The Most Important Ingredient in Your Marketing Plan
Author marketing that won’t give you the ick with publishing experts Jane Friedman, Karin Gillespie & Erin C. Niumata
Hey friends,
Welcome to another edition of Tell Us Something We Don’t Know… where we source a panel of literary experts and ask them questions about whatever the heck. Today, the heck is author marketing and our instructors are three wise women of publishing:
The Experts:
Jane Friedman — Decodes the publishing industry for writers who'd rather not learn the hard way. Featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and the BBC.
Karin Gillespie — Simon & Schuster novelist, Substack bestseller, and a working writer who tracks the industry at Pitch Your Novel. 20+ years in the trenches.
Erin C. Niumata — A literary agent at Folio who's been reading queries for decades and representing NYT bestsellers when she finds the good ones.
The Takeaways:
How to approach author marketing as a total newbie
The most important ingredient in your marketing plan
Where to focus your efforts without getting overwhelmed
Do you need a publicist? If so, when!?
How to find extra support and broaden your reach
How to play to your strengths and use the resources you already have
By the end of this lesson, you’ll have a bunch of ideas on how to put together an author marketing plan that feels authentic and manageable — and maybe even a few ways you can make book publicity fun!
Let’s Talk Author Marketing…
Wait, as if writing a book isn’t hard enough — we have to figure out the whole marketing thing, too?!
Promoting your work can feel daunting (especially for us introvert writers) but it’s an integral part of being an author. And luckily there are a load of different ways to approach it without feeling like you’re turning into a salesperson.
Because at its core, author marketing is about showing people who you are as a writer, and encouraging them to get just as excited about your stories are you are.
But it’s all too easy to get overwhelmed by the bombardment of advice online, so we turned to our trio of publishing experts to get their take on the most effective ways to approach author marketing in a way that suits you (and doesn’t give you the ick):
