Book Marketing Breakthrough 07 - Build a Community of True Fans

A stint as a living statue taught one performer the core of building her fan base that helped her find success. And so proved a model in our own time that has been true for writers through history.

Jan 06, 2025

Amanda Palmer's Journey

Amanda Palmer traces her success as a music icon from performing as a living statue in Harvard Square, Cambridge. The lessons from this short stint proved to resound through her life. This eventually helped her create a record-setting music Kickstarter from her nearly 25,000 fans, cracking over a million dollars in pledges.

After that, she was invited to give a TED talk.

In his “Talk Like TED”, by Carmine Gallo describes it so:

Without saying a word, Amanda Palmer walked on stage and placed a milk crate on the floor.

She stepped on the crate, draped a veil across her left arm, and held out a flower in her right hand. She slowly took in two deep breaths, posed motionless for several seconds, and spoke:

“So I didn’t always make my living from music. For about five years after graduating from an upstanding liberal arts university, this was my day job. I was a self-employed living statue called the 8-Foot Bride, and I love telling people I did this for a job, because everybody always wants to know, who are these freaks in real life?

“Hello. I painted myself white one day, stood on a box, put a hat or a can at my feet, and when someone came by and dropped in money, I handed them a flower and some intense eye contact. And if they didn’t take the flower, I threw in a gesture of sadness and longing as they walked away.”

Palmer delivered the first three minutes of her presentation while standing on the crate, reliving her experiences and the people who gave her money. “I had no idea how perfect a real education I was getting for the music business on this box.” Eventually, her band earned enough money and she quit being a street performer. As soon as Palmer told the audience she had quit being a statue, she walked off the box. The box remained on the stage as Palmer delivered her presentation, its presence acting as a metaphor for her narrative:

“I decide I’m just going to give away my music for free online whenever possible … I’m going to encourage downloading, sharing, but I’m going to ask for help, because I saw it work on the street.

“My music career has been spent trying to encounter people on the Internet the way I could on the box, so blogging and tweeting not just about my tour dates and my new video but about our work and our art and our fears and our hangovers, our mistakes, and how we see each other. And I think when we really see each other we want to help each other.”

Palmer concluded her presentation with this challenge:

I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, “How do we make people pay for music?” What if we started asking, “How do we let people pay for music?”

As she said thank you, Palmer pulled out the flower that she had used to open her presentation, extended the flower to her listeners with an outstretched hand, and threw it into the audience. The audience jumped to its feet for a sustained 15-second standing ovation. Palmer the musician had given the performance of her life and hadn’t played a note.

Palmer’s TED 2013 video received more than one million views within one week of being posted online.

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Following this TED talk, she then landed a book deal, which became her “The Art of Asking”. After that publication, she resumed touring and recording.

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Is There an Alternative Model?

I’m suspecting the conventional model is wrong here. And that is the core of good research: looking for commonalities and boiling these down to evergreen models.

At its core, the three elements above (Clear offer, Consistent appearances, Building community) are correct.

But very inefficient. If you get the subject wrong, your offer has no takers = fail. If you get the price wrong, then you get few takers, or you lose your shirt on production. If you don’t promote to the right audience, you get no takers.

And there’s no telling which one or which combination it is.

Suppose you simply apply the Content Marketing supposition that you need to “build an audience” and then ask them. Well, that model has usually required between 18 months to 2 years before you get enough audience to develop a viable demand.

The trick is that it's not the numbers of audience that counts – it's the community among those audience members. There are many reports of people writing on Substack to have many paid subscribers within six months. (Not to surprisingly, most of these “overnight successes” already spent years building an audience on another platform, and then invited them over.)

Otherwise, you can use the Substack model of simply creating content that you are most interested and emotionally involved in and posting these consistently to your newsletter, as well as being active on Notes for a limited time every day, which builds community in its own way.

This follows the copywriting datum that your headline and your subheading (first paragraph) act as filters for readers. They self-select. And this is true for newsletters - you’ll attract people who like your work.

What’s interesting with this last idea is that it is best explained by the Give-Ask-Accept model.

Give-Ask-Accept

Amanda Palmer is probably the breakthrough in this. She came from a life of learning to ask instead of forcing to buy. Once she found her recording company had considered her first album’s 25,000 sales a failure, she found she’d also sold her income rights in perpetuity to them, plus a few more. So she then escaped from her straitjacket big label music contract and started giving her music away. Then letting her true fans contribute what they wanted. She started a Kickstarter for her next album and set a record of nearly $2 million from 25,000 fans.

Those 25,000 fans were aggregated one by one - through giving her concerts and giving away her music. She would often spend as much time meeting her fans after the concert as the concert itself took. All one-on-one. Signing things they brought, talking with them, directly looking into their eyes, often holding their hand.

Open-handed giving.

In her “Art of Asking” book’s Appendix, there is a brilliant article by Maria Popova, where she points out that there is a natural cycle of open-handed giving and receiving that has been noticed through our cultural histories, although not particularly popular in our current day:

“In Buddhism and other ancient Eastern traditions, there is a beautiful concept connoted by the Pali word dāna (pronounced DAH-nah ), often translated as the virtue of generosity. But at its heart is something far more expansive—a certain quality of open-handedness in dynamic dialogue with need and organically responsive to it. The practice of dāna has sustained the Buddhist tradition for two and a half millennia—monks give their teachings freely, and the lay people who benefit from them give back to the monks by making sure their sustenance needs are met.

“In a sense, dāna is the art of not-having-to-ask—a natural and intuitive recognition that the energies poured into creating meaning (and what is art if not the making of meaning?) must be replenished in order for that stuff of substance to continue flowing through and fertilizing the ecosystem of interconnectedness in which all beings are entwined.”

