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Marketing is hard, even when you do it right.

I’ve spent my entire career in marketing — from old school direct mail for magazine subscriptions to old school guerilla marketing promoting poetry readings and selling handmade chapbooks in smoky bars. I was segmenting email lists in Excel before email marketing became a billion-dollar industry, and I was engaged in and managing online communities before algorithms went mainstream.

I built the original Digital Book World on WordPress and Twitter before social media was considered a legitimate business channel, and I’ve avoided several ill-conceived “pivots” since then because I can smell vaporware a mile away. I’ve willingly been on the receiving end of a wide variety of marketing promotions myself, and I’ve worked with dozens of marketers over the years on campaigns ranging from poetry and financial services to destination events and comics.

As a result, I know firsthand how hard marketing can be when you’re doing everything right, and it’s partly why I’m not terribly concerned about “AI” replacing me any time soon.

All that said, I get really annoyed whenever I see marketing done wrong, and few industries get it wrong as consistently as book publishing.

Authors as Unpaid Marketers

Success which had previously relied on a combination of luck + publisher investment became, “If you want to succeed you’ll self-promote until your eyeballs bleed – and if you fail, it’s because you didn’t.”

—Cherie Priest

As a huge fan of The Clockwork Century, Priest’s candid vulnerability (“getting naked on main”) hit me hard but it was also refreshing because airing dirty laundry is typically frowned upon in book publishing circles. It’s such a small industry and relationships really matter. So does keeping up appearances.

Maris Kreizman, anticipating her own book release, alluded to this a few months ago at LitHub: “As someone who’s worked in and around the publishing industry for a couple of decades, it’s important to me that others think I’m a ‘good author.’”

Authors have always been expected to have a platform of some sort, but the definition has significantly evolved over the years as the overall media ecosystem has changed. In the “old days” (as recent as the late-90s), a platform could simply mean having published short stories, essays, and articles in a variety of magazines and newspapers that paid for that work, while also getting reviews, interviews, and even awards from those (and other) magazines and newspapers.

Publishers were often one of the major supporters of these influential publications (or their dedicated book sections), mainly through publicity and paid advertising — the former driving pre-publication awareness, buzz, and awards consideration; the latter supporting discoverability. Sometimes the former was organic, and sometimes it was influenced by the latter.

With the rise of the internet, those opportunities arguably expanded even further, but also frequently paid less, or in many cases, not at all. “Influence” was “democratized” and a series of short-sighted decisions were made. Digital advertising was less expensive, too, often thrown in as “value add” by the traditional magazines and newspapers who didn’t realize the light at the end of the tunnel was a bullet train heading in their direction.

Some authors were savvy enough to launch their own websites and limit their unpaid writing to domains they owned, but then social media disrupted things even more. Authors were not only expected to build audiences for themselves on each new platform, they also had to become digital marketers, promoting their own work as much as possible to complement their publishers’ efforts.

Most book publishers were slow to adopt social media themselves, relying on their authors to do the hard work first, partly because most book publishers weren’t known entities that readers would engage with. Many were generalists without clearly defined audiences, and editorial staff were mostly hidden behind the scenes, so their efforts were often scattershot and unfocused.

Digital advertising became even cheaper, and the ability to target larger audiences far exceeded the capabilities of their “traditional” advertising partners, despite many of those partners having well-defined and highly engaged audiences for years.

“Data-driven” became an industry mantra, and the race to the bottom began in earnest.

Throughout all of this, authors were encouraged (and in many cases, expected) to play a critical role in marketing efforts, especially if their book wasn’t positioned as a presumptive bestseller. One of the accepted major advantages of having a traditional publisher — a dedicated marketing plan with resources to support it — became a tertiary bullet point, putting traditionally published authors in the same boat as their self-published counterparts: “Self-promote until your eyeballs bleed – and if you fail, it’s because you didn’t.”

What’s Good Publisher Marketing?

