Authors are Marketers, Too

I was talking to an acquaintance at a party recently who mentioned that she also wrote books. She said she was pursuing traditional publication so she could "just concentrate on the writing, not all that marketing stuff."

I said something polite, but internally I was thinking about all the traditionally published authors I know who are constantly working on their marketing. Some of it, like doing market research or coming up with a synopsis to sell the book to a publisher, isn't visible to people on the outside. But most authors I see are also hard at work on improving their social media presence, doing blog tours, and in person appearances like school visits and book signings.

(Agent Jessica Faust has an excellent blog post on this topic here.)

The writer's conferences I've attended have been eye-opening, too. Many authors sign up as faculty for these conferences, not because they get paid extremely well (they don't, trust me on this), but at least in part because it raises their visibility and gives them a chance to network with other industry professionals and aspiring writers.

The bottom line is that anyone who thinks they can just write a book and forget about it immediately in this day and age is probably in for a very rude awakening. Publishers and authors form a marketing team, and an author who's willing and eager to pull his or her weight is going to look far more attractive than the alternative.