5 things I'd tell a first-time author

And a big event reveal

• Newsflash: One of my favourite non-fiction writers, Oliver Burkeman, is coming to Backstory later this month to talk about his latest book, Meditations for Mortals. Get your tickets — and browse our excellent line-up of May events — here.

ONE OF THE BEST THINGS about this job is meeting lots and lots of authors. Some are household names, most of them aren’t. Some are several books in; many are just starting out, visiting our bookshop clutching a proof of their soon-to-be-published debut or still fishing around to get their foot in an agent’s door.

From my chats with these authors and a growing understanding of how the publishing industry works, I reckon there’s quite a gap between the average first-time author’s expectations of what happens after they secure a book deal and the reality.

So here are five things I think they might like to consider:

You’re (probably) not going to sell many copies

Sorry to kick off on a downer, but you need to surround yourself with people who are honest about your book’s likely sales. It’s great to be optimistic and enthusiastic, but a dose of realism helps too.

It’s true that millions of books are sold in the UK every year. But a healthy chunk of those are the latest offering from a Richard Osman or a Sarah J Maas. Or they’re the latest craze, be it murder mystery puzzles or air fryer cookbooks. Another big wodge are week-in-week-out workhorse “backlist” classics, like Each Peach Pear Plum or And Then There Were None. That Shakespeare chap seems to be doing awfully well.

All of this means debuts account for a relatively small proportion of book sales. Especially hardback debuts.

So while the publisher — and, if you’re lucky, a major bookseller, or lots of lovely smaller-scale booksellers (hello!) — will do their best to shout about a debut they loved reading, customers will likely bustle past them in search of a good old Lee Child.

You are therefore unlikely to become an “overnight bestseller” (a cliché that gives a wholly inaccurate impression of the industry’s efficiency). But the good news is that there are lots of things you and your publisher can do in advance of publication to turn paltry sales into reasonably-good-for-a-debut sales, foremost among them my second tip:

Build your own brand

If you’re lucky, your publisher will have whizzy publicity and marketing people eager to get your book into the hands of readers (and people who might get them into the hands of readers. Hello again!)

But even at its best, authors should consider this a complement to their own brand-building exercise, not a substitute for one. The whizzy people will have lots of other authors to be whizzy for and will go on to be whizzy elsewhere after a few weeks/months (if you’re lucky) on your campaign. You get to be dedicated to your book forever.

You might already be feeling icky about my talk of “brand-building”. Sorry, not sorry. It might seem somehow more authentic and writerly to stay off Instagram or TikTok but it will ultimately mean your book is read by fewer people than it should be.

Try substituting “getting your book into the hands of readers and actually read” for “sales and marketing campaign”. Does that feel better? If so, call it that. That is all it is.

Claire Fuller (look at her Instagram video recommendations) and Alice Vincent (check out her Substack) are good examples of very good writers (fiction and non-fiction respectively) who do this stuff really well and understand that it adds to their art, rather than taking away from it.

If you haven’t got a publisher yet, doing this will help you get one. If you have, it will help you help them find your readers.

A glittering success: debut writer Orlando Whitfield at Backstory this week

Care about distribution

How your book physically gets into the hands of readers is someone else’s problem, right? Wrong.

If you’re lucky enough that your book “takes off” for whatever reason, it might well do so unpredictably and for a short amount of time. This might be because it scrapes into the bestseller charts, is longlisted for a prize, recommended by a celebrity or suddenly becomes topical.

So it is in your interests that your book can get in the eyeline of as many potential readers as possible during that moment in the spotlight.

You might think it is also in your publisher’s interests. And it is, but less so. Your publisher has lots of bets at any one time; you have one. They need to keep their distribution costs under control; you don’t need to worry about that. So it pays to care about distribution — who gets what, when — more than your publisher.

The most important determinant of sales volume during this crucial window is whether bookshops (and online retailers) are able to re-order your book quickly. Some publishers are very good at enabling them to do this. A surprising number of the big ones are really bad at it and are complacent about the need to get better any time soon.

I suggest asking your editor two questions: First, how many days on average are there between an electronic re-order reaching their warehouse (not a wholesaler’s) and the books arriving at a retailer?

Second, what proportion of books sent from their warehouse (not a wholesaler’s) are reported by retailers as damaged? (That means they have to be re-ordered, doubling the turnaround time from question one.)

If they don’t know these figures, that’s telling in itself. (The industry leaders would be able to answer “1-2 working days” and “less than 1%”.)

Embrace traditional publishers

Self-publishing might be a good idea if you’ve already got a huge online following and you’re writing mass-market novels intended to be read digitally. But if you want your book to be stocked in bookshops as well as on Amazon, it is a really bad idea.

Agents and publishers might seem like gatekeepers in the way of getting your book to readers. But they will massage your words (and your ego) into shape. Better yet, they are much more likely to get your book into bookshops than you are.

In the context of the seemingly infinite supply of people who think they “have a book in them” (lots do, lots don’t), publishers fulfil a very useful filtering function. Any given bookshop might only buy 100 or so new titles from publishers each month and reject the other 1,900 that publishers pitch them, but evaluating that longlist of 2,000 still takes far less time than considering every self-published book would.

A publisher’s catalogue of new titles also comes with an implicit assurance of (at least a level of) quality. Every book it contains might not be great, but it will have been read by several humans whose job it is to choose books people will want to buy. The bookshop buyer cannot possibly read every book her shop might stock (though the good ones will try!), but she can trust people who have.

Do it because you love it

Without wanting to sound like an inspirational fridge magnet, this is the best reason (perhaps the only good reason?) for writing a book.

If you can enjoy the research and the writing, do it. If you get excited by the process, do it. But don’t expect all that much once it is out in the world.

If it takes off, great. But if nothing else, you have a beautifully bound testament to a year or two of your life that you spent doing something you truly loved. That’s got to be worth something.

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Happy reading,

Tom

P.S. A few weeks ago, I asked you whether you thought I should order more or fewer Mother’s Day cards than I had for Valentine’s Day. 60% of you said “more”. You were right. For the mathematically inclined, we sold 72% more Mother’s Day cards than we sold Valentine’s cards in the comparable period.

P.P.S. We’re planning to invest a significant amount of time (and money) in restructuring our website. If you have any experience (good or bad) of using a Shopify agency to (re)design a website, please hit reply and let me know!