In the midst of Hillel
Italie's BookExpo coverage for AP, John Updike sounds the
old-school call on behalf of all those who believe that "the written word
was supposed to speak for itself and sell itself," without the author
having to go on a massive media blitz and roadshow as part of an expensive
marketing push. As another great American author once said, in a
completely different context, "Wouldn't it be lovely to think so?"
Now, obviously Updike's right up to a point. I'm a firm believer in
Seth Godin's principle of the "Purple Cow," which boils
success down to being remarkable or, for writers, creating remarkable
books that will make readers take notice and then talk about to everyone
they think might be interested. But I don't need to tell you about the
realities of the marketplace, the competition for fragments of the
consumer's attention span, that make the idealized form of Updike's
argument—that writers can simply be brilliant and wait for history to take
its course—unviable from a commercial standpoint.
That's where people like Kim Dower (right) come in. Dower's
the head of Kim-from-L.A. Literary and Media Services, an independent
publicity firm that also offers extensive media training, and she came to
BookExpo to present a workshop on handling interviews. The hour-long
program was a back-and-forth with Success in Media's Jess
Todtfeld, who brought along several copies of his audio seminars on
subjects like how to get yourself on Oprah, which I thought were samples
until his assistant informed me that, no, they were actually on sale for
$99 (later in the program, Todtfeld would also plug the 4-hour workshops
he was running all weekend at $997 a pop). While Dower admitted that she
hadn't brought anything with her to sell to the audience, she gave away a
lot of great advice about staying on message no matter what reporters ask
you and how often you're allowed to mention your book's title. Now here's
the thing: Unfortunately, I lost my Moleskine reporter's notebook
somewhere in the convention center on Friday, so I no longer have all the
notes I took during the talk, but the core lesson that stuck with me is
that a writer needs to be absolutely clear in his or her own mind about
the fundamental why behind the media appearance. Not just the "so
people will buy my book," but "so my book will be in a position to speak
for itself to people who want to hear about its message."