Bad News is Killing New Books
When natural and political disasters strike, book launches collapse, so why don't authors and publishers have a back-up strategy?
If you have a book launch in your future, I urge you to bring up this issue with your publisher, editor, agent, and publicist! None of you can predict what conditions will be like on your release date, so plan for the best but be ready for the worst.
What do hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, digital hacks, Presidential elections, and global unrest have to do with the book business?
Well, let’s imagine you’re an author eagerly anticipating the release of your first novel, a domestic dramedy which you labored over for a decade before it was picked up by a major publishing house offering an ambitious publicity plan and book tour for the launch. The book has received glowing advance reviews, and you’re packing for your tour when disaster strikes. Maybe the East Coast, where you’ve scheduled a host of readings, is flattened by a historic hurricane. Maybe a digital catastrophe crashes the servers of the major book distributors, erasing all pre-orders. Maybe the losing candidate refuses to accept the results of the Presidential election and civil war breaks out.
In any of these events, all your carefully laid release plans will be canceled and your precious novel buried under the wreckage of the nightly news.
In retrospect, you’ll wonder why no one saw this coming, given the frequency of disaster in today’s boiling world, why no one at your publishing house had a backup plan that might salvage your hard work, beautiful book, career, and hopes and dreams. But they didn’t. They still don’t.
This was my experience
The pandemic spring of 2020 was reportedly the worst season for book sales in publishing history — especially for fiction like my novel Glorious Boy, released that May. The losses outstripped even those during America’s Shock and Awe invasion of Iraq, the vortex of 2003 history into which my third novel, Flash House, plunged. In fact, sales of early pandemic releases tanked almost as precipitously as those of novels published on 9/11. ( I actually met one poor author who was trapped in an airport on 9/11, hiding his doomed first novel lest anyone see it had a bomb on the cover.)
The situation was especially dire for small-press books and fiction by emerging authors. According to the New York Times:
“The pandemic altered how readers discover and buy books, and drove sales for celebrities and best-selling authors while new and lesser known writers struggled... about 98 percent of the books that publishers released in 2020 sold fewer than 5,000 copies.”
This fate even befell debut novels that received a lot of advance buzz, like Jessica Anthony’s Enter the Aardvark, Celia Laskey’s Under the Rainbow, and Callan Wink’s August. This happened because the publishing industry has no contingency plan for books whose release dates coincide with national emergencies.
Historically, publishers have simply written off these titles. They calculate that it’s cheaper to eat the losses than upset the pipeline of scheduled books or gamble on relaunching the casualties. But authors stand to lose more than money.
Without a Plan B to revive their books when the crisis subsides, writers also have to write off the months, years, even decades of work that went into those titles. (I spent 6 years working on Flash House and 17 on Glorious Boy.) And since future book deals will factor in sales of an author’s last publication, one calamitous current event cycle can destroy an author’s entire career. I’m lucky I have ghostwriting to fall back on.
In case you’re getting depressed, here’s a reminder that publishing also can bring good news:
Book publishers need a contingency strategy for catastrophe
Each time a major disaster seizes the air waves, we can predict that media appearances and promotional tours for new books will be canceled, reviews will be bumped for more topical coverage, and readers will be wholly distracted by the news, if not by the physical and emotional stress of dealing personally with the crisis. Nonfiction can sometimes weather these storms, especially when it dovetails with current events. But fiction is less resilient.
Early in the pandemic, I worked with my publisher, publicist, and fellow authors to shift my publicity tour online, arranging virtual book club visits, offering signed book plates to readers, engaging my favorite independent booksellers in special online events.
These efforts made us feel proactive, but they could not make up for the fact that COVID shut down so many links in the distribution chain that some novels only became available weeks after their publication dates; or that Amazon canceled all pre-orders during the period when books were deemed ‘nonessential’; or that shuttered bookstores and libraries across the country stopped ordering any titles at all. Even if early readers wanted to buy our books, the barriers were so formidable that many just gave up.
Virtual book events are not the answer
We learned, alas, that far fewer copies are sold at virtual book events than at live events. By one estimate, book sales at virtual events amount to about 7% of sales at live events. And reader attendance has only fallen as online events have multiplied in the wake of the pandemic. Most of us have Zoom fatigue.
Bottom line: Readers want to meet authors and get their books signed in person. When live events are canceled, authors lose book sales.
And when disasters force book stores to close, many readers won’t even learn about new titles by lesser-known authors. Again, the New York Times explains:
Unlike the serendipitous sense of discovery that comes with browsing a bookstore, people tend to search by author or subject matter when they shop online, limiting the titles they see. Often, they see whatever a search or algorithm delivers, or find themselves steered toward titles that retailers push because they are already selling well. As a result, many of the new books that were released in 2020 languished, as panicked retailers focused on brand-name authors and readers gravitated toward the most popular titles.
The challenge of time-shifting
If pivoting in real time doesn’t work, what about time-shifting the release date? When the 2020 lockdown was first announced, my publisher offered me the option of pushing back my book launch to the fall. That would have meant competing with the Presidential election news avalanche, not to mention the books already scheduled for release in the fall, plus others that were pushed back. I opted to stay put with a May release.
Book sales did start to perk up after a few months, as readers adapted to pandemic life. But Covid kept us in its grip all year, so short-term time-shifting was no panacea for anyone. And it won’t be going forward, either. What we need is not a guesswork approach but an industry-wide agreement to re-launch lost books when conditions return to normal.
If you have a book launch in your future, I urge you to bring up this issue with your publisher, editor, agent, and publicist! None of you can predict what conditions will be like on your release date, so plan for the best but be ready for the worst.
What would Plan B look like?
A Plan B marketing strategy is not a simple idea. Ideally, the entire literary ecosystem would need to get involved, from publishers to booksellers and readers themselves. But everyone in this system would benefit.
Here are a few initial suggestions for this emergency game plan:
Introduce the promotional category of Overlooked Books to steer readers toward titles they might have missed due to a major disaster
Plan Book Anniversary campaigns one year after Overlooked Books’ original (thwarted) release dates
Engage reviewers and booksellers in Rollout Revivals of Overlooked Books, paving the way for later book reviews and author events
Promote Lost Generation Spotlights in bookstores, book sites, and publications to celebrate Overlooked Books
Develop State-Of-Emergency Book Promotion as a specialty, so authors and publishers could identify publicists with this expertise when they need it
Encourage bestselling authors to Adopt An Overlooked Book by giving it a blurb for its revival
There’s no limit to the impact a contingency strategy could have if the entire book industry embraced it. But first, publishers need to remove the stigma of failure that hangs over books whose only flaw is a calamitous release date. These titles deserve a second chance.
Yes, this. All of this. Early in the pandemic I actually pushed a deadline out two years because the publisher thought it would be good to give things a chance to calm down...big laugh. Personally, I think the best way for authors to keep their books in the public eye is to write opeds, essays, and articles that tie their books to current events, and not necessarily the bombshells.