Homofactus Press

Writerworking quotes from publishers lunch about book sales for Man Booker finalists and winners. The numbers aren’t pretty. But they are true and real.

“Enright’s book ranked fifth in sales prior to the award among books on the shortlist, having sold approximately 3,000 copies, ahead of Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People. (Even though bettors favored Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip, Bookscan figures cited in the press showed sales of just over 5,000 copies for that book.) Random UK says they are rushing a reprint of 50,000 copies of The Gathering.”

Writerworking concludes, “those sales figures are so low that many self-published novelists I know are selling that many. Some are selling more.”

I took the title of this piece from Writerworking. Marketing is a rough, unlovely business. We are competing for people’s attention.

But if we stay connected to our communities, and always remember that it is people who buy books, we will do okay. Books are social objects. Part of our job as authors is to talk about our books - all the time it seems like - to facilitate communication about it with others. What makes publishing rough is the expectation that marketing isn’t our job.

Yet marketing represents the verb that associates itself with our work once we’ve birthed it. So let’s show our books some respect and start chatting them up. After all, if we won’t talk about this thing that we have laboured so hard to deliver, why should anybody else?