Sep 5 2006

Success is What You Make It…

Prior to investing $$$$$$ to promote Who Are You People? I thought about how I would know whether the investment was worth it. I’ve never had illusions of best-sellerdome (well, okay, maybe a little) so, I wasn’t exactly sure how I would measure success.

Well, the book’s been out a month, I’m still in the thick of promotion, and I can honestly say the promotional efforts have been worth it. Not because I’ve hit the NY Times bestseller list, and not because the royalty checks are suffocating me. (In reality, it’s likely to be quite awhile before the advance if paid back.)

Instead, I feel the promotion is working because I’m enjoying the heck out of this process.

I love talking to people about pigeon racers and furries and Grobanites and all the other kooky but normal people I met in my travels.

I love hearing stories about other fanatics – Godzilla fans, Deadheads, the Weird Al Yankovich obsessive, the guy with two Jambo Juice tattoes, the geologist whose favorite things are at least 25 million years old… oh, don’t get me started.

I’m starting to see opportunities to develop a speaking career around the subjects in the book – outsiderness, fanaticism, passion, the changing nature of American communities.

I’ve learned I can do live TV and radio and not pass out.

And, I know I’ve done everything I can to promote this three-year labor of love.

But the biggest reason I know the book has succeeded is because I’ve started to hear from people who’ve read the book and tell me it’s touched them in some way.

Money, media appearances and bestseller lists are all great – but none of them are the real reasons writers do this work. Really.

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Sep 4 2006

Shameless Self Promotion 101

When people ask what I’m doing to promote Who Are You People? I tell them, quite honestly, everything I can think of. And I mean it. Authors rarely get any substantial promotional support from publishers, so if a book is going to go anywhere, it will be because the author pushed it there.

So, what does “everything,” in promotional terms, really mean? It means:

1. Sending out complimentary copies and promotional postcards to all the major characters in the book and asking them – nicely, of course — to spread the word.

2. Mailing postcards to friends, family members, old college roommates, former students, other writers, and anyone who’s told you the book sounded interesting, including that guy you once met on a cramped Air Canada flight.

3. Developing a website.

4. Learning how to blog. Blogging. Reading other blogs. Getting lost in the blogosphere and reluctantly admitting to yourself that the whole blogging thing is far cooler than you had originally envisioned.

5. Establishing a My Space account, but only after being reassured that “lots of other older people” have one.

6. Hiring a publicist (One Potata Productions) to conduct a national radio and television campaign, a local media campaign, and a multi-city radio “tour.” (This is after you interview 12 publicists, who quote you prices ranging from $3,000 to $30,000.)

7. Squealing like a 10-year-old when you land your first national media interview… on NPR!

8. Staying up all night before the NPR interview thinking of every possible way you will manage to inadvertently sound like a dork.

9. Staying up the night after the NPR interview celebrating the fact that Lianne Hansen actually liked your book. (You’ll come to refer to this as your Sally Field moment. She likes you… she really, really likes you.)

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Sep 2 2006

Writing About Real People

Who Are You People? is about ordinary folks in America and the charming oddball things they do in pursuit of happiness.

I studied pigeon racers in the Bronx and learned how to motivate a pigeon, which is too involved to get into here but let’s just say it involves sex.

I went stormchasing in Kansas and learned about Supercell Deprivation Syndrome, a malady that affects storm chasers in the winter months when tornadoes are not present. The condition gets so bad some chasers will watch the water draining down the toilet just to see a cyclone.

I hung out with a group of Grobanites in Texas and learned… what’s that? You don’t know what a Grobanite is? A Grobanite is a die-hard fan of the singer Josh Groban who follows him from concert to concert. Think Deadheads, but more menopausal. I learned that Grobanites are prone Grobanian slips, suffer from Joshmares, become scatterjoshed, and are seized by Joshfright when they finally get a chance to meet their idol. Older fans take Joshtrogen, and younger fans believe he is drop-dead gor-josh.

The Grobanites and stormchasers and pigeon racers and everyone else I wrote about were real in that quirky, honest, human way people have when they are not trying to impress others. Which also meant that they weren’t used to dealing with journalists or reading about themselves in print.

For this reason, I felt a responsibility to let the major characters in the book know ahead of time what I was going to write about them. Not so they could edit it, but so they could be prepared. (Also, I wanted to fact-check myself.) Most people in the book were extremely gracious and thankful that I’d thought to call them.

With one exception.

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Sep 1 2006

An Author in the Thick of It…

While Kevin is enjoying the long Labor Day weekend, I’ve agreed to step in and keep Collected Miscellany humming. So who the heck am I? My name is Shari Caudron and I’m the author of a book called Who Are You People? The book is about my three-year, cross-country journey to understand passionate fanatics such as furries and Star Wars fans and stormchasers and pigeon racers. It’s been on bookstores shelves — pant, pant — less than a month.

Over the next few days, I’ll be giving you a glimpse inside the tilt-o-wheel world of a new book author. I’ll talk about what it’s like writing about real people (as opposed to “fake” people like celebs or politicians); the reality of the author’s role in book promotion (hint: it involves $$$$$$); how freakish friends become when suddenly you have a book on the shelves; and other, well, miscellany, related to writing, publishing and promotion.

But before we get to all that, I wanted to give you a better sense of who I am and why I wrote the book. Here’s an excerpt from the introductory chapter called “Topless in the Woods:”

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