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Once again, I’ve staved off the lack of a Random Thursday blog by soliciting topic ideas (though my new Spring commute/workout schedule means this isn’t getting written until evening). The suggestion was: Marketing and/or submitting your work to reviewers. (H/T Rebecca Swartz on facebook)
When my first book, Daughter of Mystery came out, I did essentially no marketing until the book was actually out. In part, this was because, as a debut novelist, there didn’t seem much point in talking up a product no one had access to yet. But another big part of it was that I had no idea what aspects of the publicity my publisher was taking care of and I had an absolute horror of being viewed as demanding, pushy, or stepping on their toes. I didn’t know what to ask for or expect, so I waited for someone to give me a clue. (I know better this time. Nobody will ever give you a clue.) I did eventually get some information about where Bella Books had sent review copies on their own and that it was limited to lesbian/gay sites and publications, so I figured the SFF side was entirely up to me and that's mostly what I focused on.
I hadn’t been entirely quiet, of course; I’d been talking on this blog about the process of writing the book, and commenting on the publication process all along. But that doesn’t really count as publicity, since I didn’t have a readership outside the couple dozen people still reading Live Journal.
The one serious thing I did prior to publication was to schedule a release party at the Other Change of Hobbit bookstore (now, alas, no more), which included sending out announcements through all my social media and handing out flyers to people in my social circles who might reasonably be interested in celebrating with me. I really looked at it more as a celebration than a publicity event. There were a few people who came who didn’t already know me, but as a party it was a success. There were a couple dozen folks, I did a reading, there was cake (with a picture of the book cover printed on it) and the store sold quite a few copies.
Another advance thing I’d done was to finally start getting active on Twitter. (I’d had an account for a couple of years but only used it for crowd-sourced breaking news.) Twitter is The Happening Place for SFF writers and fans (except for those who stick to Tumblr, which I haven’t figured out yet). I started out with people I already knew from being active in SFF fandom or from other places online, then added people who said interesting things or who my friends all seemed to know. It was also a good place to learn about where people were talking about books and things: websites, podcasts, and so forth. I wasn’t ready to plunge in and start promoting myself but I wanted to know what the lay of the electronic landscape was. Who was who. Where I might reasonably find interested readers. I looked at it as a long game.
I also started joining facebook groups relating to lesbian fiction interests. There are a lot of book-related groups and it was a long, slow process to figure out which ones were entirely filled with authors posting endless repeats of their book promos and which ones actually had interesting conversations about books, reading, and writing that made it likely that things posted there would actually get read. I’ve been a lot more reticent about posting promotional things in facebook groups than most authors seem to be. I never want readers to think to themselves, “Oh God, not THAT again.” And I’m very aware that my books are quite out of the mainstream for lesbian publishing, so when someone pops up asking, “Recommend me some good reading,” they’re statistically unlikely to be interested in my books. So I tend to be very selective about mentioning my works--generally only when the specific genre is requested. (And, of course, there are some groups where self-promotion is frowned on and you sit there hoping that someone else will think to recommend your work. It can be a bit of a minefield at times.)
Being a researcher, I set out online to identify reviewers and review sites that might be interested in my book. As with pretty much all my promotional activities, there’s a big divide in how to approach the lesbian publishing side versus the SFF side. Lesbian or LGBTQ review sites tend to be fan-run and it can be hard to figure out whether the expected readership makes it worth asking your publisher to send them a review copy. My general impression has been that sites holding themselves up as “LGBTQ” aren’t worth the trouble because their content will be 90% m/m erotic romance and -- combined with the marginality of my genre -- this makes is statistically unlikely that a potentially-interested reader of the site is going to even find any reviews of my work. There are a lot of lesbian fiction review sites, but many review only sporadically or are on hiatus. Eventually I did identify several sites specifically oriented toward lesbian fiction, that seemed like good candidates, sent their info to Bella, and ended up with at least a couple of good reviews out of that.
The SFF side is a much tougher nut to crack. I’ve sent queries or unsolicited review copies to something like a dozen reviewers who seemed a good fit for my material without any success. In fact, for the ones that say “query first” I’ve never gotten any response at all. So it’s very hard to know how to adapt my pitch for better success. The elephant in the library here is that the prevailing impression in the SFF community is that SFF published by lesbian presses is the functional equivalent of fan-fic and not to be taken seriously. I’ve gotten a small number of very positive reviews from people in the SFF community, but only when it was someone I knew personally who was willing to give my book a chance despite that prevailing impression. Eventually I hope to get the message through that I’m writing “mainstream fantasy,” I just happen to be publishing it with a non-mainstream press for good and valid reasons. But it’s going to be a long slog and there’s a lot of prejudice to fight through.
