Where do you get your new book recommendations from? Your favourite celebrity book club, one of the lesser-known Substack lists, Booktok/Bookstagram, Fable/Goodreads, or the book that photobombed your friends’ daily coffee update? Apart from those who belong to IRL book clubs or work in the hallowed publishing circles, for the rest of us, social media is how we decide why we read what we read. Word of mouth is now a primarily digital activity. So, in our hyper connected lives, how does a new writer capture a reader’s attention on social media?
Spotify playlists, food hampers, book trailers, fun merchandise (tees/totes/mugs/hats), and building smart (and hopefully viral) social media campaigns, the list grows by the day. Even bestselling names aren’t spared today. For her debut book, Cleopatra & Frankenstein, author Coco Mellors hosted a pizza-themed launch in New York inspired by the pizza joint meet-cute of her rom-com leads. For Intermezzo, launch parties across the world featured chess-inspired merch and trivia nights where the sunny palette of Sally Rooney’s latest book cover became the moodboard for the evening.
Today, it’s not enough for a writer to write a book—the onus of marketing that book and driving sales is also firmly on them. The author is now the publicist, the marketeer, the content creator, the sales director, the social media manager, and the face of their book! And while it greatly helps if they have a large social media following to galvanize, what about the ones who don’t? Read Priyanka Khanna's chat with people in the space to find out.
