Book publishers can take months to successfully promote manuscripts and marketing professionals are expensive
After months and maybe even years of hard work, you have finally finished your book. Congrats! But now you need to promote your book and get it out into the hands of your future readers. This requires book marketing, a process that involves a good amount of effort. For that reason, many authors choose to either hire a marketing professional or find a publisher that will first publish and then market their manuscript.
Even though publishers and marketing professionals have many connections and resources, that doesn’t mean any less work is involved for them. Far from it. To promote your book, publishers undergo a long process that involves contracting, releasing and marketing, which can take a long time, according to Rachelle Gardner, a literary agent who has worked in-house at two publishing companies and has edited books published by Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, among others. So while you won’t have to promote your book yourself by going with a publisher, you probably won’t see any results for months if not longer.
Hiring a marketing professional is another option that can fast track this process but can cost upwards of $1,000, according to Reedsy, a network of publishing professionals that have helped produce more than 10,000 books.
So altogether, authors can choose to circumvent doing the extra work themselves by either spending a grand or by getting their book published, the latter of which requires first getting their manuscript accepted by publishers before waiting an extended amount of time before their manuscript is even marketed.
Without any additional help, marketing a book can take between six months to two years, according to CEO and Founder Penny Sansevieri of Author Marketing Experts, a 30-plus leader in the publishing industry that develops book marketing campaigns. Luckily, there is another option if you want to promote your book quickly and avoid putting a major dent in your wallet. But it means having to do most of the heavy lifting yourself: Storiad.
Storiad puts all of the tools needed to successfully market books at the authors’ fingertips, from numerous media kit templates to an extensive email database consisting of over 40,000 verified book publicity contacts at little cost. Authors just need to use these tools to customize and send their press kits to bloggers, for example. Luckily, these tools save hundreds of hours of research and compiling alone.
In conclusion, authors can:
- Rely on a publisher and wait a considerable amount of time even after getting published
- Spend upwards of $1,000 with a marketing professional
Or …
- Obtain all of the materials needed to successfully market a book
- Put in the effort of marketing books for considerably less money