Publicity! Visibility! Discovery!

A 2025 Update For Authors

Authors understandably want their books to be read, preferably after they have been bought.

Neither of those objectives can be achieved if the books don’t get noticed, which is why Visibility! and Discovery! driven by Publicity! are so essential after the writing and editing effort has been completed.

What follows here is focused on authors of nonfiction, books that are topical but with some intended enduring value, narratives, biographies, memoirs, history. Celebrity, scandal, and political rhetoric at the extremes have their own publicity paths to success, which tend to be short and soon replaced by the next batch in those genres.

Streaming is the most important development in book marketing since the internet enabled the means of reaching people with a device, which now means everyone. Coverage can be live or viewed at a later date, on sites mainly owned and controlled by tech behemoths like Google, Meta, and for the moment, ByteDance.

I have a friend, an author whose books are always hailed for their quality of reporting and writing but by the nature of their subjects are not likely to be big bestsellers. The story in her latest book was adapted for a widely read magazine website and posted on TikTok, where it received seven million views.

How did that triumph of attention impact her book’s sales?

The author describes continuing sales, according to her agent, as only “so-so,” possibly because the book itself was only mentioned in passing. But it is a fact that the actual conversion rate from massive visibility to sales is usually small.

In the pandemic years, when everything had to be done virtually – the Zoom years and the rise of streaming – book events went online. If in the past you might get fifty to seventy-five people for a bookstore appearance and signing, over time online you can reach thousands of people on screens.

Large numbers are certainly the goal of publicity. Yet as far as I can tell (from my own experience and conversations with many others in the book world), watching an author talking is satisfying enough for most people without buying the book, alas.

The message for writers is to do everything possible to chase interest. One bestselling author, I was told, scheduled a hundred podcasts and fashioned his own posts on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, hiring a team of publicity specialists to manage the campaign before the book was released.

To remember: this is not old-school paid advertising, where the costs of buying for the internet and what remains of print can be considerable.

The requirement is prodigious research and an ability to choose the right venues — and then performing on them with some measure of engaging skill.

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What, then, of the traditional means of book publicity — reviews, broadcast interviews and touring city-to-city for events? The impact of a New York Times review, an appearance on NPR’s “Fresh Air” and making the rounds of the PBS NewsHour, Morning Joe, and other cable news shows can still be significant, but the competition is intense and the results too often, in a word, frustrating.

Publicists for publishers are expected to do their best for every author in placing them on these shows, which is difficult when the flow of new books is unrelenting and the demand for sales revenue so great. Books are information and entertainment. They are, as I have written often before, commodities with a sales price.

The reality is that authors have to recognize the limitations of what any publisher’s publicist can achieve, even when a hired outsider is able to work on a single book at a time.

How then to best handle the process, strategically and emotionally?

It is essential to know your audience. Who is likely to be interested in your subject, or maybe even you? Be willing to extend yourself and to overcome any reluctance to be a self-promoter. Being elusive rarely supports interest, let alone sales.

And emotionally, writing a book and having it published is an accomplishment no matter who does the job of getting it out to be read — from the largest global companies to smaller independent houses or publishing it yourself through one of the many and respectable ways to have that done now. That accomplishment is yours.

And this: My mantra to authors in our time is to remember that every book with a digital identifier (an ISBN is the shorthand) and a distributor to do the packing and shipping — even if you are doing it from a home garage — can be ordered in a bookstore and delivered within a few days.

So be persistent in asking in a store for a book you want or for yours (to check availability) and be patient in waiting for it to arrive. No system is perfect.

Today’s spectrum of potential visibility is vast — greater than it has ever been. This is a bottom line that authors would do well to embrace.

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For a decade my wife and I rented an apartment at 900 West End Avenue on 104th Street. For all its vast scale and demographic change New York City is still composed of thousands of small communities, neighborhoods, blocks and buildings. This story from the West Side Rag, a newsletter, is a reminder of what community means.