About eight years ago, as my second novel, Why We Came to the City, was being published, I received one of the most devastating emails of my life—by accident.
What happened was, I had sent an email out to around a hundred people, mainly friends and family members who I knew were not on social media. I shared some good reviews, links to order the book, and to invited people to join in any book events they could make in the coming weeks. If they had already read and enjoyed the novel, I thanked them and asked politely, if they would take a moment to leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon, as this could be helpful.
It was all pretty benign—the sort of email I’d gotten from dozens of writers before.
But one recipient found it to be not benign… at all. And I got a response I never expected.
It came from another writer, from an earlier generation, a kind of mentor who had been very supportive and given me a lot of helpful advice when my first book came out. I’d noticed they’d receded a bit in the years that followed, but thought little of it.
Only then I got a reply to my email that was clearly not meant for me.
They had intended to forward my email to someone else along with their own disgruntled rant about me—but had accidentally replied instead.
I won’t share the exact wording of this email, and, sorry, I’m also not going to say who the writer was. (After all, who among us hasn’t expressed some strong feelings in an email or a text that we would not want the object of those feelings to see? Who among us hasn’t done that today, probably.)
But it was pretty devastating to read in the moment.
Their objection was that this kind of direct self-promotion displayed both desperation and conceitedness that prevented me from being a true artist. And… they also said it made them want to throw up. And they also called me a “jackass.” (Ok, I quoted from it a little.)
Whew. Yup. That still stings!
I’m not sure how exactly I worked up the nerve to write back, but I did. I let them know how much it hurt to get their email, and that I didn’t agree that it was unartistic to want readers to actually, you know, read what I’d written.
I explained that the email had gone out only to people I considered friends, and who I thought might want the information. I wasn’t spamming strangers or even people I barely knew.
They apologized, and said they felt bad for the way their opinion had come out, but that they stood by it. They truly felt it was improper for me to directly promote my own work in that way. In their view, if I wanted to be an artist, I could not also be a salesman.
I said I respectfully disagreed, and that whether I liked it or not, a modern writer is expected to be both.
Some time went by, and believe it or not we eventually patched things up. And in fact they later wrote to say that they’d actually come around to my perspective, which I was happy to hear.
Still the email touched a nerve then and continues to vex me somewhat now. I wish I could totally dismiss their view as wildly out-of-date, but there’s a part of me that often wishes things could be the way they say it. I continue to want clear separation between my roles as an artist and a self-promoter. I can, even, see how one can sometimes inhibit the other.
I’m thinking of it now because I am heading, once again, into a busy year of self-promotion… this time with not just one but two books hitting shelves in a matter of months (What? Yes! Stay tuned.)
So for my own sanity, and for the sake of helping anyone else who finds themselves in this struggle, I wanted to lay out some of the ways in which I’ve come to deal with that pressure and the ways it does, sometimes, feel very unbecoming or unartistic. I still think it is an inevitable part of the modern publication process, but in that sense I think it should be one that can be stimulating, exciting, and fun… not cheap, hackish, conceited, and desperate.
A year after this whole email episode occurred, I spoke to writer Courtney Maum for her book Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer's Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book.
She asked me for some advice for new writers and I realized I wanted to respond, in some way, to the crisis I’d had about self-promotion. So I told her this:
Remember that 'author' is always only a temporary job description. It is a role you play when you step out to talk to readers, booksellers, critics, or whoever, about your latest work. It might be a role you play for days or weeks or months--one you slip back into now and then when called upon. But it can't and shouldn't be a permanent state of affairs, because your permanent job description is 'writer' and that's what you are even when no one else is looking.
Most of the stress you go through while being an author is really about worrying that if you don't perform well enough, you'll somehow have to stop being a writer. But you were a writer before you started being an author, and you will still be one afterwards."
The distinction that came to me in that moment, between writer and author has been a really helpful one.
Here’s what I mean by it:
We start out as writers. That's the primary job, always. We do a lot of very hard work, often for many years, in some degree of isolation. Writing a story or a novel, or a poem or an essay, requires steady concentration, free of as many distractions as possible.
