The Real Dough Is Outside Of The Cookie Cutter
Your creativity—your ability to use your imagination to create new ways to promote your books—will impress publishers because they show little creativity when they promote their books.
Large houses publish hundreds of books a year, so they can’t devote enough time or money to creating the most effective marketing campaigns for every book they publish. Even the big books that receive far more attention than the rest of the list are victims of the cookie-cutter syndrome. As each book winds its way through the publishing maze, it is granted the time and attention warranted by its importance to the list.
You and your publisher will have identical interests but not identical agendas. You both want to make money on your book, but your book will only be one of the hundreds of books a large house publishes. They have to pay attention to the whole list; you don’t.
If yours is one of the few big books on your publisher’s list, your book will be looked after as well as possible given your publisher’s time, money and creative limitations.
Authors, like their publishers, are prisoners of the system. The publication of any book is a complex enterprise that, at a large house, involves the fleeting attention of more than a hundred people as the book passes before them on the conveyor belt that connects writers at one end of the publishing process with readers at the other.
Publishers publish far too many books to do all of them justice even if they wanted to. The skill, creativity and commitment with which books are published vary enormously depending on how much love or money or both motivate the publishers and their overworked, underpaid staff. The result: cookie-cutter publishing.
Ultimately, no matter who or how you publish your books, the responsibility of moving them from the booksellers shelves to your fans hands, lie solely in your hands.
The long-term payoff: everything you do to promote your books also helps sell you, your future books and all of the products and services that you will have to offer.
One reason now is such a great time to be a writer is that you can use the books you love and the authors you admire as models for creating your books and your career.
You can bring your vision, passion and creativity to promotion, your unique ability to do the same things differently and better than they’ve been done before. One way to know you’re succeeding: other authors use your ideas.
