The Launch is Dead, Long Live the Launch: Advice for Authors in a New Age
I published a book in the pandemic. Here’s how I made it work.
I boarded the plane, tugging a carry-on and trying to ignore the persistent under-mask nose-itch. It was June and sticky-hot; I’d definitely dressed all wrong for this, my first flight since pandemic lock-down over a year before. Tucked into my shoulder bag I carried vaccine information, hand sanitizer, and as many copies of my book as I could reasonably carry. I’d launched my first major book months before on March 2, 2021 — and everything had gone wrong. This trip, I knew, was the beginning of making it right.
Publishing in the “teeth” of a pandemic (as my agent puts it) feels a bit like being fed to sharks. Except none of the sharks bother turning up. It’s just you shouting I’m here and tasty! at the vast and roaring sea. You thought writing was the hard part, but it pales in comparison to finding an audience of readers, and in today’s market it’s literally the “quick” and dead. You have a few short months to make impact, and one of the ways we do that is through the book launch. At least, it used to be.
In-person events create a sense of connection. The books are right there, the author is right there. For a moment, you belong. You’re part of something. But since the covid-19 outbreak, book signings, with their tight spaces, close-talkers, and cramped tables, became unthinkable. The pandemic didn’t just change the book launches, it murdered them.
Unfortunately, those of us launching books in 2020 and 2021 more or less carried on with the corpse, watching helplessly as our books didn’t sell. It’s a by-now-well-known statistic: 98 percent of the books published during the pandemic sold fewer than 5000 copies. To put that in perspective, Jane Dystel (the president of my own agency, Dystel Goderich and Bourret) says that 15,000 copies need to be sold for a publisher to take a risk on an author’s second book — and if that one doesn’t go big, you may never get a second chance. How are we supposed to fight for our books against those odds?
If you’re already an established author with a well-known name and a backlist, you don’t need to ask that question. Most of the books sold in the last two years fell into that category (a two-year old cook book by Snoop Dogg sold 205K copies in 2020 alone.) But neither can well-known authors answer this question. You had to live through it, scrambling to change course and find new audiences in new ways. I was there, and this is what I learned about publishing, platforms, and second chances.
Sometimes Everything Goes Wrong
I wrote a non-fiction book about head transplants. A Cold War era surgeon-scientist figured out how to keep a brain alive outside its body in Frankenstein fashion, naked of flesh but still sending brainwaves via EEG. The reviews were lovely and shiny in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Science Magazine, and WIRED. I launched (virtually) on the 2nd of March at a Zoom event for Politics and Prose bookstore (D.C.), promoted by Pulitzer Prize winner Ed Yong and bestselling author Lindsey Fitzharris. Things couldn’t have been better in terms of support and placement. Then came the first week sales figures. They weren’t just low, they were shockingly low. By the end of month one, considered to be the most important for setting the stage of success, I was very clearly in trouble.
There had been no serendipitous browsing in book shops or libraries, no real uptake of those happy reviews no matter how many papers it might be printed in. The New York Times carried what felt like an obituary for the whole market: “The loss of live author events all but wiped out a significant revenue stream for bookstores. Virtual events can draw bigger and more geographically diverse crowds […] but online audiences often don’t buy the book from the store that’s hosting.” Or at all, for that matter. I’d been prepared to pitch my next book to my publisher; “maybe hold off on that,” my editor told me. Jane Dystel’s words were ringing in my ears; I might never sell another book at this rate. I needed to figure out if it was possible to turn things around, so I did what I usually do when I have such questions: I asked Twitter.
Social media has two personalities. It’s celebrated as the way to reach everyone and sell everything, and as a void of despair and hatred that can put even Satan himself into therapy. To be fair, it’s both. But my use of Twitter in this case was a means of networking not just with authors but with creators. There is another group that has had to make swift and sudden changes to survive and not just because of the pandemic. Musical performers have faced precarious shifts in industry, market trends, and the loss of revenue due to streaming music platforms. Publishing might have the turning radius of a large iceberg, but performers? They had to be acrobatic and inventive to survive.
Lessons From the Music Industry
For better or worse, making it as a performer has long been a massive hustle, and there is one thing they understand very well: it’s not just an ‘event,’ it’s got to be a show. You watch, live or on screen, because it entertains you and provides something you can’t get any other way. One of my favorite bands is Charming Disaster, a goth-folk-punk duo who sing curiously literate songs while also reading the Tarot deck for the audience. Funny, quirky, easy to recognize: they have shtick. They made the leap from in-person to Quarantine Livestream better than anyone I knew — so I asked if I could be on a show.
