Guerilla Marketing:
and Other Secrets of the Trade
Book Marketing for Independent Publishers
by Jessica
Powers
When I started my job at
Cinco Puntos Press, I didn’t have the slightest idea how to do marketing
and publicity. Even if I did, the publishing business was a complete
mystery to me. I didn’t know what I was getting into and I wasn’t
certain I had what it took. I had a few skills, which had served me well
as a graduate student: I could read and write and edit. I knew how to
use the computer and do research. I could make small talk with almost
anybody you might imagine. And I knew I was smart enough to learn other
skills.
It turns out I had
everything you need to market books and to market them well.
It’s All
About the Relationship
The most fundamental
aspects of marketing are pretty mundane. “There’s a number of very, very
boring things you have to keep in mind, like consistency,” says Mike
O’Connor of Insomniac Press in Toronto, Canada. “Hone relationships with
bookstores and various publications. Keep people up to date with what
you’re doing.”
This is probably the most fundamental aspect of marketing—developing
relationships. If that seems like a waste of time to you, you’re in the
wrong business.
“There is no substitute for the ability
to call a critic or any member of the media to tell them about a project
you are excited about,” says Ira Wood, publisher of Leapfrog Press.
“They may choose not to cover it, and this you must accept graciously,
because there is always a next time.” He adds that marketing is not
about getting coverage for one specific project. “Remember, a book is
only Front list for one season; it may have years of Back
list life. What the media may not cover today, they may discover
tomorrow...but if you do not have a relationship with them, you don't
have a chance.”
Building relationships is
time-consuming, but it’s cheap and that’s one thing that all independent
publishers need to keep in mind. Whatever else marketing plans might
entail, no matter how much time marketing takes, it should not cost a
lot of money.
“There’s all sorts of ways [to
save money],” says O’Connor. “A lot of it relies on maintaining
relations with the media and things like that, finding out what they
need, what they’re looking for, how you can help them find what they’re
looking for. Review copies are cheaper than buying a full-page ad in the
New York Times.”
The Book
Review:
Just How Important Is It?
Ah, yes, the ubiquitous
book review, one of the most important elements of marketing books. But,
and here’s the catch, are they ubiquitous? And does anybody actually
read them?
“Review space is
shrinking,” declares Alexander Taylor of Curbstone Press. “If you’re in
a major commercial house and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars
in advertising, they can hardly afford to overlook you. It’s not
surprising when you surf the web on Sunday, everybody’s reviewing the
same book. That’s the result of massive marketing monetary power.”
The
solution for a small press without a lot of money is, once again, found
in the power of personal relationships. “We try to spend a very great
amount of time talking to reviewers, visiting with reviewers, following
up,” says Taylor. “But these reviewers are suffering from burn-out
because many of these places are cutting their staff. There’s stress and
slippage so it’s even more important now to follow up, not just send the
book out. You have to figure out which reviewers want to be emailed,
which don’t, etc. We try to keep track of their preferences and see as
many of these reviewers as possible. You’re an advocate of your writer
in this way. Someone once accused me of sitting on a reviewer’s desk
until he said yes, but that’s an exaggeration.”
Okay, so
if they’re not ubiquitous, are they effective? Taylor admits, “Reviews
don’t have as much impact as they did 20 years ago. We’ve had books
reviewed 65 times and we still don’t sell the 4000-5000 copies [that we
print]. So imagine how many they’d sell if we didn’t have those
reviews.”
In other
words, they may not have the desired results, but they’re better than
nothing or, to put it more strongly, they’re still the best marketing
tool we have.
Don’t Forget the Back of the Book
Believe it or not, when
Cinco Puntos Press had events for librarians and school teachers, many
of those individuals would discuss our latest book covers with
me—whether they liked it, whether they didn’t, why they liked it, why
they didn’t. I had never realized how much people noticed the book cover
until those parties.
Marketing begins before
the book is even printed. A good book cover will help sell books.