The “general reader reviews” I get on Amazon and Goodreads and on people’s personal blogs have been very heartening. I regularly gush about how delightfully literate my reviewers are. When you’re in a marginalized segment of a marginalized genre (which is what I am, no matter which direction you’re coming at it from), it really matters that your fans are explaining why they like your book.
So what other publicity techniques do I use? Well, I printed up business cards for my book: cover and synopsis, brief blurb and reviewer pull-quote, and links where to buy. Any time my writing comes up on casual conversation (and I’ve gotten very good at making sure it comes up in casual conversation), I hand out a card. I also often carry a copy of the book with me when I think I might have the opportunity for a “strategic gift”--access to someone who just might possibly be interested in reading it and who, on the chance that they do read it (and of course they’d like it if they did), would generate significant buzz if they started telling people about it. I don’t know that I’ve actually gotten results from any of these strategic gifts yet, but it’s a crap shoot. If it works one time in twenty, it may be worth it.
One big thing I've done wasn't really intended as book publicity at all: the Lesbian Historic Motif Project. I'd been meaning to share my historic research in some way for quite some time. The LHMP started out as a Gay Pride Month project and I was enjoying it so much that it's just kept going. And although it's sometimes hard to tell from the (paucity of) feedback, it gets a fair amount of traffic and has impressed people that never would have encountered my work under ordinary circumstances. For complicated reasons, I'm much more comfortable advertising my research work than my fiction. But it gives me an opportunity to say, "And by the way, if you like my research, here's some fiction that grew out of it."
In the run up to the release of The Mystic Marriage, I’ve done a few things differently than the first time around. For one, I knew in advance that publicity is pretty much up to me and I’m less concerned about stepping on my publisher’s toes on that topic. I also got up the nerve to request that the publication schedule be designed to allow for the possibility of advance review copies (ARCs). This isn’t really a Done Thing in lesbian publishing, but it’s the assumed default in SFF publishing and there are a lot of reviewers who only do advance reviews, timed to come out when the book is released. I’ve had mixed success on this point: one month isn’t really “advance” when it comes to ARCs, so when a personal contact got me a request to submit an ARC to Publishers Weekly, what they got was the pre-edited manuscript. But it got me a review. In Publishers Weekly. And that’s nothing to sneeze at.
I’ve been able to request that electronic ARCs and publicity info be sent out to several of the online SFF trade magazines that post “forthcoming books”. It’s too early to know whether anything will come of that. For several months I’ve been letting people know on Twitter that I’d love to send ARCs to any SFF reviewers who ask, but I’ve only had one person take me up on that. As I say: a tough nut to crack. I do have reviews lined up from a couple of people who reviewed (and loved) Daughter of Mystery. Not a lot, but at least a starting place.
There are two other major things I’m doing this year for promotion. I’m taking some time to write a bunch of short fiction. At the moment, my novel-length writing is pretty locked into the Alpennia series, which makes it hard to get cross-pollination. But short fiction makes me more “agile” as they say in business. I just had a fantasy short story published by Podcastle.org, a respected SFF audio fiction site. I have a historic romance short story out on submission to a lesbian anthology. I have a sequel to the story I sold to Podcastle that should stand on its own well enough to place in an entirely different market (for which I have a few ideas). I’m working on another historic fantasy short story that I plan to submit to the anthology Queers Destroy Fantasy which -- if it’s accepted -- would be significant visibility. And I have a long novelette (possibly to become a short novella) out with the beta-readers that falls solidly in the SFF camp, although the length will make it tricky to place. (But if I am able to place it, I plan to put it out as part of a collection of related stories as a self-published e-book later.) All of these create opportunities to pick up new readers and to build up a reputation.
