At every convention I’ve attended, there’s a table full of promotional items. These usually consist of postcards or bookmarks, but sometimes there are fliers or little gadgets intended to entice people into purchasing a product. Usually a book, in my experience. Everyone is clamoring for everyone else’s attention, and if you don’t have the weight of a publisher behind you, it’s a tough row to hoe. If no one has heard of you, what is to entice someone to buy your book?

I’m seeing more and more book trailers these days. However, these suffer from the same basic issue: If I haven’t heard of you before, what will entice me to click on a link and spend 1-3 minutes of my time watching an ad for your book? Sure, it has the benefit of being “free,” except my time isn’t exactly free. There’s a limited amount of it, so I’m judicious about what I spend it on, most of the time.

I started thinking about this topic because I received a familiar letter in the mail last week. A thick envelope from the agency that represents The Road to the Dark Tower, my first book. Every six months, they forward my royalty statements from Penguin. It’s thick because there’s a separate page for each type of sale. Regular sales, international sales, various kinds of eBooks. It’s all rather befuddling and could easily be condensed to a page or two, in my opinion, but the bottom line comes on the front page: Total revenue from sales for this period and the remaining balance on my advance. This time, the balance left was almost exactly the same as my revenue for the last six months. In other words, another period like this one and I’ll earn out. The book is still selling well and consistently, seven years after publication. The revenue for the past several accounting periods has been roughly the same, so I’m confident that I will earn out (± a few dollars) by early 2012.

One thing these statements reminds me of, though, is how much I make from each copy sold. For trade paperbacks, my share is about $1.25 per copy. For eBooks, it’s roughly double that. (Go eBooks!)

Let’s look at that from a different direction. Suppose I decide to give a few copies away to generate publicity. Suppose with my author discount I can get a copy of the $16 trade paperback for $8. (I don’t recall what the exact discount is, but let’s assume 50%.) That means I have to sell seven or eight physical copies or three or four eBooks to pay for every copy I give away. If that donated copy leads to a review then it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that half a dozen people reading the review might be inspired to buy a copy.

Similarly, if I buy a pack of 250 postcards with the cover image on one side and promotional copy on the other. I can get that for about $20. If I distribute them via various means (I often tuck one in with a package if I sell a used book on eBay, for example), I would need to get 8 people to buy an eBook or 16 people to buy a trade paperback to break even. Averaging that out to 12 of either variety, that’s a 5% response rate. Worth it? Hard to say. What’s the ultimate goal: to break even or to turn a profit? Or to gain readers who, through word of mouth might generate more sales? All of the above, naturally.

How much does a book trailer cost? Some of them are done on the cheap and suffer from the same issues as a lot of self-published books: low quality. The three companies offering to make book trailers that I sampled in an unscientific survey charged anywhere from $200 to $2000. I’m sure you can do the math. That means the trailer would have to generate on the order of 100-1000 sales to break even. At the upper end of that range (and I’m sure there are companies willing to charge much more than that), you’re approaching half the typical advance for a traditionally published first novel. Worth it? I’m not convinced. If you have mad graphic arts skills and can put something together for free and doesn’t look like it was made by a 12-year-old, then why not? But I’m not sure I’d shell out any money for one.

The other thing that got me thinking about the expenses of promotion was the publicity campaign behind the A&E miniseries Bag of Bones. The cable channel put a lot of money into getting the word out. There were the obvious: print ads all over the place, billboards, TV spots, a sophisticated web site. They also hired an award-winning photographer to spend a few days on the set before filming to create a series of photo essays that were posted to a companion site called Dark Score Stories in which the lives of the characters leading up to the beginning of the miniseries were profiled—a prequel of sorts. That site got a lot of fans of the King novel excited about the miniseries.

However, the part that the general public doesn’t see intrigued me. The photo essays were turned into a lavish, limited edition hardcover sent to what Klout calls “influencers.” People who might be relied upon to talk about the miniseries and generate word of mouth. (Full disclosure: I received a copy.) Then, A&E sent out screeners of the miniseries to generate advanced reviews. This wasn’t just a couple of DVDs in an envelope, though. The discs came in a wooden box roughly a foot on a side. Inside the lid of the box was a faux turntable that spun when you opened it. Digital music played. It was pretty cool. Underneath was a nice little book with promotional material and the DVDs, plus a disc of assets (PDFs and stills) to accompany reviews. It was an impressive package. Finally, the publicist arranged interviews with various members of the production. I spoke one-on-one with Mick Garris for three quarters of an hour while he was still editing the miniseries and participated in a conference call interview with one of the actors.

