The Godel Operation is officially published today.
Which is kind of a weird thing to say. I've had a box of copies sitting in my living room for nearly a month. You've been able to pre-order it on Amazon since last Fall. You've been able to download eARCs from the Baen Web site for months. It's a safe bet that at least some bookstores have had it on the shelves for a week or more.
The concept of a set, predictable publication date is a hold-over from the days when publishers were, at heart, printers. They'd get a book set in type, and set a schedule for when those plates would go into the presses and that book would be printed. Once enough copies were ready, they'd send it out to the booksellers. (In many cases the bookstore was just the street-side room of the print shop.) And that was the publication date.
Even after publishing and printing split into separate industries, the concept of a set date remained useful because that gave one a benchmark for advertising and sales. Get some bound galley proofs to send out to reviewers in advance, so they can have their book reviews ready by that date. Buy ad space for that week in magazines and trade journals. Try to book the author on a talk show (or plant a scandalous story in Confidential to get some free publicity).
But now? In the age of ebooks, The Godel Operation has been "published" ever since the editor and I signed off on the final print file revision. That's the basis for the PDF and Kindle versions, it's the file which goes to the printer to be put on paper when time permits, and it's the version which will be used for any print-on-demand versions. None of which has much to do with the official publication date.
What's especially odd is that as the physical significance of the publication date has vanished, the marketing importance has grown. Remember back when Amazon was new and growing, and business gurus were talking about "the long tail"? The idea was that you could sell a few copies of your book a week on Amazon forever, without having to worry about bookstores maximizing the value per inch of shelf space. We wouldn't have to worry about making a big splash with the launch of every product because the niche customers would find it. Remember?
We didn't reckon with the problem of finding your niche product in the vast tsunami of other items competing for the customer's attention. Which led to Amazon and others developing algorithms to publicize specific products. Which means we now have to game the mechanics of the Almighty Algorithm.
All of which means that marketing is now highly concentrated, trying to get a sales spike at the book's launch good enough to win the Algorithm's attention. That's why I've been guest-blogging and doing interviews like a madman for the past couple of weeks, so that for the first half of May I'll be able to get as much attention as possible. And by attention, I mean clicks on YouTube videos and 'blogs, to push myself up the search engine rankings, and orders at bookstores and Amazon, to work the Algorithm.
So: if you want a copy of The Godel Operation, and want to help me: buy it. Ask your local bookstore — especially if it's a big chain store like Barnes & Noble — to order a copy for you, because that will probably spur them to get a couple more. Order it (in whatever format) from Amazon, and put up a review on their site. And do it all in the next week or two. I get paid the same amount per copy no matter what. But the more you can make the big boys pay attention to me, the better.
There aren't any bookstore signing events this year, but one of my old highschool classmates had the brilliant idea of asking if I could send out signed bookplates. I can and I will. As soon as I can get that set up I'll announce it, and anybody who wants my scrawl in their book can have it. Watch this space for more information.
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