Match, Flame, Gasoline
Book promotion doesn’t usually require me to challenge the status quo, rethink every aspect of a well-known process, or question the very humanness of the human condition—but this year is different.
This year has been different in almost every way. And that’s a challenge for us humans. Evolutionarily, we don’t like change. For authors, who live within the tradition-bound, custom-heavy (let’s just say it: stodgy) ecosystem of publishing, it’s an especially steep hill to climb—particularly for those authors who have a book to promote. And while book promotion certainly isn’t the most critical of pandemic re-toolings, it does offer a close-up view of why we humans are so resistant to change and why this change was coming, whether we liked it or not. It just came faster.
I’m deep into book promotion right now because my next book, Sydney & Taylor Explore the Whole Wide World, will launch on February 2, 2021. (Groundhog Day! Perhaps you should buy multiple copies, just in case the day keeps repeating itself.)
Now, that sentence right there (and one could argue this whole blog post) is an example of book promotion in the time of Covid. It’s a way of getting the word out about my book without getting within six feet of another person, without leaving my house, and without physical contact. In other words, digital.
And that gets at the heart of the change, because book promotion in the past was always a very person-to-person process. The author would go on the road, pass through airports, be greeted by media escorts, share car rides, strike up random conversations, meet bookstore owners, greet the audience of readers, sign books, shake hands, chat one-on-one with book lovers, pose for photographs. There was a lot of touching in those days. A lot of physical closeness. Which one could argue was the whole point of the promotional tour. It was less about books sold at any one stop and more about building a chain of ongoing relationships and creating closeness within the larger book community. It was a way to break out of the writing bubble that most authors live in and infuse the passage of the private manuscript to the public book with warmth and intimacy.
But all that touching!
Believe me, I’m no germaphobe (my reaction to germs is more: “bring it on” so I can keep my immune system strong), but seen through the lived lens of Covid (going on one year now), it seems remarkable that we (regularly! unthinkingly! innocently!) made so many choices and spent so much money to effect so much close gathering of strangers in tight spaces, so much handing of objects back and forth (books, pens, phones, children!), and so much pressing of the flesh.
But that’s the human condition. We like to be close. We feed (all of us, to a lesser or greater extent) on human contact. And contact does mean contact.
Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business, points out that the pandemic hasn’t changed things; that is, it hasn’t altered the course of events in terms of the trajectory that businesses were already on. It’s simply acted as an accelerant, moving us forward on the path we would have taken anyway in one giant leap. He argues that the result of the pandemic wasn’t to change where we were going in business. Instead, it simply accelerated the process; thus, because of the pandemic, we find ourselves exactly where we would have been—ten years into the future, but in a matter of merely eight weeks.
In other words, malls were dying anyway, and now they’re dead. Elite colleges and universities were reaching the limits of their ability to justify the obscene amounts they charge for a four-year education, and now students are turning away from them en masse. Working from home was always a good solution to a host of challenges, and now it’s suddenly gone from being a weird outlier to being the norm.
Within this framework, we can consider the conditions that existed before the pandemic (a need to cut greenhouse emissions, a desire for more time with family, a cultural movement away from materialism, etc.) as the match; the folks who heralded the need to pay attention to these conditions for years (Greta Thunberg, Catherine Jones, Marie Kondo) as the flame; and the pandemic as the gasoline—the accelerant that Scott Galloway notes pushed us forward ten years in just eight weeks.
All these things were going to happen anyway; the pandemic just cut ten years off the inevitable timeline. Which is no small thing.
Was book promotion always moving to a digital world of no contact? There are so many good reasons for making the switch to digital that have nothing to do with Covid:
I can’t tell you how many author friends have said to me in the past few months of the pandemic, “I really like being off the road. It’s so much less exhausting. And I get to be with my family.”
Digital book promotion saves money for publishers. A book tour that used to cost tens of thousands of dollars can now be put together for almost no money.
To that end, authors can set up their own far-flung book events, which is a boon for those who don’t get the marketing attention they deserve from their publishers.
It’s better for the environment to stay put. Greta Thunberg has opened our eyes to that truth.
The audience size is so much bigger. An event that might have attracted 15-20 people at a live, in-person venue, now attracts an audience of 150+ on a digital platform.
Digital promotion gives marketing departments more bang for the buck, because those digital gatherings have a great shelf life, living on as recordings that can be used as content for a variety of marketing purposes.
It’s a more efficient use of time for authors. I can be cooking soup, pop over to do a book event on my computer, and then eat the perfectly simmered soup for dinner.
We’re all spending a lot less money on clothes: one good shirt does the trick—pants be damned.
Bottom Line: More people are actually hearing about new books. My virtual Tai Chi class, which could accommodate a maximum of 25 people when we met in person in the studio, regularly has up to 185 attendees from all over the world, including Denmark, Hawai’i, Hong Kong, and the Arctic Circle. People who would have had to fly in to attend a book event can now show up after mowing the lawn and before helping their kids with their homework. It’s a brave new world.
A couple of nights ago, I was a presenter at HarperCollins Children’s Summer Showcase, promoting another book that’s coming out this year: Bubbles…UP!, which pubs on May 4, 2021. (Ha ha! There’s another example of digital book promotion. Two for two!) Normally, the authors and the booksellers would have all been in one room. This time, we were in hundreds of rooms, in different time zones, wearing who knows what from the waist down. The author from Scotland told us it was 2 AM where she was. I marveled that she had her hair combed, her lipstick on straight, and was speaking in complete sentences.
Introducing the event, Harper’s VP of Marketing and Publicity, Nellie Kurtzman, called attention to the strangeness of it all:
We’re still in such a weird world, but this is our third time doing these seasonal showcases [virtually] and I think it’s a weirdly distanced yet intimate way to let you know about what we have coming up…and I would say we’ll probably do this even past pandemic times.
Weirdly distanced, yet weirdly intimate. I feel this in so many virtual adaptations of “normal” life. My meetings with business colleagues, my therapy sessions, my school visits. We see each other’s bedrooms. We see each other’s lunches. We see each other’s beginning-to-slip-into-dementia elder parents wandering onto the screen and demanding an Oreo. It doesn’t get much more intimate than that.
And “we’ll probably do this even past pandemic times,” because…it makes sense for all the right reasons and now seems so obvious and…normal.
And yet.
And yet, would I opt for this change in book promotion, even if the pandemic had never happened? Is this the trajectory, inevitable perhaps, that I would have chosen? There are so many good reasons to go digital.
I don’t know. I miss all of you. As I contemplate a robust book event schedule (please sign up for my newsletter for all the latest info on when I’ll be appearing digitally to introduce my newest books, as well as to receive fun giveaways. Ha ha! Three for three promotion hits!), I know that I’ll feel bereft, not seeing your faces; not posing for pictures; not answering your personal questions, whispered in that quiet space we create as we bend over the book I’m signing for you. That brief moment in the book-signing process when only the two of us exist: you excited to receive my new book personally signed by me, and me signing that book—just for you.
I’ll even miss the crunchy airplane rides and making small talk with the media escorts, who really do have some whack-a-doodle stories to tell of their years driving celebrities around. I’ll miss all the strange and interesting cities and towns I would have seen with my own eyes and all the strange and interesting encounters with people who don’t live within my house.
But Greta Thunberg is right. And Scott Galloway is right. And my Tai Chi teacher is right in saying, “Do nothing, and everything gets done.”
So, I jump in with both feet, excited as ever to share my new books with the world, a little nostalgic for the old ways, but ready to face the accelerated future and seek new adventures and experiences in whatever form they might come. I hope to see you through the digital looking glass soon.