Anti-Saturation: Are Independents Their Own Worst Enemy?
I’m in the kitchen at the café, scraping the detritus of some asshole customer’s food into the bin and the radio starts playing that song I can’t stand. I suddenly can’t tell what I hate more: the fact that I just stuck my finger into a pile of half-eaten and probably now disease-carrying scrambled eggs, or that skin-melting noise pollution accompanied by vapid words. Later, I am in a dark club with my mates and the floor is sticky and lit only by pools of flashing light and my pint cost me less than £2 and the DJ starts playing something I recognise. I’m halfway through choking out the lyrics to the second verse, thinking if I know it then it must be good, before I realise it’s the same song I heard in the kitchen. It’s not always the booze that does this. It’s the drugged state of familiarity that overtakes my genuine disgust.
I have just started riding the London tube, which has the greatest saturation of book advertisement that I have ever seen. Most stops have posters for two different titles, sometimes three or four, with huge book covers and then a couple of endorsements thrown over the top like ‘international Twitter sensation’ and ‘most shocking thing since I threw your mother under a train’. I see these posters every day and have no strong reaction to them as I slide past on my way to work, but when I actually consider each title, I do a mental sneer and decide that I won’t buy that book. And when I wondered about why this might be, I started to worry about the implications of holding such an attitude.
Would you buy a book you saw on a billboard? The medium screams of mass-production, which in turn seems to cheapen something’s cultural value. I know not many people will admit to the fact that liking books that other people haven’t heard of is like being in a club where you get a membership card – it drips of desirable exclusivity – because as readers and producers of literature we should all be wanting to get good literature to those who don’t currently classify themselves as ‘book people’.
But isn’t this the underlying principle I’m adhering to if I scoff at a book that’s got a massive poster with tag lines written by famous people all over it? And by extension, don’t I want books to remain something only experienced by a select and worthy few, who have discerning taste built into them like the perforations in toilet paper?
Pretend for a moment you are a small publishing house, or the publisher of a small independent journal that is mostly reliant on grant money, and you suddenly come into a whole lot of cash with no spending guidelines. Would you spend it on making twenty billboards and an intense marketing campaign for your latest release that could potentially boost your readership numbers in the long term, or would you put it towards a hardback print run or a full-colour photography essay?
Are a lot of independents shooting themselves in the foot because of an underlying assumption that production will always be more important than marketing? One should not come at the expense of the other. Both from my own attitude and the attitude of a significant number of people I have met in the publishing industry, expansion doesn’t seem to be desirable thing for independents.
So my question is this: is it lack of funding that serves to hold back independent publishers from having a larger market presence, or is it an attitude of elitism?
Because, let’s face it, these posters probably will boost sales of the book. Maybe I’ll scorn the poster on the tube, and later see the same title in a bookshop and remember the cover, but not remember where from. Maybe I’ll think it was from a book review website. Maybe I’ll think the endorsements on the cover are all true. Maybe I’ll have a false memory about hearing that it is the next ‘Catcher In The Rye’. Just like the song that I hate but then find myself singing along to at a club, the familiarity is often enough to make something endearing. And that’s probably not something any book producer should sneer at if they seriously want to increase their readership.
Great title! Great post! Would I buy a book I saw on a billboard? Yes. But I’m not ashamed to say I read ‘popular’ books.
I think you raise an interesting but complicated point here. A lot of indies do get caught up in the fact that production is more important than marketing. I know when I started with Vignette Press it was because I love books and writing, not because I was a sales and marketing guru, and I’d guess that most people who get into indie pub do it for the same reason. That’s not inherently bad, of course, but it makes being commercially competitive difficult.
I also agree that there is a kind of snobbery around indie publishing, that pretension you speak of above, the idea that indie pub = literary. Actually, a lot of the more successful indie publishers aren’t literary – think horror, sci-fi, and romance publishers here. And maybe that’s because, as you say, they probably wouldn’t spend an influx of cash on a photographic essay. Also, they probably don’t get funded the way a literary journal would, because genre is seen as ‘unimportant’ and therefore probably have more imperative to figure out how to be commercially viable than a lit journal.
To your point about the billboard, I don’t think it would work for indies, even if the hypothetical funds became available. Marketing needs to be tied to distribution, and there is simply no point of doing large-scale mainstream ads if your product isn’t available in a large-scale, mainstream way. If your journal or whatever has a print run of 400-1000, then the marketing should be niche and targeted to whoever you think your potential audience is. Thinking in a business-minded way is important to the success of indie publishers. That said, not all indie publishing should be commercial, in my opinion. I love that there are people out there giving things a shot, trying new things, and if their journals or presses fold after one or two issues, who cares? At least it has contributed something to the culture and they have probably had an amazing experience along the way as well. If I can use the garage band analogy, just because 90% of garage bands won’t go on to make a number one hit, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t start one.
Your point about marketing non-mainstream in a non-mainstream way isn’t something I had considered. Print run vs advertising strategy is a good thing to think about. In which case, I guess successful marketing is about being visible in the right places, and maybe the tube isn’t the right sort of visibility for a lot of indies. So then what is? I sincerely doubt the effectiveness of merely plugging each others books at events. I’ve always liked the idea of graffiti as a way to promote books… something big and public, but also edgy and sort of counter-culture.
The garage band analogy is a good one, and I don’t think that flash-in-the-pan publishing houses and literary journals are inherently a bad thing. But surely our ambitions shouldn’t end there, with three books and two editions of a journal, shrugging our shoulders saying ‘we had a good run, but who are we kidding. We can’t compete.’ I believe so strongly that the products of a lot independent publishing houses deserve to be seen, and it kills me to see them go bust and have the talent and experience dissolve into the bargain bins of Borders. It doesn’t negate their value, but it’s sort of like building a beautiful sandcastle and then having the waves wash it away. Another is built in its place just so the same thing can happen. I’d like to see something beautiful built of tougher stuff.
Good points, and I suspect these are questions that are always going to plague small journals.
Thanks, Ralph. I read your interview on the ‘Another Lost Shark’ blog from last year, and I’m interested to see that you mentioned you would go the way of the web journal if you were to start a new project now. I’d be keen to know your reasons behind this. Have you discussed it somewhere on your blog?
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