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The Internet is Not a Magic Wand

Written by Eric Flint

I want to start this essay, which continues my discussion of electronic publishing and online promotion, by debunking some myths. And of the many myths about promoting published works, the biggest myth is the myth of “promotion” itself. I’ll repeat the key points I made in a column published many months ago:

The most common form of promotion that science fiction and fantasy authors undertake is to attend science fiction conventions, of which there are hundreds in the United States every year. In some instances, they are invited to be the Guest of Honor or the Toastmaster for a convention, in which case the convention pays the cost of their travel and lodging. But, in most cases, the authors are paying for it themselves. And even if the convention is picking up the tab, the author is still losing valuable work time.

Figure out the math. Assume the cost of the round-trip travel averages $400 and the cost of the hotel room is another $200 for a weekend. Toss in $100 for food and incidental expenses.

That’s seven hundred dollars. To make back that financial loss—remember my royalty figures in the fifth essay?—the author would have to sell a minimum of one hundred and eighty-seven books, over and above what they’d sell without that promotional trip. And that’s assuming that he or she gets published in hardcover, and it also assumes that their hardcover sales typically exceed ten thousand copies per title, so they’re getting the top 15% royalty rate.

In point of fact, neither assumption applies to most authors. For a new or midlist writer who is only getting published in paperback, where the royalties are eight percent of the cover price—i.e., sixty-four cents per copy sold, accruing to the author, assuming the standard modern paperback price of eight dollars—they would have to sell over a thousand additional copies of a book just to break even on that one promotional effort.

The fact of the matter—the cold, hard, cruel fact of the matter—is that 99% of the promotion that well over 99% of all books will ever get is simply being printed, shipped and displayed on the shelves of bookstores. To put it another way, it’s not “promotion” at all, in the sense of a special effort. It’s simply a byproduct of the routine process of manufacturing and selling books.

Tom Doherty, the founder of TOR Books and probably the most respected currently active publisher in the science fiction and fantasy genre, has a very pithy way of putting it:

Every book is a billboard.

 This is a good part of the reason that, like most professionals in the field of publishing, Tom doesn’t get too worked up over the clumsiness—even the silliness—of the consignment system of publishing books. True, about half of all books printed will wind up being destroyed. But if you look at those books as simply the equivalent of advertising material, the situation doesn’t look as bad.

(I’m not quite as blasé as Tom is on the subject, because I think the quirks of the consignment system hurt individual authors more than they do publishers. That said, I’m admittedly not losing much sleep over the issue myself.)

This feature of publishing, incidentally, is one of the real drawbacks of electronic publishing. Yes, it’s certainly true that electronic publishing eliminates most of the (huge) distribution cost of traditional paper publishing. But the flip of that same coin is that electronic publishing loses all the benefits, as well. There is no online equivalent of the automatic promotion that a paper book gets simply from being printed and distributed in the first place.

Books on the shelves of a bookstore are very visible; web sites are all but invisible. The same obstacles there are to building a bookstore—that’s a lot of bricks and mortar, and the labor to use them, with corresponding costs—also means there are relatively few of them. So, people interested in buying paper books are drawn willy-nilly to a small number of places where most of the goods are displayed for sale.

Nothing equivalent happens in electronic publishing. Unlike brick-and-mortar bookstores, web sites cost peanuts to build. That means there are literally millions of them. Granted, relatively few of those sites are in the business of selling books. (Or pirating them, I might add.) But they still tend to get lost in the blizzard of web sites on the internet.

True, there are some very well-known bookselling sites, Amazon.com being the most prominent. But even when prospective buyers do find their way to such an internet site selling published material, it’s a lot slower process to browse through the available goods than it is in a bookstore. Slowly walking down the aisles of a bookstore and scanning the shelves to see if there is anything of interest is a lot faster and more efficient than trying to examine the same number of titles in Amazon’s web site.

If you don’t believe me, try the experiment sometime. Shopping online is immensely convenient in terms of travel. However, once you get there—assuming the item you’re interested in is something like a book, of which there are hundreds of thousands of “models” available—then it is typically far more efficient to find what you’re looking for in a molecular shop than in an electronic one.

There’s a point that all this is leading to, which is this:

Don’t expect miracles from the internet when it comes to promotion. Whatever else it is, the internet is not a magic wand.

Why? Because you’ll find that you encounter the same quandary I refer to above. Yes, online promotion is generally a lot cheaper than traditional promotion. It’s also a lot less visible—which means, as absurd as it may seem, that you wind up having to spend time and/or money to promote your own promotional effort.

This becomes a mug’s game, very rapidly. Here, as is almost invariably true when it comes to the issues I’ve covered in these essays, we find that the future is one that combines traditional and electronic measures. It is not a future that is exclusively one or the other.

Speaking as an author, I’ve found that the general rule of thumb when it comes to online promotion is an adage that goes back at least a century and a half:

It takes money to make money.

 A more sedate way of putting that is that you have to have an initial capital investment before you can hope to increase that investment.

Translated into the terms of our discussion, what this means is that the value of using the internet for promotion—certainly in publishing—is heavily dependent on starting with something. If you are already an established author, then there are many ways you can use the internet to promote yourself—ways that are usually cheaper in terms of money and far more efficient in terms of labor than the traditional methods of authorial self-promotion. (Book-signings, attending conventions, printing and distributing bookmarks and flyers, etc.)

