Examining the assumptions behind the push to self-market your fiction

Let’s talk a little about the self-marketing tsunami. Because it is huge. It is compelling. And it is omnipresent.

Can you turn your novel into a career, if you’re just willing to do the necessary legwork?

Well, first I’d suggest you look deep in your heart and ask yourself whether or not there’s a tiny little hyperactive ADD OCD bipolar marketer secretly living there.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s marketing video for his book Crush It! is a case-in-point. Vaynerchuk has apparently succeeded in self-marketing to the extent that he’s got a whole book’s worth of advice on it. Kudos to Vaynerchuk! And his video (self-marketing his self-marketing) backs him up: as a self-marketer, he’s good.

You’ll find other writers out there writing and blogging about how they did it, they turned their book into a money-making machine, all through their native pluck and ingenuity and the utter miracle of the Internet. Their angle is always that not only did they do it, but, gosh darn it, you can, too!

On the other hand, there’s Mr. Longevity, Bob Spear over at Book Trends Blog, who has a history of self-publishing that dates back to 1989. Keep in mind that Bob has a highly-qualified specialty he was writing about, it was non-fiction, and Bob marketed his butt off. He was putting in 12-18 hour days for years, touring, speaking, giving workshops on his specialty, spending his own money (including taking out a 2nd mortgage), while simultaneously running a catalog business out of his basement, and, in his day job—yeah, he still had one—running a bookstore (the one with the 2nd mortgage). And, in the process, Bob wore himself down to a shadow. . .until he finally couldn’t take it anymore and had to quit.

Alan Rinzler got a commenter last year who said he’s looking into getting a traditional publisher now that he’s sold 65,000 copies of his self-published book. Alan replied—with what I consider admirable self-restraint, to put it mildly—that 65k is a DAMN RESPECTABLE number of self-published copies! Heck, yes, it is. Just about 55,000 more copies than you need to get a traditional publisher interested, and just about 64,927 copies more than the average self-publisher manages to pawn off on family and friends.

What’s really happening with these people?

Are these stories based on the rising wave of entrepreneurial success being brought to us by the blogosphere, in which it turns out Andy Warhol was right—in the future everyone is famous for 15 minutes? Or are they freak lightning strikes? Is it Reader’s Digest or Ed McMahon? And how can we tell?

Well, let’s crack this stuff open and find the hidden assumptions these stories are based on.

Assumption #1: IF you’re willing to do the work, you can sell 65k (or at least 10k) of your novel. You just have to do the research (read books like Crush It!), put in the hours, and have the desire. Of course, it helps a whole lot if you approach it with dogged, unswayable, death-grip determination. But. . .You can do it!

This assumption sets aside all considerations related to the book itself, as in: is there a sizable market for your subject matter? (teenage vampires) Is that market not already saturated? (whoa—teenage vampires) Are you the best person to write a book on this subject matter? Are you doing a professional job of it? And are you bringing something to this market that nobody has ever brought to it before? This also ignores the difference between marketing fiction and non-fiction. Assumption #1 is not concerned with these issues AT ALL. See Attention Deficit Disorder above.

Assumption #1 is also not concerned with the competition. Believe me, people: you have lots of competition. Way more now than twenty or even ten years ago. The rise of the supposed ease of self-marketing through the Internet has created a parallel rise in hopeful aspiring fiction authors planning to take advantage of it. And the more of you who read those self-marketers’ books, watch those videos, listen to those workshop leaders on self-marketing and believe them, the more of you who are prepping yourself this very minute—long before your novel is done—on how to go about marketing that novel into a smashing success, the more of you are fighting tooth and nail over the very same brass rings.

To paraphrase Mark Twain’s father, “Invest in readers. The blogosphere ain’t actually making any more of them.”

You don’t hear a whole heck of a lot from the people who tried self-marketing and failed. Well, obviously. They don’t want anyone to know that about them! That would mean that they alone, out of all the zillions out there trying to build a following by claiming to already have a following, blew it.

You know what I didn’t point out up above about self-marketers writing books on self-marketing? They’re still hustling to sell their books! TO YOU.

Assumption #2: IF you’ve got a sizable market for your subject matter that is not already saturated, AND you’re the best person to write a book on this subject matter BECAUSE you’re both doing a professional job and bringing something to this market nobody has ever brought to it before, THEN you are automatically qualified to be the best marketer for this book. Assumption #2 blurs the distinction between writers and marketers until it’s—hey!—invisible!

Over and over again you hear, “You are your book’s best advocate.” But are you? Just because you know your material, you know the craft of fiction, and you’ve got something unique to say, does that make you your own best salesperson? After all, sales is an industry. Marketing is an industry. The people who succeed in it (to the extent that you’ll need to succeed in order to sell 2, 10, or 65 thousand copies of your book) did not get there by being good at fiction.

Assumption #2 is not concerned with your personal strengths and weaknesses. It is not concerned with whether or not you’re actually any good at marketing, you love salesmanship, and you have experience as a marketer and education in the field, including a basic, instinctive understanding of what motivates people to act, what fires up that timeless gesture of pulling out the old wallet, as opposed to what simply leaves them flat. Assumption #2 turns a blind eye to the fact that writing fiction and marketing are two completely unrelated industries, both of which require steep, rock-strewn learning curves in order to produce even competent professionals.

Assumption #2 operates on the principle that you are, implicitly, willing to devote whatever you must to exploring this industry to its nether reaches as a newbie, sacrificing all else to the pursuit, including the time, energy, and creativity you used to put into fiction, your family, and, um, living your life.

See Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder/bipolar above.

Assumption #3: You are writing fiction IN ORDER to make a bundle; that is your goal. Assumption #3 overlooks all other considerations of the craft. It overlooks the love of the work, the joy of the process, the reason you chose—and continue to choose—fiction as your medium, as opposed to any other form of writing, such as newswriting, non-fiction, or the far-more-lucrative technical writing. Assumption #3 operates on the principle that loving fiction and loving money are one and the same thing.

Sure, we all need to make a living. I love the craft of fiction. I also have a mortgage. In fact, I live in coastal Northern California—my mortgage would probably make you choke on your writers’ workshop bagel. But loving fiction and loving getting my mortgage paid every month are not the same passion.

Are you in a position to devote the kind of time and energy (and your own money) to self-marketing that others around you do in order to succeed? Do you have kids? A spouse? A home you love? Friendly loan officers at your bank? Friends who encourage and support you every step of the way, taking hysterical collect calls in the middle of the night when you need someone to remind you why you’re doing this in the first place? Friends who stay home in order to take your calls, even if that means they get to steal your ideas and put them in their own novels while you’re out pounding the pavement?

The worst part of the whole thing is that traditional publishers are supposed to solve this dilemma for you. Remember the promise? “You give us your books, and we’ll edit, publish, sell, and promote them for you.” Promote them! They used to do that! But they’re stopping. You know why you hear people in the publishing industry plugging self-marketing everywhere you turn? Because even traditional publishers are saying it now: “We don’t market most of the books we publish anymore. You authors have to Do It Yourself.”

Think about it. Think long and hard. Are you, at heart, a writer? Or are you really secretly an aspiring marketer?