But then we turn outward for a while. This could be only every few weeks or months when some new essay or short work is ready to share. Some writers will find themselves doing it on a daily basis through social media, sharing public glimpses into their reading habits, writing process, thoughts and opinions on topics-of-the-moment. Some of this is just socializing, and some of it is a kind of self-promotion. The lines can feel very blurred. (I actually think that's good, more on this later!)
The equilibrium changes. You go from being a writer to being an author.
For this post I'm going to focus on the most extreme version of this shift, the one I was in the midst of when the misfired email happened.
Say, suddenly, you luck out and that thing you wrote all alone for years and years finally sells to a publisher? Now you're going to go into “author-mode” in a whole different way.
What’s changed exactly? Well, for one thing there is real money on the table, and an investment by the publisher that goes well beyond your advance. You quite literally sell your novel to them, and relinquish some artistic control over it in the process. (You may not, for instance, have final say on the title or the cover art. Those become the domain of a marketing department you may have limited contact with.)
The publisher is now printing it and promoting it and trying to get lots of people to read it. They may have publicists and marketing experts who will do some of this, but these folks will often be managing ten or twenty different titles every season. Nobody is going to be able to focus on just your own book like you will.
More and more, even a very engaged publisher will count on you to help in the sales and promotion process.
This can be exciting, even pleasant at times, but it is also a ton of hard work. For my books I’ve done interviews, signed stock, written personal essays (and placed them myself), arranged events, emailed with readers/booksellers/librarians, maintained my website, spoken with book clubs, travelled to bookstores, attended conferences, done panels with other authors, and posted endlessly about all these things online (across an increasingly disparate bunch of platforms.) And honestly I don't even know if I'm very good at it, or if any of it really helps sell books.
I count myself very lucky to get to do all these things, but that doesn't mean they aren't also stressful and time-consuming.
It really becomes a full time job at some point, and it can be pretty mindbending. Among other things, for those who love writing because it builds on their strengths as introverts—suddenly a lot of what you end up doing is extremely extroverted. For those of us who experience some form of anxiety (isn't that all of us?) this can be hard stuff. I will often find myself up all night, stressing about all the stuff ahead, and also panicking about how dumb I surely sounded in the last post or email or interview, etc.
All of which is to say that if someone comes along and says you've been behaving like a jackass, that's going to confirm a lot of those anxieties, even if you tell yourself it isn't the case.
Oh, woe is you—you may be thinking. How awful to get attention for your work! Would you rather just be ignored?
That's not what I mean at all, of course. I'm not looking for sympathy, just to share the reality that being an author is a very different set of skills than those required for being a writer.
It’s worth bearing in mind that, yes, this is probably something you’ve looked forward to from the start. And for good reason! After all, the goal of all that solitude (usually) is paradoxically to express something to others. Whether we ourselves crave attention (and many writers ironically don’t) we do want people to pay attention to our ideas, to enjoy what we’ve written, to provoke and stimulate their imaginations… that’s always been what it’s been for.
And that's not somehow unbohemian, uncool, or crass… yes, I hope we all write because we personally love it. But I also hope we’re writing because we believe that work simultaneously bears meaning to others.
Beyond this—you're also allowed to care about how it sells. In pure dollars and cents terms. I really mean it.
Why?
Well, to state the obvious, for one thing you may intend to supplement your living with your writing.
If anything it is wild to imagine a writer somehow wouldn't want to consider the real financial benefits that a writer hopes to reap from their work.
And in the vast majority of cases, even with a very successful book, we’re not talking about the type of money on which someone can retire forever.
In most cases the money earned from a book that took years to write won’t even come close to fully supporting a writer for the years it will take them to write another.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important to us all the same.
Even putting that aside, the other issue is that a writer whose work does not sell well has a much harder time getting published again. This is, for me, the source of an incredible amount of anxiety—after all, I love doing this and want to keep doing it. Meanwhile, the number of writers I knew ten years ago who are still producing and selling new books now, a decade later, is an ever-smaller one. That’s not always due to sales success or failure, but often it has a big role to play in the likelihood of a future career.
