To my shock, I’m finding that I’m actually enjoying marketing my second book, Social Studies, an essay collection I recently had self-published with
Friesen Press in Victoria. If anyone had suggested, even last year, that I’d enjoy marketing of any kind, I’d have told them they were nuts.
To say that I grew up with a prejudice against marketing is to understate things considerably. Marketers—the folks who pushed soap flakes and laxatives on TV—were just one step above carnival barkers, and not a very big step, at that.
This prejudice was reinforced during my years at Amherst College, where I was an English major. In the Amherst English department, irony and emotional coolness were the order of the day. Our very first freshman composition assignment pilloried a man who claimed to be able to teach people the essentials of good writing for the even-then modest sum of $35. The ultimate insult would have been for a professor to describe one of his students’ papers as “promotional” in tone. But I’m sure this never happened. By the time we’d been at Amherst for a month, we’d all have been far too gun-shy to even consider using such language.
When my first book—an industrial relations textbook—was published 15 years ago, I was delighted to learn that I would have absolutely nothing to do with marketing the book. There would be no launch, no readings, no driving around town with a box of books in my car. Like most textbook writers, I didn’t have my photo on the book’s cover. Even that would have been considered too promotional.
Marketing Canadian Industrial Relations was left to the professionals in the publisher’s marketing department, who evidently did their job quite well. Through three editions, the book has sold close to 20,000 copies. I wouldn’t have come anywhere close to that on my own.
As I sat back and collected my royalty cheques, I sometimes contemplated the fate of fellow writers who had chosen to self-publish their books. By and large, their lot didn’t seem a happy one. From where I sat, self-published authors looked to be facing an endless round of driving around to readings and book fairs, intermitted only by dealings—generally not the pleasantest of dealings—with the chain bookstores and book wholesalers whom they were trying to persuade to sell their book for them. Without getting into particulars, I can say that some of the stories I heard qualified as full-fledged nightmares.
Needless to say, such stories did little to diminish my already considerable skepticism about self-publishing. I also didn’t like the appearance of many self-published books. I figured that if a book looked as amateurish as many of the self-published ones I saw did, its contents probably wouldn’t be much better.
But over the years, self-publishing has changed, as has the marketing of self-published books. Many self-published books now look very much like the products of the most prestigious commercial publishing houses. This recognition, coupled with a number of refusals from commercial houses, convinced me that I’d better self-publish my book if I wanted it to see the light of day.
At the same time, thanks mainly to the Internet, the marketing of these books has evolved considerably from the “box of books in the trunk” days. It would be fair to say that my publisher and I are partners in marketing my book. Friesen’s offers Social Studies through its online bookstore and has also arranged for the book to be made available through Amazon.com. Though I make occasional individual sales to friends and will be doing some readings and book-signings in the fall, once people are back in town, my job is primarily to tell my friends, acquaintances, and connections through various groups how they can order the book. Thanks again to e-mail and the Internet, I can do this in the privacy of my home, without ever knocking on a door or making a phone call.
To my amazement, I’m discovering that even a bona fide introvert like me can be an effective marketer. I’m liking the challenge of seeing how many different groups I belong to and how many ways there are for me to reach those groups. By the time I’m finished—I’ve only just started my marketing—I expect to have contacted at least a dozen different groups to which I belong or have in the past belonged. These include, among others, writers’ groups, tennis clubs, and prep school and college alumni associations. The people I know from these groups number in the hundreds. While it may always have been true that, as the poet John Donne once said, “No man is an island,” this is even truer now than it would have been 50 years ago.
Nor need this “New Age” approach to marketing be confined to writers. With a few obvious modifications, the same approach could be used to promote a dog-walking service, a catering business, or a landscaping service. This is not to say that more traditional forms of advertising such as newspaper or Yellow Pages ads don’t still have their place. They do, particularly if yours is an established business or service. But by and large, the network-based approach I’ve outlined here offers a greater chance of success, particularly for new or somewhat unconventional products or services. By pitching your product or service to people you know, or at the very least to organizations within which you are a known quantity, you have got your foot in the door; you are coming in as a known quantity. This can only help your efforts.
Even after just a few weeks, I’ve found that marketing my book is starting to make my life richer, both by getting me in touch with old friends and by helping me make new ones. But there’s another lesson here, and it doesn’t apply only to those of us who are marketing something. Our retirement years can be a glorious period of discovery, a time to start exploring new worlds. If we’re going to find out all we can about those new worlds, however, we will first have to let go of some of our old prejudices (like mine against marketing) that keep us stuck in old ways. You will only be able to see those new worlds once you take off your blinders and start looking at things from a fresh perspective.
This article is another in a series by Jon Peirce, a retired professor and union representative and long-time free-lance journalist, on subjects of interest to boomers. Some of Jon’s previous work has appeared in such publications as The Globe & Mail, the Christian Science Monitor, the Ottawa Citizen, Books in Canada, the Toronto Star, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, and the Kingston Whig-Standard. Jon currently writes, teaches writing courses at the Nova Scotia Seniors’ College, and serves on the Advisory Committee of the Silver Economy Engagement Network, all of this while doing an M.A. in history at Dalhousie. He is a professional member of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia. His interests include tennis, swimming, improvisational dance, and cooking, and he has recently returned to the stage after a 46-year intermission, playing Judge Omar Gaffney in a Dartmouth Players production of Harvey. His second book, Social Studies; Collected Essays, 1974-2013, has just been published by Friesen’s Press in Victoria; his first book, Canadian Industrial Relations, originally published in 1999, is now in its third edition with Pearson Education Canada.
.png)
