Why Book Marketing Feels So Gross (and Really Is)

As a Christian author, I’ve always had uneasy feelings about marketing my work. I know I need to do it, but there was something about pitching and promoting that I couldn’t articulate that got under my skin.

Then, this morning, I read an article in Writer’s Digest from Ann Garvin. The piece was all about the icky feeling Garvin has had about being authentic within marketing to sell books.

Bookstore, NoName_13 from Pixabay

She didn’t mince words:

“The vocabulary of sales training sounds uncomfortably familiar to de Becker’s warning signs that predict violence.

• Unsolicited promises: making assurances no one asked for.
• Forced teaming: creating false intimacy.
• Loan sharking: offering uninvited help so the other person feels indebted.

Marketing borrows the language of care, but its aim is to control. It’s a sleight of hand that appears as a friendly handshake but ends in a transaction.

[…]

My issue is with the moral theater of authenticity, with the instruction of performing warmth, access, and friendliness with a secondary agenda: to move a product. Engaging in manipulation instead of speaking out against it.”

You might understand why, as an author now focused on trauma recovery, I paid attention to her language.

As someone who spent years working in the business space, I’ve seen Garvin’s vocabulary points play out over and over again. It’s not that the desire to get someone’s message out is bad. But to wrap that intent in manipulative practices simply because “that’s how business works” deserves close, intentional examination.

What Garvin identifies–performing relationship rather than really constructing one–is the heart of the issue. In my experience, it’s felt like we do that because the business of writing by nature adds a timeline to the message.

Real connection develops organically over time. But books are put out into the world in a careful sequence of beta reading, pitching, cover design, formatting, contacting the right individuals and organizations, and developing a slew of materials (e.g., social media posts, sell sheets). The result is pressure to compress what ought to happen naturally into an industry-standard window, which is only getting shorter as AI allows people to toss content onto platforms like Amazon in a matter of weeks or even days.

This is a problem in any genre. But the ethical issue is even more stark around trauma content, which by nature requires extra sensitivity around interpersonal trust.

There’s no getting around the sequential arc that the book industry expects. And the hard reality is that the more connections we have, the more superficial we have to become. That puts writers between a rock and a hard place, as the very success we seek creates the relational diffusion that makes us seem less authentic and empathetic to readers.

But what we can try to do, long before a word is even on the page, is to develop relationships for relationship’s sake. Inside of that, we can share specific books to the relevant people, but the books themselves are not the driver of engagement, and we stop performing as though they are.