How to reframe capitalism to make sales and marketing work (better) for you
Rejection sucks. Marketing is hard. Capitalism makes it worse. However, with a couple mindset shifts we can start enjoying the process more and get more out of it...without losing our souls.
Often, I get angry that I’m forced to live in a capitalist society slowly selling my soul to the highest bidder. This is an article I had to write to reframe my own journey of balancing capitalism with artistic expression. If you are a paid member, I highly recommend my articles How to survive as a writer in a capitalist dystopia and Is it even possible to be a writer AND happy at the same time? to give even more context to this article.
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It’s really hard to show writers how to grow their author business without talking about capitalism because the biggest things holding writers back are the constraints of capitalism.
Specifically, the need for hypercapitalism to commodify everything to extract the most value from it.
In a nutshell, hypercapitalism is the idea that every act is worth compensation. While this can be tenuously sustained for business and commercial acts, even those not necessarily leading to direct value for customers or consumers as a whole, the real application is to individual acts and efforts. The perpetual drive to consume, which drives the bottomless desire to earn, has driven some vast percentage of people to believe their every action should cause coins to drop. Not just believe out of greed, but believe on the level of natural law or entitlement. -James Gifford
Authors generally feel gross about marketing and sales because of the way capitalism teaches you to commodify your work. Unfortunately, it is the dominant economic paradigm we live in, so we must soldier on with it.
If I cannot disentangle commerce from capitalism, then at least I can show you different ways to think and talk about your work and make money that don’t feel as gross as capitalism often makes writers feel. I wrote about the difference here.
There is good news, though. You can still make money without succumbing to the capitalist meat grinder. The exchange of money for goods and services is not the problem most people have with capitalism. This exchange isn’t even capitalism, it’s commerce, and there is a big difference between the two.
Commerce is the exchange or trading of goods and services. It has been around since human societies have existed but in different forms: from barter trading, like trading in fruits for silk, to using currency today with US Dollars, Mexican Pesos and other currencies to pay for lunch. -Suzanne Yada
Capitalism is a form of commerce that emphasizes profit and consolidated wealth built around private, free markets. It is generally categorized by the gluttonous and ceaseless need for endless growth to feed the need for line to go up. Plenty of scholarship exists which shows that capitalism does not require constant growth to exist…
…but there is no doubt that the nightmarish situation we find currently find ourselves in does require perpetual growth. It will, given enough time, devour itself, all the while knowing it is dying by its own hand and being unable to stop consuming anyway. The feeling you have deep inside your gut that the entire financial system is imploding on itself is a feature, not a bug, of the dominant economic paradigm we find ourselves in…
…but we don’t have to design our creative lives around that system to make money. Yes, we have to live in a capitalist system, but we can create an ecosystem more aligned with the values we hold dear inside our own businesses. All capitalists conduct commerce, but not all people who conduct commerce are capitalists.
While it is debatable whether capitalism can be ethical, there are ways to conduct ethical commerce within the systems forced upon us.
Where is the healthy line between commerce and capitalism? Therein lies the rub, because that line is a moving target, and it’s very personal for each of us.
Some people will be more comfortable further on the capitalist side of the spectrum and others would prefer to be further on the socialist side of the commerce spectrum. Some might even choose to extricate themselves from the system altogether and rely solely on bartering.
Each of these decisions comes with different constraints and strings attached to them which will influence how you move forward.
You can make more money as a hyper-capitalist, but the pressure to always perform for the approval of strangers and constantly prove yourself becomes harder to bear as the years wear on you. A system of bartering is a lovely thought, but it’s hard to exchange a goat for seven pairs of Levi’s unless you find the right trade partners, which is why currency is fungible in the first place.
There is no wrong answer, just what is right for you at this moment. Maybe in your early twenties, you are happy to delve deep into the seedy belly of capitalism to extract maximum value for yourself to live on later in life. Then, in your thirties, you decide that you would rather slow down and take your foot off the gas to preserve your mental health, and in your forties, you move to Peru and live in a yurt, knitting and bartering alpaca sweaters.
These decisions don’t define our lives, just phases of our lives. I’ve listened to the Tim Ferris Show for years, and hearing him grapple with the hyper-productivity he became a poster child for in his 20s, even though it no longer serves him in his 40s, is fascinating. If even he can shift his perspective on what serves him over time, then so can each of us do the same.
You can change your mind at any time and work toward a different equilibrium, but it starts with realizing that commerce can exist without capitalism, even in a capitalist economy. It takes self-reflection to start the ball rolling, and it takes work to maintain a healthy, balanced mindset once you find it.
