Une interview de Kristine Kathryn Rusch

[jerome]

Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Les Feys, Les Disparus) est en interview sur le site travisheermann.com. Elle y parle essentiellement de sa condition d'auteur. Toute l'interview est ici. Voici un petit extrait sur les auteurs et la promo...

TH: You say that you don’t promote yourself at all, but yet you also write under several pseudonyms and teach classes on understanding writing as a business. Marketing oneself is certainly part of any successful business. Isn’t that contradictory?

KKR: Understanding the business model is extremely important. In publishing, the business model is this: writers market their wares to publishers, who then market those wares to bookstores and (ultimately) readers. Writers who believe their job is to promote those books in bookstores are actually getting in the way of the business model unless (and this is a big unless) the publisher requests the writer’s assistance in that promotion.

Publishers usually have an important reason in asking for that assistance. The reason usually isn’t sales, but sales velocity. What gets books on the bestseller lists isn’t the number of copies sold. It’s the number of copies sold in a set period of time. So a book that sells 100,000 copies over the space of two years isn’t going to get on a list, but a book that sells 100,000 copies within two weeks of its release will. (Even if the book that sells 100,000 copies over two years ends up selling more in its publishing lifetime (say 500,000 over 8 years) than the one that sells 100,000 in two weeks, the only one that is considered a bestseller in publishing terms is the one that sells 100K in 2 weeks (even if it only sells 150,000 in its publishing lifetime). The other book is called a consistent seller and provides reliable backlist. That’s different from hitting a bestseller list.)

Writers have no place in the promotion game except as a tool at the right time for the right book—as determined by the publisher.

Writers often get confused about this and think that they must promote the book themselves to market themselves. They don’t. They need to writer better and better books, which build a readership. The readership will find the new books.

The most a writer should do if the publisher does not request help is a few interviews (when asked), maintain an active website, and keep a list of fans who’ve contacted the writer directly. Otherwise, the writer needs to write the next book.

What I just gave you is a very truncated version of a marketing class that Dean and I teach professional writers. We spend 5 hours per day at this class over the space of a week. So in no way can I explain all the permutations of this in a short interview.

As for the teaching, we don’t do it as marketing. We do it to pay forward. We can’t pay back our teachers. (Jack Williamson, Fred Pohl, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm and many others.) So we pay forward, helping the next generation of writers. While we make our expenses on these workshops, we don’t make a profit. All we ask is that the next generation, when they become successful, pay forward to the next generation.