The Publishing Game May 2024

by Jay Hartman

Over the weekend of April 20 and 21 I had the opportunity to attend the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. It was my first official public outing as Vice President of WPN, and also the first time I was able to meet WPN President Kathleen Kaiser in person. We had a terrific time with discussions on All Things Book, making plans and changes for WPN, and just being in one of our favorite environments.

Throughout the weekend the WPN booth hosted authors to share their work with the public and in the process sell copies. Meeting the faces behind books I’d only heard about was such a positive experience.

The interesting part of the weekend was that I spent most of it wearing my publisher hat. While the sun beat down on the hundreds and hundreds of people walking by, I stayed inside our tent in what I referred to as “the therapy chairs.” An endless flow of people stopped after they saw our mission. They wanted the opportunity to talk to “someone who knows something about the publishing industry.” I met authors, publishers, editors…all people who had questions about the industry or their work. Over the course of two days, I spoke to dozens of folks who stopped by, in addition to the authors who were part of our tent.

As the weekend unfolded, I soon discovered it didn’t matter what genre authors wrote or which categories publishers…er…published; questions and concerns were universal and came up over and over. This helped me create something of a road map for Kathleen and me to address for our members. Clearly, there is a need for knowledge.

Here are the most common questions I encountered:

How do I get my book into libraries?

I addressed this in one of my “The Publisher Perspective” columns, but I told folks at the festival that the article appeared in 2022. Whoo boy, was I off. My article on a grassroots effort to get your title into Overdrive appeared back in October 2021.There is more than one answer to this question. I’ll work up a better seminar on this topic for the future.

What else can I do? I’ve talked about my book endlessly on Facebook, and I feel like I’ve exhausted all my possibilities.

There’s a lot more to social media than Facebook. Genres and books are received better on some social platforms than others. Knowing where to spend your time and effort to maximize visibility is a key to success. We’ll address how best to proceed based on your title, experience level, and available time.

How do I get XYZ bookstore to carry my book?

The sad, short answer here is the odds of a bookstore carrying a title by a small or indie press is virtually zero and even worse if you’re self-published. There aren’t many stores willing to take a chance on independent books. That’s not to say it can’t be done, but it requires real strategizing to figure out which bookstores will be the most receptive. This can be addressed through education.

Here are some of the things I heard and saw so often that I file them under “Umm…you’re doing that wrong…” or “That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.”

• Authors incorrectly spell the names of bookstores on their signage and literature.
• Saying their title is available “at Amazon and Kindle.” One is a bookstore, one is a method of delivery of a title from that same bookstore. It’s the equivalent of saying your chicken is available from McDonald’s and Salad.
• Table literature and signage that states the book is available from both Amazon and their publisher, with no links or QR codes for the publisher
• Telling everyone their book is on Amazon and not mentioning any other store, when their title is distributed by IngramSpark, which means it’s available worldwide at hundreds of retailers for ebook and thousands of bookstores for print
• I asked every author what success as an author meant to them. Most of them had never given it a thought.
• Wanting to find a publisher when the book wasn’t anywhere near being publisher-ready.
• No elevator pitch to make their title stand out from others to readers, an agent, or a publisher
• Self-published authors who have no business plan, no records, and no familiarity with running a business
• Self-published authors who want to publish everything themselves but don’t want to promote; they just want to spend their time writing
• Authors who spend an obscene—and I do mean obscene—amount of money with publicists and hybrid publishers. That makes me want to find those publicists and hybrids, turn them upside down, and shake them until the money falls out of their pockets to give back to the authors.

Whew! That list could continue, but the gist is that although the bar to entry into publishing lowered to make it accessible for everyone, the same can’t be said for the education necessary for authors to make informed choices for their careers.

The weekend made us aware that we need to roll up our sleeves over here at WPN HQ and get a boot camp going for the basics with extended classes and training for writers. There’s a lot of work ahead of us to help writers be winners in The Publishing Game.

Join the discussion! Send your questions to jhartman@mistimedia.com with TPG in your subject line.

WPN Vice President Jay A. Hartman has worked in the publishing industry for more than 30 years. For 13 years he served as the creator and editor-in-chief of Untreed Reads Publishing before the company was acquired in 2022. In 2023 he created Misti Media, a company dedicated to book publishing and author education.