The thing that makes you feel gross about sharing your art is probably not the marketing or the sales…it’s the capitalism that forces “line to go up” at all costs.
So, when people say “Why does this guy talk about capitalism so much? All I wanna do is find more readers to support my work.”
It’s because in order to grow your business, you almost always have to change your relationship with capitalism.
In order to do that, you have to understand that capitalism is everywhere. Once you do that, you can start to build a better relationship with it and your art. At that point, we can start creating conditions to live within it.
*** Please note that if you are reading this via email, Substack only sent out a partial version and the article will eventually stop without notice. If you want to read the whole 8,500-word article, then go to this website.***
Capitalism is the dominant economic force of our time. Even if we wanted to escape it, unless we lived in a yurt on a remote island, catching our own food and making our own clothes, we’re probably not going to get far without engaging on some level.
Additionally, let’s face it, capitalism has its benefits. The fact that a climate apocalypse is currently knocking down our door aside, things are pretty okay for many of us, especially compared to where we were even a hundred years ago. Depending on the metric you use, capitalism has raised more people out of poverty than any driver in modern history.
Of course, those are the same people who will be climate refugees in the coming years, but capitalism is not without benefits. We live better today than kings did two hundred years ago. Honestly, I would probably take my life over a king’s from even a century ago.
That said, capitalism might not be the enemy of artistic expression, but it is certainly not a friend to it, either.
The fact is that capitalism forces almost everything to be monetized and productized, which is antithetical to most people’s idea of artistic expression.
Throughout history, we have relied on various other means to communicate our feelings. Art has been a major form of expression. This is because art allows saying something and implies something different. Art is left to subjective thinking and art has been to express feelings when you cannot express them directly. In communist countries or in scenarios where the freedom of speech is limited, art is the way to go to express. Art can take many forms, from sculpture to songs, to picture, to writing, to singing, to dancing. Art is used not only to express repressed feelings but to also better express feelings. It is also important to note that artistic expression is a feature that separates us from animals, as no other animal engages in such activity. -STEMFrenzy
Sometimes, artists need to follow their muse into unprofitable corners of the world. Capitalism is very bad at allowing us downtime. For instance, we can’t have hobbies anymore. We have side hustles, instead, because we have to monetize every action. It’s deeply toxic.
This constant desire to work can manifest itself in all aspects of life – whether it’s aiming to do 12-hour study days, feeling guilty for taking breaks, or constantly checking emails when attempting to time off. It’s motivated by an internal need to constantly compete with not only those around us, but with ourselves, resulting in unattainable goals and unrealistic standards. -Jess Lomax
If we aren’t being productive, or if we dare seek stillness, the forces of capitalism rise up to say you are wasting time. It’s been such a constant message for decades that we have internalized it.
You are constantly bombarded by things you should buy, bills you have to pay, or ways you need to make money to survive. Capitalism is hungry and it must be fed, even as it causes hunger and poverty.
At best, capitalism and artistic expression are frenemies. They aren’t going to kill each other on sight, but there is a lot of spiteful sniping and conspiring against each other in private, at the very least.
Even if we yearn for a better system, the simple fact is that we live in a world of capitalism in the same way Henry Ford lived in a world of horse-drawn carriages or Nikola Tesla grew up in a world of candles.
We must learn to navigate this world even if we hope to change it. At best, we have to find a way to create a bubble around ourselves to insulate ourselves from the worst parts of our hypercapitalist society.
Yes, it might only be paper-thin at first, but over time we can expand that bubble more and more, to protect our artistic expression from the worst parts of capitalism.
We can never completely isolate ourselves from capitalism, but we can create a shield around ourselves and our art. What follows are some of my best trips to build barriers between our art and our capitalist tendencies.
The more we want to grow, the more we must engage with capitalism, as it’s the dominant force of conducting commerce in the world. So, my plan for this article is to give you some mindset tricks and reframes to help you exist sustainably in this capitalist hellscape while still making work you care about deeply.
If capitalism forces us to put a price on everything we make in service of “extracting value from our productivity”, then giving our work away isn’t something we do because our work doesn’t have value. It’s something we give away because we value our readership and believe that if somebody reads my work, then others will resonate with it and see the value, too.
I often tell people that I’m giving my work away for free/at a discount because I’m making a gamble that you’ll love my work enough to buy it at full price in the future.
I’m more than happy to make that gamble a billion times.
In capitalism, everything we make must have value, but it is our choice how we price it. We can price our work below, at, or above market value. We can also give it away for free.
