I See Red...

I find myself a little bit irate today. My blood is boiling and I see red. I've heard that publishing companies, in general, don't do such a hot job in marketing and promoting books. This is something that makes very little sense to me. Shouldn't they put money and effort into marketing books since this is the key ingredient in selling books, which is the way these people make money?? You'd think, but apparently not.

Last week I got an ANNOYING email from the marketing person of my publishing company. Keep in mind, my publisher is small. They have 200 authors and ONE marketing person!! Nevertheless, this is not my problem. I'm not going to excuse her for incompetencies just because she's overworked. Maybe she needs to let the higher-ups know, so they can hire someone else...LIKE ME! I have no marketing degree, however I think I could handle the job quite well, since I've pretty much taken it on PLUS my current full time job for the past year! Back to the anoying email...In this email, the marketing director so GRACIOUSLY notified the authors that we get a WHOPPING 50$ off our OWN books when we order 100 books or more.

THAT is just lovely. Thank you for taking 5 minutes of your day to write an email to sell ME my OWN book...since you're not selling it to anyone else!!! This was the first thing that agitated me. Second thing occurred when I was roaming through Barnes and Noble on Saturday afternoon...and saw a flyer for the Oklahoma Book Festival , which takes place next weekend..."over 60 national and LOCAL authors will be available to sign books." What?!? It sure would have been nice to be made aware of this event. Now, if my publisher was in NY...I wouldn't expect them to know about this event. But they're in OKLAHOMA! ...and this is a BIG event.

So after I inhaled and exhaled five times and calmed myself down. I contacted the people at the festival to see if it's too late for me to take part in it. I'm anxiously awaiting some sort of response. Afterwards, I decided I had to voice my frustration to my publisher. So, I wrote the marketing person. To which, she responded that she didn't know about the event, and can't stay on top of everything because she has 200 authors to represent, yet she understands my "frustration", however she asked me to mail her a list of contacts (TV, radio, newspapers, bookstores) for her to send press releases too, and I had not done that as of yet.

WHAT? EXCUSE ME??? Thank God I save all emails from these people! I quickly copy and pasted my email that I sent to her in September of 2004!!!!!!!!!! Finally, she apologizes and has the nerve to ask ME if SHE has contacted them. To which I reply "if you're asking me, then I'm going to have to guess NO." She then emails me back saying "since neither of us can remember I'll go ahead and contact them." I'm sorry, it's not my JOB to remember...it's yours! How are you going to forget something like this? Don't you have a file on each author? Copies of your work??? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! So now a year later!!...I'm back to the basics on this book.

Why is it that people like this have great jobs and an office with a view? And people like me drudge to work every day?