The second thing I’m focusing on this year is the convention circuit, complicated by the fact that I have two entirely communities to try to connect with. I’ve been attending (and even helping run) SF conventions for the last 30 years and have participated in programming at many of them prior to having my novel out. So I’m not in the position of trying to break into a new community waving an “outsider” book in that crowd. I know the ropes and the rules and it’s a way to convince a roomful of people at a time that I’m a serious fantasy novelist with an interesting product. So this year I’m doing FogCon (my very local literary SF convention), BayCon (local regional con), WorldCon (THE big SF convention), and ChessieCon (a smallish regional convention in the Baltimore area that I attend for complex idiosyncratic reasons) and I’ll be participating in programming for all of them. (I can say this, now that I’ve gotten my programming invites for both WorldCon and BayCon.)
On the LGBTQ side, last year I went to my first Golden Crown Literary Conference (GCLS -- the premier national lesbian publishing convention) and I’ll be going again this year. I’ll definitely be doing a reading -- I don’t know yet whether I’ve been accepted for any other programming. For smaller events, I applied to be one of the reader guests at a one-day event in Austin TX in April: “Lone Star LesFic”. Frankly, it’s quite an investment in travel for a small one-day convention, but it looked like fun and it’s happening the week before The Mystic Marriage gets released so it seemed like a really good choice. The week before GCLS in New Orleans, there’s a smallish, very new LGBTQ SF & Media convention in Tampa FL which seemed like a nice synergy of geography, so as with the Austin event, I applied for one of their “featured guest” slots and was accepted. Another smallish regional event I have on my schedule is Gay Romance Northwest in Seattle. I briefly considered it last year, but it looked to be so m/m-heavy that it didn’t seem a good fit. But evidently they’re seriously trying to be more diverse and I figured I’d give it a shot this year. And Seattle is convenient enough for a quick trip. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to be involved in the programming -- I’m included in someone’s panel proposal but no guarantee that that panel will be accepted.
The convention circuit isn’t for everyone. I wouldn’t advise anyone to try to use SF conventions as a promotional opportunity unless you’re already involved in the larger SF fannish community. The dynamic is very much that of a communal conversation and people don’t always take kindly to someone showing up just to promote their new book. It is also, let us be honest, very expensive and nowhere near a good return-on-investment in monetary terms. It’s a long game. It’s a way of building a reputation and a brand. (It’s a way of writing off lots of writing-related expenses on your taxes.) I’m privileged to have a day job that pays well enough that the limitations on my ability to attend conventions come in time rather than money. But if you’re in a position to do so, it can be a lot of fun. And if it isn’t fun, by all means, don’t do it!
When my first book, Daughter of Mystery came out, I did essentially no marketing until the book was actually out. In part, this was because, as a debut novelist, there didn’t seem much point in talking up a product no one had access to yet. But another big part of it was that I had no idea what aspects of the publicity my publisher was taking care of and I had an absolute horror of being viewed as demanding, pushy, or stepping on their toes. I didn’t know what to ask for or expect, so I waited for someone to give me a clue. (I know better this time. Nobody will ever give you a clue.) I did eventually get some information about where Bella Books had sent review copies on their own and that it was limited to lesbian/gay sites and publications, so I figured the SFF side was entirely up to me and that's mostly what I focused on.
I hadn’t been entirely quiet, of course; I’d been talking on this blog about the process of writing the book, and commenting on the publication process all along. But that doesn’t really count as publicity, since I didn’t have a readership outside the couple dozen people still reading Live Journal.
The one serious thing I did prior to publication was to schedule a release party at the Other Change of Hobbit bookstore (now, alas, no more), which included sending out announcements through all my social media and handing out flyers to people in my social circles who might reasonably be interested in celebrating with me. I really looked at it more as a celebration than a publicity event. There were a few people who came who didn’t already know me, but as a party it was a success. There were a couple dozen folks, I did a reading, there was cake (with a picture of the book cover printed on it) and the store sold quite a few copies.
Another advance thing I’d done was to finally start getting active on Twitter. (I’d had an account for a couple of years but only used it for crowd-sourced breaking news.) Twitter is The Happening Place for SFF writers and fans (except for those who stick to Tumblr, which I haven’t figured out yet). I started out with people I already knew from being active in SFF fandom or from other places online, then added people who said interesting things or who my friends all seemed to know. It was also a good place to learn about where people were talking about books and things: websites, podcasts, and so forth. I wasn’t ready to plunge in and start promoting myself but I wanted to know what the lay of the electronic landscape was. Who was who. Where I might reasonably find interested readers. I looked at it as a long game.