Did it work? Certainly there were a lot of published interviews and reviews of the miniseries in the days leading up to its premiere. Alas, the reviews were not all that glowing and in some cases were really harsh. Although the miniseries ultimately fared pretty well in the ratings, one can only wonder how much better it might have done if it hadn’t been roundly panned beforehand. Is it true that any publicity is good publicity? Hard to believe.

What’s my bottom line? As usual, I don’t think I have one. These are just things that I’ve been thinking about for the past few days as I ruminated over what I would write about this month. Food for thought, perhaps. Something to start a discussion, maybe. I don’t think there are any definitive answers about how to promote your work. But I think you should weight the costs and potential returns before sinking a lot of money into a campaign that might never pay for itself.

No matter what side of the self-publishing, Publish-on-Demand, e-Book, Internet makes everyone an author model argument you fall on, there is one fact I find incontrovertible.  What I’m about to say is based on personal observation over more than two decades of writing professionally – you can take it for what it’s worth.  The proliferation of books by people with no business being published has hurt everyone.  Authors and editors and publishers warned that it would be so, and I’m telling you – it happened.

I was over on the Kindle Discussion boards this morning at Amazon.com.  It’s a place I have come to frequent because it’s one of the only ways to reach Kindle readers short of forking over huge advertising dollars to Amazon, or to some other purveyor of top-level billboards.  Except, I’m not sure that the forums really are a viable way to reach readers. At least half of those there are just other authors trying to sell their own books, reviewing one another in trade for good comments on their own work that will, in turn, become new posts on the boards starting with “just got a five star review!”  – Ugh.

What has happened in this age of “everyone is an author” is that the term author has become synonymous with “Schill”.  Half the posts (maybe more than half the posts) on that forum are either by authors promoting their own books, authors cross-promoting one another’s books, or authors creating transparently disguised threads for the purpose of furthering the first two types.  Amazon doesn’t care who gets promoted.  They get their share however you slice it, and they are not likely to provide any advertising method that levels the playing field unless it in some way impacts their profit margin.  I’m not holding my breath.

Don’t get me wrong – authors have always been stuck selling themselves if they weren’t at the upper rungs of the publishing ladder.  The lion’s share of advertising and promotion goes to a very small group of privileged authors.  Most of them earned the right to be there – it’s always questionable whether being there once should buy you an extended ticket, but no one ever claimed the business was fair, and I don’t expect it ever will be.

Still, there was a time when, if you were an author, readers were thrilled with the chance to pick your brains.  They wanted to know what you thought about, what motivated you, and their desire to know wasn’t based solely on what they could learn and use to sell their own books.  Even on the Internet, there was a time when more of the time on a writer’s site was spent on his or her own work than on writing about book promotion, or publishing models.

It’s come to the point where I don’t even like to talk about my own work, because there’s a sense that doing so just rings like white noise in people’s ears. We’re bombarded by such talk day in and day out, hour after hour.  We have to try and sell our work, and our characters, but doing so is feeling oily and repugnant in ways it never did in the past.  I sometimes feel like a  yapping dog running in circles in a dog-pound filled with other dogs who are all just as frantic to get out.

I saw a commercial last night for a new job hunting site, something about ladders.  In the commercial, all the fans at a pro tennis match roared out onto the field.  They grunted and sweated, batted at balls with their brief cases, and in the center the pro stood there looking baffled.  The message was, if you let everyone onto the field, it’s impossible for the best to stand out.

