The first in-person meeting with your book's marketing and publicity team: What to know before you go
Spoiler alert: You're gonna need to bring your agent
Hello my writer friends!
Thank you for being here. This Friday Office Hours comes to us courtesy of a great question from subscriber Annabelle, who is going to be a published author soon! Congratulations Annabelle! Please put the name of your forthcoming book down in the comments. Her question is a bigger one than it appears, and concerns a milestone that hopefully all of us will experience, so I wanted to give it ample room in a dedicated post. Before we jump to Annabelle’s question, however, a quick reminder that the first batch of answers to your questions came out last Wednesday. From a writer worried about what will happen if her agent dies to a writer who doesn’t know what to think about an R&R request, we got some awesome conversations going last Wednesday—give them a visit if you missed them during the week.
Please click on footnote #1 if you have a hard time reading the words in the following image or have disabled images for this post. Here is Annabelle’s question1:
It’s time for a true story. When I got word that I was going to have an in-person meeting with the publisher of my first book (Simon & Schuster), I was all business about it. “They don’t need to take me to lunch or anything,” I told my agent. “We can work through it. They don’t need to wine and dine me—I’m happy to just get down to brass tacks, you know?”
Understandably, my agent was horrified. “This is a social meeting, Courtney,” she said. “The social-ness is the point.”
And therein lies the thing I did not understand about my first in-person meeting with my publisher. It wasn’t about business, not really, not on the surface. It was a kind of feeling out. Let me explain.
To do so, it’s important to revisit what has transpired with your editor and agent up until this point so we understand how one gets to an in-person meeting with one’s publisher. We’re going to look at what they are expecting from you and hoping for, and what you should expect/hope from them.