The First 4 Facets of Marketing Passion-led Fiction

There's more--but this is where we are right now.

Rory Sutherland says you can either determine what people want and discover a way to make it, or you can determine what you can make and inspire people to want it. In the end, the result is the same.

To translate for fiction writers, you can write to the market, or you can write what you want and bring the market to you.

Therein lies the great challenge. How does one bring the market to Mohamed? The answer will be multifaceted, and discovering and polishing those facets is Literary Salon’s ongoing pursuit. I would like to discuss my current thoughts on the subject, however—facet by facet.

First, if you’re here on Substack (or elsewhere) with a newsletter of your own, that’s the first step. When you write to the market you can fish by the stream because your bait conforms to the appetites of the majority. When your writing is more personal and passion-driven, the metaphor shifts from wild-caught to farm-raised.

It’s a fishy metaphor. I know.

We turn our fans into subscribers and our subscribers into fans. They’re in our mailing list, ready for the next story. That’s the first facet, a growing pool of readers.

The second facet is the lure. Readers who have a taste for our kind of fiction need to know that you’re offering what they want. This means specificity in messaging, and as uncomfortable a word as it may be, it means branding.

You can’t be vague. Tell people what you offer.

We need to lure in readers who are receptive to our type of story and then sell them on the way we tell it. Without specificity, you’ll gain more subscribers who won’t stay and you’ll miss subscribers who could have become lifelong fans.

The third facet is growth. If you want to turn that mailing list in into a sustainable source of income through paid subscriptions and book purchases, the primary way this is achieved is through numbers. Most everything else is optimizing the conversion from free to paid, but you need a large pool of subscribers who are selected for a bias toward your kind of writing. Not every subscriber will be the right fit, but if you position yourself well, a high percentage of them will be.

Positioning in this case is about specificity in messaging and the relevancy of your reader magnets. A free book is a great way to build your subscriber list, and if you have a limited number of books, then you use what you’ve got: a collection of short stories; a collection of essays from your newsletter; a novella or a novel, if you can give one away and still have something to sell.

The more relevant the book is to your body of work, the better.

I once saw a tweet that simply said people could get his novel free. Nobody responded. Free books aren’t hard to find. You have to tell people why they want yours, and that begins with what kind of story it is—specificity in messaging.

We hate AI for many reasons: early training was based on theft; it’s being used to replace humans in the creative endeavors that bring life meaning; it’s bad for the environment; and we’re just sick of everyone marketing everything as NOW WITH AI—like it’s the hot new flavor. That being said, we can’t protest it away, and there are legitimate uses. One is creating all the specificity of meaning that authors hate to write. Tell the program what you need and give it the information. If you need a book blurb or sales copy, it can do that for you.

You also need to get your message in front of people.

Bookbub is expensive but gets fantastic results if you can get chosen for one of their featured ads.

Bookfunnel is effective and only costs $100 a year. You just need to keep joining new promotions and bringing traffic to those promotions, because any one promotion soon gets stale. The participating newsletters can only send so many readers. It works. I love it, but not everyone wants to go through that. For some, the $100 is a barrier, too.

Here’s where I mention Bookmotion.

Bookmotion is like a Bookfunnel promotion with us pooling our money to buy Facebook ads. There’s a waiting list, and we won’t take anyone off the waiting list until it reaches sixty.

The promotion will select for appropriate readers as they choose their categories and select their book(s) from the category. It is another one of those dreaded business buzzwords: a funnel.

At the top level are all the Facebook users who see the ads. Those interested in books go to the page. Those interested in your category choose that page, and those intrigued by your book choose yours and subscribe to your newsletter. A large number at the top, with those who aren’t a good match filtered out along the way, until we reach the end of the funnel and you have new subscribers.

The fourth facet is asking for the sale. Offer the book. You can link to Amazon, but I’m big on using our own dedicated, direct bookstore where they see all your books.

Ask for the paid subscription. Ask for the purchase of your other services and products—just like I asked you to join Bookmotion. We’ll get into that in future articles, as we examine the art of offering other services and products without robbing yourself of writing time.

If we’re writing according to our own passions, we know we’re fighting a more difficult fight to get our readers. Every reader, every subscriber we have becomes precious—which leads us to…

The bonus facet: relationships.

The smaller you are, the easier it is to establish relationships. Go the extra mile for people. Be kind and supportive. Be generous.

I manage group homes for people with developmental disabilities, and it occurred to me one day that the same thing I teach my staff applies here. A relationships is the most powerful tool you will ever have. Nothing else compares. That’s what solves problems in the group home, and that’s what brings solutions with your readers.

You’ll grow soon enough, and if you want to generate an income or regular sales of any kind, growth is necessary. Our goal becomes thousands of subscriber—but to quote the book of Zechariah: don’t despise the days of small beginnings.

You can do things now that simply aren’t scalable, and as you grow, the way you establish and maintain relationships will change. While you’re small, you can make relationship that can last through all that.

Maybe friends become superfans and maybe they just remain friends. Most often, a friend is exactly what you need.

—Thaddeus Thomas

Click the image to visit Bookmotion and select a book.

And join the Bookmotion waitinglist.