I got a book deal from Penguin in the fall and my agent called me a few weeks ago with a question.
It’s not unusual for publishers (especially ones that are publishing very popular books) to be interested in putting out a book that they think will sell well, but it’s a very tricky thing to do. Publishers have to know that the book itself is of high quality, and that the publisher is going to be able to get a good deal on it. And one of the things that publishers look at is whether the book will help to sell the publisher’s other books.
Many publishers are willing to put out a book that they think will sell well, but they are worried that they will have to make it a “spin.” They know they will have to give up royalties and potentially have to put out a book that is more of a vanity book. A spin is basically a way to take a book’s sales on a particular date, and then sell it to another publisher. Usually a spin is for a book that is about an established author.
A spin is different for every author, and so different publishers have their own strategies for spinning books for authors that have published few books. There are also some tricks that publishers have that I haven’t seen published in other books, like the fact that if a book comes out in a certain month, it will be promoted to the sales books in that month.
a book that has been published and is available for download in certain dates but is still in print, but is no longer available.
Publishers have their own spin selling strategies. We do not, and we will not, promote a book because it is out of print. We do promote it because it has been out in print but it is no longer available for download. But there are many spin-selling strategies, and some authors do not even have a strategy. For example, we do not spin books about characters that we have never met because we do not want to lose potential readers.
We have a strategy that is so popular that we have decided to share it with the world. While we don’t want to lose readers, we do want to make sure a reader sees the book. So we share and promote the book, and other authors do their best to do the same.
We may not have a strategy, and there is no strategy to keep us from selling books. The problem is that we don’t want to sell the books we have. We want to make sure that the world reads the book that we want to sell. So we do not have a strategy.
Most readers are not going to understand how to sell a book. They will probably go straight to the “want” or “need” section and not bother to look at the marketing section of Amazon, so we have to do the work to explain it.