Market Value (MV) is the projected value for which an asset, or liability, would exchange between a willing buyer and seller in an independent transaction, following proper marketing, and where both parties acted with knowledge, caution, and without compulsion. It also represents the value a person is willing to invest in an asset or business. -Wallstreetmojo
That is our choice. That is one small way we take the power back from hypercapitalist forces pushing against us.
It doesn’t matter to me if you buy my books. I think you should buy them because you’ll enjoy them, but I am solely concerned that you believe it has value. You can’t believe that if I don’t believe it.
If we can both agree that my book is worth $20, and I sell it for $10, then I’m giving you a deal. If I give it to you for free, then I’ve changed the paradigm.
A paradigm shift is defined as "an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way." -Tania Lombrozo
This trick completely transformed the game for me. It gave me control. I am always giving readers my best stuff, whether it’s free, at a discount, or paid in full.
The difference in how to price my work is my choice.
Most people are worried about somebody buying their work, but they are masking the real question that matters—
Do you see the value in the work?
If you and your subscribers can agree that your work has value, then you’re playing a different game.
It’s not about selling. It’s about showing the value until they see the worth and buy. Even if they don’t buy it, if they see its worth then that’s all I can reasonably expect hope to influence.
Then the question becomes how much value I need to show you before you buy from me.
By simply agreeing that what we do has value, and then giving it away for free, you have extracted yourself ever so slightly from the pressures of capitalism.
The hardest sale for me is the first sale.
Why?
Because once somebody has bought something from you, they have set the price.
That first sale shows that I am not bonkers for believing my work has value. It shows that my work really does have worth. It shows I didn’t overprice it or completely misconstrue the market.
Now, will there be mass adoption? I don’t know. Maybe there are only 100 sales in all of the world. Likely, there are thousands. I just have to find them.
What I do know is that once one person buys at a price, then there are many more people who will see the value at that price.
They just haven’t…yet.
My job is to convince them of the value. Perhaps they need to know more about what I’m selling. Maybe they need to know me at a deeper level. Perhaps they just need more time.
That part I’m not sure about when that first person buys. What I am sure about is that if one person (preferably not a family member or close friend) buys from me, then lots more people would be willing to buy from me if certain conditions are met.
Writers often take somebody not buying their work as a personal failing, but it’s usually not that at all. Most of the time it’s a failure to meet the other conditions necessary to make somebody buy.
In capitalism, money is literally equated to your intrinsic worth to exist. This is patently absurd, but we’ve been fed it for so long that we begin to believe it. This is one of the main causes of imposter syndrome as well.
Many people who have imposter syndrome grew up in families that stressed achievement and success. If your parents went back and forth between overpraise and criticism, you may be more likely to have feelings of being a fraud later in life.
Society's pressures to achieve can also contribute. It's easy to measure your self-worth mainly by what you've accomplished. -WebMD
However, if instead we start thinking about that rejection as simply failing to meet the conditions necessary to convince somebody to buy, it stops being about the money.
Now, it’s about the connection. Now, it’s about the journey. Now, it’s about discovery.
If somebody loves my work, they will likely buy if they can, but buying isn’t the goal. Seeing the value is the goal. Even if they see the value, not everyone can or will buy. Some will, though.
That’s a game I enjoy playing. I love that kind of puzzle.
The “buy my book” constant promotion puzzle is exhausting, but the thought exercise of building the conditions as such so that people see the value is a fun game for me.
If you can make that mindset shift, then people who don’t buy aren’t rejecting you. They simply haven’t met the conditions necessary to buy.
Even people who buy your other work have conditions to buy your future work. It’s incumbent upon us to develop a strategy to meet those conditions.
But the money isn’t the point. The connection is the point.
If we don’t make that connection between the buyer and the product, it is a failure of our marketing, not of our work.
This is why it’s so important to make a case for your book in many different ways. Most people have multiple conditions that must be met before they buy from you, even if they’ve bought from you before.
Some of them might be financial, but they might just as easily be about timing, connection, or any number of reasons.
Reframing your marketing through this lens allows you to stop seeing rejection as a personal attack, and start seeing it as what it really is…a chance to earn somebody’s trust.
Yes, is sad when you find out somebody doesn’t trust you yet, but you can earn trust. Once people trust you write great books, they often will buy from you…
…if the conditions are right.
One of my favorite marketing reframes that I’ve developed over the years is called “the theory of the case” or “the case for your book” depending on how I’m feeling that day.
The idea is that any marketing campaign is not about flashy graphics or slick copy, but a concerted effort to make a case for why somebody should care your your book.
