May 2nd, 2008

It’s All About the Marketing, Stupid. There are several reasons why I enjoy working with Ted Savas so much. First, Ted and I have been friends for a long time. Second, we share the same philosophies about what makes a good book, including the idea that there can never be too many maps or illustrations in a book. Most importantly, though, is that Ted gets marketing. Even though he’s a lawyer by training, Ted has a very strong entrepreneurial spirit, and he gets marketing. He’s been really successful with selling his books, with placing them with the book clubs, and even in selling the movie rights to one of his titles. What’s more, he encourages his authors to market, because everyone benefits from the sale of books. Ted’s marketing director, Sarah Keeney, maintains a blog on the topic of marketing and selling books, which I commend to you.

Bruce Franklin, the owner of Westholme Publishing, is also adept at marketing. Bruce has been tremendously successful in getting his titles, including Russ Bonds’ Stealing the General, reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, which really spurs sales. Dan Hoisington, of Edinborough Press, who will be publishing my Dahlgren bio, is also astute at marketing; he provides each of his authors with their own web site to hawk their books.

These three, however, are the exception and not the rule. Most publishers are abysmal at marketing. Thomas Publications, which published my first book, is terrible at it. At least when I was doing business with them, they were not affiliated with a distributor, meaning that unless the book was sold in Gettysburg or on Amazon, forget it. Your book will never, ever stand a chance of getting into the big box bookstores. As I mentioned in yesterday’s update to the first post in this series, Potomac Books is absolutely horrible at marketing. I can’t tell you how many times I complained about the wretched job of marketing was being done by them, and nothing helped.

My biggest gripe is with the university presses. Since they really don’t have to worry about making a profit for the most part, they don’t do much marketing at all. As I said in the first post in this series, LSU sold 5 copies of my book last year. Kent State, which has also published three of my books, also does not do an especially good job of marketing, although Susan Cash, the marketing director, tries. Maybe it’s that they tend to price their books at outrageous prices. I don’t know. I just know that the titles that they have published haven’t sold at all.

And then there’s McFarland, in a league all of its own for abysmal marketing and for ridiculously expensive pricing. At least they’re honest about it. They don’t even attempt to sell their books to the big box retailers.

So, it falls upon the author to sell his or her own book. You’ve got to get out there and sell it. For me, it’s a trade-off. I’m self-employed, and if I don’t work, I don’t get paid. Consequently, I’ve got to do a careful balancing between what’s the best use of my time. I do as many appearances as I can, but certainly not as many as I could simply because I cannot afford to be away from the office any longer than I already am. I try to maintain a fairly high profile for my work, and I’m getting ready to launch a website for the sole purpose of selling my books (the design is nearly finished; I will announce its launch here when it’s ready).

J.D. and I put up a website to sell Plenty of Blame to Go Around: Jeb Stuart’s Controversial Ride to Gettysburg, and it’s been successful. Its companion site, for One Continuous Fight: The Retreat from Gettysburg and the Pursuit of Lee’s Army of Norther Virginia, July 4-14, 1863, is being finalized as I write this.

Don’t expect your publisher to sell your books. Be grateful when it does. Otherwise, you’ve got to do it yourself. That’s an important piece of information that I really wish I had known ten years ago.

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