- Your job as an author is to sell books.
- Amazon rushes sell books.

This is the most basic equation since See Dick Bang Jane.

Following the logic of this conversation, here are some other things we should stop doing because they’ve been done before:
- Author book tours
- Print advertising
- Broadcast advertising
- Getting cover blurbs from famous authors

And let’s get rid of cars while we’re at it. Goddamn noisy things have been around too long …

Everyone on this board who did a rush didn’t have a marketing budget. Go out and find all the marketing campaigns you can mount on $0. This isn’t a fucking Visa commercial, and there aren’t that many. Come up with new tactics, sure, but I’d say the Amazon rush is a tried-and-true method of free advertising that produces significant book sales and motivates your fans to spread the word to people that have not heard of you.

One last thing everyone seems to miss: the ability to say you are a “best seller is a mainstay of book marketing. Mur Lafferty can say she is a #1 SciFi Bestseller on Amazon.com for the rest of her life. That “#1″ will continue to sell books for her as she encounters the billions of people who have no idea who she is, and think “Twitter” is something their spouse does all goddamn day just to annoy them.

If you’re late to the party and your fans are also fans of me, Mur, Selznick, Tee, Pippa, etc., an Amazon rush is old news and won’t work as well. Too bad for you. Go find new fans and get them to buy on that day. Problem solved.

I didn’t mention Wallace, because outside of the penal system he has no fans, and I hear they still won’t allow Twittering from supermax facilities.

Re: “small-minded people”

By this I do not mean to say that MWS, Tee, Mur, Pip are small-minded. There are people out here who WANT what Sigler got. Heck, I want what Sigler got out of it. I’m glad we’re having this discussion because it’s helping me see things clearly, especially if I’m going to join the rank of these authors.

There are people out here who want that, who are hoping for that to happen. They want to make the statement to the gatekeepers. They’re buying into the revolution, and are forgetting what Mur explained above: it’s about readers. Those are the small-minded people. The ones that haven’t done it yet, and think it will happen for them that way.

I have explained that people frame the Amazon Rush a certain way. It is clear, by what you authors are saying, that this view of the Amazon Rush is wrong. I have stated, I think, that viewing the Amazon rush that way is wrong. Where I was incorrect is in assuming the AUTHOR viewed it that way.

Podcasting is one way of building visibility. Blogging and promo swapping are other ways. All of these are limited in scope to the relatively small pool of people who read blogs or listen to podcasts – they’re big numbers compared with what small press authors used to have access to, but they’re still tiny ghettos in the the potential market. An Amazon rush is now a proven strategy for breaking out into the general marketplace, and thus for establishing the visibility to try to push past the audience-awareness tipping point and generate a Matthew Effect. Mur’s experience bears this out – so does Sigler’s. I haven’t heard directly about the long-term knock-on effects from other authors who’ve done this, but there are at least two examples of the strategy accomplishing what it’s supposed to.

Is Amazon Rushing the only way? I doubt it. One of us is going to figure out a new way to break through, and I daresay one of us will figure it out before too long. The more ways we can use the new media tools at our disposal to bootstrap ourselves into general-public visibility, the better off we’ll each be for creating our own Matthew Effects.

But as long as Amazon keeps selling small press books (I actually wonder how long that will be, considering some of their recent disputes with publishers), the Amazon rush will remain a viable avenue for brand-building, consciousness raising, market generation, and general population visibility. It may not be new and shiny and sexy anymore, but it’s solid economics.

I want to make a clear follow-up regarding my earlier comment to this post: While I do have legitimate questions regarding the long-term sales sustainability of an Amazon Rush, I have great admiration for the podauthors who have used this tactic. These writers brilliantly promoted their Rushes, and earned tremendous sales that validate not only their marketing efforts, but also their terrific fiction.

These are not “small-minded people,” as Indiana Jim incorrectly claims. They are hungry, scrappy, talented storytellers using a now-established technique to create a coordinated surge in sales. My comments regarding the short-term vs. long-term effectiveness of the Amazon Rush was not directed at the authors themselves or their judgment, but at the concept. My goal was to clinically address the phenom, and suggest that it can be improved.

It is safe to suggest that many podnovelists want to build the best-possible promotional machine for their art. Constructive conversations like this one — in which we noodle on, and dissect, the technique itself — can help create just that.