Going After Publicity for Your (small, precious) Book

So you've got a novel coming out? If you are with one of the Big Five publishers - Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, or Hachette - there will be a publicity machine at work for you. Your editor, or the publicity department, will let you know what they want your role to be. They may ask you to update your website, open social media accounts, or to provide a mailing list of friends, family, and fans.

If you are with a smaller press, say a university press or a small independent publisher - you should inquire, when you are offered a contract, what your role will be in gaining publicity for your book. Most small presses welcome your involvement and will be delighted if you submit your work to reviewers, arrange for readings and signings on your own, and so forth. But check! You do not want to overstep, duplicate their efforts, or - eek - embarrass your publisher.

I'm not familiar with every aspect of self-publishing, but I'd imagine the tips I'm about to offer will apply nicely to self-published authors as well.

If you are about to release a book, be reachable via a website. The primary purpose of publicity is to sell your book, and the secondary purpose is to get your name out there so that you can be contacted by fans, publishers, agents, and sponsors of events and projects you may find appealing.

Your website can be extremely simple - your name, your picture, your book cover, a release date, and a contact form so people can reach you (don't post your personal email address). A fuller website with lots of pictures and info about all of your publications is better, but at least have the minimum. You can hire someone to do a bang-up website, but that costs. Or you can do it yourself, nearly for free. My website is perpetually under construction and is never up-to-date, so don't come at me after you take a peek - but the point is I am findable. I do get a lot of spam. I also get fan letters, invitations to paid speaking engagements, requests for interviews, offers to contribute to journals and anthologies, and - since my novel-in-stories It's Not Even Past was orphaned last year when the publisher closed - inquiries from publishers.

You need some kind of social media. Something. Facebook has developed a reputation for being mostly for seniors, but their largest demographic (worldwide) is actually young adults 25 - 35. So you can reach young readers with a facebook page (and paid ads, if you want to go that route). But don't be too quick to write off the oldsters, either - seniors buy a lot of books! If you are already on Facebook, open a separate author page you are comfortable setting to "public." Keep this page for business. No pictures of lunch, cats, craft cocktails, precocious toddlers, thrifting expeditions or politics - unless applicable to your book.

Yes, cute. No, website.

A lot of writers promote their work on Instagram. Since the mass exodus from X (formerly Twitter), many use Threads. Bluesky is also popular. My advice is go to the websites of authors you like and admire, whose work is in some way similar to your own, and see what social media platforms they use. If you are new to all this, choose one - you don't have time to manage them all. (If you have that much time on your hands, you should spend more of it writing.)

Reviews on Goodreads and Amazon can be critical to a book's success. They are primary platforms for "book discovery." However, these platforms can be frustrating. Trolls may give your books bad reviews just for fun, or because they don't like you. If you do see negative reviews of your work - legit or troll-generated - ignore them. Remember the adage Never wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

Next up: go after publicity opportunities, large and small. Ask friends and family to help spread the word about your book by putting the book cover on their social media, and by mentioning it to their book club, local librarian, and local bookstore. Include a purchase link to make it easy for them to buy your book! Consider pushing your publisher's site and bookshop.org, which allows readers to purchase online while supporting local bookstores!

If you live in L.A. or New York, it's nearly impossible to get a reading or signing at a bookstore - there are just so many writers, most more famous than you (or I). But if you live in a smaller city or town, you've got a good shot. Walk into bookstores and greet the manager. Buy a book. Tell them you're available for a signing or a reading and that you can "fill the room." If you have a friend in college, ask them to mention your book to their English professor. But don't put people on the spot - ask once, and take no - or no answer - for an answer. No everyone will want to read your book, and not everyone who does read it will enjoy it. That's life.

Your college alumni newsletter is a great place to publicize your work. Your local newspaper editor might be interested, too. Again, highly unlikely if you live in New York or LA, but far more promising if you live in Smallburg, North Dakota or Tiny Town, Georgia. Ask!

Your publisher should provide you with ARCs, or "Advance Review Copies." These are typically electronic (PDF or epub). Some publishers will also provide hard copies, but these are expensive and must be distributed judiciously. Electronic ARCs increase the likelihood that your work will be "pirated" – that is, circulated to unauthorized readers for free… but there are worse things. No one wants to be pirated, but the truth is all circulation builds word of mouth and it could result in your finding paying readers. It's important that you discuss distribution of ARCs with your publisher. They may have a do and don't list to help control unauthorized access.

