3 Things Your Traditional Publisher Is Unlikely to Do

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Years ago, when I still worked for a traditional publisher, I wrote a blog post about the No. 1 disappointment of all published authors: the lack of marketing support from their publisher. This was back when social media was still a fringe pastime, limited mostly to MySpace. So if your publisher wasn’t investing in marketing or publicity, you probably had few available tools to market and publicize your work outside your community—unless you had funds to hire a publicist or a national platform of some kind.

Today, some form of online marketing by both author and publisher is essential for all titles, and while traditional forms of marketing and publicity are still key—everyone wants a mix of online and offline exposure to maximize word of mouth—publishers’ launch efforts may be focused primarily or entirely on online channels. It tends to be more efficient, targeted, and cost effective.

Yet authors still have very traditional ideas of what their publisher ought to do to demonstrate support for their book, even though where and how books get sold has changed dramatically in the last decade. Here are three things that you may want or expect your publisher to do—but are very unlikely to happen.

1. Send you on a national book tour

This is probably the biggest author disappointment by far, judging from the message boards and discussion groups where I see new authors unleashing their anxieties and questions.

Here’s why publishers won’t send you on a tour: book events are among the least cost-effective ways to sell books. You may get very low turnout at multiple venues and sell not more than a handful of copies at each event.

The big reason to tour across many cities is usually to secure media coverage and reach the many more people who don’t attend the event—the more times and more places that people hear about your book, the better. Unfortunately, as most of us are too well aware, local media isn’t what it used to be and the opportunities for book coverage have diminished, which further deteriorates the value of touring.

That said, events help authors network and build relationships with booksellers that pay off over the long term. But the benefit is rarely tied to selling books in the short term unless you have a marquee name that can draw a crowd.

All this isn’t to say a publisher won’t assist or support you in setting up local or regional events, or even with more extended efforts that you wish to plan. But don’t expect them to set up or fund a multi-city tour to places where no turnout is guaranteed. It risks everyone’s time and resources.

If you do want to pursue events on your own, be aware that they’re more effective if they go beyond just a reading, and go beyond just bookstores. Think about all the organizations, businesses, and schools that might benefit from a visit or workshop; think about the places that might pay you to visit and speak. Also consider if there are other authors you can partner with—this almost always increases the reach of the event and the size of the audience.

2. Invest in your book as much as their lead authors for the season

It’s very easy for authors to fall into the comparison trap. You look at the other books releasing from your publisher or imprint during the same timeframe as yours, and you see more time and attention devoted to them. Why aren’t you getting the same treatment?

Publishers divide their list into A titles, B titles, and so on. Some titles (especially those where the authors received six-figure advances) are likely to get the most support, attention, and investment. These are the A titles, and they appear at the front of the publisher’s catalog with full-page or full-spread treatment.

If you’re not an A title, then you receive some kind of standard or baseline treatment that all authors receive, with the publisher ready to respond if there’s a quick win somewhere: a starred review, a celebrity mention, some kind of uptick in attention that can be capitalized on.

Anything but an A-list title isn’t likely to receive major or national advertising or a huge publicity push to major media outlets. However, the “standard” attention your book receives isn’t exactly worthless. It likely still involves creating advance review copies of your book, sending it out to important review and media outlets, offering giveaways or doing targeted advertising, and so on. It’s just not going to be the sales and marketing focus of the publisher unless it picks up momentum in some way or gains enthusiasm in the marketplace.

Which brings us to the most important thing that you can do as an author: Figure out as far in advance as possible what your publisher’s plans are for your book—but not in a confrontational way. Proactively let them know at least six to nine months prior to your publication date what you plan to do to support your book. They can then suggest ways to support and expand on what you’re doing, and fill in the gaps where you don’t have as much marketing or publicity strength. The more you see it as a team effort, where you both take initiative, the better off you’ll be in the end.

Furthermore, you want your publisher to know what you’ll do to support your book before they start pitching their major accounts, such as Barnes & Noble. Bookstore and wholesaler orders are placed before the book releases, and those orders are affected by the marketing and publicity plan the publisher presents and commits to. Your efforts are part of that plan and can’t very well make a difference if your publisher doesn’t know about them. Don’t wait until the weeks before launch to figure out your plan; by then, most of your publisher’s marketing and publicity plans—the ones with the most potential to affect bookstore orders and national promotion and placement—are concluded.

