The Serial Thrillers and Marketing Books

Transworld have sent me a sampler of book extracts entitled The Serial Thrillers (sub-title ‘Fourteen Killer Reads’) to publicise a group of their leading authors whose latest books appear in 2010. This strikes me as a good marketing ploy, although not unique, and I’d guess it’s something which many authors published elsewhere will find quite enviable.

How you market crime fiction (or, indeed, any fiction) effectively is one of the questions over which much ink has been spilt for years. There isn't any easy answer, but trying to be innovative and interesting is probably a large part of the answer. Sadly, though, the solutions that reach the widest audiences tend to demand substantial investment of cash.

I was published by the Bantam imprint of Transworld in the early 90s, but in fact my hardback publisher was Piatkus. In those long ago days, Piatkus was an independent house, and they didn’t publish paperback editions, but they did secure a paperback deal with Bantam, who duly published the first four Harry Devlin novels. No samplers then, unfortunately, and although Bantam did try to market the books by selling them at what were then very competitive prices (£2.99 for a new paperback, I recall – bargain!) I didn’t reach the best-seller lists. And then Piatkus started publishing paperbacks themselves.

Now things are different in the publishing world. Piatkus are no longer independent, but part of a large group, and large publishers tend to focus on a limited number of writers, who are sometimes promoted heavily and effectively, as with this sampler. I think it’s a pity that many good writers of the ‘mid-list’ don’t benefit from similar initiatives, but that doesn’t meant that the initiatives aren’t welcome.

The authors featured in this sampler include such major figures as Mo Hayder, Tess Gerritsen, and Simon Kernick, along with one of my own recently discovered faves, Christopher Fowler. There is an extract from Bryant and May Off the Rails, and that is one of the Transworld titles that I definitely look forward to devouring.

Are book launches a good idea?

An obituary notice I was sorry to read today reminded me of a lunch in London fifteen years or so back, and a discussion about whether book launches are worthwhile. The obituary was of Tony Mott, a publisher once of Penguin Books; he later moved to Transworld, where he was involved with publishing Bantam paperbacks prior to his retirement more than a decade ago.

My first four books were published in paperback in the UK by Bantam (the deals were done by the hardback publisher Piatkus, which didn’t have a paperback imprint at the time.) I had a female editor and she invited me down to London for lunch one day. At the last minute, however, she couldn’t make it, and I was greeted at the restaurant by an affable chap who introduced himself as Tony Mott. I’d never heard of Tony, but I think that in fact he was my editor’s boss, so I was quite honoured.

Certainly, it was a most agreeable lunch. It was immediately clear that Tony knew a lot about publishing. He was obviously a good person from whom to seek advice. What I remember most of all is when I asked Tony for his number one tip for authors. His response was immediate: ‘Don’t get excited about book launches. They don’t help to sell books.’

This had never even occurred to me, not least because at that time neither Piatkus nor Bantam had ever proposed a launch. Since moving to pastures new, though, I’ve had a number of launches. I mentioned one or two in my post about London bookshops yesterday, and 2008 was a bumper year, with no fewer than three launches, for Waterloo Sunset, Dancing for the Hangman, and the CWA anthology, M.O..

I think Tony was right that launches don’t make a major impact on sales, unless you are already a best-seller, and I suspect he’d grown weary of authors who have unrealistic expectations of them. But I’ve enjoyed both my own launches and those of a number of writer friends. Launching a book is a good excuse for a party. They might not be commercially beneficial, to any measurable extent, but they certainly can be great fun.