NICK TAYLOR: Let’s start by asking Beth, what do you look for in an author? You want to know if they can talk, right?
BETH DICKEY: Talking is important. As important as writing.
TAYLOR: There’s a revealing statement.
DICKEY: It is very true, actually.
TAYLOR: What can an author bring to the table? What should an author think about?
DICKEY: As a publicist, an author whose platform lends itself to a nonfiction book is always more appealing to me, even though, as a reader, I prefer fiction. With that said, if it is a work of fiction, there are certainly angles that can be exploited, that can be used in media. Exploited is the right word. For example, I’m working right now on a book by the former sex columnist for the Yale Daily News. Her name is Natalie Krinsky and her book is titled Chloe Does Yale. It is a novel, but she had already made a name for herself. The Today Show had her on when she was an undergrad. Candace Bushnell is a novelist who made quite a name for herself with Sex and the City, which was a collection of newspaper columns. So works of fiction can have platforms too, but in general nonfiction is the easiest sell for the media.
TAYLOR: How do you find out if someone can talk? Do you do a pre-interview before you send the word out on an author?
DICKEY: Yes. That’s an integral part of the acquisition from a publishing standpoint. Unfortunately, it’s really a major part of the buy. It’s certainly a major part of the appeal. We always have someone in publicity, whether it’s me or my boss, sit in on each potential acquire because we have to be able to go back to the publishing side and to our peers and say, This person is articulate, camera ready, has had media experience. That’s very, very important.
TAYLOR: And that’s before you even acquire the book.
DICKEY: Yes.
TAYLOR: So would you say then that an author’s ability to be presentable on television or radio helps sell the book in the first place, as opposed to the book itself?
DICKEY: Without a doubt.
TAYLOR: Let’s move on to E. Jean and to Nelson. Both of you have made these kinds of national media appearances. What do you do to prepare for them? Or, what did you do before the first one?
NELSON GEORGE: I realized very early on in my writing career that being a specialist was an asset. I always wanted to write fiction, but my entry into writing was covering music. I worked at Billboard magazine from 1982 to 1989 as an editor. I ended up doing a book on Michael Jackson in 1984, a quickie book that actually did very well. I did a book on Motown Records. And I did a sort of a conceptual book, called The Death of Rhythm and Blues, in 1988. Those three books were centered in the music world and so there was a natural platform for me. I was working at a major trade publication. I started to do a lot of press interviews, even when I didn’t have a book out. Someone would say, I want a comment about this new direction in disco or hip-hop that’s coming up, and I made myself available. So I was able to build a name for myself as an expert in music.
The next leap was when I left Billboard in ’89. I didn’t want to write music books only. I started writing for the Village Voice. I still did music reviews but I also started writing a column, which was more of a general column about life in New York. I did pieces on sports. I did pieces on film. And eventually I wrote more books. I did a book on film. I did a book on basketball. Every step of the way my journalism career was sort of my baseline. And from that baseline I would go do books that somehow related to things I was covering and had some expertise in. So that’s my nonfiction career.
As I started doing novels it got a little more tricky because the things I wanted to write about in fiction were not necessarily the things I was writing about in nonfiction. Of the five novels, the books have been very up and down. The books that have done the best have tended to have a music connection. Having a music connection has made it easier for me to get press. A really good example is this past Sunday. I have a new novel out, my first mystery, but it’s grounded in the entertainment business. The lead character is the guy you see at every nightclub in New York, the big black guy who doesn’t let you in. That guy is the lead character in the novel, which is called The Accidental Hunter. I was on Hot 97 Sunday night on a show called Street Soldiers, which is a kind of community affairs hip-hop-related show, because there’s a connection between the novel and my brand, if you will. I was able to get on that show and get a kind of exposure I wouldn’t have gotten if I had just been a mystery writer and I didn’t have that kind of pedigree. I always worked very hard to use the brand that it took me so long to build as a music writer and also as a cultural critic, to help the fiction help my other activities. I think it’s very important to come from a place of specialization; it is very helpful in getting media.
TAYLOR: Before I get to E. Jean with the same question, let me mention some of your nonfiction titles, which include Black Face, Reflections on African Americans and the Movies; Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive 1980s as Experienced by African Americans Previously Known as Blacks and Before That Negroes; The Death of Rhythm and Blues, and Buppies, B-Boys, Baps and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Culture, an essay collection. That’s just a handful of your titles, but clearly you specialize in contemporary black culture.
GEORGE: When I was a young boy, just out of college, there were books that I wanted to read. I decided as I got older, I realized that nobody was writing the books I wanted to read. So I decided to write those books. That’s always been the motivation: to write the books that I wanted to read. I always try and write. I always think there’s a bright nineteen-year-old somewhere in America who is me now. And I want to write books for that person. That’s always been sort of my target reader—who I was when I was eighteen or nineteen.
TAYLOR: So becoming a specialist, becoming the go-to person for bookers on talk shows and so forth, certainly is a great aid in building a platform.
GEORGE: Absolutely. It can be limiting in a way, but if you have something that you know very well, there’s a show somewhere in America that wants to talk to you about it at some point.
TAYLOR: E. Jean specializes as well. And anybody who’s read her Elle column will know that she specializes in the concerns and anxieties and—
E. JEAN CARROLL: Idiocies—
TAYLOR: Desires of, I guess, young women in America, but young men as well. And her website, greatboyfriends.com keeps the buzz going. Would you talk about specialty from your standpoint?
