A DISTURBING TREND

Why Are Writers Expected To Do So Much Self-Promotion?

They now have to ‘devote themselves as much to managing their careers as to writing their books’

A disturbing trend has taken root in book publishing. Publishers and literary agents seem to expect writers to hold down two full-time jobs: writing their books and promoting them on social media and elsewhere.

I’ve written about the fallacy that typically underlies this expectation: A lot of evidence shows that nonstop self-promotion helps big-name authors sell more books but has few — if any — financial benefits for others.

That dovetails with what I saw as the book editor of a large newspaper, a job that involved interviewing authors from pop-culture stars like John Grisham to Nobel laureates like Toni Morrison and Derek Walcott.

Small- or no-name writers often fail to earn back what they spend on services like editing and cover design and on activities like travel to book fairs and signings. That doesn’t count the opportunity cost of paid work lost to time spent on marketing and self-promotion.

Yes, it’s rewarding to see your name on a book even if it loses money. Unrelenting self-promotion does help some writers hit the jackpot eventually. And people in every field have to manage their careers.

The difference is that writers increasingly are expected to do it before they have careers to manage. Too many publishers want them to arrive with a ready-made “platform” of many thousands — if not millions — of followers on TikTok or Instagram or with another sort of built-in readership.

The digital winds are shifting for writers

The recent meltdown at Twitter has made clear how perilous that expectation can be.

Some writers who’ve spent years cultivating a following on the platform are finding that their efforts have backfired as their followers have decamped for other media or become tainted by their association with the politics of a new owner. Those who’ve put a similar effort into TikTok have seen the platform banned in Montana and facing growing restrictions elsewhere.

The shifting digital winds have thrown into relief what great writers have always known: They need to put their work — not turbocharged marketing or self-promotion — first.

Even the authors who have become supernovas, like Colleen Hoover, at first made writing — not self-promotion — their main focus. And Hoover had a career as a social worker before she began writing full time, which gave her other work experience to draw on in her novels.

An apt summary of this unsettling state of literary affairs came from Christian Lorentzen, the former book critic for New York magazine.

Lorentzen wrote on Bookforum that “the dominant literary style in America is careerism.” His explanation is long, but revealing. He said:

“For decades it has simply been the case that novelists, story writers, even poets have had to devote themselves to managing their careers as much as to writing their books. Institutional jockeying, posturing in profiles and Q&As, roving in-person readership cultivation, social-media fan-mongering, coming off as a good literary citizen among one’s peers — some balance of these elements is now part of every young author’s life. It’s a matter of necessity and survival, above and beyond the usual dealings with editors, agents, and Hollywood big shots. The ways writers used to mythologize themselves have either expired or been discarded as toxic. In the old gallery there were patrician men of letters (Howells, Eliot), abolitionists (Stowe), adventurers (Melville, London, Hemingway), madmen (Poe), shamans (Whitman), aristocrat expatriates (James), bohemian expatriates (Stein, Baldwin, Bishop), playboy expatriates (Fitzgerald), denizens of café society (Wharton), romantic provincials (Cather, Thomas Wolfe), small-town chroniclers (Anderson), country squires (Faulkner), suburban squires (Cheever, Updike), vagabonds (Algren), cranks (Pound), drunks (West, Agee, Berryman), dandies (Capote, Tom Wolfe), decadents (Barnes), butterfly-chasing foreigners (Nabokov), cracked aristocrats (Lowell), recluses of uncertain eccentricity (Salinger, Pynchon, DeLillo), committed radicals (Steinbeck, Rexroth, Wright, Hammett, Hellman, Paley), disabused radicals (Ellison, Mary McCarthy), radicals turned celebrities (Mailer, Sontag), activist women of letters (Morrison), alienated children of immigrants (Bellow), neo-cowboys (Cormac McCarthy), hipsters (Kerouac), junkies (Burroughs), and hippies (Ginsberg). In the end there is only the careerist, the professional writer who is first, last, and only a professional writer.”

Lorentzen’s labels, if oversimplified, suggest the expansive range of life experiences writers used to see as essential to their work or to have thrust on them, such as military service. Instead of seeking those out, a new generation of authors may spend decades climbing the promotion-and-tenure ladders in college English departments. Many have no choice if they have families to support or their own retirements to consider.

Writers can no longer expect to cut their teeth by working as freelance or staff writers for newspapers or magazines — as Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, Jay McInerney, and countless others did — that sent them on eye-opening assignments or otherwise enabled them to gain a rich knowledge of others’ lives. The dying old media have ceased to be a dependable training camp for aspiring novelists.

Declining levels of military service have deprived writers of a different kind of experience, including some opportunities to work with people from other regions and social classes. Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms grew out of his work as a volunteer ambulance driver for the Red Cross in World War I and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 from his time as bombardier in the Italian campaign in World War II.

One of the finest short story collections of the past decade has been the former Marine Phil Klay’s Redeployment, a National Book Award winner that drew on his tour of duty in Iraq and showed the effects of war on soldiers and civilians.

The popularity of — and acclaim for — that book suggested that Americans are hungry for good stories of military life. But writers lack the expertise to write them: You’re likely to see few authors marching among the veterans in this weekend’s Memorial Day parades.

All of this has taken a toll on books. What Lorentzen called the new careerism has led to a high tide of novels not just by but about writers who work independently or in English departments.

Why are there so many novels about writers?

How many more of those novels we’re seeing — and why we are — is hard to quantify and explain when vastly more books are being published than a few decades ago. Are we seeing more books about writers because more books are being written? Or because their authors know too little about realms besides writing?

Either way, the narrowed focus of authors’ professional lives may help to explain the boom in historical novels that’s sprung up beside it. The plots of writers’ lives have grown so thin that, it seems, more authors are looking to the past — not their own lives — for great stories.

That reality has led to excellent historical novels. But not all writers want — or have the freedom — to spend years holed up in libraries or other archives doing research for fiction about World War I or the Middle Ages.

One lesson in all of this is clear: Many writers who hope to make a name for themselves would do better to seek out enriching life experiences — whether by traveling far afield or by helping disaster victims close to home—than by shooting another 60-second TikTok video.

Janice Harayda is an award-winning critic and journalist who has been the book columnist for Glamour magazine, the book editor of Ohio’s largest newspaper, and a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle. Her work has appeared in many major media.

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