Book Promotion

More on the Campbell Nomination

As my previous coupla-sentence blog post sorta indicated, I’m hella pleased to be nominated for the Campbell Award for Best New SF/F Writer. In case you’re stumbling across my blog for the first time, um, hey there. I’m the author of Infoquake and the soon-to-be-released MultiReal. But wait! Before you click on either of those links, allow me to say some good words about my fellow nominees.

I read on somebody’s blog this afternoon that Scott Lynch would “win in a walk.” Between you and me, I’m expecting he’ll win the Campbell this year too, but at least I want to make him sprint for it a little. I haven’t heard a bad word about his Lies of Locke Lamora (except from me) or the follow-up, Red Seas Under Red Skies. I dunno, given that he’s the Hot New Fantasy Author on the block and everyone I know universally acknowledges him to be a great guy, there must be something wrong with him.

'Grey' by Jon ArmstrongI met Jon Armstrong at World Fantasy this year, and I have read his debut novel Grey. It does share a number of thematic concerns with my own Infoquake — economics, rampant consumerism, class discrepancies — and it’s quite funny to boot. The book got one of the best advance blurbs I’ve ever seen from the inimitable Michael Chabon: “Jon Armstrong is a genius, with an umlaut, to the fifth power.” On a personal level, my impression of Jon (sorry, Jön) is that he’s a much, much nicer person than me, though that may be damning him with faint praise.

I haven’t met David Anthony Durham yet, but his name seems to crop up quite a bit these days as a fantasist to watch. He’s already got a solid foothold in Respectable Lit’rary Territory with his historical novels Gabriel’s Story, Walk Through Darkness, and Pride of Carthage. A vote for David might be a solid strategic move if only because it will put another dent in the armor of the snooty academics who look down on genre fiction.

I would be very, very pleased to see Mary Robinette Kowal walk off with the Campbell tiara. And not just because she’s smart, she’s my friend, she’s got a story in George Mann’s new Solaris anthology with me, she’s got a highly original voice (in both the literary and literal senses), and she’s dead sexy. She’s also the only nominated author this year with no published novel under her belt. C’mon, big New York publishers, what are you waiting for? Make this gal famous already so we can start our own cool, edgy, avant-garde writers’ movement.

My fellow Pyr novelist Joe Abercrombie stands a good chance of staging an upset win this year for his The Blade Itself and Before They Are Hanged. I’ll confess I haven’t gotten around to reading them yet, but the adjectives that get tossed around about this guy’s work are enough to make anyone jealous. Plus he has a highly entertaining blog. You know, on second thought, please help me bury Abercrombie’s work in obscurity before he totally reinvents the genre out from under the rest of us.

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This Thursday: My Reading at the Library of Congress

My first science fiction short story has just been published, and if you’re in the Washington, DC area, you can see me read it at the Library of Congress this Thursday. The story is called “Mathralon,” and it’s available as part of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two, edited by the incomparable George Mann. “Mathralon” is a somewhat unusual story. I’ve been tinkering with it for a year or two, off and … Read more

How to Help Promote Your Favorite Author

We often latch on to the authors we love. We realize this is a tough business, and we don’t want them to starve. We want them fat and happy, sitting on cushions stuffed with hundred dollar bills. But what’s the best way to help them?

People who aren’t in the writing and publishing business often have skewed ideas of how the business works. I’ve had to educate more than one eager friend or family member who thought the best way to promote Infoquake was to walk into Barnes & Noble and turn the book facing out on the shelf so it covers up David Eddings’ titles next door. I tell them to please stop doing this, because David Eddings sends armed hooligans to ding up my car with cricket bats every time he finds one of my books in front of his.

So now let me educate you, o blog reader, on some ways you can help pimp your favorite author, and some ways you should not pimp your favorite author.

Picketers with 'Infoquake' signs

Do…

…buy the author’s books. That’s the first and most obvious thing you can do. There’s really no need to analyze strategically which venue you should buy an author’s books from. We’re generally not so particular where you pick them up or for what price. Just buy ’em, and read ’em.

