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6. Interview granted to Independent Success! (not published)
Q: Please provide a brief biography that covers yourself, your books and your career in publishing.
A: I am the author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited" and "After the Rain - How the West Lost the East". I am a columnist for Central Europe Review (http://www.ce-review.org/authorarchives/vaknin_archive/vaknin_main.html), United Press International (UPI), and eBookWeb, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.
Until recently, I served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.
Q: What has been your biggest successes to date and how did you achieve them ? (Feel free to brag :)
A: I had two, unrelated and disparate, successes.
The first was my book of short fiction in Hebrew ("Requesting My Loved One"), published by Miskal-Yedioth Aharonot.
It won the 1997 Ministry of Education prose award in Israel.
I wrote it while in jail and smuggled it into the hands of (the very excited) editors at the venerable publishing house (affiliated with Israel's largest daily paper). The secrets of its success have been its brutal honesty and its post modernist relativistic morality. In other words: I told it all and I judged no one. I described childhood abuse, financial crime, group sex, and mental illness with equanimity and detail which made the book voyeuristically irresistible. Paradoxically, though, this mechanistic streak, this refusal to commit myself, this standoffish pose - also imbued the book with a great, all-pervasive, existential sadness.
My other success, "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited" was also written in jail (at least in outline). It was an unflinching attempt to understand what went wrong, what brought me hither, and where was I likely to go from there. In its current incarnation, it is an impersonal textbook, with a lot of scholarly material and dozens of frequently asked questions answered in laymen's terms. So, it has a lot for everyone. It deals with a pernicious and devastating mental health issue - the Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) with which I am afflicted. I think that what made it a hit (and, at $45 + shipping it is not cheap) is its relentless straightforwardness, its uncompromising gaze, its willingness to venture where others feared to tread. The narcissist is often also a sadist, a stalker, a masochist, a sex pervert, and an abuser. The book is a manual intended to help the narcissist's exhausted and traumatized victims extricate themselves from the nightmare of being near a narcissist or with him.
Q: What has been your biggest failure and what lead to it? (Pull out your skeletons and rattle them proudly :)
A: My biggest failure has been "After the Rain - How the East Lost the West". It is an anthology of my political columns (which deal mainly with the Balkan and Central and Eastern Europe). It was published right on time (with the eruption of strife in the Balkan). It is aesthetically designed. It is reasonably priced. I have a following of thousands of dedicated and alert online readers. And it sold next to nothing.
Why?
I thought that selling a book is a matter of mastering a few basic principles. Fresh on the heels of the success of "Malignant Self Love", I hubristically believed that I knew everything there is to know about book promotion. The truth is that every book is an entirely independent product. It has its own, idiosyncratic, rules of promotion which one to discover anew.
Moreover, "eyeballs", online readers, do not always translate to offline cash. Books can rarely be promoted exclusively online. And niche products are a lucrative proposition - providing the niche is sufficiently large and accommodating. "Balkan studies" proved to be a narrow and Procrustean market.
Q: If you knew then what you know now... what would you change and what is the best advice you would pass on?
A: I would have never embarked on any of my publishing (ad)ventures.
I live in Macedonia and sell books in the USA. Bad idea. One must be close to one's market.
Book sales are only part of a much larger line of derivative products: lectures, seminars, workshops, media appearances.
These cannot be remote controlled. The author's presence is indispensable. There is no substitute to the human touch. Get in touch with your readers. Keep offering new products. Re-invent yourself.
One important point:
Be online. Be generous with your free online content - but not TOO generous. The entire text of "Malignant Self Love" is available online. While we had more than 700,000 visitors in the last 4 years - we sold books only to a negligible fraction of them.
To succeed, write about things you know well or that are close to your heart. Write with conviction and passion - but do not hector or judge. Just tell a story. Never forget the narrative. People buy books either to escape from reality - or to grapple with it. A good book provides both options and allows the reader to smoothly switch between them.
Q: Look to the future and tell me what are your plans for the future?
A: To write. To write. To read. And then to write again. I cannot stop writing. Even if no one were to read my work - I would still be writing.
next: Excerpts from the Archives of the Narcissism List Part 38
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