These days, when writers talk about "reviews," they are often referring to individual reader reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, or on reviewer platforms like NetGalley or Booksprout. But "real" reviews - those written by professionals that appear in journals and newspapers - are the Holy Grail, and you should go after them. Thirteen million people read The New York Times each day. You probably won't get reviewed there. But a small-town newspaper, even a freebie, can easily have 5,000 daily readers, up to as many as 13,000. That's a lot of potential to sell books!

Think about books you like that are similar in some way (e.g. genre) to your own. Figure out where the books have been reviewed using your good friend google. Then contact the reviewer and ask if you can send them an ARC. Nota Bene: the more prestigious the periodical, as a rule, the earlier they want your ARCs. Many will request them four or five months ahead of publication, and your small publisher simply may not have them ready that far in advance. Wing it! If an editor agrees to read an ARC, send them a meticulously edited PDF - along with information like release date, cover price, ISBN, and whether bookstores will carry your book.

Your publisher will probably ask you for an email list - and even if not, you should have one for your own use. Way, way ahead of time, prepare a list of every single person you know who might conceivably be interested in you or your book. Have names and email addresses current, proofread and up to date. Be sure there is a purchase link (preferably, a pre-purchase link) included so that people can order your book on impulse, while they are thinking of it. If you end up sending out the email yourself, include a request that readers review you on Amazon or Goodreads.

Go after the little guys - and the medium-sized guys, too. Before It's Not Even Past was released, I hit up everyone I could think of to run a review or at least a mention. A lot of folks ignored my request, a few said no - and quite a few said yes! My alma mater asked me to teach a class. Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (where many of the stories first appeared) invited me to blog for Something Is Going to Happen. Art Taylor asked me to blog for The First Two Pages, too! Dru's Book Musing ran a cover reveal and A Day in the Life feature, Victoria Leigh reviewed, and Roger Johns ran an interview on Murder Books.

Paul O'Connor interviewed me for Hourglass Author, and Bonnar Spring invited me to an interview on Crime Wave Podcast (mine aired right after Anthony Horowitz's!). And there were more.

John Loyd posted a comprehensive review of the collection. Book blogger Anne Van Doorn ran a terrific review, and Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier included It's Not Even Past in a round-up of crime short story collections published on Crime Reads. Jeremy Black of The Critic accepted a review copy and gave it a stellar review! Then he passed the book along to David Brown, a book blogger who loves mysteries, and David ran a review and invited me to an interview!

Janet Rudolph of The Mystery Readers Journal offered me a spot in Mystery Fanfare, and King's River Life, a magazine that really supports mystery writers, told me they no longer run reviews of collections – but asked me to do a guest blog! Crime Fiction Lover ran a nice mention, and Killer Nashville and International Thriller Writers both invited me to contribute to their journals! Some of these outlets are small and some are huge. But they all have readers who love mysteries and buy books, and I went after every single opportunity I could. And then…

Down&Out Books closed and my book went out of print, right after it was released. So all that work was a big waste of time, right?

No! Decidedly not! Because a couple of months later, I got an email from a guy who'd tracked me down via my website. He had heard about the book but couldn't find a copy online (of course). Seemed like a nice guy, so I offered to sell him one of the six remaining author copies I'd been hoarding for posterity. That night, I sat bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night, struck by an epiphany. Doug Greene. Douglas Greene. I know that name.

Sure enough. Mr. Greene is the (semi-retired) founder of Crippen&Landru, a highly respected publisher of mystery collections, classic and contemporary. And he loved my book! I asked him to put in a good word for me with the editor-in-chief, Jeff Marks, and a couple of weeks later, we had a deal! Crippen & Landru will release It's Not Even Past with a new cover and a new introduction in October, and are currently negotiating foreign rights for the book on my behalf! They'll release a second collection, They Look Like Angels, early in the new year. This happy ending would absolutely not have happened had I not gone all out to get publicity for my book. That is how Doug Greene found me, and it's how the foreign publishers found me, too.

Christian Gibson's cover!