And I don’t want anyone thinking I’m saying that I’m the best.  I’m just saying that I’m getting hoarse trying to find a way to be noticed in the crowd…and I am not inclined to force myself on readers, or to buy mountains of  bookmarks, or to frequent every bulletin board and website in the universe that caters to the things I write about in the hope of finding a couple of people who care.  I love visiting such places when my presence is appreciated, but the idea I’m just another guy bothering people, begging them to pay attention to me is more than I can stomach…

I’m not sure what I expect to accomplish by this, other than getting it off my chest.  I hate the way things have shifted…I hate that I don’t have a better way of getting the word out on my books.  I also hate the image of standing still while everyone else swims frantically in circles, looking for a way to the top, and being buried in the masses.

I’m looking for a better way.  Maybe I’ll find it.  The people who do buy and read my books almost invariably find them entertaining.  I could count the negative reviews on one hand – in more than twenty years, that’s not bad.  At least it gives me hope…

To see the fruits of my latest endeavor, you can visit:

Crossroad Press

End Rant… – DNW

First off, happy St. Patrick’s Day. Though my ancestry is predominantly Scottish and English, I do have a dollop of Irish blood in me and I grew up watching the Irish Rovers on television so I always honor the day by forgetting to wear something green.

How many of you writers out there—and I invite my fellow Unplugged Storytellers to chime in—have held book launches for one or more of your projects? If you have, please tell us all about them in the comments section. I’d be fascinated to hear what you do to celebrate the moment when your projects are launched upon an unsuspecting world.

Because, let’s face it—if we don’t do something to celebrate the occasion, it’s almost like it doesn’t really happen. The books show up in stores—sometimes at the same time everywhere, but not always. Usually we know the approximate day it will be released, but I’ll never forget the time Peter Straub posted on his newsgroup about how surprised he was to stumble upon a copy of The Hellfire Club in a store. No one had bothered to tell him it was out.

Though we all anticipate the release of a new book or anthology containing one of our stories, the reality is that by the time the book appears, we’ve all moved on to something else. After spending so much time immersed in the project, we’ve released it into the hands of the publisher, who in turn ultimately releases it to a printing house, and it can be many, many months after that happens before the book appears. We get a reality check when the first proof versions are sent for review, but the arrival of the finished product is almost anticlimactic in a way. What are we to do about it?

I suspect that most real-life book launches aren’t much like the ones you read about in novels or see in movies and on television. Remember the extravagant affairs depicted in Bridget Jones’s Diary? On an episode of the ABC series Castle, where the main character is a successful crime writer, the book launch for his latest novel resembled a post-Oscar party: a crowded ballroom at a ritzy Manhattan hotel appointed with champagne and chocolate fountains, waitresses serving expensive hors d’oeuvres, celebrity guests arriving in designer apparel, full media coverage, and stacks upon stacks upon stacks of the book in question waiting to be snapped up.

I’m sure something like that happens for certain celebrity authors, but the reality for most of us is probably something quite different. Though I have published three books (including the one I co-edited with Brian Freeman) and have had stories in a number of anthologies, I’ve only had one book launch party. At this event, about ten people were invited for a sit-down dinner and no one bought books—they received copies as gifts instead.

I’ve never had the chance to attend the launch of an anthology containing my work. That’s about to change. At the World Horror Convention in Brighton next week, I’ll have the opportunity to participate in two launches.

The first takes place at 10 p.m. on Friday night—a launch party for When the Night Comes Down, the anthology containing four stories each from four authors, published by Dark Arts Books. Contributors Joseph D’Lacey and myself will be in attendance, though Robert Weinberg and Nate Kenyon unfortunately will not. Editor Bill Breedlove is hosting the two-hour event, where there will be Free Booze (Bill’s capitalization) and the opportunity to meet and chat with Joseph and myself. (Did I mention Free Booze?)

The second launch is for the Evolve anthology edited by Nancy Kilpatrick. This is a collection of Canadian authors writing contemporary vampire stories, from the same publisher who releases the annual Tesseracts anthologies, Edge Publishing. A fair number of the Evolve stable will be present for the launch, which takes place on Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m. I haven’t heard the specifics of this event. I was going to say at first that there probably won’t be Free Booze, given that it’s in the middle of the afternoon, but since this is a World Horror Convention, who knows?

Contributors attending this launch include editor Nancy Kilpatrick and authors Jerome Stueart, Natasha Beaulieu, Gemma Files, Sandra Kasturi, Ron Hore, Sandra Wickham, Rio Youers, Kelley Armstrong, Claude Lalumiere and yours truly. There will also be an Evolve reading from 3-5 p.m. on Thursday afternoon, with each of us spending 10 minutes either reading from our stories or babbling on about it. These books will be well and truly launched.

