Along with the high review marks for the book (22 total to date — 3 four-stars, 19 five-stars), a steady stream of books are sold daily on Amazon. I can only hope it will all continue. I will get a bad review at some point; it’s inevitable. I cringe at the thought-- a friend told me his wife hated it because she thought it was too graphic and sexist, but that she couldn’t put it down. She read it in two days. That would make a great first bad review — “I hated this book but I must admit I could not put it down.” You know your work is engaging when you get a response like that.
Myspace has been helping the book, too. I’ve jumped from seventy friends to well over a hundred after people started to read the book. A line from the book, “Tomorrow is not another day. Tomorrow is today’s backup plan,” is being used by a few people on the site as their catchphrase. Many are naming the book in their “Books” column. The book has also shown up on magazine message boards, like Cosmopolitan. Finally, readers have begun emailing me their dating questions.
It’s all been amazing, unexpected, and I hope it continues for a long time, snowballing more and more into a giant avalanche. The goal is to entertain and offer the advice I can; to do that, I need to reach people.
My target crowd is college students. They stand to enjoy the stories the most and gain the most knowledge from them, at a time when they have the opportunity to meet many people from the opposite sex and explore their likes and dislikes; a time when they can learn the most about themselves and those around them. I definitely wish someone had given me this book back in college. To that end, I worked and continue to work to get the book into key college resources. Fellow authors Streeter Seidell and Sarah Schneider of the immensely popular CollegeHumor website read the book and gave me a great quote for the back cover in the next print run. Author Harlan Cohen, of the popular Help Me, Harlan, recently read it as well and I will be getting a quote for the back from him, too.
A Bigger Publisher And More Marketing
Wider distribution is a factor now. What about getting the book to other countries? Translated into other languages? While many stores stock the book, Borders does not; Firefly Glow Publishing is simply too small for them to warrant giving the book their own special number, which they need to do in order to stock the book. We’ve had numerous Borders contact us for copies of the book, as well as order information. We hope they will assign it a number soon but don’t know when that will occur. The irony is that with the success on Amazon, we have money to put up posters in major bookstores. Barnes & Noble won’t put up posters that aren’t made in-house. Borders will but, of course, not for books they have not assigned a number. Gotta love that irony, eh? The plan is to put up posters in Borders referring people to B&N.
Article comments
1 - Marco
Wow. Great stuff. I am one of the readers who has been talking about Ian's book everywhere I can. In fact, I got kicked off a dating message board because they thought I was spamming! I have been following this interview along as he put up the links on his site.
I'm not a writer or a blogger, but I am an avid reader. I live in OH but have been on consulting assignment in Chicago, where I heard about Ian's book because as Simon points out, he is marketing it everywhere. I had no idea what authors go thru and applaud you all for doing it. Without you, there would be nothing for people like me to read! I found the comments about publishers and authors being responsible for the decline in literature to be very interesting and make sense. It is getting harder and harder to find good books. More and more they are just about marketing. For instance, I recently read "The Average American Male" which is just horrible and its publisher spent over $10,000 to market it with videos on YouTube. Ian's book is so much better and along the same genre. $10,000 for it could really make it take off. Yet, it goes unread and unconsidered by such a big publisher or they wanted it changed to the crappy book they are pushing.
I hope that "God is a Woman: Dating Disasters" does very well. We should all get copies, if for no other reason than to show publishers this IS a book people want and IS what readers want to read. Maybe it could do for books what independent film as done for movies. If it wasn't for independent film, all movies would be "White Chicks" now; the big places only make good films because of the pressure from small films to compete with them for awards.
Thank you both Simon and Ian for the insight. I want you to know I'm doing my part; I just talked my friends into buying a bunch of copies off Amazon for their bachelor and bachelorette parties! Thank you to all authors and aspiring ones for your hardwork. Lord knows I couldn't take punches like these.