“When we first started
Curbstone,” says Taylor, “we were just English majors. What did we know
about business? So we went to booksellers and we said, ‘We really need
some guidance, we need some help,’ and the first thing they told us was
that we needed better covers. The cover is the first thing people see.
Since then, we’ve spent a lot of time on our covers, and people have
told us they can recognize a Curbstone book by the design. That’s an
important lesson to learn early—your books have to be attractive enough
to get people to pick them up and know.”
While you’re at it, don’t
forget the back of the book either.
“We do our best to get
good blurbs for the covers,” says Taylor. “A blurb from a major writer
will attract attention, though they’re difficult to get. We’ve been
fortunate in getting Maxine Hong Kingston and Grace Paley to give us
blurbs, but that’s because they buy into our mission, they like what
we’re doing. Testimonials that this is worth reading is an important way
to increase readership.”
Readings
and Performances
Authors may not always
understand the impact readings can have on sales, in an indirect way.
Although turnout may be small, and writers don’t often get paid for such
readings, any publicity is good publicity.
Ira
Wood says one of the most successful books he ever marketed was
The German Money
by Lev Raphael. “Lev was the most
active, savvy and energetic author I've ever worked with. More than a
year before The German Money was released we sent out beautiful
mailings to every Jewish community center in the country in order to get
Lev invited to some of the hundreds of Jewish Book Fairs around the
country. Lev ended up with a 30-city tour, and of course, each visit had
media interviews, author breakfasts, book store signings—whatever we
could tack on—associated with it. The book became a BookSense 76 Pick
for the Christmas/Hanukah season, got fabulous reviews (and a lot of
them). As a consequence we're publishing another book of his next
season, Secret Anniversaries of the Heart, a collection of 25 of
his best short stories.”
Wood’s success story is just one example
of how important readings are for getting the word out. It is sometimes
important to emphasize this to writers—the fact that they need to give
as many readings as possible, even if they don’t get paid for it.
But giving a reading in a bookstore is
only one piece of the “readings” pie.
“We have writers come in to talk to the
high schools,” says Alexander Taylor. “We have one major high school we
work with. We bring in 8-10 writers a year for workshops and they work
with the kids on writing as well as being role models, since our writers
are multicultural. Ninety percent of the teachers in our surveys have
said that it significantly contributes to the curriculum. But it’s hard
to measure spiritual things!” He laughs. “How many kids when they grow
up say, ‘Oh, that one person turned my life around.’ Still, you can
un-become something. Luis J. Rodriguez was here and one student came
over and said, ‘I want you to know I was going to join a gang this
Friday, but now I’m not going to after hearing you speak.’ That doesn’t
often happen, but that’s an amazing result.”
For
Curbstone Press, the program in the schools contributes to sales
directly. First of all, they get government grants that pay for writers
to give school workshops. Second, the grants pay for copies of the
writers’ books, which are given free to the students. “We give over 2000
copies away,” says Taylor, “so it becomes a sale in a way and the
authors get royalties from those books. But the other aspect is that
these kids share those books with their parents—we’re better known here
because of our programs than because of our publications, in our
particular community at least.”
These
programs are an important part of marketing. Although the publicity may
not be as direct as an advertisement for a particular publishing
company’s book, or a specific book review, “It’s all mixed up because
funding follows publicity,” says Taylor. “We’ve gotten some major grants
because people have talked about the impact of these programs. I
encourage all non-profit presses to do this.”
Create a Literary Newsletter
(And Get An Intern or Two to Boot)
One of
Curbstone’s successful strategies has been to create a newsletter,
INK, which serves as a marketing tool but is more interesting to
read than a catalog description of the books.
“We make
INK more literary than commercial,” says Taylor, “but it’s still
something. It goes to 15,000, people and that’s a way to build name
recognition for the entire list, but we also try to present in an
interesting way what the books are about. We use interviews, poetry
excerpts—surprisingly, some of those interviews are republished later
on. We give people blanket permission to re-use what’s in INK. I
think that’s important. In this age of media culture, we can have an
author talk at length.”