So, please, fellow writers. Share your book launch stories. And here’s a checklist of considerations when planning a book launch in case someday you get the chance to do it up big, like Rick Castle.

Canada is in the global spotlight at the moment, thanks to the 2010 Winter Olympics. As some of you may know, I come from Canada, though I’ve been living south of the 49^th for the past two decades. I’m rooting for the home team and watched the opening ceremonies with a strong sense of national pride. Hearing O Canada a couple of nights ago after we won our first gold medal at a Canadian-hosted games was thrilling. 

Modesty is a trait often associated with Canadians. We tend not to boast, and we find self-promotion difficult. Prime Minister Stephen Harper urged his fellow countrymen to get over this cultural shyness—for the next few weeks, at least. “We will ask the world to forgive us [for] this uncharacteristic outburst of patriotism and pride, our pride of being part of a country that is strong, confident and stands tall among the nations,” he said. 

What’s all this got to do with writing or publishing, I hear someone in the back muttering. 

It’s award season, and I’m not talking about the Oscars. The nominees for the Bram Stoker Awards will be announced shortly, and the nominations for the Edgar Allen Poe Awards are already out, as are the winners of the Black Quill Awards. John Rosenman expressed his thoughts on the subject of awards a couple of days ago but I already had most of this article written by then, so I decided to plunge ahead regardless. 

What does a nomination signify? Depends on the award. In some cases it means that a very small group of people (i.e. award jurors) evaluated the works eligible in a category and came to some consensus. In other cases, it means that the entire membership of an organization voted to produce the list of nominees (that’s how the Oscar nominations for Best Picture work, for example, though the tallying system is really arcane). And in still other cases, the voting is open to anyone on the planet who cares to express an opinion—the Preditors and Editors awards are run that way. People outside the awards process can make of them what they will, although it’s hard to discern in some cases whether an award or nomination is based on merit or on popularity.

Here’s where I take Prime Minister Harper’s advice to heart and confess that over the past couple of months I’ve been nominated for two awards and won two others. For a while I was a Black Quill Award nominee and ultimately my book, The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, was named as the Reader’s Choice award winner. The book also won the London Book Festival prize for non-fiction, and the Mystery Writers of America nominated it for an Edgar Award. The latter is a juried award, so five or six people selected the nominees from the eligible candidates and the same people will also pick the winners, to be announced in late April. I also made the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Awards, a short list formed by recommendations made by the entire membership of the Horror Writers Association. The actual nominees will be announced a few days from now. 

There. I said it. Went all un-Canadian and got it out of my system. It’s been an exciting time for me. I’ve been getting calls and e-mails from local newspaper reporters who want to do stories about the Edgar nomination. “Local guy does good” pieces. 

I confess to being conflicted about the attention. I’m shy when it comes to talking about myself (there’s that Canadian gene expressing itself) and especially shy in front of a camera (“At least pretend you’re happy about this,” the photographer for the Houston Chronicle told me). My wife reminds me, however, that I wouldn’t be getting all this attention if I hadn’t had a hand in spreading the news about the nomination around. I am pleased the book is getting all this attention, and I hope it means that a bunch more copies get sold, that the publisher decides to do a second printing this year, and a few more dollars (or loonies) end up in the coffers. I also hope that the Edgar nomination means that when I have a crime novel to shop around in the future, an editor will take note of that fact and bump the manuscript up a notch or two in his or her stack. 

Of course I sling the nominations, including my Stoker nomination from 2004, around in every cover letter for anything I submit these days. Does it make one iota of difference to the person reading my submission? Probably not, but what’s the point in getting nominated for an award if you can’t brag about it? And where do we get to brag about it? On our web sites and in our cover letters, mostly. 

My wife and I have decided to attend the Edgar Award banquet at the end of April. I don’t stand much of a chance of coming home from New York with the cute little statue of Edgar Allen Poe (though wouldn’t it look nice on the mantelpiece?). Of all the years for P.D. James, past Grand Mistress of the MWA, to write a non-fiction book instead of a novel. It’ll be fun to attend the banquet, though, and hobnob with the other nominees and MWA members. Spend an evening basking in the glow of being an Edgar nominee. How often does one get to do that? 

