LitHub asks “Do Authors Really Need to Spend Their Own Money to Make a Book Successful?” and answers it, in the person of Maris Kreizman, pretty sensibly, ending up straddling the fence. There are just too many books for everyone to get maximum attention — this isn’t of course any kind of recent development; attention was always in short supply even if books are not. Book tours and public readings make less of an impact than you’d imagine, and review media, which often have little sales effect, are shrinking in relation to the output of books.

Ms Kreizman also suggests that mid-list is shrinking, which whether it’s true or not is, I think, irrelevant, since mid-list titles would never get much promotional help anyway. A publicity and promotion budget is calculated, surprise, surprise, on the expected sales of the book. Obviously you’ll quickly be out of business if you habitually spend $100,000 on promoting books which end up making sales worth just $200,000. The exact same calculation goes into figuring out the advance given to the author. Ms Kreizman tells us “Theoretically a book advance should pay authors for the time that it took to write their book, as well as the time it will take to promote.” Just where this theory comes from is not revealed (it’s more of an aspiration than a theory) but in fact the advance, which is an advance on royalties, is no more than a calculation of likely sales, thus royalties, some of which is offered upfront as a signing incentive. Unfortunately we have to admit that publishers more often than not get this calculation wrong: optimism is a job requirement in publishing, and sales forecasts will almost always tend to be overestimates.

It may be that some bigwig authors can demand a contract clause specifying payments for them to do promotion for the book, but such payments will be forthcoming only if the publisher could have afforded to offer an even larger advance: in other words the publisher has to believe they can afford it. Nobody gets promotion money which is unlikely to be earned back in ultimate sales. Flying an author from one coast to the other, putting them up in a hotel, paying for meals and taxis: it all mounts up quickly. If the author’s appearance isn’t going to sell more than enough books to cover these costs, why would you bother? Do the math: if your publicity budget is say 10% that means that there’s $3 available for each sale of a $29.95 novel. How many books sold will buy you a ticket from NYC to San Francisco? A lot. Given the sales trends, only the biggest authors are worth shipping around the country, but they are the very ones for whom there’s the least need to do this — ‘cos their fans are lining up to buy their books anyway.

What sells books is that je ne sais quoi to which we apply the term “word of mouth”. We hardly know exactly what this is, but publishers’ publicity and promotion activity is all directed at stimulating this genie. Will social media end up taking the place of author tours? You can’t really give up trying. During the pandemic it became the norm to live-stream author readings and bookstore events, using Zoom or some such software. This is great, but obviously suffers from the disadvantage that the viewer is not in the bookstore and is thus even less likely than those who are there in person to buy the book. Author appearances and readings continue, often in hybrid form — old habits die hard — but one wonders, for how much longer?