CARROLL: When Nelson talked it almost didn’t make any difference what he said, because he’s so likable. You could be on a television show with the sound off the way your face is all lit up.
GEORGE: Thank you.
CARROLL: That right there is what Beth is talking about. It’s the way you talk. I don’t care what you’re saying. I understand that you’ve made yourself the go-to expert in music. That I understand. But they’re going to you because you’re so likable. That’s the essence of somebody who can sell a book. You are likable.
GEORGE: But I had to learn how to do that.
CARROLL: Oh, get out of here. You’ve got it. You’ve got it. [To audience] Am I wrong? No. He’s just likable. Right? He’s just likable. That’s it. Some authors come on and you’re just like, oh…Who’s that horrible woman who’s on the radio who answers questions?
DICKEY: Doctor…
CARROLL: Dr. Laura. Remember when they put Dr. Laura on TV? It was hideous. She couldn’t be on TV, her sales went down. As soon as they took her off TV, and put her back on the radio, her sales went back up. Now you, you could be put all over the TV and your sales would just boom, boom, boom. That’s all I’ve got to say. You need to know nothing more.
GEORGE: Let me jump in. I want to say that I didn’t go through media training formally but I actually watched people on TV and realized when you’re on TV you only have X amount of time to speak.
DICKEY: Like four to six minutes.
GEORGE: And that four to six minutes goes by like this. [Finger snap.] So I really learned. In 1985, I did a book on Motown, and I was on the Today show with Bryant Gumbel. I’ll never forget this because I thought, Bryant Gumbel’s black, I’m black, it’s going to be wonderful. It was not wonderful. I sat in the green room. I sat down and I said, “How you doing, Bryant?” “All right.” I thought, uh oh. He comes in and doesn’t look up at me. And he really came at me really hard with a lot of tough questions. I was really young, it was my first major book, and I was very, very nervous but I got through it. It was a trial by fire and it was a really good experience. Almost getting my ass kicked by Bryant Gumbel was really very good because I realized if I’m going to be on TV I have to have my thirty-second bites, at the very least, and I have to be very clear about what I’m going to say. That experience made me a better speaker. I see Bryant Gumbel now and I love him because I admire what he does and how he handles himself. But sometimes you have to go through those moments of awkwardness to learn.
TAYLOR: So it’s a matter of really paying attention to the preparation for the kinds of things you may or may not want to do but have to do in order to get out there and stay out there?
GEORGE: Absolutely. I’m actually doing media training now of some recording artists. I’ve been working with a nineteen-year-old singer who has a hit record out. It’s interesting working with someone that young who’s already done a lot of media but has no idea how to tell a story about himself.
TAYLOR: Just being on a stage doesn’t automatically make you a good talk show guest.
GEORGE: No, not at all.
DICKEY: That’s an interesting point. Experts are incredibly articulate within their field of knowledge and that’s how they’ve gotten where they are. But to boil that down to a four- to six-minute interview on national television and sell your book is a whole ’nother ball of wax. That’s why there’s media training. Ideally, the publishing house doesn’t want to pay for that; they want someone to have it naturally.
TAYLOR: As Nelson said, they have to be able to tell a story.
DICKEY: Yes.
TAYLOR: In four to six minutes.
DICKEY: And make it interesting.
CARROLL: Here’s the thing about that. All those authors who speak really well, who got their message down and say the name of their book every twenty seconds—that works against you. The “well spoken author.” Don’t you hate that? The thing is to differentiate yourself, let your real personality come through, don’t pay any attention to the media training, which basically sucks. They will tell you the same thing: Wear something around your neck. Have your hair done. Wear quarter-size earrings. It’s stupid. Don’t pay any attention to it. Be yourself. Be eccentric. You know what I mean?
DICKEY: But honey, E. Jean, you are a fabulous version of yourself and some authors are not.
CARROLL: Anybody is more interesting than I am. I’m just saying, be that quintessential self.
GEORGE: One thing I learned working with this young singer was that he was told by someone to say the name of the album every sixty seconds. So I watched all these tapes of him. It’s all “My new album is coming out, blah, blah, blah.” No, no.
DICKEY: He’ll probably never get another interview.
GEORGE: He’s not projecting who he is. This is a really good lesson. I watched all of this guy’s tapes, and you don’t have any idea who he is. You have no idea who this young boy is. It turns out he has a fabulous life story, how he got to be a singer, his family. But he’s been afraid to tell that. And ultimately it’s who you are that’s the connection.
CARROLL: It’s a good thing you got ahold of him, that’s all I’ve got to say.
GEORGE: I hope so. The specialist thing, though, I definitely believe in. But it’s specialization through passion. You have to communicate the passion. I always tell stories about my mother. My mother was one of those women who used to have these parties on Saturday night. And she’d have the 45s stacked up—remember 45s, folks? And I used to look over at the little Motorola stereo and see them flip down. I would know the names of the record labels because Motown was blue and red, and Stax was light blue, and Atlantic was red and black. And so I would tell stories about how I got into music. Those were the ways—take those personal things and make them into stories. Because if you connect them to what you’re writing about, they’re priceless.
TAYLOR: This is a question for all of you—can an author develop a platform if he or she has trouble coming across as interesting?
