Some Hard Yakka
May 3rd, 2010
April was a hell of a month for me. Rewriting a manuscript while promoting another book has been draining. I’ve been scribbling in notebooks on planes, trains, hotel rooms, cafes, beds as well as experiencing reviews of the book for the first time, doing interviews, readings, a couple of launches and book signings, keeping the house going - sort of - and wrestling with this new world of the published author and all it’s internal and external crises.
I’ve enjoyed most of the publicity work, particularly the radio interviews and meeting booksellers at various bookshops. Aspiring writers could do no better than to go and have a chat with the managers of these bookshops to get a good feel for what people buy and why. I suspect booksellers are overlooked as a resource for unpublished writers because, apart from being busy, they don’t have a hotline to the givers of contracts. But I’ve learned so much from having a chat to both managers and staff and from looking at every detail of how books are presented to buyers in these shops.
You can look at the Nielsen Top Ten best sellers and think you’ve done your research on what readers are buying, but until you go to the coalface, you haven’t really. I’m looking forward to doing more and to having a few days break while the rewrites sit and ferment.
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Categories: on reading, on writing | Tags: books, publicity, publishing, reading, writing
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