Writing into existence

The only way out is through

Reading time: approximately 10 minutes

Hello again my darling readers!! 💖

Because the Internet now knows what we’re thinking, YouTube surfed me a video about author marketing and business from Joanna Penn’s podcast: Build A Successful Author Business For The Long Term With Joe Solari

In the episode, Joe Solari and Joanna spent a lot of time talking about the recent trend of authors direct selling to readers (i.e., selling readers books not through a middleman like a publisher or Amazon). Joe said:

This whole economy is built on what I call the reader-writer relationship.

If there aren't writers writing stories and readers that are prepared to exchange money for those stories, none of this stuff exists. There is no publishing, there's no Amazon, there's no ads, there's none of that stuff…

The more we cut out middlemen, two things happen.

One is the profit piece, but the other thing is you can deliver the experience that you want to deliver.

And in the end, like books are a medium for an experience, right? Whether you listen to a book or you read a book, you know, you're telling a story, and somebody's experiencing that story.

The more that you have control over the things around that experience, so like when they come to your website, you can do things that you can't do on anybody else's sales platform.

It can be on-brand for you. Like, it can be all about your characters and story world, whatever you want it to be, you have 100% control over that.

And that, for me, becomes the most important thing to differentiate yourself going into this marketplace in the future is— How are people seeing you versus other people?

Oh, you write epic fantasy, and when I go to your website, there's all these cool pictures, and things about your characters. Your emails come to me, they're written by this old wizard that sees the whole world, and I feel like I'm more and more immersed in that world. Because for fiction people, that's an entertainment thing.

I’ve been seeing a lot of this idea around the Internet lately, about how the publishing industry is at a turning point, and the new publishing model is only going to work for writers who make direct connections with their readers. The idea is that the attention economy has finally become so oversaturated that it is imploding. People are resisting tricks and ads and algorithms to pull their attention all over the place and will therefore only buy from people they trust.

I’m having a lot of ideas and feels around this. It’s still building a brand, but instead of being authentically yourself on a platform with the goal of monetizing your audience, this idea seems to be about providing an experience for your readers that your readers love. It’s about getting readers to trust in your ability to provide the experience they want rather than trusting your personality in a parasocial relationship. Which sounds a lot less creepy.

While on the one hand sending out emails written as my characters sounds like it could be a lot of fun (the most meta epistolary story ever written!!), I have to wonder—is that really the experience readers want?

I know I read an awful lot of speculative fiction where I have zero desire to know more about the author. I mean I hope they are happy and healthy and that writing brings them much joy and satisfaction, and I only half mean that so that they will keep writing books I want to read. I want to jump into the worlds they are creating for hours at a time so I’m not living in my sometimes stressful disappointing reality for a bit. They might have newsletters or websites and I really don’t care. I just want to buy their next book and slide out of this existence and into their made-up world.

Of course, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Brandon Sanderson fans that would probably disagree with me that this is the ultimate reading experience. Vociferously.

But it does make me wonder about this idea of creating a bunch of content to get people to buy the art that the artist really wants to be making instead of creating content. If we are slowly beginning to accept that attention is finite and people are starting to get very choosy about where they want to put theirs, how helpful is all this extra content around the art? And yes, I’m well aware that these essays I write could fall under the heading of “extra content” while you all are waiting on me to deliver these fiction stories that I am very publicly struggling to write. It’s not the experience I prefer from the fiction writers I read.

At the end of the day, I want to be immersed in an author’s worlds, not their heads.

Oh, wow! It almost hurts to admit that! Because I enjoy writing and sharing these essays so much!

But maybe I just needed to learn how to be more vulnerable in public, how to write emotionally and authentically in my own voice and understand that I won’t get smashed into a thousand pieces if I open up. I’m still kind of surprised I haven’t, honestly. I thank you, darling readers, for your generous help with that. 💖

What if….what if marketing could be art?

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Upon reading my newsletter last week, an excellent friend reached out to me with support and a desire for me to not get hung up on the capitalism of it all and just write the stories since writing the stories was actually working. It was a sweet and wonderful note to receive, and I feel supported and loved and grateful, and no, I absolutely cannot just focus on the writing. Because I need to know what I am writing for. When I wrote those stories, I was in a writing workshop, there were deadlines and expectations, and that’s why writing was produced.

If there is no audience, what’s the point? If there is an audience, I will write for it. But I don’t know how to get the audience. So I don’t write. But to get the audience, I have to write. But if there’s no audience, what’s the point…..

