Expert Tips from Jane Friedman: How to Navigate the Publishing Industry and Create a Buzz

In this episode, Jane Friedman shares valuable advice on publishing and marketing for authors. Discover how to find your book buying audience, plan successful book launches, and the role of literary agents. But what happens when an author engages a non-book buying audience? Find out in this episode...

In this second of a two-part interview, we welcome Jane Friedman, a publishing industry expert with extensive knowledge in author marketing and a renowned editor within the industry. Jane is the chief editor of The Hotsheet, an industry newsletter highly sought-after for maintaining an insightful pulse on the publishing industry's latest trends. Authors throughout the literary community respect her for her ability to help them understand the complexities of — among other things — their book buying audience. With an industry-specific viewpoint that is both discerning and wide-ranging, Jane is an invaluable source of guidance for authors navigating the publishing world.

In this episode:

• Learn to navigate book publishing and marketing, enhancing your authorial success.
• Discover the pros and cons of each publishing model.
• Decode data-centric decision making in book promotion.
• Conquer self-doubt and learn to embrace your potential, mastering the art of self-promotion.
• Gain insights into a literary agent's role.

The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:00 - Introduction, 
00:02:28 - Common Questions from Authors
00:03:38 - Navigating the Publishing Landscape
00:05:57 - Publishers and Data
00:10:07 - Embracing Marketing as an Author
00:17:17 - Identifying Your Book Buying Audience
00:18:59 - Collaborating on Book Launches
00:23:53 - The Role of Literary Agents
00:27:40 - Getting an Agent in Today's Market
00:28:30 - Jane Friedman's Work and Resources
The resources mentioned in this episode are:

• Subscribe to The Hotsheet Industry newsletter for updates on the publishing industry.
• Listen to the first episode of the podcast for a discussion on AI in the publishing industry, Scribe Media, and Indigo.
• Consider your goals and objectives before deciding where and how to publish your book.
• Utilize your own data and insights to pitch your book to publishers, such as social media following or access to specific demographics.
• Embrace marketing and promotion as an author, recognizing that readers are more interested in hearing from you than the publisher.
• Engage with your readers on social media platforms like Twitter, joining conversations and building relationships.
• Identify your book buying audience and tailor your marketing efforts towards them.
• Consider participating in book launch partnerships to expand your reach and connect with new readers.
• Explore marketing strategies and tactics to find what works best for you and your book.
• Keep an eye on industry trends, such as the use of data in acquisitions and marketing decision

Transcript

Transcription

00:00:00 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Today we’re talking to publishing industry commentator Jane Friedman. She’s also an editor: editor of The Hot Sheet industry newsletter. Anybody who wants to know what’s happening with the publishing industry really wants to get that subscription to The Hot Sheet. But this is also the second part of a two-part conversation. If you want to listen to – and I do recommend that you listen to – the first episode where we are talking with Jane about industry-writ-large issues, like what the heck is going on in the publishing industry, from the meltdown at Scribe Media to the changes at the upper echelons of Canadian book retailing giant Indigo? And of course, we had to spend quite a bit of time talking about AI: the implications of it as creators and whether we should be terrified or we should embrace this. So I’ll let you go back and find that episode. But today, this episode, we are talking with Jane about the questions she fields most frequently from authors, like where do I publish my book? How should I publish my book? And more.

00:01:51 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
I would like to spend a little bit of time talking about some of the issues that are directly relevant to an author’s pursuit of either their craft or whatever their definition of success is for their book and their publishing journey. So I wondered, what is the question that you get most often? Or is there a question – or questions – that you get most often from authors who are either writing or publishing or trying to market their books? I don’t know. What is that?

00:02:31 – Jane Friedman
I mean, they’re really big questions that in some regard are unanswerable. So how do I get my book published in the first place? Or which publishing path should I choose? And once they have a book in hand, how do I sell and market this thing? Because I think many people just don’t realize that’s where the real challenge lies. You thought it was writing it and choosing your publishing path, but that’s just the beginning. 

00:03:00 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah, exactly. And so what do you say to people? I mean, those are questions that can’t really be answered by anybody else. Those are things you have to learn to know yourself. But what I think I hear in those questions is somebody who’s unsure of how to weigh the information that is accessible to them. Does that make sense?

