Snow White Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Laughter, Pleasure, Malice, and the Pursuit of Adult Fun

Gina Barreca, Ph.D. is Professor of English at UConn, and author of It's Not That I'm Bitter: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Visible Panty Lines and Conquered the World. See full bio

April 4, 2009, Work

How To Sell Books: Part One

Why do some books find readers while others languish?

I have a new book coming out from St. Martin's Press in May and this means I'm nervous as hell.

I picked the title "HOW TO SELL BOOKS" for this post because it is what I want YOU to tell me.

If you got all excited thinking it's something I could to explain, I'm sorry, but I convinced myself not to feel too bad about the title-bait-and-switch after seeing as how a lot of the dieting-and-weight-control blogs seem like they're written by people who weigh about 108 pounds soaking wet. If they can discuss how people struggle with the need to eat Snickers and cheddar-flavored chips (while I can tell from their tiny photographs that they have model-sculpted, thin cheeks that nobody would pinch in addition to having swan-like necks the size of the wrists of people over 152 pounds), then I could write about the general anxiety surrounding the selling of books.

It's not that I'm bitter.

Actually, IT'S NOT THAT I'M BITTER is the name of the new collection of essays. The subtitle is "How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Visible Pantylines and Conquered the World" and while that's partly true--I don't worry about visible pantylines because I no longer care what people think of my ass as I'm leaving a room (and that, let me tell you, is one of the great joys of being 52: knowing if I haven't made enough of an impression with what I've been saying or through the creative use of cute accessories, it's already too late to gain anybody's approval)--part of the subtitle is also a lie.

I haven't exactly conquered the world--not by a long shot.

Look, I haven't even conquered my own deep nervousness about sending a new book out on its own, to cross the street without somebody holding onto its little shiny jacket and making sure it gets safely onto shelves in a bookstore or, better yet, into the kindly hands of welcoming readers.

Still, I have published eight books with major presses and a whole bunch of them have done well--meaning that they've been well and widely reviewed, translate into various languages, gone into multiple editions, and that people who are not in my immediate family have purchased copies--and so I will be writing over the next few posts about how and why it is that some books cross over without getting run down and why others end up in the gutter (a few of mine have ended up there, too, and in their memory I want to examine ways that certain crucial early interventions might have helped prevent that fate).

My hope is that, in writing about how books do find their audience, I'll remind myself of how it's done.