CARROLL: I think Beth—Beth has a string of famous people who do really, really well.
DICKEY: Famous.
CARROLL: Well, Carlin was great. His book tour was great. His appearances were great. He just sat and told a story. I think the day is coming when the book will not be the platform. The book is starting to be ancillary to the platform. Are you aware of this?
DICKEY: That’s absolutely true.
CARROLL: I use a book as an ancillary to my websites now. I mean that’s how fast the world is changing. The book is like, eh, it’s out of print. Frrppp. Everybody’s on the websites now. Ads are going to the websites now. Everybody wants to get on the websites and they want to get on the cable TV, they want to get on the radio, they want to get on Sirius. The book is on the outside now. It used to be on the inside, everything swam around that, now the book is on the outside.
GEORGE: I started a website about two and a half years ago, and it’s been a boon to my career, partly because media can find me. I was getting e-mails there for people trying to reach me for interviews, which helps the book sales, helps with visibility. And now I’m just going to take E. Jean’s model, I’m going to use if for a lot more commerce, which I wasn’t doing as much.
DICKEY: I’d like to get back to your question about whether you could develop a platform if you weren’t a particularly interesting person. One thing I always tell authors is to pay attention to the headlines and pay attention to what’s happening out there. Look at the plot of their book and look at what they’re writing about and pay attention. I go back to Candace Bushnell. When the term metrosexual was all of a sudden being written about, she immediately integrated that into her stories. I work with Alexandra Robbins, who writes nonfiction, but she is an absolute pro at doing her research and paying attention to what’s happening in the news and connecting it to what she’s writing about, and then getting her voice out there.
CARROLL: Beth, when you call the publicist in, when you’re doing the pitch, you say, “Take Candace and the metrosexual”—is that how you pitch it?
DICKEY: As soon as I saw it, as soon as she called me, she was like, have you seen this about metrosexuals? Immediately I called The View and I said, Listen, you guys have got to be reading about this, Candace is the best person to have on to talk about it, and then she was a guest co-host for a week.
CARROLL: That is brilliant. Can I ask you one other thing because you have such a great personality? Do you call people on the phone or do you e-mail them?
DICKEY: Ninety percent of the time I e-mail. It is all about the e-mail now. I have friends who constantly comment on how quickly I respond. I couldn’t do my job without e-mail because writers are on deadline, producers are moving ninety to nothing. But I do make a call when it is a headline story or I have a very good relationship with the producer and I feel confident that I’ll get their ear. But you can get into it over e-mail.
CARROLL: So you called The View.
DICKEY: You can’t get into it over the phone unless you do have that relationship.
GEORGE: You only get so much time with them.
DICKEY: You’re not going to leave a mile-long message about things either. That’s the quickest way for them to never want to talk to you again. So the e-mail is the thing.
TAYLOR: I’m going to take it as a given, and maybe you’ll tell me I’m wrong, E. Jean, but I’m just going to assume that not everybody has the product to put up a website that attracts advertisements and six thousand hits a day. How many hits does your website get?
CARROLL: About a half-million a week.
TAYLOR: So I’m going to assume that for many of us in the auditorium maybe selling the book is still the thing that they want to do. Most of us aren’t going to be on Today or Oprah talking about the current buzz word, or getting thousands of hits on our websites. How would you go about just selling the book?
CARROLL: This year was a catastrophe because I was on Oprah four times and it never coincided. The book was just coming out but she wanted me on for something else.
DICKEY: I know how that is. Always.
CARROLL: Whatever the queen wants. I am a complete ignoramus. I do poorly on television. I’m too all over the place. I can’t get my mind constrained, I am the worst there is. I am a moron and you really shouldn’t pay one bit of attention to what I have to say. Listen to Beth, listen to Nelson, listen to Nick, do not listen to me. I do everything wrong and I just completely screw up all the time. That’s it.
DICKEY: I’ll say quickly about the website thing, that you have to approach this as an investment in yourself. There are companies that know how to create a book website or a website around you as an author and make it interesting. It’s an investment. I know Hyperion, and I would imagine pretty much every major publisher, makes that investment directly for authors. We encourage authors, but a lot of times we also develop websites for them as well as a vehicle to sell their books.
GEORGE: Well, the website connected to Amazon or connected to whoever is the sales agent is the relationship you want. You want to have someone hear you on the radio, read about your book somewhere, go to the website, be intrigued and order that book immediately through Amazon or whoever your source is. I think that’s crucial. The commerce part of it is that you’re still selling books.
CARROLL: You sell them on your website?
GEORGE: It’s really, really important.
CARROLL: You give them away.
DICKEY: And you are not a moron because Oprah doesn’t book morons.
CARROLL: I’m just saying it’s so hard. I don’t know how anybody does their job. I don’t know how anybody gets a book on TV. It is so hard.
DICKEY: I’m happy you understand that.
CARROLL: Right, Beth? I don’t know how you do it. The competition to get your book on the Today show is so incredible. You’re out there competing against sixty or seventy thousand books every year. Luckily, there are only a few really, really sensational publicists in this town. And if you have one—and Beth is one of them—somebody who can get in and sell you, then you’re halfway there. As Beth said, it almost doesn’t matter what you write. I swear to God, that’s the kind of world we’re living in now.
