In the seven years since I published my first humor book, Carpool Tunnel Syndrome, I've spent an insane amount of time just trying to market myself. I'm glad I didn't keep track of the time, since I think I'd  cry if I knew how much of my life's energy has gone into the endeavor. The Internet has made it both easier and more difficult to market yourself: there are endless web sites and blogs to contact, endless online zines on which to try to get yourself reviewed or published. And the Internet rat race just gets worse and worse, as marketing "experts" tell you you're nowhere if you aren't active on Facebook, YouTube, and Twittering all day long (but I am on Facebook, and I'm LinkedIn too). I often get tired of asking the world to pay attention to me. As fascinating as I am, even I get tired of myself.

I have spent thousands of dollars on outside PR help but my biggest impressive successes have been through my own efforts or, in the case of getting a quote from my book on the Starbucks cups, through plain luck. Paid PR help has gotten me quoted in the media several times, but nothing has caused any sustained momentum. Things that have helped have been subscribing to several book marketing and PR expert newsletters, keeping up membership in a professional online writers' forum, where I always look for news about potential outlets for my work, and look for reporters doing stories on topics I can comment on, with a funny angle.

Things would have been a lot easier if I were an expert on investing, losing weight, budget travel deals, or something similar. But it's hard to market yourself as an expert when you spend your days trying to write funny stories about the latest rodent infestations, or why bad contractors happen to good people. On the other hand, I'm too far gone to stop now.

I've also learned that you have to keep searching for your audience, the people who will relate to your voice. For years, I avoided marketing my work to Jewish publications, even though I’m Jewish, since I didn’t want to limit my audience, nor did I want to be pegged as solely a “Jewish writer.” But over time, editors of Jewish publications and web sites started coming to me – they had heard my voice and recognized it in the pieces I had sold to them. In the past two years, I’ve become a regular humor columnist for an two Jewish print magazines, the “Jewlarious” section of the web site aish.com, and started podcasting my program, "Just Off My Noodle," on the web site of a national Jewish organization. I no longer shy away from writing about this aspect of my life, as it actually widens my audience, and I can almost always adapt my work written for these outlets into more generic humor, such as for my blog on MommaSaid.net, for my email newsletter subscribers, and other media outlets.

In the past few years, I've also sold pieces to the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, Beliefnet.com, and the Los Angeles Times. Earlier, I sold humor to Woman's Day, Family Circle and Ladies' Home Journal, but these magazines have closed the door on humor, at least for now. I really don't get their reasoning. They insist that they are all about "service" articles, but if you ask me, making people laugh in a troubled world is one of the best services you can offer. If only they saw it my way!

Motivational sales people always say that "no" doesn't really mean "no," it means "not yet." I've used that gambit to follow up repeatedly with editors who have ignored me, because you just never know when something may change. I even plan to contact some of the editors at these women's magazines who have published me before to pitch myself again, adding my shiny new awards to my email sig line. After all, magazines are always retooling, and maybe I'll reach them just at the moment they are scratching their heads, thinking, "Where can we find a terrific writer who can make rodent infestations funny?" And I'll be right there!

If you write for a limited market, you absolutely must love what you do and love your topic. (Keep your day job, too.) If you aren’t getting pleasure from your work, rethink your writing emphasis. Finally, persevere and carry a thick skin. If you’ve been at this for more than 15 minutes you know editors will ignore you more often than they'll pay attention, but if you keep polishing your work and continue hunting for new, like-minded audiences, you can and will break through. It may take a while, though, so stay optimistic, be persistent, and above all, keep your sense of humor.
   

Posted by: Judy Gruen

After my first two publishing disasters, I was in no hurry to publish a third book, but it remained a longer-term goal. In the meantime, I worked on “building my platform” and refining my humor writing skills, taking them as uproariously high as possible. (I don't know why, but I fantasized about one day having a reviewer call my work “trenchant.”) I had already been sending out twice-monthly humor columns, called “Off My Noodle,” to email subscribers for a few years, which were also posted on my web site, www.judygruen.com. While no one was paying for the subscription, I rarely missed my self-imposed deadlines. I tried to sell the columns afterward, but I have weaned myself off that habit: now I only write original material for my regular paying gigs, and then adapt the columns for my email subscribers. After all, my editors want original material, not “reprints.”

After a few years, I had amassed enough Noodles (high-humor, zero carbs!) to fill another book, even after weeding out the weaker or dated material. But if selling humor is a hard sell, selling a collection of humor columns is doubly so, since I was not David Sedaris or Dave Barry. I briefly thought of changing my name to “Dave,” but feared it would confuse my friends and family. Yet I knew I would buck the odds again. True, I had shown appalling taste in publishers so far, but my persistence created undeniable momentum in my career: My first two books had won awards from the publishing industry, I still had the bragging rights over the other PR and sales successes, which I had achieved on my own. I also had begun speaking on occasion—something I knew I needed to develop as a tool to drive book sales. I was selling my work consistently to a variety of media outlets.

