Katherine Reay has written a dozen novels. When The Berlin Letters, her most recent, hit the shelves earlier this year, she embarked upon a 30-stop promotional book tour.
“I love the personal connection,” she says. “So when I was given the opportunity to hire someone who had a specialty in bookstore events – events that I did not have the time nor the knowledge to plan myself – I thought that was a good use of my time and resources.”
The tour was not organized by Reay’s publisher, Harper Muse, an imprint of HarperCollins, which organized its own promotion of the book. Reay footed the bill for the tour herself.
This arrangement is far from unique. According to independent events planners, publicists and marketers, more and more authors are seeking out their services to augment the efforts of their publishers’ in-house staff.
Depending on who you ask, the trend is a result of surging promotional workloads over decades – or publishers’ disinvestment in staff.
“My publishing house is exceptional at what they do,” says Kristy Woodson Harvey, author of 10 novels, most recently A Happier Life, published by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. But as more of her books were published, she turned to independent events planners, publicists and marketers to help promote them.
“Around the time my third or fourth book released, in much the same way a business expands to more employees, my author business began expanding more quickly, too,” says Harvey.
She believes such investments in book promotion – by authors, rather than their publishers – are a natural byproduct of success. If being an author is being a business, as the logic goes, then that business will require greater investment as it grows – and it’s as much on the author to invest in their success as it is on the publisher.
But it’s not only the most successful writers who are looking beyond their publishers for help. Demand for help with promotional activity has grown sharply industry-wide.
“My particular company, we receive many more outreach requests for our services, probably 10 times more than we did 10 years ago,” says Kathie Bennett, founder of Magic Time Literary Publicity, which organized Reay’s tour. “And we’ve never advertised. Everything that has ever happened is word of mouth, authors telling other authors.”
The cost of such assistance has risen, too. Median rates for consulting in marketing and promotion increased from $51 to $60 an hour in 2019 to up to $100 in 2023, according to Mia Lipsit, marketing and membership manager at the Editorial Freelancers Association, which represents independent professionals in the publishing industry.
This lucrative boom for independent marketing of books has been driven, in part, by a significant increase in the number of ways writers can – and are expected to – promote their books.
When Debbie Macomber, who has written dozens of novels since the 1980s – most recently for Ballantine Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House – first started out, “all she had to do was write”, says Ashley Hayes, a marketer who began her career a decade ago on a team dedicated to Macomber.
“Things have evolved through the years,” says Hayes, “and now there’s just all of these things that authors are expected to do. They’re expected to have a website, a newsletter, be active on social media, have a plan for how they’re going to talk about their book. And a lot of authors just want to write the book: that’s why they became an author, not to do all the other stuff.”
Hayes, founder of UpLit Marketing, believes this explosion of promotional workloads has outstripped the capacity of in-house staff at publishers – creating a need for independent professionals like herself to help authors keep pace with work that they are unable, or unwilling, to perform themselves.
The US publishing industry is dominated by five large publishing houses: Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan. The big five players are both selective in terms of the authors they choose to publish, and invested in those authors – offering cash advances on anticipated sales, as well as in-house support for editing, distribution and promotion, including events planning, publicity and marketing.
“Authors are mostly looking for someone to uncover all the stones – all the possible ways to get media attention – beyond what their publishers are already doing,” says Darcie Rowan, an independent publicist. “That is something we ask before working with an author: what is your publisher doing already? Then we can either collaborate, fill out other areas where there is need for help or extend our services past publication dates so that the book continues to sell months later.”
All of the authors and independent professionals interviewed for this article insist that freelancers and in-house staff collaborate, rather than compete – but there is some evidence to suggest that the growth of the former at least coincides with the decline of the latter.
“From the perspective of early in the pandemic, when the publishing industry saw a huge influx of profits, it kind of got stagnant,” says Olga Brudastova, president of UAW Local 2110, which represents workers at HarperCollins, the only unionized publishing house among the Big Five. “But because there is this mentality of constant growth and constant expansion, they have to justify it to their shareholders. The way they approached it in the past was through layoffs, through reorganization, through hiring freezes. Then the work gets spread out between the remaining employees.”
According to Brudastova, management at HarperCollins reacted to the leveling off of record profits at the height of the ongoing Covid pandemic by imposing an informal hiring freeze from 2022 to 2023, aiming to reduce staffing levels by 5% across the board. The freeze not only reduced the number of staff dedicated to promoting books, but further demoralized workers. While there are fewer in-house event planners, publicists and marketers, there are even fewer experienced ones.
The 5% reduction in staff at HarperCollins was reported on at the time by Publishers Weekly, which quoted CEO Brian Murray acknowledging that a sales surge from earlier in the pandemic “slowed significantly as of late”, leading management to “pause to recognize the depth of the core issues we currently face”.
Erin Crum, senior vice-president of corporate communications at HarperCollins, declined to comment further to the Guardian.
“The publishers absolutely are unable to compete with other industries,” says Brudastova, citing higher wages elsewhere. “And a lot of the skills that our members have are very easily transferable, from editorial to marketing to graphic design … People do stay because they’re passionate about the work that they do. But at the end of the day, everyone has to pay bills, so at some point, many of our members have to make that calculation.”
For authors, looking beyond your publisher for help promoting your work often comes at a steep cost. Book tours can cost $15,000, publicity campaigns up to $16,000, and marketing work up to $100 an hour – figures that can be considerable when compared to authors’ advances and distant promises of royalties.
Harvey, who has been hiring help to promote her last half a dozen books, started out reinvesting 40-50% of her earnings, but that proportion declined to 10-15% as her earnings grew. And Reay, a relative newcomer to hiring help, decided to “experiment” with a quarter of her last advance to see if it would help grow a proverbial snowball of success.
“Basically, I’m rolling a snowball down the hill and I hope that snowball grows,” she says. “Could I tell you that, dollar for dollar, yes, this great experiment of mine is really working? I’m not entirely sure I can. But the snowball is growing, and that’s good enough right now.”
