The Brass Tacks of the Publishing Process
YEARS before I became a published author, I’d heard about author questionnaires, and nothing I’d heard about them was good. Writers whose books lined my shelves often tweeted about having to complete these long and sometimes outdated documents provided by their marketing and publicity teams, and when I finally sat down in front of my own, I understood their frustration. Shortly after I finished multiple rounds of edits for my debut poetry collection, I received my own multipage form, which included questions about my work and publication histories, the groups of people I thought would be most interested in purchasing my book, and one of the more harrowing inquiries: “Has any article or story of yours attracted particular attention?”
As an early-career writer I felt woefully inadequate for the task. Did it matter that I had yet to write anything that had gone viral? What if my number of interesting hobbies had shrunk in the years since I began working on my collection? What if I personally knew only one or two booksellers in the city where I now lived, and they, like me, were not famous but fellow writers with whom I commiserated about rejections and writer’s block?
For many writers, I suspect author questionnaires are hated, not solely for their length, but also for the ways they require us to enumerate our past accomplishments and current connections and to predict the potential commercial value of our work. Also, after many submissions and rejections, rewrites, and relays of edits, they ask us to articulate what might still be inarticulable: why we have written what we’ve written, and what we believe it has to offer to public discourse, the literary canon, and complete strangers who might happen to pick up our books.
In both their timing and tenor, author questionnaires (which are also sometimes called marketing questionnaires) are the brass tacks of the publishing process, and the fact that they often arrive in an author’s inbox at the peak of exhaustion does little to bolster their reputation among us. However, these documents are vital. During my quest to find out why they exist and how they are used, nearly every person I spoke to in publishing—from editors to independent publicists—agreed that author questionnaires are one of
the most important documents a writer might ever submit to their publisher on behalf of their book.
FOR the purposes of this article I am talking about author questionnaires as a single genre, but they can come in many forms, and the information requested in them can differ between presses. Some questions that almost always appear are those concerning a writer’s biographical information, past jobs and publications, current affiliations, and media contacts (individuals working at print and digital news outlets and in television and radio), a detailed description of the book, a list of comparable titles, and ideas for cover art. However, other sections may vary between large and small presses or university imprints versus those of Big Five publishers. For Deesha Philyaw, award-winning author of the story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020) and the forthcoming novel The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman (2025), her first questionnaire, from West Virginia University Press, was a Google Doc that asked many of the questions listed above. But at her new publisher, Mariner Books, the questionnaire is accessible only via AuthorConnect, an online portal where authors can continually update its contents and alert editors when they have completed single sections or the entire form. Philyaw was surprised to see some of the requested information, such as the birth years of her children and a list of commercial products mentioned in her book. “That’s new!” she told me. “[But] do you know why this is hilarious? My main character is a brand whore. Think of every luxury designer you’ve ever heard of.” In Philyaw’s case, this information could lead to fruitful brand collaborations that could boost the book’s sales. And for Mariner, which is an imprint of HarperCollins, a subsidiary of News Corp, such questions might be important because of the parent publisher’s already-established relationships with other corporations or even previous collaborations on past titles.
For nonfiction writer Greg Marshall, whose memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It, was published by Abrams Books in 2023, author questionnaires were a new thing: He’d heard little about them before his book was sold on proposal and had no qualms about their length or specificity. “When [a questionnaire] arrived in my inbox after I’d turned in a draft of Leg in 2022, I felt like I was being given a pop quiz I knew I’d ace,” he says. “For the first five or six years of working on the book, it had just been me. I’d spent years perfecting my pitch in query letters, revised proposals, and, haltingly, over drinks with high school friends. [But now] there would be folks helping me publish Leg. There would be an ‘us.’”
Marshall completed his questionnaire in multiple sittings over the course of two days and specifically remembers his excitement about the cover art section, where publishers ask authors to share phrases and images relevant to the themes of their books. While most authors have only what is called “artistic input”—the ability to make suggestions and minor edits for their covers—the images requested in questionnaires are used for inspiration and can help inhouse folks get a clearer sense of how an author envisions their physical book. Marshall, who was born with cerebral palsy but did not learn of his diagnosis until adulthood, had an important conversation with his editor, Zack Knoll, about how his experience with disability should be represented on the cover. During this conversation he had to clarify some of the information he’d included in the questionnaire. “One early concept included a leg brace,” he explains. “Zack asked if it was representative of my own experience with walking aids. I’d jotted down ‘leg brace’ on the author questionnaire, noting that I’d briefly worn one in elementary school. However, when it came to the cover, I asked that we steer clear of casts, leg braces, and wheelchairs. I felt that putting [those] on the cover might misrepresent my own experience.” In Marshall’s case, both the questionnaire and the conversations it engendered helped create a cover Marshall loves. “The first cover that was presented to me as an option was the one we went with,” he says. “I actually felt bad for not having more notes.”
Marshall’s experience illustrates the ways in which completing author questionnaires is more than just an annoying bookend to the editorial process; it is the first step in a writer’s building a powerful relationship with their publisher. Once the forms are completed, they are usually distributed to what Kamrun Nesa, a senior publicist at Grand Central, calls “key stakeholders,” or anyone who is working with the author on their book, from editorial assistants to publicity and marketing directors. Nesa points out that publicists use the completed documents to strategize about a book’s publicity. “The document serves as a foundation for ideas for outreach, blurb requests, and markets to target for events and in-store promotion, and it offers insight into the author’s network of contacts that we may be able to tap for coverage or collaborations,” she says.