The truth is that most books never “earn out” — meaning your share of the royalties doesn't cover the advance you get up front — and that's somewhat built in to the publishing math from the start. Still, editors want to see your books getting more popular, selling better, over time, not worse. Many authors whose first books do OK will then get paid more for a second novel, only it then sells worse than the first, and will end up with what's called a “bad track.” (This happened to me and it took about six years to get out of it, and meant changing publishers. It's very, very common.)
So for those practical reasons, we need to care about the book, not just as an artistic achievement, but as a commodity that is bought and sold. We just do. We can decry the state of commercialism in art and we can long to live in a world in which great art is well-subsidized by the State… but that’s not the world we live in. Publishing houses are businesses. Editors are looking for great art, but they are also making investments in that art in the hopes there will be some return. And if there isn't, they don't get to keep on editing for very long either.
Like it or not, that’s the reality.
It’s worth noting that, while art and commerce has been intertwined since the days of cave paintings, the overlap in publishing has perhaps not always been quite this acute.
I mentioned earlier that my friend of the misfired email was of an earlier generation of writers. That’s significant because truthfully, I do not think the burden was as intensely on them as writer to promote their work, twenty or even thirty years ago. My doing it seemed very foreign to them, and I think, like a grave mistake. His concern, at heart, was that some kind of naked ambition for success and fame would inevitably interfere with the higher goal of achievement as an artist.
A writer in their day still gave events or did interviews, but in a pre-social media world (when the reading public was not as fractured as today), that writer probably could depend on the publishing company to do the bulk of the promotion and publicity. My friend had been more easily able to stay artistically above the fray. And I think that, for them, it was very painful to see this change happening in the industry.
Even eight years ago, when that email misfired, these self-promotion stigmas were more controversial than they can be today. Back then, big name writers like Jonathan Franzen often spoke out about the evils of writers being on social media. He called Twitter “unspeakably irritating” and an “irresponsible medium.” People got pretty worked up about it. But today I don't think anybody really would.
I happen to agree with Franzen actually, and was feeling more and more that way even before Twitter was ruined by Elon Musk—but then and now I still have concerns about shutting off a rare means of direct communication with readers and with other writers. Not so much because it could help sell copies of my work, but more because I really value that connection, when the hellsite is not being such a hellsite.
As I say, today if anything, writers are abandoning social media more because the environment has become more toxic and less useful, than because they have moral objections to it being unartistic. Those who don’t like it don’t use it, and it isn’t all that controversial.
Meanwhile, those who do like it, do use it, and it still feels common to see great artists and literary authors maintain a public author persona. They're also confident and unabashed self-promoters. They post pictures from their events and signings, links to interviews and articles, and invite followers to enjoy it all with them vicariously.
I like cheering on a writer I love when they're promoting their great work. I also like being able to share in what they're reading and talking about in the world during the periods when they're not promoting. I think we're genuinely lucky to have that.
It is a welcome reminder that this need not be so fraught… that it can be empowering to take an active role in the publicity and marketing of something that matters a great deal to you. And that it can and should be fun. I think, slowly, we have been changing the broader view of what a “real” artist should be.
Career editor Betsy Lerner reflected on this stigma against self-promotion in her excellent book The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers.
Reflecting on writers she's worked with who lose the balance and become more interested in their own fame than their writing, she observes,
“Bald ambition in other professions is far more acceptable than in the arts—we still like our poets starving and our novelists tucked away in garrets.”
Lerner points out that lots of great writers historically have also been consummate showmen and salesmen—she mentions Walt Whitman specifically as someone who promoted “his work with the fervor of Paris Hilton.” Does that cheapen his work for us now? Did it then?
Early in his career, David Foster Wallace went to a writers colony and had an interaction with a more famous writer and apparently left it with a bad taste in his mouth. In a letter he later accused the guy of having become a “professional polisher of his own statue.” And yet that didn't stop Wallace from doing tours and events and interviews and signings. It isn't about never promoting, but about making sure that you eventually put your writer hat back on, and remember that this is the real job we're doing.
