Boy do I have views about this. https://twitter.com/garethlpowell/status/1294975248782196736

Some context to my thoughts - pandemic has meant publishers have had to move many books publication dates. I have a huge amount of sympathy for the position they find themselves in and increased workload/pressure to deliver. You'll be surprised how few people ......

work in marketing (for example) on a HUGE number of books. And I'm assuming there wil be no new members of staff to support volume of work. That said, this massive bun fight is INSANE and yes, lead authors will always take priority. That means the lion's share of

marketing budget, publicity activity, human resource, time, energy will be given to them and sales team will be prioritising too. In normal years, we publish WAY too many books, but, as I've learned, that's a battle not worth fighting. Ain't ever going to change.

So, let's put aside the glorious priority titles from Jamie Oliver, Martin Amis, Ant & Dec, Caitlin Moran, who will take most of the review slots in newspapers (yep, think same books across multiple slots, as opposed to even spread of books) ....

And, let's not forget that debuts and hardbacks are heavily reliant on bookshops. If the Waterstones I went into yesterday is anything to go by, readers have NOT returned to bookshops in the same numbers as before.

Also physical literary festivals usually boost these sales too. (Guessing digital festivals don't have the same results). This thread is a lot more pessimistic than I hoped. But, Pollyanna I am not.

If it is any consolation to debut authors, I have had a steady flow of traditionally published authors coming to me in the last month asking for marketing/publicity ideas so they can add to what their publisher is planning (which for some authors is not much at all).

I always get into trouble with big publishers whenever I encourage authors to do some of their own marketing & publicity. Would be much more valuable if they acknowledged they have too many books to give them all the attention they need. And quite frankly some of the