Steven Pressfield Online

Here’s a post from 2014 that has resonated with many of my book marketing friends. A number of them now use it to explain to their clients why and when it’s best to let their book go and move on to their next project…

The sum total of my twenty-two years of experience in book publishing comes down to the number 10,000.

What is a book publisher’s job?

Is it to get a writer on The Today Show?

Is it to buy a full-page four-color advertisement on the back page of The New York Times Arts and Leisure section?

Is it to make sure a book is on the front table of Barnes & Noble for its first two weeks on sale?

Is it to entertain every cockamamie marketing idea an author has…Why don’t we have an ice cream social in Times Square to promote my book about William Howard Taft?

I’ve contemplated all of these tactics over the years as an editor at the major book publishers, an independent book publisher, as an agent and even as an author for a Big Five publisher myself.

What I’ve concluded is that a book publisher’s job is to get 10,000 people to try the book.

Ideally, those readers will give their full attention to at least its first paragraph. If they like what they’ve read, they’ll read the second paragraph…and so on.

That’s it. Get the book to 10,000 people who will sincerely give it a try.

I know, this pronouncement seems glib and just more headline fodder for Buzzfeed, but think about it.

There are three major trade book-reading generations in the United States today.

1. The Baby Boomers (75 million)

2. Generation X (50 million), and

3. Generation Y (75 million).

More >>

Posted in What It Takes
24 Comments

Writing Wednesdays

An American Jew for Christmas

By Shawn Coyne | Published: December 2, 2015

How do you sell your soul?

Isn’t this a strange question?

I mean we’ve been taught that Artists don’t sell their souls. They keep their inner self-actualization struggles to themselves and let their work speak for them.

Faust sold his soul and that didn’t turn out so well (at least until Goethe made that evergreen Story/Myth his own).

So an artist should avoid putting his/her innermost thoughts up for sale at all cost. Or their blasphemous opening of their internal kimono will lead as Joe Strummer of The Clash so succinctly sang, “straight to Hell.”

Instead, it’s best to write around what you think and feel about your life’s work and why you’ve been compelled to do it. Don’t explicitly express those thoughts and emotions. And God forbid, whatever you do, don’t be so arrogant as to put a retail cover price on them.

Am I right?

This dilemma–to report or not report the internal war–is the seasoned artist’s primary bugaboo.

And it’s the reason why, for the first time, Steve Pressfield is not the author of today’s Writing Wednesdays column.

More >>

Posted in Writing Wednesdays | 18 Comments

Writing Wednesdays

Boiling A Frog

By Steven Pressfield | Published: November 25, 2015

With notable exceptions, just about any story that hopes to produce a powerful impact must build to a climax that strains everyday credulity. An astronaut makes it back safely from Mars, a seventy-year-old male intern saves a hip young female CEO, an outcast high school girl named Carrie immolates her tormenters with her telekinetic powers.