The author is readying the second volume of her self-published series, The Brightest Stars, and says that marketing indie work is harder than it should be
Novelist Anna Todd is the original Wattpad Star, the first to have her Wattpad writings take off as major bestsellers when published by a Big Five house. After was released by Simon & Schuster in 2014. S&S has published seven more Todd titles since, and her works have been included in multiple story collections. Todd has also become an unexpectedly engaged producer on the film set of After, which features notable actors such as Selma Blair, Jennifer Beals, and Peter Gallagher.
With a new profile on Todd in the December issue of The Atlantic, we spoke with her to find out how she’s doing with her first self-published series, The Brightest Stars. She has self-published it, she says, for maximum control of her work and how it’s presented—the same reason she’s a co-producer on her own film.
But there’s a surprise here: Even Anna Todd is finding it daunting to get bookstore placement in the US for a self-published book. Todd is working with IngramSpark and was told that it would “wait for orders” for the first installment of The Brightest Stars. That’s standard operating procedure for IngramSpark (the print-on-demand arm of Ingram that serves authors), but of course Todd has more than 12 million copies of her books sold worldwide so far, and her traditionally published titles are stocked in Barnes & Noble. For the second volume, releasing in February, Todd and her agent may change strategies: do a print run and try to work with Ingram Publisher Services, a distribution arm of Ingram that includes a sales support team.
Todd did manage to get the book into Target, and she notes that “Target shelf space is so hard to get, even with a publisher.” She did it, she says, with sheer persistence. “You have to email them a lot.” She also added an extra chapter and an intro letter to the book for Target to sell as an exclusive edition—and will do a Day with Anna Todd event to promote it. She says the struggle to market “shouldn’t be this hard,” adding, “if I can keep doing this, I want to make it easier for every author, because it’s crazy how hard this is.”
Meanwhile, Todd’s international rights sales are soaring. With Flavia Viotti at Bookcase Literary, the agent who specializes in foreign rights sales for indies, Todd now has sales for The Brightest Stars in Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Polish, Slovenian, Portuguese (in both Brazil and Portugal), Romanian, and Hebrew, with Turkish rights being negotiated this week.
Bottom line: When the movie trailer for After was launched a week ago, the book jumped to number one in Amazon’s paid romance category and number five overall in the Top 100. Todd says her marketing goal now is to convince booksellers that hit material doesn’t have to come from publishers. “I’m technically my own publishing house now.” And she likes it that way, despite the marketing challenges.
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.
