Fractured Publicity: Navigating Book Promotion in the Influencer Age
/Note: This article originally published in The Hot Sheet on January 15, 2025. This is an excerpt, and if you’d like to read the full article (about 1820 words), please click here.
As if the challenges surrounding book promotion and publicity for authors weren’t heightened enough these days (with complaints about social media often being front and center), recent mainstream media articles have exacerbated those concerns.
Vox suggested that everyone’s a sellout now, detailing the “burden of self-promotion” on writers and other creatives.
Esquire explored why debut novels are failing to launch, citing “today’s overstuffed, under-resourced media landscape” as one reason.
The Guardian ran a piece about how authors are cutting their own checks to augment their publishers’ promotional efforts, a point that Esquire made as well.
Recently, Lit Hub’s Maris Kreizman discussed whether authors really need to spend their own money to make a book successful. Her conclusion: no. “It would be terrible to live in a world where the only way to become a bestseller is to pay for it,” she said.
Questions have perhaps always existed about the value of hiring an outside publicist. Novelists in particular—including those who have signed with major publishers—may wonder what this financial investment can tangibly and realistically deliver.
Traditionally, publicity has been defined as earned media (coverage or placement in newspapers, magazines, TV, podcasts, etc. that the author or publisher doesn’t pay for), while marketing has been defined as paid media (such as advertisements and, more recently, some influencer outreach). Yet “those clear lines have blurred so much.”