00:03:30 – Jane Friedman
Yes. I think people are confused by all of the voices out there that are saying, “No, it should be this way.” “No, it should be that way.” Unfortunately, there’s a lot of tribalism in the author community. There are a lot of strong feelings about self-publishing versus traditional, and then you throw hybrid in the mix, and Amazon or not Amazon … I mean, people on both sides are sure that they’re right. And so I sit at the intersection of that, and I try to help people understand that there isn’t a right answer here. It’s really driven by your goals for the project: if you want to be an author as a career versus you have this book that you want out, and then you’re going to go on with your life. So I try to advise people based on their values, their objectives, and I encourage them not to just look off someone else’s paper. Especially on the marketing and promotion side, there is a lot of that: “Oh, well, so and so got big on TikTok, so I better get on there too.” Right? It so rarely works to copy someone else’s approach. I mean, you can certainly learn from it. But I find that there’s so much FOMO – fear of missing out – and it drives a lot of frenetic, wasteful behaviour because people just don’t … They just feel like it’s a crapshoot, right? And publishing falls into this really weird area of, well, it can be a crapshoot, but it’s not totally a crapshoot. 

00:05:11 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. Which brings us to the data question. I was looking at the June 21 Hot Sheet edition and your discussion of one of the panels from the recent conference. Was it the U.S. …?

00:05:29 – Jane Friedman
The U.S. Book Show.

00:05:30 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah, the U.S. Book Show. And how publishers use data to inform acquisitions. So is it a crapshoot or is it data? And marketing: I’d love to dig into that a little bit with you. So what is this data? Is it different between acquisitions and the marketing phase? And how can authors arm themselves?

00:06:02 – Jane Friedman
So this particular discussion included both really big houses as well as independent ones, and they were talking both on the acquisitions and the marketing side. And I should mention here that there are different parameters for fiction and nonfiction.

00:06:26 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Right.

00:06:28 – Jane Friedman
This also confuses people who are new to the industry because they’re taking nonfiction advice and applying it to novels. But I think the one thing that sticks, regardless of size of publisher or genre, is that the publishers love it when the author can come to the table with some of their own insights and data. And sometimes authors feel like they don’t – “What do I know? I just write the books. I don’t know anything about sales and marketing.” And that might be true for some authors, but I think they have much more insights than they give themselves credit for. So, for example, if you’re on social media whatsoever, if you have an email newsletter list – even if it’s a small one, if you teach or speak or you’re known in particular communities, you probably have access to data that’s really relevant to publishers. So one of the examples that I gave in that article is an author who had a really significant Facebook following and he could see from Facebook’s analytics that the large majority were women in the very specific age range which happened to match the Target shopper. So Target, the retailer. And so they were able to take that data when it was time to sell the book into accounts, go right to Target and say, “Look, this author’s key demographic is your demographic.” And that led to Target picking up the book. Now, that’s like one of those “all the stars aligned” scenarios. But I’m sure the author didn’t know that when he was sharing some of that information, but the publisher was able to piece it together. And so that’s an example of a great collaboration between author and publisher. So let me share another example that wasn’t in that article, that I think feels more achievable, perhaps. So there was an author who was writing the story of a young girl who in the Eighties ended up becoming kind of this famous ambassador, like not a true ambassador, but a metaphorical ambassador from the US to Russia during the Cold War. And the author of this book, who was writing a biography of this girl, she’s Russian, but did emigrate to the U.S. as an adult. And I actually consulted with this author. Her book’s now out. And at the time – we were at proposal stage when we were talking – she’s like, “I don’t have a platform. I’m not really on social media. No one knows who I am.” And I said, “But if anyone is interested in this girl,” – I think her name is Samantha Smith – “if they google Samantha Smith, it’s your website that shows up. If someone goes to YouTube and types in ’Samantha Smith’, it’s your YouTube channel that comes up. Even though you don’t have any followers on your YouTube channel, you’ve got every significant video of this girl posted. You also have access. You are best friends with her mother. You have sources and information that no one else on the planet has. You are the perfect person to write this book. You already know who’s going to be interested because of all of your research. You’re just connected to all of these primary and secondary sources.” And of course, a publisher did pick up the book because they saw the value of what she had. And she knows how to market and promote it because she’s been working towards this point for the last 20 or 30 years. So that’s another example, I think, of authors kind of discounting what they have in hand. Usually there’s something there that you can offer that’s super valuable to the publisher. Because remember, the publisher is publishing countless books every season. They know how to get books into retailers. They know how to speak to booksellers and librarians, but they’re not always that knowledgeable about the end reader, and that’s where the author comes in. 

