what an author can do to hit the list

instead of praying your publisher makes it happen

For years, I’ve been trying to learn the business side of book publishing, and translate what I’ve learned for writers who dream of seeing their books published. In creative writing programs, writers learn little to nothing about how to actually earn income by publishing their writing because the expectation is that they will go on to become teachers who teach writing to writers who will go on to teach writing to writers.

One of the reasons I’m so interested in book publishing is because I’m entrepreneurial and I actually find marketing to be a fun game (!). Another reason I’m fixated on learning the business is because I want to know what’s in my power to control, and what strategies are actually impactful when it comes to selling books.

Publishers would like for us to believe that they treat all books the same and they don’t choose favorites, but the internet exists, and we all know that some titles are higher priority than others. We can see which books get the big marketing and publicity spend. Because I work with so many authors, I get to see behind the curtain at many different imprints. I know who’s getting the red carpet treatment and who isn’t. And when I have a client who is frustrated that their publisher isn’t investing more in the launch, I love to put on my superhero cape and figure out what more we can do ourselves to generate buzz and attention.

Publishing Confidential

ran a post this week on what publishers do to make a title hit the bestseller list—but what if your book is not their priority title? Are you just supposed to give up and accept your fate?

What can authors actually do to set their book up for success?

I’m delighted today to bring you an interview with Dr. Devorah Heitner, who has a PhD in Media/Technology and Society from Northwestern. Her most recent book hit the USA Today bestseller list and she generously agreed to tell us exactly what she did to make that happen.

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Tell me about your new book Growing Up in Public. There's so much discourse about how kids and young adults use the internet and social media—although I'm not a parent, I'm consistently surprised by how unmoored adults seem by this topic, given how long we've been online ourselves. (I've been online for 26 years.) What are parents of tweens and teens struggling with and how does your book help them?

Everyone is freaking out about kids and tech. Headlines linking teen mental health issues to smartphones tend to oversimplify the link, and my biggest goal is untangling the realities from fear-mongering. By speaking to actual kids. I have been on the road speaking on this topic for the past ten years. I wrote Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World because so many people after my last book, Screenwise, said to me:

“OK, Devorah, this is reassuring about focusing on the quality of experiences online vs just counting the minutes of screentime–but…what about the fact that middle schoolers and high school kids are impulsive and my kid can blow up their life with a single post. Or someone can video a kid while they are drunk and get them canceled.”

This reputation threat just didn’t exist for me as an adolescent. 

Parents and kids are understandably worried about kids getting canceled or virally shamed. Everyone talks about how to prevent it, but I wanted to dive into what we can do to change the culture around it, and how we can support a kid who is going through something like that. 

Growing Up in Public is for anyone who is concerned about how young people are doing these days–chapters on damage control, sexting, and “sharenting” can help adults empathize with what it is like to grow up so shared, compared, and surveilled. 

Your book came out in September and hit the USA Today bestseller list—congratulations on this huge achievement! Can you tell us about any book marketing strategies you leveraged in the months leading up to launch that helped you hit the list? Looking back now, what decisions were the most impactful?

Initially, I did a pre-order campaign, focused on my email list, which has about 10,000 people on it. I’ve built that list mostly by having people opt-in at my speaking events. Sometimes I go old school and circulate a notebook—that works best. If that isn't practical, I include a "join by text" option on the slide that I have up during my Q and A:

Working closely with my marketing team at Tarcher (an imprint of Penguin Random House) and my outside marketing director, we created and offered a set of bonuses for pre-ordering that included checklists for mentoring kids in the digital age and a live Zoom event with me in conversation with Jessica Lahey, author of The Gift of Failure and Addiction Inoculation and cohost of the #AmWriting podcast.

Leaning into the pre-order campaign and emailing more frequently than usual cost me some subscribers—it's a balance. One benefit of having the pre-order bonuses on my website was that I could see who was coming to my website to sign up. I was lucky that Penguin agreed to host the Zoom event launch rather than having to run my own Zoom. If you were doing something like that on your own—I’d hire tech help for the event.

Working with my press, I created parent and educator discussion guides to facilitate community reads and book club uptake. I was lucky enough to hire writer Amy Shearn to help with those as well as helping me to identify pitchable articles from the book. The discussion guides got some readers excited about the book since they could see the range of topics in the book—like sexting and sharenting from the discussion guide—so that was another way people “previewed” the book. I also posted a picture of myself before and after recording the audiobook to get people excited about the fact that the audiobook was voiced by the author.

After a school visit in New Orleans where an educator showed me a marked-up copy of my last  book (is there anything better?) and told me she was a “Heitnerd” I decided I should call my “advance team” the “Heitnerds.” They got early access to the book in exchange for a commitment to review online and ideally to share in their school communities or on social media. 

As part of my book launch campaign, I also organized some of my speaking engagements with book orders built in. Some of those were directly through independent bookstores where the school had a relationship, and others were with bulk suppliers like Porchlight. In the case of online events, there is always a question of: How do you get books to people? If you commit to mailing the books to people, this is called a “fulfillment order.” That puts an extra burden on the hosts since they had to collect mailing addresses for all of the attendees in a spreadsheet. 

I’m very fortunate to be in a kind of brain trust with other authors in my parenting and education space and we help each other navigate PR and speaking. We could see each other as competitors, but we don’t—there is room for us all to succeed and help parents and educators in this wacky culture.

