In 2012, the Biographers’ International Organization invited me to write something to distribute at their annual conference. The topic was self-promotion and the growing need for writers to see themselves as product - something which, in the decade that followed, has become even more essential. What will happen in the next ten years? I dread to think…..
Truman Capote (1924-1984)
THE HUSTLE.
If self-promotion has a patron saint, it’s Truman Capote. He summarized the key concept of literary marketing in a single phrase: “A boy’s gotta hustle his book.”
With advertising dwindling, review pages disappearing, marketing departments downsizing, bookshops dying and with them the traditions of readings and signings, publishers rely increasing on bloggers and the “citizen reviewers” of Amazon to promote books on their behalf. Anything else involved in getting a book before the public is now regarded as part of the writer’s task.
To most of us, commodification doesn’t come easily. Few possess the mental armor that grows naturally on sporting personalities and politicians. We are never quite ready for that pie in the face – often delivered at our moment of greatest vulnerability, as we rise in front of an audience or lower ourselves into a seat at a bookshop, or in a radio or TV studio.
Mavis Gallant, doyenne of Paris’s expatriate authors, was approached at a signing by a young woman carrying one of her earlier books. Pointing to the back cover portrait, she said “The moment I saw this picture, I knew you would be one of the most important people in my life.” As Mavis framed a modest reply, the woman went on, “I can’t tell you how much you’ve disappointed me.”
Radio and TV have their own booby traps. Some are ubiquitous, such as the bored host who’s read nothing about your book but just works methodically through the list of questions on the publisher’s fact sheet. Never anticipate Question # 5 and answer it at the same time as Question # 4, because you will surely find yourself answering it all over again.
Anyone who has done radio talk-back learns to dread the phrase “Our lines are open.” If you’re a biographer and your subject lived anywhere within a thousand-mile radius of the station, expect at least one neighbor or acquaintance to call with a rambling anecdote, or a one-time associate with a grievance. A caller on Australian radio claimed her father had never been recompensed for his work on one of Stanley Kubrick’s films, and held me, as his biographer, responsible by proxy.
Worse is the caller claiming to have new information. As Charles Higham discussed his biography of Wallis Simpson, a man calling on a cell-phone from his car claimed special knowledge of the future Duchess of Windsor’s shady Shanghai past. As he started to explain, his voice broke up. The last Charles heard was a faint “I’ll call you when I get out of this tunnel.” He never did.
Talk-back induces its own special surrealism. One novelist, braced to field queries about political chicanery in the rural south, was asked by the first caller where he could buy the left-handed scissors briefly mentioned in his text. A second caller rang with the name of a local shop that sold them, and a third with an anecdote about an ancestor wounded while trimming his toenails at Second Manassas.
Doing radio interviews in England for a memoir about my passion for collecting books, I found myself trying to value rarities described by callers. “Hold it closer to the phone,” I joked. But demands for valuations jammed the switchboard, and a couple of stations asked me back to repeat the performance.
Both Britain’s BBC and the Australian ABC used to offer writers the superficially tempting prospect of an entire afternoon being interviewed on-line by a succession of regional affiliates. Locked in a closet-sized studio with nothing but a microphone and a carafe of tepid water, one repeated the interview a dozen times, answering the same litany of questions from the fact sheet. The inevitable technical glitches came as welcome relief – though perhaps not the occasion when I overheard the host and another guest, not realising the line was open, scornfully demolishing my book.
Is it worth the effort? Directly, no. Unless you’re a star, you’ll be lucky to sell twenty copies of a paperback at a bookshop signing, and even fewer in hardcover. As for radio and TV, the benefits are mostly in ego-boosting. None of us is immune to the frisson of the stranger in the supermarket saying, “I saw you on TV.”
A few simple techniques can maximize the effect of your efforts. Learn to describe your book in a single memorable phrase or sentence. David Cronenberg pitched his film Dead Ringers as “Rocky, but with twin gynecologists.” It might not have made much sense, but nobody ever forgot it.
If you’re on a number of shows, choose an anecdote or singular fact and repeat it at every appearance. Nobody remembers a statistic, but an anecdote will cling like a burr. The wife who saw you on lunchtime TV will tell her husband, “Here’s that woman I told you about. And she’s telling that same story!”
Associate your book with a popular category. Even the most staid biography can be called “a mystery,” “a tale of adventure” or best of all “a love story.” Numerous books dealt with the entwined careers and relationships of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, but Hazel Rowley’s Tete-a-Tete, presenting it as a tale of hot sex among French philosophers, brought it new life – and sales.
Never go anywhere without a dozen copies of your book in the trunk of the car. Flourish, wave and display it. Place it prominently on the table in Starbuck’s. Give copies to anyone who seems interested,and sign them flamboyantly. Forget “Best wishes”. Roald Dahl and James Baldwin habitually signed with a rampant upper-case “LOVE”. James Ellroy, eliciting the fact that I was Australian, scrawled “Wombat Blood Drops!”
Learn, too, from the writer who, on a lunchtime TV talk show, interrupted the set questions to ask the hostess, “Did you notice anything unusual about the cover?”
She stared at her copy.
“Er…no. What?”
“Hold it up for a moment.”
She did so. With nothing else to shoot, the camera zoomed in. Long moments followed of invaluable brand recognition.
“You don’t see it?”
“No”, said the hostess, now completely baffled.
“These days,” grinned the author, “publishers are designing covers to look good on TV!”
Truman would have been proud.
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This piece appears, with many other examples of otherwise uncollected non-fiction, in THE PARIS MEN’S SALON, which I recently self-published in a signed limited edition of 100. Anyone signing up for a paid subscription to Aussie on the Metro will receive an incribed copy, post-free.
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Thanks, Martina. Most books are bought by women, often as gifts - the big book-selling days are Fathers' Day and Christmas - so cookbooks are a reliable choice. Celebrity autobiographies too, particularly of sporting figures - though an up-tick in non-fiction sales a few years back was traced, depressingly, to a vogue for adult colouring books.
Most interesting John.