So you spent a year – maybe more – writing your book, and you worked hard to get it out to potential publishers. Now spend some time ensuring that your book reaches the fullest complement of readers possible! Good luck!

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Anna Scotti is delighted to have the next in her "librarian-on-the-run" series, When Bright Angels Beckon, included in the 85th anniversary issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (September-October '26), along with a personal essay, Sisters Reading Sisters. Bright Angels is the thirteenth story in the librarian series, and the eleventh to appear in EQMM. The next in the series, I Shall Wear Purple, will appear in an upcoming issue. Learn more at AnnaKScotti.com . Purchase It's Not Even Past direct from the publisher, at your local bookstore, or online. It will be available from bookshop.org soon!

Everyone - Big Five kahunas, small press authors, self-published writers and "gettin' there" authors - is invited to post comments, questions, corrections and additions in the comments. Please do!

Hammett in Celuloid

Readers of this blog may well recall that, like many of denizen of the SleuthSayers rotation (Eve Fisher, Rob Lopresti, Joseph S. Walker, Art Taylor, just to name a few), I am a long-time member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. And since our writing ideas can come from just about anywhere, it should come as no surprise to the savvy crew who constitute the Sleuthsayers readership that I get some of my best writing ideas from the SMFS email list.

Today's blog entry represents one of those times.

A thread about stories with great final lines begun, I think, by our own Rob Lopresti, morphed into another SMFSer (Bobbi Chukran) weighing in about finding a TV adaptation of Hammett's novel The Dain Curse available on both Amazon Prime TV and in abbreviated form on YouTube.

Yeah, this was NOT good.

As an unapologetic fanboy of the works of Samuel Dashiell Hammett, I am, of course, familiar with The Dain Curse (far and away the consensus choice among Hammett fans as his worst novel. I recently re-read it, and was reminded all over again how inferior it was to the rest of Hammett's canon. Of course, when you're comparing any novel to the likes of Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and The Glass Key, odds are it will definitely tend to suffer by comparison.), and with the 1970s James Coburn fronted TV project referred to above.

And it got me thinking.

Linking to any number of existing Hammett adaptations which have made it to the big or small screen might be a helpful guide for our readers who enjoy films based on great (or in the case of The Dain Curse, not-so-great) crime fiction.

I mean, the nameless Continental Op acquires a name, and that name is "Hamilton Nash." Not even a tough guy like James Coburn could do much saddled with a mouthful like that.

Well look no further! Full disclosure, there is a lot to this subject, so I will be breaking my post on it up into two entries. 

The Adaptations

Every one of Hammett's five novels has been made into a movie (or in the case of The Dain Curse, a three-hour miniseries, I think? I was twelve the first time I watched it, back in the '70s) at least once. And that makes sense. After all, with every one of his novels, Hammett practically invented a subgenre of the crime fiction milieu: 

Red Harvest: The "Town Tamer" novel.

The Dain Curse: The "Psychological Suspense" novel.

The Glass Key: The "Machine Politics/Public Corruption" novel.

The Maltese Falcon: The "First True P.I." novel (Carrol John Daly fans be damned!).

The Thin Man: The "Crime Novel as Comedy of Manners."

But what about Hammett's short stories?

Hammett cut his teeth writing short stories in an age (the 1920s) where periodicals were constantly on the look-out for content and actually paid well (Ah, the Good Old Days!), and he quickly distinguished himself as a master of the form. Stories such as "The Tenth Clew," "The Gutting of Couffignal," "The House in Turk Street," and its sort-of sequel, "The Girl With the Silver Eyes," "The Scorched Face," and "Dead Yellow Women" made both a name and fair amount of money for Hammett before he turned his hand to writing novels full-time.

And one of his absolute best stories, "Flypaper," was actually made into an episode of a SHOWTIME anthology series of noir stories entitled, "Fallen Angels" in 1994. Christopher Lloyd starred as Hammett's famous nameless detective "The Continental Op" (an "operative" for the "Continental Detective Agency," a thinly-veiled fictional version of the Pinkerton Agency Hammett himself had worked for). The supporting cast is great, too: Michael Rooker, Peter Berg (before he gave up acting for directing) and the always wonderful Laura San Giacomo.