With hope triumphing over experience (again), I spent months re-editing the columns I chose for the book, organizing them into themed sections. It was a point of pride with me that I did not just toss everything together that I had ever sent out and slap it between two covers. This collection of what I considered my “best of, so far” became The Women's Daily Irony Supplement (which earned the Gold Award from ForeWord Magazine in the humor category for 2007).

I found an agent who loved the manuscript and shopped it around for many months, starting at the top of the publishing food chain. The reactions fell into three categories: I was very funny but my platform wasn't big enough, my platform was great but I wasn't that funny, or they already had another woman humorist in their list. After more than a dozen rejections we had to conclude that I was again looking at very small indie houses or self-publishing. I appreciated my agent's hard work, and we parted on good terms.

I took several more months before deciding what to do, because I figured if I made a third stupid mistake I'd have to kill myself, and if I did that, who would take the kids to the orthodontist? (Either that, or I could write a little memoir called, Smart Women, Foolish Publishing Choices. But who would publish that?) I emphatically did not want to go POD, yet it seemed like my only option. I settled on one POD company whose references checked out, but I still felt that POD still had too many strikes against it, and couldn't bring myself to sign the contract. One day, almost in desperation, I picked up a magazine from a consortium of indie publishers that had been collecting dust on my desk for weeks. I called the organization and asked if they could think of any member publishers who might take an interest in me. They suggested I contact Beagle Bay Books, and since I had nothing to lose, and my dog is half-beagle, I sent them an email. Jacqueline Simonds wrote back right away, which made me momentarily suspicious: if she's such a great publisher, why is she paying attention to me? I had fallen into the mindset of Groucho Marx's joke: “I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.”

I shook off my concerns (after all, not only did the Simonds have a beagle, but his name was Bertie, which I knew was from P.J. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster series, which told me they appreciated literate humor. Such are the weird idiosyncrasies that form a person's decision-making.) I emailed several of their authors for references, and found only universal praise for the Simonds. Shortly after, I signed with Beagle Bay, who published The Women's Daily Irony Supplement under their Creative Minds imprint in April 2007.

Working with Beagle Bay has been a total pleasure. Finally, I was working with reliable and honest professionals who I knew had my best interests at heart. We, too, have been mystified by the failure of another PR coup—I had a quote from my book on more than 5 million Starbucks cups—to spur sales, but together we have worked to move the book forward and to help it find its rightfully larger audience. The Women's Daily Irony Supplement has also scored many publishing awards, and Jacqueline and I tried to capitalize on that by writing a funny press release called Humor Writer Achieves “Athlete's Feat”, tying it into the Summer Olympics.

I'm convinced that much of the difficulty in breaking through to a larger audience is due to the rapidly changing media environment and the drastically lessened space in newspapers and magazines for the kind of slice-of-life humor that I write. That, and the fact that I don't have my own prime-time television program. In my final blog installment, I'll write about what I've learned works, and what doesn't, in trying to promote myself in a tough niche.

Posted by: Judy Gruen

I meet another writer online whose first book is about to be published by a small house. We have an immediate rapport, and I tell her my tale of woe about my publishing disaster. She offers to tell her publisher about me. Who knows what might happen?

Here's what happened: I am about to make an even more colossal, much more costly mistake than I made by entering into a "Hey, kids! Let's make a Broadway show!" agreement with my graphic designer friend. Good thing I went to college and grad school to make me so smart.

My new writer friend connects me with her publisher, whom I will call "Bellatrix Lestrange."  Lestrange is young (too young, I wonder?), enthusiastic, has nearly a dozen titles in circulation, talks a good game, is impressed with what I achieved in PR and sales on my own. She sees I'm a hard worker, and sends a contract with a lot of bad clauses in it. I hire an agent to look at it for me, and while I get some of the bad clauses excised, I lose the most important battles.

Eager to get Carpool back in circulation, I sign the contract, give her the book for no advance whatsoever and agree to write a second book for her, also with no advance. Well, after all, publishing advances are getting smaller and smaller. If my books do well, I'll make it up on the other side, right?

In the meanwhile, my friend's book is published, riddled with errors. I worry, as Lestrange now controls the future of Carpool and my next book also. In fact, it takes me four attempts to get them to fix the typos and other mistakes that I had found in the page proofs of my second book, Till We Eat Again: Confessions of a Diet Dropout, including mistakes that were added by Lestrange's mother, who with zero qualifications whatsoever "edits" my book.

When I open the first box of Till We Eat Again, a book I loved working on and was excited beyond belief to finally see, I feel physically ill: it looks like it was produced on a 1985 dot matrix printer. I have visions of my book launch party and already feel embarrassed at taking people's money for this shabbily printed book. I hide my dismay as best I can.

The "royalty" statements are also suspiciously complicated, with columns and columns of confusing numbers. It seemed designed to obfuscate, and after hours of pouring over them, I discover dubious accounting practices, such as double-billing me for returns and weird overhead charges. I ask for clarification on the statements, but wouldn't you know it? The "accountant" is always out of town!  

