with Lynne Marie Zerance

LMZ: What I really like about your book on being a writer in the 21^st century, Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, is that its overall theme is so optimistic. Lately, all I’ve been reading, hearing, and observing is that a new writer’s chance of getting published today is dismal at best, so your book has a refreshing message. Can you tell our readers why, in your opinion, aspiring authors should keep writing in the hopes of getting published—despite the odds?

KS: It’s no easier to get published today than it was 50 years ago, but what’s different is that the game is no longer about concentrated centers of power. You don’t have to live in NYC or go to a prestigious MFA program to get published. The centers of power have been diffused, and there are positives and negatives to that.

The positives are that it’s possible to build a profile for your writing and yourself with hard work and networking. Thanks to blogging, podcasting and YouTube, the tools exist and they are cheap.

The disadvantage is that if everyone is crudely on an equal playing field, the writer who yells the loudest and promotes the hardest gets the most attention. And that’s not the way writers are typically wired.

Every writer is responsible for his or her own career in a way that simply wasn’t the case even 20 years ago. There used to be an obvious bifurcation between good and bad writers. If you were published, you had a company, agent, and publicist backing you, and you got to stay at your desk and produce books. Someone else took your manuscript from your hands and did the rest of the work involved in making it happen. If you couldn’t get published, you didn’t matter. This was before CNN, cable TV, the internet, and the countless other media distractions that exist today.

The bottlenecks used to be tightly controlled…now publishing is more of a democracy. We are all empowered to make the most of our writing careers, and we have more tools available to us. The difference is we can’t just be writers anymore. We have to aggressively market our work and ourselves. We have to see our writing as more than “my book or nothing” to imagine it as first an essay for an online publication or maybe a series of radio commentaries. We have to develop a track record before getting published, not after, and it’s easier than ever to do that.

If, as a writer, you see that fact as a challenge rather than an obstacle, you’re one of the lucky ones. If you just want to write and hope someone notices, good luck. It’s not a passive game any more.

LMZ: Please tell us how you went about getting Bookmark Now, your own first book, published. Did you have an agent, and if so, how did you get one?

KS: Around Thanksgiving 2002, I had lunch with a friend who was a junior agent. She was new in her career and she’d been calling everyone she’d known from our John Hopkins MFA program and asking us if we had any book ideas. I hadn’t been thinking all that seriously about it, but I came up with the idea of an anthology about writing in the digital 21^st century, so she asked me to write a book proposal. I started putting one together, but before I could finish it, she decided that she no longer wanted to be an agent. She ended up passing on my proposal to an old colleague of hers at ICM.

Since I’d already spent four years creating an internet property for people who liked to read (Central Booking.com, which no longer exists) and I’d already interviewed lots of authors and reviewed lots of books, I was able to put together a comprehensive marketing section in my book proposal. The ICM agent knew that if he signed me, I was well prepared to do a lot of my own marketing legwork. I think it also helped that I live in San Francisco, had contacts in NYC, and had been a journalist for eight years at the time.

We have a tendency to think that getting published is all about being some kind of genius. Genius only goes so far. Genius that can’t be marketed is great, but kind of useless. And I’m not going to advocate a world where writers think it’s beneath them to interact with the people who buy their books and support their creative lives.

LMZ: I was originally drawn to conduct an interview with you because I was intrigued by your Virtual Book Touring business model. It seemed an interesting, unique approach to book marketing. How did the idea come about? Did you think of it when you were thinking of ways to market your own book, or did the service already exist?

KS: I’d been blogging since 2001, when I’d met some people who were old-school bloggers, really the first generation of folks in the medium. At the time I was also interviewing authors and reviewing books for Central Booking. I spoke to a lot of publicists who had no idea what blogging was and didn’t see what the internet and books had to do with one another. It all seemed based on this quaint old notion that it’s cute for writers not to know anything about computers. I like to match-make—to find two groups of people and point out what they have in common. I knew a ton of people in publishing who had no clue what blogging was, but they were looking for different ways to market their books. And I knew bloggers who loved to read. Essentially, that’s how the idea for Virtual Book Touring came about.

LMZ: I’m curious as to how successful Virtual Book Touring is. I’ve read the reports on the traffic your VBTs have generated, but how many sales has that translated into for your authors?

KS: Well. Unfortunately, the amount of time I have to put in to do a good job and produce solid results with VBT is beyond what most authors and publishers are willing to pay for. So increasingly, what I’m doing is less of a tour format but rather consulting with individual authors and their publishers on how to use new media in their book promotion.

