Spinning a great idea into book marketing gold
The Author Stack sits at the intersection of craft and commerce, helping writers build more sustainable businesses that allow them to thrive while creating work that lights them up inside. We strive to give authors agency in a world that too often seems intent on stripping it away from them.
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I find it hard to develop a shared language about how difficult it is to create and launch creative projects.
I’ve called it “soul-selling”, which is NOT selling your soul, but that’s what everyone equated it to, so I stopped saying it.
I’ve called it heart selling, emotional selling, and a whole lot of other things that fell on stone-faced creative people over the years, mostly because when you combine the word sell with creative work, half the people (and nearly all the people who need to hear it) prickle up.
Recently, I saw Spinning Gold, though, and in it the parable about writing I had been looking for my entire life (minus the sex, the drugs, and the music). I often find my marketing inspiration in music, and that movie is a masterclass on what it means to introduce creative work to the world.
Maybe it’s because I also grew up on the East Coast and fled to Los Angeles, or because I spent a decade failing and failing until people finally saw the value of what I had to say and everything started falling in place, but the story of Casablancas Records resonated deeply with me.
Music, at the end of the day, has the same intrinsic problems as fiction. At its core, nothing about music is necessary. It won’t help you file your taxes. It won’t help you lose 40 lbs in 40 days. It won’t invest your 401k for you.
There is nothing intrinsic to music that people need, and the same is true with about fiction books. In fact, people devalue both in almost the same way.
No, music is not necessary, but it is essential to life in the same way books are essential. I think of this quote often.
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.
In order to go into the arts and make it a career, you need to be a little bit crazy, because you’re essentially selling air.
There is a business concept called the “blue ocean strategy”, which teaches people to look for business opportunities where there is no competition. It’s about making high-priced, unique offers in areas where nobody else is fighting for the same audience.
The book business is the opposite of that. The publishing industry is the reddest ocean you’ll ever find, infested with thousands of hungry sharks. There are over a million books launched every year.
Every single author is trying to get people to read their books at the same time, including the estates of long-dead authors and publishers relaunching public domain books, and they’re willing to drop their prices to nothing in order to capture them.
The last thing you want to do as a new business is to compete on price. As a small business, you don’t have the scale to drop your prices or the name recognition to have intrinsic virality, but that’s the common wisdom in the publishing business. Drop your prices to zero and make the money up in volume.
This is the general wisdom of selling books.
STEP 1: Make a book.
STEP 2: Drop the price as close to $0 as possible.
STEP 3: ???
STEP 4: Profit.
In the self-publishing world, this process works best when you have a long series because you can drop the first book in the series to zero and “make it up on read-through”.
The more volumes you have in the series “behind” the free book, the more money you can make on the subsequent books, and thus, the more you can spend on advertising. The golden rule of book marketing is that the person who can spend the most on marketing wins.
The only people who get ahead in that world are the ones who have the most money to spend on marketing. Casablancas Records was $6 million in debt (in 1975 money. That’s over $33 million today) before they turned it around, and they only got that much cash because Neil Bogart has a successful recording artist and record executive, with connections as deep as anyone in music before he started his label.
How many people on Earth could have made that work back then? 10, maybe? Probably fewer…
Here’s the thing, though. Even with all its advantages, Casablancas Records barely succeeded. They were down to their last dime when they turned it around and became the most successful indie label of all time. Yes, they eventually sold half their company for $50 million, but they almost flamed out.
They had a low, low, low probability of success, and more money than god to dump into marketing until their record caught on, which is why having a runway is so important.
The longer you can keep making your work and sharing it around, the longer you have to find a hit to keep yourself in business. You don’t have to sell your soul to the mob in order to succeed, either, but you need to find ways to at least break even while you search for your hits.
So, as a new author, you now somehow need to write a long series (at least five books if you want the best chance of breaking even on ads) and enough money in the bank to find your hit…all at a time when 80% of people are living paycheck to paycheck.
If this is starting to feel like the deck is stacked against you…it is.
When I talk to publishers, we often talk about how publishing is a game of attrition. You are working to simply break even on projects and keep the lights on for years until you get a massive hit.
