Hannah Vincent began her writing life as a playwright after studying drama at the University of East Anglia, after which she worked as a script editor for the BBC. Her plays include The Burrow, Throwing Stones (Royal Court Theatre) and Hang (National Theatre Studio). She has an MA in Creative Writing from Kingston and is currently studying for a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of Sussex. Her first novel Alarm Girl was published by Myriad Editions in 2014 and her second The Weaning by Salt in February 2018.
I love the use of stream of consciousness in Alarm Girl – it feels intense and urgent. The sense of place is really powerful too, especially as the novel uses snapshots and memories to tell the unsettling story – we’re anchored to the narrative by its different places. In particular, the South African landscapes are rendered in detail and the echo the sense of disorientation and loneliness created by the child voice. It’s actually quite a painful read, because of the themes it deals with, but it’s also addictive and hard to stop reading.
I asked Hannah my ten questions about book marketing:
Can you tell us a bit about you and your work? What are you working on at the moment?
I was a playwright in my twenties but more latterly I have become interested in prose. My first novel Alarm Girl was published by Myriad in 2014 and my second The Weaning is published by Salt. I discover I write short long-form – both my novels weigh in under 200 pages – and I am currently working on some short stories. When I first started writing prose I was advised to practice by writing short stories but I think it’s a very different craft. I’m also writing another novel. This one feels a bit ‘bigger’ than my first two. Certainly its timescale is larger. I like to have more than one project on the go, preferably at different stages of development.
How do you approach marketing your work, on a practical level? For instance, do you schedule it for a particular day of the week, or use a different desk, or make time for it every afternoon?
I don’t actively market my work apart from seeking out reading/performing opportunities, which, apart from around publication when things get a little more focused, I do in a fairly sporadic way. I’m on social media as a way of promoting my writing but I’m not sure how effective it is. Twitter is excellent for finding out about other folk’s writing but I’m not sure how much attention mine gets as a result of my tweeting and twittering.
Some creative people treat marketing as if it’s creation’s evil twin. Is there a way of making friends with it?
I’d prefer not to spew forth about my writing – I have several teaching jobs, a thesis to write and a life to live so like most writers, I’d rather use any spare time to do the writing itself – then again, I do want folk to read my books… that’s the point, eh? If you’re an established author with an established readership I suspect there is less need to market your work because book reviews in national press will do the job for you. If you are unknown as a writer to anyone outside your immediate circle of friends and family then you’d better make friends with ‘marketing’- not least of all because in my experience it is impossible to get a newspaper review. Book bloggers are very friendly and supportive people – writers should be very grateful for book bloggers.
Do you think about marketing before, during, or after writing, or is it ongoing?
Oh god, after. Always after.
How do you tend to market your work? For instance, do you use social media? Do you blog?
My feeling about writers’ blogs is that there are enough words out there, I don’t want to add more unless they are in the shape of a carefully crafted novel, play or short story. That said, I do write the occasional blog when the need arises… and that need is often marketing-related – news of a publication or prize or shortlisting etc which might interest others in my work and thereby encourage a dialogue between reader and writer, which for me is the point of writing.
Would you spend a substantial amount of time on a piece even if you knew you wouldn’t or couldn’t publish and sell it?
Yup. It’s what writers do, isn’t it?
Do you use any of these for marketing purposes: school visits, workshops, readings, video book trailers, seeking press coverage?
All of the above, yes.
I once heard someone dismiss a career in book marketing by saying ‘he might as well go and sell fridges’ – is selling books really the same as selling fridges?
Nooooooo! Well, yes, in that selling fridges requires an understanding of fridges, right? To market anything effectively we need to appreciate the value of the ‘product’ (hate thinking of books as a product… seems sacrilegious, somehow). I worked as a bookseller for a small chain of bookshops and then later for a bigger chain of well-known bookshops and the difference was stark – at the smaller chain, which was run like an independent bookshop, booksellers were expected to be knowledgeable about books, we were encouraged to read and discuss books with customers whereas at the big chain there was less of this expectation and the books were treated much more as products.
The success of big chains compared with smaller ones and compared with the struggle faced by independent bookshops suggests that marketing books really could be the same as selling fridges but I don’t want to believe it! Selling anything is about putting it in people’s faces and telling them it’s great and they must have it. Big bookstore chains are able to ‘pile ‘em high’ in a way that smaller bookshops can’t, and this has the (often misleading) effect of persuading folk that these books are the best ones – it’s not true, these are simply the books a rich publisher has paid the bookshop to display. And if one wants to get properly cynical, one could argue that often the books rich publishers shell out for are the ones aimed at maintaining a certain level of fear and suspicion and anxiety in our society, which keeps us all in our place.
There’s a lot of marketing jargon around, such as ‘find your niche’, ‘create a sales funnel’, ‘engage with your audience’, ‘create a platform’ – do beginning writers need to engage with it from the start? Has that changed since you started writing?
What the hell is a ‘sales funnel’? I hope I never find out. Writers starting out need to just write, I think. As they begin to refine their work there is certainly a need for them to understand how their work affects a reader and this requires an understanding of how to ‘engage’ readers but I’m talking about awareness of the effects of language and structure, not niche-finding or platform-creating, jeez.
Any examples of book marketing you think worked really well? For instance, you could share a link to a blog post about your work, and to a campaign run by an author you admire.
‘For instance, you could share a link to a blog post about your work’ – I see what you did there! I’m not sure if it has ‘worked really well’ in marketing terms, but folk seem to like the efforts I’ve made to publicise the links between my book and my lived experience – I posted photographs on Twitter and Instagram and wrote a blog post here and one of those ‘top ten’ kinda articles here.
I thought Meike Ziervogel’s YouTube videos about the editing process were a good idea – you can find them here. In case they might be of interest to fellow writers and readers I have been filming some of my own, which I will use if I find myself in the fortunate position of having to market my next book (this wholly contradicts my answer to question 4 above…).