How'd You Find Your Audience, Eric Stone?

Eric Stone is the author of the Ray Sharp series of detective thrillers set in Asia and based on true stories. FLIGHT OF THE HORNBILL, the third book in the series, will be out this fall from Bleak House Books. THE LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD and GRAVE IMPORTS, the first two books in the series are available in Bleak House paperback. Eric’s first book was WRONG SIDE OF THE WALL, the true crime/sports biography of Ralph “Blackie” Schwamb, the greatest prison baseball player of all time.

1. What single marketing strategy best helped you spread the word about your book to people who would be interested in buying/reading it?

To be honest, I’m not sure what works best. I tend to believe in the shotgun approach – you send out a large number of projectiles in one general direction and hope that at least a few hit their target. I’ve done a bit of everything: book tours; special events at bookstores; Web site; book trailer; e-mail blasts; MySpace, Facebook and Crimespace; attending conventions and conferences; speaking at libraries and to special groups with an interest in the topics I cover; a little advertising; hired a publicist; interviews like this one; radio shows; and a few TV appearances.

That said, not being a well-known author, the one thing I’ve done that I think has sold more books than anything else is to visit as many bookstores as I possibly can. I do my best to visit every single bookstore in my hometown – which is tough since my hometown is Los Angeles, and I think of it as Southern California in general – and I also go on a big book tour, visiting as many independent bookstores as possible, particularly mystery stores since that’s the genre I write. A good example of why that’s important is my visit to a new bookstore in the South on my first book tour. I got there for my event, and there was only one person there. The store had ordered 30 or so books. I visited with the one person, signed the books and left, asking myself if it had been a waste of time or not. A month later, I heard from the store that they had sold all the books and ordered more. Because of my visit, they got to know me and my books, and were better able to recommend the books to their customers. So it’s a mistake to underestimate the affect of personal visits to stores.

On the other hand, even if every single store I’ve ever visited sold an average of 50 books – which would be a lot, a realistic figure might be an average of between five and 10 books – at this point, having visited about 300 stores over the course of promoting three books, that still doesn’t get me anywhere near any best-seller lists.

Near as I can tell, there is no single thing you can do that works. According to what I’ve read, if you appear on Oprah, The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, that will usually boost sales. But it’s no guarantee. It used to be that the morning talk shows like Good Morning America guaranteed sales, now they seem to have very little impact. Supposedly, if your publisher pays to have your book placed on the “ladders” at the front of Barnes & Noble and Borders (85 percent of the books those stores sell come from within 20 feet of the front door), that might work. But I know a couple of authors who had that done for them, and it didn’t accomplish much at all.

I’ve come to the conclusion that once you’ve written and sold the book, you have to peel off your author suit, get out from behind the keyboard and hit the road as a salesperson, even if it’s only close to home; Arthur Miller magically transforms into Willy Loman. There are a few lucky exceptions to this, but you can’t count on being one of them.

2. What surprised you or was most unexpected when you first set out to help promote your book?

That I was mostly on my own when it came to promoting my books. I’ve had three publishers. All three were very good about sending out review copies, not just to their lists, but to the lists I compiled myself and asked them to send copies to. One publisher didn’t even assign a publicist specifically to my book. Although they did kick in $500 toward the book tour (that cost me about $3,000.) One publisher assigned me a publicist who took me out to an inexpensive lunch in New York (after I paid for my own ticket to get there) and who was very nice, but did nothing else at all for the book. My current publisher, Bleak House, has been by far the best, but it is also the smallest of the three and doesn’t have the money or resources to do as much as – in a perfect world – you’d want your publisher to do for you. Still, they are great to work with, creative, supportive, and I feel like they’ve got my back when I come up with ideas on my own for how to promote my books. (They also come up with some of their own bright ideas.) They even throw what money they can afford at promoting my books, and the publicist they’ve assigned to me is a joy to work with.

