Anonymous Interview with a Marketer

What does a book publishing Marketing Manager do

In the spirit of other Anonymous Interviews, this is under paywall to protect the privacy of the interviewee, but I think this (and the 4+ posts I send a month) is worth $6.50… particularly if you had a lot of feelings about the author responses to this survey blaming their marketers for their book’s failure! (But Kathleen Schmidt’s wonderful “The Myth of ‘My Publisher Did Nothing For My Book’” was the original inspiration. And Jeffrey Yamaguchi recently wrote some detailed breakdowns of marketing plans if you want more.)

Book publishing’s marketing teams are doing so much and trying so hard. Some interesting things to me in here were how marketing’s involved at the acquisition stage; how marketing thinks of backlist; and the Marketer answers honestly whether an author needs to promote their own book on social media (plus some highlights of the job).

Q: Most people reading this know what Book Publicity is, but fewer understand what Marketing does, specifically. Can you briefly describe the main goals of a good marketing campaign?

I was once in a meeting where someone said (in an attempt to be witty) that “publicity is what you pray for and marketing is what you pay for.” Not only is it kinda...rude, but it’s wrong. Marketing is almost everything else in terms of getting your book in front of people that is not media. The obvious aspects are social media promotion, advertising, and influencer outreach (which at some imprints is under publicity). But it also includes brand partnerships, bookseller connection, asset creation (all those fun graphics come from somewhere!), email marketing, merch creation (all those bookmarks, stickers, and pins have to come from somewhere!), NetGalley management… I could list more, but we could be here all day.