my biggest book promo mistakes
and a few things I did right (+new release fantasy football!!!)
Hi reader! What follows is a sample of a series I’ve been doing for paying subscribers called how to promote your book without dying of shame. I hope you like it—and if you do, consider signing up for a paid subscription.
When my book Marilou Is Everywhere came out in summer 2019, I was elated and terrified. Like many banner moments in publishing, it seemed staggeringly important to make the most out of the opportunity … and also completely taboo to talk about the experience. I didn’t find a lot of candid takes on publication (and Courtney Maum’s extremely excellent Before and After the Book Deal wouldn’t come out until later that year).
So I offer some of my experience here—this is by no means a complete accounting of what I did wrong and right, just highlights that I hope will be helpful. Plus at the end, a fun exercise I’m calling new release fantasy football …
the mistakes
Not having a mailing list all along
Listen, I was a party girl. A PARTY. GIRL. I knew everybody. I was at every reading. Every event. Every afterparty. For at least 10 years, I was always running a reading series or editing a literary magazine or drunkenly talking someone’s ear off about the Ultimate Warrior over cheese cubes at a reception. At AWP, I couldn’t walk through the book fair without running into 15 people to say hi to. I was, shall we say, quite socially lubricated—in a way that would end up having unpleasant consequences, yes, but still. PARTY. GIRL.
Good fucking god, I wish I had thought to start a mailing list then. When I knew everybody and I would write my phone number on your arm with a magic marker in the women’s restroom at the Beauty Bar.
But I didn’t, because it had never occurred to me that I might one day be outside the milieu of grad school, and because at the time, the idea of having a mailing list felt kind of weird and try-hard. (I’m sure there are some mid-2000s hunnies who were already figuring out how important it was to make it easy for people to know about you, but they weren’t in the bathroom at the Beauty Bar, I guess.) And besides, I had almost 1,000 friends on Facebook, and it seemed like that was going to keep me in rotation without any added effort on my part.
Twitter and Instagram didn’t exist yet. This was before Mark Zuckerberg’s eyes took on the dead-black shark eye opacity of present day—we all knew there was something kind of sticky and addictive about Facebook, but it had not yet leaned into its ability to redpill boomers and destroy democracy. Nobody had any clue that whole demographics would migrate away from Facebook leaving behind a wasteland of Minions memes, 1 like = 1 pray.
If I could go back in time, I would tell my younger self: you absolutely have to collect the email addresses of everyone who wants to hear from you and send them a funny lil note about once a month. Because the thing is: No matter how much they love you, it takes effort for people to keep up with you. There are tons of people who are big fans of you and would love to know that you have a book coming out/what you’ve been reading. But they are busy, and they are awash in a sea of demanding, noisy, distracting information. They probably won’t randomly think of you one day and go, “Ah, I should see what Sarah’s been up to lately.” But if they see my name in their inbox, they may open the message.
You have to make it easy for people to find you and find out about what you’re doing. And while social media may be the swiftest, easiest way to accomplish this, it’s not durable. If your platform of choice goes under tomorrow, how many people are going to go out of their way to find you on another channel? Not many, even if you’re extremely supercool.
A lot of people are finding this out the hard way right now w/r/t Twitter. Even though it presently seems like Twitter isn’t actually going to disappear, a lot of writerly people have left in anticipation of it blowing up, and others are realizing that the contacts they made on the platform aren’t necessarily fungible. The edifices of social media can feel almost institutional, like buildings or campuses or news networks, but they operate at the grace of a billionaire—inherently fickle—and also at the whims of the populace (slow-moving, yet also fickle). Sure, you can throw yourself into TikTok and chase the sense of visibility to be had there. If you enjoy it, go forth! But if you’re doing it out of cringing obligation (which will inevitably also contain a grace note of resentment), spare us. And who’s to say? A platform featuring two-second-long videos may take over in another year.
Email is durable. It’s been part of our online reach since the beginning of the internet. Everyone checks their email. (Some people as often as 20 times per day.) Granted, an inbox is also full of signals and noise, but it’s a much more intimate form than anything you’ll find on social media.
I’m not saying that my first book would have been an immediate NYT bestseller if I had a massive email list to notify about it. Who knows, right? But I bet I would have sold a few more books, gotten a few more opportunities. A few more people would have told a few more people to check out Marilou. And over time, hearing little bits of someone’s life makes them more interested in seeing what you might do next. It’s not like there’s an ultimate number of subscribers that will equal $ or definitely get you a book deal with another zero on the end.
But that’s how this is—the path from one book to the next is mysterious. Lucky breaks happen all the time, but they don’t happen if you stay inside all day and nobody knows what you’re up to in there.
If you do only one thing for yourself and your writing this year, make it an email list. I beg of you. The best time to start one was 10 years ago … but the next best time is right now. Right fucking now. TODAY, BITCH. Your future self will thank me.