What I had to learn to contend with is that there are nearly 200,000 books a year published in the United States and not even the big publishing houses have the money or resources to promote all of them. Generally they spend the most money promoting books by the authors who they already know will sell a lot of books. (The ones like Janet Evanovich who you would think need the least promotion at this point.) In most cases, promotion is much more the author’s job than the publishing company’s job. That was a bit surprising – they are trying to make money after all, aren’t they? And a bit depressing. But I’ve learned to live with it and even to enjoy the promotions side.

3. What challenges did you face during the first months of your book’s release?

Exhaustion, both mentally and physically, from trying to visit and talk to as many different people in as many different places as I possibly could. Then there’s also distribution. You just can’t count on your books showing up where and when you want them to. Most of the time they do, but sometimes for any number of reasons they don’t. I quickly learned to keep a box or two of my books in the trunk of my car so that when I got to a bookstore and they hadn’t got their shipment yet, I was able to loan them books for my event. When I traveled by plane, I tried to pack as many books as I could or check a box of them with my luggage.

A lot of the work also needs to be done before release. After a book comes out, there’s no more than about a six-week, maybe two-month, window of opportunity to run around doing whatever you can to promote it. If you haven’t set up most of your events, interviews, media appearances, etc. well before the release date, you’re not going to be able to set up many on the fly afterward.

4. If you knew then (when your book first published) what you know now, what might you have done differently?

Spent even more time online – on blogs, chat rooms, social networking sites. It’s something you can do from anywhere, and that is increasingly important at getting your name in front of potential readers.

I probably would have concentrated my efforts more heavily in the first few weeks after pub date on one region, hoping to somehow shove my way onto some local best-seller lists and get a large number of good local reviews that might be noticed elsewhere.

I would have made a bigger effort to promote my book to non-bookstore groups. My first book was a biography of a baseball player. I mostly hit bookstores for events and only a few baseball organizations. I should have tried to get in front of a lot more baseball organizations. My most recent book is a novel, but it deals with the theft of Cambodian antiquities. I made an effort to give talks in front of arts organizations, as well as at bookstores, but I probably should have made more of an effort to do that.

5. Any other advice for newly published authors?

The one thing that most authors find scary is the whole sales and promotional aspect. By nature, most writers are pretty solitary, spending hours and days and weeks in front of their keyboard with little human interaction. Get over it. You’ve got to embrace the social side of being an author. There is never going to be a better salesperson for your book than you. Even if you are published by a huge house and they pull out all the stops to promote you, readers still want to meet you, see you, hear you, get a little piece of you. And that can be gratifying if you relax about it and convince yourself that it’s just as much a part of the job of being an author as writing the books. Don’t be shy. You’ve been published because some company thinks your book is good enough that people other than your mom are going to want to read it. And good enough that they’ve got a chance of making some money off it. As soon as it’s in a store or on a library shelf, you’ve accomplished something great, and that you can be proud of and that will interest other people. Use that knowledge to boost your self-confidence. A lot of writers are attracted to the profession because it means they can work on their own. And it does mean that, up until the moment a publisher buys your book. Then, unless you want to rely on sheer dumb luck, you’ve got to get over the alone thing fast.

Get to know booksellers. As an author, they are your partner, you couldn’t be doing what you do without them. And because they are the retail end of the business, they know the customers (readers). They know what people like and don’t like. They have good ideas about what does and doesn’t work in the way of marketing, because they often talk with their customers about how they found out about a particular book. (Or they can recommend your book to their customers.) By and large, you’ll learn more from independent booksellers, rather than the big chains where there’s a high turnover of employees. But if you cultivate the right friendships, you can learn a lot from anyone who sells books. Plus, people who sell books tend to read and love books, and it’s just plain fun hanging around with them and chewing the fat.

Seek out other authors to hang out with. You need someone to talk shop with. Writers’ organizations like Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, Romance Writers of America, etc. are where you’ll find your chance to have some good “water cooler” time with colleagues.

Want to know more about Eric Stone and his books? Visit his Web site at http://www.ericstone.com/.