Do I Really Need to Op-Ed to Sell Books?

Writing essays to help promote your work is a growing expectation that merits more scrutiny.

In the months leading up to the April 2022 hardcover release of my book, Some of My Best Friends, I tended dutifully to the rituals of prepublication. I sent a gamely cheerful email blast to my contacts asking them to please preorder copies. I plastered my website and social feeds with graphics of the cover art. I retweeted, with genuine glee, every photo of a galley copy spotted in the wild. I was going to be a model citizen of self-promotion, giving my debut a fighting shot at selling well.

But there was one directive from my publishing team that brought me up short: to brainstorm essays related to themes in my book, ideally keyed to the news, which could then be pitched to various outlets to coincide with publication. I took the instruction as I had all the others — if it helped the book, then of course I would do it. But after losing several Sundays to a blank document, I realized that mining for soundbites felt deeply at odds with the work I wanted to put into the world. I’ve seen fellow writers nail this task, and I admire my peers who seem to have a knack for it. But of the many challenges involved in producing and marketing a book, the one I find most intractable is the idea that writing promotional essays is always an effective way to support your book.

I understand how we’ve arrived at this point. In principle, the idea makes sense: If a writer has just churned out tens of thousands of words on a subject, surely they can cough up a few thousand more in order to reach a broad audience, establish authority, and sprinkle a trail that leads readers straight to the preorder button. Recent examples from the New York Times opinion section — perhaps the grail for promo essays — include an essay on Biden’s cognitive abilities, by the author of a forthcoming book on memory, and “My Father, Ronald Reagan, Would Weep for America” (Patti Davis, who just published a book about her parents called Dear Mom and Dad), both of which offer a preview and a primer on the issues their books explore.

Predictably, your risk of being cast as spokesperson increases if you’re writing on a subject that the publishing industry hasn’t previously given much space.

But in practice, such essays can make for a tricky genre, which embodies an expectation that shapes other parts of the promo process, from interviews to personal branding: that writers be ambassadors or educators for their books’ issues, even if those issues are incidental to the work. Reducing something to its buzziest takeaways is part of selling anything, and for subject-matter experts writing on topical issues, this distillation is more straightforward. But for a sizable cross-section of others — including essayists, memoirists, and fiction writers — the role of ambassador is an awkward fit.

Rainesford Stauffer is the author of An Ordinary Age and, more recently, All the Gold Stars. In promoting the former, a book on the cultural pressures that shape young adulthood, she was thrust into the role of “spokesperson on all things millennial.” As she explained to me, “Because millennial has become such a headline-y buzzword, it felt like everything could be spun through [that] angle.” Editors wanted her to pen essays with a generation-wars slant. Interviewers asked her why millennials are so slow to grow up. She hadn’t anticipated this pressure to be an “Author with a capital A,” performing total confidence in anything vaguely related to her book — a reported look at how milestones such as college and internships have become so prized that they’ve turned young adulthood into a “competitive sport.”

“For a long time, I felt like I was letting everyone down,” she added. “I couldn’t get to that place where I was ready to step up and say, ‘I am an authority on everything in [my book], from perfectionism, to work and burnout, to unpaid internships,’ when I am not any of these things.”

Lilly Dancyger, author of the forthcoming essay collection First Love, faced similar expectations while promoting her 2021 memoir Negative Space. The memoir centers on Dancyger’s childhood and the impact of her parents’ struggles with heroin addiction. But while doing press, interviewers would pose policy questions. “There was this assumption that because addiction was part of the story I was writing,” she said, “I should have deeply held and informed opinions about how society should handle addiction [and] treatment.” When planning the essays she’d pitch, Dancyger considered trying for a big, timely op-ed. “If I really wanted to get into some of the top-tier general interest publications, a topical, opinionated piece on that subject probably would have been the way to go.” But she ultimately decided that being a commentator would’ve felt disingenuous and — more importantly — was irrelevant to the book. Her priority was to give people a sense of who she was and what she cared about as a writer, which in turn provided a better glimpse of what her memoir had to offer.