I have a friend that had to wait nearly 20 years for the hit that allowed them to 10x their business in a few years. I have another friend who had only had 2 hits since they opened, but those books sold millions upon millions of books.
In previous generations, the rule was that when you release 10 books, one of them paid for the other nine.
I don’t think that’s possible anymore. It really wasn’t ever possible, but survivorship bias is a killer. For every successful publisher that survived for 10+ years, I talk to a dozen that flamed out and a hundred others that ever even got started.
At Wannabe Press, we have to break even on every book and have from the beginning. When we got started, Katrina Hates the Dead kept me in business for years, but my other books still sold enough to become profitable. They each paid for themselves and Katrina paid for our expansion. Some months, those other books saved me.
On top of that, they only saved me because I had written off that money years before, so it was all found money to me.
The sole reason we even got to the point where Katrina Hates the Dead could keep us afloat was because I produced both that book and Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter volume 1, along with 4 other books, years before I launched the company.
I made them while I was still working a full-time job and after I received an insurance settlement that allowed me to pay off all our debt and have some left over. I had already absorbed their cost years before I ever launched my company.
Without all of that, Wannabe Press never would have gotten off the ground. Even with those things working in my favor, by the time we started making money from these books, I had spent all our money and then some investing in products no publisher wanted, just like Neil Bogart and Casablancas Records.
By the time I officially launched Wannabe Press in 2015, our savings were completely depleted. It took living hand-to-mouth until 2017 before we found a hit and started getting ahead. It was only because my wife had a good job and I somehow lucked into ownership of a Verizon dealership when I left my job that the company survived until fans took notice.
This is a very hard thing, and doing hard things is hard. It’s so hard to do creative work even if you are bound to fail at it, let alone succeed. I come from a middle-class family. I graduated from school with no debt. I married a woman who graduated from school with no debt. Our families were supportive of us, both emotionally and financially, when we struggled. We didn’t have any children, and we didn’t have any major life events that hampered us or illnesses that prevented us from moving forward…
…and still, with all of that…I almost failed.
It wasn’t until the middle of 2022 that I thought maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t have to find a job in the next six months to survive. As recently as last March, I was substitute teaching to supplement my income. Even now, my success is derived from multiple sources of income beyond fiction.
It took almost ten years of doing this work at a very, very high level, and a decade before then spent learning the trade, that I found any comfort in my position, and even now I am cognisant of the fact it could all go away tomorrow.
By the time I turned it around, our company had burned through $100,000. We weren’t $100,000 in debt, but only because of everything I mentioned above, and about a thousand lucky breaks. That’s not quite $33 million in debt, but it’s a lot of money.
It took living on a razor’s edge, robbing Peter to pay Paul, in order to get Katrina Hates the Dead off the ground. It took seven years for Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter to find an audience. It took gambling everything on numerous 50/50 shots and winning a dozen times in a row in order to get here.
When Monsters and Other Scary Shit became an actual hit in 2017, we had literally gambled everything on it and our upcoming Pixie Dust release. If they didn’t work…I don’t know what we would have done. Their success allowed us to keep going until Cthulhu is Hard to Spell became our biggest hit ever and proved we had staying power.
That is why I have trouble listening to people who can’t explain, or refuse to explain, how they manufacture a hit…
…which brings me to the reason why Rick Rubin grates on my every last nerve.
I saw this quote on Substack Notes recently, and it made every hair on my body stand on edge.
"It's fine to want to connect with an audience. And, if you want to connect with an audience… you have to ignore them when you are making the work. Because if you're making the work for the audience, it's no longer a genuine work. It's no longer authentic. The authenticity is what makes it good. You putting yourself into it, flaws and all. Ugly and all. Beautiful and all. Weird and all. All of those things are what makes people connect. So when I say "the audience comes last", I do mean it, but the reason the audience comes last is, the audience has to come last – in service to the audience. If you are making it for the audience, you will undershoot the target. If you are making it for yourself, you'll do the best work."
Here’s the thing about Rick Rubin, he says things that sound helpful but are in fact condescending and wrong. Every word out of his mouth feels like a truth, but when you scrape the surface, it falls apart under the slightest scrutiny.
You absolutely can, and should, think of your audience if you want to succeed in doing this work, and you can absolutely, 100%, manufacture a hit.
