On social media recently, I saw an author who was exceedingly upset that their publisher was not giving them the marketing and promotion support they felt their book deserved.
If you have even a modicum of knowledge about the publishing industry, then you know this is among the most common complaints. What made this particular author stand out, though, was that she publicly shared the list of demands she had emailed her publisher. These demands were numerous and significant: even one of the items would require hours of work from a marketer or publicist. I didn’t get a sense of which areas of support were most important to her, or if there was one overriding opportunity that she thought had been missed. Rather, it was as if her intent was to overwhelm the publisher with guilt, shame, or a sense they had utterly failed and now owed her big time.
I can assure you this method doesn’t work.
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Jane Friedman has spent her entire career in the book publishing industry, with a focus on author education and trend reporting. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals. Her latest book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (University of Chicago Press), received a starred review from Library Journal. In addition to serving on grant panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Creative Work Fund, she works with numerous organizations to bring transparency to the business of publishing.