Marketing to “everyone”
Somewhere in the run-up to publication, you’ll probably be asked to fill out an author questionnaire. This is so your publisher knows of any groups they can market you to, any editors you’re in with who might be up for pitches by/about you, writers who you can ask for blurbs, etc. And also—I suspect, although I’ve never been part of the inner workings here—to help them figure out how to market you, and who your audience might be.
At some point in my author questionnaire for Marilou Is Everywhere, I was asked to name all the groups that I thought might be interested in my book. I gave a broad answer, hilariously so. Of course, I began with people from Northern Appalachia, where the book is set. Teenagers, yes, as it’s a coming-of-age story. People who grew up during the back-to-the-land movement of the ‘70s and ‘80s. And … Christians, sure why not? God speaks to a character in the last section of the book, so Christians would probably be into that, right?
If I were running publicity for a writer and I saw them construe their audience so broadly, I would heave a massive sigh. Because, yes, one hopes that a book would be a massive success, taking off across the populace and being read by everyone from your mom’s book club to your snobbiest friend. And it seems as if, in order to accomplish this, you’d want to cast as wide a net as possible. But actually, the opposite is true.
If you want something to break big, it first has to break small. You’re not going to get the word out across a massive swath of the culture by addressing everyone at once; you’re going to address your highly specific audience directly, give them something they love, and let them (and their enthusiasm) sell you to everyone else.
When you try to address everyone, you pull your punches. Don’t want to offend the Christians while speaking to the back-to-the-landers, you see. Better take out that indie rock reference that only like, five people would probably get. But the thing is, if you talk to the five people who get the reference, your voice can cut through the noise. If you’re pulling your punches, you’re going to start sounding like a politician. Appropriate, well-measured, and pretty much forgettable.
I’m currently in the process of redesigning my website. There was nothing majorly wrong with the old website—in fact, a lot of people praised it for its professional look. I made it with the aid of a Squarespace template and an online course about how to “tell your story” in order to “convert visitors to customers.” I have written elsewhere about ominous signals of internet design such as the gradient—if you’ve read that essay, you probably know what I’m talking about. I followed the prompts, I told the story of why I considered writing to be vital, I narrativized myself as an only child who wrote to be less alone. It was very life coach. It was very the Wing. Muted tones, abstract squiggles, archway elements, etc. The current visual vernacular equivalent to, idk, the cafe in your neighborhood with marble counters and a felt letterboard sign that says BUT FIRST COFFEE. What was I thinking?? My ideal reader would probably look at it and find it boring or cloying. If they wanted to find out more about my book, they would do so in spite of my website.
My redesign is minimal. I’m using a picture my sweetie took of me—it’s black-and-white, and I’m standing on top of a mountain looking slyly over the top of my sunglasses. I will link out to reviews and interviews and list where my work has appeared—these, along with a contact form, are really the only thing an author website needs. I’m making it in a way that would communicate with the people I want to communicate with.
I didn’t realize that I could have a say in determining how I wanted to be seen. I thought the outside world held all of the power on that one. And when you look at things that way, you feel indebted to (and at the effect of) every single person in the world capable of forming an opinion about you.
If I could do it again today, I would think deeply about who my perfect reader is, and I would talk directly to them. That would probably include being a little sassier with Scott Simon and answering interview questions the way that I would really answer them instead of saying only the things that made it past five social acceptability filters.
This is an incredibly important point. And in some ways, all you need to do in order to do good book promo is decide how you want to be seen and commit to it.
Being too shy to share my ideas
I wanted so badly to be a guest on Brad Listi’s Otherppl podcast.
So badly that I … didn’t tell anyone about it.
I thought that Queer Appalachia might like my book because, among other things, it depicts Appalachian people outside the standard type. I think I put it on my author questionnaire as an outlet that might be interested in my book, but I never heard anything about it again, and I didn’t bring it up.
My attitude with everything around my book launch was: Let the professionals do their jobs, be easy to work with, and express gratitude. Don’t get me wrong, I think those are great attitudes to cultivate. But there’s a way of conflating petrified/silent/shut down with “easy to work with.” And that’s what I was doing.
To be very fair to my former self, I was doing the best I could with a situation that terrified me. I didn’t share my anxieties with many people because I felt totally ashamed that I was having a not 100% elated reaction to getting what I had always wanted. It seemed like all of my hopes and dreams lived on the other side of this interval of time, as if my future would be foretold over the first few months that the book came out. And it seemed as if my hopes and dreams rested on being universally beloved by all the people in the world, because I would say only the smoothest and most socially unimpeachable things. So, any time I floated an idea and it didn’t get a big response, I dropped it immediately.
There’s a difference between dissociating and being easy to work with.
