Doing the Marketing Questionnaire

It's a complex process to publish a book, as I was telling my cousins just a few days ago. Writing the thing is just the beginning. Or sometimes not even the beginning. But let's not go way back in the process. Magnetic Woman has already been written, proposed, peer-reviewed, contracted, and revised, after which I turned my attention to image acquisition (it's an art book, after all), and I've been working on that for several months now. And also working on the next book.
Meanwhile, it came time to do the Marketing Questionnaire!
If you aren't a writer--and particularly a book author--you may wonder why I had to complete a Marketing Questionnaire.
Wonder no more. Publishers have staff who work to publicize books, but those staffers can do a better job with help from the authors. To this end, they ask authors to fill out a Marketing Questionnaire.
Since I've been writing for a long time now and have had some experience helping other authors promote their books, this was not news to me. Still, I had not been involved in promoting anything in quite some time, so when I went to the AWP conference in March, I attended some panels on book promotion, which were very helpful in getting me up to date and ready to work on my Marketing Questionnaire.
A well-thought-out Marketing Questionnaire isn't something you throw together in an afternoon, although you can probably make good headway on it in that amount of time. Some of the information is probably ready to hand, while other information will have to be hunted down. Depending on the topic of the book, it may be useful to include your religion or where you spent your childhood. For scholarly books, it's important to provide information on which disciplines and sub-disciplines the book pertains to and whether the book could be used as a textbook in particular kinds of classes. For every book, it's smart to provide information on specialized media that might review it, local newspapers and radio stations, organizations that might be interested, bookstores where you might be able to do a signing or reading. The publisher's staff may already know about some of what you put on the questionnaire, but they are not likely to know everything that you can dig up.
It's also important to know whether you feel comfortable speaking in public or being interviewed. It's much easier to promote a book whose author is able to speak well, but many writers are shy. Luckily, most authors of scholarly books are used to teaching and giving talks, so that gives us a bit of an advantage. At the same time, as one AWP panelist pointed out, it's wise to know just how much about yourself you are willing to tell the public, and to think ahead about how you would present yourself in an interesting and truthful, yet unembarrassing, manner should you be so lucky as to be interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air.
I spent over a week preparing my Marketing Questionnaire. I didn't work on it every day of that week--I did have a family funeral to attend midway through--but I did think about it every day. I spent most of one day on the first go-round, added bits on subsequent days, and finally looked it over to see what I had left out. While I'm sure that with additional time I could come up with more to add, I was able to turn in a carefully thought-through document by the requested deadline.
And now it's back to image acquisition.