…buy the author’s books at their preferred venue, if you have the choice. The foregoing notwithstanding, many authors would be happy to see you buy their books from a specific venue, if it’s all the same to you. What is the author’s preferred venue? It varies. Check the author’s website (assuming they have one) to see if they have something other than the standard Amazon button listed. Lots of authors like to champion independent stores like Clarkesworld, Mysterious Galaxy, and Powell’s. Rob Sawyer politely pushes you to buy autographed copies on his eBay store.

…tell your circle of friends and acquaintances about the author’s work. Duh. Word of mouth is the absolute number one way that most books are sold these days. So aside from buying the book, the most important thing you can do to promote your favorite author is to put your mouth to work for them. Don’t feel like you need to compose a detailed essay or review; don’t be pushy or intimidating. Just spread the word, one person at a time. I’ve had people tell me how they sent emails to a groups of their friends, and then some of those people go off and email a group of their friends. It snowballs.

…use social networking tools like Digg, StumbleUpon, MySpace, and LibraryThing. See all those little funky icons at the bottom of blog posts all over the web? They lead to social networking sites that can seriously boost an author’s web traffic (and consequently, their visibility and sales). I got a surprise jump in traffic from someone who listed my post on The Return of the King on StumbleUpon. (Here’s the StumbleUpon page.) How big a jump? About 14,000 visitors in the space of a few days. That’s 14,000 potential new readers who might not have heard of me before.

…write a positive Amazon review. Don’t worry too much about the other specialty book sites out there; people may buy books from a number of different online venues, but they go to the Amazon reviews to hear the buzz. Keep in mind that generic two-line five-star reviews with no content (“David Lewis Edleman Rulez!!!!!!!”) and reviews that are obviously from friends and family (“Even if David Louis Edelman hadn’t donated a kidney to my sick child, I still would recommend his books!”) don’t help. Thoughtful critiques that don’t just summarize plot or shovel out meaningless platitudes — even critiques that contain negative impressions — are much more persuasive.

…write about the author on your own site(s) and link to the author’s website. Got a blog or a website? It may seem like a no-brainer to write reviews of your author’s favorite works. But linking to the author’s website helps in a number of other, less visible ways: with Technorati ratings, with Google rankings, with Alexa rankings, etc. Not to mention having your favorite author’s name linked on your site is a constant tickler to your web visitors, who may be inclined to purchase something on your recommendation, but who might not always remember the name of the author you recommended.

…join the author’s mailing list. Yes, lots of people get their information from RSS feeds and Tumblelogs and Facebook updates and the like. But believe it or not, email is still far and away the number one driver of Internet traffic. Some authors just send out ticklers with release dates and upcoming events; others really put their heart into it. But mailing lists give authors a simple way to get in touch with their readers all in one pop. Fellow Pyr author Kay Kenyon has a dynamite newsletter wherein she dispenses writing tips and little mini-essays about her fiction, if you’re looking for a good example. (Here’s the signup for my mailing list, if you’re interested. Just sayin’.)

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Who Should You Nominate for the 2008 Campbell Award?

Well, it’s that time of year again… time to make your nominations for the Hugo and Campbell Awards in preparation for this year’s WorldCon. Here’s the link to the official Hugo Award Voting site, where you can download the ballot. I’m absolutely loathe to do this, considering that I scrupulously try to avoid any hint of self-promotion on my blogs. But I suppose I should mention that this is my second and final year of … Read more

End-of-Year Miscellany

So I’m in Houston, Texas right now for a big ol’ reunion of my wife’s family. Somewhere around 30 people in all whose political views span the spectrum between rabid leftists and rabid rightists. Actually, that’s incorrect. There really is no spanning of the spectrum; just a bunch of folks hanging out on each end of it firing dirty looks across the divide. I have little hope that there might be intelligent discussion about the … Read more

Mini-Essay on the Internet and Publishing on SF Signal

I’ve got a mini-essay (three paragraphs) up today in the new “Mind Meld” feature of SF Signal. The question was about how the Internet has impacted publishing and the author’s ability to sell more books. Quick excerpt: But even more important, the Internet has allowed me to keep in touch with readers during the (too long) break between novels. Before the prevalence of websites and blogs, the only way for newer SF authors to keep … Read more

