The difficulties and expenses of marketing came as something of a jolt once I had 3300 copies of LAST PHOENIX in my possession. The number of books was non-negotiable, and the cost was daunting. So, I set about to market my Great American Novel (tongue very much in cheek).
My publisher arranged several dozen telephone radio call-in show appearance at $50.00 cost for a 30 minute segment. I had the opportunity to sell myself and my books and to be subjected to a truly diverse set of questions coming in from the radio audience and other planets. I never fancied myself to be much of a public speaker let alone a radio personality, and it was a nervous beginning. With time, I learned how to talk about the book without hemming and hawing and saying “uummm”.
I came to enjoy the repartee with the talk show hosts and to be able to divert the call-in audience’s questions back to the issue at hand that I cared about for the most part. I developed a spiel that was short, too the point, and catchy–at least I thought so.
However, the other planet people spend a lot of time on call-in shows, and some the questions they posed were so bizarre and tangential that they defied an answer. On one Nevada show, I was deluged with conspiracy theories as soon as I mentioned that my book had to do with the CIA. That allowed the Martians, Klingons, and Nevadans who stay up late to ventilate about their own pet conspiracy concepts.
I am pretty sure that I had several opportunities to provide talk therapy to more than a few schizophrenics.
Anyhow, suffice it, that avenue of marketing did not pan out. Next I placed books in grocery stores, freebies in libraries, and finally hired a distributor of books who assured me that he regularly put books on shelves of stores of all kinds. He was primarily a distributor for aspiring authors of themes related to the locally predominate religion.
I checked in the stores. No books there. In time, I went to his office, and he was out. My books, however, were in. They were all neatly stacked in a their boxes in a far corner of the warehouse. When I confronted the crook, I learned that he suffered from several fairly severe disease processes: deafness, dumbness, amnesia, and a thought process disorder that interfered with his capacity to do math or to make difficult decisions like giving me back my money.
I looked into getting a publicist and found that they abound. The cost for an advertising blitz is prohibitive. At that time, the price was around $20,000 for a region and 10-15 times that for the nation.
Unfortunately, even with that cost, it was extremely unlikely that the big book stores (where intelligent readers actually buy books) would ever put one of my books on their shelves because they did not come from from a national distribution publisher–one of the big publishing houses like Random House, Harcourt Brace, or Doubleday.
Marketing was certainly not my forte, and I decided that I would just write novels and nonfiction for the love of writing and giving my efforts to friends. Think about it.
Carl Douglass – Author
Carl Douglass Books
www.carldouglass.com
“Neurosurgeon Turned Author Writes With Gripping Realism”
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