00:10:27 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Right. And this is really important. So it’s very common – I don’t know how common: I feel like I see comments in Facebook groups or on LinkedIn or other places fairly frequently where an author says, “Yeah, I’m really disappointed in my publisher. I thought they’d do more marketing.” And there’s this difference. You just hit the nail on the head there. The publisher can get the book into the distribution system and into the retailers, but I always am having a conversation with our authors that their readers don’t give a hoot about the publisher. The readers of their book want and are interested in hearing from the author. So can we talk a little bit about that? And maybe what is it that makes authors feel so reluctant, if that’s even the right term, but to step fully into the shoes of being ready to embrace the marketing of their book and of themselves as an author, I guess.

00:11:41 – Jane Friedman
Yeah, I think “reluctant” is a good word. I’ve also seen authors who are hostile to the idea of marketing and promotion. And I think part of it is just this mythology, at least in Western culture, that art and business don’t mix. That if you are to market yourself, that is somehow beneath what the artist does. Or that you don’t know anything about marketing, so how could you do it? Or that you’re selling out or you’re a shill. And I think the other piece is, so many people do marketing poorly, and so there are so many bad examples out there, and people think that’s what you have to do. And it’s like, “No, don’t follow the bad examples.” That’s what we want to avoid.

00:12:28 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah.

00:12:31 – Jane Friedman
I think first, it’s like trying to get people out of that mindset that this is something that doesn’t actually go hand in hand with the writing or the creation. Something motivated you to write this book. There’s something inside you. There’s a message, a theme, something you’re hoping – most people want to be read when they’re writing a book. So who is it that you imagine is going to benefit from this or will be entertained or is going to be delighted, or who needs this from you? And hopefully it’s not that big of a jump to think about, well, the people who need this or would benefit or be entertained, where do they hang out? Who do they talk to? Who do they pay attention to? How do I become part of those conversations? And we often talk about social media, not because I think it’s essential, but because it’s the lowest hurdle to finding and having engagement or conversations with your readers. You can sit at home in your pyjamas and do it. It doesn’t cost any money. It takes your time, of course, but you don’t have to go travelling across the country. You don’t have to convince anyone to host you on their podcast. You don’t have to get Oprah to select you. You can go straight to the reader and talk with them wherever is comfortable for you to do that. And for people who just feel like, “I don’t know who my reader is,” I would say, “Well, who do you think you’re like? Other authors, influencers, creators? Who else do you think your readers are paying attention to? And can you be in conversation with those other people, or can you …?” I think on Twitter: Twitter is the platform where I spend most of my social media time still, and I often like to use it as an example because it’s where you see the best behaviour and the worst behaviour. And so you can see all sorts, like the whole spectrum. And what I think delights people on Twitter is when people they wouldn’t otherwise get to interact with are engaging in conversation and having fun. And that person who you never thought you would get to meet or engage with, you’re engaging with them right there because they’re open to the conversation and you both have something to say on a topic. The really bad part is where you just say, “Buy my book,” and you do nothing but post about your own stuff, and you never engage with other people on topics of interest to you. So it’s not that different from showing up at a party and instead of talking about yourself the whole time, you actually engage in conversations with other human beings.

00:15:19 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Right. Amazing. I’m going to go to the book launch partnership potential. But before we do that, something else on the data article – or component of the article – that I saw that fits in with this part of our conversation, which is the statistic about not only do we have to identify the reader, but we have to remember what proportion of those people are readers.

00:15:52 – Jane Friedman
Yes.

00:15:52 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Can you talk about that just for a minute?

00:15:55 – Jane Friedman
So there is something known as the book-buying audience, and it’s estimated that about one in five people in the United States are book buyers. So, for example, if you … 

00:16:10 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
One in five?

00:16:12 – Jane Friedman
One in five.

00:16:13 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
That’s a little scary.

00:16:15 – Jane Friedman
I actually think it’s a really good number.

00:16:17 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Oh, do you? Okay.

