Spreading the Word....
From book festivals to LinkedIn..
Writing a book is one thing, getting it published another - and then comes the difficult part. Selling it. My first book Dot Bomb: The Rise and Fall of Dot Com Britain taught me that the economics of publishing are very much like venture capital - for every 10 books published, one will be profitable, two or three may just about break even and the rest will lose money.
That book was published on 9th September 2001 - there were a couple of favourable reviews, a reasonable amount of buzz about a “timely” account of the dot com bubble, and I was naively optimistic about its prospects. But two days later, on what became known as 9/11, an event occurred which demanded the attention of every branch of the media and their audiences, leaving little room for anything else.
My book sank without trace, and every year I still get a statement from the publisher revealing how much of the paltry advance for Dot Bomb I still owe them.
But that makes me all the more determined to get the word out about Always On, so I have accepted just about every invitation from literary festivals, book clubs, podcasts and any other opportunity to promote the book - though I’ve yet to do a TikTok.
This weekend I was in Devon for the Ways with Words festival at Dartington Hall. It was a hugely enjoyable experience in a beautiful place, with the chance to meet both readers and other writers and compare notes on the anxious process of getting your book noticed.
I spent time talking to Dr Jim Down and was amused to find this ICU doctor asking me how I managed to fit writing a book into my busy schedule. “Well you were on the Covid frontline!” I pointed out - he grinned and said even in 2020 doctors did get days off between their exhausting shifts. By the way, I do recommend Life Support, his enthralling diary of what it was like to be an intensive care doctor as the Covid-19 wave crashed onto his hospital.
I had the good fortune to have my event at. Dartington chaired by James Long, the BBC Economics Correspondent in the 1980s when I arrived in the TV newsroom who later became a very successful writer of thrillers and historical fiction. He had been meticulous in his preparation and during our hour on stage roamed far and wide, from Stephen Hawking’s warning to me about the threat posed to humanity by AI, to my description of Elon Musk as “bonkers but brilliant”.
Then the audience - carefully spaced out rather as if they were in an exam hall - weighed in with some penetrating questions, many focused on what could be done about the pernicious effects of social media. It is so invigorating for an author to emerge from the lonely process of writing to find that people are actually interested in the themes of your book, especially when that is a living, breathing audience rather than just some muted avatars at the end of a Zoom call.
Mind you, with Always On having gone on sale in the US this month, I am enthusiastically accepting invitations to talk about it via video call as a tour of American bookshops is not a practical possibility right now. The best such call so far has been with Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s global head of PR who has a regular series on LinkedIn called CommsConversations.
We had a long chat about everything from sourdough - like me he’s a keen baker - to the communications strategies of the major tech companies. The final edited version focuses on Chapter 9 Spinners Hacks and Hype, which Frank says communicators may find “a little bit tough” as it examines the relationship between the PR industry and technology journalists.
We discuss the differences I see between the attitudes of American and British journalists, in particular broadcasters, summed up by this paragraph about my attempts to secure an interview with Apple’s CEO:
I once spent months negotiating to get an interview with the chief executive, Tim Cook, at a major product launch. While we had never had an interview with Steve Jobs’ successor, the signs were hopeful. But a couple of weeks before the event I was called in to Apple’s London office to be told that an exclusive had been granted to the anchor of one of the American nightly news programmes.
To my horror, I watched his folksy piece begin with him actually hugging Tim Cook as he came off stage after unveiling the new product. Not a sequence I could ever imagine in a British television news piece.
And to my surprise Frank Shaw was happy to bring up the incident where I nearly got him sacked. I had come to the West Coast to shoot a piece explaining cloud computing to the audience of the Ten O’ Clock News. At the heart of this report was an interview with Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie, who was masterminding the company’s rather tardy entry into the cloud business.
I asked a handful of perfectly standard questions for any British reporter, including a suggestion that Microsoft was way behind its rivals, and we departed happy that the interview had gone well.
Not so, according to Ozzie, who told Frank that talking to this crazy BBC reporter had been a disaster, he’d always known that would be the case and he should never have listened to the advice of his dumb PR team. Later that evening I came across the British PR executive who had fixed my visit, a lovely man who was now getting it in the neck for letting the Beast of the Beeb loose on Ray Ozzie.
Still, once the perfectly straightforward two and a half minute report was broadcast and the sky did not fall in, everyone calmed down. But Frank says he learned a lesson - he should have briefed the executive first that “Rory is going to ask some very hard and direct questions and I’m confident you’re going to be able to answer them, but you just need to be ready for it.”
If you want to know more about the ‘hard and direct questions’ that I have asked other leading figures in tech, you do of course need to read Always On, now available in good bookstores in the United States as well as the UK. Spread the word!
Always On is available as a hardback, ebook or audiobook here.
And if you want to support your local independent book shop you can order it at Hive.