There it is. There’s my fun tension of opposites that I keep banging back and forth between. It’s why I can’t just produce now and market later. Because the second I start trying to write without expectation, I’m just stuffing down all these feelings about how much I want to share my work. When I start trying to figure out how to share my work, I don’t see the path forward. So I sit on the lack of audience so-few-writers-ever-make-it feelings of mild depression and de-motivation and try to write stories until I can’t keep a lid on the feels anymore, and then I stop writing. And start researching how to build a platform.

Well, you know what? I didn’t learn all that Jungian shit for nothing, my friends. I healed my decade-long writer’s block by completely giving up on writing for years and letting it come back to me without the desperation. I dug into my unconscious and figured out that my relationship to writing broke when I was disenrolled from my tribe. I have come to terms with how damaging my formal writing education was to my process. I have sought and sought and sought and finally found and internalized the craft theories of story creation that resonate with me. I have learned how to open up and write emotionally.

I am not going to let a little tension of opposites trip me up five feet from the damn finish line. Abso-fucking-lutely NOT.

Time to individuate the hell out of this thing. Let’s go.

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Brass tacks: Marketing professionals sound like egomaniacal, psychologically manipulative bullshit artists who are thrilled to teach their morally bankrupt techniques on how to engineer people’s behavior.

I mean, I could use my “I statement”s and qualify this. But let’s take Mr. Joe Solari from the interview above as an example. He really wants to help writers build sustainable businesses. Sounds laudable. Here’s a quote from his website:

In the last email, I told the story of how the American West was changing in the 1870s. I shared how General Sherman applied second-order thinking to use his limited resources to drive the plains natives from their nomadic lifestyle and on to reservations.

Regardless of your opinion of the man, respect his ability to get to the heart of a problem and leverage the results he desired.

While there was an armed conflict, the war was won by eliminating the Native American economy’s linchpin – bison. His army protected hunters and settlers on hunts and incentivized them by paying bounties for buffalo tongues.

Tragedy of the Commons part 3 of 3, joesolari.com

I just keep re-reading that sentence.

Regardless of your opinion of the man, respect his ability to get to the heart of a problem and leverage the results he desired.

Respect the ability of someone who’s answer to a problem was to destroy a species, hundreds of cultures, and thousands of families. Who actively changed the course of generations of lives from happiness and prosperity to poverty and exploitation and fighting genocide. To get results.

If this is the kind of problem solving mindset it takes to get people to buy my product experience, then I’d rather never write another word again, thank you very much.

And here I am, not writing another word.

This is the real insidiousness lying at the heart of my feelings. I want to find my audience, but not if I have to make a devil’s bargain to get results.

So, let’s just skip that, shall I? I’m going to just say right now 1000% that I am not going to make compromises I don’t want to make. I’m going to assume that I can find my audience without engaging in the sort of marketing practices that would make me a terrible person.

Ha! Take that, unconscious! I’ve got your back over here. WE AREN’T SELLING OUT, BABY!!!! ✊

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So what the fuck am I doing then?

I like this idea of thinking about the reader’s experience, but not in the genre-research keyword-searching Amazon product category sales funnel kind of way. In the way that an actual human will experience it. I like the idea of melding reader experience into my writerly muse art-making process. And instead of making content around the art, I like the idea of making more art around the art.

Like the way musicians market an album. Or used to. With cover art, and live performance, and costumes and photoshoots. With interviews talking about the album. All different forms of art building on each other to entice the notice of fans.

Writers still do readings, right? Go on tours, virtual or otherwise? Find great art for their covers? Do interviews (maybe on podcasts now)? These techniques still work, don’t they?

With people moving off of social media, with the big platforms collapsing in on themselves, in this post-pandemic world where we are craving physical experiences again, isn’t this the perfect time to, like, go out to an open mic night or something and put our work literally in front of people?

And what if instead of fearing that I’ll have to ruthlessly psychologically manipulate people into reading my work, or that I’ll have to turn my life into the Brand of Me and answer every comment and engage one-on-one with every single fan every single day, or write what sounds like a sure thing to an editorial department…instead of holding on to those fears, what if I trust that readers want the worlds that live in my head most, and my work for them—for you—is to make those worlds as visceral and compelling and fun and easy to access as I can. And that that is the best marketing strategy of all.

Let’s find out!

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As always, my darlings, if you have made it this far, my deepest gratitude. 💖 I’m not sure yet exactly what these new ideas are going to mean for this newsletter, but since Substack is my only active platform right now, it’s where the magic is going to be happening.

Till next time,

💗 💗 💗

Elnora