What Marketers Can’t Control

Why great ideas, smart campaigns and hard work still doesn't guarantee results.

Artwork by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

A weekly newsletter by a publishing professional with a decade of experience. This is for writers seeking publishing tools, readers looking for great recs, and humans who love to journal, observe, and reflect.

Maybe the most challenging part of my day job as a book marketer is this: I can have a lot of tricks up my sleeve, but none of them are guaranteed to wow an audience.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how often marketers are treated like performers. In meetings, authors come in with ideas (sometimes great ones) about what they think will activate readers and trigger sales. And many of those ideas are good tricks. But good tricks don’t always earn a standing ovation. Sometimes there’s no wow factor, no entertainment, no moment that makes someone pause, lean forward, and say, I need this.

Another important detail that often gets overlooked: a publisher typically enters an author’s world six to nine months before a book goes on sale. Which raises a real question: what was happening in that world before those six to nine months?