The best part? You can watch all 29 minutes of it here, for free, on YouTube. And it is well worth your time!

Okay, now for the novels!

First there's Red Harvest, Hammett's first novel, serialized in Black Mask magazine as four related novelettes before its publication in 1929.

There are several terrific adaptations of this novel, none of them under its actual name, although the incomparable Megan Abbott is reportedly working on a screenplay for a new adaptation with Scott Frank (responsible for a lot of great stuff coming out of Hollywood, not least the script for the film adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Out of Sight  and the terrific Monsieur Spade). You can read more about their collaboration here.

The first of these is Akira Kurosawa's 1961 masterpiece: Yojimbo. It stars Toshiro Mifune as a masterless samurai in Medieval Japan, and follows the central premise of Hammett's novel (the Continental Op subverting expectations and manipulating competing factions in the town he's just arrived in, setting them up to take each other out). You can watch it here. It is well worth your time!

Up next is Sergio Leone's 1964 spaghetti western, A Fistful of Dollars, shot in Spain, with a largely Italian cast, it made Clint Eastwood a star (Leone is reported to have said of Eastwood's acting, "He has two expressions: 'hat on,' and 'hat off.'" That tracks.). It's nothing short of a shot-for-shot remake of Yojimbo. So not a direct adaptation of Red Harvest, but rather an outright theft of Kurosawa's adaptation. Kurosawa himself said in a letter to Leone not long after the film's release: ‘I’ve seen your movie. It’s a very good movie. Unfortunately, it’s my movie.'"

Did he really NEED to act?

Still an enjoyable movie. And you can, of course, catch it from any number of streaming services, including here.

Nearly forgotten these days is the great Walter Hill's take on the Hammett novel: 1996's Last Man Standing, starring Bruce Willis. It gives Kurosawa a writing credit, and yet is set in the same period as Hammett's book (the 1920s), with the location is moved from the frontier mining towns of Montana to the Texas Borderlands. Willis does a great job, it's full of action, and features solid performances all around, especially from Christopher Walken as the film's Big Bad. And he is (unsurprisingly) scary. You can find it lots of places, especially here.

It's Walter Hill, and it's Bruce Willis and it's Christopher Walken (And did I mention William Sanderson and Bruce Dern, too?), so it is also well worth your time!

And the final entry for this week's post is an early '80s entry very much in the vein of the aforementioned Monsieur Spade. A fictional take on the life of Hammett during the early years of his writing career, it's titled simply Hammett. Directed by Wim Wenders and the immortal Francis Ford Coppola from a script written in part by mystery writer and Hammett Scholar Joe Gores! Furthermore, it features the always watchable Frederick Forrest (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Hammett) in the title role.

The resemblance really is uncanny.

As if this wasn't enough, this film features the great Peter Boyle as the detective Hammett used as the inspiration for the Continental Op. Boyle is, as always, fantastic. As is Marilu Henner as Hammett's "inspirational" librarian neighbor. Fans of Hammett's work will find all manner of easter eggs in this one.

Definitely worth your time!

And the best part? It's available for free on YouTube. You can watch it here!

That's it for me this go-round. Next time we'll finish walking through the film adaptations of Hammett's work. See you in two weeks!

And the Derringer Goes To…

As you may have already learned, Murder, Neat: A SleuthSayers Anthology (Level Short, 2024), which I co-edited with Barb Goffman, earlier this month received the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s inaugural Derringer Award for Best Anthology.

Unlike some of my colleagues, I don’t view an anthology award as an editor’s award; I think of it as similar to the Academy Award for Best Picture, in that it requires the work of an entire team of people—editors and writers, primarily, but the publisher as well—to succeed.

In the case of Murder, Neat, we had quite a team. SleuthSayers, as a group, selected the theme, and Paul Marks had barely begun work as the original editor before illness sidelined him. Barb and I stepped in, solicited and selected stories, and worked with all the contributors to create the final manuscript.

We were working without a net. There was no publisher attached to the project—the first and only time I’ve edited an anthology on spec!—and we pitched the finished manuscript to a handful of publishers.

Verena Rose and Shawn Reilly Simmons of Level Best Books stepped up, and Murder, Neat launched Level Short, the publisher’s new imprint specifically for anthologies.

