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2025-10-26

Man!! It looks like George Soros has been busy 😂😂🤣 Trump faces MASSIVE BACKLASH in SOUTH KOREA over $350B Tariff Dementia Deal #Trump #Scammer #SouthKorea #TrumpCrimeFamily #dementia #Thief #NotPolitics youtu.be/_AOCwb7jhiA?...

Trump faces MASSIVE BACKLASH i...

#trump #scammer #southkorea #trumpcrimefamily #dementia #thief

Lizmonster Writes @[email protected]

2025-04-17

About Trade Publishing, Part 3: Marketing

Introduction

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a publisher bought my book. Things immediately started going wrong.

It started with that phone call with my agent, in which I almost threw away my book deal. Whether that would have changed my future, I can’t say. In my defense, I knew nothing about publishing. I was counting on my agent to make sure my work and my career were protected. I ignored my screaming instincts, and let a lot of mistakes happen.

Most of those were in marketing.

They leaned heavily into my sex in the marketing materials. The words “strong female voice” were tossed around in early drafts, and yes, that was as icky as it sounds. They removed that, but the emphasis was still very much on me, and not on the story. Some of the phrasing they used sounded like they’d never encountered another woman writing science fiction, ever.

They played up the romantic elements of the plot. Which seemed fine at the time. I loved the romantic elements of the plot! But the marketing very quickly blurred, pushing the book toward romance reviewers who objected to the lack of a Happily Ever After for the romantic elements in question.

(I spoke up about that at the time. My agent said they were hoping the book would have mainstream crossover appeal, and if their plan didn’t work, they’d just redo the marketing and relaunch the book.

Seriously.

To be clear, kids, that is not a thing unless you’re an already-established, successful author, and honestly maybe not even then.)

And then, after the book was published, an established science fiction romance author trashed it in a paid blog spot for the SFWA. (No link. April 2016. You can find it if you’re curious; it’s still up.) It was clear she hadn’t read the book, but she used it as an example of people getting romance wrong. (Remember: I hadn’t written romance, and any marketing person with an ounce of sense would have been very, very aware of that.)

The comments on her blog were of the “oh, that poor author!” ilk, because the SFWA people understood what I did not yet get: that my career was dead, suffocated before it saw the light of day.

(In fairness: That wasn’t bad marketing. That was bad publicity. And yes, there definitely is such a thing.)

Marketing is about setting reader expectations. And if your publisher gets that wrong, the consequences can be dire.

How Marketing Can Determine Your Fate

For the purposes of this conversation, I’m going to split the marketing vs. publicity hair thusly:

Marketing establishes your book’s niche, and makes retailers aware of its availability/viability as a saleable product.

Publicity lets your potential readers know the book exists.

An example:

Marketing is elevating a book’s visibility in a place where Barack Obama finds his recreational reading. (Yes, I did just read The Ministry of Time.)

Publicity is Barack Obama putting it on a reading list he makes public.

They’re inextricably linked. Publicity is vital, of course: if Barack Obama doesn’t mention your book, what does it matter that he read it? But bad publicity is salvageable. Bad marketing, for most books, is not. If the marketing goes wrong, you’ve entirely lost your ability to reach your readership.

(The divisions are much murkier in self-pub. In the English-language market, self-pub is still deeply dependent on Amazon, even in those geographies where it has some retail competition. For the purposes of this post, I’ll just say that although self-publishers don’t have access to the marketing a trade publisher does, the self-pub market is very different, and there are options there.)

You’ve probably seen writers say on line “Trade publishers make you do your own marketing, even the Big 5.” That’s…sort of true? But by my own definitions, trade publishers are asking you to participate in publicity, not in marketing. You’re not going to be sitting down with a regional Barnes and Noble guy with a handful of trade rag reviews of a book, trying to convince them to carry 20 copies and put one in the window. You will probably be asked to do some blogging, flog on social media, maybe contact your local library, or set up a signing at a local bookstore. All those things can be great – but in general, how successful they are is going to depend on the marketing scaffolding the publisher has already set up.

And anybody who says it’s necessary for you to do those things isn’t aware of authors who’ve published posthumously with books that have sold well. Publishers know how to work with, and around, whatever you do or don’t do. Asking you to participate is a choice on their part.

If you’ve got a good social media game? Awesome! You may scare up a decent number of sales. For the rest of us? Honestly, I felt a child being given busywork so I wouldn’t question what the grown-ups were doing to my books. (Some of the stuff I was asked to blog about around the releases of my first two books…oof. Objectively, the weird focus of the topics and the ways I had to tie my opinions in knots were reflections of a murky and ineffective marketing strategy. Fortunately, by the time the third book came out, nobody cared anymore, so I didn’t have to blog for it. Maybe that’s part of why the third is my favorite.)

So when it’s you, what do you do?

Know what you are selling, and know your worth.

Remember those comps everyone witters on about when you’re writing a query letter? Those are actually really, really important. Not for the query letter – I’ve said elsewhere I disbelieve any reasonable agent is going to toss a good book because you didn’t get your comps right in the query – but for the future marketing of your book.

Know what you have written. Know who else is writing in your genre/subgenre. Know what sells there and what doesn’t. Know their covers, how often you see them in bookstores. Know how well they rank with etailers. Know if anybody’s yakking about them in your genre’s particular fandom. Not so you can duplicate their sales or their success – so you can make sure your publisher doesn’t absolutely fuck this part up. So you have facts you can hand to them if you have to fight for your book’s life.

To be fair, most of the time a publisher is going to get this right. But the times they get it wrong? It’s not just me. When I started talking with other writers about what happened to me, they came out of the woodwork. Publishers may not make frequent mistakes, but when they do, this one’s pretty common.

Don’t let your publisher market your work as something it’s not. You see a hint of a yellow flag, you scream bloody murder until somebody fixes it. And if they don’t? Return the advance and take your book back. I am serious. As the writer, you’re the most vulnerable link in the retail chain for your book. Barnes and Noble isn’t going under if your book doesn’t sell, but you may find yourself unable to sell anything again.

Protect your work. No one cares about it as much as you do. No one is at higher risk than you are. Stay on your toes, and fight for your art.

#notPolitics #publishing #writing

#notpolitics #publishing #writing