I also started joining facebook groups relating to lesbian fiction interests. There are a lot of book-related groups and it was a long, slow process to figure out which ones were entirely filled with authors posting endless repeats of their book promos and which ones actually had interesting conversations about books, reading, and writing that made it likely that things posted there would actually get read. I’ve been a lot more reticent about posting promotional things in facebook groups than most authors seem to be. I never want readers to think to themselves, “Oh God, not THAT again.” And I’m very aware that my books are quite out of the mainstream for lesbian publishing, so when someone pops up asking, “Recommend me some good reading,” they’re statistically unlikely to be interested in my books. So I tend to be very selective about mentioning my works--generally only when the specific genre is requested. (And, of course, there are some groups where self-promotion is frowned on and you sit there hoping that someone else will think to recommend your work. It can be a bit of a minefield at times.)
Being a researcher, I set out online to identify reviewers and review sites that might be interested in my book. As with pretty much all my promotional activities, there’s a big divide in how to approach the lesbian publishing side versus the SFF side. Lesbian or LGBTQ review sites tend to be fan-run and it can be hard to figure out whether the expected readership makes it worth asking your publisher to send them a review copy. My general impression has been that sites holding themselves up as “LGBTQ” aren’t worth the trouble because their content will be 90% m/m erotic romance and -- combined with the marginality of my genre -- this makes is statistically unlikely that a potentially-interested reader of the site is going to even find any reviews of my work. There are a lot of lesbian fiction review sites, but many review only sporadically or are on hiatus. Eventually I did identify several sites specifically oriented toward lesbian fiction, that seemed like good candidates, sent their info to Bella, and ended up with at least a couple of good reviews out of that.
The SFF side is a much tougher nut to crack. I’ve sent queries or unsolicited review copies to something like a dozen reviewers who seemed a good fit for my material without any success. In fact, for the ones that say “query first” I’ve never gotten any response at all. So it’s very hard to know how to adapt my pitch for better success. The elephant in the library here is that the prevailing impression in the SFF community is that SFF published by lesbian presses is the functional equivalent of fan-fic and not to be taken seriously. I’ve gotten a small number of very positive reviews from people in the SFF community, but only when it was someone I knew personally who was willing to give my book a chance despite that prevailing impression. Eventually I hope to get the message through that I’m writing “mainstream fantasy,” I just happen to be publishing it with a non-mainstream press for good and valid reasons. But it’s going to be a long slog and there’s a lot of prejudice to fight through.
The “general reader reviews” I get on Amazon and Goodreads and on people’s personal blogs have been very heartening. I regularly gush about how delightfully literate my reviewers are. When you’re in a marginalized segment of a marginalized genre (which is what I am, no matter which direction you’re coming at it from), it really matters that your fans are explaining why they like your book.
So what other publicity techniques do I use? Well, I printed up business cards for my book: cover and synopsis, brief blurb and reviewer pull-quote, and links where to buy. Any time my writing comes up on casual conversation (and I’ve gotten very good at making sure it comes up in casual conversation), I hand out a card. I also often carry a copy of the book with me when I think I might have the opportunity for a “strategic gift”--access to someone who just might possibly be interested in reading it and who, on the chance that they do read it (and of course they’d like it if they did), would generate significant buzz if they started telling people about it. I don’t know that I’ve actually gotten results from any of these strategic gifts yet, but it’s a crap shoot. If it works one time in twenty, it may be worth it.
One big thing I've done wasn't really intended as book publicity at all: the Lesbian Historic Motif Project. I'd been meaning to share my historic research in some way for quite some time. The LHMP started out as a Gay Pride Month project and I was enjoying it so much that it's just kept going. And although it's sometimes hard to tell from the (paucity of) feedback, it gets a fair amount of traffic and has impressed people that never would have encountered my work under ordinary circumstances. For complicated reasons, I'm much more comfortable advertising my research work than my fiction. But it gives me an opportunity to say, "And by the way, if you like my research, here's some fiction that grew out of it."
In the run up to the release of The Mystic Marriage, I’ve done a few things differently than the first time around. For one, I knew in advance that publicity is pretty much up to me and I’m less concerned about stepping on my publisher’s toes on that topic. I also got up the nerve to request that the publication schedule be designed to allow for the possibility of advance review copies (ARCs). This isn’t really a Done Thing in lesbian publishing, but it’s the assumed default in SFF publishing and there are a lot of reviewers who only do advance reviews, timed to come out when the book is released. I’ve had mixed success on this point: one month isn’t really “advance” when it comes to ARCs, so when a personal contact got me a request to submit an ARC to Publishers Weekly, what they got was the pre-edited manuscript. But it got me a review. In Publishers Weekly. And that’s nothing to sneeze at.
