Book Marketing, Traditional Publishing, and Templates
I have about five years of experience at traditional publishing houses. While I spent most of that time in production, I did spend about a year helping with marketing at various internships. When I decided to self-publish my debut novel, The Way of the Cicadas, I turned to my experience and tried to replicate the marketing motions I’d helped with in the past. In the process, I encountered all the ways that indie books need to be marketed differently—both due to budget constraints and gatekeeping and due to market differences. I also got a pretty good idea of why my book hadn’t succeeded in the query trenches.
Publishing Likes Templates
One of the first tasks most publishing interns get sent on is mailing review copies. You export a list of contacts from ancient database software and format it in a Word document. You nervously navigate around intimidating publishing professionals and try not to break the printer behemoth as you create labels. Then you stuff dozens if not hundreds of advanced reader copies (and press kits) into bubble mailers. You stack several USPS crates of packages for the bedraggled mailperson to send via media mail. And as soon as you’ve finished one mailing, there’s another ready to go.
The publishing industry employs a lot of templates. Press release templates. Email templates. Marketing plan templates. Transmittal templates. Book publishing is a rinse and repeat industry. That’s not a bad thing—from a project management standpoint, it makes sense. But on the author side, it feels preposterous. My book is special! What do you mean the person who wrote my back cover copy probably wrote the back cover copy for ten other books the same day?
Traditional Publishing Isn’t Interested in What Books Deserve
In the same vein, it used to be brain breaking to me that a book that I knew many people would enjoy and that was reasonably well written could not find a foothold in traditional publishing, not only on behalf of my book, but for the dozens of high-quality manuscripts I read as a critique partner. In my head, a good book deserved to be traditionally published, and highly marketable but more poorly written books didn’t deserve to be published at all.
But here’s the thing: publishing companies acquire books not based on how well they’re written but on how well they will sell. What’s more, they select books that will require the minimum amount of effort to intrigue readers. Even if a book has the potential to appeal to a mass audience, if it would take too much maneuvering to make it comprehensible in a 200-word back cover, a publisher is not likely to bother when more cookie cutter books could sell well too.
Breaking from the Template
An author who has a book go viral on TikTok has proven that their premise can be communicated to a broad audience. In fact, they’ve done most of that work already. The author has found readers outside of the deep grooves of traditional publishing’s repetitive marketing motions. These authors (presumably) didn’t send hundreds of advanced reader copies to every review outlet in the country. Instead, they found readers on social media or the internet in a method that publishers are still baffled by. It’s a different method but leads to the same ends: book sales.
Finding Your Own Way Isn’t Easy
But knowing that a book theoretically has an audience and actually getting an audience are two different things. I know that there’s an audience for my book. Why else would there be seven seasons of The 100? Why else would Wool have gone viral? But I still haven’t connected to as many readers as I think I potentially can. I’ve found the largest obstacle to be communicating that it’s a YA/adult crossover book.
Other comps I’ve read that straddle the line between adult and young adult tend to pick young adult—at least, this was the case pre-2020 before YA began to fall out of favor. For example, The Electric Kingdom reads as an adult book despite its YA label. It’s multi-POV like mine and features a young child, a teen, and an adult narrator. And it’s plain weird, weird enough and with as placid of a plot to fall into the same literary category as Station Eleven.
But The Electric Kingdom’s YA label didn’t appear to hold it back. I think it’s because it appeals to both audiences, and in the end, those audiences are not that different. Teens read adult books, and adults read teen books. The main difference is that books marketed toward teens need to rein in some themes to appease gatekeepers but also just to be more appropriate for younger readers.
I didn’t feel comfortable wholeheartedly embracing the YA label for The Way of the Cicadas, and I felt it held enough adult appeal to earn the adult label. There’s swearing, some dark themes, and a brief intimate scene. Basically, my book is for anyone who would watch a CW show.
The term New Adult should in theory be a great label for my book, except that if you give the vaguest hint that there could be romance and thus there could be steamy scenes, you get ripped apart for not having them. I was not interested in that, so I suppose I traded one problem for another. Also, there is no “New Adult Sci-fi” category on the Zon.
Can you see why a traditional publisher wouldn’t want to bother navigating these intricacies, even if my book was the best book in the world? At the same time, I can’t be bothered to write to a checklist or to write book after book in the hopes that one might, by chance, appeal to a traditional publisher.
Enjoying the Process
Despite the marketing difficulties, I am so glad that I decided to self-publish Cicadas. If I hadn’t, I never would have gotten my amazing book cover designed. I wouldn’t have typeset the words or written snappy back cover copy. I wouldn’t have started drafting book 2 because so many reviewers wanted to know what happened next. All these steps have been meaningful.