Book blues

My book The Blue In The Air has now been out for more or less a year, and in that time has sold a staggering total of 113 copies. This is pretty shameful stuff by any means.

It’s easy to pinpoint the reasons why it has done so badly. Almost no publicity for a start. I was supposed to arrange that when the book came out – on Royal Wedding day – but unfortunately my mum chose that moment to fall seriously ill. Not her fault, of course, but the inevitable lost momentum was never really regained. Hardly any mentions anywhere, let alone reviews; two good ones in the music press, another couple of Amazon, a few more wisps of recommendation here and there, but nothing to make anyone aware of the book who wasn’t already aware of it. In addition virtually no bookshops stock it – the only place I’ve seen it in London is in Foyle’s – and, if that weren’t enough, the book is full of blogposts which are readily available to read online, for free. Why bother paying a tenner? I wouldn’t. I did think of deleting the posts in question from the blog so that anyone who wanted to read them had to go out and buy the book, but the naïve, idealistic part of me said that wasn’t really what the internet was supposed to be about. More fool me, obviously. Furthermore, my introduction includes a stupid remark about “the refreshing change now taking place in British politics” (it was written in May 2010, before the election), stupidly failing to anticipate the most oppressive UK government regime since the days of Lord Liverpool.

So the question is: where to go from here? If people want me to write more books they might like, they have to buy this one first to justify it. I can’t go to publishers with a record-breaking sales figure of 113, and besides they’ll just tell me for the billionth time that blogging is not the same thing as writing a book. Well, no, that’s why I’m asking; help me turn the blog into a book.

Pushing aside the question of whether publishers actually want books any more – as opposed to kitchen-shagging celebrity nightmares – there’s also the thorny issue that such “non-mainstream” books that do get published, particularly music books, have an argument to offer. An easily digestible either/or approach, or a detailed history of a specific movement or musical genre or musician(s). Nothing wrong with the latter, of course. But since the point of my writing is fundamentally that there is no “argument,” then that’s me doomed from the off. I don’t do polemics or propose bright new Jerusalems; well I do but it’s so subtle it drifts or sweeps past most readers. And unless a book hits you right on the head from the word go, you really don’t stand a chance.

I do have ideas for other books but sadly no time to research, develop or write them. Do another blog book? Then Play Long, perhaps, a 500-word page-per-entry deal? Do me a favour. Why would anyone want to spend money on edited highlights when they can read the full thing online for nowt? No, I would have to do something new and unique, something that can’t be found online. But I don’t have the time for it.

Oh well, that was my attempted career as a music writer. Just as well I never gave up the day job.

It’s easy to pinpoint the reasons why it has done so badly

you don't mention another obvious one, which is that not many ppl might want to read your book. I hadn't heard of your book but I checked out the product description on Amazon:

A galaxy of characters, ranging from Marty Wilde to Jay-Z via Glenn Gould, Dorothy Squires, Britney Spears, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Patrick Cargill, Orson Welles and many forgotten others, conspire to alter his perspective, leading to a climax where he is finally united with his wife and the world chooses a new and better leader.

I mean, I've read a ton of music books and I always want to read more but I would never read a book like that.

I have to say I didn't write that blurb.

I would (and had not heard of the book). Is it too late to try to arrange readings, get on panels, get the publisher to do send out promo copies, etc.

books kind of have a longer shelf life (no pun intended) than a lot of other artforms -- you can still promote something that's a year or two old as new/current, and should

I mean I'm grateful to Zero Books for wanting to publish me in the first place but it could have been done a whole lot better. The trouble is publishers always want an angle to what is essentially a not-quite-random collection of blogposts. It's not the book I would have written or published if I had the final say but you can't always help these things. Church of Me would have worked about a zillion times better if I could have persuaded an editor to sit down and go through it but the general feeling still is it's far too long to work as a book.

i kind of doubt that the availability of the blog wd bite into sales that much. it's an unbelievably tough market for books out there, bar the obvious titles. partly because and partly why bookshops and supermarkets are so conservative in what they pitch. and maybe the promotion was less than ideal? you wd really want to have some similar titles to compare it to.

but in the end i think not reaching the audience you'd hoped isn't the same as "failing". your book you have to judge by your own lights, and maybe recognise that everything once it's out in the world is chance and unguessableness. and you wd hardly be the first writer whose first book's reception was less than stellar. you can keep going if you really want it, i guess.

