Thursday's Guest Thoughts with Charles Salzberg
by Charles Salzberg
When I finished writing my novel, Swann’s Last Song, I thought the hard work was behind me. I should have known better. In fact, it was just beginning.
I wrote Swann’s Last Song, which is what I like to describe as a quirky, literary detective novel, almost twenty-five years ago. At the time, I was making a living as a magazine writer here in New York City. Always a novelist at heart, I had reluctantly made the leap into journalism, selling my first few articles to some major publications. But writing was writing and, as it turned out, being forced to write to length, having the opportunity to interview all kinds of people and research a variety of subjects, only stoked the creative juices. In fact, the idea for my protagonist, Henry Swann, came from an interview I did with a skip tracer.
But Swann was a different kind of detective novel, because he follows all the clues but, in the end, finds that the murder he’s investigating was completely random. And so, he does not solve the crime. I thought it was a great, fun, genre-bending idea. Editors didn’t. And so, I tucked the manuscript away and forgot about it.
Almost.
A few years ago, I picked it up again and, now willing to change the ending, sold it first to M. Evans, an independent publisher which, only months before the book was due to be published, was swallowed up by another publisher which didn’t publish fiction. The book was returned to me and my agent re-sold it to Five-Star Mystery, a small imprint of a much larger company, Cengage.
By this time, I was experienced enough--I’d had over 25 non-fiction books published--to know it was going to fall upon me to actually sell the book, if not door-to-door (and believe me, I considered that,) at least using any other means short of that. But, unlike many other writers, I was prepared. Kind of.
First, I called on many of the contacts I’d amassed over the years--through teaching, hanging out with other writers, and meeting a few people with recognizable names--to get blurbs for the novel. Best-selling author, Andrew Klavan is the brother of one of my best friends, Ross Klavan, a screenwriter who wrote Tigerland; I gave a little advice to Robert Hicks, author of Widow of the South, I worked with and taught comedienne, Joy Behar, from The View. I worked with Brian Kilmeade, of Fox and Friends. I asked these and others for quotes, and they obliged.
One of my students was Lauren Weisberger--she began The Devil Wears Prada, in my class--and she generously wrote about Swann on her blog. I joined Facebook and created a separate page for Swann. And Twitter. I booked readings. I sent copies to whomever I knew who might have any connection to the media. I taught magazine writing at S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and one of my students is now an editor at the New York Post, and she gave Swann to the book editor and he gave me a nice mention in the weekend edition.
I also joined the Mystery Writers Association and, through their invaluable help, was asked to appear on a number of library panels. Every time something interesting caught my attention, like the first Empire State Book Fair, in Albany, New York, I made contact, finding that these venues are always looking for authors who’ll appear on panels and sign books.
Sometimes, opportunities come out of the blue. A few weeks ago, I received an email meant for an editor, who happens to be a friend of mine. It was from a woman representing the Kansas Writers Association and she was asking the editor to appear as a speaker at the convention. I contacted her and informed her of her mistake. I gave her the proper email address, as well as a number of other possible editors for her event. Several days later, she contacted me again. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this, since it was right under my nose, but would you like to speak at our conference?” It didn’t matter to me that she probably couldn’t come up with an editor. What did matter is that nearly 100 people are scheduled to attend and I’ll be allowed to sell my books. And even though the only thing they were paying for was expenses, I leaped at the opportunity.
I also asked friends to recommend the book to their book clubs, offering to appear at the book club meeting, if they chose to read it. This impulsive offer wound up costing me money when a friend in L. A. convinced her group to read the book. There were only six readers, but a promise is a promise, and so I wound up spending several hundred dollars to sell half a dozen books. But it was fun. And besides, it was never about the money. It’s about numbers.
The dirty little secret of publishing is that your next book isn’t dependent on reviews, it’s on the number of books sold. Low numbers, no contract. It doesn’t even matter if you’ve been nominated or won awards. In fact, when Swann’s Last Song was nominated for a Shamus Award for Best First PI Novel, I excitedly called my agent and asked, “will this help with selling the sequel?” His terse answer was, “it can’t hurt.”
This was hammered home when I’d spoken to my agent not long after the book was released. “I just ordered 25 books from the publisher to sell at an event,” I announced, thinking he’d be thrilled.
“Haven’t we had the talk?” he asked.
That I rarely spoke to him at all, didn’t seem to cross his mind, so the answer was, no.
“Always buy your books from a bookstore or Amazon or BN.com.”
“Why?”
“Because books sold from your publisher don’t appear on BookScan and if they don’t appear there, they don’t count. And when I’m looking to sell your next book, you can bet that while I’m on the phone with an editor, she’s punching up BookScan on her computer to check your numbers.”
That it would cost me significantly more buying the books the way he wanted me to, didn’t matter to him. And the truth is, it didn’t matter to me, either.
And so, I’ve probably spent way more promoting my book, than I’ll ever make from it, despite the fact that it went to a second printing in hardcover and is now available in paperback.
Is it all worthwhile? I’ll answer that if I find a publisher for my Swann sequel, Bad Reception.