I’ll also be at the Stoker banquet in Brighton, England this year, regardless of whether I’m nominated or not. I decided to attend World Horror several months ago and figured the banquet would be a good way to spend Saturday evening. I haven’t been to a WHC for a few years, but the chance to go back to England and to attend the launches of a couple of projects I’m involved with was a lure I couldn’t resist. 

I’m thrilled to win the awards that have already come my way, and to be nominated for the others. I’m proud of the book that generated all of this positive attention. The readers’ choice Black Quill Award means that a bunch of people with no particular investment in the outcome signed up and expressed their opinions. Critical accolades are terrific, too, but the readers, after all, are the people we write books for, and to discover that they are pleased with something I helped produce is gratifying. 

At the end of the day, these nominations and the awards themselves amount to a highly visible pat on the back. Job well done, mate. Writers mostly toil in isolation, and our successes are usually experienced that way too. Every acceptance letter, for example, is a little moment of validation, as is every letter from a reader who took time from his or her busy schedule to tell you that he or she liked something you wrote. So getting recognized on a larger stage is like having a spotlight aimed at us, however briefly. 

Then, like Punxsutawney Phil, we see our shadows and retreat to our caverns for another six weeks of writing.

And I, like a good Canadian, return to being my regular, modest, humble self…until I write my next cover letter.

I’m not a 13-year-old boy from Western Maine, but I pretended to be one on the internet.

That sounds a lot worse than it really is. It wasn’t an undercover sting to flush out predators. It was part of an alternate reality game (ARG) run by Scribner to promote Under the Dome.

In September, I was asked if I would play Scarecrow Joe McClatchy in this unannounced game. That’s an intriguing aspect of ARGs – there are no big announcements or ads. Instead, subtle hints direct people to certain web sites, or hidden messages must be detected and decoded. Then the game is afoot.

Scarecrow Joe was the pivotal character in this ARG. He was to step out of the pages of the book and become a real person. His primary stomping grounds was his personal blog. Starting weeks before the game launched, I wrote daily blog entries to lay the foundation. We wanted to have a number of elements in place before people discovered the site, including discussions of different kinds of codes that would be used later on in the game. Since Joe had myriad interests, I mixed discussions of cryptography in with talk of skateboarding, Red Sox baseball and science fair.

One of the main conceits of an ARG is “this is not a game.” In fact, that’s the title of a very good novel by Walter Jon Williams that I read earlier this year. In the novel, the puppet master in an ARG (a person who corrals players in the right direction when they seem to be going astray) uses her players to solve a real-life set of mysteries in an process akin to massively parallel computing.

That novel proved to be excellent reference material. It helped establish the boundaries and framework of the alternate reality for me. Scarecrow Joe lived in Chester’s Mill, a small town in Maine that was sealed off by a dome on October 21. He had a life before the dome, and a new reality after. He was not aware of the impending publication of a Stephen King novel about a town in Western Maine cut off by a dome, although he was aware of Stephen King the author and had read some of his books. It’s a fine distinction, but one that I needed to adhere to. As far as Scarecrow Joe was concerned, he was not part of a game.

We had a couple of complications to handle with our ARG. Dome Day, October 21 in King’s book, was a Saturday, which impacted where certain characters were when the town was cut off. Nine-to-fivers weren’t at work in neighboring towns, for example, but Scarecrow Joe’s father was away at a flea market, something he always did on Saturdays. The townspeople didn’t have to deal with closing school for a couple of days.

Also, the plot of King’s novel ended before the day the book was released, November 10, though we wanted to keep the game going beyond publication day. For that reason, we couldn’t stick to the timeline of the book. That and the fact that we didn’t want to divulge the book’s plot, especially not the ending—especially not before the book was published!

So, we decided to be inspired by the book but not enslaved by it. The world of the ARG was a parallel universe to Under the Dome. Some elements were conserved, but we diverged after the dome came down. I was given carte blanche in that regard. All I had to do was hit certain benchmarks and make specific clues and messages available on particular days to keep the game rolling along. The rest of the storyline was up to me.