GEORGE: I’ve been writing books now for about twenty years. The book tour was an essential part of the mechanism at one point. And now fewer and fewer publishers are doing book tours, or doing them as extensively as they used to. I understand the economics of it, but because there are fewer tours, there is less connection with the readership. A lot of great success stories start with these connections that writers make with the audiences one-on-one. Because the book business is increasingly mirroring the film business and the record business, with the idea of the big opening, there is less and less of that building a book slowly over time. I still think the fundamentals apply to a great degree. Especially for fiction, I think, that you have to find your readers, you have to cultivate your readers, and independent bookstores, in my opinion, are still the best way to do that, especially for literary fiction and even some commercial fiction.
DICKEY: It’s critical for literary fiction.
GEORGE: It’s still about finding the bookseller who likes your book, going to their store, going to the book circle. Book clubs are essential. Being aware of book clubs, finding book clubs. For every topic, there is a book club that is interested. And they’re online to a great degree.
TAYLOR: So word of mouth is still important.
GEORGE: I think so.
CARROLL: Oh yeah, peer to peer.
DICKEY: I have an author on a thirty-city tour right now, which, as you said, is very unusual now. It’s the economics. But bookstores can be so defeating. This author is one of my favorites; she’s genuine and interesting. We’ve broken her out in some new markets. One was Dallas, Texas, and when she signed at the Waldenbooks there last week, there were five people and two books sold. That’s good for a new market, that’s really good. Because often there are zero people and zero books sold. But the advantage is that you have the opportunity to meet the bookseller, to discuss your book, and that will improve the hand sell of your book. It is very good for fiction. But there is an economic situation there too. The local media doesn’t book the way they used to either, because they too are more susceptible to the flashier news story.
GEORGE: It used to be easy to get on the local Live at Five. You could always get on the local Live at Five in Birmingham, Alabama or in some secondary market. Now a lot of those pieces are being funneled in from the national network.
DICKEY: It took several phone calls to get Candace Bushnell on Good Day Dallas. You know, this is Candace here. So it’s not easy. It’s important to keep that in mind. To get back to the book tour, realize when you go out there that you’re doing it not just to sell your book; you’re doing it to connect with your audience, and to connect with the bookseller, and to really make a big difference, especially with those independent bookstores.
CARROLL: One time I went to Indianapolis. I’m from Indiana, I had a book, and I went to Indianapolis, and did two morning shows, three radios, the Indianapolis Star. I said, “Come down and see me, four o’clock this afternoon, I’ll be at Barnes & Noble, I can’t wait to see you.” I said it all morning long on every show. I go into the signing. Two elderly sorority sisters of mine show up, that’s it.
DICKEY: God forbid if it rains. Forget it. If there’s, like, inclement weather, it’s over. It’s over.
GEORGE: There’s nothing worse than having two people show up and then you go back to the empty hotel room, and it’s freezing cold, and—
CARROLL: You get the mini-bar though; you get the mini-bar.
GEORGE: You get up early the next morning to go to the next city and you’re afraid no one’s going to show up there. And then you go to Seattle, which is a great place. Elliot Bay is one of the best bookstores in the country. You go there and you have a fantastic audience and people really know what they’re talking about, and the whole trip is salvaged.
DICKEY: By that one great experience.
GEORGE: It’s definitely slogging, though. It’s definitely trenches.
TAYLOR: Are you all saying that TV and local TV appearances and radio appearances really don’t make a whole lot of difference?
DICKEY: No.
GEORGE: I think radio helps.
DICKEY: They make a difference, they absolutely make a difference. And it’s imperative that you find at least one interview here in your market.
CARROLL: What’s that station in Portland that will put a book on the bestseller list? A little one. TV and radio station in Portland.
DICKEY: Northwest Afternoon.
CARROLL: That’s it! Northwest Afternoon. You get an author on that show and those people will buy and read that book.
DICKEY: That’s a good show. Not every market has those. But it does absolutely make a difference. If nothing else, you have to look at it this way too: if nobody comes to your book signing, you were on the radio and somebody was in their car listening. That is going to get somebody to a bookstore, whether it’s the one you’re signing at that night or not.
TAYLOR: Authors are always complaining about in-house publicity, they’re saying my book was just published by—well, not Hyperion certainly—some other publisher.
DICKEY: Not Hyperion.
TAYLOR: And they’re not doing anything, they’re not getting the word out. And sometimes authors hire outside publicists. Is this a good idea? Is it worth the money?
CARROLL: Can I just say one thing about publicists?
TAYLOR: Please.
CARROLL: I think they’re the hardest working, and they’re the first people blamed when stuff doesn’t work. Blame it on the publicist.
DICKEY: Oh, I knew I loved you. I knew it.
CARROLL: It’s true. Publicists are blamed, publicists are fired. When GE, take all your big companies, if they’re launching a new product, the product doesn’t go well, who are the first people out the door? It’s the head of PR. Out the door. Do you know the average person in PR in big corporates lasts barely two years and then they’re the hell out of there? If an author’s book is not selling, who gets blamed? The publicist. You guys suck wind the minute you get out of bed. I don’t know how you do it. And of course we do hire outside publicists.
DICKEY: I hate to say I think she’s right. On a personal level, when an author hires an outside publicist, I’m always a little like, Oh, crap. The truth is it’s a blow to the ego.
TAYLOR: How many books are you working on right now?
