How To Help Your Favorite Author

Book launches are important to writers. Much like the way Nielsen Ratings uses sweeps periods throughout the year (Feb., May, July, Nov.) to determine numbers used in setting TV advertising costs, publishers use the first week of a book's sales to gauge a writer's popularity. These are the writer's die-hard fans, or fans in the subject matter of which the author is deemed to excel in writing about.

First week sales numbers determine many factors: how much more publicity money the publisher will free up to promote the book; whether they will continue to employ a writer or set him loose; and, if they do keep the writer, how much his or her next advance will be. Most authors will only make a best seller's hit in the opening week. The majority of books do not have long-term sustainability. Only a fraction of all the books ever published remain in print years after they come out.

So how can a reader help an author?

Why It Takes So F#%&!^g Long To Write a Novel

A fan at my BEA book signing said she had been waiting a long while to get The Lost Prince, the sequel to Awakenings. She's right. And though I've written about the real-life challenges of trying to write novels while holding a day job and promoting one's book, the other part of that delay is the work (i.e. minutia) involved with writing a coherent, well-thought out story. Many literary writers (my favorite being Jonathan Franzen) go years between books, but we seem to expect a faster turnaround from genre writers. The delays go beyond plot, narrative, character arcs, and story development, although those too are time consuming. What I'm trying to bring to light are small moments that pull a writer aside from the bigger picture. A lot of you can read a paragraph in less than 30 seconds, but are not aware of how many hours it took the writer to make those four or five sentences ring as true as can be.