Selling books

Over on Murderati J.D. Rhoades articulates very well some questions I've always had about mid-list writers promoting themselves. I don't have any answers and I haven't even figured out how I really feel about the matter but J.D. does set a person to thinking. Here's an excerpt:

"...But I think the point's still valid: you may sell some books through the kind of marketing "everybody says" you have to do. But I really don't think that the people who make blockbusters blockbusters are buying books because they saw a trailer, or even because they saw a website.

"I know this sounds like heresy. But I think we here at Murderati, and all of us folks who frequent the book blogs, are a bit of a skewed sample. Most of us are not only hard-core book geeks, we also probably spend a lot of time on the Internet.

"But here's something I've noticed. A lot of the biggest readers I know, including mystery readers, don't spend a lot of time Web-surfing, and those that do aren't hitting the book sites. My in-laws are voracious readers, and they don't even have a computer (which gives them more time to read). Several of my colleagues in the law biz read a lot, and I can't remember a single one of them telling me they bought a book because they saw a trailer for it on YouTube or stumbled across the author's website. I know I've sold some books via people I've met on Facebook, and a few due to the blogging I do, but none of those sales were enough to kick me up to the bestseller lists. And while there have been a couple of times I'd have had to take off my shoes and socks to count the number of books I've sold at bookstore events, more often than not I can just use the fingers of one hand. There have only been a couple times when the sales themselves justified the cost of the gas."

For the complete piece go here:

http://murderati.typepad.com/murderati/2009/02/the-heretic-.html