The alchemy of book marketing

"Was I this obsessive about the last book?" I asked my husband the other day, after trotting into the living room to report on my morning Amazon check for The Poisoner's Handbook. (Wow! In the 100s! After six weeks!)

by Deborah Blum

"Yes," he said, in that patient but-I-can-live-with-it tone that he's perfected over the years. "But you were more frustrated."

Ugh. I hate it when he's right about these things. But I do get consumed, every time.

I've written four previous books — The Monkey Wars, Sex on the Brain, Love at Goon Park and Ghost Hunters — and they've all been critically well received and had respectable sales or better. But none of the others took off in the way The Poisoner's Handbook has: Picked up by Costco as a mass-market best seller, chosen as a nonfiction selection of the Mystery Guild Book Club, and Lily Tomlin's production manager offered me free tickets to her performance in my hometown of Madison if I'd come down to the theater and sign some copies of the book.

Of course, it helped that I had a seductive subject: murder, poison, forensics, and the jazzy backdrop of 1920s New York City. But I've had catchy subjects before — sex differences, ghost hunters. So what is it about The Poisoner's Handbook? I've often wondered about the alchemy of good book sales. This time, though, I spent less time musing on alchemy and more time trying to make it happen.

And, obsessive as I am, I drew up a list, which you'll find ranges from some standard advice — website, blog, social media — to my experimental venture in running a national sweepstakes.

Be obsessive. People buy books they've heard of more than books they haven't. In case you wondered.
Encourage your publisher to propose excerpts to magazines, newspapers, and any publication in your area of interest. Mine sold an excerpt to the Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition about three weeks before my Feb. 18 publication date, and I'm still hearing from readers. If your publisher or agent isn't promoting excerpt ideas, do it yourself.
Remind yourself that you may not have a big publicity budget but that you have some great stories to tell. I pitched a piece to Slate shortly before my book came out on my favorite investigative story from my book: The U.S. government poisoning of American citizens as part of Prohibition control. That article, "The Chemist's War," was the third most e-mailed story on Slate that week.
Focus your website on the current book. I gave mine a vintage look to go with the 1920s time period of my story, and I kept The Poisoner's Handbook the center piece of the home page.
Create a Facebook fan page. I got this advice from some friends who work in marketing. I use it to post good news about the book — reviews, links to radio interviews, events — and I linked it to Twitter so that my fan page news automatically becomes a tweet as well.
Embrace Twitter. It took me a while to learn this, but I've come to really enjoy the Twitter community (@deborahblum). There's a lot of generosity there and a lot of good information. I've set up a number of events and interviews via Twitter direct messaging. And, yes, it's an excellent way to pass along news about your book and your blog.
Your personal blog. I let the book serve as inspiration for a blog about culture and chemistry. Again, I started the blog before the book came out as a way of building up anticipation. But I quickly realized that after spending three years working on a book about poisons, I'd developed a fair amount of expertise, some excellent stories that I couldn't fit in the book, and that I'd revived an old affection for chemistry. So the blog has taken on a life of its own — I'm running more than 10,000 visitors a month. That's good for the book — and sometimes I use it to raise the book's profile — but it's also become something that I really enjoy.
Other blogs. I was invited to do a guest blog for a really terrific true crime blog, Women in Crime Ink. And I was really thrilled because I thought my book, which is about a pair of pioneering forensic scientists, had some cross-over potential to mystery lovers and true crime readers. Plus, writing for Women In Crime pushed me to think about my work in new ways.
Sweepstakes and contests: During National Poison Prevention Week in mid-March, I ran an audio book giveaway on my blog. Readers were invited to send in suggestions for future blogs. The first five got an audio book of The Poisoner's Handbook. It was a little extra work for me in terms of mailing but minimal cost since my publisher had sent me extra copies of the audio book. And I got some great tips on everything from the copper poisoning of poet William Blake to the toxin in puffer fish.

I also helped set up a national sweepstakes for the book, the Name Your Poison Weekend. This was the brainchild of some very good friends of mine in Chicago at Flair Communications, an advertising and promotions company, and they put together the prize package — two nights at a Gold Coast hotel, Rolls Royce transportation, a jazzy cocktail party, and more — and set up the website for the sweepstakes. It's gotten thousands of entries and helped raise the profile of the book. It helps that it's a good prize but I also like the way it picks up the theme of the book.

Work with your publisher. Every author I know (including me) wishes their publisher could do more. I'm still waiting, for instance, for those full-page ads in major newspapers. But Penguin Press did give me a six-city book tour this time and I added another six stops myself, making a very respectable round of talks. And they assigned me a terrific publicist, who has sent out countless review copies and helped set up a host of really good radio interviews. I make a point of being grateful and I say yes to every request, which has led to some fascinating and unexpected interviews.
Be grateful for your friends. I've felt blessed in this book because it has reminded me over and over again how lucky I am to be friends with so many terrific people. Friends put me up at their homes while I was traveling on book tour, hosted book parties, set up book events, and helped with interviews and news coverage. The kindness of colleagues, the enthusiasm of friends all the way back to my high school days, has made this a wonderful experience.
Have fun with it. Every time I talk about the book, I'm reminded that I wrote it because I really do find poisons and poison detection fascinating. I've talked about it to large groups and small in the course of this book tour, done events ranging from a Barnes & Noble in New York City and at Dog Ear Books in Madison, Ga. The only thing I've promised myself is that I'll have a good time and so will people at my events. It's helped make it a terrific experience. And, finally, remind yourself every once in a while that the whole point of this is the book itself. It's easy to get absorbed with marketing and forget that this all started because you had a story worth telling. Give yourself some time to remember that. And, allow yourself to obsess about the vacation you'll take when all of this is done. You'll need it. And so will that ever-patient significant other of yours.

Deborah Blum is a freelance writer and professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin. Blum was 2003-04 NASW president.

(NASW members can read the rest of the Spring 2010 ScienceWriters by logging into the members area.)