3. Market and publicize your work after the initial launch period has passed

Once you’re aware that your publisher’s most important efforts and planning happen before the book is released, it starts to makes more sense (maybe!) why their post-launch activities may be minimal. The plan that was decided upon months ago has already been set in motion, so it’s mainly about coordinating, following up, and building on any momentum that has been created.

Unfortunately, the large majority of book launches involve some sales, some reviews, but nothing outstanding that would motivate the publisher to invest more resource. For authors who haven’t prepared or thought about the launch, this is when panic sets in, especially if they expected more from the publisher. While publishers do a lot of marketing and publicity work to the industry itself (booksellers, wholesalers, libraries, reviewers, media), this work tends to be invisible to the author. For better or worse, these industry-facing activities may not produce the sales everyone wants, or they may not meaningfully affect how many readers hear about the book.

Each publisher and imprint is different in terms of its strength and ability to reach readers directly, but it’s almost always done through online channels (Goodreads, social media, advertising on literary blogs and newsletters, and so on). But few publishers will continue to put forth such efforts beyond a three-month window after the publication date; they’re doing their best to support initial sales through stores and create a positive track record. Then they have to move on to the next season of titles.

Authors can and should continue to reach readers directly the months (and years) after publication through whatever means they have available to them—whether online or offline. More than half of any book’s sales is likely to be through Amazon, and continued sales over the long term is affected by one’s rating and reviews there. Try to worry less about how much your book continues to remain stocked in a Barnes & Noble or nationally, and focus more on ways to perennially get attention and word of mouth for your book to the audiences most likely to buy it.

For more on book marketing and publicity, check out these other articles:

Authors still have very traditional ideas of what their publisher ought to do to demonstrate support for their book, even though where and how books get sold has changed dramatically in the last decade. Here are three things that you may want or expect your publisher to do—but are very unlikely to happen.

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Cyndy Etler

Brilliant, as always, and exactly what I needed. Do you have a psychic line on my personal author questions? Point 1, regarding the non-norm of book tours, is a fleshed-out version of what my agent told me, not a week ago. Makes perfect sense. But wahhh, I want someone else to pay for my martinis!

Jane Friedman

Ha! Thanks, Cindy. Don’t give up on having someone buy you martinis—tell the bartenders/waiters everywhere you go, “My book just launched!” It can be the equivalent of stating it’s your birthday. 🙂

Todd Besant

Excellent post. I might append it to our new author questionnaire.

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[…] The No. 1 disappointment of published authors is the lack of marketing support from their publisher. Here's how to prepare for what will—and won't—happen.  […]

Michael W. Perry

Traditional publishers need to realize that virtually the only thing they can offer a writer that independent publishing can’t provide (perhaps with some outside help) is marketing in the broad sense. As one traditionally published writer I recently heard said, that publisher can take out ads, set up speaking tours, and arrange for translations. An author who is doing all that doesn’t have much time left for writing.

Those tasks are a bit much for many authors to handle, as I know. My latest independently published book, Embarrass Less: A Practical Guide for Doctors, Nurses, Students and Hospitals, would make a marvelous textbook for those in healthcare, particularly students. Do I have the contacts to get the word out? No, nothing like those a well-established textbook company would have.

Publishing I can handle. I’ve been doing it for almost 20 years. I can make books look excellent, as you can see from the cute, kids-playing-doctor cover of that one. Distribution is easy. A week after release, that book was available in print and digital around the world. Amazon had both the print and digital versions available worldwide the day after I sent them the files. Here’s the book on sale in Japan:

https://www.amazon.co.jp/Embarrass-Less-Practical-Students-Hospitals/dp/1587420929

Twenty years ago, how many independent authors or even small publishers could have done that? Yet, there it is for sale far away, effortlessly on my part and done automatically. For that I don’t need a traditional publisher.

Marketing is the hitch. What happens when a publisher does not get behind a book, spending money and time to market it and make it as large a success as possible? From the perspective of many authors, it is doing nothing and yet grabbing the lion’s share of the profit. As this article notes, the three things that a traditional publisher is least likely to do are the three that it is best equipped to do. That is not good news for traditional publishers. They’re making themselves unnecessary.

And yes, the traditional methods that publishers have used to promote books, such as magazine ads, are becoming less and less effective. Even book tours could often be replaced by online videos. Publishers need to master the new ways of promoting books, including carefully targeted digital advertising, Youtube postings, and search engine optimization.