We don’t tend to fault actors for going out and talking up their new play or their new movie. We don’t criticize a musician for talking up their gigs either. But we want to think of writers as being somehow above all this. Why?
Of course I think we should desire more than fame—if that’s all we wanted then I’d suggest we’re probably in the wrong line of work to begin with, as most people wouldn’t know even a “famous” writer if they ran into them on the street.
Still, there can be a negative reaction when we see someone who is “too” direct in their role as salesperson, and even if we don’t care what others thing, what if we simply still do not feel comfortable doing it ourselves?
I’ll be honest, sometimes it really can feel a little gross. It really can feel not very artistic.
But I don’t think that needs to be true.
There are lots of ways to talk about your work and help get that work in front of readers that are not crass or egomaniacal.
So how to earn out, without selling out?
Have Fun. Yes, just as I’ll emphasize the importance of having fun while wearing your writer hat, I’ll emphasize it as you wear your author hat too. Just as writing you find fun is going to be more appealing to your readers, the fun you have as an author can be fun for others as well. At the very least, we should acknowledge that we’re doing something pretty rare, something people you know might love to do themselves. If you focus on the hardship, disappointment, and misery of selling your work (even if you feel that way sometimes, that's very normal) then you're probably not going to persuade people they want to pay $30 and sit down for many hours with your novel.
Recognize what you're asking. On that note, just remember… books are expensive, and they are time-consuming, no matter how enjoyable. Hopefully you know lots of eager readers, but their TBR piles are probably already toppling over. Meanwhile, the average American adult reads maybe a single book a year. I have dear, dear friends who, I suspect, have probably never read anything I've written. It's fine! I support a strong “don't ask, don't tell” policy here. If they tell you they got a copy, great. If they tell you they actually read it, great. But if they don't do either, don't take it personally. Lots of totally surprising people will read it, and will let you know they read it. It doesn't mean they love you more, or that the others think you're a terrible writer. Your book just may not be their particular cup of tea. Pressuring people won't usually get you far, and it will probably lose you real friends.
Don't be braggy. Don't be too modest either. Imagine your friend sent you an email or posted on social media that they just got a HUGE promotion at work, big salary bump, lots of new benefits, their boss told them they were a once in a generation talent, and the President of Luxembourg personally handed them a gold medal. Day in, day out, they share more news of their singular triumphs. Would you be happy for them? Yeah, hopefully. But you might also think they're maybe a bit of a jackass. You might not line up to go to their next birthday party. You might quietly mute them online. You might blast them in the group chat. There's such a thing as going overboard. At the same time, you may find someone doing the opposite, in some attempt to avoid seeming egotistical. This is also unsettling. This is what I call the, “I wrote a thing” approach… and for me it's equally uncomfortable to witness. “Hey I wrote a thing, it's getting published? IDK. I guess it'd be cool if you bought six copies. But it probably sucks, just FYI. Jk, jk. Seriously, FML.” It ends up implying just as loudly that you really want lots of reassurance that you're incredible. And, you don't need to downplay anything… this is a significant accomplishment! It is exciting. You are not solving world peace, but you're also not selling lint. It's fine to take pride in your work, but keep it in perspective all the same.
Don't be crazy. I think once upon a time getting away with a certain amount of bad behavior was a perk of being an artist. Writers may have never been rockstars, exactly, but some have certainly behaved as if they were. I remember professors bragging to me about writing scathing reviews of other writers who had somehow crossed them. I've seen writers post long rants arguing with critics who gave them a bad review. (I plan to address review etiquette in another newsletter, so look for that!) You don't succeed at authoring by tearing every other author down. This isn't an episode of Survivor. Publishing isn't a zero-sum game. Great writers, and authors, are the ones who support and nurture each other along the way. And writers who pull shenanigans and get found out really can suffer big consequences.