DICKEY: I’m going to be perfectly honest. If I were an author today and I had the means—even if I didn’t have the means, I’d find a way to get the means—and I’d hire a publicist. Because the truth is, at the end of the day we work for the publisher. We don’t work for you. We’re not doing client here. You are my client, but I work for the publisher and at any given time I’m working on twelve to fifteen authors, twelve to fifteen books. It’s insanity in the office. And there’s never a time that I don’t finish a book or wrap up a project that I don’t feel so strongly that if I had just had a little more time, if I just had more one-on-one with this book and this author, there’s more I could’ve done. And it makes me feel bad, but that’s just the nature of the beast.
GEORGE: I’ve used outside publicists a few times and I think one of the things to remember if you do is to have a clear mandate as to what the outside publicist is supposed to do.
DICKEY: Absolutely.
GEORGE: Vis-à-vis what the inside publicist is supposed to do. That’s really crucial.
DICKEY: It’s imperative.
GEORGE: What’s a good example? Hip-hop America, which was a history of hip-hop. Okay, someone handled The New York Times, handled all the mainstream media. I wanted someone to make sure I got in every little hip-hop magazine and every little hip-hop radio show, I wanted someone who just does that kind of stuff, make sure that audience knows it exists. So that’s a good example of being very specific about what you’re paying these people to do.
DICKEY: Absolutely. I’ve worked on Anthony Keidis, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ lead singer. I worked on his book.
GEORGE: He’s not dead. I thought you said late singer.
DICKEY: The lead singer.
GEORGE: Right.
DICKEY: He’s very much alive. But he’s an example. It’s Anthony Keidis, it wasn’t all that difficult to get him media, but I didn’t know that there’s a lot of specialized media out there. I worked with a woman I had met in passing who does music websites. She was invaluable to me for reaching that core audience.
If you do hire a publicist, it’s much more helpful to do it in the beginning phases. I’m very used to working with outside publicists and I love them. But it’s good to get that dialogue started early, so that you can divide and conquer. And you don’t step on each other’s toes.
GEORGE: You can monitor what they’re doing because you’re paying them.
DICKEY: Right.
GEORGE: You want a specific mandate so you can easily see what they’re doing and not doing for you.
TAYLOR: Let’s open the floor to questions at this point.
Q: What does it take to get the word out on a book?
DICKEY: First of all, organization is key. It’s absolutely key. One of the very first conversations that I want to have with an author is, “Have you interacted with the media at all? Who do you know?” I am so irritated when they go, “Oh, about two years ago I was on radio and—” No, no, no. I want a database here. If I were an author, that’s what I would do. You need to be very, very organized. So think outside the box. Think, oh gosh, I’ve never done an interview for anything, but my cousin’s nephew is a writer for the Tampa Tribune. Anything you can think of. I am always, always impressed and very thankful when an author is organized. The more that they can supply me with, the better able I am to increase their visibility. I mean I’m busy. I can’t be reading, I can’t be thinking about one book; I have to think about twelve. So if your client sees a headline and says, “Gee, I could really talk to that. That’s something I’m passionate about and that’s something I write about,” they should shoot me an e-mail about it. That makes a big difference. And it can increase their visibility because I can just tailor that e-mail a little bit and blast it to my contacts. And the next thing you know, we get a phone call. So, that’s a big deal.
CARROLL: You just said when your clients send you an e-mail to send you a really good e-mail so you don’t have to spend the rest of the afternoon working on an e-mail that you can blast out.
DICKEY: I usually do a little tinkering.
CARROLL: But it’s good to give you the basics.
DICKEY: I need the basics. Another thing is to be proactive about their careers: They need to get out, they need to be talking to people, they need to interact with their peers. The more you do that, I think, the more you get to know people. You get on those Rolodexes and you become a spokesman for your platform.
TAYLOR: In the third row, the lady in the hat.
Q: How do you persuade a publisher to buy a book on a subject that’s not new?
GEORGE: I’ll give you a good example. A friend of mine is a yoga instructor. She studied under a very well-known yoga instructor who had two books of her own. She came up with a take on yoga that involved weightlifting and mixing the two together. She asked me for advice, and I said, Why don’t you use the book that’s already sold and say you’re adding an element to it. So she went to the same publisher who had published her mentor and said, I’m taking that philosophy but I’m extending it sideways. And she showed how. Maybe she said an audience exists for this style of yoga, but by adding this other element to it I believe I’m extending it and opening it to another audience. She was able to get that published. I go into a bookstore right now, and her book’s there. She did it in two years. So I think it’s definitely possible, but you should also make sure that you look at the marketplace first.
Q: What do you mean by a platform?
TAYLOR: That’s a great question.
DICKEY: I have a definition. I have a dictionary.
GEORGE: I’ve got to tell you, I use brand, I never use platform.
DICKEY: Well, the dictionary definition is “a position of authority or prominence that provides a good opportunity for doing something.” I thought, I’m going to say platform a lot tomorrow, I better know what it means.
TAYLOR: Some platforms are more like a big three-ring circus. E. Jean, maybe you can add to that definition.