Watching Spinning Gold proves that there are ways to reverse engineer what makes a “hit” according to Casablancas Records. All the artists they spotlight are bold, outspoken, larger-than-life personalities that stole every inch they were given and pushed for more.
They created categories and pushed them into the popular zeitgeist. Parliament pushed funk to the forefront. Donna Summers was the godmother of disco. KISS created hair metal and spectacle rock. The Isley Brothers stood at the bleeding edge of R&B.
Casablancas Records created categories. That’s how they manufactured hits. They knew where the industry was, predicted where it was going, and saw the future.
Even in the movie, Neil Bogart says basically “When I heard their music I saw the future. All of it.”
As a visionary-type leader myself, this is how I work, too, which is probably why it resonated with me that much.
Neil Bogart was a tastemaker. Casablancas Records led the industry into the future. That was how they succeeded. It’s not the only way to succeed, but if they asked me to consult with them, I would tell them that across all their projects, they were trying to create the future.
Why weren’t they successful in those first years?
For the same reason, it took me forever to break through with non-fiction. The world wasn’t ready for their sound, just like the publishing industry wasn’t ready for direct sales in 2015. We were both living too far into the future.
Casablancas was the living embodiment of Marty McFly.
That’s why it made sense for them to pay DJs to play their records…because they needed to change the whole shape of the industry before people were comfortable buying their records.
This is not to say that everybody should build a "tastemaker” business. It is only to say that there is a definitive way to quantify what made Casablancas Records great.
No, not everything they made was successful, but knowing how they manufactured hits, and staying in that zone of genius, gives you the best chance at replicating that success…
…and avoiding their failures. If you aren’t careful, the same thing that makes a visionary great is also what kills them, in the end.
One of the hardest things for “tastemaker” artists to grabble with is that they don’t always have to be “new”. Somebody like Trent Reznor effectively created industrial rock, or at least broke it through to the masses, and then spent the next 30+ years refining it to what it is today.
He was a tastemaker who grew into an iconoclast. Most visionary artists spend their whole careers trying to be “new” instead of refining and honing what people love about their work.
Other writers work better acting as a warm, comfortable blanket. They create the same type of work every time, existing forever in the same space, writing the same types of stories, and relying on their fans to come back whenever they want the same “feeling” in their lives.
Their problem, of course, is that “comfort” artists can be drowned by the millions of others doing the same thing.
At their best, both of these creative types can learn and grow from each other.
As a visionary type, I learned to use my ability to “see the future” to create long-running series that took the best of where the industry was, what was popular at the moment, and where I envision the industry going and melded them into one product. Then, I combined that with the universal fantasy I give my readers and the themes that resonate through all my books to bring readers back to my work repeatedly.
That is how you manufacture a hit. It’s not perfect, but it’s way better than saying “just do your thing, buddy”.
Telling people art is ephemeral and unquantifiable is wrong and unproductive to people trying to make art their lives. When the odds are stacked against you, empty platitudes won’t help get you to the other side of the chasm.
That said, there is some truth in Rubin’s words because there are two parts to creating art; building the scaffolding in pre-production and then crafting the piece into its finished form.
In the planning stage, you should absolutely be thinking about your audience because every decision you make at the world-building level will either expand or narrow your audience. Are you making a broad fantasy starring a beautiful, tragic, relatable chosen one destined to save the world or a surrealist futuristic meditation on karma narrated by god?
One of those two books will reach a broad audience and the other will be appreciated by a narrow one. Neither is wrong, but they define the audience.
Considering your audience at this stage doesn’t make your work more or less “authentic”. It makes your art more or less marketable to a wide audience, but Taylor Swift makes work that is both authentic and broadly appealing.
More often than not, when I talk to authors, they are trying to market a niche book with a small potential audience like a broad one with mass market appeal.
No wonder they fail. You simply can’t treat those two the same. Success looks different for each of them. You won’t get the kind of CPC on the surrealist fiction to make Amazon ads profitable, for instance. So, you probably shouldn’t do them.
Instead, you might focus on influencer marketing, or building a niche audience mailing list who will pay top dollar and appreciate the quirkiness of it.
