I recently read "The Cruelty—and Possibilities—of 21st-Century Book Promotion", a long piece by Michael Castleman in The Authors Guild Bulletin. His book-publishing history and mine both cross the same span of time. He's published 19 books since Sexual Solutions in 1980, the year before my first book, Thomas Southerne, was published; his most recent, The Untold Story of Books: A Writer's History of Book Publishing, was published in 2024, the same year as my most recent books, The Arc of the Escarpment and Time's Passage, were published. His article offers an overview of changes the publishing industry has undergone in the last twenty-five years, particularly in the present decade, and suggests ideas that might help me engage in publishing again.
Offering "Marketing Strategies for the 99.99 Percent of Authors Who Aren't Bestsellers," Castleman finds it depressing "that authors are uninformed about the daunting challenges they face in marketing books today." Retracing his publishing history, beginning in 1980 when publishers released 45,000 titles, he claims that "since 2000, releases from Big Five Publishers, indie publishers, pay-to-publish ("hybrid") houses, and self-publishers have averaged more that 2 million annually," nearly 45 times as many titles. (His italics.) He reports that publishing The Untold Story of Books "cost $16,000 over six months" in free copies and shipping to contacts, hiring a publicist and a marketing assistant, and "miscellaneous".
In the entire 20th century, he maintains, "American publishers released 2.5 million titles. Today, that many appear every year." He asserts that "each new non-bestselling release [. . . ] [is] unlikely to garner much attention"; a bestseller like The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store can sell a million copies but there are "only around 200" bestsellers annually, "one title in 10,000." It is estimated that "79 percent of new releases—four out of five—sell fewer than 100 copies. Only 6 percent sell 1,000. Most self-published books sell in two figures—many Big Five titles sell only a few hundred copies." Although he reports that publishing The Untold Story of Books "cost $16,000 over six months" in free copies and shipping to contacts, hiring a publicist and a marketing assistant, and "miscellaneous," he advises authors releasing a book to keep their expectations low: "Only 20 percent of new titles sell 100 titles."
Castleman reports that, before 2000, new books needed to find audiences in order to get additional printings; that required continued promotion. (Note: Several of my earliest books are no longer listed in their publishers' catalogs and were only printed once. Some still sell through used book dealers.) "But ever since 2000, when publishing went digital, authors have gained one small but significant advantage. Books no longer go out of print. They've become digital files that can be maintained almost for free and printed when ordered."
"Authors now enjoy longer promotional runways," Castleman argues, because publishers aren't backlogging abundant physical copies but mostly printing them when orders come in. (That's likely happening with The Arc of the Escarpment—a limited number exist at the UW Stevens Point Cornerstone Press campus, but additional copies are ordered through a printing firm.) Publishers needn't remove older slightly selling or unselling books to make room for newer potential-selling volumes. The "best way to sell books has always been face-to-face and word-of-mouth endorsements," Castleman asserts, claiming that writers need to "cultivate a wide social circle" by sending a few group emails a year. Amazon uses pre-order buttons, which Castleman used to inform 1,000 names on his list ("family, friends, and associates"), all on his own time, achieving a 15% response rate to his pre-order—"85 percent didn't buy." He also repeats his posters, promoted twice for Christmas gift sales (20 copies a week for seven weeks), and will send them out next Memorial Day and Christmas.
"Eight months before pub day," he turned his final manuscript into a PDF and pitched every author he knew. "I distributed 75 PDFs, and within a few months, harvested 38 lovely blurbs. . . . A few of those blurbs grace the back cover, but they all appear as editorial reviews on the book's Amazon and Bookshop pages, and as hype in several pages before the title page." He's not sure how much influence they'll have but "Maybe." He also worked up a cheap website for the book.
Though they're harder to get now, Castleman has used print reviews and approved Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. He invested $6,500 "in a publicist with a strategy," whose effectiveness he's unsure of. He's also uncertain about how profitable other enterprises like podcasts and interviews are (he got 25), and thinks its okay to post on Facebook, Instagram, and BookTok and to solicit reviews on Goodreads. He recommends book festivals, Amazon advertising, and repeat marketing to an author's personal list rather than bookstores. "Today it's easier than ever to publish books but harder than ever to promote and sell them." That's an observation that sticks with me.
I think The Arc of the Escarpment is a pretty good book but, for mostly time-crunch reasons, I haven't sought sales as hard as I once did, and Castleman's convinced me of the limitations of author promotion in terms of profit and popularity. After reading him, I still feel encouraged to keep writing and keep letting the work go public. Composing the kind of books and essays I've been doing over the past forty-five years has given me a fairly solid sense of how reading and writing taught me to value what I've centered on. I'm feeling assured that I need to continue doing that as long as I can.
Notes:
Castleman, Michael. "The Cruelty—and Possibilities—of 21st-Century Book Promotion", The Authors Guild Bulletin (Spring-Summer 2025: pp. 18-24).