People don't understand how hard it is to get recognized, how hard it is to get people to read your books. How hard it is to get people to even to understand what they're reading when they're talking to you about their books.
If no one knows your book is out there, no one will think about buying it. It's as simple as that.
PR and marketing doesn't sell books. It gets attention for them. It sends readers to bookstores and websites to read a few pages.
People think writing is a very distinguished, cerebral thing, where all you do is write. It doesn't work that way. People have to see online promotions, see piles of your book in stores, and you have to make sure the guy recommends it!
You want people to be eager for your book; the downside is when the people forget the series even exists.
If I see Marian Keyes' books or Patricia Scanlan's books given more prominence than mine in the bookstore, I'll move mine to the front. I've told them I do this, and they've confessed to doing the same thing to me.
I think it's a fallacy to say that a good book sells itself. It doesn't happen. I'm a voracious reader and I can give you a long list of books which should have been best sellers but they aren't. How can you buy a book if you haven't heard of it?
Publicity doesn't work for books. It really doesn't. All it does is get your name in front of a reader who might then glance at your book. Or not.
All the marketing and advertising sells the book as what it is and hopes that the book will be displayed so that your readers can find it.
As an author, I realise, you're on your own. You have to do everything you can to help The Book. If I make sure people know it's out there, they can make up their own minds whether they want to read it.
No matter how beautiful and loved a cover may be, the jury on it remains uncommitted until the book has been in the world for a while. Perhaps bookstore buyers will be indifferent. Perhaps it will be lost on store shelves. Perhaps there's another book or two out there using the same or a similar photo.
Thousands of books are published every year in India, and it's becoming more difficult to stand out and get people to buy the books. The only way to get people notice the book is to create a buzz much before it's released.
After a while, if you're a writer, you want to start appearing in the bookstores of the place you're living in.
There are a lot of wonderful books out there that aren't marketed properly, and readers who might love them never even know they exist.
I don't have hard numbers about this, but the impression I get is that the amount of eyeballs you get from being on the humor shelf at Barnes & Noble - it is almost insignificant.
The higher a book's sales ranks, the better chances it has of being noticed by Amazon's internal recommendations engine.
The hardest thing in the world for a writer is to amass a readership. So many good books come out, and so many good books disappear.
The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.