What does any of this have to do with writing, you might ask. My part in the ARG involved writing from a fictional character’s perspective daily for about two months. I had to inhabit a fictional world and keep it alive in the minds of the participants. In short, it was very much like writing a novel, except I was doing it in front of a live audience and could interact with them.

I also had to “Joe-ify” my writing. The youngster had his own vernacular and speech patterns, so I often had to write at first as me and then translate the text into Joe-speak. I didn’t have to dumb him down, since he was supposed to be supersmart, but I had to make him, well, thirteen. I haven’t been thirteen in a long [long] time! When in doubt, I went back to the book and found passages of his dialog that I could adapt for my purposes. At other times, I reached back into time and revisited the 13 year old me who grew up in a small, rural area not so terribly far from Chester’s Mill, Maine.

The game went live when a link to Scarecrow Joe’s blog appeared on the official web site for Under the Dome. At that point, people still didn’t know it was a game. They just thought it was an interesting bit of promotion. I entertained myself reading what people wrote to and about Joe, including speculation about who was writing the blog. I was pleased that no one suspected it was me, which meant that my real internet persona could act as a shepherd, too, encouraging players with subtle direction.

People started engaging Scarecrow Joe in conversation. Players subscribed to his blog entries and befriended him on King’s message board after he joined. I decided to test out Twitter and quickly discovered the power of that social network – Joe racked up followers on Twitter much faster than he did on the blog and his tweets reached a wider audience.

The puzzles were just for fun in the beginning. Joe mentioned the hidden messages in the icons before commercial breaks on Fringe, for example, and posted links to web pages for the Caesar cipher. Ultimately the puzzles grew more sophisticated, using King’s newly posted pdf of The Cannibals manuscript as a lookup key. Diligent players found messages hidden in the web pages created for Chester’s Mill businesses. Several of those who cracked the final part of the puzzle were rewarded with free books, including a signed limited edition of Under the Dome for the first person to log in to the mystery URL at the end of the trail.

The webmaster was busily scurrying behind the scenes, setting up the puzzles and hiding the clues. All I had to do on a daily basis was be a rather precocious thirteen-year-old computer geek with a fondness for skateboarding. I didn’t have to create Scarecrow Joe out of whole cloth – I had the character and some of the situations from the novel to work from. However, I did have to interpret the character, put him in situations that weren’t in the book and interact with real people who wanted to strike up conversations with him. Most played along with the premise that they were interacting with a fictional character. One challenge for me was in handling people who wouldn’t or couldn’t, who insisted on breaking the wall between the fantasy of the ARG and reality. The ones who wanted to talk about events in the novel that hadn’t yet happened or who wanted Scarecrow Joe to pass messages to Stephen King.

Scarecrow Joe was part of my daily routine for nearly two months, and it was a challenge to keep him from encroaching on my regular writing time. I had to keep him compartmentalized, but I needed to keep him alive, too. Constant care and feeding required. Some days it was easy to come up with something for him to ramble about—other days it was difficult. I didn’t have a script, so I was flying by the seat of my pants.

At the end of the day, it was a fun experience, putting on Joe’s raggedy sneakers and wandering about in Chester’s Mill before and after the dome came down. In the final analysis, it was a game, and my part involved writing a fictional character confronted by unusual circumstances. Not so very different from the rest of what I do as a writer.

My newest book was the inspiration for my February essay (Book packagers) and also influenced other essays throughout 2009. It’s called The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, published by Fall River Press.

“Who’s that?” I hear someone in the back ask. Fall River Press is part of Sterling Publishing, a conglomerate that encompasses dozens of imprints including Gollancz, Hearst, Metro Books, Orion, SparkNotes and the San Francisco Chronicle. Sterling is a wholly owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble.

My work on this project was enlisted by becker&mayer!, a book packager in Seattle hired by Barnes & Noble to produce the companion. Their previous works include companions on Poe (winner of a 2009 Edgar Award, written by a distant relative of Poe) and Jane Austen (written by an Austen scholar). They contacted me to develop the outline and write the text because of my previous work on The Road to the Dark Tower.

