Seriously, Dayna, It's All Good

Our very own Dayna Hart’s first novella for Samhain Publishing, “Go Between”, will hit the web in less than a week. She’s bouncing off walls. One of the blog buds asked if she had any fingernails yet, and Dayna shot back, “Nails? Forget nails, I’m down to the joints.”

I was no help at all, of course. I tried to think of a single thing that could possibly be bad about having a new ebook release (with a great cover, no less) and failed utterly. I’ve said it before, and I think the time has come to say it again in public: it’s all good. Really.

Publishing is a lot like cooking spaghetti. A publisher works up a business model and hires editors, who buy stories they like which fit the publisher’s specs. Over the course of a year, the editors buy lots of stories. (Samhain alone publishes between five and ten novels and novellas a week.) They boil ‘em up--er, edit them, throw them at the wall--I mean, the reading public and applaud when something sticks.

Sometimes it’s serendipity. The right book hits at the right time, and an unknown author turns into J.K. Rowling. More often the progress is a slow build. Each book attracts two fans, who tell two of their friends about the next book, and so on and so on. Hard as it is to wait this one out, this scenario can be just as rewarding as the overnight sensation. Consider Nora Roberts’ career.
In either case, there aren’t any short cuts. Promotion helps, but it’s only to a point. Yes, these days reclusive writers are the exception as opposed to the rule. Yes, chats, excerpts, ads and convention appearances help. Signings and contests too--though to a much lesser extent. (I once ran a contest which had fewer participants than it did prizes. I never even shipped the grand prize. The winner neglected to provide a snail mail address.) But realistically, without a massive budget, there are only so many people a writer can reach.

Even a big budget is no guarantee of sales. To increase the return on their investment, New York publishers promote the heck out of all the titles they paid big advances for. But an ad in The New York Times won’t make a bestseller out of the literary equivalent of a sow’s ear. As the editor of a review site for eight years, I know for a fact the objects of some of the most expensive saturation ad campaigns of the past ten years sank without a trace.

Reviews help a little. Ahem, ALL reviews help a little. The most fascinating thing about the process is bad reviews help as much as good ones. I track the sales of With Nine You Get Vanyr through Publishers Marketplace, and every time a review appears, there’s a visible jump in sales.

In late July, I noticed a bump in sales and couldn’t figure it out. Sunday morning, for the first time in about two months, I decided to Google for reviews. Lo and behold, on July 21, just before my sales started to rise, Raph Koster panned Vanyr as a Mary Sue. He even said it was like watching a “trainwreck” (sic). That’s the nicest thing he could've done for me. Seriously. Within five days, my Amazon sales tripled. The sad part is he’ll never believe my thank you note.

I also discovered something far better for the ego, if not for the pocketbook. Vanyr has been added to the New England Science Fiction Association’s database of recursive science fiction.

I didn’t know what recursive science fiction was either until I rummaged around the site. The short version is SF or fantasy which uses SF/fantasy fandom or any other element of science fiction or fantasy literature or related media as a major plot point. WooHoo, I’m part of a catalogued sub-genre, along with people like Mercedes Lackey, Fritz Leiber, Sharyn McCrumb, Fred Saberhagen, James Tiptree and Roger Zelazny.

Like I said, Dayna, it’s all good.