9 x 12: The Adventure Continues - Chapter 4

Your book's at the printers: you're done, right?

Hurray! The book is finished. It is such a relief to have crossed every t, dotted every i, tested, tested, and re-tested every recipe, finished all the photography, and delivered all the material to my publisher. It's at the printers as I type these words and I'm eagerly anticipating seeing the press sheets and advance copies. Phew. We are on schedule — 8 weeks until publication day!

'You must be so relieved,' a friend recently told me, 'now you can relax until the book arrives!' 'Well, not really,' I replied. 'Now it's time to change tack and put on my marketing hat; it's a full-court press until the book arrives.' She looked bewildered. 'You mean you're not done?' 'Not at all, in a way, I've only just begun,' I said.

Marketing is the other side of writing a book (cooking or otherwise) that no one really talks about. Writing the book is the creative part. Marketing the book is absolutely essential for your book to succeed, and by marketing the book, I mean that you (or, in this case, me) have to do that work. Unless you're Ina Garten or have an initial print run north of 100K copies, most publishers expect the author to organize much of the book's promotion. This is a painstaking and time-consuming task, but you must do it. It is also, for most people, myself included, an uncomfortable one because, essentially, you're tooting your own horn. I don't know about you, but I am not at ease saying, here, look at the new book I just wrote/it's terrific/ would you like to write a piece on it? Interview me? Publicize the book? Or words to that effect. The author is usually the best mouthpiece for the book as you know the subject matter intimately. Who else but the author can talk well about what inspired them? But there are challenges to this: one, you must find an outlet through which you can talk about the book, and two, ideally, you must also find people who will talk about your book for you.

The book business is a crowded marketplace. The question for any author is, how can your book stand out? Over 700 million print books are sold every year, of which 20 million or so are cookbooks, the fourth largest adult non-fiction segment.

Marketing a book is a months-long, multi-faceted endeavor. The goal is to create a buzz for your title and to give sales legs. By this, I mean that you want to generate robust pre-sales (more on pre-sales in a moment) and generate longevity. It's great to have a strong opening week of sales, but you want those to continue for months. A staggering 450,000 to 500,000 new titles (fiction and non-fiction) are released yearly; of these, 66% of all newly published books sell less than 1,000 copies in the first year in print.

These are sobering statistics. The question is, how do you beat the odds?

Here's my crash course in book marketing: