Ask an author who has published before what disappointed them most, and you tend to get the same answer.
We take ten to fifteen calls a week with authors submitting books to us. Many of them are on their second or third. The complaint that comes up more than any other: my last publisher did nothing to market my book.
The complaint is accurate. The expectation underneath it is the problem.
Most traditional and independent publishers do three things. They edit your book, they print it, and they distribute it, which mostly means getting it onto a van headed for an Amazon warehouse and, if you are lucky, a Barnes & Noble one. That is the arrangement. Everything after that — the launch, the go-to-market strategy, the outreach, the follow-through in month seven when the launch-week noise is gone — belongs to you.
One hundred percent of the launch is on the author's back. — Scott Jeffrey Miller
There are exceptions. If you are Barack Obama, or you happen to be married to Jeff Bezos, a publisher will put real marketing money behind the book. That is a rounding error against the number of titles a house publishes in a year. Assume you are not the exception, because almost nobody is.
We won't criticize any particular publisher here, partly because we work with most of them. Gray + Miller sells books to the big houses every week, and at the moment we are placing titles for 2028, because their 2027 is already full. Those publishers are good at what they do. What they do is edit, print, and distribute.
So the question worth asking before you sign anything is narrow and unglamorous: which launch activities does this publisher actually own, and can someone name them out loud? Get the answer in writing. Whatever is not on that list is yours.
Once you know what's yours, the budget question follows. Most first-time authors assume launch money should go to advertising. In our experience it should go to putting physical copies in the hands of two groups — the people who will advocate for the book publicly, and the people who might hire you because of it. A book that arrives on the right desk, tabbed to the right pages, with a note naming something specific about the person receiving it, outperforms the same money spent on impressions.
That is a smaller and less exciting plan than most authors picture when they imagine a book launch. It also works.
