Of course they would. Most artists would rather do their art, then promote themselves or their work.
The issue is whether they will achieve greater financial success thereby.
It’s all a matter of finding the right market.
In the past the answer to this was: “impossible to know.”
Today, the answer to this is: “impossible to know.”
Be sure to tell all of us in the field if you have a different answer that we can rely on.
There’s also the belief - part reality-based, part ethos-based - that an artist or artisan promoting hi/rself will take away from their dedication to their work and the quality of that work.
I don’t think it is impossible to know. I’d look to see what writers and other artists who have achieved financial success actually do.
Many of them certainly appear to work hard to promote themselves and their work. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume a correlation.
Why artists would assume that artistic endevour should, uniquely among human activities, not require promotion and marketing for success is I think more wish fulfillment than anything. The key seems to be that artists would, as a group, prefer to do their art than “waste” time with such uncongenial activities as self-promotion - so would prefer to believe that, in concentrating on art, they are actually doing that which will achieve financial success.
It’s worthless if the vacuum cleaner doesn’t work. You can market all day, but it boils down to whether the product is something someone will pay money for.
In writing, your book is your product. Unless you write a book that people will be willing to buy, promotion is a waste of time. And if you spend your time promoting the book, that’s time spent away from the writing – because authors succeed not because of one book, but because of multiple books (not necessarily a series).
If you do write a book that people is willing to buy, your promotion efforts pale behind the ability of a publisher to promote the book. Occasionally, a writer can make it work. But it’s a business model that fails far more than having a publisher promote it.
Vanity press book sell an average of 75 copies, no matter how hard the author promotes them. My novel sold 16,000 copies. I worked to promote it, but I doubt I sold an extra 100 copies after all my work. If I had worked ten times as hard, I might have sold another 100.
Good. Nearly all authors who have achieved financial success had the publisher do the bulk of the promotion. Sure, they did what they could to promote the book, but until you become successful, there is no way you can reach the number of people you need to reach in order to become successful. Again, Stephen King didn’t do much to promote Carrie; it succeeded because of the publisher and reviews. Stephenie Myer was the same: her publisher did the promotion that made Twilight a success. There may be a handful now who manage to promote themselves to success, but all are able to write books people want to buy, and for every one, there are dozens and dozens of others who succeeded by letting the publisher do the bulk of the promotion work.
Again, promotion is the publisher’s job. No writer can do it better. The time spend on self-promotion is just not cost-effective for 98% of all writers.
Like I said, why isn’t Gene Steinberg a successful author? His self-promotion is legendary.
OTOH, someone like Esther Friesner has made a good living from her writing, yet does no more self-promotion than anyone else who has a web page.
The problem with your argument is that you are arguing from a vacuum. You really don’t have any idea how publishing works, nor how authors succeed, nor what works in promoting books. Yet you make pronouncements from ignorance and on the basis of “it works that way for vacuum cleaners.” :rolleyes:
Amanda Hocking, Julie Powell, Jerry Holkins, Mike Krahulik, Jenny Lawson, Matthew Inman, Drew Curtis, Bill Simmons, David Moody, Perez Hilton, Matt Drudge… should I keep going?
Why? Who cares? No one is saying that being a blogger/self-published is the true road to fame and fortune and anyone who stops doing it to sign a deal with a traditional publisher is a sellout.
And do you think she’ll stop promoting herself now that she’s signed with a publisher? Is the Facebook page going away or the Twitter feed being shut down? Come on. The publisher will handle a lot of the big marketing, but if you think Hocking is just going to sit back and do nothing to interact with her fans now that she has a deal, you’re crazy.
So marketing isn’t necessary for vaccum cleaners, either?
The choice isn’t between vanity publishing and having a publisher, any more than it is between having a crap product and having a great product. That’s yet another false dichotomy.
Rather, it is between doing promotional work yourself, and not doing it.
I fully understand the desire to believe that an artist should not waste his or her time promoting him or herself, that the essential excellence of the work ought to shine through, without any further effort, and be recognized. Really, I do. But it defies reality.
People have to know about your wonderful work, in order to buy it. Relying on a publisher to invest money in you may work for some, but publishers are like anyone else - more willing to invest if you can prove you have an audience. Which means you must create one.
Interesting that you should mention Stephen King. It is a cliche in the publishing world that, “unless you are Stephen King”, you can’t rely on your publisher to do all the work of promotion.
Exceptions are not rules.
So far, with all your alleged insider’s knowledge, you haven’t made a convincing argument. Rather, you have relied on straw-manning, false dichotomies, and appeals to personal authority. Oh yes, and on proclaiming that those who disagree with you are ignorant. That’s sure to work! I mean, when isn’t that a winning strategy for the internet!?
Silly me. Since you only mentioned science fiction bloggers I assumed I could use that as my base. Apples to apples. But if you really want to play in the open field, your examples look worse and worse because then you have to compare them not just to the small number of sf writers but to the entire field of 151,700 “writers and authors” you yourself cited. How do they look now?
The rest of it from you and Malthus is just the same tedious argument that the Internet has changed everything. To which the only response is: no, it hasn’t.
