What it's like to be an author promoting a new book

A portrait of the artist in pre-publication limbo.

I’ve got a book coming out in July—my third published novel—and I’m in the throes of self-promotion. Or, rather, the throes of thinking about, worrying about, and obsessing over self-promotion. Because, as you’ll see below, a large part of the work of being an author in the limbo of promoting a book that is not yet out in the world is the mental and emotional labor of thinking about it constantly and wondering if you’re doing it right. I don’t want to over-generalize from my experience (not all authors are as neurotic as me), but I’m willing to bet that whatever you see of an author’s promotional efforts is just the tip of the iceberg. Whatever’s beneath the waterline is mostly a lot of spiraling thoughts.

This is the third time I’ve been through this process, but I’ve never really spoken at any length about what exactly it’s like to be an author promoting a book in the social media age. I want to rectify that this time around. Hiding the reality of the experience, I think, contributes to authors feeling isolated and alone when their turn comes up, wondering if what they’re going through is normal. Honestly, I’m not sure if my experience of self-promotion is normal.

Here are some things I’ve found to be true about pre-publication author promotion of a new book:

It tends to be unclear what an author’s promotion of their own work is for—or how to tell if it’s working.

It’s commonplace for authors to whisper amongst ourselves that our own efforts to promote our work don’t really matter, that it’s really the publisher’s support of a book that will most contribute to sales. I’ve never quite agreed with that—the bracing truth is that nobody knows for sure what will or won’t sell a particular book, that instead of knowing with certainty what will work book people are instead left with a long list of things that might work, that have worked (sometimes) in the past. Author self-promotion is among those things. So we’re left to do as much as we feel comfortable with, not quite knowing whether it will meaningfully move the needle. (Before anti-traditional-publishing folks swoop in to say this is why publishers are unnecessary, I’d hasten to clarify that what an author does is always in addition to everything a publisher does: cover design, book production, warehousing and distribution, trade publicity, pitching bookseller accounts…)

That leaves the troubling question of whether we’re doing the right things, whether any of it’s working, and what “working” even means. On this, authors don’t have much solid data to go off of. In the social media age, “pre-publication promotion” basically translates to “doing posts”—so there are, to start with, the metrics of those to drive us mad: likes, shares, impressions. Beyond that, the metrics that the posts are presumably meant to push, and harder to budge: Amazon rankings, Goodreads shelf adds, popularity on a site like Netgalley. But it’s easy to drive yourself nuts with this stuff. Best to just do…whatever promotional stuff you’ve decided to do, and trust that it’s doing…something.

Authors over-communicate with the people they know in hopes of reaching people they don’t know.

There’s a major audience problem in online author promoting. Every author has dozens to hundreds of people in their community, and who are very happy for them to be publishing a book…but that book’s success actually depends on the author (and the publisher) reaching lots of people the author doesn’t know.

This leads to a strange dynamic where an author initially informs their community of an upcoming book, usually in the form of a deal announcement or cover reveal, and everyone is very very happy for them. And then, after all the author’s friends and family know about the book and have most likely pre-ordered it, the author…just keeps talking about it. To the author’s friends, this can look like self-obsession (we know about the book, stop telling us about it already), but in reality it’s a hope that an awareness of our book will somehow spill out beyond those we know by name.

Back in the days when Twitter/X and Facebook were mostly the only games in town for online self-promotion, this looked like treating social media as a big cocktail party, where the author posted constantly in the hopes of connecting with lots of folks, many of them other writers and people in the industry. (This was especially the dynamic on Twitter.) The going thought, for many, was not to self-promote, but just to be a human people wanted to talk to. Talk about your book, yes—but also tell jokes, and take stances on the issues of the day. This had its own problems, obviously.

Today, when TikTok and Instagram Reels rule the online scene, the friends/strangers dynamic is more pronounced than ever. The algorithmic nature of these platforms promises the possibility—but not the certainty—of virality. And more than ever, an author’s posts might look like thinly veiled advertisements for a product. Maybe it’ll only reach a few hundred or thousand followers—or, maybe, it’ll go viral and reach millions. Posting on these platforms, today, is like pulling the handle on an engagement slot machine. Why not try? And try, and try, and try…going for a chance at that big audience at the risk of exhausting or alienating your built-in audience.

Basically, the author has to risk looking like an unhinged, obsessed weirdo to their friends, in hopes of reading a faceless horde of theoretical book buyers waiting in the wings—themselves overwhelmed by choices for what to buy, and to read.

Outside the publishing community, people don’t really understand the point of pre-promotion publication.

Inevitably, some time before the publication of one’s book, an author is bound to have a conversation in which a close friend offers some form of the following apology: “I’m sorry I haven’t bought your book yet!” And then you tell them that it’s not even out yet, and they get a confused look on their face.

Huh? Why are you talking about it so much if it’s not even on sale yet?

I won’t go into the importance of pre-orders here. It’s well-covered elsewhere. I’ll just say that to people who are not publishing professionals or authors, this does Not. Make. Sense. It’s commonplace for authors to start begging for pre-orders six months to a year in advance of publication—but wow, that is such a long time to sustain interest and buzz for a book. I’m seeing indications that some authors are starting to think about this differently, waiting to talk about their book until three months or less from publication, leading to a shorter and more sustained period of promotion and buzz. What’s the right way to do it? I don’t know.

Absent many guardrails for the right way to do things, authors are left, mostly, with vibes.

How is promotion going? I don’t know. But I do know how I feel about it at any given moment. A pre-publication reader review comes in on NetGalley or Goodreads; if it’s 5 or 4 stars, I feel good. Less than that, less good. A low Amazon sales ranking can make me feel sad, until it jumps, then I feel like can breathe again. Notice how often I focus not on what the actual impact of something is, but how it feels? So many times, making a book promo post, I’ll reflect that if I was being totally honest with my audience, what I’d actually do would be to simply ask if someone, anyone, can put in a pre-order to improve my rankings. Or go and click “like” on the nice Goodreads review to bury the mediocre one that’s inexplicably on top of the page. Or promise me—promise—that you’ll come to my book launch party in a few months’ time, so I won’t have to face the terrifying prospect of an empty bookstore.

But that’s embarrassing. Hell, maybe this whole post is embarrassing.

But in an industry in which many products come to market, and it’s hard to definitively establish causation when it comes to promotion and performance, this is what authors are so often left with—not what we did and the impact it made, but what we do and how it feels. How it feels now, and how it will feel later, when the book is in the world.

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Buy The Day He Never Came Home! It’s available for preorder wherever books are sold. I might especially suggest Next Chapter Booksellers in St. Paul, who will get you a signed copy of the book, plus a few freebies provided by my publisher.

I’ll have some news about launch events soon!

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash