A couple weeks ago, industry analyst Mike Shatzkin wrote a long post discussing how authors still need help with their digital presence (and related marketing)—help that traditional publishers are rarely providing. While he advocates for publishers to devote more resources to “author care” functions, he also discusses the potential for authors to collaborate among themselves to improve their situation, without the involvement of agents or publishers.
In the self-publishing community, authors have been helping each other from the start, and you can see active examples of it through Kboards and countless Facebook groups. But in the traditional publishing community, that kind of activity is harder to find, with the best example probably being the secret Facebook group Binders Full of Women Writers and all of its attendant subgroups.
But Shatzkin pointed to an excellent example—on the traditional publishing side—of an author marketing co-op that’s becoming highly visible: Tall Poppy Writers.Founder Ann Garvin started the group in 2013 by asking other women authors if they wanted to be part of a collaborative marketing effort. The group now has about 45 members and specializes in books by women and for women—especially women in book clubs. Everything they do is reader-centric: their group newsletter reaches about 20,000 readers, and their new book club has 3,500 members.
When we asked Garvin whether she thought a publisher could be successful in creating a collective to mimic their success, she said, “Our goals are different from a publisher’s goals. Of course, we would like to sell books, but our primary objective is to give our readers access and personal interactions with authors. To that end, a Tall Poppy author is invested in relationships—and not only the kind of relationships where money changes hands. We want our stories to resonate, and getting to know our readers helps us do that. If a publisher has like-minded, committed, generous authors who enjoy social media, it’s possible they could mimic what we do.”
As far as the organization and management of the collective, there are core leaders, but every member is listened to and expected to contribute. Garvin describes the leadership as laissez faire, based on trust. “Our authors enjoy a wide degree of latitude in making decisions and working on projects autonomously. We remain small and focused on our mission so that everyone has our goals in mind and a voice to manage their domain of interest,” says Garvin.
Here at Hot Sheet, we’re very familiar with authors’ frustrations with efforts to get their book in front of readers. As Garvin explained to us, Tall Poppy Writers channels that frustration into an organized system that works on several levels. She says, “We see immediate changes in ranking on Amazon when our Poppy network gets behind a title, and that eases the mind of the author. … There is no anxiety related to wondering if we could or should do more. The Tall Poppy network helps us control a small part of the process, and this can be wonderful for the entire publishing experience.”
Bottom line: Note that the term author collective can mean a lot of things. Most frequently, the goal of such a collective appears to be marketing—one for all and all for one. But perhaps we’ll also start to see large-scale production collectives like the Magnum Photographers’ collective, which was created after World War II in Paris to process film and meet business needs for major magazine and war photographers. A group of professional authors may want to hire the various elements of a publishing house for themselves, to service their production needs from editing to design and right on out the door to publication and marketing. If you dig hard enough, you can find a few burgeoning examples of this type of collective, such as Triskele Books, based in the UK.
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.