This isn’t about begging, pleading, or cajoling, but about looking at both the positive reasons somebody should care about your book and overcoming the negative objections somebody might have.
During the Kickstarter campaign for Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter volume 4, I broke this into six phases:
Initial announcement - 0-28 days prior to launch - From a month before launch up until the day of launch, my job was to announce the book, reintroduce people to the series, and build excitement for the next volume so the launch goes well.
Launch - 1-5 days after launch - Once the book is launched, the next phase kicks into gear and my job is to capitalize on all the hype I have built up prior to launch. These are generally you’re traditional “ZOMG! It’s live!” type outreach.
Sideways sales letter - 5-12 days after launch - Most writers are pretty okay up to here. They generally don’t do nearly enough initial announcement outreach, but usually do send emails, but this is where their outreach stops. Mine, on the other hand, is just beginning. The sideways sales letter is a strategy where you break up your sales page, Kickstarter page, or other marketing across multiple emails. A sales page contains all the information a buyer needs in one place, but most people never read it, so instead I cut up the sales page and use it as outreach over several emails. You would not believe how many people read the page but miss some fact that causes them to buy.
Praise - 14-21 days after launch - Many of my launches don’t go long enough to incorporate these other phases, but the next step I use when appropriate is to pull together reviews, email blurbs, and other nice things other people have said in order to show how much other people like me and/or my work.
Objection handling - 22-28 days after launch - Once I have talked about how much people like my work, my last phase before closing out a campaign is to take all the objections people have given me over the years and try to overcome them. For instance, lots of people have told me they don’t read that series because they don’t read horror, but Ichabod is more a fantasy book than anything. So, I state the objection and then overcome it.
Final countdown - 29-31 days after launch - If you have an evergreen launch model, where you’re not doing time-based launches, then this doesn’t really fit, but one of the best ways to push people over the edge is by using scarcity and telling people your offer is going to end. Even if you have an evergreen model, you can do things like pledge drives or limited-time offers to drive sales. I know many authors offer bonuses to people who buy during their preorder period and upload proof of purchase to their website, for instance.
In each of these phases, you are shifting the narrative to make a case for your book to people who need more information to be convinced. One of my iron-clad rules of marketing is that once somebody has seen a piece of marketing and decided not to buy, they will never buy from it.
That doesn’t mean they will never buy, though, which is why you need a bunch of different pieces of marketing to build a case and persuade people to buy in different ways.
This also extends to your overall positioning in the market.
What is market position? In marketing and business strategy, market position refers to the consumer’s perception of a brand or product in relation to competing brands or products. Market positioning refers to the process of establishing the image or identity of a brand or product so that consumers perceive it in a certain way. -Strategic CFO
Since I am very into author ecosystems, I often think about how a writer is positioning themselves and their work to not only stand out from other writers but also fit into the existing conversation.
This means not only asking yourself questions like “What is your point of view?” but also things like “Given my ideal reader has already read these things, how can I give a different perspective that builds and expands on, but still fits with what has come before and what is going on right now”.
Understanding that your audience also reads other things, and is influenced by other things, so you have to position yourself relationally to them while offering your own perspective, is one of the most important things for me.
Most writers seem to hate newsletters (if they hate newsletters) because they don’t want to be a bother. They think of their email sends as the worst kind of “spam” that comes into their inboxes…
…but what if those emails were somebody’s favorite thing to read every week?
Those supermarket coupons? Somebody has been waiting all week to see them.
Those blow-out sales? Somebody has been sitting on those to buy something they’ll love.
Those Nigerian princes? Well, no. They are actually just scam emails, and annoying. However, even those emails usually allow somebody very lonely to be seen in a way they probably haven’t in a very long time.
Whatever way you slice it, people wouldn’t send emails if nobody was excited to get them. You can bet that all around the world, lots of people are over the moon to save $.64 cents on Campbell’s Soup next week.
What if, instead of thinking of your emails as spam, you instead saw them for what they are…somebody’s favorite email waiting to be found; the one they have been waiting for all week.
You might say “That’s impossible. I’m just sending an email about my new book launch,” but I can assure you that if you’ve built your list correctly, then your email is going to make somebody’s day.
I am constantly shocked by how often people thank me for sending promotional emails to them. I do get my share of bitterness, too, but I get way more support than I ever thought possible when I was just starting out.
In my main email automation sequence, I give people the option to choose how often they hear from me. I tell them flat out that if they don’t choose either weekly or monthly, they are giving me carte blanche to email them as often as I wait, even multiple times a day.
