Grosse Fugue
  • Home
  • About 'Grosse Fugue'
    • Synopsis
    • The title and the music
    • Buying 'Grosse Fugue'
    • Read an Extract
    • Buying the music
  • Read an Extract
  • Reviews
  • Buy the Novel
  • About me
  • Blog
  • Contact

Masturbatory publicity – the eye-wrecking need for DIY

26/7/2012

5 Comments

 
Grosse Fugue has now been on the market for a month or two. What’s clear is that any author but the most established needs to be as much a marketer as they do a writer.

You only have to look at the fabled lists of looked-forward-to books to see the challenge.  Here’s one example: Huffington Post’s 15 Best New Books Of 2012. Predictable, tedious and entirely elitist. Established authors from established publishers log-rolling their respective interests. This is no more a commercially competitive picture than retail banks or privatised utilities, with their cosy co-existence and identical offers (and that, of course, it no imputation of cartelling).

It’s a picture of those who are striving every sinew to keep what they’ve got. Conservatives in the true sense of the word.  So, for the brave, entrepreneurial independent publisher and their stable of authors, the chances of penetrating the fortified walls of the publishing behemoths and the papers who review their works are slight indeed.

We writers have to do it ourselves. The proliferation of electronic media makes all this possible. Easily upgraded websites, Facebook, blogs and Twitter are all essential weapons. 

The great challenge of course is content. It’s all very well having these media at your fingertips. It’s quite another thing to originate interesting things to say on a regular basis. And, sheesh, are they hungry! A bit like the burgeoning of tv channels inevitably resulted in a reduction in quality and the long, triumphant march of mediocrity, so that is the threat hanging over social media.

That means I’m off to a darkened room now to dream up screeds of interesting high-quality material to feed these voracious beasts. I may be some time.

5 Comments

    Author

    If you're mad enough to want to know about me, click 'About me'!.  It's in the menu bar. You can return to the Home Page here.

    Archives

    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012

    Categories

    All
    Avant Garde
    Bach
    Barenboim
    Beethoven
    Books
    Boulez
    Censorship
    Chief Rabbi
    Circumcision Ban
    Criticism
    Education
    Erotica
    Facebook
    Fifty Shades Of Grey
    Grosse Fuge
    Grosse Fugue
    Guardian
    Holocaust
    Identiity
    Israel
    Jewish History
    Judaism
    Letters
    Michael Gove
    Music
    Novel
    Oratory
    Partita
    Politics
    Pornography
    Proms
    Publishing
    String Quartet
    Twitter
    Violin
    Writers
    Writing

    RSS Feed