Last week’s “You Can’t Handle the Truth” post got a lot of email and in the coming weeks I’ll mention the lies/excuses as they are sent to me. (If you are an author, editor, agent, publicist etc - please send your lies/excuses to [email protected])
This one came in over the weekend.
Lie #1 – “We are doing really great marketing for your book to booksellers. You’re in our catalog!”
This one comes to me from an author who wanted to sign up for my AuthorBuzz service but first wrote her publicist and asked her opinion.
The email she got back made it clear (to me) the publicist hadn’t spent any time reading the info: “There’s no reason to take out an AuthorBuzz note,” she wrote the author, “the 1/2 page your book had in our Summer catalog will cover that same market.”
What market is that? The 330,000 readers AuthorBuzz goes to via DearReader?? The 10,000 librarians who use the service to build their newsletters? Clearly she saw the words 2000 booksellers and stopped reading.
Of course being in the catalog matters. I don’t want anyone reading this to think I’m underestimating their importance.
But clearly, for this mid-list author, having a half page in a catalog that was mailed during the winter is not going to help her reach more readers when her book comes out in July.
We all know what happened. The publicist was too busy. What publicist isn’t? The author was just one more author bugging her and asking for something she couldn’t give, didn’t have or didn’t know about. She’s probably juggling activity on 25 books at any given time.
But in this case, saying I’m sorry I don’t have time to help you with this would have been so much more helpful than misinformation and a lie.
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