Why authors need to join the PR circus

So a newly published novelist is dismayed at all she's asked to do to publicise her new book: inane bits of publicity, talking about things she thinks are irrelevant to the book, doing loads of stuff for free. A private person who just happens to have published a book who would rather stay that way: a private person. You can read Anakana Schofield's heartfelt and often very funny rant here.

She draws the comparison between a writer and a train driver; everyone tells her how lucky she is to be published, but they don't say to the driver how fortunate he is to be at the wheel. I don't think she's lucky. I have seen how hard it can be to write a novel. Having no aptitude for either career, I can however say that though I've met a couple of train drivers who have told me they'd love to be novelists, none of the authors I've worked with have ever confessed a secret longing to drive the 5.15 from London to Bristol.

Why is the focus on me and not the book? she asks. Why do I have to do so much stuff for free? And why is the world obsessed with the process of writing? I sympathise. And I feel a bit guilty: publicists like me ask a lot of our authors, and many find the publicity process irksome.

Many authors think quite reasonably that they've done their job in writing the book. It's disconcerting to find that they are then expected to promote it. Having to be a marketer as well as an artist is a surprise to many, and requires learning some new (if in some areas overlapping) skills. The storyteller Daniel Morden tells me that what they never teach you when you do a degree in drama is something critical to success as an artist: how to market yourself.

PR has always had a role to play in book sales; even in the year before his death, Charles Dickens gave a series of "farewell readings" around Britain and Ireland (managing a total of 87 out of a scheduled 100). Once, publishers could pay for stock and display space in bookstores – as in Waterstones 3-4-2 promotions – but there are fewer opportunities now. Then there's advertising. Like it or not, books have a relatively small audience. Advertising is a classic way to reach a mass public (those who buy cornflakes), not a niche one (interested in literary fiction). And although cornflakes may indeed be fascinating, there's not much of a story to offer the media (though that may just be me being uncreative). With a book, there is. Which, again, is why we do PR.

And what of the nature of publicity? Yes it would be nice if every newspaper could double its review space (hey, that way twice as many of the 140,000 books published in the UK each year could be reviewed!). But it's not going to happen. If it's tough to make a living as a writer, newspapers aren't having a great time either. So a publicist has to look for other ways to spread the word – hence the first-person pieces, the Q&As, the endless guest blogs. Yes, some publicity is plain daft (we publicists do try to filter these out) but it always has been. Fifteen years ago at Penguin I turned down a Q&A that asked Richard Dawkins whether, as a writer, he had a "lucky pen".

And ultimately you have to find a way to deal with the personal questions. The fact is that many of us are fascinated by the creative process, whether it's how Captain Beefheart created Trout Mask Replica or how Esi Edugyan came up with the amazing narrative voice in her book Half Blood Blues. Is it so wrong to be curious? I know that writers often find questions about writing frustrating because they often don't feel they understand the process themselves. But coming up with something interesting on that front can't be that difficult; after all, being a storyteller you surely have a head-start in that area.

What about doing stuff for free? I've asked it myself about publishing internships (which I absolutely think should be paid). It's worth bearing in mind that in the community of readers and writers a lot of people give their time for free or for very little: prize judges (who should be given a medal); people who help with literacy schemes; established authors who read new authors' books and offer a quote if they like it; people like my former colleague who volunteers at a mobile library for the homeless; and of course bloggers. When you take bloggers into consideration, a debut author may actually get more reviews than they would have had 10 years ago.

It's part of a larger business and cultural trend. The challenge for all artists now is how to make a living when so much is given away for free, something Nicholas Lovell tackles in his forthcoming book The Curve (Portfolio Penguin, October 2013). Lovell outlines a process by which you can connect the freeloaders at one end of the curve to the superfans at the other who will pay large amounts of money to support you. But this means understanding the marketing process, and embracing your fans. The fact is, as writers and publishers we are competing for our audience's time and money with huge corporations commanding huge budgets – and hence much greater persuasive power – than we can have. No author wants to have their book ignored.

The most important question is, surely, where are the readers in all this? Ultimately what I felt was lacking in her piece was enough consideration of this most important group of all. Readers are often curious about the writing process, and not just because they are all closet writers themselves. It's the readers who buy - and more importantly, read - the books, who come to the literary events. It's these enthusiasts who form book groups - again, something that's brought vitality into the book world over the past few years. Authors who are able to build relationships with the wider community of readers, whether via social media, events, blogs or any number of new and as yet unthought-of ways, are best placed to have an audience in the future. I've seen so many book trade discussions, whether about price or marketing or territories or formats or whatever else, get bogged down in back-and-forth about publishers/authors/trade/media, when it's the readers that count. Isn't it?