This is why I get livid whenever I hear publishers say authors MUST have a platform and be willing to do more and more marketing to support their traditionally published books. Even worse, some publishers are still using vanity metrics to determine if an author is worth publishing at all.

I’ve advocated for years that authors should focus on owning their own domain and engaging with relevant communities of interest because I believe the internet is ultimately a net benefit for all writers. Marketing books is just a fringe benefit of having a strong online presence, though, and a good publisher should be able to market a good book* whether or not the author has a lot of followers on the social network du jour or is famous for something other than being a good writer.

If a publisher can’t credibly market the books they’re publishing without relying on authors matching (or exceeding) their efforts, it doesn’t matter how good their contracts, editing, and/or distribution is — they’re not very good at Publishing.

The idea that an author must bring an audience with them to be publishable has always been a red flag for me, with publishers of all sizes, but especially nonfiction. When I ran Writer’s Digest, one of our primary advantages was that we had a large, engaged audience to market our books to, and anything our authors brought to the table was gravy. Some were already established, while others became known after publishing with us. WD wasn’t unique in that regard, but the approach sadly still remains uncommon, especially in corporate publishing.

Good publishers know their markets and audiences, and how to reach them. Full stop.

Good publishers have reputations that their partners and readers know and respect, enabling them to nurture new authors and help them build an audience together. They also tend to have established authors who will enthusiastically support each other in amplifying specific marketing efforts, or simply boosting each other for moral support.

If a publisher doesn’t have the ability to create and/or open markets for new or low-profile authors, they’re just another intermediary extracting value rather than adding it.

Sorry, not sorry.

What about Publishers’ Platforms?

While an author’s platform is definitely an important factor in the long-term viability of their career, it shouldn’t be seen as a core requirement for the potential success of any given book—unless their publisher is just a dumb pipe feeding ebook files and metadata to Amazon, in which case, just go full DIY! Plenty of authors who don’t have what’s considered a traditional platform today have had successful books, while remainder bins are full of books by authors with “large platforms” and Big 5 publisher imprints on their spines.

In 2019, I remain astounded (but not totally surprised) by how many authors’ platforms lack the basics—if they have one at all—but far more egregiously, too many publishers are way behind the curve with their own platforms, doing a disservice to the authors they’ve committed to support and help succeed.

If you’re querying a publisher—big or small, traditional or hybrid—you (or your agent) should be able to satisfactorily address these three planks of their own platform before they inquire about yours. Each one is potentially more important than the size of your advance, and definitely more important than the size of your own Twitter following or email list.

I wrote that back in 2019, and I think it mostly holds up as a bare minimum rubric.

You can learn a lot about any publisher by analyzing their website(s), and search and social presences. Assuming you’re engaged in relevant communities of interest yourself, you’ll know if they’re a relevant presence in those communities, too. Of course, many are doing the exact same thing with prospective authors.

Visit a few bookstores, large and small, and see how many titles they have on the shelves. How many of those authors have you already heard of through something other than their books?

Visit your local library and see how well they’re represented there. Browse the library’s digital catalog and see what’s available and how many holds their titles have.

If they’re a niche publisher, how visible are their titles in relevant settings you frequent?

In 2025, authors have three viable options that will vary in appeal depending on their personal goals, but each one comes with notable compromises. Whether traditional, hybrid, or self-publishing, they all require some degree of marketing effort on the author’s part, though.

Traditionally published authors shouldn’t have to be marketers, but they should be prepared to participate in and amplify their publishers’ good faith efforts, and establishing those expectations upfront is critical to a successful partnership. Good publishers should be prepared to meet authors more than halfway, too.

* “good book” I’m making a good faith assumption that most publishers genuinely believe the books they publish are objectively good, although that’s demonstrably not always the case. When an author’s “fame and reach” are considered critical factors in deciding whether to publish the book at all, that leaves room for a bad book that requires less marketing support taking the place of a good book from a lesser-known author who might need more support. It’s the kind of short-term thinking that defines most corporate and generalist publishing, and it has ripple effects on the market that negatively impact everyone else.

Header Image: Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash