Last year, after we realized that all our fiction debuts would be released within a few months of one another (Alethea’s story collection was due to be published by a commercial publisher, Céline’s novel was scheduled for release by an independent press, and Michelle planned to publish her novel with an independent company she founded herself), we got together to compare notes about everything from working with an editor and choosing a cover to marketing and publicity. Our discussion was published as “Decisions, Decisions: Three Different Paths to Publication” [3] in the July/August 2011 issue of this magazine.

Now, after a year filled with successes and failures as well as constant challenges and continuing rewards, our books have made their way into the hands of readers. A debut novelist once told Alethea that having a first book come out is like lighting a firecracker that doesn’t go off. While having our debuts published was undoubtedly an exciting event in each of our lives, it didn’t happen precisely the way we had planned. Of course we knew there were no ticker-tape parades for published authors, so the three of us arrived at our publication dates with relatively sober expectations; nevertheless, the postpublication journey was full of surprises. Here’s what we learned.

Black: I think the greatest advantage to being with a large publisher was the power it had to get my book into the hands of people who could really help. The best thing to happen to I Knew You’d Be Lovely was that it was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program, and the lion’s share of our sales has been from Barnes & Noble. My publisher also made sure to reach out to independent bookstores, and even had me write a personal letter of introduction, which was then enclosed with the ARCs sent to bookstore owners. The most surprising thing my editor did was ask me for a list of “tastemakers” whom I’d like to receive my book. I didn’t understand. “You mean, like Michelle Obama?” I don’t know who ended up receiving surprise copies of the book, but it was encouraging to feel the publisher was going to bat for me.

Toth: As a self-published author, I knew it made no sense to invest time or resources trying to break into bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Traditional publishers dominate that important sales channel because they have the necessary scale, distribution capabilities, promotional dollars, and stra-tegic partnerships, and if that weren’t enough to dissuade me (it was) the very thought of having to manage returns from bookstores would have. On the plus side, these constraints helped to make my strategy clear: Focus on online distribution via e-books and print-on-demand paperback books. With print-on-demand, there is no inventory. The online sale triggers production of the book, which is then shipped to the consumer. For my paperback I used Amazon’s CreateSpace (which will accept and ship orders not just from Amazon but also from other retailers such as BarnesandNoble.com) and for my e-book I used Kindle Direct Publishing in combination with Smashwords, an independent e-book publishing-and-distribution platform that produces e-books in multiple formats, including those for the Kindle, Nook, and iPad.

Keating: My favorite appearance of Layla on a shelf was in the Occupy Wall Street library at Zuccotti Park. As the novel centers on youth activism, this was perfect. One reason I had chosen to go with a small press was because mainstream publishers found the novel noncommercial. I wanted the thrill of seeing it on bookstore shelves, and the chance at serendipitous purchases. Plain View Press lacks a sales-and-marketing staff, and encouraged me to hire a publicist for outreach to independent bookstores. Although this was somewhat successful, most stores that carry Layla are not in New York City, where I live. Still, I get a charge when I do come upon it in libraries and bookstores.

Toth: My goal as an indie publisher is to replicate as closely as possible the way a traditional publisher produces and markets a book, so I hired a publicist who secured reviews and mentions from a number of online sites as well as Library Journal. Annie Begins was a semifinalist in the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and reaching that round of the contest resulted in a Publishers Weekly review. Having positive reviews lent credibility and support to my indie effort, and likely made bloggers and other reviewers more open to the book. I also had some excellent exposure in Bookmarks Magazine. My luckiest break was being picked up by Amazon for an e-mail promotion that introduced Annie to a much wider audience. I believe this resulted from the combination of being categorized as a genre book (contemporary romance), garnering a lot of early five-star reviews on Amazon, and my decision to price the e-book at $2.99. The only problem was that a few members of the contemporary romance audience would have appreciated a steamier book, and I did generate my first negative reader reviews after that!

Keating: Layla garnered good reviews and articles, was named a Huffington Post pick, and drew invitations to such blogs as the Quivering Pen and Words With Writers. Overall my marketing efforts felt a bit like throwing spaghetti at a wall. I tried giveaways, offering fifteen books each on LibraryThing and Goodreads, where  two hundred and six hundred people signed up, respectively. More than a hundred people added my book to their To Read lists, and sales jumped. A mistake was paying for inclusion on book club sites. Given the huge number of books listed on such sites, I found it’s best to skip them if you can’t also afford an ad. There’s no shortage of work you can do for your book, and it’s hard to choose where to put limited resources. I wish I’d done more personal outreach to book clubs, bookstores, and libraries. But the path to publication is really a path to a writing career. Rather than put much energy into marketing, I focused on my next book.

Black: Reviews are pivotal when it comes to reaching a larger audience, but even a big publisher can’t force anyone to give your book coverage; in fact, I know a couple of reviewers who feel it’s a turn-off when a book is pushed on them too aggressively. I was up against some steep odds—paperback original, first book, short stories—and I did not get a lot of ink. In fact, one of my reviewers opened by saying she was surprised the book wasn’t being given more attention. Now that I’ve seen how things played out, I do think I might have benefited from an outside publicist. But at the time, I couldn’t justify the cost; I figured I should get health insurance before I got a publicist.

Toth: I did readings and events in only three cities: Boston, New York, and San Francisco. I had a launch event cohosted by Harvard Book Store (where Annie is available on the Espresso Book Machine) and Grub Street, Boston’s independent writing center. It drew an overflow crowd, and I sold all my preprinted copies (which felt good but is really a rookie-publisher mistake, as my writer friends pointed out). I did a round of literary festivals and book clubs—for Annie and also on the topic of self-publishing. I found that Skype book clubs can be a blast, and that when you figure out your core audience and connect directly with it, there’s nothing better. I could have done more and, as an extrovert, would have enjoyed it, but the demands of my day job had increased thanks to an unexpected promotion, and it was a struggle to do just the basics. This is an inherent challenge for any writer with a day job—and surely any self-published writer.

Black: I wanted to take the show on the road, and at one point told my in-house publicist that if she’d book the events, I’d pay the expenses myself. But no events were booked; book tours don’t seem to happen these days, even at a big publisher, unless you’re already well known. Of course, there’s a reason for that: Such efforts don’t typically have a large impact on sales. Nevertheless, I love to give readings—I love the smell and the feel of bookstores, and I love talking to book people—so I put together a small tour myself. You know the Onion headline “Author Promoting Book Gives It Her All Whether It’s Just Three People or a Crowd of Nine”? I drove from New York City to Chicago to give a reading to about twelve people. But the math of finding your audience isn’t linear, and even if you read to only two people, one of them might host a radio show, or be an influential blogger, or fall in love with your book and buy copies for friends.

Keating: At first I considered asking friends to be my public-speaking avatars, as I’m an introvert—but I knew readings would be one of the best ways for Layla to reach readers. Unlike Alethea, I live in dread of a small audience and put in enormous effort to make sure good crowds showed up at every venue. My first event was at Montauk Bookshop on Long Island, where I spend weekends. Although my husband embarrassed me by papering the town with flyers and telling everyone he ran into about the event, that personal touch really paid off. It was the bookstore’s biggest crowd ever, and the owner’s enthusiasm garnered some terrific press coverage after the fact. With personal postcards, e-mails, and Facebook invitations, my book-launch party in New York City was packed to overflowing. Then the timing was right for an official tour—vacation road trip! I traveled throughout the Northeast, where friends generously hosted events and lined up readings. By the fall, bookstore owners, book clubs, and librarians who had actually read Layla were sending me invitations to read, attend book club meetings, and even run a writing workshop. One of the most memorable events was reading with Alethea and Michelle at the Cornelia Street Café in Manhattan. There’s nothing like combining forces with writer friends to fill a space, not to mention to share the anxiety—and the wine.