I tend to be sort of skeptical of "electronic self-publishing is author's paradise" triumphalism, but if it's true anywhere, it's true for "non-mainstream" books. At some point, when Zero feels they're not likely to make more money off the book, maybe they'd be willing to let you handle the aftermarket yourself? I think it's pretty effing hard to make any serious money this way, but I think it's not so hard to sell more than 113 if they're priced to go.

same problem as releasing an album these days. you can work for years on something, but just putting it out there and hoping for something to happen isn't enough (in 99% of cases anyway), even if it's really good. it feels like any artist needs to be a lot more responsible for their own marketing & hustle (although it is terrible when they actually talk about marketing & hustling, no one wants to hear that) than in the past.

and even then, you need to have a flexible definition of "success". it might just be setting you up with some cred/exposure/experience for your next thing.

I think that's true but it sucks, because the kind of person who's good at creating great art is 99% of the time not the kind of person who's any good at marketing, and vice versa, i.e. there's a reason that PR companies and managers and marketing teams exist

it is terrible when they actually talk about marketing & hustling, no one wants to hear that

why?

tracer - i agree, but do you think it's less common for an artist to have those things now that there's a lot less money involved? i realize it probably varies a lot depending on what sphere/level we're talking about.

thom - not naming names, but following some rappers & labels on twitter feels like going to a motivational sales seminar in a Best Western conference room. on the flip side, i think a lot of artists want to appear unconcerned about that stuff, for fear of seeming calculated or inauthentic maybe.

my total experience of that is that there's a skit on the mr exquire mixtape about trying to get people to listen to your mixtape

i don't know, i feel like if there's an economy which requires artistic types to hustle then it's bad that it's also an expectation to be silent about the fact that you have to hustle. but that's probably not exactly realist of me.

Books operate on the same model as movies and pharmaceuticals. One or two blockbusters compensate for the 99% that fail. Usually in movies, the blockbusters aren't really that amazing in terms of artistry; they're usually just a combination of being marketed right, reaching some 'lowest common denominator', and often just dumb luck. I can see how discouraging this is for you, but I would say to think of people like JD Salinger, JK Rowling, and James Redfield, whose success can be fairly attributed to persistence. Of course, there are plenty of people who are persistent and get nowhere, but if there's one quality that at least anecdotally is crucial, it's an unshakable belief that what you've done is groundbreaking and needs to be seen. Good luck!

This is all very good and wise advice and I’m more than grateful for it.

I guess the central problem is, once again, down to me. I hear what you say about taking on the book myself, self-publishing, the necessity of any artist to hustle so that they’re heard, etc., but truthfully I’m not sure my own belief in the book is unshakeable.

I think it partly comes down to the fact that for so long a time no one seemed prepared to help and develop this book except me. No one seemed to care about it except me, and it felt like I was doing all the work. And now it’s been out for a year, it’s like…I don’t know how to put it, other than to say that I don’t really want to revisit the book, I want to move on, but of course if I do (a) I can’t go on and do (b).

It’s like I just want to let it go. Unfortunately thomp’s words about hustling are true; the whole history of literature is in a lot of ways about hustling in that the stuff that gets published, read and handed down through generations got there in the first place because the artists (or their agents, or patrons, or whoever) were able to sell themselves. Totally agree with what Tracer says as well; like he says, PR companies are there for a reason – they do it so the writer doesn’t have to. But I remember shopping around for agents at the time I wanted to publish CoM and no one wanted to take me on.

The trouble is you have to have that hustling spirit within you and I’m not sure that I have. I also don’t feel that I particularly regret not having it. But it means I don’t get publicised and therefore read – someone (I can’t remember who) once said that full-time writing was 10% actual writing and 90% pitching.

I have been thinking about a condensed page-per-album Then Play Long book, something along the lines of David Thomson’s Have You Seen…? But DT has decades of reputation and goodwill before him (currently reading his David O Selznick biog Showman – and it’s a terrific read) whereas I’ve basically been blogging to a relatively small audience for a decade. Provided I can discipline myself to do 500-word essays on all the albums (five-and-a-quarter thousand words on Roy Orbison is OK in blog terms, if you know your audience, but commercial suicide in print) then I think there’s a gap in the market for it and also that with the right promotion (all the UK number one albums, including many that are almost never talked about anywhere else) it could cross over to readers who don’t necessarily know about my writing or history. All credit to Zero but I would need somebody bigger to take this on. Ideally I need an agent – but who would take me on, and how would I go about attracting/convincing them?

if it makes you feel any better, i sold even fewer copies of Raped By Logic: A Futile Analysis of the Lyrics of Gordon Sumner

why because it looked into Sting

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Sport/Pix/pictures/2009/7/21/1248211693679/Tom-Daley-with-gold-medal-001.jpg

I do feel for you Marcello - like a lot of other people here, I think you're a top-quality writer and I've admired & enjoyed your various sites over several years. It does seem unfair that your writing doesn't move easily to a broader market.