As I wrote back in February, book packagers are full-service publishers who produce books that have intensive design requirements. Mainstream publishers often farm out production of these kinds of project to them. I can see why—from inception to publication, becker&mayer! put together in nine months a gorgeous volume that has been receiving nothing but praise for its high production value.

After preparing a detailed outline, I wrote the text in January and February, and received the edited manuscript for revisions in March. The becker&mayer! documents specialist used my manuscript to gather complementary photographs and archival material in March. I received the copyeditor’s report in early April and the first page proofs shortly thereafter. I wrote captions for the photographs and included documents, and did the first pass on proofing the laid-out document by tax time.

The proofreader did her extensive review in early May, and I tidied up any remaining errors and omissions the same week. The final pass page proofs were delivered to me in mid-May and the files were sent to the printer at the end of the month. The finished books arrived at Barnes & Noble warehouses in late September, and I received a couple of boxes of contributor copies at about the same time. Nine months after I wrote the first words. This lavish hardcover, chock full of fascinating and faithfully reproduced memorabilia that few people had ever seen before, was priced at less than $25.

Throughout the process, the editors at Barnes & Noble stayed at arm’s length. They had final approval on everything, but their input was filtered to me through becker&mayer! I had no direct contact with them. By all reports, they were (and continue to be) very happy with the results.

However, here’s where the main difference between this and other types of publications kicks in. Since this is a B&N exclusive, it wasn’t marketed in the same way as books from traditional publishers. For one thing, the publisher doesn’t need to market it to booksellers, since they’re one and the same. They don’t need to get advance reviews to encourage bookstores to buy more copies up front. All they need to do is ship the books to their stores and put them on their shelves. Publishers don’t need to pay for product placement within the store. If a regional B&N manager decides he wants to put a big rack (a dump bin) of these books at the front of the store, he is free to do so.

I did what I could to promote the book on my own. I sent out press releases to all the usual suspects, and conducted a few follow-up interviews. Since I’m an active member on message boards, I spread the news about the book within the King fan and collector community. This was a strong case for the power of social networking. The book went on sale at the B&N web site two weeks before it was available in stores. Since there was no other promotion for the book up to that point, I figure that my bush beating was responsible for a large number of the early sales.

I was pleased with the results. Shortly after the book became available, it reached a sales rank of 317. Unlike Amazon’s mystical number, the B&N sales rank is literally a book’s position on the overall combined bestseller list, including hardcovers, paperbacks, videos, music, e-books—everything the store sells online. Thanks to B&N’s reasonable international shipping charges, the book became instantly available around the world, and I heard from people in Poland, Italy and The Netherlands who purchased it online.

There wasn’t a specific publication date. I was told that it would be up to local store managers to decide when to shelve the book and how. That was a little frustrating. One of my coworkers pre-ordered a copy from the store nearest to us, and picked it up at the information desk, but when I went to the store a couple of days later no one could find the book, even though it showed up on their computers as being in stock.

There was one published review of the book, in a Las Vegas paper, and a number of blog posts about it. News about the book spread mostly by word of mouth. It settled in to a comfortable and unremarkable position.

Until November 10, 2009, that is, which happened be my wedding anniversary. It also happened to be the publication date for Under the Dome by Stephen King. Unbeknownst to me, Barnes & Noble set out a flier to its club members that day, discounting Under the Dome and featuring a prominent link to my book as well.

And here’s where today’s title comes from. That promotional ad wasn’t the only location I benefited from. Many stores featured my book in a dump bin next to Under the Dome on the launch day for King’s new book. Publishers pay good money for that kind of promotion. It didn’t happen in every store—the one nearest to me shelved it in the Bargain Books section—but I had reports from New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania and California, some accompanied by photos, one of which appears with this essay.

Over the course of that day, my sales rank went from about 8000 to #132. It was selling at only a slightly slower pace than preorders for the next Michael Crichton, and orders for the latest Michael Connelly novel and Patrick Swayze’s autobiography. A heady feeling, for sure. I held secret hopes of cracking the top 100, but that was not meant to be. Nevertheless, a good day.

So, how do you sell a bunch of copies of a book? Make sure a bunch of people who might be interested in buying it know about it. It’s that simple.