35 days
Happy new year! 35 days until THE BOOK OF THE PRECIOUS SUBSTANCE is available anywhere, everywhere. Above you’ll see tour dates. Probably all of them will be over zoom, so you can come to ALL of them. Connection details coming soon. And you’ll be hearing from me more often over the next few weeks as I push the hell out of this book.
If you want to help out a bit, you could follow Dreamland Books on twitter (@dreamland108) and retweet what you find there, leave a good review on goodreads or amazon (if you liked it! if not, feel free to keep that shit to yourself), mention the book on whatever social media you use, pre-order it from amazon, bookshop.org, and/or your local bookstore, and, most of all, tell a friend about it.
Every year the fine line between “writer” and “professional clown who begs for sales on social media” becomes finer and finer still. As I’ve often said, I don’t think this creates a healthy psyche in the individual writer or in the community. And I’m not sure it works all that well. The New York Times has recently confirmed something I’ve suspected for a long time—there isn’t a consistent link between social media followers and book sales. That’s kind of an exciting thing, though, because social media is boring, and sucks. (But I think it would be a mistake to neglect it all together, so I have a wonderful assistant who runs our twitter for us.)
So what does sell books? I don’t know! No one knows! Billions of dollars poured into a business for hundreds of years an no one seems to know anything useful regarding US book sales except “word of mouth.” How do you generate word of mouth? No one knows! Do reviews sell books? Maybe, if there’s enough of them, and they’re really good, but not always. Marketing? Sure, but which kind of marketing? Again, though, this is more liberating than constraining. The possibilities are, if not endless, expansive.
Do I care about sales? Another unknown! I mean, I care very much about creating good work and getting it to readers. Do I care about sales beyond that? This is something that I constantly struggle with. Half of me wants to go live in the woods and print books on letterpress and risograph and mimeograph and send them to a hundred subscribers and then move on to writing another book and just remove commerce from the equation all together. And half of me wants a big fucking bestseller and all the fun that comes with that—attention, events, humiliation of enemies, look-at-me-aren’t-I-clever moments in interviews. These perks aren’t anything to build a life around, or become addicted to, but they’re fun when they happen. There’s another half (think we’re up to three halves) that would be happy to take a break from Hollywood and make some money from books for the next few years—Hollywood is going through a dull, dreary, moment. And there’s a fourth half (I’m COMPLICATED, ok? MANY HALVES.) that feels like I’ve got a pretty good thing going in H’wood, and it would be foolish to turn my back on it just because I’m kinda bored.
I guess I’m constantly asking myself these questions, and they all kind of add up to the same question: how do I want to spend my days? I’m very, very fortunate to be able to make this choice. Most do not.
If you’ve read this far, you’re a True Fan and I’d like your thoughts—what else would you like to see/hear/read from me? Writing advice? Inappropriately blunt career discussions? Let me know!