The Publishing Game

With the advent of the Kindle and Amazon's advertising, the publishing world has been turned on its ear.  Traditional publishers are likened to dinosaurs uneasily watching the sheen of ice that forms on the swamp every morning and wondering if maybe they should consider relocation to a spot closer to the equator - about a one day lumbering walk south of home sweet home.


For a brand new independent writer, the dead tree traditionals have one major advantage; advertising.  They've got a whole network of village idiots who make their living writing reviews of new books and telling the great unwashed what to read and why.  The trouble is that getting access to this network requires an author's work to pass inspection by a group of editors, all of whom are graduates of East Coast universities, have their official SJW license, and have never been more than 50 yards away from a flush toilet in their entire lives (that last is a quote from Fred Reed).

One organization that is trying to help themselves to this new independent book market is Hometown Authors, a division of Weaving Influence, and the brain child of CEO and entrepreneur Becky Robinson.  In short, for around $25,000, the folks at Weaving Influence will promote your version of the great American novel all the way from the press to the top of the NYT Bestseller list, and help you organize a book tour and speaking engagements, for which you'll presumably be paid a small fortune for each engagement.

I don't have twenty-five grand this week.  Next week isn't looking good either.

So browsing around the web, I stumbled across these words of wisdom from Hometown Authors: The Best Kept Book Marketing Secret: Author Parties by David Sanford (linkedin).   Here are a few excerpts:

Few Americans have ever been invited to an author party, but most say they would love to attend one this year. 

I've never heard of an author party.  I've heard of book signings and ever been to a few; not an author party.

Simply ask friends of yours with a nice larger home who love to host parties to host one for you and provide the refreshments. For your very first author party, invite 100 to 125 of your friends. Thereafter, ask hosts to invite their friends. Many times they will be honored to do just that.

Okay, stop right there.  I don't know anyone with a home that qualifies, or who loves to host parties.  What friends I have go out to bars, underground gin mills, and after hours strip clubs.  Moreover, I don't even know 100 people.  I think my facebook account has something like 47 friends, and 5 of those are fake accounts featuring hotties with limited English skills and a penchant for trying to con me out of ten large so they can move their inheritance from Koutammakou, Togo (West Africa) to the United States.  They'll be ever so grateful.

Moving right along, once these 100 people show up and somehow find a place to park, the author has an odd recommendation.

I recommend abandoning the till. Instead, do what many stores do now and let individuals ring up their own orders, so to speak. How? Simply put $30 of change (a $10 bill, three $5 bills, and five $1 bills) inside a basket lined with a decorative cloth napkin. 

I've never seen nor heard of a store that allows customers to ring up their own order.  And $30 in a basket, unwatched, is going to vanish faster than six felons at the policeman's ball.

There's more.  I provided a link to the entire article at the top, but reading it just makes me wonder what color the sky is in David Sanford's world.  I'm betting on a nice coquelicot, shot through with fulvous and purple flashes of insight.