The countdown to publication day beats with fervent anxiety. It’s a time when everything and nothing happens at once, and the days are either filled with dull silence or frantic yelling.

For most of it, everything is out of your control: you cannot choose your publication date, you cannot influence how readers respond to your book, you cannot set the publicity and marketing budget. You are left scrambling for something, anything to make your own, but in the world of Big Publishing, the debut author is a small player. What power could you possibly wield on this journey? Social media is the equaliser.

Bookstagram, BookTok and BookTube create bestsellers. Seasoned reviewers can even distinguish an imprint by its books, and their enthusiasm creates an interdependent relationship with publishing houses.

The recent Shelves and the City event, in which HarperCollins invited influencers to a star-studded weekend in LA, and the highly coveted Bloomsbury Creator Circle confirms just how integral the influencer ecosystem is for book sales. When influencers post about their favourite books online, publishers repost their content, and both parties gain from this: the influencer gets more exposure and the publisher gets more sales. This can only be a positive thing, right?

Not quite. In an industry plagued by unconscious bias, books written by white authors, with straight, non-disabled protagonists, benefit more from the ecosystem. When publishers repost and participate in such content, they reinforce the disparity.

We should also consider the necessary ingredients for viral book content: special editions, book boxes and merch. Books written by marginalised authors are less likely to receive such marketing treats, so the online support for our books is quieter. If you want to make it as an influencer, you must shape your content around the books that publishing wants everyone to see.

Debut authors are told to avoid trying too hard on social media because self-promo doesn’t push the needle. I disagree. Traditional publishing is reactive (it seeks trends), risk averse (it avoids books that stray from trends), and lacks diversity (diverse books are consistently un-trendy), therefore marginalised authors cannot afford to relinquish everything to our publishers.

If publishing, due partly to unconscious bias, decides that Book A is a guaranteed bestseller, it will do everything to ensure influencer hype, from sending out PR boxes to securing book subscriptions. Book B, that might only receive a fraction of the support, will garner softer sales. Publishing will then conclude that their budget went to the right book – ignoring that they created the disparity in the first place.  

In an industry plagued by unconscious bias, books written by white authors, with straight, non-disabled protagonists, benefit more from the [social media] ecosystem

Feeling determined, I researched viral book content and posted a video to TikTok. It was an image with a text overlay of my elevator pitch – POV: you wrote an urban fantasy that reimagines the Grim Reaper as a polite, tea-drinking supernatural assassin from Africa who meets a Jamaican empath and they team up to solve magical crimes while maintaining the secrecy of London’s hidden underground city.

The views exploded overnight, leading to dozens of NetGalley requests, preorders, and a podcast interview.

Social media is important. You won’t always go viral, but you never know who is watching.

My elevator pitch videos caught the attention of Dryad Books, which led to them hosting my preorder campaign, complete with merch and signed bookplates. Encouraged, I pitched my book to a major book box company who was impressed enough to organise a special edition, the purchase of which will leave me just shy of earning back my advance on the book. I kept posting and pitching, securing four more podcast interviews along the way.

What can you do? Practise your elevator pitch because social-media users have short attention spans. Research viral posts. My simple text overlay is one type, but there’s also 10-second videos that explain the novel’s premise; screenshots of fun dialogue; and if you’re a romance author, share spicy quotes.

Cast your net wide to find your audience. Publishing imprints frequently congregate on Instagram, so you’ll face an uphill battle trying to disrupt the ecosystem, but Threads has a passionate reader-base that craves diverse reads. My Goodreads adds jumped from less than 200 to almost 1,000 in three weeks just because I regularly responded to any thread that asked for Black fantasy books. In June, I’m doing an AMA on r/fantasy, which has over three million international subscribers.

All hope is not lost. You might not have the money to fly dozens of people to LA, but you are the author who spent countless hours on your manuscript. No one will be more passionate about your book than you.

Traditional publishing may have some idea on what they think will sell, but you possess a proximity to readers on a grassroots level. Utilise the space that’s available to you and carve out space of your own. There is room at the table for everyone in this industry, but some of us might need to bring our own chair.