The option to choose is at the bottom of every email I have sent for years, and still, less than 5% of people have made the choice to hear from me unlimited times.
95% of people on my list are perfectly happy to hear from me as often I want to send emails. That’s bonkers. I’ve pulled back my email sends a lot over the years, but I used to send gobs of emails. Sometimes, during launches, I would email up to 4 times a day…and still almost nobody unsubscribed.
Yes, people do unsubscribe, yet most people don’t. It’s still wild to me, but the truth is that some people want to hear from you. To some people, you will be their favorite email.
If you move through the world with that truth, it will attract even more people to you.
Yes, some people might hate it, but those aren’t your people. If you can focus on finding your people, this whole game becomes much easier.
All we’re trying to do here, in all of this work, is find the people who resonate with what we do.
They are few and far between, but those moments you come across one are magic.
I’ve gathered almost 200,000 emails over the years in order to find 20,000 or so that resonate with what I do, and 5,000+ that have actually paid for it.
That’s a fractional share of the number of people I’ve met in my career, but when you do this work for long enough and with intention, you can end up amassing a rather large group of humans who care about your work.
Some of those people have resonated with me for years and others only resonated with my work for a season.
It’s always sad when somebody stops resonating with my work, but I try to take solace in the fact that it’s magic to find anyone who resonates with me for even one second.
It reminds me of the Korean concept of In-Yun, which I first learned about from the excellent 2023 film Past Lives.
Beyond helping me grieve my own past, Past Lives has taught me to find comfort in the Korean concept of in-yun, or how fate brings two people together based on countless connections in their previous lives. Nora, when getting to know Arthur, tells him that if two people get married, they must have reached 8,000 layers of in-yun over 8,000 lifetimes that finally allows them to be together. When Arthur asks if Nora believes in in-yun, she jokes that it’s “just something Koreans say to seduce someone.” When I ask Song about the term, she lights up and says, “It’s an amazing thing! In-yun is basically about how you can’t control who walks into your life...and who stays in your life. That to me is…at the heart of the film. It’s about the ineffable thing...about every relationship, even the person who brushes up against you, even you and me who’s sitting here.” Song’s treatment of every relationship in Past Lives reflects this value, as seen when Hae Sung says to Arthur, “You and I are in-yun too.” Instead of representing the typical love triangle trope that pits love interests against one another, Song centers the significance of human connection. -Nancy Wang Yuen
This whole thing has nothing to do with money. It’s all about resonance. Money is the byproduct of running a connection-focused business, not the focus of it.
That doesn’t mean we don’t offer products and services to our audiences, quite the opposite.
Money comes because you have infused that connection into every bit of your work, and people want to support you for taking that much care with their attention.
If you treat that connection as a burden, either for you or for them, then you turn it into something bitter and ugly, but if you cherish it for the magic it is, then magic will flow through you.
Any good sales process is a discussion with your readers.
Writers love to talk about “engagement”, but they tend to be haphazard and unintentional with their engagement when it comes to sales.
If you’re judging the success of your social media activity based on its engagement you aren’t just looking at irrelevant markings, you’re potentially steering your activity based on a completely false map. -Jerry Daykin
Not to mention that social media engagement is a terrible way to judge buyer intention.
Buying intent, also known as purchase intent, is the probability of how close a consumer is to completing a purchase of a product or service from a company. Professionals who work on a marketing or sales team use buying intent to target specific leads to generate higher conversions. A lead is a consumer who's shown interest in possibly purchasing a product or service from a company, and those with buying intent are a more promising sector of leads. -Indeed
Not that engagement isn’t important. Even if it doesn’t lead to sales, the biggest reason many authors write is to connect with their readers. My point is just that if we get really good at asking readers what they want, and then give it to them, the whole process becomes a lot easier.
I’m not necessarily talking about sharing the behind-the-scenes process of your work, but instead using that connection to ask direct questions like “Why didn’t you buy?” This is not meant to be an accusation or to make somebody feel guilty, but because I want to improve for next time.
After all, I am making this for them to enjoy. If they don’t like it, I need to know why, not to shame them, but to give them what they actually want.
Conversely, when somebody does buy it’s important to ask “Why did this resonate? What was different about this book?” Again, this isn’t to be self-deprecating but to gain insight that will help improve the next book.
Nobody ever gets it perfect the first time, but you can’t get the next one right if you don’t know what you did and didn’t get right this time.
Writers are hesitant to ask readers the thing they actually want to know, but the answers I got were life-changing and people were all too happy to give me their opinions.
