Selling a book can require as much skill as writing it. Published author and media consultant Terry Prone writes about the challenge of moving a book out of shops and on to bedside tables via the agonising roadshow process
Jacqueline Susann is the one to blame. The woman who wrote the 1960s record-breaking bestseller, Valley of the Dolls, pioneered the media tour, travelling between US cities in an aircraft emblazoned with the title of her novel, and pitching up for interview at every radio and TV station that would have her.
Bookshops adored her, big hair and all. If she was in your town, not only would she create huge interest in the book, but she would arrive, later in the day, at your shop, talk with the sales assistants, sign copies for customers, and later send thank you notes that reminded the sales assistants of the pleasant woman who had written that unputdownable book about women and drugs.
Susann effectively put paid to the concept of the writer as someone who lived a thoughtful life isolated from the commercial concerns of promotion, which could be left to the publisher, replacing it with a view of writers as arguably the best promoter of their own work, if not the personification of it. This was partly because her arrival coincided with the growing importance, when it came to booksales, of radio and TV.
Although TV coverage is generally assumed to be a great "mover" of books, radio is much more powerful. As a young radio researcher, I was taken aback, one Christmas, when I dropped into my local bookshop on the day a script I had written about children's annuals had been broadcast. The ones I had heavily recommended were nowhere to be seen. I asked why.
"Oh, they got a fantastic plug on that 11 o'clock programme on the radio," the manager told me. "Ten minutes after the programme finished, the shop was full of mothers buying them. Two and three copies each. They cleaned us out in 30 minutes."
Achieving that kind of sales impact, if you're an adult novelist, is a considerable challenge. First, radio and television programmes are more amenable to the inclusion of non-fiction writers than they are to fiction writers, because it's easier to interview someone, say, about their study of how a new diet improves the quality of a woman's cleavage than it is to discuss a reflective work of fiction.
The media tour, nonetheless, is increasingly assumed to be an integral part of the novelist's job. It can last anything from two to 10 weeks, Moving from hotel room, to hotel room, city to city, interview to interview. First time out, the writer often feels like a celebrity. That's before the insulting experience of being interviewed by people who have not read the book. This new book, or any previous book.
"They ask the most superficial questions possible," one old hand at publicising books maintains. "There's no point in getting angry about it: it's just the way it is." The humiliation is worth it because of the payoff. An appearance on Oprah Winfrey's programme in the US has generated upward of 500,000 immediate sales. (Her now-defunct book club built on this.)
It is a rare book, however, which gets itself on to the best-seller lists as a result of a TV or radio appearance by the author. Most writers simply hope, during a media tour, that whoever watches or listens to a programme remembers the name of their new book. Ensuring that this happens is not easy. Publicists demand, before they even plan a media tour, that the writer is trained, their performance honed to such an extent that they can, by reflex, utter the title of their book every 45 seconds, this being the frequency proven by experience and research to lead to reader recall.
Constantly reiterating the title of your book while being interesting about its themes is difficult enough in a one-to-one interview. However, many radio and TV producers are so unconvinced about literary discussions as crowd-pullers, they will drop a writer into an assorted panel of speakers whose subjects may not relate to each other at all.
"I really don't need to be on a show with people who are discussing the heartbreak of psoriasis or freez-drying your pets after they die," says Rita Mae Brown, author of the classic Rubyfruit Jungle. "They're out there, let me tell you. Or how about cellulite discussed in the same weighty tones as nuclear disarmament. You die a little when you go out there and do that."
Mave Binchy once walked on to the set of such a mixed-allsorts programme and was asked by the presenter, during the commercial break before her slot, how long it had taken her to become interested in restoring antique furniture. Because Binchy is both easy-going and obliging, she considered, for one brief moment, the possibility of pretending to be an antique-furniture-restorer, before coming to the realisation that she didn't know enough about the topic to wing it. She explained she was the best-selling novelist and that someone else must be the furniture restorer. The presenter took the correction without loss of bonhomie and moved seamlessly on to a discussion of her book, which he clearly hadn't read.
WRITERS quickly find that most interviews follow an infinitely predictable pattern. Neither the presenter nor the researcher will have had the time to read and appreciate the book, and so the questions will be a brisk visitation of the key points made on the book jacket, in a press release and author's biog, with side excursions into the writer's personal life where that has entered the public domain.
The predictability makes the task easy enough. Dangerously easy, at times. Older viewers and listeners who are big book-buyers tend to catch more than one appearance by a given author. For example, you may see a novelist on perhaps two different British TV programmes and hear them on radio before they turn up on The Late Late Show. If the writer tells the same charming anecdotes, the switch-off point is easy to reach, and the chance of motivating the viewer to buy the book is slim. The good media performer refreshes the material offered, knowing that, today, selling through radio, TV and print interviews is essential.
Publishers increasingly view a writer who is unwilling or unable to "do media" as completing only half their job.
"The competition for the attention of the reader and the book-buyer has never been more fierce," according to Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who has been both a book publicist and a bestselling author. "There are 100,000 novels alone published in a given year in America. When you factor in the speciality books and the publications one must read for one's trade or profession, then people are not going to buy your book unless there's something immediately enmeshing about the way you talk about it."
If you don't talk about it in the media, she points out, a reader has to happen on your book in a bookshop, because few publishers put much money into print or electronic media advertising, and a relatively small proportion of books are reviewed.
On the other hand, according to Ed McBain, the thriller writer who also writes novels as Evan Hunter, media tours are not good for marriages, not good for the soul and not good for the work, because they take you away from your "work" for so long.
And that doesn't include the constant possibility of insult at the hands of the interviewer, like the one who said to to McBain: "I understand you've written a mystery?" "It sounded like I was a retired mailman who suddenly decided to write a mystery," McBain seethes at the memory. "What did I say? I flared. I became somewhat immodest. I said: 'I am the pre-eminent mystery writer in the world!' I don't remember where the interview went from there . . ."
Terry Prone's latest novel, Dancing With the Angel, published by Marino Books, is out now in paperback (€13.95)