Dr. Sketchy's in the News (God, aren't you just sick of it already?)

More new, awesome features of Dr. Sketchy's Official Rainy Day Colouring Book. This time on Venus Zine (one of my favorite magazines) and on Needled.com (a fantastic body art site).

If you're like me, you are just sick of hearing about all this media attention Molly has gotten. No one likes hearing about how popular other people are. Friends keep congratulating me on all of the coverage, like I had something to do with it.

Nada.

All of this amazing coverage is the result of Molly busting her butt -- emailing and calling every editor, writer, and blogger she can -- to get her book featured or reviewed. She deserves all the credit. The only smart thing I did was sign her up for a book deal.

This is instructive for both authors and publishers. Success in the future of book publishing (especially for what the industry calls "midlist") is going to rely heavily on the author's ability to self-promote.

The reasons for this are many, and not entirely (or even mostly) the publisher's fault. A lot of this has to do with our current level of media over-load, and our personality-obsessed culture -- neither of which publishers can control (so stop blaming them for everything!).

Publishers would be smart (when dealing with midlist authors and small print-run books in the future) to reconsider their level of internal spending on marketing versus the small amount of financial support that could help the author build his or her own empire. These could be small things, like helping them build a simple website, printing postcards or stickers they can hand out everywhere they go, splitting costs on local tours.

We can't top-down publish every book.