For instance, back in 2016, I was launching a lot of books that just weren’t connecting with readers. Since I was doing a lot of conventions at a time, I started to ask my fans what about my work wasn’t working for them.
That year I released a mystery novel, a children’s book, and a YA novel…none of which my fans actually wanted.
What did they want? Comics about monsters. My two best-selling books at the time were Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter and Katrina Hates the Dead.
I was building a comic book audience, and I wasn’t giving them any comics!
The overwhelming response caused me to put Monsters and Other Scary Shit, a monster anthology, into production, which became my breakout hit.
Plus, when I launched that book, the marketing was easy because my audience told me what they wanted. I was just giving it to them.
That doesn’t mean I only give people what they want. After all, a big part of building a sustainable business is hearing what fans say and deciphering what they really mean.
There are essentially two types of customer needs: physical and psychological. These needs often overlap, which sometimes makes it challenging to separate them. Physical needs are the simplest to identify, as they often have direct solutions. For example, if someone is hungry, they need something to eat.
Psychological needs are sometimes harder to identify, but they are also typically the more powerful driver of customer decisions. For instance, while a physical need tells a customer they need something to eat, a psychological need directs them towards food that provides them with a specific feeling. Psychological needs can be the difference between a customer buying a salad over a burger because they want to feel healthy. -Indeed
Additionally, I write a lot of novels, so I had to do a lot of work convincing my audience they wanted prose books even though they never said they did.
Keep in mind that your customers know only what they’ve seen and used, and as such, they are often a misleading source of information about what you should be building next.
For example:
Consider how Hollywood’s major movie studios make films today. They test. They survey. They focus group. They copy what was done last year. They combine the concepts of two already-successful films so they can say “It’s X Meets Y.” In fact, in many cases, the producers of high-budget blockbusters are so unsure of how their work will resonate that they often script and film multiple endings — and then test the various options with audiences, to make sure they are not delivering a “product” that disappoints.
And all of those safety measures explain why every Hollywood blockbuster is such a terrific film — adored by fans and hailed by critics. Only kidding. It’s why so many big-budget Hollywood movies are so similar, predictable, and boring. It’s precisely because the budgets are so huge and the stakes so high for the studio executives that they so often take the safe route — double-checking every detail with the movie-going public beforehand, so they minimize their risk of putting out a product that doesn’t generate enough buyers to earn back its staggering costs.
It’s also why a small group of filmmakers without the pressure of a big budget on the line were able to make the movie they knew their audience would like, even if the concept had never been done before. That movie, The Blair Witch Project, cost about $35,000 and earned more than $100 million. All without the filmmakers first asking their customers what they wanted.
Product managers who rely too heavily on customer feedback or surveys are effectively tying an innovative hand behind their back — limiting their options for their products to only the requests and demands of their existing customers.
That’s not how the iPhone was developed. -ProductPlan
However, in general, my sales process involves using my engagement with readers to figure out what fans really want, and then delivering that experience to them.
A ton of my marketing involves phrases like “Look at what I made for you” and “You told me this is what you wanted”.
If you’re having trouble embracing the sales process, then a really helpful reframe is to stop writing only what you want and start a conversation with your readers about what they want.
Then, deliver it to them.
If they still don’t buy, then you need to:
Ask better questions and/or
Become a better translator between what your readers say and what they mean.
I have found that most problems arise because people don’t spend enough time with customers to become great translators.
You can’t learn how to translate English to French well without a lot of practice. Yes, you can be passable pretty quickly, but if you want to be world-class, you have to spend years learning the language until you can speak it without even thinking.
The same thing with learning to speak the language of your customers. Most people send maybe one survey a year and then talk to their fans in platitudes; never about anything that really matters.
If you’re struggling with it, you probably need more reps in order to be able to translate customer speak into what they really want.
What is it they say? “If a reader tells you something is wrong, they are always right. If they tell you how to fix it, they are always wrong.”
If you just ask more questions/ask better questions to more and more people, you will get better at it. We grow where we put our focus.
This doesn’t mean stop writing the stories you love. It means finding the intersectionality between what readers want and what you love writing.
Using the conversation you’re probably already having with your readers as a way to make your work resonate deeper with readers helps short-circuit the part of your brain that doesn’t like sales…because you really aren’t selling.
You’re serving. I wrote about this in my article about being noticed on Substack.
What does it mean to be “of service”?
Lots of people talk about being of service to their community, but they miss one crucial point.
Being of service to something — a person, a group, a community, a cause or a belief — means that you’ve chosen to engage without expectation of reciprocation -Copyblogger
Those last four words are everything. “without expectation of reciprocation”. I see so many people seeking to serve in order to get more followers, make more money, or boost their egos.