Stakeholders can receive these documents anywhere from eight to fourteen months before a book’s release, but in many ways, that can feel like a late arrival in the life of the forthcoming book. For Molly Templeton, who is now a publicist and awards administrator for the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation but once worked as the publicity manager at Tin House Books, the questionnaire is a way for the publicity team to play catch-up and get to know writers who have, up until this point, spent most of their time talking with editors. “The form is the beginning of a conversation among the writer and their publicitymarketing team. It’s a starting point for ideas: Does this writer have any unusual hobbies that we can somehow weave into the presentation and promotion of this book? Have they written for or worked at outlets or organizations that [we] would want to know about?”
Comprehensively completed questionnaires and the discussions that follow can help stakeholders find both
large and niche audiences for a book, even when an author isn’t already a household name. “There are authors who are still early in their writing careers and still getting their bearings, and that is perfectly okay,” says Nesa. “There have been several instances in which an author mentioned a contact for media coverage, or blurb requests, or a new angle, and it helped us prioritize our outreach and see the book in a new light.”
There is also another, far more practical reason for taking these documents seriously, one that was echoed by Philyaw’s editor, Rakia Clark, and Michael Taeckens, an independent publicist and a founder of Broadside PR. Clark, who is now an executive editor at Mariner after stints at Beacon Press, Viking Penguin, and Kensington, says that her use of author questionnaires is supplementary; still, she encourages her writers to begin working on them early and often because when they’re thoroughly completed, they make everyone’s job— including hers—a bit easier. “I don’t use them to get media. Publicity and marketing use them,” says Clark. “[Instead] I am trying to get the house as excited about the book as I can. My launch presentation will get the room hyped, and people will be like, ‘Well, let’s see what she’s talking about!’ It’s like, if somebody is trying to set you up on a blind date, and they make this person sound like they were the most amazing person on the planet, you’d be like, ‘I want to see a picture!’ I use the author questionnaire as the picture.” For this reason Clark implores her authors to complete them promptly, but she also asks that they do so thoroughly. “When people walk out of the room after a launch, and they feel more excited about my list [of soon-tobe published books], I don’t know how much of that I can attribute to the author questionnaire, but in my experience as an editor, if you’re trying to get people to do their very best work at the very highest level, giving them everything they need as well as you can makes them do a better job,” she says. “That gives the book a better shot.”
Taeckens, who worked in marketing and publicity at Graywolf Press and Algonquin Books before cofounding Broadside PR, where he represents clients such as Clint Smith, Safiya Sinclair, and current U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, has long emphasized the importance of author questionnaires. “What I tell authors is that author questionnaires are incredibly helpful for every single department in the publishing company: publicity, marketing, sales, editorial—everything.” Taeckens also reiterates the benefits of being comprehensive: “The staff at publishing houses are spread pretty thin. They have so many projects going on, and it’s just a big help to them to have all the information right there at their fingertips,” he says.
According to both Clark and Taeckens, authors should always err on the side of abundance, particularly when it comes to listing one’s media contacts. “No media contact is too small,” says Taeckens. Clark agrees. “I encourage [my writers] to be as exhaustive as possible,” she says. “Because if we’re trying to get to Oprah, and nobody knows Oprah, tell us everybody you know who might know Oprah.” And though there are some limits to whom one should list, Clark points out that it’s important to be strategic. “Don’t list your dog walker,” she says. “But if your dog walker is an intern at Seth Meyers, then list your dog walker.”
As for strategy, Taeckens says that if he had to choose the items that are most important on a questionnaire, they would be those concerning media contacts, comparable titles, and an author’s description of their own book. While media connections can help get the word out, comparable titles can be exponentially helpful with marketing, and the reason is simple. Comparing new books to books people already know and love can spark interest. “For every book that gets published, the sales team is putting together what are called tip sheets, and they have comp titles on those,” he says. “When they’re preparing for sales conferences to pitch an entire season’s worth of books to all the sales reps—the entire sales team that is based nationally—and selling the book to all the independent bookstores, libraries, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, they will use that information.” Taeckens recommends doing more than simply listing books that are similar to one’s own. Pointing out a book’s similarities and differences makes a stronger case for the use of those titles in marketing campaigns.
When it comes to an author’s description of the book, Taeckens points out that an author’s voice is a lovely addition to publicity materials, even if, as is the case with comp titles, their words are not being used verbatim. Oftentimes the way a writer describes their own work can be helpful when pitching the book, or for descriptions that appear on the jacket, in the galleys, and in catalogues. Taeckens will often use these same descriptions in his own work. When writing his pitch letters, which accompany the galleys of his clients’ books that are sent to media contacts, he sometimes takes phrases and sentences from the descriptions written by authors on their questionnaires, which are shared with him either by his clients or their publishers. “I mean, these are writers, and they’re so talented at language and description,” he says. “There are often just really beautiful nuggets in there that are helpful. And if it’s not necessarily the language, it’s the ideas.”
Despite their seemingly superfluous questions, poor timing, and general tedium, perhaps this is the unsung magic of author questionnaires: They may be the first time an author can speak coherently and enthusiastically about the work they’ve finally completed and, in so doing, collaborate with publishers to plan for a book’s entrance into the world. Author questionnaires are an essential part of a writer’s work, and so they feel like labor for a reason and for a very important cause: the books to which we have dedicated our time, our energy, and our lives. “I understand that it can feel like a tedious bit of homework,” says Taeckens. “But it’s homework that will pay off in the long run.”