Author Publishing Quizz – Martin Bannon

BIO: Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Martin Bannon has lived in Oregon’s politically schizophrenic Clackamas County since 1998.
Senseless Confidential, a comedic romp through the county’s backwoods, is his third book.
Bannon, who has lived in places as varied as Puerto Rico, Switzerland, and Utah, majored in Soviet Studies to pursue a career in Intelligence. When he discovered that there was no such thing, he became a writer instead, where he has been living out cover legends ever since.
He is fluent in three languages and can make educated errors in several more. He has traveled to 38 of the US states and 19 foreign countries. He has been a tea guest of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, pursued by Hungarian security forces, and questioned by East German authorities.
He has been adopted by a cat named Rudy, who is sometimes mistaken for a meatloaf.

Visit Martin Bannon’s blog.

“Senseless Confidential” was released on August 1, 2012. It has been extremely popular among Portland-area locals, to whom I have hand-sold over 150 copies at book readings and -signings, as well as local festivals and at Wordstock, the annual regional book fair. Two local book clubs have selected it as book of the month. It has also been popular online, earning a rating of 4.9 stars out of 5 on Amazon and 4.56 stars out of 5 on Goodreads.

Your book falls under the main Comedy genre. Do you tag it with other genres? What do you see as the pros and cons of writing Comedy fiction on the publishing scene?

MB: Genre fiction in general has become too formulaic, too predictable. When I read, I love books that cross genres and mix things up. I don’t like to be able to guess what’s going to happen. When I write, I do the same thing. But that does cause some difficulty when it comes to marketing. Even online booksellers like to pigeonhole books into very narrow genre definitions. “Senseless Confidential” is a funny book. So it’s tagged as comedy. But there’s also a crime story playing out and some romantic entanglements that are central to the plot. There’s also a twist ending that numerous readers have said was a complete surprise to them. I love that; it means I’ve done my job. To encapsulate all this I’ve given the book the subtitle “An absurdist romp through the Oregon Cascades,” and I market it as a “comedic crime caper.”

What part of your writing time do you devote to marketing your book?

MB: I spend far more time marketing than I would like to. Since this book was completed at the end of May 2012, I have averaged about 20 hours a week marketing. This has involved writing and distributing press releases to news outlets and emails to booksellers, personal visits to booksellers to deliver advance reader copies, follow-up emails and phone calls to place books in stores, ordering and delivering books on consignment, arranging and attending book readings and -signings, preparing collateral for shows and fairs, blogging, social media, networking with authors, enlisting reviewers, distributing comps to potential readers likely to be influential, being interviewed by five newspapers, appearing on the local Author’s Forum TV program, attending meetings of writer and publisher trade organizations, traveling to other cities to promote the book, adjusting pricing and discounts, offering giveaways, and participating in online interviews such as this one!

What would you say are the main advantages and disadvantages of self-publishing vs being published?

MB: This is a topic that has been fairly exhausted among the online writers’ community, and I’m not an expert at predicting which arguments will prevail in the end. In my view, a writer’s early career is not about sales or income from writing. It’s about exposure. This is where traditional publishing lends a great advantage. Many new self-published authors get haughty about how small the royalties are in traditional publishing and boast of the great percentages earned selling ebooks. In truth, very few authors will ever get rich off of ebook sales. Print sales online are even less likely to amount to a living wage.
The point is to get noticed, to generate a buzz about your work. Getting your books out there to be read is the first priority. Self-publishing allows you many ways to connect with thousands of people instantly. This is both good and bad. It has resulted in an overload of offerings that even the most avid reader couldn’t possibly keep up with, so he or she must find a way to differentiate among what’s offered by self-published authors. While it has been trendy for a while to offer ebooks free to generate distribution numbers—Amazon being the leader of this trend—I believe that this has led many readers to discount the value of such books when making comparisons. Email is free prose, but that doesn’t mean it’s worth reading. If I stood in front of the grocery store and handed out free books, I doubt many people would rush home excited to read them.
I try to get beyond this problem by never offering ebooks free, or severely discounting them. I’m happy to offer a print copy free to anyone with whom I have first established a relationship or at least a conversation. A personal gift, signed and personalized, is much less likely to be discarded or ignored. This has resulted in fewer sales initially than with my first novel, which I enrolled in Amazon Select, but it has generated a slow and steady buzz and a lot more positive feedback. Traditinal publishers aren’t willing to wait for this organic process to happen; if a book isn’t a bestseller within x amount of time, they pull it and give up, oftentimes tying up the rights to it for years, thus depriving the author from marketing it. So, in the end, self-publishing is a lot more flexible, but has so many more pitfalls to negotiate.

How did you get to be interviewed on TV?

MB: I was fortunate that when I joined the Northwest Book Publishers’ Association there was a member who regularly produced a public TV show called The Author’s Forum. I presented her with comps of my three books just two months before “Senseless Confidential” was due to be released. It was perfect timing to arrange an interview about six weeks after the book’s release. It was also advantageous that my book was set locally.

What do you think is the main factor, other than writing a quality and professionally edited books that differentiate a successful self-published writer from one who remains forever out of the limelight?

MB: Exposure. A writer needs to get noticed. If you don’t have a big budget, the best way to start is to get local attention. I sent my press releases to over two dozen community newspapers in the region, highlighting the local setting and locally popular themes—such as bicycling and the national forest—in my story. I visited every bookstore within 150 miles in person and talked to the bookseller. Indie booksellers are a lot like indie authors, struggling against the Big Publishing machine to get noticed and build reader loyalty. They are our allies and it pays to befriend them.
I’m appalled when I am asked again and again by self-published authors online, “Why do you even want to be in a bookstore?” Building reader loyalty is key for self-published authors. We can’t all be Hugh Howey. Few of us will truly succeed with only an online presence. Besides, the most rabid and loyal readers are the ones who lurk among the shelves of bookstores. They are fewer than the online masses, but they’ll pass your book on, talk about it in their book groups, and line up to buy your next one. They are the ones who get the booksellers excited about carrying your work. And that leads to readings and signings, an invaluable chance to engage with readers face to face, an experience they’ll remember much longer than a “click here to download free.” Once you’ve wowed the local market, you can begin to get attention farhter afield. But it takes time and many young authors are impatient, wanting the immediate gratification of Amazon stats.