Zero is a slightly funny proposition - I liked the idea of them very much, and was glad someone was finally gathering up interesting long-form writers from around the web, especially the British wing of it. And it seemed like a good home for your work when I heard you were being published by them. But they're actually a bit sub-par from what little I've seen of their books - slightly over-priced, unattractively produced (bad paper iirc) - like they're not satisfactory book-as-physical-artifacts, so I'm not tempted to move from reading these writers online. (I haven't bought your book yet; I will now. Your sales are too low.)

I'm not sure Zero are good hustlers either. I don't see them in bookshops a lot (they're in the old Calder bookshop, the LRB shop, the ICA… not sure I've seen them anywhere non-arts. Are they in any Daunts?)

One self-publish option is maybe the kind of high-output thing that people like Andrew Hickey are doing. From what I can see (I haven't looked at the books) he writes a lot, puts a lot up on site, but keeps pointing people at his print-on-demand/e-book aggregations and revisions of this material, which I assume are low cost for him to produce. I can see that being a really hacky model in most hands, and it demands a high output to draw people in, but with a bit of editorial fussiness & integrity & the right sort of pricing model, it could be something that gives a small income stream and various other rewards. I'm a bit suspicious of it, and it's low-prestige compared to a bodley head hardback, but it's a path that's opening.

oh, do you know how other zero titles are selling? That'd be an interesting point of comparison.

yes, i suspect 113 copies is actually a pretty staggering success compared with most of their lineup

114, just ordered off amazon

Further to what woof was saying, another example is something like w03b0t did here: 100 Lost Rock Albums From The 1970s

Save up some posts on select albums instead of publishing them on your blog, throw it out there as an ebook preferably available for buttons and try and get some sort of word out about it online. You'll make bugger all money but more than you would through your blog, but fingers-crossed you'll then have some sales figures behind you that you could then go to an agent with. I know toss all about this game though so I could be talking bollocks.

Cheers, WF!

The only “big” London bookshop in which I’ve seen the BiA book is Foyle’s. Daunt Books certainly used to carry Zero Books titles and they used to have major book launches at the Marylebone branch but this all seems to have disappeared and now there certainly aren’t any Zero titles to be seen in any of their branches.

The big Zero sellers I think are K-Punk’s Capitalist Realism, Hatherley’s Militant Modernism and possibly Nina Power’s book; AFAIK these are the only ones to make it into four figures.

I’ve seen the W**b*t ebook and it’s very entertaining and (how does he do it? Like Mike Westbrook: “I can’t write anything under three minutes long”) concise but I’m looking to do a “big” book. Still I agree it would be useful to have something to point potential agents and publishers at so I’ll have to research this whole business, how you put an ebook together, how much it’s likely to cost, and so forth.

One more thing about Then Play Long; I’m thinking about turning it into a radio show (there’s a good tie-in) but I don’t particularly want to take it to Resonance as I don’t think it’s the right place for it. Podcast time?

This is a reasonable review of the book, though the comments in the penultimate paragraph suggest the reviewer has missed the book’s entire point. Never mind.

CHeer up Marcello.

Easier said than done.

I’m wondering even whether to carry on with the Then Play Long blog. Nobody’s reading it who doesn’t already know it exists. It’s not reaching out any further. People moaning about no decent music writing these days and there it is and nobody wants to read it. Abysmal number of hits it’s getting, and I’m wondering whether the time and effort I’m putting into writing it isn’t a waste and I’d be better off doing something else with the time.

The pathetic sales figures for the book certainly show that no one wants to pay to read my writing, so maybe it’s not “decent music writing” at all. Or maybe it’s just that there is literally no market for this kind of long-form writing any more; no one is remotely interested.

I think perhaps if I dumbed down the blog and put in lots of emoticons and marks out of ten and YouTube links and easy tenth-hand opinions it would be more popular; that’s the way it seems to work on the internet these days. Or maybe people just find my writing dull, monotonous, rambling and soporific; I really don’t know (cue hundreds of ILxors in fervent agreement with that). All I know is that I’m knocking myself out to put this thing together with no response, good or otherwise, and it is getting tiring talking to myself out there. It's not getting me any work or recognition, nor as far as I can see getting me anywhere.

Sorry if this is rambling and self-pitying; move on, nothing to see here, etc.

I am a dedicated follower of Then Play Long. Please continue.

