In the midst of marketing a book, one big promotional decision is sometimes overlooked: on what bookstore shelf should your book be placed? In this Publishers Weekly article, Sara Nelson takes a look at the impact of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces on the shelving decisions of booksellers and librarians.
But while industry folk and the people who love to talk about them—at least once in a while—ponder the bigger questions, a cooler head might see them all as one spectacular manifestation of a very old and really rather simple publishing problem: How do you define and market books, and what are the up- and downsides of doing so?
Fiction or nonfiction? Novel or memoir? That should be the easy part, and we can only hope all the recent hand-wringing will clarify the distinctions that have gotten blurry of late. But a far more common—almost everyday—problem for publishers and booksellers is determining which books should be aimed at which niches, and which niches are most likely to buy.
How do you want your work defined? Should you go broad or for a narrow niche? Is your work easily defined? Or will it get misshelved on some back nether aisle because booksellers can't figure out who it is intended for? All of those are important promotion questions to address even before you write the first word.
