I have worked in marketing for more than a decade, at some huge international brands. I spent almost half of that decade in publishing, at one of The Big 5 publishing houses. I’ve seen it all. Scathing handwritten letters sent to the publisher when someone hated a book, filled with expletives and signed off with fury. Hundreds of thousands of pounds and countless hours spent on campaigns just to see a book flop on publication for undeterminable reasons. Author tantrums on the scale of Veruca Salt in the chocolate egg room, with phone calls expressing rage at their perceived competition “getting more attention than them”.

So, when I made the terrifying leap from marketer to full-time author myself, I felt overly prepared. Nothing would flap me. I would be the dream author to represent! I wouldn’t be anxious, neurotic or get into a stress over the small stuff. I know how publishing works, I know the ins and outs, I’m realistic enough to have expectations in-line with my advance and I know when a room full of women tell me they ‘adored my book’ that probably only half of them will have skim-read it. Or, so I thought.

Let’s start at the beginning – my debut. It was done. Out of my hands! Hurrah! Sold! The hardest bit done, my agent a dream, everything now will be easy and smooth so long as I keep my expectations realistic. My agent, brilliant at holding the team to their original promises (easily lost or forgotten when staff turnover occurs), was on top of the campaign. But turns out, there’s more to it than just that. Enter, being tagged by a blogger in a three-star review. Somehow more cutting than a one or two star. Two stars, and I could convince myself that they were the wrong audience. Three stars, and maybe I’m the problem? I took a peek at NetGalley to check how the other reviews were doing. I ignored all the five stars, my ego clinging onto the slightest criticisms instead. You guessed the ending? How dare you guess the twist! I could tell this wasn’t good for my mental health and quickly made the decision not to read any more reviews.

Then, later down the line, I was invited to enter the “Debut Group” WhatsApp chat. I’d be warned about the toxicity of some of these pages but waded in regardless. Turns out, the toxicity is more targeting the publishing industry than between the authors themselves. Strange, virtual rooms filled with nervous writers eager to share their successes and rant about losses. Someone is always doing better than you and you forget that someone is also always doing worse than you. People are getting those coveted supermarket slots they turned you down for and you begin to second-guess yourself. When your kind publisher tells you not to worry about not getting Tesco because of X, Y and Z, all you can think about is all the reasons they told you that supermarket slots are a dealbreaker. But now they haven’t all worked out as planned, it’s not a big issue? Where is the line drawn between comforting an author, and being real with them?

Then comes the second book. Written, re-written and ready to go. You think it’s the best thing you’ve ever written. But different in tone to your first book. Your marketing brain picks away at it needlessly and incessantly. If it came to you on your desk, you’d turn it down. The pivot in author positioning is too much. You decide that nobody will ever love this book as much as you do, because it’s too dissimilar to the debut. You are inherently sure that everyone will want to change this book, which is paramount to changing your very soul. You decide, for your mental health, to forget about book two until your publisher is ready to talk about it. 

We present would-be authors with vague promises and sweet nothings, template timelines made up of filler acts

Then you realise, you can still panic about book three. The unwritten tale! The book pitch you need to be re-contracted in order to keep up this lavish lifestyle of sleeping in until 11am and feverishly writing through mental breakdowns and coffee until 1am. It needs to be good. Juicy. Something they won’t be able to say no to. But what direction do you take it in? Marketer Callie says similar to debut. But you have no ideas for that! Author Callie has wild ideas she wants to chase down, which Marketer Callie reminds her are not commercial. You wish Marketer Callie didn’t exist in that moment, she’s planting too many seeds of doubt in your mind. You end up lying in bed, your ADHD whirring through 50 different book ideas every 50 minutes. You end up sending neurotic “NEW IDEA” emails to your agent at 2am. It’s happened. You have become the author you never wanted to be. And you wonder – is the marketing experience, the insider knowledge, really helpful, or is it just lowering your expectations? Perhaps ignorance is bliss?

Perhaps not.

Being in the “Debut Authors” group chat has taught me so much about how mysterious the publishing world really is and how much anxiety that can cause. I’ve answered countless questions for writers worried about their marketing campaigns. Things we take for granted as common sense actually aren’t for most authors. The marketer might know there’s no way they’ll be getting a billboard in every underground station, but the writers don’t – especially when you’ve told them how amazing and inspired their novel is. There is very little open honesty and transparency in publishing because, when pitching to authors, we’re all fighting to be the kindest, nicest team you’d want on your side – often at the cost of realism.

The issue with marketing is that every team does it differently. Every campaign has different goals, different budgets and different audiences. This is something that a lot of authors don’t understand fully. If X is an e-book and has this campaign, why doesn’t mine? If Y’s team are arranging blog tours and mine isn’t, is it because they’re slacking? Is Z something I should be doing for myself, because my team hasn’t mentioned it? The anxiety that comparison is causing is palpable through the text messages and while I try my best to help and clear up any questions, I don’t know that every team works in the same way and can’t offer sure-fire promises to comfort the authors.

As for me, my struggles are different. I might understand why choices are being made and what is a standard baseline to expect as far as results go but I also know that my team is very likely overworked, over-exhausted and trying their best to be kind to me while dealing with their own lives. If I didn’t hear from my marketer for a while, I’d have the experience to know that she’s probably dealing with 50 other campaigns, some much, much bigger than mine and that it’s not that she “hates me”, as I’ve heard in the chat a few times. But this knowledge doesn’t necessarily make me feel any better. My concerns are different but, ultimately, I do think that a lot of the anxiousness that these authors are feeling could quickly be puffed out with a healthy dose of realism and honesty from their team. This means from the very beginning, not halfway through the campaign when the priorities change. If you’re focusing on Amazon, tell them why and give them strong comparisons. If your biggest goal is blurbs from A, B, or C, tell them why and how they can help. If you want a supermarket slot, explain the realistic percentage of authors pitched who get one of those slots, why you want it, what may help push the dial for you and what the backup plan is if you don’t get it.

I was guilty as a marketer of not having the time to do this, particularly for last-minute competitive pitches. We present would-be authors with vague promises and sweet nothings, template timelines made up of filler acts to make it seem amazing when, in reality, I was still waiting for budgets to be signed off before I could say anything for certain. I think this is where we’re going wrong and where so much author anxiety comes from. And when we do decide to start being more transparent about things, where is the line drawn? How much honesty is too much? I once snorted into my coffee when an author told me their book was one of the most important novels of the modern century. What should I have said to realign their expectations? I had told the editor to speak to the agent to speak to them – the wimp’s way out.

And which marketer wants to be the first to be real, when all the other publishing houses are showering their authors with sweet and empty promises that sound fantastic on paper? It could cost them a deal, and it’s competitive out there. Perhaps the truth is that although authors are ready to get real, it’s the publishers who are too afraid to.

Callie Kazumi’s debut novel Cuckoo is published by Penguin on 13th March.