Valley of the Trolls
In the 1960s, Jacqueline Susann invented shameless self-promotion for the author. Observers claim she spent more time promoting her novel, Valley of the Dolls, than she did writing it, with Truman Capote notably remarking, ‘That’s not writing, that’s typing’. Nevertheless, Susann’s novel about struggling actresses in Hollywood went on to sell more than 30 million copies. But why? Because it was good, because it was what the public wanted, or because she created such a buzz around her book that everyone wanted to know what the fuss was about?
I don’t have an answer to that question, but it does raise interesting issues about the way authors are now required to market themselves. This happens mostly through the internet (one website suggests that authors keep a blog, get websites to link to articles about their book, get their friends to review their book on Amazon, and ‘write articles discussing the merits of [their] book’), but also through self-funded tours, and even selling copies of their book out of the boot of their car.
We all know that there are countless blogs kept by authors for the purposes of promotion. The popular ones seem to be both highly personal (so much for the Death of the Author … ) and tantalising (offering exclusive excerpts, giveaways, etc.). But further than that, authors are getting even more marketing-savvy. The Washington Post wrote an article last year on this very issue, using mother-turned-author Kelly Corrigan as a case study of self-made success. Not only did she do all the usual publicity work herself, spending thousands of her own dollars doing so, but Corrigan got on a brand-spanking-new bandwagon. In yet another correlary to the film industry, books now have trailers. Compared to book tours, these trailers are inexpensive and easy to distribute through the internet.
Book trailers are one of the newest promotional outlets. Everybody’s got them, little video commercials for their books, something like movie trailers. Grisham’s are 20 seconds; Corrigan’s is about two minutes.
John McWeeny, chief operating officer at TurnHere Inc., a media production company based in San Francisco, has seen his company make “hundreds and hundreds” of these videos since it got into the business in 2006. He’s hired mostly by publishing companies, he says, but a bargain-basement video for a writer working solo would cost about $2,000.
“We’re not shooting talking heads in studios,” he says. “We’re capturing a story about the author, often on a location relevant to the content of the book. It’s a way to convey the meaning of the book in moving images and sound . . . and relative to the cost of a tour, it’s extremely inexpensive.”
Corrigan made her own, using the iMovie software on her Apple computer and posted it on YouTube, getting over 100,000 hits. She also posted a video of a reading she did at a bookstore, which went on to get 4.5 million hits.
They say any publicity is good publicity, but when will all these in-your-face authors become obnoxious, if they haven’t already? Do all these bells and whistles cheapen what, in the end, we hope should be good writing?
Maybe, just maybe, there should be fewer Jacqueline Susanns and more Thomas Pynchons.
I was once stalked by an author at a large scale dinner because I LOOKED like the type who would be interested in her book. She came with pamphlets in hand, asking only enough questions to prove that I might be interested. That was annoying. Authors promoting themselves online where I can avoid them? Tolerable.
But when my dad’s book got published, I carried it around and made sure everyone knew it was there (especially because I helped him write it).
What is art if there is no one to appreciate it? What is an investment into publishing your book if there is no one to buy it?
You would hope that the writing would speak for itself, but some (self) promotion can’t be avoided if you want to sell books. How annoying this becomes for innocent consumers is probably best rated on a sliding scale, with Esma’s experience, I would hope, being the absolute limit. I heard that Matthew Reilly promoted his first book by sitting on buses with it, utterly absorbed in his own words. He probably doesn’t need to do that now, though it would be sort of fun…
When I think of book trailers, I think of the bone-chillingly bad synopses of books on the otherwise entertaining First Tuesday Book Club. I know these are not the same as trailers, and I can only hope that none of these trailers sink to the lows of the FTBC synopsis.