BESTSELLERS & BEST FRIENDS
My book publishing blog, with murder mysteries woven through it.
If this is your first visit, be sure to start with “1. Let’s do it!”
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Six months later it’s pub date for Matt’s book, Reinventing Justice. The cover wasn’t a winner, Matt was an unproven author with no sales records, and the title was a wee bit of a yawn.
Yet Matt and his colleagues (mostly from Harvard) were well-connected to influential policy makers. You could sense a buzz. The sort of thing that could take one by surprise.
If “reinventing justice” was to be the next big thing, current and wishful office holders, and those in the business of local, state, and federal governments would have to read Matt’s book. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of books!
If we could put Matt and his unexpected book onto the bestseller list, we’d have the thrill of catching our competitors completely off-guard…plus a year-end bonus. Cool!
But geez, how does one make this unknown author’s book—when shelved in bookstores among thousands of exciting and proven books—be one that goes to the cash register?
The book’s not literary, so reviews in the New York Times Book Review and New York Review of Books were out.
The content was serious, thoughtful, and complex. It’s not the exciting stuff of morning talk shows that’s going to make someone, downing their coffee, pause to scribble down the title.
And the cover was not going to cause an impulse buy for the bookstore customer wandering around looking for beach reading.
Instead, it was a book that needed to be called out, introduced to the curious, and debated via op-ed pieces in national newspapers and respected magazines.
Our publicity director said, “We’ll mail copies to political writers—”
“To their offices?” I interrupted.
“Of course, we’ll—”
“Nope, not this time,” I interrupted, “That won’t work. They’re not at their offices. The New Hampshire presidential primary is next week. They’re all in Manchester (NH). You mail the book to their offices, and they’ll never see it until they’re home and the Presidential campaign is over. We gotta get the book to them now. For the next five months, they’re on buses and planes, in hotel rooms and at hotel bars. And they need to file a story every damn day. If they have this book, some late night when stumped for material, they’re going to write about it. We gotta get books to them right now.”
“How?”
“Think about it. Everybody we need to trumpet this book is in Manchester. At essentially four hotels, or in the bars next door. Just a 40-minute drive from here.”
“So?”
“We drive up there and give each of them a copy of the book.”
Luckily, we had two adventurous assistants on staff. I asked them.
“Sure, we’d love to do that.”
We loaded 200 copies of Reinventing Justice into the rental car.
They asked, “How do we know which people in the hotel lobby or bar are journalists?
“Trust me, you’ll know. They won’t look like New Hampshire locals.”
It went well. They simply walked up to people who “looked like” political writers and offered a book. They got it right nearly every time.
Now we waited.
Within a week, a column about Reinventing Justice showed up in the Baltimore Sun. Then on February 5, David Broder did a piece in the Washington Post. “I recognize him!” said one of the assistants who drove to Manchester, “He was in the Holiday Inn lobby. He took the book but didn’t smile.” The next day, columns showed up in Seattle and Denver. Of course, Freeman did a great piece in the Pittsburgh Press. Then the AP and UPI released articles. And then the articles came like a flood. Within three weeks, a hundred columns about Reinventing Justice were published (100 articles out of 200 books given away—not bad!).
David Broder and Holiday Inn lobby
Reinventing Justice soon went onto all the bestseller lists and stayed there for months. Matt was a New York Times bestseller author! Cool! Rich and Freeman were surely jealous. But not me—remember I’m the guy who wanted to be a publisher, not the lousy writer I mostly was.
The lesson? When in doubt, load up a rented car and head for a hotel bar. No, seriously, the market for any one book is unique and fluid and unexpected. Templated marketing plans are deadly. And just why the hell anybody would want to make a career of doing templated marketing plans is beyond me. What’s the thrill in that?
Tomorrow: Crisis Management