So, how many of you have seen or heard an author give a variation of this statement?
“Oh, woe is me, even legitimate publishers are not promoting and marketing their authors anymore. Writers have to do all the selling!’
I would say those are weasel words, but I like ferrets. So let’s call those statements what they are: blatant excuses promoted by any number of small presses, vanity publishers, and self-publishing gurus.
The self-pub advocates have most of my sympathy here. It takes real effort and skill to self-market their work without any institutional back-up. That lack of support, coupled with genuinely bad experiences from commercial publishers, has rightfully embittered many self-published authors. They know it’s a more-than-fulltime job. Done well, it can yield results as good as or better than most commercial publishers’ marketing. Kudos to informed self-publishers for being strong positive examples.
But when underperforming small presses and vanity publishers use those phrases, or teach them to their authors, what they are probably saying is something like this:
We are not going to market your book. We are going to make you market your book for us. We are going to take a large percentage of sales to pay for our probably sub-standard editing, formatting, and covers. We are going to disguise our open graft and/or incompetence by telling you ‘we’re like a family’, and providing bullshit lists of all the lovely things we might do for you, but which might be completely ineffective at selling your book. We are going to teach you counterproductive ‘strategies’ for selling your book, so you can look like an idiot online and probably lose potential readers. And when you cannot sell your book as effectively as we’ve led you to think you should, we will lay the blame squarely on your shoulders.
To add insult to injury, your associations with us may actually damage your future writing career. Even if you come to your senses, we can make you worry that, because you first published with us, you’ll have such a poor publishing history that larger, more-respected, higher-earning, and advance-paying publishers might not give you the time of day. Thus, you are more likely to come back to us or a publisher similar to us.
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I’m ranting about this right now because I put a fellow author on ‘block’ today on Twitter, after they spouted this marketing fallacy too many times, too arrogantly, in front of a lot of people who know better.
Here’s a similar response from an AbsoluteWrite member discussing that same canard on that social media writing site:
“It’s not true that writers signed with legitimate presses “don’t get any promo or marketing support from their publishers”, and I wish people would stop perpetuating this myth.
If it were true, why would publishers employ whole departments of marketing, publicity and promotional staff?
Much of the marketing that good publishers do is designed to get the big bookshops to carry their books. That one single step sells a huge number of books, and is really effective–it not only generates all sales from physical shops, it’s also responsible for about 40% of online sales too). But it’s all aimed at booksellers, so it’s invisible to most readers and writers–which is partly why so many people think publishers don’t do any marketing.
Another reason people believe publishers don’t market or promote their books is they’ve heard it said so many times. Vanity publishers have encouraged this; the more evangelical self-publishers have encouraged it too. But it’s wrong, and with a little logic and research it’s easy to see that.
I’m not saying that all publishers market or promote their books effectively: I know many don’t. But the ones which fail in this regard are almost all the tiny publishers with poor business models, inadequate resources, and no distribution, which I’d advise people to avoid for those very reasons.”
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So, when you hear an author use a variant of ‘publishers don’t market’, go look at that author’s publishers, and their book(s) sales ranks on large platforms like Amazon and B&N. Chances are, if the sales are really poor, you might find that same telling phrase in the publisher’s website and its authors’ social media posts.
When you do, don’t send work to that publisher. Or at least, don’t until after becoming as well-informed as possible about the risks.
A billion times this. A big part of why I decided to sign with a trade publisher after trying the self-pub route is that I was convinced that they are going to bring to the table marketing and editing opportunities that I was not able to create for myself, and that they’ll be earning their fair share of profits, not just taking them because they decided they could.
Yep. Last year, I made the decision not to self-publish the ‘Singer in Rhunshan’ novella for several reasons: that version was not as polished as it could have been, my agent and beta readers thought it could be a longer book, and I needed a Big Five imprint’s support if I wanted back in the SFF pool.
In addition to getting books in bookstores and libraries (which are not dinosaurs, not yet), effective publishers can trade on brand recognition, reach better review sites, and do wide-scale media advertising.
I support this article 100%, but for different reasons. Self publishing works for me because the Big Five aren’t an option. I write short romance novels and novellas. There’s lot of romance publishers out there, but only a handful of them have solid marketing and promotion plans beyond what I can do myself. Most of them can’t get into bookstores or libraries. A lot of them seem to be author factories. Giving these companies 60% didn’t make sense. At least with self publishing, I’M the one getting the big piece of pie.
Hear, hear. It’s a choice many more authors should probably consider, given their publishers’ performance. BTW, thanks for the e-book how-to guides on your blog!