PHILIP F DEAVER - HOW MEN PRAY

Marketing the Book

By Philip F. Deaver

While I don’t have enough books to shake a stick at, I did spend a number of years in business, and I think I’m pretty good at promoting my books without going over the top. For some reason, the very self promotion that the publishing industry has begun to require of authors is something I find distasteful, and I find it sometimes annoying when I see someone who is really good at it. I had always hoped someone else would think I was good enough to promote me. I always thought that was part of what came with having a book published. And I’m not unhappy with how the University of Georgia Press promoted my book Silent Retreats, and Anhinga Press, a good but small press devoted to poetry, has also been great to me with my new book How Men Pray. (I know you spotted the self promotion in the last sentence!) But in both cases, if the books were to sell well, it was going to depend on me and both presses were clear with me about that. It was difficult to resist that fact once I talked with friends who publish through the big houses and they too were shouldering much of the challenge of promoting their own books (and being held accountable if they didn’t do very well).

There is a marvelous old axiom from the anarchist Proudhon: “Multiply your associations and be free.” I’m not sure how that works in the world of anarchy (that’s humor), but one interpretation of that gem would be called “networking” these days. I reached out to my friends, to my home region, to my former professors at their colleges, to writers I’d met along the trail. I was a fellow at Bread Loaf, and my fellow fellows have stayed with me all these years, and I’ve stayed with them. Email and the telephone. In fact, it was friends who nominated me for a fellowship to Bread Loaf, and those friends are still out there, and we’re all working together to move each other’s books. Nobody is above this kind of work, and if you are embarrassed to self-promote, balance it by giving to others, by promoting friends as well.

I’ve arranged local readings for poets I know. They deserve better, but it’s what I can do – they come on their own dime, and they bring their books, and in front of 30 people they read their work and reach out to their audience and sign and sell their poetry and stories. They are willing to do it, and they know I am. We all keep an eye out for book fairs and festivals, try to be on panels at conferences, and always have a box of books with us to sell.

We write reviews, and get in the paper, and our biographical paragraphs there spread the word of the book and how to find it. We all have websites, and we mention each other’s work on our websites, always with links on how to buy. I think the best advice is to support your fellow writers. The whole community of writers is a force when it is being mutually generous. That was originally the purpose of the Pushcart Prize, in fact. When the community of writers being super competitive and anal retentive, that’s just more of the crap we see in the rest of the world and we ought to be above it and in fact can’t afford not to be.

There is a chance I’m selling myself short, and my friends. But I’m talking about selling five, six, seven thousand books, not 45,000, not a million. One always hopes that there is some “critical mass” sort of issue out there, that there’s a tipping point, that suddenly 9,000 books sold will hit a marketing artery of some sort and thousands will suddenly be sold as the book “takes off” (as they say). Meantime, we have to do all we can do, usually while we’re doing some other job, having a life, and of course always writing the next thing.

I should say, too, that I have found writers at all levels enormously generous, and some of the most famous have been the most generous. And I always think to myself, I hope the day arrives when I can pass it on as they have, to the good ones in the community who are in the struggle to get their good work up into the light of day.

Comments

[Ted Krauser]

Philip F. Deaver is the best short story writer in America. I read Silent Retreats in the early nineties and nearly keeled over dead for happiness. How come you don't have more short story book, Philip F.? The world is cold and lonely without Skidmore & Co.

[Dan Wickett]

Ted,

The good news is that PFD is shopping a book of 6 or 7 inter-related short stories - many of which have been either in year end anthologies (BASS), or nominated for such (Pushchart).

Visit his website (link above) and you can get links to a couple of his stories since Silent Retreats.

Great taste by the way,

Dan

[Philip Deaver]

Ted, thanks for remembering Silent Retreats. In addition to the "novel in stories" Dan refers to, the novel I'm pushing right now, no telling when it would see print, is called Past Tense. It revisits many of the characters in Silent Retreats. It's the story of Skidmore's journey to try to get a little forgiveness from those he's "wronged" (to state it nicely). Problem is, he keeps earning their anger, because, really, after all these years he hasn't changed a bit. It's a 100,000 word raucous ride, fun to write because it was like hanging out with all those old friends I made up back when people still loved short stories. Etc.

And thanks so much too to Dan Wickett, The Great Networker himself, who LIVES Proudhon's admonition "Multiply your associations and be free," and is helping to free us all.

Philip