This post is part of a series about writing with a co-author. To read all my advice about the full process of collaborative writing (including stories and bonus chapters not found here on the blog), read my book, In It Together, a guide to writing with a co-writer without losing your mind.
You did it! You successfully co-wrote a book, revised it, chose a publishing path, put it through the production process, and now it’s coming out into the world. Hooray!
Now it’s time to tell the world about your work! Promotion can feel like shouting into a void sometimes—and it can easily eat up all your time and money if you let it. But if you want eyes on your book, you have to make promotion work for you—and if you’re working with a senior partner or a publisher, you may be contractually obligated to do so.
Let’s talk about some of the main ways authors promote their books, and some of the unique challenges and decisions that co-authors face in the promotion process.
Social Media
When your book comes out, one of the first thing most authors do is announce it on social media. Why? Well, because social media announcements are generally free and are a good way to promote your book to people who already follow you, as well as get the word out to people who haven’t heard of you yet. If you use social media platforms as part of your launch strategy, you’re probably going to also do some posts and promotions on social media leading up to and following your launch.
There are multiple ways you can organize this as a partnership. You can each do separate posts to your individual social media accounts. This may make sense as a strategy if you each have platforms that don’t have a lot of cross over. You each talk to your own audience and hopefully get those audiences interested in the book.
If you’re working together on a series or on more than one book under the same brand, you might consider creating some joint social media specific to the project as well. The downside to doing this is that it can be a lot of work to keep up with separate social media accounts—do you post enough to keep multiple accounts active? Does your partner? Who will do the posting on your joint accounts? How much should each of you post on your individual accounts during a launch and after? Designing a joint social media strategy will help you to get the most out of your existing social networks without burning yourself out or breeding resentment.
Advertising
One of the biggest arguments for opening social media accounts for your joint brand (even if you don’t post to them regularly, and save most of your activity for your individual accounts) is to run ads from them. If you plan to run ads for your book on a platform like Instagram or Facebook, you’ll need an account from which to run the ads. You may want to keep those ads separate from your personal ad account. You may also want the name of the account to be consistent with your joint brand, rather than your personal one. Whatever you decide to do, you’ll want to consider the options and choose carefully, because the way you organize social media ads will affect your workload, the ad message, and your payment structure.
If you’re going to engage in paid advertising for your book, you have several other decisions to make. Where will you run paid ads, and who is going to manage them? Running profitable ads can be incredibly time-consuming, especially when you’re in the testing and tweaking phases. You’ll have to decide not only how to divide this labor, but also how to pay for it—if you have an LLC and a partnership bank account, you can pay out of there, but otherwise you’ll have to determine who’s going to foot the bill, and how they will be reimbursed for their investment.
Paid ads are one of the biggest barriers to the royalty model—if you each make fifty percent of the royalties on your book, that’s great! But when you run ads, you might only make 10% of your income on that your first book as profit—or you might even take a loss on book one and depend on the readthrough to the rest of the series to make a profit. That changes things—how will you calculate the money that gets divided between you? Are your royalties paid only on profit? How will you keep track of income and expenses, and, perhaps most importantly, who will be responsible for all the accounting required to keep good records of the money coming in and the money going out?
There are no right answers to these questions, but if you want to run paid ads for your books, you’re going to need to sit down with your partner and find an answer that feels good to both of you, and make sure it’s laid out in your contract or contract addendum.
Newsletter Marketing
Many authors keep newsletter lists so they can contact their readers when they release new books or put books on sale. If you have individual email lists, it makes sense to email them! You’ll want to consider if you’re going to rely only on your individual lists, or if you want to build a separate email list for your partnership or series brand.
If your individual lists are composed of people who are likely to love your joint books, it might make sense to use those alone. But if the audience of your joint work is different from your individual work, you might want to consider building a new list to avoid putting off your existing readership with a lot of information about a genre they’re not interested in.
The downside of this is that you’ll have to maintain (and regularly contact!) multiple separate email lists, which can double the work you’re already putting in to email marketing. You’ll also need to decide if you’ll use your existing newsletter client or open a separate account as a team. Who will pay the fees for your newsletter subscribers? Who is going to do the work of writing the emails, and how often?
Again, there are no right answers, but you’ll want to look at your individual and joint circumstances and make a newsletter marketing plan that makes sense for you as a team.
Book Signings and Appearances
If you have physical books in bookstores, you might want to set up some book signings! Even if you don’t, you might want consider ordering stock and scheduling a book launch at a local independent bookstore, or staffing a booth at a convention or other local event to sell your books to readers.
Personally, I think doing events as a team is a nice way to celebrate your work. Doing signings as an individual author can be lonely, especially if you don’t already have a hungry, dedicated audience that will turn out in droves. Selling books with a partner gives you an opportunity for moral support, and also lets you rave about how awesome your partner is if you feel uncomfortable selling yourself.
As part of your marketing plan, you’ll want to discuss your local opportunities to sell books in person, and also your individual comfort levels with doing such events. If one of you is enthusiastic about in person events and the other hates them, you’ll have to negotiate and find a solution that works for you both. Be mindful of resentment: don’t say yes to things you’ll resent your partner for later, and don’t ask your partner to do things they’ve expressed they’re uncomfortable with. Remember that what doesn’t work for both of you doesn’t work for your partnership, no matter how good an idea it might seem to one of you at the time.
There will also be organizational things to discuss: who is going to set up book signings? What is each of your availability and tolerance for attending these events? Will you attend them together or separately? How will you publicize them? How much book stock will you order and who will pay for it? If travel is involved, who will pay for that? How will the money from in person events be handled?
There are lots of equally valid ways to do signings—and you don’t have to do them at all, unless you’re contractually obligated. But if signings are something you enjoy and you have the opportunity to do them, they’re a great opportunity to showcase your work to new readers as a united team.
Even if you can’t do signings, or can’t physically be in the same location for events, you can also consider scheduling podcast or video appearances, or doing guest posts for blogs and websites. All these things can go in your joint marketing plan, but remember to be mindful of who is putting in the work, and to keep things in balance with your overall partnership workload.
Don’t Forget to Celebrate
A word of advice from my writing teacher Chris Crowe: don’t forget to celebrate. In publishing, by the time exciting things actually happen, they are often old news. Books come out years after you sell them, offers often can’t be announced until months after you first hear of them. You may feel tempted to delay celebration until something feels real and solid and final. But if you do, by the time things are final enough to celebrate, the moment is past. The accomplishment feels like old news.
The only functional solution is to celebrate everything. Celebrate the moment you finish the draft. Celebrate the moment you get an offer on your book, or the moment you upload it. The moment you announce your book deal; the moment you announce your release on the internet. Absolutely take a moment from your busy promotion schedule on release day and celebrate your success as a partnership. Do whatever feels celebratory to you: order pizza, go out to dinner, have a dance party. But take a moment as a partnership to pat each other on the back for all you’ve accomplished.
You deserve it.
