It drives me a little crazy to watch someone spend months and serious money getting a book written and then treat the launch as an afterthought. The book has done its part by then. Whether anybody reads it is up to the author, and too many authors find that out after launch week has already come and gone.
I tell every ghostwriting client the same thing: start posting the day we start the project. Don’t wait until the book is finished. Don’t wait until you have a cover. Don’t wait until you feel ready. The moment we begin working together, your audience should know a book is coming. For more, see what really sells books.
When should book publicity start?
The biggest mistake authors make is treating publicity as something that happens after the book is published. By that point, you’ve already lost months of momentum. For more, see book marketing.
When a client signs a ghostwriting contract with me, one of our early conversations covers what they should be doing while I write. Post about the process. Share that you’re writing a book. Talk about the subject matter. Build anticipation with your existing network. You don’t need a marketing degree to do this. You need a phone and the willingness to tell people what you’re working on. For more, see haro for authors.
This serves two purposes. First, it creates an audience that’s primed to buy the book the day it launches. Second, it forces you to start thinking about who this book is for and where those people spend their time. Both of those answers shape how you promote the book later.
None of my clients has ever worried that I’d steal their idea. What they do worry about is other people hearing it before the book is out. That’s a fair concern, and it’s still no reason to go silent. You can post about the process, the subject and the fact that a book is coming without giving away a single chapter.
The Launch Is Not a Single Day
Too many authors think the launch is the day the book appears on Amazon. A launch is a campaign that runs for months.
I advise clients to schedule both in-person and virtual launch parties. The in-person event gives you photos, video content, and social proof. The virtual event extends your reach to people who can’t attend in person. Both generate content you can repurpose for weeks afterward.
Beyond launch events, the book needs sustained visibility. Post about it consistently. Share excerpts. Talk about the stories behind specific chapters. Respond to readers who engage with it. The authors who treat their book as a six-month conversation instead of a single announcement are the ones who see results.
A good book shouldn’t go quiet after launch week. The author posts once, collects a round of congratulations from friends, moves on, and the book slides down the rankings with nobody pushing it. Those later months are when readers who’ve never heard of you should be finding it.
The Publicity Game Has Changed
From the podcast
Matt Walker has spent a career in IT and cybersecurity and blames the profession for its own credibility problem, on Leaders and Their Stories:
We did this to ourselves, over a couple of years and many, many decades. We kind of assigned this othering to technology.Publicity has the same trap. A field that makes itself sound unapproachable doesn’t get covered, it gets avoided.
Traditional book publicity, securing interviews on television shows or reviews in major publications, isn’t what it used to be. Digital platforms have taken over. Podcasts, YouTube interviews, Instagram, and platforms like BookTok now drive more book discovery than traditional media for most authors.
As Jane Friedman has noted, authors shouldn’t expect to see each publicity dollar come back in the form of book sales. That’s especially true with traditional publicity channels, where a single television appearance might cost thousands to arrange through a publicist and move a handful of copies.
The authors who gain traction are the ones who engage directly with readers on platforms where readers already spend time. Goodreads, Substack, LinkedIn for business books, and niche Facebook groups for specific genres all offer direct access to potential readers without a publicist as middleman.
I think that shift is good news for the kind of authors I write for. A consultant or an executive with a real story gets more from a small podcast audience that cares about the subject than from three minutes on a morning show nobody remembers by lunch.
Is paid advertising worth it for book publicity?
Unless you have a significant budget you’re prepared to lose, don’t run paid ads for your book. The numbers don’t work for most authors. A book sells for $15 to $25. The cost to acquire a single customer through paid advertising on Facebook or Amazon often exceeds the revenue from that sale. You end up spending money to lose money.
The exceptions are authors with large existing platforms, proven ad copy, and enough budget to test and optimize campaigns over months. If that describes you, paid ads can amplify what’s already working. If it doesn’t describe you, spend that money on launch events, direct outreach, and building your email list instead. Watch the calendar too. Back in 2024 my site traffic went to nearly zero on Mother’s Day, and Christmas week looked the same, so if I were buying a campaign, I’d never run it over a holiday.
The ad platforms won’t tell you any of this. They’ll happily charge a new author’s card every day for a month and show a dashboard full of impressions while the sales column sits at zero. I’ve got no respect for anyone who sells book ads to first-time authors as a launch plan.
Do You Need a Publicist?
A good book publicist starts at around $10,000 per month. That’s not a typo. Quality publicists have established relationships with media outlets, podcast producers, and reviewers, and those relationships take years to build. You’re paying for access you can’t get on your own.
For authors whose books are central to their business strategy, executives using a book to land speaking engagements or establish thought leadership, a publicist can be worth the investment. The book itself might cost $50,000 to ghostwrite. Spending another $30,000 to $60,000 on a three-to-six-month publicity campaign is proportional to the stakes involved.
For authors working with smaller budgets, the money is better spent on direct engagement. Build your email list. Get on podcasts yourself by pitching producers directly. Host events. The work is less glamorous than having a publicist handle everything, but it’s effective and sustainable.
Be careful with bargain publicists. One who promises national coverage for a small monthly fee is selling a press release blast and a list of outlets nobody reads, and the author finds that out after the money’s gone.
What a Ghostwriter Does and Does Not Do
Ghostwriters are almost never involved in book publicity. That’s not their job. A ghostwriter writes the book. Some, like me, also offer publishing services to get the book formatted, distributed, and listed on major platforms. But the publicity is the author’s responsibility.
What I do offer is advice. During our interviews, I make sure clients understand what’s coming after the manuscript is finished. I walk them through what works, what doesn’t, and what they should be doing right now to set themselves up for a successful launch. It’s part of making sure the investment in the book pays off.
The book is the basis, the foundation for your PR and marketing. Once we have the outline done and agreed on, built from your summary document and our interviews, it can go to your marketing or PR firm. From there, they’ll know exactly what you’re trying to do. Wait until the first couple of chapters are written as well, because you want to have something to give them.
I’d rather tell a client something uncomfortable about marketing in month two than have them call me a year after publication asking why nobody bought the book. By then the launch window has closed, and I can’t write my way out of that for them.
The book on this: Sell Your Books is 660 pages on marketing a book without the hype, drawn from the launches that worked and the ones that flopped across 113+ titles.
A good book that nobody hears about wastes the author’s money and every hour they spent in interviews, and I think it’s the most avoidable failure in publishing. Write a book worth talking about, then talk about it every week for as long as it keeps opening doors, because nobody else is going to do that work for you.
Schedule a free consultation to discuss your book project and what comes after the manuscript is finished.
