The Marketing Your Traditional Trade Publisher Should Do

Do publishers still market books?

This is a question voiced by many authors. More and more they’re finding the responsibility pushed onto them to have an audience, build a platform, do the legwork. Want a book launch? Unless you’re a very big name, you’re probably organizing it yourself.

It all feels like cost-cutting, and some of it is. But there’s at least one good reason for it. Most of the old, familiar opportunities for book promotion—newspaper reviews, magazine interviews, well-attended public events—simply don’t exist anymore. The columns are gone, the magazines have shut down, and the people are staying home. When books do end up in front of big audiences these days, it’s often through social media traction, and publishers can’t manufacture that on their own.

This doesn’t mean publishers are off the hook for marketing activities. As someone who did this work in house for years, I can tell you a number of things your publisher must do, and some that good publishers should do for you and your book. When considering an offer of publication, make sure they have these things covered.

What Publishing Companies Must Do to Market Your Book

1. Create a title, cover, and book design that sells it to the right audience. You might not find this intuitive, but these factors do count as marketing. A publishing team must be knowledgeable enough about their market to make the correct packaging decisions. This is also why you will probably not get more than the right of consultation on these elements in your contract. You’re the expert on your manuscript, but they are the experts on their sales channels.
2. Create robust metadata. This is all the information about your book that gets entered into the book industry’s digital Onix system and distributed to all the book-industry players, from warehouses to libraries to brick-and-mortar bookstores and online retailers. As a customer, you’ll see the title, book description, genre, category, cover image, Look Inside pages, creator names, and creator bios. Behind the scenes the publisher also includes a lot more information to help booksellers and wholesalers categorize the book correctly and decide whether it’s the right fit for them. Today, metadata is the #1 most important marketing tool for a book, and it’s ever evolving. Even mid-sized publishers now have employees fully dedicated to it.
3. Create physical and digital catalogues. Truthfully, some publishers already do without physical catalogues, but they’re still common enough to make this list. More importantly, publishers need to use the book’s metadata to create listings in virtual catalogues using multiple online systems that get used by book sales reps and by the wholesalers, retailers, and librarians who will decide whether your book makes it onto shelves. I won’t get into the fussy details, but this is a lynchpin in your book’s ability to be found and bought.  

These activities are not glamorous. They happen quietly behind the scenes. But without them, a trade book is dead in the water. Companies that promise you wide market coverage without having a handle on these basics are either naive…or they’re hoping that you are.

What Publishing Companies Should Do to Market Your Book

Note: this is written from the perspective of marketing for children’s and adult trade books; that is, the books that get sold through regular bookstores. If you’re publishing through a university press or in the educational market, some of these will be less relevant.  

1. Send out review copies. These days, review mailings are partly done through digital services like NetGalley and Edelweiss+ or via PDFs to trusted recipients. However, for many genres and categories—especially where format, illustrations, or photographs play a significant role—the most important reviewers still need physical copies. This is expensive, and it requires that the publisher be on schedule to send out their review copies many months ahead of the publication date. If your publisher is getting their books reviewed in the top literary journals, that’s a good sign that they are on the ball with their schedule and their industry relationships.
2. Send out press releases. Your book was published! It won an award! It had or was connected to a major event! All of these are good reasons for publishers to send out a press release, even if the media landscape is contracting.
   Although your publisher should do some of this, you can spread the net wider by developing your own list of media contacts and sending press releases of your own. They’ll have better luck reaching national or publishing industry-specific publications, but you’ll have the advantage with local media and special-interest groups.
3. Do outreach to content creators. As print book reviews have disappeared, digital ones have emerged to take their place. The landscape is more volatile, but publishers should nurture some reliable contacts and should be able to identify which of them serve your book’s target audience.
4. Advertise. Your book probably won’t get a billboard in Times Square, but your publisher should know where its advertising dollars will do the most good. This might mean print ads, promoted social media posts, ads on websites or in newsletters, or sponsorship of events. Even a small budget can have a strong impact when an ad is well targeted.

This won’t be an exhaustive list for most publishers, but other marketing initiatives will vary widely based on the size of their staff, their budget, and the number of books they publish each year. They might table at library trade shows, help you apply to festivals, hook you up with interview opportunities or speaking gigs, create downloadable extras like book club guides and worksheets, film YouTube videos, set up a book tour, produce freebies like bookmarks or stickers…There is no one-size-fits-all approach for any book, publisher, or budget. However, for the most part, a company that covers the four activities I’ve described above is doing their best by you.

Of course, there’s lots that you can do yourself to market your own book. Check out this post for my top thirty ideas.