Much of the publishing industry was shocked at the beginning of 2010 to receive a report from Bowker stating that over a million books were published in 2009 (the numbers for 2010 aren’t yet available). About 770,000 of those books were self published, and another 250,000 or so were traditionally published. And those are just the books that came out in 2009; there are still a lot of books on the market from previous years. Amazon lists 14,729,806 paperback books and 6,933,791 hard cover books currently for sale. As an author, that’s what you’re competing against.
How are you going to stand out from the crowd? With so many books on the market, publishing without a marketing plan is like opening the restaurant of your dreams in the middle of desert without telling anybody it’s there; who would you expect to come? Now, if writing is a purely personal thing for you, or if you’re writing your memoir just for your family, that can be a wonderful thing, and in that case, there’s no reason to invest time or money in marketing. But if you’re hoping for any kind of retail success, book marketing is a must. You have to be able to carve out your little place in the world and make some noise to draw people toward you.
Almost every day, I hear authors say, “I’m a writer, not a marketer.” I understand that your passion is for writing, but you have to understand that in order to sell your book, you’re also going to have to learn to be a marketing manager and a promoter. Even if you don’t realize it, you’re already the perfect person for the job in many ways; after all, you know your project better than anybody else.
If you choose to self-publish, marketing becomes your responsibility. Nobody is going to do it for you unless you pay them. Even if you’re lucky enough to get a traditional publishing contract, you’re still going to be expected to do a fair amount to promote your book. Unless you’re already one of a traditional publishing company’s best-selling authors, a household name, you’re more than likely going to be required to promote your book through social media on your own. You’re going to be asked to solicit your family and friends to act as promoters for you. Unfortunately, the days when traditional publishers took care of all the marketing and publicity for their authors are long gone.
These days, if you’re an author and want to sell books, you need to treat your writing like a small business. Marketing it is going to take planning and time. You’ll need a strategy, a marketing plan, and an attainable and well-defined goal. In other words, you’re going to have to treat selling your book just as you would treat anything else that’s important in your life.
Why publish traditionally? They take most of the profit when they have nothing invested in the book. In addition, if we're not well known the publishers expect us to market our own book. What good are they?