Since most people in the world of art and creativity are not really interested in getting more competition than there already is, it is extremely rare that such people talk about how the business really works. But it’s Friday night, I just had a Scotch, and I’m going to tell you the real story. At least, my version.
One of the many interesting side effects of the standard educational experience is the belief that if you just apply yourself and follow the instructions given by a professional teacher, you will meet with success.
Oy.
This is not how it works.
There are seemingly endless numbers of people in the book business who offer coaching and editing and sales advice. Their services are not without merit I suppose, but at a certain level there is a very basic problem with what they offer, which is they add a step, and delay the ultimate putting of your product out in the marketplace to be judged. Let’s face it, they make their money by coaching you, and once you achieve success, you are not going to hire them anymore. No one is above being influenced by such conflicts of interest.
There really isn’t any "system" for successfully publishing a book or selling a hit record. True, there are existing networks of people in the business who have the ability to publish at will, but for the most part, these are all closed shops. They guard their market share with extreme jealousy, and the idea that you can be certain of getting into one of these inner circles through the auspices of paid coach is, quite frankly, very hard for me to believe.
There are really two tricks that you need to know. One is developing a professional attitude. Try to get into the minds of your customers and gatekeepers. School taught you to be self-conscious, you need to forget all that and reverse the perceptual flow. This information is not that hard to get. A literary agent is perhaps hard to find, but your local independent bookstore owner would jump at the chance to have his lunch paid for, and you could learn just as much or more from them about the book business as anyone else. You don’t have to acccept as gospel everything that these gatekeepers tell you, but it’s helpful to know a little bit about their point of view.
The second thing to know is, well, I call this "seepage" marketing. Once you create a product, and you put it out for people to see it, hold it, and smell it, if it has any merit at all, somebody, somewhere will buy it. If they really like it, they will recommend it to their friends. You don’t necessarily need to pay a publicist $30,000 to promote your book. Big media conglomerates, of course, do major media blitzes, but this works for them because they are usually publishing books by celebrity authors that are already famous and can get invited onto any and every radio and television talk show in land. If your book or invention or idea has real merit, if you just keep plugging away, the day will come when good morning America needs to fill 10 minutes and they will call you.
Just one example, six weeks after I first published Real Men Don’t Rehearse, a friend of mine read it and she knew Paul Sullivan, a host of the nightly national CBS radio show. He saw the book, and since they were airing a Boston Pops concert on the Fourth of July, they thought I could come in promote my book and their concert all the same time. I didn’t want to be late so I showed up an hour ahead of schedule… it turned out there was a problem with the previous guest and so they were just treading water in and out of an Amber alert, and the moment I arrived, they said go right in.
I was supposed to only be on for 10 minutes, but so many people called in wanting to talk about their memories of Arthur Fiedler that the switchboard was completely jammed and I was on national radio for two hours.
I didn’t get that break by paying a big-time publicist. It happened because I published the book and I put it out for people to actually read. Breaks are bizarre wonderful things, and it's impossible to predict them. People who offer systems to get breaks are, to me anyway, on a par with those books on how to pick up girls. They assume that all girls are the same and are looking for the same thing. They aren't.
Very often, extensive marketing plans are really just a form of stage fright. It’s a fear of putting yourself via your product in front of a bunch of strangers and possibly being rejected. There are people who will prey on that fear and exploit it, and offer ways to avoid it into infinity.
Marketing anything is a highly imperfect process. It’s an art, not a science, and there’s a lot of luck and serendipity involved. Even Peter Drucker said few successful products are bought by the people for whom they were intended.
Make no mistake, I spent several years writing three other books that went no further than a few copies shown to friends. But when I wrote Real Men Don’t Rehearse, I knew I had a good product, as everyone who read it loved it. I showed it to several literary agents who also liked it but did not see its commercial potential, but I saw a market where they didn’t, and I bet on myself, and quintupled my money.
So yes, there is a phase of learning the ropes of any business, and that phase of it is, at times, extremely unpleasant. I hated discovering that there are certain things I wanted to write about that nobody on this planet wants to read, and there are rules for making good products and presentations which at their core state that I am not the center of the universe. But once I got over it I became much more effective as a professional. I suppose, if I had had the money, I would’ve paid someone to avoid having to face some of these unpleasant truths about myself. But I didn’t. One of the many advantages of being broke. Failure is a great teacher.
© Justin Locke