CARROLL: I’m telling you it’s ceaseless, it’s endless. You have to become a non-person. If you have a book, you do nothing; you do not eat, you do not sleep, you do nothing except badger people. You become a bad human being. Truly, you give up your soul, you do things you’d never dream you would ever, ever do. You’re making calls it kills you to make. You’ve got to make the calls. It is endless. It is grinding. It is not fun. You’re constantly on. You feel so sorry because you’re calling your publicist. You say, I can’t call, I’ve called her twelve times today. And you know what? Authors get nuts. Every agent in the audience knows what I am talking about. Authors are insane people when a book comes out. You act insane because you have to get so much done. And basically the platform is your energy. Remember Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil? That was a nowhere book. He got in his car and drove to every little bookstore in the South, and he made that book go on the bestseller list. He just willed it. He ate in his car, he slept in his car. He made that book happen. I swear to God, nothing will stand between you and selling your book if you just have the enthusiasm. Emerson said you can accomplish anything with enthusiasm. I swear to God I think that’s true. But you will drive your publicist crazy. How many authors do you have right now who call you more than twice a day?
DICKEY: Oh, good lord.
CARROLL: How many?
DICKEY: I don’t know, maybe ten, fifteen.
CARROLL: See? But that’s what it takes. You have to not care whether you’re liked. If you want to have friends, forget it.
DICKEY: Wait. Now I’ve got to disagree. You do have to be driven. You do have to be passionate. But if you drive them crazy—
GEORGE: That’s not a good thing.
DICKEY: It’s not good. There’s a fine line.
GEORGE: I’ve been in meetings and I’ve heard publicists talk about other authors, and I didn’t want to be the other author.
DICKEY: I have groups. I love them and I hate them. And there is no one in between.
CARROLL: Tell me this, the ones you hate, do you work just as hard for them?
DICKEY: No.
CARROLL: Oooh.
DICKEY: I don’t. Because they are thankless and they are annoying. And that’s that.
GEORGE: One thing I have learned over the years is that your publicist and your editor—
DICKEY: Need to be your friend.
GEORGE: They are going to love you.
DICKEY: And if we love them, then I will work my ass off.
GEORGE: Okay, you know what happens, in those meetings you know nothing about, when they’re doing budgets and talking about where they are going to put ads and if you’re going to do the extra promotional thing, that likability is the difference between your book getting into the book fair, or not, or “let’s have that sign of his book”—as opposed to her book.
CARROLL: See, you’re likable, that’s what it is.
TAYLOR: There’s a fine line between persistence and being annoying. Right back here, yes.
Q: How do I market my book to black audiences in the English-speaking Caribbean and the U.K.?
GEORGE: I can tell you one thing. There’s a couple of really good black newspapers in London that you should go to. Actually, you know the model for that. He does a literary festival in Jamaica every year. Colin Channer is a black novelist with a Caribbean background. When I was in London he was doing readings. Very unusual to see an American author, especially a black American, doing readings. But he used a Caribbean connection. There’s a huge community of Caribbean blacks there. And a lot of media outlets, newspapers.
DICKEY: There are. I worked on Bob Marley’s wife’s book.
GEORGE: I think you can do that. But I think that community probably reads newspapers more than Americans. They’re very literate in terms of what they read and their newspapers are cleaner. They really pay attention to that. So I would really target the Caribbean media in the States. Because it works both ways. They read in both places.
DICKEY: I don’t do any kind of international media. I get lots of phone calls for it and I immediately pass it along to our subsidiary rights department. Or if I know that the agent negotiated for all rights outside of the U.S., then I immediately take it and send it to their agent. I would go completely insane if I did all that too. But it’s really important to remember your core audience. I’ve worked on several Irish-American books. And it is unreal to me, but there’s the Irish Times, the Irish Edition, the Irish Echo. And it makes the book. I mean these are the people that are interested. This is your core. You always have to target the core before you can even think about the outside, the rest of it. So there is a lot of press for you for that book here in the U.S. Like I said, I worked on Bob Marley’s wife Rita’s book, No Woman No Cry, and it got a good deal of that press.
Q: Can authors contact media venues on their own or do they have to go through publicists?
DICKEY: You need to go through your publicist. You really do. It’s the quickest way to totally annoy a producer.
CARROLL: Talk about that. What’s that like? What do you mean?
DICKEY: It depends. Someone like E. Jean, who’s been on the Today show several times, who’s been on Oprah several times, writes for Elle--if she wants to call them, fine. But 99 percent of the authors out there don’t have that luxury and they should not be calling. And it doesn’t matter if they’ve been on the Today Show before, what they need to do is keep careful documentation of every media individual you have ever met. Keep their e-mail, keep their phone, whatever you’ve got, keep it in a database. Then you can give that to your publicist and let him or her do the talking.
Q: How do you get people to come to your website?
CARROLL: You have to have publicity. We launched Great Boyfriends, no hits. I launched it in Elle magazine, no hits. The thing was I got all these letters from women complaining they didn’t have boyfriends. And I thought wait a minute. You all have great ex-boyfriends that you just have gotten tired of, or you broke up, and he’s got a great job, and you disagreed about religion, whatever. Why doesn’t every woman out there just recommend a guy she knows and then everybody who wants a boyfriend can have a boyfriend? So it’s a great idea. So we had all the girls recommend their ex-boyfriends. So I called somebody at The New York Times, and it hit the front page of the Style section. Boom. The website was born. That’s all I needed was one hit, one hit.
DICKEY: But you know what you could’ve done. The Style section is a great hit for anything. But let’s just say I was your publicist and you said I would really like for you to call. I would call.
CARROLL: And you probably would have gotten a better response, you know.
