Dude. Where’s My Tail?

In the last month I’ve delivered one novel and started another. I have done what, in former times, would have constituted the entirety of my job: writing a piece of fiction and selling it to a publisher. What happened to it afterward was sort of up to them.

Without going into the sad details, let’s just say that this business model no longer cuts the mustard. I’ve been writing professionally for twenty-odd years, and it’s become clear that I can’t depend on publishers to make me rich and famous. They keep dropping the football. Sometimes they can’t even find the football to drop it.

Often publishers will do some very nice things for my books— foil paper covers, etc.— but these all go under the heading of gimmicks. They all have one thing in common: they don’t cost real money.

As someone whose books used to get full-page ads in Publisher’s Weekly and Locus, I can but look on these efforts with a degree of skepticism. Not that I’m not grateful for any publisher’s efforts in any regard whatever; but I can pretty much demonstrate, with over twenty years’ worth of data, that my books sell in direct proportion to the amount of money spent on promotion. I’m told that these data are meaningless, because they don’t apply across the board to other writers; but they damned well apply to me, so it seems that people should pay attention to them. But they don’t.

Writers of mid-list fiction— which is pretty much everything but the best-sellers— are more or less obliged in these sub-lunary times to shoulder the burdens of publicity and promotion ourselves. We are expected to have web pages, we are expected to have blogs. It’s not that I don’t enjoy communicating with my readers, or that I don’t have fun on this blog, but I have to wonder how much profit actually accrues from this use of my time.

Full-time advertising professionals assure us that an advertising campaign along the lines of, “This is a new Walter Jon Williams work, wholly original and unlike any previous Walter Jon Williams work” is doomed to failure. According to these highly-qualified professionals, people only respond to things that look like other things that they already like. That’s why, whenever I write a book like Days of Atonement, which was the world’s first (and, so far as I know, only) Gothic Western science fiction police procedural, a book which I fondly assumed might appeal to readers outside the normal SF audience, the publisher made sure to put Death Rays on the cover, to assure genre readers that this was a thing that looked like other things that they already liked, and to make sure that all potential new readers were discouraged from so much as glancing at the book.

It is a truism of advertising that you keep the consumers you’ve got— even if they’re getting older and reading less and, you know, dying— rather than take the risk of alienating them in pursuit of new consumers.

So the rule would seem to be: whatever’s actually in there, it’s gotta look like the other stuff. But I don’t get to pick cover art and design anyway— at best I get to veto it when I don’t like it— so any further thoughts in that direction are fruitless.

Nevertheless the next book, Implied Spaces, is appearing from Night Shade, which is a small(ish) if very successful press, and which despite its success presumably can’t afford to spend five or ten times the advance to make a brilliant success in the market. Which means we’ve got to sneak the success and glory in on a low budget.

And it has to be something I can do from New Mexico, which is the most isolated place in the U.S.

I have observed with interest the development of Long Tail theory, in which it is demonstrates that the development of electronic distribution networks can theoretically provide very large audience for hitherto obscure books. I’m not sure that this would work for me: I suspect that my books already sell more copies than just about all of those Long Tail books.

Still, growing a Long Tail certainly wouldn’t hurt sales. But how is that to be done?

What I clearly need is a huge online audience, like those of Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow. The problem is that Neil was beloved by a vast audience well before he ever had a blog, and Cory had a huge online audience before he ever wrote an SF novel.

So it seems to me that I’ve got to get famous first.

What has to happen, it seems to me, is that I need a certifiably famous person to say that I should be more famous and popular than I am. Elmore Leonard was a fairly obscure writer until George Will wrote an entire column about how good Elmore Leonard was. Then Leonard became famous, and book and movie deals descended like unto manna from heaven. And to mix fairy tales if not metaphors, Oprah regularly turns ugly ducklings into gold-laying geese. Does anyone have her phone number?

Does anybody out there know a truly famous person who could be persuaded to tell everyone that I should be famous, too?

And if not, does anyone have any useful ideas?

I’m going up the mountain in a couple days for Taos Toolbox. I’ll be gone for two weeks, and during that time I’ll have only intermittent access to the internet, assuming I have any access at all.

So feel free to discuss the issue of my worldwide fame and success, and why it’s important. I won’t interrupt.

Thank you.