Predictably, your risk of being cast as spokesperson increases if you’re writing on a subject (or from a perspective) that the publishing industry hasn’t previously given much space. Angela Chen, author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, knew that she’d become an ambassador when her book came out. “There just aren’t that many trade books about asexuality, which means there’s more scrutiny and more pressure,” she said. Though Chen is a subject-matter expert, she notes that she “didn’t want to be only talking to an audience as an educator. I wanted to be talking to the people who are affected and to my own community.”

I felt a similar expectation to educate. My book is an essay collection about how institutions have learned to parrot the language of social justice even (or especially) when it isn’t sincere. That meant the news pegs on which I could hang my hat on were grim: public failures of diversity. Literary figures who were ripe for cancellation. The proverbial “racial divide,” a phrase that makes me think of nothing other than, reliably and inexplicably, an image of the Grand Canyon. I wanted to do whatever I could for my book, and I knew tackling these issues could be a shortcut to grabbing thousands of readers by the collar and teaching them my name.

But they were also subjects I found intellectually dull, creatively deadening, and artistically demoralizing. Again, I get the principle, even respect its mercenary logic: If I could make myself a mouthpiece for the biggest issues tangentially related to my book, people would be more likely to care. If I proved myself nimble enough to chase the ambulance, they would know to call my number. The problem was that none of these ideas felt faithful to the work I’d done or the kind of thinker I am — and I was horrified by the implication that they might be. If you stripped everything else away — the research, the jokes, the painstaking revision — was this really what my creative labor boiled down to? That we should cancel Joan Didion?

None of this is to say that the promotional essay is all schlock and mirrors. An essay can be deeply aligned with the concerns of a writer’s book, get published around the same time, and still be searing: Nicole Chung on the untenable financial costs of choosing the writing life; Zadie Smith on thinking she’d never write a historical novel; Stauffer on the perils of our ambition narratives. The writers I spoke to for this piece all developed ways to approach the task that felt authentic. Before his novel Appleseed came out, Matt Bell sent a list of essay ideas to his editors to make sure he was pitching things he felt both keen and equipped to address, like his book’s genre-fiction elements. “As much as possible, I wanted to be proactive in what that part of the pitch would look like,” he said, rather than letting others decide for him.

Setting limits can help ensure that a writer isn’t pushed into mining their work in uncomfortable ways. Taylor Harris, whose memoir This Boy We Made explores medical racism, disability, and genetics, published one essay about being a BRCA2-mutation carrier and then gave herself permission to step back. “After that piece ran,” she said, “I just had to remind myself that I don’t have to take on every opportunity related to breast cancer or genetic mutations.”

The balance is one I’m still figuring out. I know there are prospective buyers who long for an intrepid expert to lead them out into the racial divide — and I know I risk sounding precious when I try to describe why this isn’t the book I wrote, or how I want to sell the one I did. There’s so much creative potential in writers returning to the subjects of their books to drill down or build on their themes. But so much can get lost when the sole approach is to find the snappiest topical takeaway in a clear grab for attention.

Besides, how much difference does a media hit like this really make to a book’s fate? “It’s my sneaking suspicion that it does very little,” Bell said. Katie Gutierrez, author of the novel More Than You’ll Ever Know, also went into the process with eyes open, as published friends had advised her there’s not much an author can do to move the dial on sales. (That sound you just heard was a thousand publicists screaming.) Like Bell, Gutierrez was proactive about the essay-writing process, but recognizes that a title’s ultimate success is determined by other factors. “It depends on how much support you’re getting from the publisher versus how much you’re expected to do yourself,” she added. For someone with a slimmer marketing budget or less institutional backing, there may be more pressure to land that op-ed. Or, as the release of their paperback nears, to write the sort of essay they were meant to be writing when their book originally came out — even if that essay is a rebuttal of this whole exercise.