Book Marketing Essential: The Author Questionnaire
The book marketing process is a looong one. Short lead campaigns start 6–8 weeks from publication, long-lead publicity starts 3–4 months before that, sales conferences with trade reps and/or bookbuyers start 3–4 months before that, and information for metadata feeds and Edelweiss pages can sometimes start nearly a year out from publication. But those are just tactical exercises. Things actually get started much, much earlier.
The true marketing for a book begins with acquisition, because by and large your most important marketing engine is the author. While direct response marketing is improving in the trade (and a well-oiled machine for those of us who were nestled within large organizations and had ready access to large, qualified lists) and co-op opportunities can drive visibility (at considerable cost), book marketing is still, for good and bad, a word-of-mouth business. Or, as Andy Hunter put it recently as he was describing the recommendation strategy in his new venture, Bookshop.org, “people buy books because they hear about them from someone they trust.” It likely wasn’t because of advertising. And to generate the type of word-of-mouth awareness that drives sales, authors will be doing most of the heavy lifting.
The best authors understand this and start thinking through promotional blog posts, social media plans, media contacts, and tie-ins with professional appearances immediately. Newer authors, or those who require a little coaching, are typically surprised to find that the bulk of the marketing for a book will rest on their shoulders. Their view of how a book gets marketed is a bit romantic and their expectation is that the publisher will fund and manage a nationwide media campaign with stops on national morning shows, glowing coverage in print media, and a multi-city book tour—all they have to do is show up.
This where perhaps the single most important dart of a publisher’s marketing quiver comes in—the author questionnaire. This simple document, which can be as detailed or as sparse as you see fit, is an elegant tool that accomplishes two primary objectives:
It organizes all of the information the publisher needs to build out book-specific marketing tactics, short- and long-lead publicity campaigns, and ballpark budgets. The author is going to need to do a lot of work on their end, but a good publisher is responsible for supporting all of these efforts in any way it can via scheduling, managing, and covering costs.
It level-sets expectations for the author. This gives them a sense of what they’re going to be asked to do, forces them to recognize and leverage any marketing and publicity assets they already have, and gets across the most important point: writing the book was the first half of the job and selling it will be the second.
The details of the document are up to each to publisher to determine and may change from book to book. I’ve attached below a generic version that I’ve used in some form or fashion for a number of non-fiction and cooking titles, but many of the same questions would apply to a number of subject areas. And just as important as the content is the timing. Some basic information should be collected at the proposal stage to help you decide whether this is a project worth pursuing, but my team typically waited until the manuscript was submitted to send the questionnaire (which was typically 8–10 months from publication) to avoid derailing the writing process but also get the author into marketing and publicity mode as soon as possible while giving the marketing and publicity teams plenty of time to start working on plans.
Regardless of what works for you program, I highly recommend not skipping this step or thinking a quick conversation or email will suffice. This is an essential step in the marketing process for any book. Be sure to treat it that way.