I would love to say “If I could go back in time, I would xyz” about this one, but honestly, some/a lot of my book promo struggles had to do with my personality and my childhood and my deepest fears, my underlying self-concept of how I could relate to the rest of the world, my sense of what I might have to do to be loved, whether it was possible to love me at all, etc., and so it would be a little blithe to say, oh younger Sarah, just don’t do that! Just be completely different! I don’t think that I could have had a different experience without being a different person, and it’s cruel to look at your past self and say such things.
I don’t mean to slag myself here. Like I said above, I was doing the best I could, and I was scared out of my mind.
Sometimes the thing you want the most and the thing you fear the most is the exact same thing, and when you’re getting/confronting it, you’re going to make decisions out of fear.
And besides,
I did do a few things right! Such as:
Nurturing relationships with local bookstores a long, long time before the book release
This one was easy; I buy a lot of books, and I like talking to the people in the store about the books I’m buying. I also tend to special order things copiously, which is even better because you get to talk with your local bookseller about things you love which they may not be aware of. (If you’re special ordering something from an indie press, the bookstore may just order a few extra copies, given the fact that you’ve already demonstrated a proven interest in the title—so this is good for the writers you love, too.)
By the time my book was coming out, I had a good relationship with the independent bookstores in my town, and they were more than happy to do events with me. The thing is: Networking isn’t networking if you’re making friends. And making friends is easy when you share an enthusiasm with someone. (This is important. We will come back to it later.)
Adding DIY stops to my book tour
I was incredibly fortunate to have my publisher set up some dates on the East Coast for me. As the book tour is a vanishing tradition (especially lately), this was a really outrageous stroke of luck.
But I also had time on my hands, and I wanted to go to the Midwest. I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, so it only made sense that I would go there to give a reading. I still knew a lot of people in Iowa City, and your publisher is a lot more likely to send you out for dates where you’re going to have a few people in the audience.
Since I was going to drive out to Iowa anyway, I looked into other Midwest locations to add to this trip, making it less of an outlier and more of an official leg of the tour. Which led to me contacting an indie bookstore in Lincoln, Nebraska, and basically saying, “hi, can I come?” Ditto contacting a friend in Minneapolis and saying, “hi, can I come?” And contacting three bookstores in Chicago and saying, “hi, can I come sign stock?”
The fantasy, I think, is that once a book comes out, you’ll be a hot invite, and people will just beg you to grace them with your presence. And that will probably happen a little—for real, it probably will! But you might not get invites from all of the places you’d like to go. And as much as it could bruise your ego to go first and offer your services, it can sometimes be the only way to travel.
Book tours can be lonely. They tell you this, everyone tells you this. And I still thought, nah, not for me! But it was true. At times, driving eight hours across the plains listening to Lana Del Rey, I was like, oh wow, where am I on the mortal coil rn? A little like I had invited myself to a dinner party where I didn’t know anyone. Which was like, a little bit true. But also, waiting demurely for an invitation can also be a sign of entitlement. Offering yourself up, if you do it without expectation, can be a gesture of humility.
Gratitude is never a mistake
I sent so many emails of thanks to people involved in the book—every time there was a new bit of press coverage, or anything like that, I sent an email with a million exclamation marks. It felt … unhinged. I was worried that I looked unhinged. But it wasn’t the time to seem cool, and in hindsight, I’m really glad I never held back on the gratitude or excitement. Because fuck being cool. Seriously. It’s a lie. And so is the voice in your head that tells you everyone thinks you’re a sappy goon. If people think that, believe me, it’s for reasons that you really, really don’t need to worry about.
this week’s assignment is: new release fantasy football!
Pick a book that’s coming out this season. You could get it from the Indie Next List or LitHub’s list of anticipated 2023 books. (Or any of the dozens of similar listicles that pop up in January each year.) The only guidelines are
Your book should be by someone who doesn’t have a massive following (i.e. not Prince Harry)
The book should be coming out at some point in the next six months. In order to get the most from this experience, I suggest you choose a book that hasn’t come out yet because it’s more fun/instructive to watch things develop over time.
Ideally this book’s genre/audience bears some relationship to yours—if you have the time to follow a few writers closely, by all means! But in the spirit of making this exercise the most useful to you, it’s reasonable to pick something that you would consider a comp for your own work.
You should preorder the book because, karma.
This book/author is going to be your fantasy football (bookball?) draft pick for the year. You’re going to keep tabs on them—read all of their interviews, look up all of their reviews, follow them on social media. Do they have a publicist? How often do they post? How many followers do they have? What’s the overall mood of their promo stuff? Do they seem to be having fun? What kind of content are they choosing to share? Do they seem like they have a strategy, and if so, what is it?
Don’t be creepy! If you want to comment/interact, don’t be like I’m following you closely. Just keep an eye out for how they’re doing, send them all the good luck you can muster, and pay attention to the things that are happening bookwise.
that’s it for this week! I hope it’s still useful & interesting! If there’s something you’d like me to talk about, let me know. <3