Into the Fire

If you could change five things (or less) in CBA publishing, what would they (it) be? (Unabridged and unedited.)

From Author J. Mark Bertrand:

There are plenty of things I'd change, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized there's one area that constantly undermines change. So I figured I'd change that …. 🙂

I’m limiting myself to one wave of the magic wand, but it’s a big one. The change that would enable so many other changes:

Let’s change the marketing macrocosm. Book marketing is now “open source,” meaning it’s up to the author to do more and more of the work. In some ways, it always has been. Marketing support makes all the difference in a book’s success. While support doesn’t guarantee a book will hit the bestseller list, lack of support guarantees it won’t, exceptional flukes notwithstanding. Thanks to limited resources, publishers can’t support every book as if it’s destined for immortality. In the old days, this reality meant that a lot of good books would be doomed to obscurity. Then along came blogs and social networking, bringing with them the possibility that authors could do for themselves what publishers couldn’t or wouldn’t. So here we are.

What’s changed, though, isn’t the What or How of marketing, just the Who. In the old days, a frustrated mid-lister could complain that everything would have been different if only the publisher had given him marketing support. Now it’s his own fault. He should have had a more successful blog or posted some viral videos. He should have made himself a celebrity.

The old way wasn’t perfect, but I’m afraid what we’re replacing it with will be even worse. Do publishers need better marketing people? Absolutely. I’m just not convinced they’re going to find them by unloading the problem onto authors. 

So here’s what I would change, if only I could. I’d move the question of how books will be marketed back into the marketing department, where I’d start gauging success by how well the department sells the books that don’t sell themselves. While I would expect a lot of involvement from authors, and would invest more resources in those willing to match my efforts, my marketing people would be driving the story. Like some World War II code breakers, they’d be on a twenty-four/seven quest to discover how to market books in the twenty-first century.

If we changed this one thing, we’d make it easier to change everything. The biggest obstacle to change is failure. When books succeed, we get copycats. If the copycats succeed we get trends. Success drives change, only it tends to be capricious. Good marketing increases the potential for success as much (if not more) than good writing. If you want change anywhere, marketing is a great place to start.

To be continued . . .