00:16:20 – Jane Friedman
I guess it depends on your perspective. So, yeah, one in five. And so, for example, I don’t know if you or your listeners would remember there was a New York Times piece some years ago when a really well-known musician came out with a book that nobody bought. Well, how could that be? That musician has millions of followers. How could the publisher fail or how could the author fail so terribly? And the answer is that musician does not have a book-buying audience. And there’s actually someone – he’s quoted in that piece you reference: Peter Hildick-Smith of the Codex-Group actually is able to calculate what he calls, I think, an author equity score. And he was able, for example, to predict that Tina Fey, her book would do amazing because her audience is a book-buying audience, by and large. And he was right. Her memoir Bossy Pants did fantastic. So how do you know if you have a book-buying audience? I think that’s really difficult to say, but if you’re writing fiction, I think, well, yes, you have a book-buying audience. I think the questions start to come into play when you’re writing nonfiction, when you’re a celebrity, a public figure, and so on.

00:17:42 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. And then you want to be able to tap into, in some way, shape, or form, either get help with it or know what you’re looking for in terms of psychographics and making sure that all those pieces fit together. Okay.

00:17:53 – Jane Friedman
I thought I’d mention one more thing I forgot. As part of that article, there was a romance novelist, specifically, who was frustrated that she wasn’t selling more books despite having this really engaged following on Facebook. And it turns out she was engaging people with recipes and other kind of lifestyle things, and so she was engaging the non book-buying audience. And so that’s a trap that people can fall into.

00:18:19 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. And it’s really helpful to have something to sink your teeth into in terms of recognizing the difference. So size isn’t everything, and not everybody –  if one in five is a book buyer, then four out of five are not.

00:18:39 – Jane Friedman
Yes.

00:18:39 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Jeez. Anyway, okay. Book launches kind of fits together. We’re moving out of the data and into the still related to marketing. But I really appreciated the little segment on how authors and publishers can collaborate on a book launch. And you heard about this at the U.S. Book Show.

00:19:05 – Jane Friedman
Yeah. I think that by and large, this didn’t come through in the panel, but I know it from experience: Authors have to be very proactive. You can’t just sit and wait for your publisher to contact you and say, “So you want to talk about marketing.” It just typically doesn’t work out that way, unfortunately. And so this panel had really great people on it who were giving great advice, and I think one of the messages was, “Look, if you have good reason to be planning the marketing or the launch earlier than one year out, say so. And if you have an agent, get them involved and make sure you have that meeting very quickly after the book is signed so you can talk about what initiatives might require a very long runway.” Sometimes this happens with authors who just have a lot of –  they have fingers in a lot of pies. They have lots of potential things they could do, maybe, like events or touring or things that with their schedule is not very flexible. You want to make sure that you’re allowing room for certain things to happen after the book comes out. So there can be special situations that merit that planning one to two years in advance. Otherwise, usually publishers are looking at six to nine months before the book releases and that’s when the marketers and the publicists start thinking about, “Okay, who are we really thinking about approaching?” That’s not part of a boilerplate sort of plan. So I should probably explain what a boilerplate maybe is. So boilerplate is the thing that every publisher does that you might not necessarily see, which is they’ve got their catalog copy and they have materials going out to bookstores and librarians and their accounts. And so they’re making sure that the industry is aware of the books that are coming out that season. And within that season, there are going to be certain priorities. So your A-list, for instance, and books that are going to get a bigger push. So I always advocate for authors to understand, see, are you just going to get the boilerplate treatment? Like every book will get that and if that’s all you’re going to get, you need to know that as early as possible. Or are you going to be getting that little extra? Or if you’re an A-list, there’s going to be some customization and you need to know what that looks like. The author also needs to – at least in that, I would say, about nine months out, at least – you need to come to the table with your own priorities and what you think is going to really help the book sell. Now your publisher may disagree, but I think you need to at least explain what you’re going to do and how you can build or collaborate with the publisher on those items. The other thing that came up in that panel, which I thought was very useful, is a lot of authors wonder, “Well, if I only have a small amount of money to spend, what’s the best thing to spend it on?” This is a question I get. “I’ve got $2,000. What do I do with it?” There’s not a universal answer to that question, unfortunately. And I thought the panelists were very good at saying, “Look, if you ask your publisher how to spend it, they will tell you exactly where they think it should go.” So go and ask them and don’t be mad that they’re not spending the money. I think this often comes up, especially with like book festivals and events and things where the publisher is not going to spend the airfare and the hotel nights to send you, but it could be super useful for you, for your career, for relationship building, for your next opportunity. So in any event, I think more conversations need to happen between author and publisher about that marketing so there aren’t surprises, so that everyone’s rowing in the same direction and authors don’t feel like, “Well, it’s my release date. What have you done?” That’s not the attitude you want to take.