Focus on the job. Know that being an author takes a lot of energy and time. For weeks before publication, maybe even months, you'll be very focused on all those tasks I mentioned earlier. There is a lot to plan, to prepare, to practice. Once the book comes out, you're on, all the time, and it can be exhausting as much as it can be exhilarating. There will, inevitably, also be disappointments along the way. The aforementioned bad reviews, the events to empty seats, the interviews and articles you worked hard on that never run… hopefully all this will be balanced out by way more things that go really well, but either way it isn't easy. My advice is to not try and get any real serious writing done in this period. Keep doing what's fun, but don't beat yourself up for not being able to do both jobs at once. (You probably have several others already!)
And then, let it go. Sooner or later, it ends. As I said before, this was always all temporary. This is both great and terrible. Even a wildly successful book will probably only be the focus of any real external attention for a week or two. There are always other, newer books coming out. Even your biggest fans will surely move along as time goes on… and that's to be expected too. It’s normal to want the ride to last a little longer, and you never know when things may come up in the future. But take it from me, you can enjoy it for as long as it lasts, and still be relieved when it is over. Because no matter how it all worked out in terms of sales numbers, at some point at least you get to take off the author hat and put your comfy writer hat back on again. (You may need a nice long break in between.) You can go back to your introverted rhythms again and see what comes out next, and while it can be another tough transition, it’s one I tend to welcome.
I’ll wrap up here with one last anecdote, this time from ten years ago during one of the very first events I ever did as an “author.” I was at a presale conference where I was supposed to meet and greet librarians and booksellers who might stock my debut novel on their shelves if all went well. I was super-nervous and felt very out of my depth.
The folks in charge set me up at a little table with copies to give away and for a few hours I sat there and tried to look smart and appealing and lure some booksellers over—a few came, but not nearly as many as were lining up at the table next to mine, where author Ruth Ozeki was sitting.
She was there with her new novel, A Tale for the Time Being and, well, she had a line out the door from opening to closing. Since I had a lot of downtime on my hands, I kept an eye on what she was doing (in a not-creepy way I hope) and was amazed to see her simply on fire… greeting each bookseller with hugs and handshakes, remembering events she’d done at their stores in great detail, asking after people who hadn’t come, asking after the cats that lived in the stores, etc. Her last tour had been almost ten years earlier! She was recalling some of these people from almost a decade ago!
It struck me immediately that she was having a lot of fun, and putting them at ease with her fondness for them too. It didn’t feel like she was promoting herself at all. It just felt like she was spending time with old friends.
Later on, feeling like a failure for not having moved more copies, I ended up chatting with Ozeki on the way to dinner. I confessed I was in awe of how easy it all seemed for her and she consoled me kindly with a few words I’ve never forgotten since.
She told me to think about a novel as a kind of sorting machine, only it sorts people you’ll like a lot from people you wouldn’t. So long as you write something true and personal and honest, the readers who enjoy it are probably going to enjoy you as well. Those that don’t, won’t… and that’s OK.
The best thing, she said, was that the book finds these people for you and invites them in. All you have to do is welcome them and make them feel at home. Be a grateful and generous host, and they’ll be excited to come again, even ten years later.
This, I think, gets right to the heart of it for me. Call it self-promotion, call it selling out, call it whatever you like. Ultimately, the author job can be done and done well, in a way that feels generous, not greedy—if we can remember that we wrote it for other people in the first place. As long as you're thinking more about your readers than yourself, you'll be fine. And then, take the author hat off, and get back to the really fun stuff.
Speaks to exactly the issue artists and musicians are dealing with too: https://www.vox.com/culture/2024/2/1/24056883/tiktok-self-promotion-artist-career-how-to-build-following why be a writer if you have to be your own social media manager, hype beast, and sometimes even your own YouTuber or TikTok influencer. How do you have time to create if you're forced to spend all your time signaling hype and promoting work?
Great advice, thanks.
I am a dedicated writer, but only time will tell if I ever get the opportunity to be an author and therefore forced to deal with these issues.