If this
seems like one more list of things to do on an already overwhelming list
of things, Curbstone’s solution is for interns to create the newsletter.
Though interns don’t get paid, they get college credit for their time at
the press. Allowing them to write, edit, and print INK means that
the newsletter doesn’t take away from any full-time employee’s usual
tasks.
Guerilla Marketing: Above All, Be Creative
Marketing
is about relationships, book reviews, and readings, but it’s also about
fearlessness, claims Mike O’Connor. “Don’t be afraid [to do something
that seems weird],” he says. “If there’s some sort of opportunity to
promote the book, go out there and do it even if other people aren’t
doing it. For instance, we published a book of poetry by a performance
group called AWOL Love Vibe. They were very much into voodoo, so we put
together a charm, a kind of chant, to promote book sales. [We claimed
that] if you played this in your bookstores, it would increase your book
sales tremendously. And it worked, as long as they kept playing the
chant. We also sent out voodoo chants to prevent low returns. People
could also write in and put together love or hate charms.”
Insomniac
Press seems to specialize in unusual marketing plans. “A couple of years
ago, we published a collection called The Necrophiles,” says
O’Connor. “Oddly enough, the author was a semi-professional mud
wrestler. So for the launch, she wanted to mud wrestle and read from the
book at the same time. She memorized the work and as she wrestled, she
read from it.”
Not every
press is willing to create voodoo charms or allow their writers to
mud-wrestle at the same time as they “read” from the book that’s just
been published. These sorts of marketing strategies or book launches are
certainly different, and creative, though they might not qualify as
“guerilla marketing,” which can be defined as doing anything it takes to
sell a book without spending a single penny.
Guerilla
marketing, says O’Connor, is “ground level” marketing and tailored to
the individual book. “You’re trying to take an audience by surprise in
some way where they least expect a book to turn up or that particular
book to turn up. Guerilla marketing has that element of surprise as one
of the prevailing characteristics.”
In other
words, encourage all of your authors to do what it takes to get books in
the hands of potential buyers.
I didn’t
know it was guerilla marketing, but shortly after my hiking guide was
published, I went into the local Barnes and Noble, removed a couple
copies of the book from the “local authors” section, and placed them
face outwards in the hiking section. True, I was a local author, but I
didn’t think people who were looking for hiking guides to the region
where I live would necessarily be looking for it in the local authors
section.
Don’t Give
Up, But Don’t Be A Pest
There may
be a lot of things to do in order to market a book, but there is just
one simple thing not to do.
“You never want to give up...but you
never want to be a pest,” says Wood. “To many members of the media, a
publicist is like an adolescent boy who wants to score. His burning
desire is to get into bed, his hormones are raging...much like a
publicist who craves a review. Better always to become a friend, build a
relationship. Hang around. Be trusted. You'll get your media attention
eventually, if not for this project then for another. A NO is a NO.
Just make sure you remain friends.”
“The critic you annoy, the reporter you
pester, the 'big name' you attack, the arts editor you lie to when
promising an exclusive, are NOT going away,” he adds. “They'll be there
next year, for your next campaign, and they won't forget you.”
A Book is Like a Child
The truth about marketing is that there are no secrets. Everybody does
the same thing except occasionally when someone has a stroke of genius.
The most important thing to remember with marketing is not to neglect
your book once it’s published.
“A book is like a child,” says O’Connor. “It’s going to do things that
you’re kind of embarrassed about, that make you angry, and it will go
off and live its own life and every once in awhile you’ll hear back from
it and be amazed where it has gone and what it has done. It takes on a
life of its own. But you do have to actively promote it. You don’t turn
a child into the street and say, ‘Good luck!’ What do you think is going
to happen?” He laughs. “You take care of it, do the best you can, and
sometimes, it really surprises you, but first, you gotta do the
legwork.”
Jessica Powers is a freelance writer who lives in the tiny corner
of the U.S. where New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico meet. She may be reached for
comments at jlpowers at evaporites.com. You can read her
African History column at
www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/african_history.
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