The Taylor Swift Solution to the Doctorow Conundrum
Unlike Amazon and Facebook, the NFL has backed away from their own greed accelerated demise (GAD).
Part 1 in a series
Yes, we all enjoy cliffhangers. And in last night’s Super Bowl, we were waiting for the happy ending where Kelse got kissed by Taylor.
No, not really. But just a few years ago, the NFL was playing to empty stadiums because of management choices to embrace other importances than playng football and having Clydesdales hauling Budweiser for beer ads.
This article isn’t about sports, it’s about marketing books. Big surprise with that title? Let’s keep going, I’ll get there.
Because before I was reclining with my sports-loving wife to watch this year’s drag-on game, I had spent most of the afternoon studying how book marketing was supposed to work and how it actually did.
But before we get into that, we have to bring in Cory Doctorow. He’s infamous for many things in addition to being a prolific writer. One of these fame-points is because he coined the phrase “ensh*ttification.”
I have Tara McMullin to thank for that. There, and here, this pull quote:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
- Cory Doctorow -
There’s a further explanation of this (from Doctorow’s article), a bit more granular:
I call this ensh*ttification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
The long and short of it - Amazon (and Facebook and Twitter, Google, et al.) no longer work the way they were promoted. And to simplify the terminology (and quit typing asterisks) let’s use that Greed Accelerated Demise (GAD) above.
Because that’s what’s doing it. Greed on steroids.
And if you read Doctorow’s and others articles about GAD, you’ll find it’s almost a given to today’s societal and cultural problems. Businesses grow because they fill a need, then get greedier, and collapse under their own incestual greed.
Why Book Marketing No Longer Works Like It Was Supposed To
Basically, most book marketing became Amazon-centric. Amazon pushed the high-profit “ebook” which cost nothing to deliver and had huge profits.
Sure, I was on that bandwagon. So were romance writers - and so were scammers. You once could make a ton of money by “writing to market” (read “boilerplating”) and churning out .99 or 2.99 ebooks of about 300 pages that would get consumed by avid readers who seemed to do nothing but read books. And these were easier than having a lot of paperbacks that you have to lug around and re-sell for pennies on the dollar when your shelves and floors started groaning under their weight.
Book marketing still kinda-sorta works. But mostly not - because Amazon (as in that article) keeps changing the rules. No other book distributor uses reviews. Amazon is always adding new “categories” for similar types of books - but these don’t align to “BISAC” rules for organizing books. So when you use something to ferret out where and what to market in their book area, then you wind up with data that you have to translate elsewhere - or just stay only on Amazon.
Of course, the slow grind of their ads and truly lousy book sales pages (where there are some 200 links on each page that go somewhere else) force you to advertise on your own book page - or someone else will.
But on Kobo and others, you simply get more books by that author. Very few others are recommended. And (for now) Kobo doesn’t run ads for refrigerators, supplements, and cat-raising supplies along with their books. Because Kobo only sells ebooks. And do this much better than Amazon.
The reason I was studying Amazon was to test two services I use in order to find the best BISAC genre to put my book in, and perhaps to tweak the emphasis of how the book was organized to help it sell better. (Those services are k-lytics.com and Kindlepreneur’s Publisher Rocket.)
How both of those work is to scrape Amazon’s data and give you better choices instead of spending hours on fruitless searches.
The funny thing that came up in doing these studies is that they were both telling the same story: Amazon is slowly dying from GAD.
And there’s nothing anyone can do to help them. (As if anyone would want to, after how they’ve treated their authors - but I digress.)
All this number-crunching is mind-numbing. And as Mark Twain said: “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Since I can see this is going to be a long debrief, in several parts, lets get back how Taylor Swift solve’s Doctorow’s situation.
Doctorow said in his various theses on his subject that both the Government (with it’s own incessant GAD problem) should get involved. But more accurately that people should simply extract from these companies and take their money elsewhere.
Taylor Swift was the solution to the NFL’s GAD scene. They were facing multiple boycotts - mainly viewer drop-off (like a cliff) because they abandoned the principles and norms that their viewers wanted. Mainly, sports without politics - just entertainment. After their Bud Light moment with Kapernick’s protests, their ham-handed solutions just drove fans away.
Then Taylor Swift started attending boyfriend Kelse’s games, and all that was history. (And all their advertisers learned from Bud Light and produced entertaining and non-political ads again.) Swifties then started affecting viewership.
Boycott? What boycott?
We still have the problem that books are harder to market than ever.
And I’ll get into figuring out how to market into this mess in an upcoming Part 2. Because I have a lot more resesearch to do in confirming what is working, what probable solutions we have.
For now, please enjoy these AI-generated images from GAB Ai
Upcoming:
How to figure out where you book fits to get best sales.
What formats to also publish in and how these increase profit from the same book.
How you learn from what scammy book authors don’t - by reversing their example.
The one principle and strategy that is always profitable in all sales or marketing.