Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Sales Mode: Flogging Your Book Like a Rabid Lunatic Is Its Own Reward

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I mean, you do have to enjoy the selling, and you have to appreciate the rewards that it brings.

Let’s take each by one:

First, the selling:

You have to like to follow up with people. Over and over. Like a dog without a bone, an actor out on loan. With each message to a non-responsive podcaster or a journalist getting more and more urgent. To the only important youth sports podcaster I hadn’t heard back from, I finally wrote: “The more interviews I do on Soccer Dad, the more I fret about not having heard from you. …”

Freedom being another word for nothing left to lose, I wrote this to a newspaper columnist who happens to be from the same region I’m from, who had agreed to have me send him a review copy of the book and then gone silent:

1. You despise the book. (Not likely.)

2. You have been gone from Northeast Ohio so long, and in such epistolary demand as a big-city newspaper columnist, that your manners have withered, and no longer require faithfulness in correspondence. (Also unlikely.)

3. You just don’t give a shit about the book and don’t have the heart to tell its author, who kindly sent you a copy after you put him through the wringer in an email exchange … that you can’t bring yourself to write anything about it—good, bad or indifferent. (This seems likely indeed. But give it to me, S——, I can take it. I grew up where you did, and embrace disappointment like an old friend from Cleveland.)

[Insert winky-face emoji here.]

You have to like writing shit like that. You also have to enjoy a “no,” like a bracing slap across the face. And you have to keep on coming in manic bursts, the wind power behind which surprise even you.

Second, the rewards:

My first book, An Effort to Understand, I sent to my high school English teacher Mrs. Greer, who was the first person not-my-writer-parents who suggested that maybe I should become a writer. She loved the book—and sent me her book of poetry, which I loved—and we had a great email dialogue—as it turned out, just a couple of years before she died.

Another high school teacher, a truly great history teacher named Mr. Yanko, appears in Soccer Dad because he was also the school’s golf coach. I tried out for the golf team every year of high school, and he cut me every year—the last year, laughing as I walked into the clubhouse. Well, Mr. Yanko is going to come to my reading at The Learned Owl Bookstore in Hudson, Ohio, in September. Now 85 and just retired from teaching, he also accepted my invitation to play golf while I’m there. “It is time for me to assess the state of your game,” he wrote with mock sternness that reminded me of the humor and made me more excited to see him again than I can explain.

Meanwhile, last week here I mentioned Carla Overbeck, a member of the 1999 U.S. Women’s World Cup champs who provided the inspiration for our family’s soccer dream. Overbeck and I were guests on the same podcast last week, and I got in touch with her afterwards and shared an excerpt of Soccer Dad that quotes her and told her I’d love to send her a copy of the book because she and her husband are sports parents too and I bet they can relate to the book too and she said she’d be delighted to read it and gave me her address! I told Scout, and she said, “Oh my gosh, are you so happy?!” Yes, I told Scout. I am so happy!

This is all before the book is out and a single official copy is delivered. A friend of mine heard me talking this way on the phone the other night and said, “I hope you’re enjoying this time.” Yes, I am. Because whatever else it is—and a get-rich-quick-scheme, it’s not—a book is a rare and grand occasion to connect with some people not in your life, who have unwittingly made your life better.

And that’s worth one hell of a lot, all by itself.

Sales Mode: Don’t Disparage Your Last Book, Because Its Readers Might Be Listening

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When selling a book, one must put oneself into an ego-trance so deep that one concludes, temporarily, that every book ever written pales in comparison to yours—or at best, sits below your new thing in a disorganized heap on the library floor of literary history.

Unfortunately, if you have intellectual integrity, these also-rans must include previous books you have previously published. Books you once placed atop the literary pile, when you were promoting them—as I did five springs ago, with my first book, An Effort to Understand.

I was so proud of that book when it came out, so satisfied with it. It felt like the culmination of a whole life’s thinking about communication. It was celebrated by most of the people I’ve ever known in the communication business and many strangers besides. It seemed that if I never wrote another book again, that would be fine with me.

That clinking clanking clattering collection of caliginous essays?

Now that I’m introducing the world to my latest book, Soccer Dad (out in April but available for pre-order in print, Kindle and Audible) I can barely look at Effort to Understand. A lad my daughter is dating recently read it and wanted to talk about it and I struggled to be polite about it. I gave him an advance copy of Soccer Dad, and told him to read that if he wanted to know anything important in the world.

But then this week, I got this, on LinkedIn, from an Emily Bourke.

***

Hello,

I’ve been meaning to write something half-way clever to you for months and kept putting it off.

Biting the bullet today. Just the writing bit, no promises on the clever bit.

You don’t know me, but we have a few mutual connections on Linkedin and I regularly read writing boots and your posts and reposts on all things comms and AI. I am a world away in Melbourne, Australia and thoroughly enjoy the stories and ideas you share on all American things, on parenting and life. They resonate.