Reality dictates that professionals should do what they are best at and employ other professionals to assist them in the fields where they are not. That has always been true in every field, including the arts, and remains true today. A model in which professionals - any and all professionals, from doctors to singers - has to do all the different chores of succeeding in that profession by themselves in sure to fail. Not only that, but the very terms of your own arguments, it’s not even close to being true today. Those bloggers you mentioned didn’t develop their own blogging software, you know. And Scott Sigler does himself no favors by running one of the ugliest sites on the Internet. You don’t think a professional designer might be of assistance?
Since Malthus loves these terms, let me throw out the fallacy of the excluded middle. The middle you’re overlooking is that writers need to participate in promotion but should not need to do it all themselves.
If you want your arguments to be taken seriously, stop using the claim that “X is successful so everybody could be successful if they did the same thing.” It’s laughable. I’m sure there’s a name for this fallacy, too.
The publisher can do it better, if they do it at all. That’s the thing. It’s not enough for a publisher to buy and publish your book, they have to care about the fact that they bought and published it, which, a surprising amount of the time, they don’t. The reality is, major marketing budgets – or any budget at all – attach to only a fractionally small percentage of books released in a year. Most books that are published, have limited or no marketing budget. As an entire class of publishers, prestigious university presses in particular have no marketing budget. In 2009, most marketing budgets were slashed by half in the publishing industry. That means a large fraction of the authors who could expect marketing support, in 2009 received less or none.
My father has two books out from a reputable academic press. He’s always griping that “they” should be doing more to promote his book. Well “they” aren’t going to, because “they” cannot afford it. So, you accept that and do some of your own promotion, or you can just do nothing, and let the readers ignore you at their leisure.
Can you do it “better” than the publishing house could if they wanted to? Almost definitely not. Is doing something to promote your book better than what the publisher is going to do, when what they’re going to do is nothing? Definitely yes.
Odd - I haven’t mentioned the internet at all.
Huh? Where did I say that writers need to do all the promotion themselves? Sure, I’d gratefully accept any promotional efforts made on my behalf by my publisher. The problem, as others have noted, is that these efforts will generally not be enough to ensure my success - hence the necessity for non-Steven-Kings of promoting oneself.
The name of the falacy you are looking for is “strawmanning” - defined as recasting someone elses’ argument in such a way as to make it easier to attack. Such as claiming the exclusion of a middle that was not, in point of fact, excluded.
Malthus said it before I did, but I’ll just say that I agree completely with this. Exapno and Chuck, the two of you are talking in absolutes that really do have no bearing on the discussion. And you’re arguing from a position of authority that doesn’t correlate with how the publishing business seems to work today.
And you keep missing my point, so I’ll repeat it again. I’m not saying that bloggers have some magical path to success because “the Internet changed everything.” All I’m saying is that it is possible to go from being a blogging sensation to being a “real” writer (define real however you want, but I like to think it’s if you can support yourself with it). And a big part of that is marketing ability.
Anything is possible. It’s possible for a black man to become president. But that doesn’t help Herman Cain at all.
Saying something is possible isn’t an argument. Analyzing whether a particular course is helpful or not to an individual, and what that course would take to become helpful or better, and how much time and effort and learning of new skills would be involved, and all the 10,000 other aspects of professionalism that a career requires would be an argument.
I don’t see any of that in these posts. Talk about arguing absolutes! Some people have been successful. That’s all I know about the industry and all I ever have to know! That’s what I keep hearing.
OK, but you keep ignoring pretty much everything that’s happened in the publishing world in the last decade or so. It is possible to start out as a blogger and move on to professional writing supported by a traditional publishing house. And the way you do this is you learn how to market yourself. Your argument seems to boil down to “That’s not the way I did it!” and you want to leave it at that.
If I remember right, Chuck published his last book in 1990 or so. I don’t really know anything about your writing (I didn’t know you were a published writer to be honest, I was always under the impression you just worked in publishing a while ago), but is it more recent? It’s hard to argue about the present state of the publishing world when your experience comes from 20-30 years ago.
If that’s true, this would explain the overly authoritative tone based on how the publishing industry used to work.
I published my sixth book last month, from a major publisher. Things have changed since I published my first book in 1999, and even more so since 1990 and earlier.
Not only do I write, but I do a regular column on business trends in the industry. A paid, professional column, not a blog. (I have a blog, of course. I’ve even published a book based on that blog, though it’s not a writing blog.)
I don’t ignore what’s been happening in the publishing world. In fact, I keep getting annoying when people in the field, supposed professionals who should know better, post about “new” stuff that I had written about literally years earlier.
The simplistic understanding of the new publishing world is pretty much entirely wrong. I get it. We’re in early days. Nobody knows anything about how anything will turn out. I’m telling you, though, that much less has really changed than the “Internet changed everything” people think. If all you know is the last ten years, you can’t understand that.
Is your column or blog publicly accessible online? Would you be willing to post (or PM) the link?
Flat no. I don’t give away my identity. I think no less of those who have, like Chuck. It’s an individual decision. I’ve decided no, for any foreseeable future.
Besides, since you don’t believe a word of what I write here, why would reading my column make any difference?
It’s not that I don’t believe a word of what you write, but we are both involved in the business of books (albeit from different ends) and we see things very different. That’s interesting and I think reading your column would be interesting as well.
Because then we could not believe a word of it more knowledgeably!