New Frontiers in Marketing

Ah, what is there to say about marketing? We don’t know any writers who like doing it, even those who are good at it. It’s an essential element of a writing career, though, and a mere glance at the paltry tally of posts in that category here at the Skelleyverse gives you an idea of how we feel about it.

We’ve focused our efforts (“focus” and “effort” being two things our marketing activities do not have much of) on traditional publishing. We send queries out to agents whose profiles and portfolios indicate we might be a good fit. As everyone who’s ever done that knows, it’s a slog. There’s really nothing to say here by way of encouragement, it just sucks.

• It relies on a different type of writing than the product you’re trying to sell.
• There’s practically zero feedback to tell you if you’re on track. Miss by an inch or miss by a mile, it usually looks the same from your desk.
• It’s time consuming, especially if you’re conscientious about researching the agents and sending your query selectively.

Authors today of course have many new options for self-publishing. This is something we’ve been reluctant to embrace, partially due to a sense that traditional routes offer greater validation of the work but mostly because the landscape was in such perpetual flux that it was difficult to know how much faith to put in any of it. Things have matured substantially in recent years, although we do still live in exciting times. The interesting twist is that the new age of technology is actually pushing publishing models back in time. The future will probably look a lot like two centuries ago, before there were such things as publishing houses.

No matter how you go about it, getting published seems to entail taking on a shit-ton of work that’s not the writing you want to do, not the stories inside that are trying to get out. It’s business. It’s different.

But it’s also how a writer connects to readers, so it’s a gotta-do-it, however much it sucks.