Bad Book Publicity

[jimhines]

I’ll probably be talking about book-release stuff next week when Mermaid’s Madness comes out, which got me thinking about some of the really bad publicity strategies for authors.

I’m not claiming to be perfect.  In the past five years, I’ve tried any number of things to promote my work that make me wince to think about ‘em now.  Bad home-printed

Comments

[txtriffidranch]

I once worked with a reasonably big writer in the genre: if you read military SF, you'd probably recognize his name. Nice guy, and very easy to work with, but he spent all of his time at work promoting his novels. We're talking wearing T-shirts and bearing tote bags with the cover to the latest novel on them...at work.

The only reason why he got away with this was because this was a government position, and he'd been there so long and had done his job so well that everyone figured "Ennh, let him play." Try that at most places of employ, or even idly mention "Hey, I have a book coming out" in the lunch room, and that's automatically one big checkmark in the "People To Jettison When The Layoffs Come" list. (I made that mistake back in 1991, and was promptly laid off because "Oh, he has something to fall back on." Two years later, when my first book did come out, not only was I laid off from a new job the day it came out, but my old department manager heard about this and said "See? I knew Paul was going to do well." Bastard.

[jjschwabach]

Actually, that makes it odder that he got away with it, since in my own (government) position, we have to sign an annual agreement to do no such thing. No using work time to promote self, outside work, etc.

[txtriffidranch]

Well, that's a funny thing. He didn't actually use work time to promote himself or to do any work on his novels. Again, he did a really good job, and he kept going until he retired a few years back. (When I was working with him, he was already talking about leaving, collecting his pension, and spending the rest of his life writing novels.) However, he was still a walking billboard for his latest novel, and he made a point of always wearing that T-shirt and carrying that tote bag at all times, so sooner or later someone would ask.

[jjschwabach]

Huh.

Of course, where I work, tee-shirts aren't allowed, though of course there are always people who get away with things the rest of us don't. And the totebag would still work. Problem is, I keep getting asked to read other people's... well, you know how that goes.

[jtglover]

Huh. I'm sorry for your difficulty, lo those many years ago, but thank you for telling this story. VERY instructive, especially in this time of managers looking for places to trim fat...

[txtriffidranch]

If it helps, while the layoffs were painful at first, I realized later that these were two of the best things to happen to me. Texas Instruments got rid of its entire Defense Electronics Group about a year later, sold it to Raytheon, and Raytheon hung onto my old facility until a decade ago, when it would have had to start paying taxes to the city in which it was located. Likewise, with the other companies where I made these mistakes, they're no longer around. Considering how a supervisor I had for a temp spot at CompUSA's headquarters was countermanded by her supervisor over hiring me full-time in '93, on the same "But he'll leave us the moment he sells his first short story" pseudo-logic, I can't help but let loose an evil chuckle every time I go by a shuttered and dead CompUSA during my travels.