Do Authors Really Need to Spend Their Own Money to Make a Book Successful?

Last week The Guardian ran an article about how some authors are seeking help outside of their in-house publishing teams to promote their books. This is nothing new. There are lots of independent publicists who’ve been working with authors to supplement the work of their in-house teams for years. But this piece seemed to strike a particular chord with literary Twitter, probably because of one particular line: “Book tours can cost $15,000, publicity campaigns up to $16,000, and marketing work up to $100 an hour – figures that can be considerable when compared to authors’ advances and distant promises of royalties.”

That’s a lot of money, I think we can all agree. So yes, (some) commercial authors are spending significant amounts of money on outside help, and the authors featured in the Guardian piece are happy with their investments. But I think a lot of readers came away from that piece feeling like they could not be successful without spending extra money. Not true! Here are some other things to keep in mind.

In-house publicists and marketers aren’t lazy.
I mean, some of them might be, but that’s not what’s going on here. I’ve already written about how, overall, there are too many books, often because the people who run publishing companies consistently value quantity over quality. This is stressful for the workers on the ground, the ones who likely chose to work in book publishing in the first place because they actually, you know, like books. As workloads have increased and in-house staff become more overwhelmed by the day, outside consultants can be attractive simply because they have adequate time to spend on each of their clients.

The midlist is vanishing.
There’s a wealth gap in publishing that has been accelerated by corporate consolidation. The rich (celebrities, politicians) are getting richer, while the rest of us (most of whom actually write our own books!) have less to work with in terms of money and resources. Theoretically a book advance should pay authors for the time that it took to write their book, as well as the time it will take to promote. With advances diminishing (or at least certainly not keeping up with inflation), authors can end up spending an amount of time on those jobs that comes out to way less than the minimum wage. Paying for outside help on top of such low wages is absolutely not an option.

Most readings and tours don’t make a huge impact on book sales.
Most authors who pay for outside help with book tours are unlikely to see a big return on investment. There are other benefits to IRL readings: the community, the chance to interact with booksellers, the chance to see friends in far off places. But having a big tour is probably not what’s going to make or break a book, which can be a tough lesson to learn when so many of us (me included) have romantic ideas about what being an author actually entails.

Book coverage is more fractured than ever.
As Kate Dwyer noted in a recent Esquire piece on why debut novels are more difficult than ever to launch, there is no longer a winning formula for the kinds of book coverage that would clinch bestsellerdom. Even the most prized spaces in print media are no longer a guarantee (even the cover of the New York Times Book Review, which was always my gold standard), nor are radio and television appearances or celebrity book club picks. Hiring the “right” outside publicist with the right connections to pitch their books might not pay off in the way authors might hope.

Authors have been asked to do more and more.
Authors are constantly told to be your own brand, to develop your own following, to be active on social media, to bootstraps your way to literary success. Which is ironic because brand identity means so little to the book publishers themselves. Apart from a few really focused indie presses (NYRB, you’re killing it!) and genre imprints, publishers do not distinguish themselves in ways meaningful to consumers. It’s a lot of pressure when the burden falls entirely on the author, so of course seeking outside help is appealing.

All of literary culture suffers if the barrier to entry is too high.
It would be terrible to live in a world where the only way to become a bestseller is to pay for it. We’re not there yet (well, except for political books bought in large chunks by PACs). Yes, outside help can absolutely be worth the money, but it doesn’t guarantee success (and the opposite is true: if an author doesn’t have extra money to hire outside help their book is not doomed). Ideally, publishers would be able to provide all of the resources to enable their authors’s success, but even in the good old days success was never guaranteed.