In general, the weirder your book, the more superfans will pay for it because there is nothing else like it. They scour the internet looking for similar books and are very appreciative when they find one.
The broader the appeal, the more people will buy it, but the more of a commodity becomes because it looks like many other things.
Both books can be massively successful, but not if you are going into the production of a book with the wrong expectations. You have to figure out the marketability of your book before you write it.
I call this “putting on your publisher hat”.
When you take that hat off and put on your “writer hat”, then you have to abandon all of that scaffolding and write for yourself, because that is how you make something uniquely you that will resonate with your audience.
I have a 12-book series called The Obsidian Spindle Saga, and during preproduction for it, I decided to make it as broadly appealing as possible. The first book is called The Sleeping Beauty, and features twists on fairy tales, mythology, and portal fantasy.
I made choices to make the series more appealing to more people. That said, the love story at the center of the story is between two women, which will limit the audience. Some people will love that part, while others will hate it, and still others will say that as a cis, het, white man I don’t have the right to center those kinds of stories.
In the planning stage, I understood all of that and still made those choices anyway. It was where my visionary self needed me to take the series for me to remain interested throughout the process.
When I started writing the books, I took all that planning and added my unique twists to them. I wrote for just one person, my wife, and added specific elements I thought she would like into the story. I took all that planning and spun it in ways only I could make them fit together.
What came out was something nobody else in the world could have written, but it still had elements that would attract the broadest audience possible.
This is how commerce and art can work together in practice. I still made art. However, I made choices that expanded the audience beyond my earlier work.
There is no doubt that using The Sleeping Beauty, The Wicked Witch, The Fairy Queen, and The Red Rider for the first four books will greatly increase the eyeballs willing to even give the books a chance.
However, when readers interact with the series it will be something only I could make because the words on the page were written without thinking about the broad audience at all.
A few years ago I listened to a Masterclass by Frank Gehry, and he said something that stuck with me ever since.
As an artist, I got constraints, gravity is one of them. But within all those constraints I have 15 per cent of freedom to make my art." - Frank Gehry
Artists think that constraints hamper them, but structure sets you and your audience free. You would never go on a rollercoaster if you weren’t confident that you would survive the experience. Confidence in your survival is what allows you to experience fear in a safe and fun way.
In the same way, if your audience is not confident they understand the promise they will get with your book, they will not be able to fully experience your world and deal with their emotions in a safe way.
Additionally, you can’t subvert tropes unless you understand those tropes. You can’t break structure in ways that will delight your audience if you don’t have a structure to begin with, either.
The more constraints you place on your work, the more your brain is able to explore and create true art. If you know the tropes of your genre, and the brand promise you offer as an artist, then you can break things in fun and interesting ways that will delight your readers.
Does structure destroy art, or does it enhance it? Does commerce degrade art, or does it allow for it to shine?
These are the questions artists have dealt with for generations, and there are no easy answers. What I do know is that I enjoy exchanging money for goods and services, but I also love creating art.
I have found ways to combine both of those things together in ways that enhance both. Sometimes, I made a project for the widest audience, and other times I write books that will only appeal to my truest fans.
Both have value. However, knowing why I’m making a book and who I’m making it for helps determine a reasonable outcome for my art.
Most disappointment in art comes not from the creation of a piece but in the disparity between reality and expectation when art collides with commerce.
If we set realistic expectations, then we can create better mental health practices for ourselves and sustain our careers for longer.
So, yes, authenticity is what makes good books. I just fundamentally disagree about what makes something authentic.
The Author Stack sits at the intersection of craft and commerce, helping writers build more sustainable businesses that allow them to thrive while creating work that lights them up inside. We strive to give authors agency in a world that too often seems intent on stripping it away from them.
We have hundreds of articles in our archive, along with fiction and non-fiction books for paid members.
If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.
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What you said about constraints hit perfectly for me, as a creator. It's something I've been trying to articulate for a while and you just did it in a big, encouraging way:
Don't tell me to think outside the box. I don't know what I'm doing outside the box. Give me a box -- the littler and the tighter the better -- and then I'll show you how the inside is bigger than the outside.
Thanks for sharing this perspective and the parallels with music and the story of Casablanca. Good stuff.
I hadn't read this Kurt Vonnegut quotation before:
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.