Planning bulk orders and especially fulfillment orders (where each attendee at a virtual event gets a book mailed to their home) is logistically taxing. On the other hand, the best advertising for a book is the book itself. If your book helps readers, they will tell their friends about it!

On the whole “bestseller list” front—I knew September would be a competitive time, my book initially had a March pub date, and my hopes sank when my pub date got moved to September... I was thrilled in the end, to hit the USA Today list (number 37 overall, and the Indie list at number 44). The New York Times list is a black box—it is not just based on the sales numbers. I’m lucky that the USA Today List came back after a hiatus in a time that worked out for me… and I’m sad for authors who would have made the WSJ list since that’s going away. While the lists themselves can be problematic, having even fewer of them seems like a bad thing for authors.

How did you approach a book tour? What did your publisher organize for you and what did you organize yourself?  And what about media–how much did that factor into the sales?

Penguin was always clear that they were not going to send me on a book tour, so I knew I was on my own for that. Since all of these trips involved working for numerous schools or organizations, I paid for my own travel. 

Airfare has gone up so much, so that was a shocker and definitely ate into the money I made on the road. But almost all of the events did pay an honorarium, so I did not lose money on the tour, despite staying in hotels, renting cars, etc. At my speaking events where the organizer purchased books as part of their fee, I made half my honorarium and the other half went to books. Other organizations paid me to speak and collaborated with a local bookstore for an “off-site” event.¹ You have to balance how much you want to make income versus selling books since those are not the same thing. Giving the book away means everyone gets one, otherwise be prepared to speak to 300 people and maybe 30-50 will buy the book.

Since the end of my launch week coincided with Rosh Hashanah, I had my book launch party at home the weekend before the book came out. That party and my first Bay Area event (a smaller event at a school with fewer than 90 attendees)  were both technically before my launch date, but we had stock in place, and all those sales counted as pre-order sales.

After the Bay Area, I spoke in Baltimore, Boston, New York City, Chicago, Saint Louis, etc. I tried to get local media wherever I went, so for example, I did Baltimore Public Radio, when I was in Baltimore. I also did a bunch of national media from the road, so I was dealing with The Atlantic editors from the Bay Area which involved a lot of waking up at 4 a.m. in California to see if my Atlantic article about people tracking their kids was up yet. 

I also published this article in the Washington Post about kids coming out (as queer, neurodiverse, etc.) online during launch week and was so grateful to the team at On Parenting for holding the article to run during that week. On the swing-for-the-fences front on media, I pitched Sharon McMahon and was thrilled to be on her podcast, Here’s Where Things Get Interesting. My first outreach to her team was in February 2023, and having that run during launch week was amazing. 

There were two NYT pieces as well as well—including this one on launch day that generated conversations. I worked closely with both the Tarcher PR team and my outside publicist and did a ton of my own pitching, too. One strategy I recommend is going back to your comp authors from your proposal, searching for them on podcasts and listening to those episodes and then pitching the podcasts as appropriate. Another investment I made beyond just paying for extra PR was paper galleys. I didn’t have physical galleys in my contract and they are no longer a given, but I paid to have galleys made. They weren’t cute as I had to make them before my book had a cover, but I know they helped with media. Lots of journalists do NOT want to read a 300-page PDF.

How do you approach your own social media life with intention and purpose? Are there boundaries you set around your social media use? What are the upsides of publishing a book at a time when anyone can get online to share their ideas, and what are the downsides?

As I try to encourage kids to focus on actual friendships vs. collecting followers to resist the urge to quantify their relationships, it is a bit ironic to then turn around and say to their parents, Follow me! Like me! Share me! Review my book on Amazon!

I remember the first time I got giddy and kind of nuts over numbers, way back in 2014 when my TEDx talk got shared on Upworthy and I watched the metrics obsessively. I soon realized how toxic that could get for me and I’ve tried to avoid getting hung up there. But–these apps are designed to get us where we are most human. Humans want to be seen, known, liked and regarded. It is hard to resist anything that allows you to quantify that. So I *try* not to obsess about my Amazon ranking or the sales portal, etc.

My own kid has known that I’m working on a book about kids and privacy for much of his life, so I haven’t been allowed to share him for years—I’d get serious teenage side-eye, as no one can spot hypocrisy like a teenager (which is one of the things I love about living with a teenager and getting to talk with so many teens for my work). 

Ultimately, the process of writing Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World allowed me to get into some great conversations about tough topics with thoughtful and amazing teens. One of the biggest changes to the culture that I’m excited about is the ways teens and young adults are sharing more about mental health. When I was a teenager I saw a therapist and I didn’t even have to be told “Don’t tell anyone.” I just…didn’t. The ways kids are sharing now is changing the culture for the better.

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If you’re interested in Devorah’s work, you can follow her on Substack, find free resources on her website for talking to your kids about tech, invite her to speak at your school or organization and order a copy of her book (great holiday gift alert 🚨)

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What surprised you the most about Devorah’s book launch campaign? Was there anything she did that you would have expected a publisher to do? What strategy are you filing away in your brain to use in the future, when it’s time to launch your next book? Let me know in the comments!

1. Devorah told me, “I think ‘off-site’ is good lingo to know if you call a bookstore since some of them are actually MORE likely to say yes to an offsite vs an in-store event.”