Marketing - Who's Job Is It Anyway?

With a trade publisher, the author is certainly expected to cooperate, but generally, the publisher has marketing professionals who know what they're doing.

It's common for publishers to encourage authors to use social media they already have a presence on, for instance, or to assist with obtaining reviews, or interviews, perhaps.

Hunt & Peck said:

I guess this is a post involving two questions...one, what percentage of marketing is the author doing, and two, what factors flip the coin to the better option being to self-publish?

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1. Depends on the publisher. Smaller publishers are more likely to have the author bear the brunt of the marketing load, but that's not always the case.
2. Volume. Will the publisher move more copies at a lower royalty than you could by self-publishing at a higher royalty?

Hunt & Peck said:

Who exactly is marketing (promoting) the book...you or the publisher. Am I wrong that it seems as though the author is expected to market the book? Blog, Tweet, speak, write, all about the book every chance they get. Is more effort put in by the author post-publishing than pre-publishing.

Don't get me wrong...as who's better to promote the author and their book than the author him/herself, but what exactly is the publisher, agent, or anyone else involved doing when it comes to selling the book to the masses?

What brought me to this question was when I considered self-publishing. If I'm writing the book and then doing all the post-publishing legwork, why use the middleman? Is this now especially true if the target audience is primarily local to the state I'm in.

I guess this is a post involving two questions...one, what percentage of marketing is the author doing, and two, what factors flip the coin to the better option being to self-publish?

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You're conflating things, but regardless, stuff like blogging, twitting, etc., about the book is not what drives sales of a trade-published book.

Publishers have entire departments that work very hard to get publicity where it counts, and that's not with readers. Readers pick books off bookstore shelves, but they don't put the books ON the shelves.

An author blogging is nice, but if no one has heard of the author, that does nothing. Even if someone has, unless the author in question is JKR, the number of readers of his or her blog is likely to be minute. Getting a book into catalogs, into the hands of reviewers (reviewers with influence -- like name pubs), onto shelves, onto endcaps, onto display tables, onto 'what's new' shelving and lists, in libraries, etc., is all stuff most authors can not do for themselves, in nearly any circumstance, and those are the things that sell books.

Occasionally, a self-published book takes off in a huge, Andy Weir-like way, but that's almost never down to something the author did besides write something that clicked with enough people that the book started generating its own momentum.

Self-publishing is an attractive idea for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that you have full control (and don't share the money with anyone else). Of course, you also have to either pick up the skills to do all the sales/marketing stuff yourself, or have the ability to pay others to help you out. But depending on what you're looking for (and sometimes on your genre - there are genres that do really well in self-pub), it can be well worth the time and trouble.

Trade publishing is going to give you exposure you're unlikely to get self-publishing. And for various reasons it's difficult to get a self-published book into a bookstore. None of that's a guarantee of success, but in general with trade pub you're getting a smaller percentage of a much bigger pie, even if the book doesn't do spectacularly well.

I think which you choose really depends on your goals, your temperament, and what sort of books you write. It's also worth noting that there's absolutely no reason you can't do both; I know of a number of authors who have both trade-published and self-published books, all of which do appropriately well in their various markets.

I was not, just btw, suggesting self-publishing can't be successful or wasn't a good way to go -- it depends on the individual. Self-publishing gives the writer all the control, and all the responsibility. Plenty of people choose it for a whole slew of reasons, and find success (however that's defined) with it, but it should be something chosen specifically, not because 'hey, publishers would ask me to blog anyway so what's the difference?'

cornflake said:

I was not, just btw, suggesting self-publishing can't be successful or wasn't a good way to go -- it depends on the individual. Self-publishing gives the writer all the control, and all the responsibility. Plenty of people choose it for a whole slew of reasons, and find success (however that's defined) with it, but it should be something chosen specifically, not because 'hey, publishers would ask me to blog anyway so what's the difference?'

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Oh, absolutely agreed. (I didn't mean to be disagreeing with you!) It's a much more complicated question than that. I know what I prefer, all other things being equal; but other things are so rarely equal.