Last week was Bi Week. It’s a time to raise bisexual awareness and impulsively buy books with bi protagonist. (That bit was just me? Worth it!) Anyways, if you were on twitter you might have seen some recent book events and they got me thinking.
When we write a book the goal is to finish the book. It’s a very in the moment feeling. Once we’ve done that we are told to write something else as we wait for news about the first’s fate. Again, a very in the present activity.
If that book in question get’s a publishing deal, then the whole process shifts to be about the future. About the TBD date, about the release date. Because isn’t publication day the day all your dreams come true?
When I finished posting chapters of Bone Diggers and my Friday was no longer Wattpad Friday, I literally cried. I was so sad it was over. I love that novel and I didn’t want the project to end, even though I knew the story did. And here’s the first point I’m getting at.
I think it’s a misunderstanding of the internet, and maybe even the world, to think it’s a straight progression of linear understanding. Because it’s not. It’s more like a spiderweb. Something posted in March can raise a controversy in September. It’s not that everyone planned and waited for Fall. It’s simply a fact of life that the majority of people will not know things the second they are done.
To visualize this let’s use real data from tumblr.
Purple is the original poster and orange is one of my blogs, blue is anyone else who reblogged. Notice how there is nothing linear about this? Notice the complete lack of designated handoff? I can show you an endless amount of digital spiderwebs to prove this is how information is spread.
That wasn’t my only reminder that data travels this way from last week. My friend retweeted a lovely cover that was in the #BiVisibilityDay tag. The author was posting international cover variants of an already published book. In the mood to buy, I went straight to Amazon and soon realized the book was from 1987.
The first time I knew this nearly 30-year-old book existed was on that day. Not because I personally found the author tweeting, but because someone else did and indirectly showed me.
The marketing moral here?
Books are forever.
If you want your book to sell, to find new audiences over the years, you’ll never be completely done with it. And today might feel lackluster, but your story will be with you forever if you want it to be.
If success is the goal, you’ll never have to say goodbye to your story after all.
