You need to bring your own readers, whether you are self or traditionally published. What do I mean? For self-publishing, the answer is obvious: You need to find and market to your potential readers. Gone are the days when you could stick a book on Amazon and expect to get some traction. Keywords and strategic category choices will help, but if you don’t have your own audience to sell your book to, your book will sink in the quicksand of 4,000+ uploads a day.
Even the Trad Publishers Don’t Market Like They Used To
One reason so many authors loved the traditional publishing model is that they could count on the publisher to market their book. Yes, they might have to go out on a book tour, but the publisher set up the book tour for them. Press releases were sent out automatically. Distribution to brick and mortar stores was a given. Advertisements appeared in the right magazines and papers.
Unfortunately, more and more, traditional publishers are not putting marketing and advertising dollars behind new and mid-list authors. That money is saved for the big-name authors that are practically guaranteed to sell millions of copies. (These are the same authors who get huge advances for the simple reason that the publisher knows the author will deliver a highly marketable book and they will earn the advance back. Quickly.)
Traditional Publishers Want You to Bring Your Own Readers
Publishers (and therefore agents) want you to have a platform—an ability to reach the people who will buy your books.
I recently saw someone post that publishers wanted an author to have something like 750,000 followers on social media. My eyebrows shot so far back in my head that I looked ten years younger for the next hour or so. I also thought, That can’t be right.
Guess what. It wasn’t.
Because frankly, if I had three-quarters of a million followers, I wouldn’t be looking at trad publishers. I wouldn’t need them.
With a little digging (very little—Googling isn’t that tough, people), I came up with some more realistic numbers. In an interview with agent and author Mary DeMuth, Thomas Umstattd, Jr. of authormedia.com, pulled some solid numbers from her for both fiction and nonfiction authors.
Publishers are looking for nonfiction authors with a minimum of 50,000 followers across all social media platforms. If you have 50,000 email subscribers, that’s a much more solid platform base and you are almost guaranteed to land an agent and a publisher.
An email list of subscribers is weighted much more heavily than social media followers. Your email list is comprised of people who self-selected to follow and interact with you. They have taken a bigger step than just clicking “like” or “follow.” In short, they are fans of some degree.
If your book is compelling, if you were “in the room” when a major event went down, you might not need that large a following to attract a traditional publisher. But truth be told, if you are in those rooms, you probably already have media contacts and a platform and reach.
Bottom Line: Traditional publishers work with authors who have the capacity to reach a large amount of readers on their own. That’s a clue as to how much marketing support they are giving their authors these days.
Self-Publishing
In self-publishing, you are the person responsible for selling those books. If you already have a large email subscriber list and a large social media following, your job is much easier. But as I said above, the email list is much more valuable than social media followers. I follow Andy Borowitz; I like him. But truth be told, I have never bought one of his books. (Sorry, Andy.)
Your platform can also be a TV show, radio show, podcast, or (gasp) syndicated newspaper column. (They still have those? YES!) However, having your own email list is the most important marketing piece you can have.
Why?
You have control over your email list. No one can take that away from you. (You are downloading and backing up your subs on a regular basis, right?)
You also have control over your podcast content, but you don’t have control over Apple, Podbean, Spotify, etc. It’s good to use those distributors, but they can go away or kick you off with no notice. TV shows get cancelled. DJs—even the popular ones—seem to get fired every few years when the station hires new management to “shake things up.” Your very popular syndicated column can have the floor taken out from under it. (Ask Andy Borowitz. The New Yorker cut his column after twenty-five years due to financial difficulties.)
Why Am I Telling You This?
At the beginning, middle, and end of the day, you as the author are responsible for marketing your book. Unless you are one of the top authors at a Big Five publishing house, it is up to you to figure out how to find your readers and entice them into buying your book. Traditionally published authors at medium and smaller publishers (even the “prestigious” houses) end up doing the heavy lifting when it comes to marketing their book.
In writers’ groups (after writers’ groups, after writers’ groups) I see authors frustrated by a lack of sales. Some have done some actual marketing; others have just uploaded their book to KDP/Amazon expecting Oprah to call any day now. I have had that same frustration and I will continue to have it. Marketing is a full-time job in itself. You can automate parts of it, but you still need to develop a marketing plan and actually follow it. Sales do not magically appear out of nowhere.
Most of my clients are business owners—coaches, trainers, speakers, consultants—and their book is a marketing tool, not the end product. Their goal is to get their book into the hands of people who will hire them; any royalties are a secondary bonus.
Your goal as a business person and as an author is to build your platform, specifically your email list. Then nurture that list, giving them pertinent information, allowing them to get to know who you are and what you do. Writing a book is an extremely effective way to do this, but it’s just the start of the journey.