In my case, the good news is that searching Google for “embarrass less” in quotes gives links to my just-out book as the top four hits. The bad news is that, without those quotes, it’s not even on the first page of search results. I did choose a good title, as that first ranking indicates. (The more common “Less Embarrassment” would not have done as well.) But more than that needs to be done to get the word out. This book could make a marvelous impact for good in hospital care, dealing with what are for many patients their number one worry. And yet without marketing, few may hear about it.

I once read a business writer who explained that after WWII many railroad companies made a major mistake. Thinking they were still in the business of transporting passengers, they responded poorly to the shift to automobiles after the war. They did not realize, he said, that they were in the transportation business and that they needed to shift their emphasis from transporting people to transporting bulk cargos. It took them years to realized that.

In a similar fashion, many publishers think they’re still in the business of printing, warehousing, and distributing printed books. They’ve failed to realize that their real business niche has shifted to marketing both print and digital books, with the printing and distribution often handled by others. They are still needed, but in a different way.

–Michael W. Perry, Inkling Books

Jenny Milchman

Michael, you’re clearly very accomplished, with great content to your name. Congratulations on that. But as a traditionally published author who studies the different paths to publication very carefully, I think there are some misconceptions in your comment. First, being available is not synonymous with distribution. Distribution means your book physically exists in a number of outlets that the big 5 (and some independent presses) have access to, and they are many (independent and chain bookstores; libraries; big box stores, for example). It may mean that the publisher has paid for co-op with B&N and your book is optimized in New or even on the octagon. To the extent that bricks and mortar display sells books–and it does–these things can be key to discoverability. It’s true that a smart indie author (or even a not-so-smart one) can have the same *online* availability as a trad published one, but online sales are still only a part of the marketplace, which leaves an important slice on the table.

I agree with you that traditional publishers need to reinvent given the failure of print advertising and other formerly tried and true means of getting the word out. They are not breaking out authors, but relying on already established ones, and the occasional phenom (which by definition cannot repeat) to fill the coffers. But going indie doesn’t solve those problems–and it means foregoing some aspects of a writing career that, depending on the author and the book, might be crucially important.

Michelle Favazzo

Hi Michael,
My name is Michelle. I found your reply to be quite helpful. Are you related to Paul Perry?
If I could afford the best Marketing Co, who would you suggest. I don’t know any of this computer marketing. Please help.

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[…] Link to the rest at Jane Friedman […]

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[…] 3 Things Your Traditional Publisher Is Unlikely to Do (Jane Friedman) Years ago, when I still worked for a traditional publisher, I wrote a blog post about the No. 1 disappointment of all published authors: the lack of marketing support from their publisher. This was back when social media was still a fringe pastime, limited mostly to MySpace. So if your publisher wasn’t investing in marketing or publicity, you probably had few available tools to market and publicize your work outside your community—unless you had funds to hire a publicist or a national platform of some kind. […]

LIsa Tener

These are all excellent points that most aspiring authors don’t realize. One thing I suggest to authors is to consider having a business plan for their books. If an author spends a certain amount of money on marketing and, sometimes more specifically, publicity, it may not produce enough of a return on investment through book sales. However, if book sales and publicity fuel sales of related services or products, the investment can pay off in additional income through these services and products, as well as additional book sales, and help raise the visibility of the author’s message and work overall.
I think of it as a “sustainability” model for authors.
This works especially well with my clientele who are writing self-help, how-to and health books, but can also work for other genres. I recently attended a book event and sat with an author whose novel comes out in April. We brainstormed some exciting ways her novel can fuel sales of other items and services such as party planning kits, t-shirts and speaking. This is where marketing gets fun and creative and can become an extension of the creative writing process–and an opportunity to get connect more deeply with readers, while generating income, which just about everyone needs.

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[…] route, you usually need an agent and someone else is your publisher. Jane Friedman clarifies 3 things traditional publishers likely WON’T do for you, and Mary Kole tells you what to expect from an […]

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[…] a tough time to be an author. Traditional publishers aren’t going to market for you anymore, and there are more books on the market now than there ever have been. So how do you stand […]

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[…] story is my kind of hero, but we do lean towards the self-publishing author just a little more. At Jane Friedman, Jane shares three reasons why sometimes being indie is the right […]