DICKEY: No, well, look what you got. But I’m just saying, to go back to my point, let’s not encourage a lot of phone calls.
GEORGE: Everywhere your name is, every time you send out your biography, your website should be on that.
DICKEY: On everything.
GEORGE: I did a radio show Sunday night. I was supposed to get the names of all the events I was doing. I said, it’s all on my website. I’m driving people to my website as much as possible. That’s how you create traffic. People tell their friends, and it gets on links, and that’s how you do it.
Q: What makes a good e-mail?
DICKEY: Well, the headline is critical. You’ve got to have something in that headline that’s going to make them open it up.
TAYLOR: You mean the subject line.
DICKEY: The headline of the actual topic. You don’t want to just write hello, or great book. No. You need to say what you are e-mailing them about. It doesn’t need to be a mile long but it needs to say what you are getting at. Then you go into the body of the message, you want to have an interesting opening. You want to get to what you’re doing here from the get-go. First line, get to it. Then you introduce yourself and the title of your book: E. Jean Carroll, author of Mr. Right Right Now, parentheses, HarperCollins, the price point, and the publication date. You put that in all bold, all caps. And then you go into it. If you’ve got them in those first two paragraphs, you can go on and on and on. I usually attach a press release, or a Q&A I might have done with the author, a photograph of the author, if it’s for television, that kind of thing.
CARROLL: How many words? Do you keep it under four hundred words?
DICKEY: Oh God, yes.
CARROLL: Under three hundred words?
DICKEY: Oh yes.
CARROLL: Under two hundred? Wow.
DICKEY: Yeah. I mean it needs to get to it. Make him want to call you and talk about it further.
CARROLL: Do you ever send handwritten letters by messenger?
DICKEY: Sometimes.
CARROLL: Because you know what I suspect now? I suspect television producers get so many pitches that they’re like everybody in this room, you read your e-mails, you put it aside, say I’m going to deal with this later, and then you forget. So I’m starting to think if you messenger over a hard copy of what you just e-mailed—
DICKEY: I’ve done that. I don’t do it a lot, but I have done it.
CARROLL: Does it work?
DICKEY: Yeah, it works. It actually worked with the Style section once.
TAYLOR: Thank God, we’re entering the post-e-mail world.
Q: How does a mid-list author achieve a platform?
GEORGE: I think it’s very much what Beth said, being aware of ways your specialty intersects with what’s going on in the news. I think that’s really essential. The other thing is to look at magazines, specialized groups—like if you’re in the record business, the RIAA; then there are all these groups that do seminars for their clientele. There are many ways you can flip your information and introduce it to another audience. There’s a book that lists every trade organization in the country.
DICKEY: The Directory of Associations.
GEORGE: I would look closely at that list and see if there’s a trade publication or a magazine out that you don’t know about. You’re a product. And if you weren’t you and you were just a product you were selling, what would you do to sell that product?
CARROLL: You’re exactly right.
GEORGE: You have to look at yourself as that product. How do I take what I know and get it to the people who are interested in what I’m talking about? It’s particularly true of nonfiction, because with nonfiction there’s a real hook there. I met a barber once and he told me a great story about the dangers of being a barber, so I wrote a story about a barber and put it on my website.
CARROLL: I can’t wait to go to your website.
GEORGE: I got an e-mail from the National Barber Association. I had no idea they even existed. They told me, we loved your story. So you never know what groups are out there that are interested in what you’re doing.
CARROLL: I think this is the publishers’ fault. I think publishers are buying too many books by people who will never sell. Swear to God. You are getting stuck with authors you will never be able to get on anything. They feel bad, you feel bad, everybody feels bad about it. If they just wouldn’t buy these books to begin with, it would be much better and everybody wouldn’t have to go through the pain.
GEORGE: I agree. There are probably more books being published now than ever.
CARROLL: How many books are being published now?
TAYLOR: A hundred and fifty thousand a year? Something like that.
DICKEY: I thought it was 130,000.
TAYLOR: 175,000 is what I’m getting from the second row. And that doesn’t count self-published or print-on-demand, which really will get it up there.
CARROLL: So to get your book out there to more than four people—
TAYLOR: You’ve got to have more energy than E. Jean Carroll. Question here, yes.
Q: I worked on a book about martial arts with an instructor. Is there a way a ghostwriter or collaborator can help with publicity?
CARROLL: You should be because you are great looking. I swear to God, that’s 94 percent of it, right there. Talk to Roger Ailes, who runs the Fox News Network. When he hires anchors he never has the sound on, he just looks at the people. You should be on TV just for the way you look. No, really. Beth, am I wrong about that? Look how cute she is.
DICKEY: The attractive quality. Yeah, I agree with that but also I don’t. I don’t want my people, writers, to think—
CARROLL: I think you could help it, I really do. Am I way off here? When you get an attractive, articulate person like this who’s got a—
GEORGE: It’s not her story.
CARROLL: It’s not your story. Oh, okay.
DICKEY: You wrote it. It’s his story and you wrote it.
TAYLOR: So the question is, how can a ghostwriter help sell a book she wrote, though the story isn’t hers?
DICKEY: Your contacts are critical. I mean you’ve got the contacts, he’s got the story. But you want this book to sell too. You want to make some money from it too. Unfortunately, it’s his story, they’re going to want him to do the interviews. They’re going to want your contacts absolutely. You should do that as much as possible. And you can have as much of a dialogue as the other writer. I work with two authors all the time.
