Gareth’s Blog

I came across the name Susan Kelly, looked her up, and found what looks like her abandoned blog. On 3/17/05 Ms. Kelly listed her five favorite reasons for rejection. Her second was: “Susan Kelly is not sufficiently well-known for us to market this book successfully.”

This dovetails with advice I’m receiving from a wonderful person who has become a great fan and supporter, Brownell Landrum… who is pushing me to appear on Oprah! The common point is theme is that if you want to get your book pubished, you need to become famous first. How does one break out of this tautology?

I am continuing with my previous approaches: I still believe in the importance of the first chapter, and have started using this methodology to introduce Church of the Epistles through my network, and plan to place future books on lulu.com.

But once I finish fooling around with last minute edits, web design, and drafting letters for my book, I’m going to get down to the serious business of driving fame.

My premise is that, just as the death of old information channels holds the future potential of lulu, so it also offers great new opportunities to do online marketing. Blog marketing is now an industry in itself, and its one that I am going to try to use to my advantage. I suspect that fame is a misnomor here, but driving awareness, curiosity, and plain controversy must briung opportunity.

By the way, Susan Kelly’s favorite rejection was: “This book is too well-written to be commercially viable.” As she said, “Keep the faith, babies.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 4:13 am and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.