I listened to and read An Effort to Understand more than a couple of times last year. It became like a meditation during long walks in between speech drafts. Some days, it felt like your essays were the only things that made any professional sense. They still do. I told anyone who would listen about your book—”strategic” comms people, political advisers, fellow speechwriters.

But I wanted to tell you that your essays were both grounding and uplifting. For me, they were part road map, part reminder of why I believe in the value of the work. Your book emboldened me as a former radio journalist, now professional speechwriter, to do my best to think and write clearly—always. As a human (parent/wife/eldest daughter/friend) so many of your stories and personal reflections resonated. Maybe it’s a values thing or a human condition thing. You brought me to tears, I roared with laughter and I’ve punched the air and yelled “exactly! what he said!”. This is not a book review, by the way. It’s a thank you. You made a difference. Your writing had an impact.

“I love your book” is lame. But I do love it. And it has a tonne of sticky notes and underlines in pen and pencil to prove it. And I’ll go back to it again and again. Like I did last night.

I had cause to revisit the end of your book. I was looking for something and wasn’t sure where I read it. I was in the right place. A dear friend died a week ago.

In re-reading your essays last night, I found comfort in your reflections on grief, and the Aeschylus /RFK quotes about sleep and pain, wisdom and making gentle the life of this world.

Maybe it’s a coincidence, or just part of the process, but the awful dull heaviness of the past week is lifting after reading these words and I am grateful.

I didn’t really get or take a chance to tell my friend that he mattered and his words made a difference. The regret burns.

I don’t want to be indifferent or too cool when someone’s work, effort, writing, packs a punch or moves me to tears or laughter, makes me think or think differently. Whether they’re a friend or colleague or a writer on the other side of the world, I’ll make an effort. So, today, I thought I would let you know that your writing efforts matter and are valued.

That is all.

***

In our ensuing conversation, Emily begged me not to disparage An Effort to Understand and added, “If I’d written it, JFC, I’d be sitting back smug-as peeling grapes for the rest of my days.”*

Happily, Emily is a soccer mom—to a seven-year-old girl known in Greater Melbourne soccer circles as “the bulldozer.” So if she liked my first book …

* To understand how Australians (and Kiwis) use “smug-as,” see this video, in which a kid says “smooth-as.”

Sales Mode: Diary of a Writer Determined to Find a New Audience for a New Book

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Writers who are not famous have to choose daily where to spend most of their energy: writing, or promoting their writing.

Most writers usually choose writing, for two reasons:

  1. They didn’t study literature and writing in order to pitch stories to magazines and to craft book proposals for would-be agents. They went to school to become writers.
  2. Even when their work finds its way into The New York Times or The Atlantic or Fortune magazine … the feedback they get from those huge audiences of strangers is often less meaningful (and even less voluminous) than what they get from their regular readership.

But that’s also one reason most writers aren’t famous. For instance, they’re perfectly happy to be composing Writing Boots post # 4,494—(really)—for their faithful audience of some hundreds or thousands.

However: This inclination to write rather than sell often means the writing doesn’t often find new eyeballs, provoke unpredictable reactions, spark strange conversations, create new communities.

And those are good reasons to write, too.

So that’s what I and my publisher, Disruption Books, are out to do the first half of this year, by pushing my forthcoming book Soccer Dad just as hard and far as we can—through media interviews, podcasts, paid social media, live events. For the love of God, we’ve even made a book trailer (presumably to be pulled behind a BookMobile?).

But when you think of it, it’s a hell of a big job, to introduce a book to an audience of people who have never heard of David Murray, don’t know a Writing Boot from a soccer boot and rightly wonder why some random dude thinks his experience raising a sports kid is overflowing with wisdom they need.

No, not just introduce the book to those strangers: Actually convince them it’s good (even though it’s a yucky old book, which only 16% of Americans read for pleasure). Then, rhetorically strong-arm them into buying a copy, in hopes they open the fucker and actually read it. And maybe (great Scott!) even pass it on to someone they know, who might enjoy reading it too.

I mean Goddamn, right?!

I have no particular sales goals, no numbers in my mind at all. Just by turns grim determination and enthusiastic ambition to do this insanely difficult thing the best I know how: Partly because I and my publisher have a product whose usefulness and quality we deeply believe in. Partly because I genuinely look forward to what I may learn (and maybe even teach) in the conversations that might result. And partly, I’m sure, to make up for years of writing constantly when I might have been selling more frequently.

Because many of my readers are un-famous writers too, I’m going to bring you in on the parts of this process that I think might interest or edify, over the next six months—the book launches April 14 but the promotions will go on well after that—with occasional Boots posts titled “Sales Mode.”

And if I post here a little less than daily over the next half-year, now you know why.