I’ve been able to request that electronic ARCs and publicity info be sent out to several of the online SFF trade magazines that post “forthcoming books”. It’s too early to know whether anything will come of that. For several months I’ve been letting people know on Twitter that I’d love to send ARCs to any SFF reviewers who ask, but I’ve only had one person take me up on that. As I say: a tough nut to crack. I do have reviews lined up from a couple of people who reviewed (and loved) Daughter of Mystery. Not a lot, but at least a starting place.
There are two other major things I’m doing this year for promotion. I’m taking some time to write a bunch of short fiction. At the moment, my novel-length writing is pretty locked into the Alpennia series, which makes it hard to get cross-pollination. But short fiction makes me more “agile” as they say in business. I just had a fantasy short story published by Podcastle.org, a respected SFF audio fiction site. I have a historic romance short story out on submission to a lesbian anthology. I have a sequel to the story I sold to Podcastle that should stand on its own well enough to place in an entirely different market (for which I have a few ideas). I’m working on another historic fantasy short story that I plan to submit to the anthology Queers Destroy Fantasy which -- if it’s accepted -- would be significant visibility. And I have a long novelette (possibly to become a short novella) out with the beta-readers that falls solidly in the SFF camp, although the length will make it tricky to place. (But if I am able to place it, I plan to put it out as part of a collection of related stories as a self-published e-book later.) All of these create opportunities to pick up new readers and to build up a reputation.
The second thing I’m focusing on this year is the convention circuit, complicated by the fact that I have two entirely communities to try to connect with. I’ve been attending (and even helping run) SF conventions for the last 30 years and have participated in programming at many of them prior to having my novel out. So I’m not in the position of trying to break into a new community waving an “outsider” book in that crowd. I know the ropes and the rules and it’s a way to convince a roomful of people at a time that I’m a serious fantasy novelist with an interesting product. So this year I’m doing FogCon (my very local literary SF convention), BayCon (local regional con), WorldCon (THE big SF convention), and ChessieCon (a smallish regional convention in the Baltimore area that I attend for complex idiosyncratic reasons) and I’ll be participating in programming for all of them. (I can say this, now that I’ve gotten my programming invites for both WorldCon and BayCon.)
On the LGBTQ side, last year I went to my first Golden Crown Literary Conference (GCLS -- the premier national lesbian publishing convention) and I’ll be going again this year. I’ll definitely be doing a reading -- I don’t know yet whether I’ve been accepted for any other programming. For smaller events, I applied to be one of the reader guests at a one-day event in Austin TX in April: “Lone Star LesFic”. Frankly, it’s quite an investment in travel for a small one-day convention, but it looked like fun and it’s happening the week before The Mystic Marriage gets released so it seemed like a really good choice. The week before GCLS in New Orleans, there’s a smallish, very new LGBTQ SF & Media convention in Tampa FL which seemed like a nice synergy of geography, so as with the Austin event, I applied for one of their “featured guest” slots and was accepted. Another smallish regional event I have on my schedule is Gay Romance Northwest in Seattle. I briefly considered it last year, but it looked to be so m/m-heavy that it didn’t seem a good fit. But evidently they’re seriously trying to be more diverse and I figured I’d give it a shot this year. And Seattle is convenient enough for a quick trip. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to be involved in the programming -- I’m included in someone’s panel proposal but no guarantee that that panel will be accepted.
The convention circuit isn’t for everyone. I wouldn’t advise anyone to try to use SF conventions as a promotional opportunity unless you’re already involved in the larger SF fannish community. The dynamic is very much that of a communal conversation and people don’t always take kindly to someone showing up just to promote their new book. It is also, let us be honest, very expensive and nowhere near a good return-on-investment in monetary terms. It’s a long game. It’s a way of building a reputation and a brand. (It’s a way of writing off lots of writing-related expenses on your taxes.) I’m privileged to have a day job that pays well enough that the limitations on my ability to attend conventions come in time rather than money. But if you’re in a position to do so, it can be a lot of fun. And if it isn’t fun, by all means, don’t do it!
