In which promoting a book is like driving across Nebraska in October
This is going to take some explaining.
So once upon a time, I was kindly helping Tessa Gratton with some background information about Canada because she was setting part of a book (Strange Maid, 10/10, would recommend) there. After I told her what she wanted to know, she told me that in her world, Canada had been mostly overrun by trolls. “Well then,” said I, “If I ever write a second book, I’ll burn down Kansas.” (Prairie Fire, 2015)
All told, it wasn’t a bad plan. There was historical precedent (which was something I played around with a lot in the OWEN-verse; taking real fires and endragoning them), and also it gave me character development for a character who needed it. There was just one tiny problem: I had forgotten about Nebraska.
Promoting a book is a deeply horrifying process for most authors. A staggeringly high number of us have Impostor Syndrome, and since most of us are working primarily with Twitter, we’re usually up against a news cycle that can be, shall we say, bloody hindering awkward*. Yet we try. We cast ourselves into the uncaring seas, hoping an anchor will catch somewhere. Wait, I’m trying to talk about Nebraska. Wrong set of metaphors.
ANYWAY. So the thing about Nebraska is that it’s between where my characters in PRAIRIE FIRE were and where Kansas is, and because I’d forgotten about it, suddenly the dragon had to go WAY FARTHER than I’d intended. Which all turned out fine, in the end (except for fictional-Kansas, obviously), except that as some sort of divine punishment for forgetting Nebraska existed, I had to drive all the way across it. THREE. TIMES.
At a certain point of book promo, you’re committed. If you tweet about a give-away, you have to carry through. If, god help you, you are doing a pre-order campaign, then you have just made a massive investment of both time and money. Most of what you see authors doing for promo is on their own dime, including, very often, travel to conventions. Which is a nice way of saying: don’t feel badly if you see people going to Comic-Con and you are not going to Comic-Con. They probably live close enough to make it work. (Sometimes publishers do pay, of course, but they like to keep us on our toes, so very often it’s kind of a random mix, and not even people sent by the same publisher are getting the same things.)
It’s kind of like corn subsidies, in a way (which is why Nebraska has so much corn). Money is poured into a thing because a thing is Good. Who decided? Honestly, it might have involved a dartboard at some stage, but the decision has been made. Now we all just have to strap in and hope that monoculture doesn’t lead directly to an apocalypse. (This is one place where publishing is better than the corn industry, because a blockbuster novel provides money for editors to take risks. See: Little, Brown while they were making bank on Twilight. Also, books don’t kill you like corn syrup does but I DIGRESS.)
A cool thing about Nebraska is that the speed limit is 80 miles an hour, so as soon as you clear Omaha, you just tell Chewie to do the calculations and make the jump to hyperspace. The only downside is that you keep passing FedEx trucks, and after six or eight hours, you get this nagging feeling that you keep passing the SAME FedEx truck, and that you will never escape. But you do escape. Of course, you only escape to Wyoming or the ugly part of Colorado, but the important thing is that there are mountains ahead of you, and you can start to dream again**.
And that is, probably, the most important thing about book promotion: don’t get so bogged down in it that you forget what you’re here for, and don’t forget that your primary job as an author is to write the next book. It’s too easy to get caught up in what other people are doing, and unless they are upfront about it, you have no idea how much is them and how much is their publisher (this isn’t a conspiracy, btw, it’s just the weirdness of art meeting bean counters.***), and sometimes they just don’t have the time to be upfront.
My approach is to do what’s fun, and to do what I can. And three times now, that has meant driving across Nebraska. It has zero to do with my sales, I’m pretty sure, but I saw some great stuff and met some great people and learned all the words to Hamilton in October of 2015, so it was time well spent. You just need to find your own Nebraska. And, like, aim for one with some ocean real estate.
*David Eddings, the Tamuli
**Also there’s a time change in the middle of the state for no particular reason aside from the fact that God is cruel and wants you to miss breakfast biscuits at McDonald’s, but that’s less of a thing now that McDonald’s serves all-day breakfast.
***Okay, maybe there’s a bit of a conspiracy.
Product Review No One Asked For: the Tim Horton’s Chocolate Cheesecake
I feel like this is a miss entirely, in that it doesn’t taste at all like cheesecake and there are mint-looking sprinkles that don’t taste minty (especially weird, as this was the FREAKING CHRISTMAS DOUGHNUT), and also apparently the Tims CEO plans to cope with paying his employees a living wage by cutting their benefits which, honestly, eff that noise.