00:23:20 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. I think our final topic area and question – and it’s totally out of order in terms of the published timeline: We’ve been talking about acquisitions data and then marketing and launches and now I’m going to throw in a question about literary agents – and that is authors often, obviously, “Which publishing route do I choose? I want a traditional publisher. But oh, you can’t get a traditional publisher without an agent.” But we have many other routes to becoming a published author that don’t require either a traditional publisher or a literary agent. What is happening in the world of literary agents now? And they seem to be busier than ever and it’s hard to get one. How would you recommend that an author think about whether that is a route that they need to pursue and how hard and how long to pursue it before trying a different route?

00:24:24 – Jane Friedman
So a literary agent is mostly necessary if you want to be considered by the biggest publishers or the most prestigious. So in the United States, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and some of the really big independents like Graywolf, for example. So you just can’t submit your work to those big places without an agent doing it on your behalf. Now, if you want to be published by a smaller press, a university press, there are still hundreds, if not thousands of those opportunities that you don’t need an agent for. That said, a lot of people prefer having an agent because they don’t want to deal with the contract negotiation. And if it’s your first time publishing a book, you don’t know what normal looks like. And there are going to be all sorts of questions that come up about, “Well, the publisher did this today. Is that normal?” Or, “I haven’t heard from my publisher in X months, is that normal?” And an agent helps you keep your relationship with the editor untainted by difficult conversations that you might have to have. And so those are some of the reasons people like having an agent. But you can certainly operate without having one. It just so much depends on your experience, your comfort level. Some people, if they have a great agent, they can really brainstorm with that agent. They can use that agent to help manage their careers in other ways. Strategize. But others, maybe they don’t have as good of an agent and they never hear from them. So I can’t, you know … It all depends, right, as so many things.

00:26:08 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
And it’s hard to find one because?

00:26:13 – Jane Friedman
There’s so much competition. So I mean, I don’t know that it’s necessarily harder today to get an agent than it used to be. I think there’s like probably roughly the same number that are open, but it is taking them longer to respond. And I think it’s just, part of it has to do with just the increasing number of people who are knocking on the door. The pandemic is still partly responsible for that because a lot of people, during the pandemic and also coming out, they had time on their hands. They had time to write a book or they’re revisiting some of those things now that they’ve changed careers or they’ve retired or we’re looking partly here at the baby boomer generation reflecting and writing and now submitting. So I do think that it’s still possible to get an agent, but you have to have something that deserves nationwide distribution, like a national marketing campaign. That’s kind of what the agent has in mind. Obviously, they’re also thinking about the advance. If your book doesn’t merit an advance of 10,000 to 20,000 minimum, is it even worth their time to get involved unless they just feel like they have to do it because they’re so excited about the project? 

00:27:38 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. What part of your job do you like the best?

00:27:45 – Jane Friedman
I like the writing. I am still a writer and editor at heart, so I really like doing the newsletter. And it’s always been about carving out more time to write and edit.

00:28:02 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Well, it’s a very good newsletter. So for those who aren’t yet subscribers of The Hot Sheet, how do they find you?

00:28:11 – Jane Friedman
The best place to go is JaneFriedman.com, because that points to all of the different things I do. So I have a free newsletter, I have the paid newsletter, I have classes, I have an archive of 2,000 posts at my site. So, yeah, that’s the best place.

00:28:29 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us and spending time with us today. I can’t guarantee, in fact, I can guarantee that I will be back with a request that you come back and speak to us again on the Ingenium Books podcast. Thank you very much, Jane.

00:28:44 – Jane Friedman
Thank you.

00:28:46 – Boni Wagner-Stafford
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode of the Ingenium Books podcast, please, like, share and subscribe. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. But also consider subscribing to our YouTube channel where you can see these episodes in addition to hearing them.