The Plot to Understand Second Life

Last night I had the privilege of attending a reading and interview of renowned science fiction author Paul Levinson in support of his book The Plot to Save Socrates. I stayed in my bathrobe the whole time, because the event took place on Second Life.

the-plot-to-save-socrates I had an ulterior motive for attending. I’m in the process of evaluating promotional ideas for my upcoming novel MultiReal, and the idea of doing a book launch on Second Life has cropped up in my discussions more than once. I created a Second Life profile many moons ago, just to poke around and see what the fuss was about. After a few days, I quickly grew bored with the whole thing and uninstalled the software from my PC. But yesterday, in the service of book promotion, I resurrected it and went exploring once again.

And after attending Paul’s Second Life event, I can now officially say I don’t get it.

This was no fault of Paul Levinson’s. I’ve shared a couple of panels at cons with him, and he seems like a friendly, intelligent, and interesting fellow. The reading itself was quite lively, and the book The Plot to Save Socrates sounds like that perfect combination of thought-provoking and nerdy cool. The plot in a nutshell: a grad student in the future decides to travel back in time to save the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates from drinking the hemlock. (Go read more about it on Paul’s website.) The interviewer herself asked pertinent, thoughtful questions.

But the Second Life aspect of the event basically went like this: I logged in and teleported to a virtual auditorium. I sat down in a virtual chair along with about 25-30 other spectators. The virtual Paul Levinson and the virtual moderator sat in virtual chairs on the stage, next to a virtual spinning copy of The Plot to Save Socrates. And then we all just sat there for an hour doing nothing while the two of them had a very interesting chat on audio.

So besides the novelty factor, what does Second Life offer to book promotion that you couldn’t get by holding your reading on, say, FreeConferenceCall.com or WebEx?

I’m not saying that Second Life is a bad place to hold a book event. If you’re the author, you get to see who’s attending the reading. You get a direct conduit to your own personal bookstore, along with all the tracking that entails. You get the potential of interacting with people who live in remote places you’re not likely to ever hit on the real-world book tour. Oh, and it’s free.

But as I sat in front of my computer and watched my avatar watch Paul Levinson’s avatar watching the moderator’s avatar, I tried and failed to figure out what potential Second Life has for literature over the next ten years. It’s kinda neat. It’s kinda fun. Is that it?

I tried to extrapolate, to think big. What if my name was Stephen King or Dan Brown, and someone gave me $500,000 and six months to put on a fabulous Second Life book event? What could I possibly do? Hire Second Life actors to put on a clunky little pantomime while I read? Create big virtual sculptures of the creatures in my book to hang over the stage? I have a difficult time imagining what I could do that wouldn’t just look silly. I suppose in 15 or 20 years when you can see 3D Hollywood-quality monsters zooming around while you read, that will be pretty cool. But Second Life is still a long way off. Right now they’re closer to King’s Quest IV circa 1988 than they are to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.

The problem is that literature is a very one-directional art form that doesn’t translate well into an immersive environment like Second Life. People are always talking about “updating” the reading experience, and so far it’s pretty much all been marketing hokum. Even if we all ditched paper and ink tomorrow and shifted over to Amazon Kindles or some other gee-whiz e-book reader, the basic reading experience wouldn’t change, only the distribution method. You’re still staring at a narrative of sequential words that you read from start to finish. What’s really changed about the narrative experience since the ancient Sumerians sat around the fire to hear The Epic of Gilgamesh? Only three things that I can think of: (1) writing, (2) paper, and (3) hypertext.

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Peter Watts Praises “MultiReal”

I had been planning to unveil this news at a later time closer to the book’s July release date. But I just browsed to the Amazon page for MultiReal and saw that the news is already out. So no use waiting. Peter Watts, Hugo Award-nominated author of Blindsight and the Rifters Trilogy (Starfish, Maelstrom, and Behemoth), expert in the ecophysiology of marine mammals, Canadian, and just all-around nice guy, has given an advance blurb for … Read more