4 Things I’ve Learned About the Book Business While Publishing My Debut Novel

I’ve been a reporter at The New York Times for 15 years, and I’ve spent the last four of those years covering my favorite thing: books.

(3 Ways to Fall in Love With Book Marketing.)

Now, I have also written a novel called How To Sleep At Night, which will be published in January. It’s about marriage and ambition and what happens when who we are in the world doesn’t match how we see ourselves. There’s a woman who has become a stay-at-home-mom by accident, another whose career is her entire life, and then there are two men who are married: One is a Democrat, one is a Republican, and as the book begins, the Republican decides to run for office. We’re all stuck together in families—or in a country—with people we don’t agree with, and we have to figure out a way to live together. Maybe this novel can even give us a little hope.

It’s been an interesting road publishing a book as someone who knows a lot about the industry, but only from the outside. Here are a few of the things I’ve learned.

As a journalist at a major national outlet, if you want to write a nonfiction book, you usually put together a proposal that includes a meaty outline, a couple of sample chapters, and with the help of your literary agent, send it out to publishers. At that point, hopefully one of them will buy it. This also applies to celebrities who want to write books, to academics, to politicians—many nonfiction books are sold on a proposal.

If you're writing a debut novel, on the other hand, you have to write the whole thing before a publisher will consider it. This makes sense if you think about it. You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if the pacing is off, the writing is flat, or if the book is just boring, no one is going to want to read it. A novel is all in the execution. And a summary can be misleading: There are lots of incredible novels where nothing much happens.

My novel, How To Sleep At Night, is about 80,000 words long, and I wrote the whole thing thinking that, in all likelihood—just playing the odds—it was never going to be published. In a newspaper story, the first few paragraphs are called the “top.” So when I started writing the novel, the file was called "Book Top." I told myself: I'm just going to write the top, just the top, and I'm not going to worry about where it's going. The file was called "Book Top" until I sold it.

I’m asked all the time if I’m going on a book tour. This seems to be one of the first things people think of when they hear you’re publishing a book. The answer is that I’ll be doing some events, but I’m not really going on a tour.

It can be difficult to get readers to come out for a debut novel event. If the book is nonfiction, they might show up to an event to learn more about a topic they’re interested in, say the author is an expert on Facebook or Elon Musk or their favorite TV show. But if you’re an author no one has heard of, and your book is made up, it can be a harder sell.

Changes in local media have also shifted the calculus for flying around the country, even for a lot of more established authors. In the past, you could do an interview with a local paper and a segment on the local NPR affiliate, and that was often considered worth the trip even if the attendance at your book event was modest. But there is so little books coverage left in local media these days that those opportunities are rare.

Social media has also played a role. Book events used to be how readers connected with their favorite authors in a way that felt personal—to see their face, to hear their voice. Now, you can follow an author on Instagram and hear from them all the time. You might even get to see their kids or their pets, who would not normally come to a book event.

Events can still be important for building word of mouth, which is the secret sauce for selling a book (book events are also a lot of fun!), but it’s a steeper hill to climb than it used to be.

Like any creative field, writing—and selling—books is a tough business. People in this country buy books, but a relatively small number of titles actually sell well.

At an antitrust trial a few years ago, executives at Penguin Random House, the biggest publisher in the United States, said that most of the books they published lost money. At that time, only 35 percent of their books turned a profit, and among those titles, just four percent of them made up 60 percent of the company’s profits.

That’s pretty daunting for an author, and I knew it all going in. But I wrote the book anyway because I wanted to write it. The act of putting it together became like an addiction. And now, I’m doing it again. I’m on book leave from The New York Times, working on a second novel.

There are so many great books out there that don’t get published, because they don’t find their way to the right person at the right time. I feel lucky every day to have a wonderful editor and a great team behind me.

I hope readers find my book, and I’m doing everything I can to help make that happen. (Just ask my very patient publicist!) But I’m also trying to enjoy the ride. How lucky am I that I got to write this book? That it’s being published? And that, maybe, some of you will read it. 

Check out Elizabeth Harris' How to Sleep at Night here:

Bookshop | Amazon

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