Ugly Truths

I dropped by the BK Author Marketing Workshop this morning to say hello to a number of BK authors. I arrived a bit early and saw Roosevelt Thomas, Martha Flynn, and our own Mike Crowley winding up their talk about how to attract attention in the marketplace and create vital communities. It takes a tremendous amount of work to do this sort of platform-building -- way more than most people realize. Their session reminded me of one of the hardest facts I have to relay to authors who submit their proposals to us -- that their work will not, by virtue of its own brilliance and insight, garner market attention and become a bestseller.

It's equally beautiful and frustrating to me that so many authors believe, with the sort of blind faith often reserved for religion, that somehow word shall spread about the book and people will be mysteriously drawn to it purely because of the value of its contents. The whole thing is all rather metaphysical, really, because it suggests some sort of collective consciousness that all humans are tapped into, and when one person sees brilliance, the rest will also know of it.

To be honest, I actually wish that this was the case and that this vast intellectual collective consciousness did exist. Then we wouldn't have Snooki Polizzi's so-called "memoir" burning up the New York Times bestseller lists while another hundred absolutely brilliant books continue to rot in a warehouse somewhere. You see, the consciousness knows what's good and what isn't, and the consciousness does not watch The Jersey Shore on MTV.