About Trade Publishing, Part 3: Marketing

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a publisher bought my book. Things immediately started going wrong.

I can trace it all back to the conversation I had with my agent when she told me who’d won the auction. She was going on about a character who wasn’t going to be in the subsequent books, and when I reminded her he was a one-off, she said “Well, we can talk about that later.”

I thought about that for about half an hour, then sent her an email telling her if the publisher had bough...