repetitive stress disorder from pushing "refresh" on their book page.) The only problem was the author then tried to return the books, because if he'd had to pay retail for them, he would have shelled out more than he got as an advance—and probably would bankrupt his family, too.

But for one brief and shining moment, he got his wish: he was one of somebody's top sellers.

This author—and the ones guilty of the more minor infractions outlined above—caught some flack from the book world for what many considered his unseemly nerve. Me, I applaud him. In this age of shrinking publicity budgets and dwindling media coverage and all sorts of new tortuous ways to quantify "success," what else is a poor writer to do when, say, she discovers her charming memoir about reading has been shelved with Belles Lettres? Sure, if you're Dan Brown or John Berendt or Joan Didion, you're going to get front and center treatment; in a lot of cases, that fact will have been written into your contract years ago. But for the rest of us, hanging back and hoping our publisher will buy front-table space—or, ha ha, an ad—for our small-but-delightful midlist novel is going to prove more than slightly frustrating.

Authors should take heart in knowing that in today's publishing world, self-promotion is next to godliness, but within limits. As the prayerbook continues, "If I am only for myself, what am I?"