Professional profile – Max Barry

http://www.maxbarry.com

The subtitle of your main website is ‘self promoting since 1998’. What sort of self promoting did you start with and what have been your influences since then?

At first I just threw up a basic website, because it seemed like a good idea at the time and I'm kind of geeky that way. This was back when I still believed that publishers would take care of marketing, so it was nothing special: just a page with Chapter 1 of my first novel Syrup, a Q&A where I interviewed myself, some brief biographical information, my email address and tour dates.

But hardly anyone visited that. There was no reason to: the site never changed and what was there wasn’t especially fascinating. I really only started getting visitors in numbers when I released the game NationStates and began blogging.

Just like DVD extras, you supply deleted scenes, publisher and designer correspondence, writing notes, trivia and even computer wallpaper for your books. You also provide commentary (and even newsletters) whilst writing a book. Do you find that these appeal to both newcomers and fans?

I don’t do the newsletters any more: I do the blog, although it’s basically the same thing. I also stopped doing the running commentary of what I’m working on, because while I think it is interesting for some people, it was messing with my head. Also it was really embarrassing to get to the end of a novel I’d been yapping about on my site and realise it was actually a pile of crap. So now I avoid talking about books I’m working on until somebody has agreed to publish them.

The extras, deleted scenes, etc., are just things I’d be interested in seeing from authors I like.

What I hope to do via the website is establish a longer-term connection with someone who cares enough to look up my website. That person could easily forget all about me by the time my next book comes out, and I want them not to: I want them to follow my career. The best way to do that, so far as I’ve figured out, is to give them stuff they’re interested in.

The other side is it’s incredibly cool to communicate with fans. I don’t know how authors did it before the Web – in nine years I’ve received two physical mails from readers, and one of those told me I was going to Hell for blasphemy. I would feel very isolated if I didn’t have regular reader emails and website comments, like maybe nobody was reading my books at all.

You supply the first chapter of each of your books for free at your website. How have you found this and any other similar approaches you’ve tried?

Well, putting up the first chapter is nothing special. I’d be an idiot if I didn’t do that. I also post short stories for free, and allow anyone to reprint them under a Creative Commons license. So occasionally someone somewhere in the world includes one of my stories in their local newsletter or school newspaper or whatever. That’s great, because it gives my writing some exposure: I don’t see short stories as income generators but rather promotions for the novels, so any way I can get them out there is good.

Some people, like Cory Doctorow, put their entire novels up for free download and apparently this helps physical book sales. I’ve thought about this, but can’t really believe anyone wants to read a whole novel on a computer screen. I still feel like that’s more of a turn-off than an inducement. But I might change my mind on this in the future.

Your website has a login that people can sign up to, and you also have email lists. How important is it to collect such contact information and how do you use it?

It’s not important, and I use it for precisely and no more than people expect. The idea that you should be building a database of emails you can spray marketing junk to is outdated. All you need today is to produce regular content; there are plenty of ways for people to subscribe to it without you doing anything. The ability for people to sign up for emails of my blogs has been very useful, but will become steadily less so as more people use feed readers, and receive updates from all their favourite sites in one place.

You designed an Internet simulation game based on your book Jennifer Government. Did your publisher end up thinking you are ‘a left-field marketing genius, instead of a chump who blew four months on a web game when he should have been working on his next novel’?

NationStates www.nationstates.net was popular way beyond anything I could have anticipated, and introduced my writing to a lot of people who otherwise would never have heard of it. It’s hard to translate into sales, but Jennifer Government sold ten times as many copies as Syrup, and I'm sure NationStates was a significant part of that. So yes, it was definitely worthwhile.

My feeling is that nobody cares about new novels by authors they’ve never heard of. So I didn’t attempt to make people care; instead I offered them a free web game. Once they were playing that, they would see ads for these books by the site’s creator, including one upon which the game was based, and hopefully some would then check it out.

You can’t force people to buy your book, of course, or even to be interested in it. All you can do is let them know it exists. And the best way to do that is via something else they are interested in.

What advice would you give to an author considering starting a blog, email list or podcast?

I think regular output is a good thing. I try to update my site once a week, and that’s important to maintaining the connection.

There are a lot more blogs around now than when I started in 2004, so it’s probably harder to stand out. But if you’re a published author, you’ve probably got a book that has spoken quite profoundly and intimately to some people, and they’ll be interested in more of what you’ve got to say. So it’s simply a matter of talking to them.


 

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