I started my publishing journey a while ago—first with poems and short stories in online magazines and literary journals in the aughts, then getting an agent in 2009, and a rocky meandering road to getting my first novel published in 2015. Three novels later, I wish I could say it’s been smooth sailing from there, but that would be a pile of lies. Some of this is the ruthless nature of publishing, some of it has been crap luck, but a lot of it, honestly, is on me. I resisted marketing and self-promotion for years and I wish I hadn’t.
Here are the things I wish I had known about marketing, which would have made this hard thing called publishing a lot less hard.
Unless you are some huge name with a major book deal, you need to learn to market yourself. And I mean, seriously market yourself. When I started publishing, the advice I heard was a breezy, “might be good to start a Twitter account” kind of thing. But that’s not nearly enough.
You can’t sell books without an audience. For years, I thought if I wrote a good book and sold it to a big five publisher, that’s how I’d build an audience, but I was wrong. I wrote good books, got stellar reviews, but that wasn’t enough to make for good sales. See, I had it backwards. You build an audience so you can sell books. You don’t sell books and then build an audience. Doesn’t work that way.
No matter how big your publisher is, they’re likely not going to be spending a lot of energy on attention or publicity for your book. Will they give you amazing edits, a stunning cover, and help you get a polished product you feel proud of? Absolutely! Are they going to be booking you on Good Morning America and getting you a slot in Oprah’s book club? Hahahahha no. If you are lucky, here’s what you can expect: some tweets, some graphics on social media, maybe they’ll send you to an event or two. The rest is up to you.
Find your medium and strengths and lean all the way into it. Are you a teacher who can give writing advice? Are you a hilarious blogger? Do you review books? Are you a good photographer who can think of creative ways visualize books, your writing, or your area of expertise? Find whatever it is you have knowledge of that intersects with writing and figure out how to build off of that. Same goes for the platform(s) you concentrate on. If you’re all about pithy 240-character commentary, Twitter’s your game. If you’re a video person, go to YouTube. You can start a blog, a newsletter, whatever you’re into. And research the platform to try to figure out how to best reach new people.
Don’t try to do too much—keep it simple. For a long time, I resisted marketing myself as just an author, because, like you, I am a whole human being with a lot of things going on. I’m a singer/songwriter, I’m in a band, I work for a political blog, I’m a mom. This is all fab and good in real life, but in marketing? Too many things going on is actually an impediment to building an audience. What you’re trying to do when you market yourself is to build a niche audience who care about a few things, and you go all the way in.
Build something separate from your friends and family. Friends and family are lovely and wonderful, but they aren’t going to be the ones keeping your publishing career afloat. I spent years using my personal social media accounts to promote myself—reaching only extended family, friends from high school, co-workers, etc. Not only is that a limited audience, but in my opinion, self-promotion is actually the most painful and cringeworthy to do in these spaces. Build something somewhere that is just about you and your writing so you can build a new audience specifically interested in what you’re doing. It’s also freeing—it’s strangers on the internet you’re talking to! No one actually knows you.
Create content that isn’t only about your book. No one wants to follow someone who is telling you how great their book is and to buy their book all the time. You have to find clever and fun ways to drop your book in now and then, and provide interesting content that somehow intersects with your topic, with writing, with who you are as a person.
For better or worse, marketing is important in publishing, almost as important as the writing itself. Even finding an agent requires some level of marketing on the writer’s part. So if you’re building a writing career, I can’t emphasize enough—build yourself an audience as early as you can to make sure once you get that book out in the world, it succeeds.