Things go from bad to worse. I compare notes with other authors similarly shackled to the same publisher, and we all come to the inescapable conclusion that Lestrange has taken us all for a ride. Several of us even fly halfway across the country to appear at a legal proceeding against her brought by one of the authors. Many thousands of dollars later, I ransom my books via an intellectual property attorney, the same books that I had given away for free. It's hard to admit all my dumb mistakes publicly, but if it helps someone else be more careful, to do more homework, I'll be glad.

This was a painful way to learn that it was not enough to have met an author thrilled with her publisher when the author-publisher relationship was so new. I have since cautioned every would-be author who asks me for advice to get several references from authors who have at least a year-long relationship with a publisher before signing a contract. There is too much on the line, too much a publisher needs to show they can deliver professionally over a sustained period, before you can safely assume you're dealing with a pro.  

Now I had two books OOP, but both books had won awards for humor, I began to be invited to speak at conferences, and my fan base was growing. Like an addict, I couldn't stop myself from thinking about a third book. Good thing I have a sense of humor.
    

Posted by: Judy Gruen

Seven years ago, in a moment that was either inspired or crazy (or both) I decided to write a humor book called Carpool Tunnel Syndrome: Motherhood as Shuttle Diplomacy. I had already worked as a writer and editor for several years, had a graduate degree in journalism, and had many author friends, so this idea wasn't quite as ludicrous as it might have been if I were, say, an actuary for an insurance company. Since I knew something about book publishing already, it made my idea merely meshugena.

Still, as an unknown writer, I knew my chances of landing an agent and contract with a reputable publishing house were slim. So, trying to save time and aggravation (that was the idea, anyway) I decided to self-publish. Knowing I lacked the skills to handle all the functions of a publisher, I researched publishers that offered self-publishing services. One man at the publishing house I almost (and should have) signed with was saint-like in his patience for my endless questions during numerous phone calls.

This brings me to my favorite line from the movie "Terms of Endearment," when Jack Nicholson, who plays a retired astronaut romantically involved with Shirley MacLaine, keeps trying to make a break from MacLaine, who is clinging to him needfully. Just when he thinks he can bolt, MacLaine latches on again. Nicholson, in classic tone, says, "Just seconds from a clean getaway."

And so there I was, ready to write the publisher a big check and get my book project moving,  when a friend about to self-publish her husband's book invited me to publish my book under her new imprint. She had read John Kremer, she had bought a block of ISBNs, she was applying to B&T and Ingrahm for distro agreements, and she was an outstanding graphic designer who I knew could ably handle the book design.

"Why not?" she said. "I know you could save a lot of money if we do it together."

And so, like Nicholson, just seconds from a clean getaway, I signed an agreement with my friend that we cobbled together as best we could. This was a big mistake. I ignored my misgivings, such as that my friend had a controlling personality that I knew could make her difficult to work with, and that despite my research, which included calling publishing attorneys, no one had ever heard of this kind of publishing partnership and could offer no advice about how to structure the contract. Our agreement spelled out our respective responsibilities as we could foresee them. But of course, certain things were not foreseeable, such as my friend's marriage dissolving, her life becoming so tumultuous that she could no longer keep up her end of the bargain, and the worst: her deciding to yank her (ex)husband's book from circulation, ending her imprint, and therefore forcing me to declare my own, precious first book OOP when it was barely getting its sea legs.

This was devastating. I had devoted more than six months to just marketing the book, networking with every Mom-related web site in the universe, sending out review copies, contacting magazines, a maniacal one-woman marketing machine. And she was the one who convinced me to publish with her! 

Despite this, we had three successes: Radio shrink Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who had more than 20 million listeners back then, plugged the book on her show and offered it as a giveaway to "the first five callers" who called our toll-free number. (No one on her staff told us that our phone would start ringing at 6 a.m. and go through the night, by "first callers" who listened to the show in every time zone imaginable.) I also sold an excerpt to Woman's Day (circulation 6.2 million at that time), and they also put in our toll-free number to order.

Dr. Laura's plug pushed the book sky-high on Amazon . . . for about two days, after which it settled back down to humble territory. I was bewildered that the Woman's Day excerpt did almost nothing for sales that we could see, until I realized that a magazine whose every issue hawks "20 ways to save money" (my excerpt was about saving money, too) was a magazine whose readers waited for their books at the library. 

The third, and most substantial success, was my selling 2,500 copies of Carpool to Scholastic Book Fairs. This was a huge achievement, though a logistical pain (25 copies to this location; 87 to this location, etc), but at least I made a little money.

When I was forced to declare Carpool OOP, we hired a legal mediator to untangle our partnership, simple as it was. While my partner's troubles were far worse, I still felt I had gotten a raw deal. Thinking about what might have been with the other publisher was useless, but I wasn't ready to remainder my book to a small sad blip in publishing history. Tune in next week to find out what happened next!

(By the way, if you'd like to order a copy of Carpool Tunnel Syndrome, please order it from my web site, www.judygruen.com. Remember, it's OOP!)

Posted by: Judy Gruen