Fast Fashion Publishing?

What if we tried word of mouth instead of buzz

Talk to anyone in publishing, or hang out with groups of writers who are drafting their first books or hoping to get a book contract, and you quickly realize that most of the work that goes into promoting a book happens at least six to nine months before that book is available to buy. Bookstores and other large accounts place orders six months in advance; pre-publication trade reviews like Kirkus need to have advance copies of books at least six months in advance if they are going to review the book, which will (or not) guide those bookstores and libraries into placing those orders. Events are scheduled far in advance. Review outlets tend to book up many months in advance too: want your book to be considered by the New York Times Book Review? Then send them a copy of it at least six months before it publishes. “Buzz book” listicles—which increasingly important as so many places for book reviews spots have vanished — also cull their lists far in advance.

As a result, few people will have actually read the books that receive the most notice when they are published. Maybe a half dozen, maybe less (many of the books that receive lots of advance buzz do so based on the name of the author, or the names of the blurbers, or maybe the description, but have not actually been read by the people ordering the books or writing “buzz lists” about them in advance.) It’s not surprising, then, that so many new releases tend to seem to be everywhere at once—and then nowhere, fast. If, once people actually buy and read those books, the buzz doesn’t match up to the reading experience, everything goes quiet. This also happens when all the work that went into getting that title noticed six months before it publishes is simply marketing magic—a really good publicist, or a press that decides to spend a ton of money—can succeed at getting a book in front of many people, and ordered by even more, even if no one actually wants to read or buy that book. What happens to those buzz books you heard about but no one you know actually read? They get returned to the publisher in droves. Meanwhile, many worthy books, that didn’t win the six-months-in-advance marketing sweepstakes, are overlooked. Fewer returns, because fewer advance orders, but the same number of copies sold..

It’s an exhausting game, and it’s tremendously stressful to spend a year working to get a book noticed—it takes six months of work getting blurbs and writing copy, not to mention actually editing a book—to be able to start promoting a book six months in advance. But it’s the game, and few publishers wants to sign up a title they think could receive a lot of national notice and then not try to get it, so most play it.

But you know what is much more fun, and much more gratifying, and much more sustainable? Word of mouth. It goes like this: someone buys a book. (How that someone found it in the first place is key—random Amazon search? Indie bookseller recommendation? Publisher newsletter?—and publicity and marketing has to happen to make that first sale. But.) They read it (this is also an important step that is often overlooked: many books are talked about, but not read). They like it (another key!). They tell someone about it. That person reads it. I don’t need to continue —you get it. The book starts selling more, because people are reading it and liking it. Suddenly, the publisher needs to go back for a second printing, even though there haven’t been many reviews of this book. There are almost no returns, because there weren’t huge orders in the first place.

As I become more experienced as a publisher—I’m on about book 85—I grow only more enamored of the books that have sold better than expected due to word of mouth. In April 2020, we published The Last Children of Mill Creek by Vivian Gibson. The timing, of course, was terrible. The book received some great reviews upon publication—we were lucky, given the pandemic news that dominated everything, and the closed bookstores!—but fewer than we had hoped. However, two years later, the book has been adopted by dozens of book clubs, and is now part of the curriculum in many middle and high schools. The author continues to give talks and do readings, and I am continually checking inventory and preparing to send it back to the printer, yet again.

Belt had another wonderful word of mouth hit in 2021 with An Alternative History of Pittsburgh. Although we anticipated lots of local press for the book upon publication, we received less than we hoped. However, local bookstores stocked the title, and their customers started picking it up. Eventually, they read it—and, clearly, they liked it, because their friends started buying it as well. Once again, I found myself surprised when I needed to go back for additional printings: I hadn’t realized how well it was selling, because the sales were not correlated to reviews or other forms of publicity. Months after publication, the author was being invited to do more and more events. This title is currently our strongest selling backlist book.

This year, I’ve seen this magic happen once again, with Boys Come First. This one differs from the other two in that we did spend six months doing everything we could to promote the book, pouring lots of resources (for us) into the rollout. And we received as much press as we could have hoped, with the book appearing in lots of “buzz books” lists, receiving stellar national reviews, and being covered in newspaper and other features that aren’t parts of review sections per se. The initial batch of advance orders—which was large, but not aberrantly huge—shipped out. More often than not, in publishing, advance orders will comprise 80-90% of the total sales of a book. That is, when you play the game of working so hard many months in advance to launch a book, and get a lot of advance orders, the sales for the book are then clustered in an extremely tight window of about 3 weeks—you are working for a year for a few days of sales. But with Boys, we have seen the orders continue to come in, day after day, and we have also watched reader responses to the book continue far longer than often happens with big releases. Instagram and other social posts from people saying “ picked up this book and it’s incredible” are popping up regularly, two months after pub date, and not because we sent them free copies this winter, either. The sales aren’t coming in one big gulp, due to one big hit—an experience that is so stressful I actually have grown to hope we *don’t* receive such notice, given that it means we have to go back for an emergency reprint and accounts are hectoring us, asking after copies. Instead, they are coming in at a sustainable, steady clip, and thus the experience of keeping it in stock is wonderfully calm.

What I’m saying here seems so obvious and dumb and hardly seems worth saying: when a book is good, and a few people read it, it can continue to sell because those few people get the word out. I mean—of course! Duh. But when you are immersed in a world where the only way to sell a book seems to be to get the *right* people to write about it—whether or not they read it—long before any consumers have a chance to read it themselves—this can be easy to forget.

Sometimes I fantasize about publishing reversing itself and going to something like the Shein fast fashion model. Instead of choosing some winners—lead titles— inside a marketing room a year in advance, and pouring all the resources into them, and printing oodles of copies in advance, risking huge returns afterwards, publishers would just throw all their titles to the public willy nilly, in small batches, and let readers decide which they like the best. Then, publishers would put more money and marketing into the early winners that rose to the top, going back for larger print runs and working to get them even more notice. Publication dates would cease to be as important; instead, actual sales and reader responses would determine which books would receive the most attention. It could work! It’s absurdly obvious!

Notes from a Small Press is the newsletter by Anne Trubek, the founder and owner of Belt Publishing.  Subscribe to receive every post. Oh and don’t forget to grab a copy of  So You Want to Publish a Book?, the book based on this newsletter that other people say good things about.