I'd be really interested to see a breakdown of the top 2 or 3 best avenues for book promo by genre. We talk about promoting 'books' like they're a monolith, but I suspect the way Kindle crime readers find new reads is different to how nonfiction pop psych readers find theirs.
I'm sure there are *some* common channels across all types of book, but there must be some that only exist for, say, indie Romance authors, or SFF authors, or litfic authors, or authors writing sports biography or whatever. I'd love to get a sense of those different networks.
I love how some books can be selling like gangbusters, despite being completely unknown elsewhere, because of a community's spreading the word. Later, sometimes they spill out of their niche. But it's fascinating & exciting to me how different books spread.
I'm also fascinated by how little the question 'is the book any good?' gets discussed when I read about promotion. Clearly being good is not a necessary condition (bad books have done well) & being good is not sufficient (great books have done badly). So what effect does it have?
Maybe quality (which I realise is too nebulous to have some objective answer) is a population-level effect. If you were shown 100 manuscripts, reading the first page might give you a better-than-chance guess at whether it sold more or less than the median sales for that 100.
I barely discuss book promotion on the podcast, but for me, the first & most important question is: is there anything, meaningfully, an author can do to shift the needle, or should they invest their time in producing more & better work, & looking after themselves?
Is the best self-promotion to write the next one well, in a timely manner? Should you be spending the morning writing answers to that email interview for that blog, or going for a long walk to refresh & reset? Do the things an author does have any meaningful impact on sales?
Jeez, I ought to get an expert on the show to ask them these questions, rather than lofting them rhetorically into the e-wind.

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More from @TimClarePoet

28 Mar
Cults are a critique of society. We ogle & mock folks who fall for them, but the classic profile of people who join is someone who is lost, traumatised, struggling for identity. Nothing in the emptiness of late capitalism speaks to them. Cults thrive because we're bad at meaning.
'Wow, how could so many people put their faith in such an obvious con artist?' Well, maybe because they were pretending to offer a bunch of stuff contemporary society utterly fails to provide. Direct confrontation with our fears. Validation. Deep purpose. Community.
'Cult' has a hygienic specificity that suggests pathological false beliefs & behaviours exist Over There. Whereas, of course, these beliefs & behaviours exist on a spectrum. We all belong to communities & subcultures with dogma, rules, punishments & outgroups.
Read 15 tweets
28 Mar
Not to clog up the TL with too many saucy pics, but here is my non-exhaustive 'sizzle reel' of games acquired during lockdown which have seen little to no IRL play. I'm looking for partners, when safe & legal. First, adorable tessellating kitty-stacking mini dex game KITTIN.
From the same makers, TINDERBLOX. Take it in turns building a little wooden campfire with coloured blocks & tweezers. Like reverse Jenga. Played with my daughter this morning - it's ruddy hard! Very quick, tricky filler. Maybe good as a tie-breaker / turn-order-decider.
SIDEREAL CONFLUENCE. Big multiplayer space trading game, where you're all doing deals to exchange resources to put through weird conversion engines to get better resources. I really negotiation games! Not sure whether the asymmetry forces a strategy on you but eager to find out.
Read 12 tweets
27 Mar
I get like 3 or 4 weird or inappropriate emails a year from (presumably) listeners of the podcast. Mostly they're lovely. But I bet I'd have to deal with a bunch more if I weren't a chap/white. Extra condescension, creepiness, presumptions & outright abuse. An emotional tax.
I know most folks are only too aware of this. I just, in my own slow, knuckleheaded way was like 'huh, harassing or weird messages are kind of rare for me!' even though I get a lot of emails. Then I realised some people probably have to continually actively filter.
Obviously I expect certain types of content attract more odd/abusive correspondence than others. Also I guess podcasts are an opt-in medium? It's not like 'what's this shite Radio 4's forcing on me now? Tim Clare?' Come to think of it I got more abuse when I did live radio
Read 4 tweets
27 Mar
Somehow I've managed to acquire 4 new boardgames in the last week. I'm starting to feel under seige. Really need cups of tea, components in ramekins & some patient company to try them all out!
I *think* I'd like to write a book about games, but as always the challenge is thinking of a way that would be rewarding for the reader & for me. I mean, I really enjoy peanut butter & jam sandwiches but I don't think I could spin that out into a book.
(a *good* book, that is. I can digress so intensely I bet, if one doesn't already exist, I could find an entire book in pbj sandwiches)
Read 6 tweets
27 Mar
The openings of THE HOBBIT by JRR Tolkien & THE 39 STEPS by Richard Hannay. Very tonally distinct, despite their being essentially the same story: grumpy recluse is forced into embarking on a big game of hide & seek, at the end of which, war breaks out. ImageImage
I don't know why I said THE 39 STEPS was by Richard Hannay. It's John Buchan, obviously. Richard Hannay is his protagonist! Although it's *told* by Hannay, just as THE HOBBIT is, nominally, based on the record as written by Bilbo Baggins.
The main difference between the two characters, aside from height, is that Bilbo is very happy in his hole, whereas Hannay wants to clamber out. Richard Hannay is one of the least likeable, most misanthropic, xenophobic, carping protagonists in all popular fiction.
Read 4 tweets
26 Mar
The opening of Nancy Mitford's THE PURSUIT OF LOVE. I love this paragraph so much. It doesn't introduce plot, just voice & characters. Your hook needn't be a pistol pressed to the protag's head. Uncle Matthew is one of my favourite comic characters. Image
Uncle Matthew, we're told, has a tendency to write the name of whoever he's angry with on a scrap of paper & put it in a drawer somewhere, apparently in the belief that doing so will hasten their death. The drawers round the house are full of pieces of paper with various names on
He likes munching on pigs' brains, which he eats like peanuts & offers to guests on a platter, saying: 'Pig's thinker?'
Read 4 tweets

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