Black: Crown Publishing Group, the division of Random House whose imprint Broadway published my book, placed AdReady network ads on sites such as Harper’s, the Atlantic, and Goodreads. Print ads are more expensive—the smallest ad in the New York Times Book Review, a two-fifths-page spot, costs $6,688 for black and white and $12,731 for color—so they didn’t go that route. I personally paid for an ad on Narrative.com and one in Poets & Writers Magazine; both places give you a healthy author discount, and it felt like money well spent. Lovely was in its fourth printing this past April, but that number doesn’t tell you much—we could be in our one-thousandth printing if each print run were ten books. My initial print run was eighty-five hundred, and each of the subsequent runs was under two thousand. When my first royalty check arrived earlier this year, at first I didn’t know what it was; I wasn’t expecting to have earned out my advance. I was surprised that only one e-book was sold for every ten p-books (and I was surprised to learn the term p-book).

Toth: Annie Begins was an Amazon Top 100 Kindle Best Seller and Top 10 in Kindle Contemporary Romance for a time during the summer of 2011, and in the first year of publication e-book sales of more than five thousand dominated paperback sales of around five hundred. I recently elected to participate in an Amazon e-book giveaway that generated more than fifteen thousand downloads in less than a day and drove a significant jump in sales momentum. I also experimented with Facebook ads, which did not pay back the investment in terms of sales. The most effective thing I did was to focus on e-books and Amazon. Controversy aside, Amazon is by far the most important site for e-book sales, and I suggest to all self-publishers that they should not only have an online strategy, but also an Amazon strategy.

Keating: I had modest expectations, as I knew going in that Plain View Press had limited marketing capability. Then the publisher died, throwing the press into turmoil from which it is valiantly recovering. So I’m thrilled that ten months out, Layla is still selling, which I assume means it’s being hand-sold. Sales are actually picking up, and Layla was Plain View’s top seller for 2011. My wildest dream was to sell a thousand books the first year, and it looks like that just might happen. My publisher put out an e-book version of the book recently, so I look forward to taking Michelle’s advice about e-book strategy. 

Toth: Part of the approach my publicist and I agreed on was for me to blog and speak on self-publishing, both because of the momentum of the self-publishing path and because I have a business background. It’s been gratifying to help empower authors by spreading the word about independent publishing, but such exposure does not necessarily translate to book sales. I also put up a Facebook page and did updates when I felt there was real news, believing that readers don’t need more than a couple of reminders to know if they want to buy your book. Mostly, though, I’ve reassessed the trade-off of taking time away from writing my second novel and developing the (sixoneseven) books platform, now structured as a micro press that has published three additional authors—two novelists, one memoirist—and counting. While I appreciate the value of social media, I think the best way to achieve my creative goals is to write and publish more books—of my own, and of other writers!  

Keating: I dove into social media feet first (as in, less brain) and tried everything: Facebook, Twitter, Gather, Goodreads, LibraryThing, She Writes, and Red Room. This was SM—as in sadomasochistic, not social media—overkill. Like a bee amid flowers, I flitted from one site to the next, sipping nectar but producing only exhaustion. But gradually I began to make meaningful connections and tap into a wealth of useful information. And I got a real charge when I put an invitation on She Writes to anyone who lived in a town where I was giving a reading and didn’t know a soul, and a blogger and short story writer showed up! There’s no magic about social media. Just as with connections in the real world, you can’t expect tangible results without a significant investment of quality time.

Black: I’m no good at coming up with real-time 140-character-long observations that would be worth anyone’s attention. My publisher requested that I join Facebook, and I did; but I’m not on Twitter and I’m only minimally on Goodreads. Instead of putting my time into those venues, I tried to continue to write. I wrote a piece for Writer’s Digest about how I wished my dad could read my book, an essay for Narrative Magazine about why I write at night, and I published a new piece of fiction in One Story. I also told a couple of stories onstage for the Moth. The Twitterverse serves a lot of people well, but I think you should play to your strengths. If you’re a fish, don’t try to ride a bike.