But there’s nothing magic about the process. The mistake made by far too many people is the delusion that the internet provides them with some sort of magic wand with which they can wave aside the longstanding obstacles to becoming an established author in the first place.

I’ve attended a lot of science fiction conventions over the years, and participated in (by now) hundreds of panel discussions at them. For whatever reason—probably the fact that I’ve been a publisher and an editor as well as an author, which is rather unusual—I often get placed on a panel whose topic of discussion is something like “how to get published.” Not surprisingly, a lot of people who attend SF conventions are aspiring authors themselves, and this topic is a perennial favorite for panel discussions.

It’s a somewhat depressing experience for me, because with few exceptions I know ahead of time what the panel will look like. Once in a while—oh, hallelujah—the panel consists of several well-established professional authors, of whom I am only one. Far more often, however, the panel consists of me and . . . Up to half a dozen people, each of whom has published something, but usually not more than a handful of titles and those almost invariably in very small and often obscure outlets.

To put it another way, the panel consists of one six hundred pound gorilla and half a dozen very small monkeys.

The monkeys, naturally, chatter away like mad, flooding the audience with advice and suggestions—

—almost all of which are blithering nonsense and some of which are downright damaging to whatever prospects one of the aspiring authors in the audience might have to develop a career in the field.

I am not the world’s kindliest person, but I’m not an ogre, either. I take no pleasure in hurting people’s feelings, and I always find myself walking on eggshells at these panel discussions. Somehow or other, I have to find a way to convey to the audience the fact that most of the advice they’re getting is wrong, without placing unnecessarily large bruises on the egos of my fellow panelists.

(This experience is by no means peculiar to me, by the way. Every established author I know who attends SF conventions has gone through it, if not usually as often as I have.

By far the most common piece of drivel-passing-as-sage-advice is one or another variation on this message:

You really need to spend a lot of time and effort to promote yourself as a writer or you’ll get buried. And my sure-fire recipe for doing so is . . .

These recipes then follow. And while they vary considerably in detail, they all share the same basic ingredients.

Of these ingredients, there are three. The first is that the budding author needs to spend most of his or her time while working as an author doing promotional work. The second is that this will involve a lot of time and effort if they are to have any chance of success. To the point where they will apparently only be able to do any actual writing in dribs and drabs.

I suspect those two ingredients have been staples in these panel discussions since the first science fiction conventions were held back in the 1930s. The third ingredient to the recipe, however, is of fairly recent origin:

But the internet makes it all so much easier!

Oddly, the greater ease purportedly provided by the internet never seems to mean the budding author can spend any more time actually, you know, writing something. Instead, it is claimed, the internet gives all promotional efforts a tremendously multiplied effect.

How is this effect measured? Hell, don’t ask me. When I got started as an author, I spent almost all of my time writing. It seemed self-evident that since nobody had ever heard of me, nobody would be that interested in what little I could “promote,” either.

And that’s the advice I always wind up giving at these panel discussions. Here it is, stripped to the essentials:

“Spend no significant time or effort promoting your work, which is minimal to begin with. Instead, sit your ass down and write. As soon as you’ve written something, submit it to a professional publisher. While you’re waiting to hear the results, write something else. Yes, it’s a dreary business. Yes, it will get damn depressing. But it’s the way I got published and it’s the way almost all authors initially get published. And if it makes you feel any better, the one bright side to the whole dark and dismal process is that good writing is actually fairly rare. If you can genuinely write well, you will eventually get published—as long as you stick to it, and don’t let yourself get sidetracked by silly schemes like the ones being spouted by the other members of this panel.”

I try to find a polite way of saying the last sentence. But I’m very blunt about the rest of it.

I can afford to be, because I’m right and I know it. It helps to have as much editing experience as I have. (In addition to editing two magazines, I’ve have just about as many volumes published as an editor as I have as an author.)

Trust me. The one thought that never occurs to any editor as they contemplate a slush pile of stories submitted by unknown author—has never occurred once, in the centuries-long history of print publishing—is this one:

Oh, gosh, it’s going to be so hard choosing the one or two stories or articles or books I can afford to buy out of this huge pile of wonderfully-written material.

It’s enough for me to make this remark at any panel discussion for every editor in the room to burst into laughter. The fact of the matter is that the writing in slush piles is notoriously bad. With a few exceptions, the best of it only rises to mediocrity. The most you can say is that there’s nothing flagrantly wrong with the story or article or book. On the other hand, there’s nothing particularly right about it, either.

This is the one great saving feature of being an aspiring author. If you can write—and understanding that most people need to write a lot before they start writing anything good enough to get published—you will eventually get published. But that means you should spend almost all of your time writing, not frittering it away doing “promotional work.” Most of that promotional work will be useless and even the little that has some value has only minimal or marginal value.

Why? For the good and simple reason that, by definition, an aspiring author has nothing much to promote in the first place. That crude reality is not changed in the least by coating it with electrons. More precisely, burying it under electrons.

Okay. That’s enough for this month’s column. What I’m going to do in the next essay is show how an author who is already established—not necessarily well-known; just well-enough established to be taken seriously—can use the internet to promote his or her work.

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