It depends on how much time TPL is taking you compared to "real life", and if you can see a point in the future album charts where you think "Is there anything worthwhile I can say about 'No Parlez'?" I have been a huge fan of your writings for many years and have discovered music I love through your blogs (and I'm still trying to get my head around "Escalator..."). You are insightful, wise, making great links between songs and genre. Maybe you need to take a step back, have a break away and see who misses you. It may be more people than you think. But keep your head up, you should be proud of what you have done.

Seconded - I'm regretting not posting anything in the TPL comments boxes now but honestly all I'd be adding most of the time would be "Another great piece, please keep it up". A personal favourite was the entry for Wish You Were Here, it touched on so much outside the record itself, just a jot to read really. I'm also constantly impressed that you have something new to say about such well-worn albums (and by something new I mean something that changes the way you think about the music in question).

I guess the big problem is publicising the blog, there must be plenty of people who'd love to read TPL but who don't know it exists. I don't know how to get around that I'm afraid, I'm not too media-savvy.

I hardly ever leave comments, either. I almost feel like they'd be an impertinence! That said, I do have it in mind to provide an answer (of sorts) to the question left open on your latest post (Disco Fever) - hopefully at some length - but it will take a bit of drafting.

If you were a jollier/perkier/cuddlier/fluffier/more clubbable personality away from TPL, and if TPL encouraged the kind of comments box culture that you get on Freaky Trigger, then you'd probably win more readers. But you are who you are, and it is what it is, and it happens to be a very very fine thing indeed.

Happily the redoubtable Mark S emailed me off-board, and there are a few ideas that can be tossed around in terms of publicising the blog - I agree that's the main problem and I too am not media-savvy (or publicity-savvy) so I've no idea how to go about it.

I like the notion that it's this sort of samizdat underground blog that no one knows exists, but alas if drawn to its logical conclusion that would mean nobody would stumble on it and read it until maybe 2099!

In the long term I think - well, if I have to write about The Script for a third time rather than Dylan or the xx I'll have to take a step back and say, "do I really want still to be doing this in my old age?" Maybe keep going with TPL up to a point and then say, sorry folks, there's only so many ways I can write about eight gazillion Boyzone/Westlife albums, and do full-length posts only on selected entries while leaving the rest in one-liner limbo. I reckon probably more people would be interested to read what I had to say about e.g. Chznnel Orange rather than Newton Faulkner.

What it probably means, though, is that I've been working seven months straight since recovering from my stroke and I just need a good holiday.

haha mike, I am all of these things at one time or another, but not usually in the presence of fellow ILxors! I was thinking of closing down TPL comments, actually, as nothing seems to move forward with them, and I moderate all comments on a pretty hardcore level, it's true, but if you saw some of the stuff I get in my inbox from assorted spammers, trolls and general nutters and ingrates, you'd know why I don't publish them! I'd love to get "serious" comments, but I guess TPL doesn't have that playful/approachable aura about it and that in some part is deliberate since the blog isn't about what most of its readers think it's about (and I'm sort of slowly bringing that more to the fore now).

Some fine words over port in the Groucho Club, perhaps, but I can't take alcohol while I'm on Warfarin aargh!

Oh, I'm going to have a LOT of fun with No Parlez...

correction: CHANNEL Orange sigh

(several xposts so some of this overtaken by events!)

I hope TPL continues too - I read it regularly (and FWIW was one of the 113). OK, full disclosure: I hope you will continue at least until the end of the 70s. I think there really is a good story in the run of 70s #1 LPs that nobody - even Woebot, though I'm intrigued by his ebook; if only I was equally interested in owning a Kindle - has yet told, and which would make for a great book or ebook with (so far anyway) not too much editing required. Rather that than trying to capture the entire history of the chart in 500 word chunks please!

On the separate issue of "knocking myself out to put this thing together", as I've said elsewhere: take your time. Is it necessary to publish a new post every week? As an avid reader but with other things to do I can say that is actually hard to keep pace a lot of the time. The Sex Pistols entry on its own will take some weeks' digesting.

A few thoughts on the book thing from someone who isn't particularly a fan; I speak largely from a position of ignorance, so feel free to dismiss, but this is meant well and I hope some of it might be useful:

1. You're doing alright! Actually having things to say, and then being able to sit down and write them, probably seems like nowt to you but it's really really hard - lord knows I've been trying myself for long enough. You can do it in your sleep, which means your problem is just in directing it;

2. You've written one book. That's the ideal training for writing a better book;

3. Don't try to do everything pt I. I thought this was pertinent: "A galaxy of characters, ranging from Marty Wilde to Jay-Z via Glenn Gould, Dorothy Squires, Britney Spears, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Patrick Cargill, Orson Welles and many forgotten others, conspire to alter his perspective, leading to a climax where he is finally united with his wife and the world chooses a new and better leader. - I mean, I've read a ton of music books and I always want to read more but I would never read a book like that". You're not pulling in Britney Spears fans with that, you're putting them off. ILM might be full of people who like Spears and Stockhausen, but the world isn't;

