03 Who's Stopping Writer Success?
Serial - Episode 3: The mystery deepens as we examine the crime scene...
Writers are encouraged to create books exactly for the whales.
The most successful write in specifically popular genres, covering the expected tropes. They write in interconnected series.
But even while apparently covering all bases, there is no guarantee that your book will generate sales enough to cover your expenses. It's often only by the fifth book in that series that the whole set becomes profitable. Because readers will find a later book, enjoy what it brings, and then go back to buy the earlier ones.
Frequently, authors will run ads for and discount the first in the series to persuade new readers to buy, who then get hooked for the entire set.
If you are able to churn out boilerplate popular books in the hottest categories, exactly meeting the tropes – by the day, week, and month, and year – then you have a chance to make an income that will support you.
And there is about three or four-tenths of one percent chance that you can.
How Conventional Publishing Breaks Down
Yes, the above system works for many authors. Particularly fiction writers who can afford to invest heavily in the early years of production – and who are prolific beyond measure. Those who love to read and write in the popular genres.
That interconnection break down when the author's own individual style varies too much from the boilerplate tropes the readers want. They won't get traction. The sales never show up, and those authors are in debt from the production and advertising costs that their booksales failed to pay for.
More authors are slightly outside the main trope-driven genres. They are expressing Thoreau's “different drummer” creative mindset. There approaches aren't popular, but they are still good stories. Their audience is smaller, and not inside the mainstream genre borders.
Most authors are in that last boat. A few make this system work, but not many. For the vast majority, that system is broken.
Amazon tends to discourage writers and authors from communicating directly. This is a bastardization of the traditional market place ethos. They've built a massive database of buyer emails and purchase history to recommend what Amazon thinks they most want. For instance, Amazon bought the review site Goodreads, which used to be a valuable community for readers to review authors and books for each other. But since that site has been revamped to only service Amazon, it's more like a ghost town.
A seemingly logical approach to solve this could be social media – where it should be fairly simple for writers and readers to meet. But, no...
Social Media's Failed Conventional Wisdom
There is a consistent push – which has become conventional wisdom – that all authors need to do “social media marketing”, especially for finding readers for their books. The theory is to amass followers, engage with them, and convert them into buyers. All this is done outside of the non-existent communication channels of the book distributors.
But this factually gets you nowhere fast. Because any of your social media posts that have an out-bound link in them go exactly nowhere. Both Meta (Facebook, Instagram) and X/Twitter have announced they won't be sharing any posts there with links in them that go outside their platforms. Because those social media corporations don't have to. They control what their viewers see on that platform. Only a tiny percentage of social media denizens will even share a post that they do get to read there.
Again, they are pushing a corrupted marketplace ethos.
All this “engaging and conversion” becomes a big time suck – and takes you away from writing.
The basic problem is that social media isn't a platform where people go to buy. Social media doesn’t sell your books or anything else – because they only sell ads.
Not that those ads sell many products - Advertisers pay for how many times they are seen, not whether anyone actually buys.
Recent study shows ads on social platforms get only 3 clicks out of a thousand views. And clicks aren’t purchases.
That’s worse results than the click-through rates for email spam in your in-box.
Because it's all about them. You are the social media's product. And they think piling people up inside their walled garden makes the best economic sense – for them, not anyone else.
The only people who are able to get any boost from social media have massive followings. Like literally hundreds of thousands of followers – even millions. Because roughly the same percentages apply. 100,000 followers can give you (in theory) 300 possible clicks. Then your click-through-rate of your content might get you 3 sales.
But building that following takes years of daily posting and commenting and engaging. Many take as many as 5 years or more. Others, who are already famous by becoming rich or a celebrity in the real world, can attract followers more quickly. It's still not overnight, even for them.
Social Media Isn't for Everyone – or Anyone.
When you see someone talking exclusively about using social media for marketing, you know they are some sort of “guru” who already has tons of followers. Their purpose isn’t to make a living selling books, it’s usually to get paid speaking or consulting gigs about how to succeed on social media. That's just the way it is.
They aren't making money from selling books or products on social media – they are making contacts for pitching their own services. This is loosely called “networking”.
And social media consultants - who get paid better if you spend your time “engaging” on social media, so you're spending more time on these platforms. So you continually need more of their “consulting”.
Social media is built on your back. They make money by getting you dopamine-addicted and showing you ads. They aren’t your friend. You are a commodity to them. A dopamine addict.
If you quit all your social media tomorrow, none of them would care. Because there are billions more out there to take your place.
There is actual life outside of social media. Lots of it.
Again: social media has no product. It improves no one's life quality. None of their years of operating their scam has resulted in any cultural or scientific breakthroughs. They are leeches. And got insanely rich by addicting this culture to their “product”.
Social media just puts another interloper between you and your customers. You aren't able to contact them directly. And you can't send your readers to your site or somewhere to find and buy your books.
So, what are they thinking to spend all this time promoting themselves as the one-stop shop for marketing?
Why Big Tech Treats You Like That
Cory Doctorow in late 2022 attributed all of the perverted conduct on Big Tech (which also includes Amazon) to one of the Cardinal Sins – Greed. (He aptly named it “ensh*tification”.) The social media and Big Tech companies have proved again and again why it is a Cardinal Sin. It does no one any good. And vast amounts of ill-gotten gains helps no one sleep better at night. Doctorow laid out how they did it – they started buying up the competition and then buying off the government, “helping” them re-write the laws to benefit the Big Tech monopoly overlords.
Doctorow recommends taking the time to break up these monopolies through legal operations. And he's probably right in a broad sense. Even though, as he points out, it took 69 years to break up AT&T.
Personally, writers can't wait around that long. We all have our lives to lead – mortgages, rent, food, and utility bills to pay.
The trick is: people can get along just fine without any social media. They can quit any time they want.
Underlying all this is that digital-only products and businesses based on these (social media, Web3, crypto-anything, AI) – none of these have staying power. Because they are based on nothing that actually exists in the real world. If the Internet disappeared tomorrow, they'd no longer exist. One global EMP strike and they're gone.
Meanwhile, people are consistently continuing to buy paperbacks and print versions of books in far greater volume than their digital counterparts – always have.
This points to the idea that ebooks may be best used as Self-Liquidating Offers – and then only used as loss leaders and advertisements for the physical object. You want to lure people back toward the real world and give you their email address for that service.
Don’t miss the earlier installments in this series: