Twenty years ago, a debut novelist with a major publisher could expect their house to organize a modest tour: five or six cities, bookstores selected by the publicity department, hotels and flights arranged, media interviews scheduled. The author's job was to show up, be charming, and sign books. Today, that same debut novelist—even with comparable advance and institutional backing—will likely organize their own events, pitch their own podcasts, manage their own social media campaigns, and fund significant portions of their promotional travel from personal savings.

This transformation didn't happen through explicit policy changes announced in trade publications. It occurred gradually, through slow erosion of publicity budgets, increased reliance on author platforms as acquisition criteria, and the quiet normalization of expectations that writers will market their own work. Publishers still invest heavily in promotion—but increasingly only for books already showing momentum, creating a system where authors must generate their own initial visibility to access institutional support.

The consequences extend far beyond individual inconvenience. This shift in promotional labor fundamentally restructures who can sustain literary careers, what kinds of books get published, and how the economics of authorship function. It creates a system that advantages writers with flexible schedules, geographic proximity to media centers, robust health, and existing financial resources—while systematically disadvantaging those without these conditions, regardless of their artistic merit.

The economics of traditional book promotion were never particularly generous, but they operated on a clear division of responsibility. Publishers controlled marketing budgets, publicity staff maintained media relationships, and the institutional apparatus of book distribution included mechanisms for generating attention. Authors contributed their creative work and their presence at events; the machinery of promotion belonged to the house.

This arrangement began shifting in the 1990s as publishing consolidated and profit margins tightened. Publicity departments shrank relative to title output. Marketing budgets concentrated increasingly on lead titles—the books publishers believed would succeed anyway—while midlist authors received what the industry euphemistically calls limited support. The gap between institutional investment in potential bestsellers and everyone else widened dramatically.

Into this vacuum stepped the concept of author platform—originally a term from nonfiction publishing describing an author's existing audience or expertise. By the 2010s, platform had become a crucial acquisition criterion across genres. Agents began advising clients to build social media followings before seeking publication. Editors justified acquisitions partly through platform metrics. The author's promotional capacity became a factor in whether books got published at all.

The pandemic accelerated these trends by normalizing virtual events and demonstrating that authors could generate significant promotional activity without publisher investment in travel or venue costs. What might have been a temporary adaptation became permanent expectation. Publishers discovered they could maintain event calendars while eliminating most touring budgets.

Contemporary debut authors routinely spend months organizing their own launch activities: reaching out to bookstores, arranging podcast appearances, coordinating with book influencers, managing pre-order campaigns, and maintaining constant social media presence. This work happens alongside—not instead of—whatever traditional publicity their houses provide. The labor hasn't been redistributed; it has been expanded and assigned downward.

Takeaway

When industries transfer labor costs to individuals while maintaining the same output expectations, they're not innovating—they're extracting value from workers who lack the collective power to refuse.

The promotional expectations now embedded in publishing operate on an assumption of author availability that many writers cannot meet. Consider the practical requirements: attending evening bookstore events requires either flexible employment or vacation time. Podcast recordings happen during business hours. Social media demands constant attention. Book festival appearances consume entire weekends. Each activity assumes time, energy, and often money that the job of writing alone does not provide.

Geographic inequality shapes promotional capacity profoundly. Writers in New York, Los Angeles, and a handful of other media centers can attend industry events, meet journalists for coffee, and build the relationships that generate coverage. Authors in rural areas, smaller cities, or countries outside the Anglophone publishing centers must travel extensively—at their own expense—to access the same opportunities. Virtual options help but haven't equalized these disparities; in-person relationships still drive significant media attention.

Disability and chronic illness create additional barriers rarely acknowledged in publishing's promotional culture. Book tours assume physical stamina for travel, repeated performances, and irregular schedules. Social media engagement assumes cognitive capacity for constant context-switching and public interaction. Authors managing health conditions must either disclose medical information to explain limited availability or accept being perceived as insufficiently committed to their careers.

Family responsibilities distribute promotional burden unequally across gender lines. The evening events, weekend festivals, and travel demands of contemporary book promotion fall harder on primary caregivers. Publishing's promotional culture was built around assumptions of author availability that presume either childlessness, sufficient wealth for extensive childcare, or a partner absorbing domestic labor.

The compounding effect of these factors means that authors who can most easily meet promotional expectations—those with flexible schedules, geographic advantage, robust health, minimal caregiving responsibilities, and financial cushion—gain disproportionate visibility. Their success then reinforces the system's assumptions about what author engagement should look like. The writers who struggle become less visible, and their absence from bestseller lists gets interpreted as artistic failure rather than structural exclusion.

Takeaway

Systems that reward availability rather than quality inevitably select for privilege—they just disguise the selection as merit.

Publishing operates on remarkably thin evidence about what promotional activities actually drive sales. The industry's conventional wisdom—that tours build audiences, that social media creates discoverability, that podcast appearances generate readers—persists largely through anecdote and tradition rather than rigorous analysis. When publishers do conduct research, results rarely circulate beyond proprietary reports.

What evidence exists suggests complicated, often counterintuitive patterns. BookScan data analysis indicates that most book sales occur within a title's first few weeks, driven primarily by prepublication buzz and retail placement rather than author activities after release. Store events typically draw existing fans rather than converting new readers. Social media following correlates weakly with sales except at extreme scales.

The activities that do appear to drive sales—major review coverage, prominent retail placement, book club selections, award recognition—remain largely outside individual author control. These outcomes depend on institutional decisions and cultural gatekeeping that promotional hustle cannot reliably influence. An author can podcast themselves hoarse without accessing the mechanisms that actually move significant copies.

Yet authors understandably fear the consequences of reducing promotional effort. Publishing contracts increasingly include publicity cooperation clauses. Agents advise that visible engagement demonstrates professional commitment. The next book's acquisition may depend on platform metrics regardless of their sales impact. Authors face a classic collective action problem: individually rational promotional investment even when systemically the returns may not justify the costs.

This uncertainty creates particularly cruel dynamics for authors with limited promotional capacity. They cannot know whether accommodations for their circumstances cost them sales or merely spare them ineffective labor. The system's opacity about what actually works produces anxiety that drives escalating promotional expectations even as evidence for their effectiveness remains thin.

Takeaway

In systems where success attribution is unclear and failure carries real consequences, people optimize for visible effort rather than actual effectiveness—and industries exploit this uncertainty.

The transformation of book promotion from institutional function to author burden represents a broader pattern in creative industries: the transfer of business risk and labor costs from companies to individual workers while maintaining—and often increasing—output expectations. Writers now absorb promotional costs that publishers once covered, perform marketing labor that publicity departments once handled, and bear consequences for visibility failures that structural factors largely determine.

Addressing this requires both individual strategy and collective action. Authors benefit from honest assessment of which promotional activities serve their work versus which merely perform industry expectations. But individual optimization cannot solve systemic problems. Writer organizations, literary agents, and authors with leverage must push back against escalating promotional demands and advocate for more equitable distribution of marketing labor.

The most sustainable response may be strategic disengagement: identifying the minimum promotional threshold that satisfies contractual obligations while preserving creative energy for writing. The books that endure rarely do so because their authors excelled at podcasts. They endure because the work itself compelled readers to share it.