The model of Palmer seems to be Give-Ask-Accept. This is a continuing cycle which flows through our commerce lanes. You don't really have much of a choice, or way to really stop it. For it will go on without you, much as Palmer's 8-foot bride would offer a flower in exchange for donations, and a look of sadness if the flower wasn't accepted.

She gives an example in her book about how the give-ask-accept flow continues on – of encountering a barista fan who now offers you free coffee:

“Ben Folds, a piano-slaying, songwriting friend of mine, wrote a song called “Free Coffee” about the irony of being showered with certain kinds of help once you don’t need it as much. It’s a kind of Murphy’s Law. Let’s call it Ben’s Law:

“Once you’re a well-known artist who can afford to buy coffee, some percentage of the independent coffee shops you walk into will be staffed by a fan who will offer you free coffee. You will want to scream, I DON’T NEED FREE COFFEE! I CAN FINALLY AFFORD COFFEE, I COULD EVEN BUY LIKE TWO HUNDRED COFFEES AND NOT FEEL THE FINANCIAL STING or NOW? NOW YOU OFFER ME FREE COFFEE?

“And you will realize you’re staring down the barrel of your past, being offered free coffee by a previous incarnation of your barista self, the one who worked at Toscanini’s and had $26 in her bank account. And you will look at yourself and remember how you used to give free coffee to the people you admired and liked, to your friends, to your family, to the old professor of yours who walked into the shop and barely recognized you.

“So you will take the coffee, because the truth of the matter is that your acceptance of the gift IS the gift. And if you’re not in a hurry, you will also draw the barista a picture, or draw a picture for his friend who’s a huge fan, or tell her about the Ben Folds song. And when he’s not looking, you leave a ten-dollar bill in the tip jar.

“Because you can. And because you remember how fucking amazing it used to feel to empty out the tip jar and see a ten-dollar bill.

“The gift must always move.”

Our Modern Cutative Approach

The cutative approach is to somehow give only with the expectation of a certain monetary sum in return - or, preferably, in advance. And so our businesses revolve around discounts and limited offers - rather than open-handed help and assistance without asking anything directly in return.

We don't recognize our own gifts coming back to us.

We don't see we need to be “fertilizing the ecosystem of interconnectedness in which all beings are entwined.”

This is the stuff that gives our lives – and all around us – meaning.

The closest I've seen to this is in Cialdini’s “Influence”, where he describes the principle that when you give gifts to others, this then sets the receiver as somehow indebted to you as the giver.

Before the direct mail expenses became too high, Nightingale-Conant would send free cassette-sets in the mail, knowing that it was a year-long process to get that first purchase from that individual. But in their experience, the certainty was there. Their metrics proved it. Life-long buyers resulted.

Come forward to today’s idea of “pay what you want” as Gumroad and others have implemented. Your value is much higher. And so the person is always ready to give at some point in the future.

Only, as the barista example points out – our returns are not necessarily direct and definite. The process tends to give new meaning to the Golden Rule – by clarifying it as open-ended.

So we then return to the idea of giving far more in advance than we expect. Substack has stories of people who simply found themselves getting paid subscribers “out of the blue” after their free readers were finding valuable materials given to them open-handedly and simply wanted to return the favor.

How Does This Build Community?

It depends on your giving.

It's developing a consistent ask, a consistent offer, consistently being helpful open-handedly.

Your readers know much about you from your newsletters - but too often, they are themselves a mystery. Once you start interacting with them on a personal level, then you can tailor your offers to those readers on a personal basis.

But the attitude has to go beyond the concept that the “audience” is a neutral and buying force out there, completely anonymous.

Let’s go back to the idea that a person has a certain number (on average) of people they can effectively network with. Dunbar’s number has this value set at 150 on average. Authors usually sell only 250 books, which is explained as the immediate number of friends, associates, and family that they can influence. Plugging Kelly’s True Fans concept into this, let’s set $50K and a suitable annual income level for an author. Then with 250 people on their list sending them $200 every year would make their income.

Of course, that author would want to spend some time regularly interacting with these people to make that happen. And here is a possible marketing approach.

Consider the idea of four Kickstarters a year, and each of their True Fans then buying four sets of $50 offers. Or 250 fans on a Patreon tier where they pay about $20 per month. Or combinations of the above, plus buying your regular commercial books at going rates for ebooks, paperbacks, and hardbacks.

This does probably entail a larger number of free subscribers who are then moving on and off paid services. Or perhaps only buying one-off offers, or some combination. Your free newsletters continue unabated meanwhile.

You want to know your fans, build relationships, and be willing to get intimate with them. And give them help.

The point is to open-handedly give and enable people to pay whatever they want to back your success.

It's not making people want to buy your stuff.

It's letting them find ways to pay you for your art.

Then you are marketing for real.

And then the universal gift keeps moving.

Community Principles

We are all interconnected.
The exchange necessary for communities is openhanded giving and help.
Its formula seems to be Give-Ask-Accept.
Its only rule is that it has to keep moving.
The Kelly True Fans model then says you can earn support from a much smaller community of patrons who support your work, rather than a huge number of anonymous readers purchasing undervalued and discounted books.

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Finally, let’s see next (and finally) how all this fits together into a cohesive system of elements which make it possible for any author to market their writing and earn a livable income…

How This Can Help You

This course evolved while I was wrapping up the first three books in this series - and became part of the fourth book (see below.)

In that fourth book are three mini-courses — this is just the second lesson of the first course in there. The reason for this last book is to give you actionable material to get you started simply. And speed your own progress.

Meanwhile, comment below or DM me with any questions you have. Or get this full book as available below.

And you can always buy me a coffee…