GEORGE: I was going to say that since you’re an experienced journalist, you should be training him now. That’s where you can be really helpful to him. I’d make a list of the ten questions you know they’re going to ask this person and help him refine those ten questions into really good answers.
CARROLL: Another thing is how anybody makes any money selling books. Really, if we’re going to start telling the truth here, hardly any authors make the big money.
DICKEY: That’s true.
CARROLL: It’s the big lie. You work three years of your life, turn out the best thing you possibly can, the book may, if it does well, break even.
GEORGE: Can I ask you one more question? Does your friend have a company?
Q: Yes.
GEORGE: Then what he should be doing is thinking about ways of inviting media to get on-the-job training, with a TV crew. Morning shows love to have their people come down there and act like they’re breaking a brick.
DICKEY: You could even do an event there. Wherever his hub is, wherever his big studio is, do an event there. Have him do a workshop and bring in a bookseller to sell books.
GEORGE: Absolutely.
DICKEY: That will also invite press.
Q: How do you find a private publicist?
DICKEY: There’s a website called Literary Market¬place that some publicists are connected to. Also, if you notice a particular book is getting a large amount of press, you may want to go onto the author’s website, the publisher’s website, because oftentimes the contact, if it’s not someone you know, if it doesn’t say Beth. Dickey@SimonSchuster, or Beth.Dickey@Harper Collins, if it says something else it’s probably a freelancer.
GEORGE: If you’re with a publisher, they often have people they work with that they’ll recommend.
DICKEY: I know a ton.
GEORGE: If your book’s already set up you can ask them.
Q: How much outreach is there to local public libraries for author publicity?
DICKEY: I would say there’s a fair amount. A lot of libraries are connected to festivals, so it’s important to think about what region of the country your author lives in or what region of the country their book is appealing to, and get them to that festival. You also like to have a presence as a publisher. Often, a bookstore has a unique relationship with a library and will bring an author to the library because it’s a bigger setting, and can hold a larger audience. I’ve had some library events and I have to admit I’ve not had strong fills. But we do try to work with them. I mean libraries are critical. They’re the bread and butter .
Q: Do you always wear glasses on TV?
CARROLL: I do. I always wear them. There’s a guy who watches television a lot and if I don’t wear my glasses he sends an e-mail saying he was frightened to death.
DICKEY: They’re your signature.
Q: With a book that is about to come out, how do you leverage early publicity into publicity when the book is actually available?
DICKEY: Book buyers are impulsive. If you do early publicity and you’ve made your point, then they rush to the bookstore and can’t get the book because it’s not publication date or it’s not been shelved yet. So it’s always good to say you know what, I would love to do your interview. My publication date is in about two weeks. But if they’re like, no, no, no, this is my deadline, this is when we’re going to do it, then you say all right, I’ll do the interview as long as you’re willing to plug my book on your website at least on pub date. You’ve got to work it a little.
CARROLL: What’s the name of your book? Let’s do a little publicity.
Q: Baby G.
CARROLL: Baby G. Look for it in your bookstores. Baby G.
DICKEY: Time Out New York is a fantastic forum for fiction, for literary fiction. Very good.
Q: What is the role of paid advertising in a book’s publicity campaign?
DICKEY: There is an advertising budget for every book you publish, and sometimes it’s zero. The problem with advertising is, let’s say a book is $24.95 in hardcover and you take out an ad. I’m not good with numbers, that’s why I’m in publicity, but let’s say you’ve got to sell 100,000 books to break even on that ad. Big car companies can bring out their big ads because their product is expensive and they will break even. In our industry, unfortunately, the price of the product is so low compared to the cost of an ad that it won’t.
I have to say in my career, Hyperion is noticeably more generous with their advertising dollars, and sometimes I really think it’s worked. But they’re also very selective. They do it very carefully. They target it, which is what everyone does, obviously. Also, if a book does start to take off, and they want to continue the book sales, they’ll up the ad budget that way because they know the publicist has got to move on. Most of the time you’re going to hear, “This isn’t in our plan, this wasn’t in our budget.” I have to say I see the point of the publishing house because as publicity director at Long Street Press in Atlanta I had to do the marketing and the advertising. So I handled those dollars. Ads are ridiculous. I mean just ridiculous. Even a quarter-page ad in the Atlanta Journal Constitution when I left was $75,000.
CARROLL: Are you serious?
DICKEY: Quarter page in the AJC.
TAYLOR: But as Nelson and E. Jean have told us, you can use your website very effectively for advertising.
GEORGE: Unless your book is already climbing the bestseller charts and is already on its way and you’re trying to maximize it, advertising is not an effective use of your money.
CARROLL: Ditto.
DICKEY: As an author, you should really encourage those dollars to go elsewhere. I completely agree with that.
GEORGE: You’re better off having the local rep put a big poster in the store.
DICKEY: A blow-up. And those are expensive. And I can’t tell you how many times authors are like, Well how about a blow-up?
GEORGE: They are. They are expensive. But they’re reaching buyers.
DICKEY: It ain’t in the budget.
TAYLOR: I’m afraid that we’re out of time. Let me thank Beth Dickey, Nelson George and E. Jean Carroll. Let me thank the audience for coming out. We’ve learned that more and more, the author is the product in today’s book publicity machines. And I’m going home to work on my website.