Those people often wonder loudly why they don’t get anywhere…and it almost always flows back to those words.
You expect something.
That is not being of service to your community. It’s counterintuitive, but good things happen when you do things without expectations.
The easiest way to get results is to stop doing things expecting results and to simply do them to be of service. Share insights without expectation of anything in return.
A huge part of being “of service” is to do things without expectation of reciprocity.
However, there is nothing that says people can’t reciprocate, just that you can’t expect them to reciprocate.
You can (and should) design your service to facilitate reciprocity, even if it’s not given.
The difference is that I never expect people to buy anything I make. I made it because I thought people would like it.
I use my decades of experience to design products that I believe will resonate deeply with my ideal audience and then hope that resonance makes them want to buy it.
If they can’t buy it for some reason, that’s okay, but I know if I infuse my work with enough love and share it with the right people, some of them will buy it.
If you build a big enough audience, then those few souls who resonate deeply enough to buy are enough to make a decent living.
If you want to get better at sales and marketing, the single best reframe I have ever heard is this:
Nobody buys because of you. They buy because of how you make them feel.
They do not buy your memoir for your story. They buy it for how it can inform their story.
They don’t buy your course because they love the platform you teach. They buy it because of the transformation you promise.
They don’t buy your novel because of your name. They buy it for the promise your name delivers to them.
It’s not always the most fun thing to think about, but none of this is about us. It’s all about being of service to other people.
If you want more people to buy your books, then you have to focus not on what you teach, but what transformation, or universal fantasy, you hope to elicit in your readers.
Universal fantasy is basically those fantasies that we have, I would call it universally. But it doesn't have to be completely universal. It just has to be a fantasy that a lot of other people share.
There's some, like, big, big, big fantasies that everybody from a 3-year-old to a 70-year-old, or an older adult share. Those are fantasies like people appreciating you, being seen, getting attention. Those are kind of universal fantasies. Having somebody who's really worthy fall in love with you, things like that. Those are universal fantasies. -Theodora Taylor
If you think about your work this way, then pricing becomes a bit easier because you’re not even selling the work. You’re selling the transformation. The bigger the cost, the bigger the transformation you promise with your work.
It’s as hard and as simple as that. The same is true with marketing. Lots of people get grossed out by marketing, but if you think of asking and receiving like a goodwill bank, it becomes easier.
You are going to ask for a lot from your audience when launching a product. They will be bombarded by it on every social media channel imaginable; you will be disseminating information dozens of times a day on multiple outlets. God help the people who follow you on multiple channels. They’re the real heroes.
With so many updates about your product, it’s easy for people to become annoyed with you and tired of your product. They will want to unsubscribe from your newsletter and unfollow you on social media. By the time your launch is over, they won’t want to hear from you ever again.
The only way to combat this is to have a great relationship with your audience before you launch your product, because you will torch it once your launch begins.
That’s why you need to be making deposits into the goodwill bank far in advance of any product launch. This is the crux of the value first mentality. This is the business reason for why we have to provide information to our audience and grow their trust before we ask anything in return.
Because we will ask for something in return when we launch a product, and we will ask a lot. We will ask so much that any rational person will tune us out. But emotions aren’t rational. People allow those they like and trust to get away with irrational things, like pounding them with reasons to buy their product.
That’s why we need to build up massive goodwill before we even consider launching our product.
Think about your goodwill like it’s a bank. We’ll call it The First Bank of Goodwill. This bank works like any other bank, except that it runs on your goodwill instead of money.
When you do something nice for somebody, you make a deposit into this bank. Whether it’s writing a blog post, speaking on a panel, providing advice over coffee, or even just retweeting an interesting article, everything you do for your audience is a deposit in the goodwill bank.
By contrast, everything you ask of your audience is a withdrawal from the goodwill bank. Every time you ask somebody to buy your product, every time you pitch them something, and every single time you ask them to share your posts, you are withdrawing from your goodwill account.
If you have been depositing into the goodwill bank over and over again, you can make these withdrawals without overdrafting your account; however, if you haven’t been making these deposits, then you can’t afford to make an ask of your audience. Imagine trying to buy a $50,000 boat in cash when your checking account only has $3.27 in it. You just can’t do that.
The same is true with your goodwill.
If you keep withdrawing from the goodwill bank without making deposits, there will be nothing left in your account when you need it. Without enough goodwill, your product launch won’t be successful, because your audience has no reason to support you. If you keep making those deposits, then you will always have enough goodwill in your account to sustain your withdrawals.
