MISSION: ACQUISITIONS

[Sunny Frazier]

Want to know how an Acquisitions Editor for a small publishing house operates? I come clean in a blog over at my page.

[Augie]

Sunny, I am not able to pull up the blog.  augie

[Sunny Frazier]

Go to my page. It should be listed right there.

[Albert Tucher]

Thanks, Sunny, for spelling out some things I have long suspected about the query letter.

[I. J. Parker]

This is a perfectly reasonable way of going about the selection process.  Let's face it, the publisher relies on the author to do the selling of the book.  And this, of course, was always my downfall.  I was not prepared to sell after doing all the writing and revising work.  I wanted to go on to the next book.  After all, I was better at writing than as a salesperson.  Not to mention the fact that the advance didn't pay for expenses.

Mind you, I had credentials, having published short stories and won an award.  I also had a clean copy that didn't require much editing.  What I didn't have was a web site back then.  I did get that after a while and strongly believe in it.  I'm not so sure that a blog helps much. And social networking sucks up an enormous amount of time.  It used to be, before the electronic revolution, that the selling required personal appearances in a huge number of venues.  At least that is no longer required.

 

But the bottom line is:  if I'm going to have to sell the book myself, I don't need the publisher and all his middlemen.

[Sunny Frazier]

I put together what we call "The Posse" to make marketing painless. Basically, when I market I make them go over to the sites and weigh in. I give them inside scoops. Now, they are beginning to communicate with each other and the impact we have on sites and promotion we do as a group is immediate and the results are amazing. We're a bit subversive as well. I'm asked to talk about the Posse at conferences now. Just a new dynamic in marketing.

[I. J. Parker]

Well, you must explain, I think.  :)

[Sunny Frazier]

We function as a group. When we find sites that will expand our awareness of the industry, reviewers, interviewers, and people looking for guest bloggers, we are johnny on the spot. When one of our own blogs, we encourage the others to make a comment. We bring in traffic and readers to sites we feel deserve it. This builds name recognition and the "Q" rating of authors before they publish. It's like having a built in promotion team.

 

I have a blog coming up next month on this site. I blog about the Posse all over the Internet.

 

[I. J. Parker]

Thanks.  And author collaborative, then?  Good for you.