4. Don't try to do everything pt II. You sound like you're trying to pour all of yourself into everything you write. But again, unless you're lucky enough to be an iconic figure, for the same reasons eventually you'll whittle your audience down to just yourself. Even John Lennon couldn't sell Two Virgins;

5. Of course you have an argument pt I. You might think you're just stream-of-consciousnessing as the charts stream past, but you're not - you have things you like, things you don't, trends you're identifying, etc. What's obscuring them is the format, and 'the album chart' itself isn't engaging enough a subject to do that for you;

6. Of course you have an argument pt II. People like arguments (and ultimately you want to entertain them), that's why the front page of every other newspaper is all 'fury' and 'outrage' over things that people don't actually care that much about. But if your format can't do that for you, change the format - cut it down to Led Zep albums, or key female albums, or the course of britpop, and there's a hook already doing some of your job for you.

I dunno, you can obviously do it, it's just a question of doing it better i.e. entertaining more people. You yourself might like it less, but that's life I guess.

It's probably obvious but I should've said: I'm not a fan for the same reasons as these hypothetical readers, basically. I'm not a huge enough fan of 'everything' to read a ramble, and I don't have the time to do my own editing. I'll be missing out on nuggets for sure - I remember one FT comment, I think about your dad getting ill, from memory from about the time of Ghost Town, that was an incredible bit of writing - but I can't sift a whole random-album blog for them.

That's not really a criticism as such; but I think it is reflective of a lot of readers - we need to be edited to from the first moment.

3. yes I know which is why I said upthread "I have to say I didn't write that blurb." Zero marketed it wrongly, there was potentially a huge market for it but they were more interested in shouty radical politicking. Nothing wrong with that if that's what you like but it's not really what I do.

5/6. not stream-of-consciousness and not a random-album blog either; everything is meticulously put in there for a reason. The blog isn't what it appears to be about, i.e. it's not a blog about UK number one albums, but that will slowly become clearer. By slowly I mean years so you'll have to have a lot of patience.

Also, sorry if I sound a bit K-Punk here but my blog is not there to entertain people and it is not my aim or wish to entertain.

("huh, no wonder no one wants to read you" etc.)

No, I appreciate that - but there's an obvious trade-off between that and wider appeal, and ultimately you have to pick where in that spectrum you want to be and be happy with the result.

As someone who's started several blogs over the years and abandoned all of them after about ten posts, I'm wondering if blogging ever feels 'satisfying'? Is it a continual struggle to be self-motivated, to actually make yourself sit down and do it?

(IK xp) Well, I think I'd prefer a few hundred people who "got" me to read it rather than 40,000 people who think it's Record Collector Magazine But With Number One Albums but I can't make a living out of the former and I couldn't live with myself if I did the latter. So you see the paradox. Basically it just needs decent publicising. I'm not advocating a barbed wire TRESPASSERS WILL policy but equally I don't want people reading it and thinking it's something other than what it is, since they are likely to be disappointed.

DY: good point and I need to think about that.

Fan of yours of many years, Marcello. When I think about influences on my own blogging habits, you're at the top of the list.

My view is the traditional one, i.e. if blogging becomes a chore rather than a pleasure, then stop it straightaway. I do feel satisfied when I've written and published a new TPL post; there's a definite feeling of "I've DONE something." When I did CoM it was because at the time it was the only thing I could do; I HAD to write that blog just to keep breathing. Wouldn't have met Lena and got married again and got my life back if I hadn't written it. Sounds over-dramatic, maybe, but that's the way it was. I don't know if I could read much of it now but at the time it was vital to me. Whereas I do have an agenda of sorts with TPL (which hasn't yet revealed itself, though it's there through all the individual essays) - but once I had got to what I wanted to say, would there be any point carrying on towards what I know is fundamentally going to be mediocrity, or face the challenge of writing challengingly about muck? Or just bring it to a natural close and do something else with my old age?

If you have a particular period where your point - whatever it may be - is made then that may be the time to stop, so you don't have to find something to say about Westlife. While there are interesting records at number one then there is still reason to write. I have no idea what the point is, all I know is your mix of personal and professional (for want of a better word) is intriguing and makes me want to read more, and investigate records I may have dismissed previously. Some of your most affecting writing has been in the most unexpected places and I personally can't wait to find out what your point is. I sound a right sycophant, sorry.