softcover soft launch
a paperback release case study
📣 Three announcements before I get into this week’s post on paperbacks!
- interviewed me about how writers should approach newsletter content. You can read that here (and I highly recommend subscribing to !)
Tomorrow’s Chat Room conversation is at 1pm EST with Sarah Cantin, VP, Editorial Director, Fiction at St. Martin’s Press. Sarah edited The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Weyward by Emilia Hart, Tell Me Lies by Carola Lovering, Maame by Jessica George, and A Bit Much by Lyndsay Rush (poetry). Premium Attention Economy subscribers will receive the Zoom link tomorrow morning by email.
I’m speaking at an event in Manhattan on March 20 about writing satire at a time when reality itself is “a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination,” to quote Philip Roth. I would love to see you there! Tickets are $15 but my subscribers can save $5 using the code selfcare. Click here to buy yours.
Who are paperbacks for?
In January, I gave some unsolicited advice to an anonymous writer about her paperback launch, and in the comments section, a couple of you asked me to write more about paperback launches.
I write this newsletter to empower authors to market their work directly to their own audience, and I kept running into a paradox whenever I thought about paperback launches: if the author has promoted her hardcover book to her audience so well that her publisher puts out a paperback edition, who is she supposed to market the paperback to? Haven’t her fans already bought the book in hardcover?
I asked my friend Mackenzie Brady Watson at Stuart Krichevsky about the audience for paperbacks, and she said:
There are so many readers out there who prefer paperbacks to hardcovers. I think the lower price point1 and the fact that they are lighter/more flexible editions to tote around make them far more accessible editions for a lot of people, so even though the author may have engaged their audience at the time of hardcover publication, some people will always wait for the paperback format. Anecdotal evidence: my mom is in three book clubs and one of them exclusively reads paperbacks, and I'm sure that her club isn't the only one to have that preference. This is why you see a lot of reading guides included in paperback editions. Also, colleges/universities will often prefer paperback editions when they’re considering books for course adoption.
Mackenzie represents my client Sarah Vogel, whose memoir The Farmer’s Lawyer came out in paperback in 2021 with a new foreword by Willie Nelson. On her website, you can hear the actor John C. Reilly read the foreword aloud. Both those connections (to Willie Nelson and John C. Reilly) came from Sarah, not from her publisher Bloomsbury, so I think this illustrates how an author can be a collaborative partner in the publishing process.
Mackenzie also shared this with me:
Last year I had a conversation with Picador, whose sole focus is to publish the paperback editions of the FSG list, and they shared something really interesting on the call. They consider the hardcover life of a book to be the experimental year where the goal is to learn as much as they can about what is landing with audiences and what isn’t. They then use that information to maintain or change the package of the book, the messaging around the book, and how they’re approaching target audiences (or reimagining who those audiences are). This is why you’ll sometimes see the covers change for books between hardcover and paperback, or campaigns to target niche readers that weren’t approached the first time.
Case in point: Rebecca Makkai has written about the paperback cover design for her novel The Hundred-Year House. She writes, “It sold respectably well in hardcover, but the redesign helps signal that the book is kind of gothic/about ghosts.”
So best case scenario, let’s say your hardcover performed well, you have the backing of an imprint like Picador that has been doing research and collecting data for the past year on the market for your book, and you’re about to launch your paperback.
What kind of campaign can you do on the internet, to generate fresh attention and enthusiasm for the book that many of your fans have already bought and read?
After the paywall, I’ll show you a case study of a paperback launch from the Gen Z internet, and share some more ideas for promoting a paperback.