I’m also increasingly working in the live event space. The San Francisco Film Festival hired me to accredit local bloggers as members of the media and had them cover the festival. That was a great success. I’m continuing to do it for local theatre and Broadway revivals, civic festivals, that type of thing.

LMZ: Why does VBT focus mainly on blogs and not other types of static websites?

KS: People don’t come back as often to static websites. Blogs are personal and have regular readers. Plus, if they’re RSS-enabled, the content can be delivered directly to readers. Also, I’d rather deal with people one-on-one, and blogs are run by individuals, not corporations. It’s much easier to make things happen quickly when you’re dealing with an individual versus an institution. I’m one guy. I don’t have the time or resources to clear my work with six marketing VPs before I get to it.

LMZ: What about other forms of book publicity? Since you’re an expert on marketing, can you give our writers some good grass-roots publicity tips?

KS: Writers have to think about how they can best use the internet. They need to have a website, and it has to be one they can update themselves, so they’re not bothering their designers every five minutes.

If a writer publishes a book about gardening, then they should be using the internet to find all of the local gardening clubs, find all of the like-minded people they can. That’s something the internet is great for--picking the low-hanging fruit. If you’ve written a book about asparagus growing, you have to think: Who, within fifty miles of me, would be interested in this subject? Find the vegetarians, the foodies, the nutritional counselors, find these people. Local goes a long way. Local means a whole lot more than just a name you picked at random off of Google.

And look for the underserved media outlets. A book review in Asparagus Growers Weekly is much more important than a review in a major newspaper. Think niche, niche, niche. It’s much more important to sell your book to people who are predisposed to want it than to people who don’t know they want it. And the internet, large as it is, is a niche-driven medium.

LMZ: What about novelists? I know this is a tricky one that stumps most publicists: How can a writer market fiction?

KS: If you’ve written a novel, ask yourself: What are its unique characteristics? Is it about displaced teenagers? Does it take place on a minor league baseball team? Is it about an asparagus grower? Find the unique factors, then find the affinity groups.

LZ: I know you’re a public speaker on the state and future of publishing as an industry. Is there anything from your lectures that you’d like to share with our readers?

KS: We’ve created an image in the media today that getting published is more about luck than talent. Publishing is a hard business. In any other line of work, you find coaches and mentors, but for some reason we don’t think it’s necessary in publishing…but it’s vitally important.

If I had to fix a problem with my car, and I know nothing about engines, what I would not do is open the hood and start tinkering. I would find people who knew how to fix it and say, “Tell me what to do. I know nothing.”

I speak at writers’ conferences all the time, and I can always differentiate between the writers who are going to make it and those who aren’t. The ones who are going somewhere are the ones who listen more than they talk, and who follow up on suggestions. They don’t argue. They take my card, and they call me later. They say, “I’m a newbie. I’m a rookie. I’m here to learn.” They acknowledge where they are and ask how I can help them advance.

The writers who are going nowhere bellyache, they argue, they insist the system is stacked against them and nobody recognizes their genius. They want to be writers but they don’t want to be professional writers.

This is a job. If you’re a new writer and you go to a writers’ conference, it’s important to realize that most of the people there are experts, are further along in their careers than you are, and your job is to learn from them.

LMZ: What would you say to encourage the writer who has gotten nothing but rejections thus far?

KS: Everybody gets rejections. There are so many cases of now-classic books that were rejected over and over again. Forty publishers rejected Gravity’s Rainbow. But at no time in our history has the power been with creative people in the way that it is now. Cost of production is low, cost to get seen and heard, while difficult, is doable and cheap. The game has shifted. As a writer you are now in charge of your own career. So in addition to seeking validation from publishers, you have to seek it for yourself. Seek it in your community, from your friends and peers.

You have to build from the bottom up. Publishing is like a pyramid, and publishing with a traditional publisher is the top. If you think you’re going to start at the bottom and spring to the top, you’re gonna get real winded, real fast.

Starting at the bottom means writing articles for your local paper, for online publications, for anyone who will publish you, then moving to larger regional publications then national, and so on. A book is the summit. And hardly anyone will publish a writer who has no track record from the lower levels of the pyramid.

That said, it's possible now as never before to be a respected professional writer on those lower levels. The "I publish a book or I'm not a real writer" is not the world we are living in anymore.

Kevin Smokler is the editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times. (Basic Books, 2005). His writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, he has made radio appearances on NPR. He speaks throughout North America and consults with writers at all levels. He and his large orange cat live in San Francisco. More about him can be found at www.kevinsmokler.com.