Sales, accolades, sales again

Recognition, gathered via awards from officious places, or premature death, always bring sales of your book.

Many authors spend their entire careers unjustly unappreciated by awards and/or sales. Trust that you are not alone, and that every sale is worth something. Mr. Obie Joe was intrigued to read of the book sales for the five nominees for the prestigious National Book Award:

(winner) LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN, by Colum McCann 17,200 copies
LARK AND TERMITE, by Jayne Anne Phillips 15,250 copies
IN OTHER ROOMS, OTHER WONDERS, by Daniyal Mueenuddin 8,750 copies
FAR NORTH, by Marcel Theroux 1,275 copies
AMERICAN SALVAGE, by Bonnie Jo Campbell 1,100 copies

Sidenote: A hearty congrats to McCann, a fav around Obie Joe Media for his book, Zoli, about the Romany, and the struggle to be left alone by the dominant culture. Best line: "I still call myself black, even though I have rolled around in flour."
(Photograph: Tina Fineberg/AP)

TIP: Fancify your online invites

Sure, fancify is only a word the littlest Obie Joe could conjure, but the intent for online invites is the same. How best to match the online invitation to your event? There are a fair amount of these services, and nearly offer the same points:
• Ease of design. Some offer more options in clip art. Most offer templates for any occasion; Constant Contact is known for their range.
• Tracking. Evite pings you by cell phone; all services notify you by e-mail as the yea/nay/maybe somedays roll in, as well as tell you how many opened the invite at all.
• Cost. Only Evite is free, and scrolling through the ads can annoy. Constant Contact does offer e-mail management; those authors with multiple e-mail lists arranged by niche audiences can find this service a life-saver.

We're also been intrigued by a new player, paperlesspost. Still in beta, and not offered for free (yet), there are aspects of using an online invite system that looks more at home with a wedding planner. When we received an paperlesspost invite from Love Is a Mountain author Mozella Perry Ademiluyi for appearances in London, we paid more attention because the look, and suspense of "opening" the invite gave a larger sense of exclusivity to it.

When designing your next evite, try for a personal, formal look. It might not work for an event in an institutional setting (library, bookstore), but for a more intimate setting (book club), where you want to guarantee close to 100% confirmation, something along the lines from paperlesspress might work.

Perhaps an author tour is worth the time...

Not a fan of Wal-Mart, and probably should know more about Mr. King, and yet this event located just miles from the Obie Joe Media home inspires much love for all involved. Hundreds of fans showed up to meet the man, many of whom camped out the night before.

Get out there and tour! Surprise yourself with the possibility of fans. Maybe not King-size, but surely well enough for building to the same.

(image courtesy of The Baltimore Sun)

TIP: Bringing strangers to your book

Use of steroids in tennis?
Have you ever had a blinking light as a thank-you from a faery?
Are you a shaman?
How do you avoid a Facebook "suicide?"

One of the first tasks in the use of social networking to promote your book is contacting your real-life friends and family, and to build from that base. Well, sure, it always helps to start from home. At a certain point, though, your book needs to make friends with strangers. Such as, Troupes vs. Dance Companies. Or, the answers to any one of the questions above. That's the wonder of Tribe.net, a very popular site for all kinds and causes. At the very least, have fun with the search engine on tribe.net:
• Healthy food for lazy people (4987 members)
• Burning man (20,000+ members, but you already knew that)

Tribe.net strives to connect to all resources on a topic -- blogs, commerce, news -- so be prepared to take a bit of time to drill to a group that is active, and is about one topic of interest to your book. Try e-mailing moderators; not only are they responsive, they'll know exactly which tribe is home for you.
(the hand of purple is from loop.pool, a tribe.net project by Rick Walker's Abstract Electronic Live Looping Project)

Just like the Alien vs. Predator fight, we don't know who will win in the Amazon vs. Wal-Mart fight to sell bottom-priced books. We do know the loser: those who love books. Sure, the price wars are limited to the blockbusters, so what's the damage for 95% of the other books?

Lots. Those blockbusters also shore up the independent bookstores, authors, and the publishers by subsidizing the more modest sales. That's Mr. Obie Joe's opinion. Pudd'nhead Books found a few other opinions, including the first comparsion of books to pork chops.

"It's a totally different market. If Wal-Mart started selling pork chops for $1.79 a pound, they're not going to put Whole Foods out of business. There is plenty of room for everyone."
Barbara Meade, co-founder of Politics and Prose, Wash., DC

"I'm tickled pink (that Wal-Mart and Amazon.com are fighting), and I'm hoping that they lose a lot of money."
Jane Kessler, owner of Appletree Books, Cleveland Heights, OH

"Bestsellers are not the strength of independent bookstores," Klein said. "We don't live and die by the bestsellers. . . . What goes on between Amazon and Wal-Mart affects them more than it affects us."
Richard Klein, co-owner of Book Revue, Huntington, NY

"It's the chain bookstores and the readers that are going to be hurt by this the most. Chain bookstores can't do what what independents can do, not can they pay their bills by selling toothpaste and electronics. Readers will suffer the most, however. If the general public learns to expect cheap books, publishers won't be able to afford to take a chance on new writers, so quality, story, research and expertise will slowly disappear from new books, and we'll only have those most commercial and bland books to choose from. Again, you get what you pay for."
Nikki Furrer of Pudd'nhead Books, Webster Groves, MO

TIP: Memorize these terms

Ellis Weiner's new piece, "Subject: Our Marketing Plan," would be funnier for Mr. Obie Joe had we not realized we knew most of the terms used in marketing books the modern way. Even tab-skimming your blog's comments.

Sigh. (And the image is inverted to push the point.)

How u doin', MySpace?

At this point Mr. Obie Joe wonders if the old becomes the new in the ever dizzying swirl of social networking tools. All of advertising appeals to the fantasy within, and we are driven by similar desires by choosing which social network to use for ourselves and our book.

So, Facebook is in, MySpace is out. Facebook is for younger, hipper, richer, more active people. MySpace? Sniffed one social media researcher to NPR this morning: MySpace is too brown and too poor. How does she know this? "Because, she says, low income people are more likely to click on ads, in MySpace," notes NPR.

If social networks are like our neighborhoods -- welcome to only those who live there -- then how to expand your book's presence within social networks? Well, for one, don't believe the balderdash of these "social media researchers." There are a few teenagers in the Obie Joe family, and judging by the average 1,000+ count of friends on their Facebook accounts, we'd say teens are a lot more open to new ideas and friends than we think.

So, start up a MySpace page. Use MySpace's wonderful capacity to post calendar, audio clips, and segments of your book. Granted, it's more difficult to filter in MySpace to find your prospective readers (try typing in names of your favorite authors to see what MySpace groups they are placed in), but not impossible.

Plus, you know those fickle teenagers: if you think they'll be on Facebook by graduation, they have a Tweet for you.