The Summer 2014 issue of Scratch (my magazine for writers) is now available. Inside, you’ll find a roundtable I hosted on book marketing and promotion, with an all-star lineup of industry folks with a wide range of experiences and viewpoints.
Here’s a little snippet, featuring Rachel Fershleiser of Tumblr, talking about the author’s role in the marketing process:
With the number of books in the marketplace, it’s going to take all of us. It’s going to take the marketing and publicity department at your publisher, your agent, your best friend, your local bookstore, librarians who love your work. It’s going to take every single person invested in your work, working together. So the author is a piece of it.
There’s this sense that this is something new, that we’re asking authors to build their own platform, and they didn’t have to before. In my experience, it’s really that you didn’t use to have the opportunity to build your own platform. So if you wanted to sell a nonfiction book, you had to already be a professor at Harvard or have a show on CNN. Or you had to have an Iowa MFA or know Lorrie Moore.
So we’re not saying you have to do something you didn’t have to do before. We’re saying you used to have to have one of six kinds of traditional platform. Now you have the opportunity to make one no matter who you are and where you are. So it’s more open, not less.
In addition to Fershleiser, the roundtable features branding expert Cindy Ratzlaff; Tim Grahl, author of Your First 1,000 Copies; longtime marketer and publicist Claire McKinney; Kathleen Schmidt, director of publicity for Weinstein Books; Maris Kreizman of Kickstarter; and Dana Kaye of Kaye Publicity.
Go read the roundtable for free. (Registration is required.)
Also free in this issue:
- Baby Gotta Eat by Kima Jones—including her 2012–2014 writing expenses
- an illustrated essay, What Took Me So Long, by Carolita Johnson
- Real Writers’ Houses, lifestyle photos from the Scratch community of readers
- The Transparency Index, where we reveal the relationships that went into putting together the issue, as well as how much money we’ve earned/spent
- Letter From the Editors
Subscribers get access to the full issue, including my Contracts 101 piece on non-compete and option clauses, and my report on The Secret Life of Romance Writers.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
I’ve already started reading the latest issue of SCRATCH, Jane, and it’s magnificent as always! I like the thinking that marketing is MORE open to authors theses days, not less. We need to embrace this new-found power we have and not whine about it.
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