Authors are not marketing tools

After embarking on a spree of publicity tours, Harper Lee of To Kill a Mocking Bird fame finally called a halt. She could afford to. Her masterpiece had made the New York Times’ best-seller list in its first week. Even fifty long years after her book knocked sales figures out of the park, she had the  BBC camping outside her house, hoping for a look in.

Although she wouldn’t oblige, and now famously expected her book to speak for itself, what does it tell you? As an author if you want your books to do well, you need to have visibility. You need to get out there and market yourself. You need to be here, there and everywhere. 

Yet, good books if positioned right should, shouldn’t they, without the author flim flam find their market? In today’s publishing world, apparently not. 

Authors are expected to be—writer, publicist, social media strategist and stage performer, all rolled into one. The lines between creativity and commercial hustle have blurred. It has set the trend for every author’s nightmare- publicity hunt.   

While marketing is absolutely and irrefutably important in the book world, the idea however that authors should serve as marketing tools for their own work seems kind of problematic. It necessarily shifts the focus from storytelling to salesmanship. 

An author is a writer and creative story-telling is what he or she does. A writer is not a sales person and should not be required to be one. If to publicise, market or sell was what an author wanted to do, wouldn’t he or she have opted to become a PR executive or a marketing person?

However, that’s exactly what editors and publishers presently expect their authors to become. And that is unfair. Everybody knows that writing and marketing need completely different expertise. Writing is an act of creation.  

An author’s primary role is to create narratives that challenge, inspire or resonate with his or her readers mentally -not engage with them frontally. It is a behind-the-scenes operation that is quiet, solitary and mind consuming. Marketing on the other hand demands visibility, performance, and people skills. Both are thus fundamentally at odds.

The need to market might well, take the joy out of the writing too. Even become psychologically challenging. Authors are not trained marketers nor are they commodities or products. They are not mobile posters or social media influencers and shouldn’t be made to perform like them.

It’s not that authors don’t dream of becoming wealthy by reaching their readers. They obviously do, but they are also just people who have simply signed up to write stories. When publishers offload what should be their chore on to authors, they risk damaging the very talent they rely upon to produce good content.

It’s often mentally unnerving and even demeaning for most authors to get up on stage and promote their books by holding them up like they are new borns. While many writers do enjoy engaging with audiences to promote their work not everyone likes the limelight.

By all means, engage with those who do. Harness them and involve them and sales might skyrocket. However, should the success of a book only hinge on the author’s Instagram strategy, conversation skills or stage presence? Shouldn’t it be valued for its creative output rather than his or her ability to sell it?

To turn authors into promotional tools might even put their innate creativity at risk. So, let’s uphold, promote and celebrate authors as artists, not advertisers. Marketing should be a happy choice and not a criterion for success. Let’s not insist on what most authors across the board, dread – in-person book launches or in-conversation sessions that force them to perform before an invited audience to entice them into buying their books.

Though these gatherings have become the norm, an author's presence should ideally only be peripheral to all marketing strategies. For who knows, too much public exposure and hype might even backfire.

Readers might get put off and authors might get writer’s block. When writers are free to just write, the world gets better books—and isn’t that a win for everyone? May publishers realise, sooner than later, that they- why else are they in the business - shouldn’t have to call on authors to promote, market, sell and turn those books into money spinners.

An author’s role is to only create, write and provide them with - yes, those tough best sellers.  

(The author is a freelance writer)