This research sought to explore how creative writing university students' knowledge aligned with published authors and marketing professionals within the publishing industry. Participants from all three groups were recruited for semi-structured interviews, and the transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis. Overall, both published authors and creative writing students' knowledge was misaligned with industry perspectives, practices, and expectations, despite both authors and students generally believing marketing was important. Both the authors and students overall possessed a limited understanding of marketing and so their marketing knowledge did not appear to greatly increase after graduating. Given that authors found it difficult to build their marketing knowledge and skills due to time constraints, it would appear useful to embed marketing and entrepreneurial knowledge in creative writing university curricula to ensure students graduated with knowledge that would enhance their entrepreneurial and marketing skills and their income opportunities.