How Vox’s whining about author self-promotion misses the point

In her article “Everyone’s a sellout now,” Vox’s Rebecca Jennings laments the poor, sad situation of authors who’ve found that only by selling out and promoting themselves can they generate books sales. Some notable excerpts:

The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from nine-to-five middle managers to astronauts to house cleaners — you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand. . . . for people who hope to publish a bestseller or release a hit record, it’s “building a platform” so that execs can use your existing audience to justify the costs of signing a new artist. . . .

“Authors are writing these incredible books, and yet when they ask me questions, the thing that keeps them up at night is, ‘How do I create this brand?’” says literary agent Carly Watters. It’s not that they want to be spending their time doing it, it’s that they feel they have to. “I think that millennials and Gen Xers really feel like sellouts. It’s not what they imagined their career to look like. It inherently feels wrong with their value system.”

Because self-promotion sucks. It is actually very boring and not that fun to produce TikTok videos or to learn email marketing for this purpose. Hardly anyone wants to “build a platform;” we want to just have one. This is what people sign up for now when they go for the American dream — working for yourself and making money doing what you love. The labor of self-promotion or platform-building or audience-growing or whatever our tech overlords want us to call it is uncomfortable; it is by no means guaranteed to be effective; and it is inescapable unless you are very, very lucky.

[Now we live in a world of] social media, where every single person with an account plays both author and publisher. Under the model of “artist as business manager,” the people who can do both well are the ones who end up succeeding. . . .

You’ve got to offer your content to the hellish, overstuffed, harassment-laden, uber-competitive attention economy because otherwise no one will know who you are. 

Let’s pause a moment while we shed a tear or two for all the starving artists forced into self-promotion against their wills.

Sniffle.

OK, now that that’s done, wipe your eyes, blow your nose, and understand the fundamental flaw in Jennings’ article.

Promotion and self-promotion are not identical

If you have a book and you want it to reach its audience, you are responsible for promoting it. Publishers won’t do it for you. Bookstores won’t do it for you. That’s life in the twenty-first century. Any author who fails to understand this is just pursuing a time-consuming hobby.

Does that mean that you need to post endless videos about yourself on TikTok?

No!

Books are about ideas. And ideas can spread.

The job is not to promote yourself, which is tiresome and boring to both the author and the listener.

The job is to get people excited about your ideas.

For a nonfiction book, those ideas are often helpful. People are interested in helpful ideas. They want to know how to garden better, how to do digital marketing efficiently, how to rewrite their résumé to get a better job. Even if your book is full of that, it’s not sufficient. You need to get those ideas out there by every means possible — videos, speeches, podcasts, blog posts, social media posts, LinkedIn newsletters, Substack, and so on.

If you are not up to the work of promoting your ideas, you don’t really care about your audience. You are a tyro. Why did you even write the book in the first place?

If this idea spreading pays off, you succeed. Not by selling books. By selling speeches, workshops, consulting, products, services, and who knows what-all else.

If you have a fiction book, it’s different. But I’d still argue that the lonely work of excruciatingly egotistical self-promotion is not your job. If you write fantasy, your job is to write essays about how fantasy works, or interview other fantasy authors, or critique fantasy books and movies, or show up on panels at fantasy conventions. And it’s the same if you write any other kind of fiction.

Fiction or nonfiction, it’s also your job to build a mailing list of people who believe in what you’re saying and give them bits and pieces to share with their friends and get people energized. Your job. That’s the job of a writer.

If your book is any good, it will spread by word of mouth, but you have to help.

Five steps for promotion: PQRST

So if you’re done feeling sorry for yourself, learn how to promote, not you, but your ideas. Your plan has five steps, which you can remember by the initialism PQRST:

• Positioning. What kind of book is it, and who is in the audience?
• Question. What question or need does your book satisfy for that audience.
• Reach. How will you get the word out to as many people as possible in the audience?
• Spread. What will you give those people to make it easy for them to spread the word?
• Timing. Are you ensuring that all of your promotional efforts are concentrated around the book’s launch date?

(Yup. I’m promoting ideas. Not myself.)

Self-promotion is ultimately self-defeating and tedious. But book promotion? That’s your job. Connecting with readers is part of the work of being an author. If you want to be successful learn to do it — and enjoy it.