Keating: Readings not only helped me get past my shyness but also brought me back to my reason for writing in the first place. At a book group in Staten Island, New York, I had the overpowering experience of listening to women quote favorite lines from Layla and describe the metaphors that moved them. There’s nothing more rewarding than that, no matter which path takes you there. But while I’m thrilled I seized the reins by going with a small press, I learned that I don’t have Michelle’s energy and entrepreneurial savvy for DIY. I think it’s really tough to find your audience without adequate sales-and-marketing muscle. So for my new book, which aims for a more commercial audience than Layla, it looks like I’ll be shopping for an agent.

Toth: I’m not at all shy, but I still find self-promotion uncomfortable. One trick that helped me was to separate myself a bit from my book: I talked about what was happening for my character Annie, not myself. I rallied family and friends to join “Team Annie” to help in various promotional activities. And I surrounded myself with supportive writer friends who would understand the unique challenges of willingly subjecting yourself to public judgment and loss of privacy.

Black: It’s possible to promote yourself too much, and I think a lot of first-time authors do themselves a disservice by misusing the megaphone. Yes, a lot of book publicity falls on our shoulders these days, whether you’re with a big house, self-publishing, or somewhere in between. But the injunction “Buy my book” never works. It’s like being on a date and being told, “Like me.” If you have interesting things to say, if you make people laugh or make them curious to learn more about you, buying your book will be a natural consequence. If someone else’s book really wows me, I might make a public fuss about it. But I don’t think the most effective marketing always uses the front door.

Toth: My surprises weren’t all specific to my path, but there were several of them nonetheless:

1. I didn’t expect Annie to resonate as much with men as it has, and they’ve provided some of the most illuminating feedback.

2. An editor from a traditional publisher contacted me, having discovered Annie as part of the Amazon contest, and asked to see my next manuscript.

3. Despite my all-digital strategy, I started getting multiple purchase orders, which seemed to have been triggered by the Library Journal review. Suddenly, I became the shipping department I never thought I’d have: packaging and shipping paper books while calculating discounts and sending invoices.

4. I was bemused when some people I gave books to—in the unspoken hope they would provide positive word of mouth to others—made a habit of enthusiastically loaning the book out rather than encouraging people to purchase a copy!

5. If you write in the first person, and borrow anything from your real life, people will assume everything you’ve written is autobiographical.

Black: I need to say an amen to Michelle’s last point. There is so much in these stories that’s true, and so many people who were able to recognize it as true, that they sometimes imagined it’s all true. I had a friend who, after reading a story about a college student who performs a kind of striptease for a homeless man, tried to divine if this was something I’d actually done. When my own mother first read a story about the summer we lost one of my sisters up at Lake Winnipesaukee, she was puzzled by the ending. “That’s not the way it happened,” she said. I had to remind her that this was fiction, not memoir. I got a more troubling surprise when two friends stopped speaking to me because I’d forgotten to put them in the acknowledgments. And I had an ex-boyfriend request that I write a sequel to the story about a threesome—not because he wanted to read the sex scene, but because he disagreed with my ideas about nonpossessive love and wanted to see them challenged.

Keating: My narrator is twenty-two years old, so I thought I’d escape the question of autobiography. No such luck. People ask in hushed voices if I know any real fugitives like those in the book—or perhaps wonder if I am one! But most surprising for me has been how Layla has been perceived. Because editors in mainstream houses felt the novel wasn’t terribly commercial, I’d internalized the perception that it had limited appeal, especially given the political issues it raises. So I’ve been surprised by how strong the emotional response has been. I’d hoped the novel would resonate with people who lived through the 1960s, but it seems to strike more of a nerve with young people and parents in terms of their relationships with each other. A woman I had never spoken to rushed over to give me a hug and thank me for bringing her and her daughter together. I now see my own novel in a completely different light.

Alethea Black is the author of the short story collection I Knew You’d Be Lovely, published by Broadway Books in July 2011.

Céline Keating is the author of the novel Layla, published by Plain View Press in June 2011. She is an editorial associate at Hanging Loose Press.

Michelle Toth is the author of the novel Annie Begins, published in March 2011 as the first title from (sixoneseven) books, an independent publishing company that she founded. Toth is a member of the board of directors of the literary nonprofit organization Grub Street.