There's an article in the current issue of The Author (the magazine of the Society of Authors) which at first sight looks like bad news for those wishing to sell books... but I'm not so sure. It's by lifelong author Roger Williams, who like most lifelong authors wasn't making oodles of money and who had decided to seek "a market that would drive sales". He devised a cunning plan (well, I expect it seemed so at the time) to write a book of fact-based short stories all set in the 200 or so hotels around the world that happen to be called the Hotel Bristol. The idea was to sell them direct to the hotels to put with the Gideon bibles as light reading. He self-published High Times at the Hotel Bristol, at a cost of about 60p a copy for 2000 copies. That meant he didn't have a publisher's marketing dept to rely on. But I doubt any publisher would have gone the length he did in marketing.

He sent copies to the local press and targeted the city of Bristol. The local Waterstones and Blackwells took copies, as did the tourist office, it went up on Amazon and he went on local radio (BBC) to talk about it.

This resulted in some sales in the city but not one outside (he knew, as all orders came to him). Then the Mail on Sunday named it their travel book of the week. That brought a grand total of one new order. However this was better than the result of exposure on Radio 4 (he'd sent a copy to the producer of Excess Baggage; again classic author marketing strategy but not a single order resulted.

So he went online - set up blogs, put chapters online, made podcasts. He reports "barely a sale" as a result. Then his luck seemed to turn - the Wall Street Journal picked up on it and he got 29 column inches and a mugshot in both the US and European editions. Total extra sales? One.

So where's the ray of light for writers in this sad story? I think there might be two. One: before you market your idea you must have it, and if it's a dud it'll be a dud however good you are at the marketing. I think a collection of stories that just happen to take place at various hotels called Bristol was just not a very fascinating idea to start with. Neither do I see why the inhabitants of Bristol should have been likely to buy it just because it name-checked their city. (I do think he might have done better to home in on cities outside the UK called Bristol; "exiles" tend to have a more sentimental attachment to old-country names etc than those of us who live there).

And the other thing that's interesting is that he chose the idea not because it fascinated him but because he thought it would sell. The fact that it didn't suggests that at least for writers, who tend anyway not to know much about what sells and why, it might be better to write what pleases them, as well as they can, and hope it also pleases others. Do the marketing afterwards, by all means, but don't create your product with marketing principally in mind; it may work for beans but on this showing at least, it doesn't for books.