Part 2: Why We’re Doing This: You, Me & Bookthreads

A Brief Personal & General History of Author Challenges

By Michelle LaPointe

In January of 2024 I finished writing a comic novel, Mary Frances O’Halloran Discovers Sin. It’s my second novel. I finished the first one, an espionage thriller, twenty years ago, and spent about two years trying to find an agent.

I’m told I came close. Six agents asked for the manuscript. I had multiple phone conversations with three of those. Of those three,

• One asked for extensive cuts before she’d consider signing me. I didn’t make them very well; when I sent her the shorter version, she told me that my cuts had taken the life and personality out of the book. She was absolutely right.

• The second agent suggested other changes and asked me to resubmit after I’d made them. That process took me nearly a year, owing to the pressing distractions of earning a living and raising children. By the time I’d delivered them, the agent was no longer representing thrillers. She’d decided to focus only on romances and books about architecture and gardening. She was lovely to me, actually, and I was pleased to see her own book about Victorian homes in bookstores a year or so later—though not pleased enough to buy a copy.

• During the last call I had with the final agent, she told me she was not going to take on my novel, saying, “I’m going to say ‘no’, but I may be making the biggest mistake of my career.” Happily for her, she was wrong. Her career as an agent continued unabated. My career as an author has been less illustrious.

Spend any time at all in the writer community, and you’ll know that my story is hardly unique. But now that I’m beginning the process of marketing my new novel, I’m finding that a lot has changed in two decades, for good and bad. For one thing, I think that if I were trying to sell that espionage thriller now, there would be fewer people asking me to consider writing under a man’s name.

• It is much, much easier to connect with a community of other authors, to share experiences, aspirations, frustrations, and support. That is lovely, and THANK YOU, BOOKTHREADS. It’s also very painful for us as marketers, because every day we can see the frustrations and challenges that our fellow authors face.

• For any path to publishing, there is exponentially more pressure to deliver a large ready-made audience along with a manuscript. For some agents and publishers, an audience of significant size weighs heavily in their decision to consider an author, and they will transparently say so on their websites.

• The path to traditional publishing is as difficult as it’s ever been, but there are more avenues to self-publishing and distribution. That is wonderful and awful at the same time. The wonderful part is that the joy of having a real, published book is now open to everyone who can afford the fairly modest cost of doing so. The awful part is that there are more books published every year than can be absorbed by the market, meaning that most books will have extreme difficulty finding significant sales. That puts writing bestselling books on a par with achieving success as an A-list actor or a professional athlete.

And yet, every year there are new A-list actors and professional athletes — and an even greater number who manage to find a level of success somewhere between the minor leagues and the stratosphere. For authors who want to be read—and don’t we all want that? —there are still possibilities that make it worth the effort.

There’s also a lot of marketing advice on the Internet. Much of it has been copied and pasted so many times that it has lost all meaning, all connections with its point of origin, and any context or results. It’s more folklore, now, than advice. A great deal of it is big on the “what” you should do, but painfully short of the “why” or “how.”

Some of it is so bad that it’s hilarious. I have extensive notes taken from a free sample webinar, offering a very expensive course, that was unlikely to teach anyone how to sell anything. The presentation, offered by a famous author, was by turns embarrassing, shocking, and very funny, but not in a good way.  On the other hand, if you paid the four-figure tuition cost of his course, he would post a single Tweet in your honor. Totally worth it!

Some online advice seems very sensible, and may even be excellent. But it’s usually presented completely without results beyond broad claims of success. For example, a book marketing formula may include ten or fifteen recommendations. But what happens when you can’t do all of them? 

Which ones make a quantifiable difference in sales? How do they rank in terms of importance? Are some more effective for different genres and audiences than others? Are some better at generating pre-sales or reviews or post-launch sales? Do some work best for generating sales among readers who are active in the book community? Do you need different tactics for reaching book clubs, casual readers, and impulse buyers? Some of these answers should be easy to get with rigorous testing. Some may be much more difficult. But we think it’s important to try. 

Image credits: Stock images: Envato Elements. Editing: Michelle LaPointe