B&N placed an initial order of 100 copies.) He also showed the retailer some YouTube clips he’d made promoting the book. The author, calling himself V Publishing, told the retailer that his house was targeting the “hipster market, the most elusive of all segments” and would rely on guerilla marketing.
(No meetings were required with B&N everything was done via email. To get copies into Barnes & Noble, the author posed as an independent publisher and pushed the title through the retailer’s small-press program. Mark’s Bookshop and Nolita’s McNally Jackson. “I was getting just about enough orders that, if I lived a simple life, I could pull it off,” the author said.Īmping up his promotional efforts, the author hit several indie bookstores in N.Y.C., gaining particular traction at Spoonbill & Sugartown in Williamsburg, Brooklyn the East Village’s former St. He decided to do a 5,000-copy print run of a new trade paperback edition, and to focus almost entirely on selling it. After moving back to New York City, the author, who was then working freelance advertising gigs, felt emboldened by the success he had selling, and distributing, the book in Europe. the stores, he noted, all catered to young hipsters, whom he considered his target market. He also started getting copies into bookshops in other cities, such as Paris’s Shakespeare & Co. Soon the author was taking requests for bigger orders from the Amsterdam bookshop. “I think he had this fear, because it was self-published, that it was poorly made and would fall apart. “ held up and shook it,” the author said. After taking one into a bookstore in Amsterdam, he was pleasantly surprised by the fact that he got the title on the shelf. Although the author hadn’t intended to self-publish, he decided to make use of the copies he suddenly had. At that time he was working for an ad agency in the Netherlands and, after having the book rejected by a number of U.S.-based literary agents, a friend of a friend offered to print him 1,000 hardcover copies for free. The author, who asked that his name be kept out of print, spoke to PW from his apartment in New York’s East Village about the long, strange trip of publishing -and promoting- Diary.Ī Brit who honed his advertising craft at some of the major agencies in London, then New York, the author self-published the novel in Amsterdam in 2006. He pulled off a savvy publicity campaign that prioritized, above all else, getting the book’s title shared on social media. The book’s unlikely rise, from underground hit to Big Five-published novel, is due predominantly to the marketing efforts of its anonymous author. In its first three weeks on sale, the title has gotten off to a respectable start, selling roughly 14,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan. After selling nearly 100,000 copies-predominantly in trade paperback and e-book-the book was acquired by Simon & Schuster’s Gallery Books imprint in May, and re-released by the Simon & Schuster imprint on June 14. The slim novel, which details the travails of a broken-hearted, alcoholic, and bitter misogynist (who is also an unreliable narrator), was self-published in 2006. And that’s by design: a design carried out by the book’s anonymous author over 10 years. Or maybe you saw a picture of the book on Instagram, or read a discussion of it-positive or negative-on Twitter. You may not know what Diary of an Oxygen Thief is about, but you might have heard the title. How 'Diary Of an Oxygen Thief' Went from Self-Published Obscurity to Bestsellerdom Living in New York City meant that Anonymous had an advantage when it came to posters and bookstores, but considering the wide reach of the Internet, almost anyone with an understanding of their potential readers could do what Anonymous did. He started small, but eventually got his book into Barnes & Noble. Unlike Scott, the author of Diary (Anonymous) peddled his book directly to bookstores. (In Scott's case he formed a LLC.) But in important ways, their stories diverge. Both positioned themselves as independent publishers. ( YA Debut Gets Six-Figure Deal: How did Scott Bergstrom Do It?)īoth authors had a background in advertising and understood marketing.
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The case of Diary of an Oxygen Thief is highly reminiscent of The Cruelty, a YA novel by Scott Bergstrom that landed a six-figure advance and movie rights after being self-published. Even if you have taken the traditional route, they teach us what it takes to make a success of your novel. Self-publishing success stories serve as lessons for us all.
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