Their Livestream had not, as a general rule, included authors — but they did often include guests. I went on to discuss head transplant, and they just happened to have a song in the catalog called “Disembodied Head,” so you could say it was a match made in Internet Viewing. I wore a silly hat, I gave my own type of performance. It felt like being in a play, having a bit of fun — and the audience typed in questions and chatter through YouTube. In short, I fell in love. I’d already done an awful lot of Zoom-style interviews for my book, but this was entertainment. Were there more such places? Ellia and Jeff asked if I knew about the Bushwick Book Club.
The BBC group showcases new musical talent by choosing a book to read as the theme. Founder Susan Hwang chooses books by famous authors like Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut. Would they, I asked by phone call, consider doing mine? Yes. So would their London venue. And that’s how I ended up on a rooftop in Brooklyn in June 2021, with four copies of Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher and a whole bunch of new ideas about what the future of book promotion might look like.
Making What You Can’t Find in the World
Usually, the authors are not necessarily in attendance at BBC, but the audience is; we were reversing the trend. With us at Hwang’s flat (or streaming to us, projected above her mantle) were singers, songwriters, a chef, and a video-artist, all producing content inspired by my book. The chef made an aspic in the shape of a brain, by the way; my own contribution was a personally crafted cocktail I called the Humble Butcher. And it was humbling.
All of these delightful people creating things from my creation; I thought I’d cry. I had gone from months of isolation to the warm embrace of fellow creators coming together as a supportive community. The event was covered by Bob Krasner for the AMNY Villager:
“The most recent meeting of minds and music took place in Hwang’s living room in the East Village and featured not just songs but food and drink inspired by the latest work by Brandy Schillace, as well as the author herself.”
I said then, and I’ll say now, “to see people engage so deeply with my work that they created something new was wonderful; there are lots of ways to measure success, and today I feel like I won the world.” Just as the Bushwick Book Club had used their platform (streaming or live) to support talent, I wanted to have something like this for book authors, and non-fiction book authors (like me) in particular. It was time to mobilize.
Making Room for Second Chances
I ’d spent three months mourning for what felt like lost hopes. That’s fair. Things are hard and the pandemic made everything weird. But I was ready to chase after something better, and it happened in a series of coordinated, frequently simultaneous and overlapping steps.
- Social Media: How to Do it Well (and Not Burn Out)
I know there are drawbacks. I know there are trolls. And I know that the sheer number of social media platforms can be utterly overwhelming. I was told to get an Instagram, a TikTok, FB, Reddit, Goodreads… I do have all of those (you can find me as bschillace or b_schillace on most of them). But after a year and more of participating on everything, I realized I felt more at home on some sites than others. In the end, the most useful and valuable tool I have is Twitter, and it turns out that focusing in one (or only a few) areas is more effective and more efficient than trying to do them all.
What makes Twitter useful to authors: direct contact. Authors, publishers, and editors live in a world of gate keepers. It makes sense; you wouldn’t want your personal email out there, and we all get enough spam calls as it is. By contrast, Twitter offers a quick and easy way to “meet” people. Unlike the personal intrusion of an email or phone call, a tweet feels like a comfortable mode of approaching other authors. I received this advice from Ed Yong about reaching out on Twitter: Don’t be afraid to ask. Over the years I have made wonderful contacts and wonderful friends through Twitter, from authors to editors. And some editors even accept pitches through Twitter these days. I chose this as my main avenue, and put my resources here. I am approaching 10K followers; I’m up there as @ bschillace.
In May and June of 2021, I decided to reach out to the authors I tend to read: slightly peculiar non-fiction, weird history, curious medicine, mysterious tales. That ended up being authors like Mary Roach, Carl Zimmer, Lindsey Fitzharris, Sam Kean, Deborah Blum. I wasn’t asking them to promote my book; I was asking if they might like to join me in building a platform to help all authors promote their books. They enthusiastically agreed to be part of this project. My next step was learning how to make it real. (We’ll come to that in #4)
2. Writing for Hire. Again. And Again.
I almost hesitate to make this “number 2,” because this is ongoing both before and after the book launch, but I re-committed to freelance for hire after taking my first steps to build an author promotion platform (for me, and others). Consider the news cycle. Nothing stays on the front page for more than a day — most of us get nanoseconds. I realized that the best way of making sure my name, if not my book, stayed current was to publish a lot. I joined Medium, for one thing, and I try to write at least one essay a week. (More on that in #3). I also started pitching everywhere — most especially to places that had reviewed my book, like WIRED and WSJ. I’ve since published in the Scientific American, the Globe and Mail, and Undark, too. And several of these pieces were related to the book I’d launched.
My agent considers my success rate the stuff of miracles, but it’s not. I did two things, and I did them really well:
- First, I researched the publications deeply and read a lot of their articles to see what worked for them. I am always surprised by how many people don’t do this, but it’s so important to tailor the idea to the venue.
- Secondly, I wrote a LOT of pitches. I sent 4–5 a week, every week. I kept reworking and re-sending. Even better, most venues pay you for the essays. You are keeping your name fresh, getting to know an editor, and because you can then push the articles on Twitter, you grow your audience and the network of authors, too.
