The loud spaces in which we’re supposed to be selling our books, even if we’re uncomfortable doing it
If you’ve written a great story, found the right publisher, and secured a publishing deal, you might think you’re done. Your book is out there and you’ve been successful. But this is where some of the harder and often uncomfortable work starts; you need to market your book. What may once have been the job of a publisher now firmly sits with the author. Unless you’re with one of a major publishers, or you’re Julia Donaldson, but most of us are neither. And what if the sales and marketing doesn’t actually suit most of us?
A theory: writers don’t make good marketeers
I have a sneaking suspicion that most writers don’t make good marketeers. And before anyone gets offended, hear me out; writers tend to be on the introverted side of the spectrum. We like sitting alone with our stories, being in our own heads. We like having our characters do the work while we stay quietly in the background. But marketing requires the opposite; you have to put yourself in the foreground, make yourself heard, and promote yourself in space that asks you to be uncomfortably loud.
The shouting match that is social media
On Instagram, my platform of choice, it used to be that you could post a lovely picture and it would get seen, commented on even. But things got more crowded and we needed carousels to please the algorithm. Our faces needed to be seen and ideally we’d film ourselves, because moving images hijack attention better than still ones. But now that’s not enough either and we have to add text overlaid to our pictures and videos, because who has the patience to actually read a description of a post?
I hate all this and refuse to go along. I don’t like posting pictures or videos of myself, and I definitely won’t post anything that feels staged. I try to stay away from anything that feels too pushy, too salesy, too unnatural. It just feels wrong to assume that people want to see endless posts about my latest picture book, or videos about me talking about myself, and does the world really need another unboxing video?
And that’s just Instagram. There are all the other platforms governed by tech bro overlords, and some of us feel we have to be on all of them. I find Facebook visually offensive, X is a cesspool of angry people and trolls, and please don’t talk to me about BookTok. My head might explode.
Call me old school, but on social media, I feel that unless you post something that’s visually striking or genuinely funny and/or interesting, it’s better not to add to the shouting match. But this isn’t how books get sold, and I’m likely doing myself a disservice.
Or am I? Does social media activity actually translate to sales? I doubt many writers have the metrics to calculate the effectiveness of their posts. It’s easy to think you’re doing a great marketing job when you’re posting constantly and accumulating likes – but traction doesn’t necessarily equal success. I’m guessing it generally doesn’t.
So should we bother? Should we focus our time on the people who actually read our books?
Book events at schools or bookstores
I love doing book readings. It’s the moment I see the books I’ve made being enjoyed by the audience I wrote them for – a group of excited kids laughing, gasping, adding their own ideas. There’s nothing quite like it.
Most of my books are written for a South African audience and published by South African publishers, so most of my readings happen there. And it’s relatively easy to set up. Schools love hosting authors, bookshops are open to it, and I can organise a small tour when it suits me. My publisher arranges sales through local bookshops at school visits, and I’m usually guaranteed a decent amount of book sales. It’s fun and genuinely effective.
The UK is a different story. When I published my first book book with a UK publisher last year (New Frontier Publishing), I naively assumed I could do the same thing – walk into schools and bookshops and set up events. They’d be glad to have me, roll out the red carpet. But I couldn’t even get a response from most of them. Bookshops have event calendars booked years ahead, largely with bestselling authors. And schools have limited space in their curriculum.
Getting a book event in the UK requires a serious hustle. It’s a saturated market, and not one I enjoy navigating.
The kind of marketing that depends on your publisher
For authors with a major UK publisher, marketing isn’t thrown into their laps in the same way. Major publishers have the budget to secure prominent bookshop placement, which pretty much equals good sales. But this visibility is something smaller publishers (let alone authors who self-publish) can’t afford, and their books end up on overstocked shelves, hard to find. (If they’re stocked at all. Getting your book into Waterstones in the first place is no mean feat.)
So if you publish with a smaller publisher, your disadvantage marketing-wise is significant. It’s like turning up to a race after everyone else is near the finish line. And yet we’re expected to close that gap ourselves, with a social media account and a school visit offer.
Is there another way?
The marketing space isn’t new to me – I’ve done marketing and communications in a professional capacity for many years. But marketing yourself is different. Unless you present yourself as a brand (please don’t!), marketing your books is personal, which makes it more difficult, and if you’re like me, a bit awkward.
There is a hustle involved in selling your books, and at some point most of us have to engage with it. That’s just the deal. But I’d like to think there’s a way of doing it effectively without selling yourself out, without becoming someone you’re not, and without giving in to every exhausting social media trend.
I can’t say I’ve cracked it yet. But I’ll keep at it, one Instagram post at a time. Without text overlays.