items store.

And item 7- yes that has been our experience- gone are the days where publishers have publicity budgets for new authors. You have got to be publicity savvy yourself as an author or you’ll get nowhere. I reckon we sold 90% of our books on the back of our own promotional activities.

http://www.cocktailsatnaptime.com

If it took you 100,000 words to say what you wanted to say in the first place, saying it again in 50 will inevitably lose a lot.  A plot synopsis tends to make the book look naff; as somebody once concluded, there are really ‘only seven stories’.  A brief description of the subject matter, in the case of my book, can make it seem off-puttingly ‘techy’ and brainy, or ‘icky’ and disgusting, or both.  Something vague, like ‘this is the sort of book that women of all ages want to share with their mothers and daughters’, whilst an accurate representation of feedback, will not give enough information to be trusted when the book being referred to is not well known (although it will set people nodding sagely with agreement with regard to a well known book).

But whatever you say about your book, you are doomed to be one step behind if you try to learn from feedback which aspects of it are most appealing.  If you tell the next person what the last person found intriguing about it, you will find that aspect leaves the next person cold; and you will then have a damage limitation exercise on your hands:  “My book’s not really about that; it’s about this…”

If you are lucky enough to get any journalists interested in your work, they will have their own narrative which they will squeeze you and your book to fit.  If you are a British author responsible for promoting your own book, this will often be ‘the cult of the amateur’, eg ‘local mum writes book’.  And the response thus engineered from readers of the piece is not “I must read Ariadne Tampion’s book” but “I must write my own book”.

Journalists are correspondingly ruthless in suppressing angles that do not fit their narrative.  A British daily newspaper ran an article about the work which inspired the greater part of my book.  I posted a comment on their on-line version detailing my own previous involvement and mentioning my book.  It was ‘removed by the moderator’ despite the fact that I used no intemperate language and the person who was the focus of the article was happy for me to do what I did:  he acknowledges that as popular fiction, my book has the potential to bring our ideas to a much wider audience, thereby generating greater interest in his more serious work.

If my book ever does achieve the bestseller status its fans believe it deserves, then let my comments on this blog bear witness to the fact that this ‘simple mum’ did not enjoy ‘overnight success’!

But there is a silver lining…

The technology and changing markets have made it easier than ever for someone to get their message published.  But you have to be wise about the publisher you partner with.  At our company, Higherlife Development Services, we work hard to educate our authors on the various publishing options available to them including self-publishing, non-traditional publishing (such as on-demand and co-publishing) and traditional publishing.  If you tailor the author with the right publishing plan, they can be successful and have a great experience.

David Welday – HigherLife Publishing

Take a look at the two most popular non-fiction categories: biography/memoir and spiritual books. Even though I have a killer plot in mind, I won’t write a mystery until I have a few non-fiction titles under my belt.