This is where most people screw up when it comes to launching a product. They haven’t spent enough time making deposits into the goodwill bank to sustain their withdrawals, so their ask comes across as begging. It’s perceived as brash and creates an uncomfortable situation. Instead of people gladly buying the product, they either bristle at the thought of buying or only buy out of pity. This type of customer doesn’t stick around for the long haul.
This is why making deposits into the goodwill bank is such an important concept. If you do it correctly, you’ll always have a massive amount of goodwill available when it’s time to launch your product. With that goodwill built up, your audience will gladly buy from you instead of recoiling from your ask.
Just note, making deposits into the goodwill bank is a perpetual task you must perform throughout your career. You can’t just use it on your first launch and coast on the interest forever. Your goodwill account is like a checking account—it doesn’t build interest.
Luckily, goodwill is easy to deposit if you are a good person who wants to serve your audience. If you come from a place of service and value, then almost everything you do will make a deposit into the goodwill bank.
A simple formula I use is to give more than I ask. If I ask a lot, then I have to give a lot.
However, it’s important to remember that people want to support you making more they can enjoy. You are helping them. Yes, there is an exchange of money because of course there is, but if you fill your audience with the right people, then you are serving them by making things, and by buying your work, they are helping you make more things for them.
It’s important to note as we wrap up that you don’t have to do any of this stuff. If you want to fund your writing by funneling money from your full-time job, or you want to live in that yurt on a remote island, that’s all valid. However, if you want to maximize how many people see your work, you’ll have to do at least some of this stuff.
So, if you want to improve your mental health, ground yourself in the work you create. That’s great, but it’s only half the equation. We still need to engage in commerce to acquire a desirable enough resource to exchange for goods and services.
Maybe your solution to the money situation is to get a job that allows you to separate your work from commerce altogether. That’s fine. I know a lot of people who work that way.
The problem is that even if you can make that work for your creative process, I’ve never met an author that didn’t want more people to read their work. If you want more people to read your work, then you have to get the word out to lots of people.
Unfortunately, that means doing a significant amount of marketing, and marketing is (often) fueled by money. You can definitely get some readers by focusing solely on free, organic marketing, but more and more the indie publishing industry is pay-to-play these days. If you’re not spending money, then you’re going to get drowned out, and not enough people will read your work to satisfy you. Without those readers, most authors will eventually get disillusioned and give up. Looking back at my career, at least 80% of the authors I’ve ever met have given up eventually because they couldn’t find a critical mass of readers, and that’s being generous.
So, even if you don’t care about making money on your work, in order to gather a critical mass of readers to appreciate your work, you’ll need to make enough sales to drive your marketing. Sales don’t have to be the main goal of your writing, but money is a byproduct of creating value in the world.
On top of that, book design costs money. Covers cost money. Editing costs money. Proofreaders cost money. Websites cost money. How long can you spend money on these things without making anything back before the investment stops being worth it? It’s not fair, but neither is capitalism.
I work hard to develop a different paradigm with my readers than one that relies on capitalism, but usually, truth be told, it does rely on capitalism. I hire artists, editors, admins, and other contract staff, and then leverage their work to obtain a greater value than I paid in the market.
That’s capitalism, and I don’t love it. I try to make myself feel better by saying that I’m helping pay their bills and survive, but on some level, I know that is just a platitude that capitalists say to feel better about themselves.
I’ve talked about turning my company into an autonomous collective for years, but I am pragmatic enough to recognize when I’m lying to myself.
Part of doing this work is realizing that you are probably not the noble paragon of virtue you think you are, especially if you want to make money from your writing. The more you want to scale your author business, the more compromises you must make with yourself.
Hopefully, you can find some balance in it so you don’t sell your whole soul even as you piecemeal it out over your career.
That is not a very cheery thought, but it is the truth. You absolutely can make a living as an artist, but the question becomes how much can you compromise without losing yourself in the process.
Just remember, no matter how much capitalism tries to tie your worth to the amount of money you generate to feed it, you have intrinsic self-worth just for being alive.
You are worthy of being alive simply by being alive. You don't have to make or do something to be worthy of that. You have as much value and worth as kings, CEO, and the homeless.
It has been the work of a lifetime to understand that my self-worth is not coupled with my success. It's not tied to my productivity.
It is not tied to anything.
It just is because you are.
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Your work resonates with me so much!! Definitely sharing with everyone on my team!
Wow, just discovered this article. My last newsletter bemoaned capitalism and the push for monetization, so this is timely and addresses marketing in a way that I can relate to. Thanks!