One thing that surprises most authors is how much marketing and self promotion they must engage in to promote their work.
Kate Eltham is the Chief Executive Officer of Queensland Writers Centre. She writes on her blog “Electric Alphabet”:
One of the things I’m often telling emerging writers is to moderate their expectations of how many marketing dollars are invested by publishers in their books. New authors often have unrealistic ideas about how much promotional support they will receive, especially for a debut. They have visions of national publicity tours, signings, launches, displays and printed collateral. In reality, it’s more likely to be distribution of review copies, some targeted media releases and inclusion in the catalogue. Don’t get me wrong – done well, a thoughtful publicity campaign will yield just as much exposure for far smaller spend than a lavish marketing program.
So expectations of authors of marketing support from their publishing house are usually set way too high. They don’t realize that the one thing that will encourage their publisher to “toss marketing dollars” behind their book is a surprisingly good run “out of the gate” and the best way to achieve that is with a healthy dose of self promotion.
Yet when confronted with the prospect of going out and promoting their own work, many author’s bristle. After all… isn’t self promotion reserved for self published authors? After all, the publisher gets a percentage of the sale… shouldn’t they be more interested in marketing and promotion then the author is?
JA Konrath offers the following advice over at Newbie’s Guide to Publishing:
So basically, what I’ve learned in the past five years is that the only real control an author has is how many books they can sell by self-promotion. That’s the only way we can empower ourselves.
As a result of spending the last decade working on the web, one of my favorite sayings is “I don’t make the rules, I just follow them.”
When it comes to author self promotion, one of the sad rules is that the author who promotes his or her own work often finds he/she gets more marketing support from the publisher as a result.
