Solutions: One Way to Deal with the Self-marketing Frenzy, Plus a Shout-out to Publishers.

Today, Sarah Prineas talks about the things publishers, editors, and marketing departments can do help their authors not feel quite so desperate and help turn down the volume on the AllMarketingAllTheTime Channel.

Solutions: One Way to Deal with the Self-marketing Frenzy, Plus a Shout-out to Publishers.

First, I’d just like to reiterate that yesterday’s post was a rant. My opinion, and the result of seeing social spaces co-opted by what I consider to be authors wasting their time promoting their books. Rant. Rant!!

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So anyway, authors are marketing their books on social media sites, and I know why they’re doing it.

It’s because writers are control freaks.

No, it’s okay. I’m a control freak, too. As a writer, it’s part of the job description. We write our books, controlling every aspect of the setting, of our characters’ lives, and then we’re supposed to just let the book go and move on to the next book.

But we can’t. We can’t let it go. Many of us spend years, maybe, trying to perfect that first novel, get an agent, sell the book. So much of our sense of self is tied up in that process that we lose perspective and feel that our debut is our one chance to make it as a writer. Our entire career is riding on it. We delude ourselves into thinking that somehow we can control not just the book, but how the book is received, how many copies it sells. If we just do enough, somehow….

I can think of two ways to deal with these control-freak tendencies.

One, authors need to understand that every career trajectory is different and success has many different definitions.

It’s true that some debut books, a very few, do take off. Some careers start in the stratosphere. And that’s what we want for ourselves. Still, do you think those stratosphere authors stress about maintaining that kind of orbit? You bet they do. The control-freak problem affects every author, no matter how far out in space she is. For the rest of us, when we don’t hit the stratosphere on our first launch, we worry and stress that somehow we have blown our one chance, that we have failed.

We—all of us, both the authors in a high orbit and the ones living down where the atmosphere is breatheable—might do better if we change our perspectives, try seeing the big picture, the long game. We need to think about our careers instead of getting caught up in the success or failure of one book.

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The next thing has to do with publisher expectations. So many of us get desperate because we have no idea how our publishers define success or failure. We think they want every book to be a bestseller. Well, maybe they do, but they don't expect every book to do that. Some books--the ones with a smaller marketing push--will succeed if they meet certain lower expectations. Hey, a book with huge expectations that sells only a few more copies than a more modest book could be a bigger failure!

The problem is that the entire publishing process is so opaque to us writers. We have pretty much no clue how our publishers feel about us. They tell us almost nothing. We get clues, little crumbs of information, and we parse these coded messages, trying to figure out what is really going on. Our editors may say nice things to us, and that makes us happy, but we generally don’t know how committed they are to our careers. Goodness knows, we’ve all heard horror stories about authors being dropped by their publishers. What if that story turns out to be about us? Ack! Nooooo! The problem is that we assume, because of our publishers’ opaqueness, that the publisher doesn't care about our books and isn’t going to promote them as much as our books deserve, so in desperation we try to make up the ground ourselves.

Incidentally, I think publishers care very deeply about our books, and they are not trying to make us crazy by keeping the process opaque. I think they see how wrapped up in our books we are, and they treat us tenderly because of it, but they don’t really understand it. Their solution is to keep us in the dark because the opaqueness keeps us freakazoid authors out of the book-making/book-marketing/book-selling process. Which is where we belong, because we are not book-makers or book-marketers or cover designers or copy editors or part of a great sales team. We are writers. We need to shut up and write, and be cheerfully available if our publishing team needs us for something.

On the same hand, for editors and the rest of the publishing team, putting out a book is business as usual. They don’t explain stuff to us because they already understand it, and it may not occur to them that we need to know all that stuff, because it’s not our job. No, our job is to, ahem, see above about shutting up and writing the next book.

But we are control freaks, after all, and we do want to know what is going on with our books. And there are things our publisher could do for us to help us writer-freaks deal with the anxiety and horror (and, yes, occasional awesomeness) of having a book published. All they need to do is be less opaque about their expectations for our books. Here are some examples of the kind of things our publishers might tell us about their expectations which would, in turn, help us to manage our expectations:

"We are putting a lot of marketing money behind this debut and have announced a print run of 100K, so if it doesn't hit the NYTimes list we'll be a little disappointed. However, if the preorders for the author's second book in the series remain steady, we'll be happy."

"We expect this debut to sell mostly to libraries. If it sells 5,000 copies we will be thrilled."

"This quirky debut novel is not commercial, but it's a house favorite and we're hoping it will find an audience. We'd love to keep building this writer's career, though we don't expect overnight success."

"This literary book feels like an award contender to us. We'll publish it hoping teachers and librarians take notice, and we'll focus our marketing efforts on them. If it doesn't win an award we probably won't do much more for it."

"We bought this novel based on a strong proposal from an established author, but the book she turned in disappointed the editor; it is not the strong book we expected to see. We won't give it a marketing plan and don't expect big sales."

"To our surprise, this book received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly, Booklist, and School Library Journal. Our expectations for it are changing and we're going to add a little more marketing push in hopes of seeing bigger sales than we initially expected."

Wouldn’t it be great to have that kind of information up front? To have a clear, straightforward explanation of the publisher’s expectations for a book? It might not be nice to hear “we don’t expect a bestseller,” but wouldn’t it be good just to know?? That way we could chill and, you know, go write the next book.

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That is all! Thanks for reading.

Sarah Prineas is the author of the hugely popular Magic Thief books, the first of which was an E. B. White Read Aloud Honor Book as well as an NCTE Notable Children's Book and has appeared on numerous state lists and has been published in twenty-one different countries. She has a PhD in English literature and has taught seminars on science fiction and fantasy literature. Her next book with HarperCollins, WINTERLING, will be out in 2011.

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Thanks everyone, for participating in this lively discussion! See you all next Monday!