Marketing & Publicity
What if the expectations of publishing are too much?
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QUESTION:
I love writing stories and being a home schooling mother but I fear success! Is it possible to get agented and published if I can’t commit much time to marketing & publicity? What’s the minimum marketing & publicity required from an author, so both agent & publisher are happy?
-Afraid of Making It
Dear Afraid of Making It,
First, thank you for bringing up an important aspect of writing we don’t talk about often enough—a very real fear of success. We ask ourselves what if things all go belly-up, what if we don’t get a yes from an agent, what if we go on submission and all the news is bad.
But it can be truly terrifying and disruptive to realize: what if we hear yes? What if the good thing actually happens?!? We know everything will change, but in what ways? And how much? What if we don’t WANT all those changes? What if we get so far into something, we can’t stop or hit pause or walk it all back?
It really is different to write and edit once you have a book deal. The pressures are real, the stakes are high(er), and we can never return to the quiet of our own minds before the voices of editors, agents, book reviewers, Goodreads trolls, and even friends and family began to intrude.
Of course I’m not trying to romanticize the query trenches, or discounting the deep stress and challenges of breaking into an increasingly shrinking market. And it’s by no means some great tragedy to get published. :-) But I want to take seriously the question you’re raising here, Afraid, because although it’s essential to embark on this journey with open eyes, I hope I can assure you that YOU’RE the author and you do have a say. There are plenty of situations in which publishing is going to call the shots (cover art, timeline to publication, sometimes even your title — more on that in another letter, if you’d like). But you don’t have to wind up taking on more than you can realistically handle.
There is no minimum amount you have to commit to in order to be seriously considered by agents and publishers. You don’t have to sign a contract that says “I will work X hours/week to promote my work.” I have never, ever had an agent or even an editor ask me about promotion or publicity. Maybe it’s different for non-fiction, and you don’t say what genre you write. But for fiction, I’ve only ever discussed marketing and promotion directly with a publicist, usually by filling out an initial form and/or hopping on a call. I’ve always been able to say what I do and don’t want to tackle given my preferences and time constraints. Your publisher will want you to do something, but what that something is will vary depending on the individual, the project, the publisher, and what you—the author—are up for.
Fun side story:
I was in a Lyft with one of my publicists at a conference in Reno and the Lyft driver recognized me (!!!). I’m, uh, not famous, and I kept thinking the driver must have mistaken me for another Rebecca Brooks (my pen name for my romance novels). But nope, she named one of my book titles and everything. I died! I’m dying all over again just remembering it!!
This was wild, and it did net me a few sales—the driver came to my book signing the next day and bought up an entire series, and you never know who else she told. Word of mouth is real!
But the hard truth, and why writing this made me remember the way even my publicist’s jaw drop, is that it’s basically impossible for an individual author to hand-sell their way to a bestseller. The real driving factor is which titles have the publisher’s backing, i.e. the largest slice of the budgetary pie. This is different for self-publishing, of course, where you’re the publisher and need to take on all the marketing and promotion yourself. But for authors with a traditional publisher, your own promo work isn’t going to be make-or-break. This is frustrating…but also liberating. If you don’t want to spend your time on promotion, then you’re 100% allowed to do what you can, what feels reasonable and feasible and maybe even enjoyable to you, and then let go of the rest.
What this looks like might even change over time, or from book to book. You don’t have to do everything at once, and you don’t have to keep doing something, or not doing it, just because it’s how things went before. Hopefully your writing life will be long, and you’ll grow along with it. You don’t have to have all this planned out in advance, and I’d like to gently suggest that worrying about these questions now might be putting the cart before the horse. There are a lot of “what ifs” and hypotheticals in your question, and one of the things I like to remind myself of when I’m freaking out about something (so… daily) is that I can pause my worrying until there’s actually something concrete to worry about.
Write the book. Then figure out promotion. Yes, these things are all easier said than done. Trust me, I know! But thinking about how much time you might have to devote to selling an object that literally doesn’t exist yet is a recipe for the type of total brain overload that I know would make it hard for me, personally, to write a single word.