3. Finding an Audience is Nobody’s Job (but mine)
Coming out with a large publisher, and with a respectable advance, I had assumed they were working on finding and building an audience of readers for my book. In turn, the publisher probably assumed that getting star reviews in all the right publications would do that work. We were both wrong. In the pandemic publishing-postmortem, one thing is abundantly clear: the only one you can count on to build your audience is you. So how do you find your readers?
Do you like fishing? I don’t, actually. To me, it seems like a very foolish thing to sit in the hot sun on a large body of water in the hopes that your particular lure will attract some fish than may or may not be there. My father, on the other hand, loves to fish. And he catches them, too. How? He studies the body of water, even it’s topography. He gets to know the seasons and the temperatures. He sorts out which fish will go for what, when — usually through trial and error. In other words, it’s work. Effectively finding an audience turns out to be the same.
Of course, the launch of a book is a bad time for trial and error. There’s nothing I can do short of time travel to fix that, but I wanted to prepare for the next one and pick up readers for the paperback launch. So I went fishing — through the medium of Medium.
Here, I can follow other writers and watch for trends (study the lake). I can test out my headline writing skills (lures); I can see what content ‘hits’ and what doesn’t (which fish). Because Medium already had a huge readership I know that the fish are out there; because Medium provides analytics, I can keep track of how well I’m managing to attract them. There are blogs and substacks, too, and if you already have one it’s worth focusing there instead. In any case, it’s not just about “finding” readers, it’s about re-training yourself to meet their needs.
4. Building a (Peculiar) Community of Readers and Writers
Steps one through three, in their several permutations, brought me to one singular realization: books like mine DO have an audience. In fact, there’s masses of us: folks who like weird, peculiar, gothy, macabre, nerdy, sciencey, medical, mysterious stuff. We exist. And we’re hungry to read, hungry to connect, excited to participate. But this hardy troupe of #Peculiars also tend to be often marginalized, excluded, mistreated, made fun of. As a result, there wasn’t an existing platform collecting them together.
In my other (other) life, I am the editor in chief of BMJ Medical Humanities journal — which focuses a lot on social justice, inclusion, and accessibility. As I looked at the readers of my own and my friends’ strange books, I realized building this audience meant more than selling books. It meant making a community. It meant, in a way, providing a safe and inclusive home for people whose interests had been maligned in other ways. How did I know?
Because I was the 3rd grader reading about Bubonic Plague alone on the playground, made fun of because I didn’t know any of the more popular books (something to do with babysitting, I think). Why was I so WEIRD? Why couldn’t I like NORMAL things? Sitting at my computer, I decided that the platform I needed would celebrate those once-kids. I called it the Peculiar Book Club, with the tag line: If you’re weird, you’re family.
Mary Roach agreed to be my first guest in a livestream show that allowed the audience to chat through Youtube. After her came Lindsey Fitzharris. Then all the members of our first season. I contacted a friend of mine, podcaster and film fella Davey Berris, to serve as producer. I got us a Streamyard account, a website, and we launched ourselves on Youtube at the end of June 2021. We are now launching subscriptions to our second season, though the individual shows remain free or by donation. We have a podcast, a Goodreads shelf, A FB page and group, and of course Twitter. And because everyone then wanted merchandise, I also launched a store.
I’d just built what I could not find in the world: a place where readers and writers from all over could talk live about books. And then, we partnered with indie bookshops (Loganberry US and Foxlane UK) to get signed copies to our show audience. Suddenly, we were supporting authors, readers, and bookstores. And as a result, I was asked onto podcasts too — and to book store events — about my own book, which we featured for our Halloween show.
5. Playing to Your Strengths
I’d love to end by saying all this work turned me into a bestselling author and redeemed my book from obscurity and remainder piles. It didn’t (or at least, it hasn’t yet). But this year, I took what was essentially a “failure” and potentially the death-knell of my writing career, and I turned it into a foundation on which to build.
My WSJ editor contacted me yesterday, and asked that I add the book club information to my next article (due in two weeks); I’ve had a publisher contact me to ask how to get their authors on my show; I’ve had authors contact me through Twitter and inquire about joining the podcast. More importantly, I have found a community of like-minded readers and writers that can meet virtually to share their love of books. Lastly, this platform (and my essays and social media presence) helped me shop my next book — which will be coming out in 2024. By then, I will know JUST how to launch it.
If you are interested…
I didn’t achieve any of this by following a formula. I’m pretty sure post Covid, all formulae for publishing went right out the cockpit. Instead, I played to my strengths —and you will, I hope, play to yours. In the meanwhile, I am building Season 3 for the book club, and if you are interested, you know where to find me. I’ll be on Twitter, and happy to chat.