The end result, as we recently learned, is an award-winning anthology.

So, thanks to my fellow SleuthSayers for all you did to make our group’s first anthology a success!

SLEUTHFEST AND SHORTCON

A hurricane postponed last year’s SleuthFest in St. Petersburg, Florida, and the conference was rescheduled to May 15-18. At 4:00 p.m. Thursday, I’ll present “Writing Short: How to establish and maintain a long-term career as a writer of short crime fiction.” This is a variation of my presentation at last year’s ShortCon, and I provide invaluable information about the business side of writing and publishing short stories.

Speaking of ShortCon, the one-day conference for writers of short mystery fiction returns Saturday, June 7, for its sophomore outing at Elaine’s in Alexandria, Virginia. In addition to presentations by SJ Rozan (“Short Fiction—What’s the Point?”) and Jeffrey Marks (“Crafting Your First Collection”), I’ll present “Writing for Anthologies: How to Slip Between the Covers” and Stacy Woodson will lead an end-of-day panel discussion with all the presenters. ShortCon is limited to 50 attendees and was approaching sellout the last time I saw the registration numbers, so register now if you wish to attend.

Ngrams, or How to Be Groovy in 1864.

 Let's get a bit convoluted, shall we? Last month on the Short Mystery Fiction Society* list Judy Penz Sheluk pointed to a blog piece she wrote about a webinar Iona Whishaw gave.  Her subject was Ngrams.  According to Wikipedia "an n-gram (sometimes also called Q-gram) is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sample of text or speech."

And what the hell does that mean, you may ask. Take a look at the diagram below.  This is an ngram of Google books showing how often the terms crime fiction, detective fiction, mystery fiction, and noir fiction showed up in each year.  More accurately, it indicates what percentage of pairs of words published in a given year consists of the pair you are looking for.  So detective fiction was the most popular term until 2011 when crime fiction surpassed it.  I would have guessed that happened decades earlier.

Pretty cool?  But wait: we are just starting.  Not visible at the bottom of the screen is the fact that you can look up all the books (magazines, law codes, etc.) that contain your phrase in a given year or time period.

If you are writing historical fiction you have just acquired an amazing new tool, thanks to Sheluk and Wishaw.

 I wrote a story earlier this year set in 1967 and I used the word groovy.  So let's see how that word does in the ngram world.  The diagram below shows the word was very popular in 1967, although it peaked in 1970.

But wait - why do we see that huge jump around 2010?  A quick click on the 2009-2011 button reveals a programming language called Groovy. And sure enough, if we make the ngram case sensitive Groovy becomes briefly more popular than its lower case sibling.

But I learned something even weirder. Groovy was being used long before the flower children's parents were even born. I found this quotation from the Saturday Review, January 1864: "For a groovy parent trains a groovy child, and the groovy child must be father of a groovy man."

How hip those Victorian English dudes were, you may be saying. Alas, the anonymous writer did not mean it as a compliment. He was talking about being stuck in a rut, thinking inside the box. Very much not groovy.

I am also writing a story set in 1959 and one of the characters is socially awkward, has certain verbal tics, and can do amazing mathematical feats in his head. Today most of us amateur diagnosticians would say "he's on the autistic spectrum." But would anyone have used that term sixty years ago? We can go to ngrams again, but this reveals a weakness of the tool.

Because when I search for uses before 1960 I find publications that supposedly have that date, but were really published later.  There is a 1992 edition, for example, of a psychiatric manual which was first published in the 1950s, and Google Books can't spot the difference.  There is a similar problem with journals that were founded a long time ago.  (HathiTrust, another great free tool for historical sources, suffers from the same limitation.)

On the other hand... A few weeks ago Leigh wrote a fascinating piece here about words and concepts that started in the 1980s.  His source claimed that "eggs benedict" wasn't given that name until 1984.  Google Books Ngrams quickly found it in a  the Hotel St. Francis Cookbook, 1919 edition.

And now I'm hungry.  But before I head to the fridge, much thanks to Judy Penz Sheluk and Iona Wishaw for pointing out this cool tool.  You can play around with the Google Books ngram viewer here.

*I am the Society's current president and I hereby invite you to join.  It's free but new memberships are not accepted between January 1- May 1, so hop to it here.