That being said…
It’s also true that publishers have slashed their publicity budgets and are consolidating their focus around an increasingly small number of big sellers. This means that unless you’re a very, very, very lucky breakout author, the likelihood that a publisher is going to take care of the bulk of the work of selling your book is…. nil.
This also means that realistically, yes. Some of the work of marketing and publicizing your book may fall to you, the author. So let’s talk about what that might actually look like.
Depending on your genre and focus, you may be asked to write articles or essays for different publications to get the word out about your book. You may also be invited—or want to pitch yourself—to appear as a speaker on a panel, be a participant in an interview, or get involved in an event at a school, library, conference, bookstore, etc. that will help get your name out there. Publishers do want to know that authors are committed to doing some of the work of selling their books. I think this is a lousy expectation because that’s literally what a publisher’s job is! But I also live in the real world and know I have to hustle if I want to play the game. I wouldn’t straight up say to someone in publishing, “Sorry, I don’t have any time to market my book.” But that doesn’t mean you have to become a full-time book publicist. It just means that it takes a team to bring a book into the world, and agents and editors want to know you’re up for being part of that team in some way.
None of these tasks are absolute, and none of them are full-time. You can control your involvement in social media, for example, and how often and on what subjects you post online. (For more on best practices for social media, shoot me a question as I know this is a topic that often comes up.) You don’t have to go on a multi-city book tour for weeks on end. You don’t even have to write that many essays or do a million interviews. You can pick a few that speak to you and fit them in when you have time. Or, honestly, you can choose to do none at all. None of that is what’s going to massively tip the needle on book sales. Again, this can be so, so maddening— why are publishers asking authors to do so much work when the work won’t get us measurable results?!? But it also means we can ease off some of that pressure that we HAVE to become impressive salespeople, as well as writers and editors and social media experts and web designers and interview robots with all the time in the world to leave our jobs and families behind.
And if you do get that one-in-a-million deal that involves your publisher jetting you around the country for TV shows and interviews and busy, large-scale events???
You discuss with them what your schedule is. You note that you have certain requirements at home and can’t do abc, but are eager to take on xyz on 123 timeline. Authors all have other things going on in their lives, things they can’t immediately drop. Your obligations as a parent and a home schooler don’t make you ineligible to be a kick ass author with a robust publicity team. Please write this on a sticky, tack it to your computer, and repeat it as many times as needed!! A publisher should work WITH you, when the time comes, to put forward a plan everyone is happy with.
I won’t lie—the weeks around a book release can feel like a whirlwind of activity, both elating and exhausting. But none of it should last so long or be so disruptive that it cuts into the important things: your life, your other work, the task of writing your next book (if you so choose). This isn’t an all-or-nothing scenario where you’re either doing zero promo or you’re stretched thin as a pancake. I think you’ll find, once you’re in it, that there’s a happy medium where you’re doing what you can but not so much that you regret ever publishing a damn book in the first place.
And if things do start to feel like too much, your agent is your best ally to work on your behalf and recalibrate your publisher’s expectations, push back on what they’re asking, and get everyone back on track as a team.
You don’t say whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction, or who your audience is. Different genres can have different expectations, and for non-fiction in particular, your book proposal will need to include a marketing plan. That plan isn’t all on you, though. Regardless of what you’re writing, publicity and marketing remain multifaceted and extremely imprecise undertakings in which author engagement is only one slice of the pie.
What I hope, more than anything, is that the fear of the unknown, the future, and your time commitments don’t stop you from pursuing whatever you might want to in publishing. You certainly don’t have to try to get published in the first place. But I hope that if anything is holding you back, it’s not a worry about the time you’ll have for marketing and publicity. It will work out. SOMETHING will work out, and you’ll be doing it, and when you have something concrete to worry about, then you can get to work finding a solution. There’s no point sitting at home fretting about what if your publisher wants you to go on a three-city book tour while your kids need to be home schooled, when you don’t have a finished project, an agent, a publisher, a book deal, or a publicist yet. While it’s good to plan ahead and know what you’re getting into, this feels like a moment for deep breaths and “one step at a time.”
Your job is to write the book. An agent’s job is to sell it. An editor’s job is to polish it up. Then it’s the publicist’s job to spread the word.
You’ll get there, and I’ll be rooting for you, no matter how much—or how little—you take on!
Kate
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