By Novae Caelum · Originally published
I’m actually not sure it’s even other publishers
So I’ve been thinking a lot about the publishing world. I was telling Cassie last week that I had a Capital T Thought: what if our competition as authors isn’t other authors, but actually other publishers?
And, in some ways, authors who are also publishers.
But ALSO:
“And also, authordom is so circle-jerked into infinity that they can’t in some ways be competitors if we want to break out of that”
And that is the reality I’ve been churning on for a while now. And, partly, why I’m pursuing filmmaking with such ferocity—I want out. I want out of that circle jerk into infinity that is authordom.
Right now, authordom is eating itself alive. Few people are actually thinking about creativity and innovation, everyone is accusing each other, everyone’s being accused, everyone is upset and angsty.
This isn’t new to the age of AI. This was going on waaay before—I’ve had conversations with other authors about sensitivity and writing diversely and had answers such as: if you can’t afford sensitivity readers, then you shouldn’t publish, period. Lo and behold, another form of gatekeeping. I’ve watched authors being taken down by mobs long before AI was on the horizon.
What’s happening with AI panic in authordom now is ugly, but it’s not new.
Once AI blows over, authordom will find another subject to rage about.
And—yes there are so many authors who are quietly trucking and enjoying themselves immensely in what they do.
But the parts of authordom that surface online tend to be ugly as hell—sugary sweet until someone feels threatened in some way, and then all hell breaks loose.
Is this cynical AF? I don’t like that it is. And also, I’ve been in this realm long enough (since 2010 or so) to see the patterns. And they seem to keep getting worse. At what point does everything combust?
Setting all that aside: you don’t need authordom to be an author.
Actually, you might be a lot better mostly outside of it.
And THAT is the realization I’m really churning on. We as indies have built a pretty robust community—we think—except, it’s a very small bubble in the vastness of the creative realms. It’s even smaller, just the tiniest speck, in the fabric of industry and tech and all jobs that exist.
We’re significant—yes. Authors do have a huge impact on society at all levels. But the actual industry of authordom doesn’t have as much impact as we’d like to think. Not, at least, if you stay in the bubble.
Cassie and I have been going to Pierre Jeanty’s Direct to Readers Skool calls every week, and we’ve been learning a toooon about how ads diversity actually works.
It’s not at all what we’ve been taught in authordom.
(I highly highly rec his Skool if you run a direct store and run Meta ads to it! It’s an absolute treasure trove, and Pierre is amazing!)
And, I think so much of authordom is so self-referential that that’s what a lot of the marketing crisis that’s happening right now with a lot of authors is about. Things that have worked solidly for the last few years are stale—readers know all the tropes, all the vibes, all the formats. There’s very little that’s new in book marketing—except AI.
These things do all still work, but, not on their own anymore. And only watching other authors for ideas on how to break into other realms isn’t going to cut it. Because all those authors are only watching themselves and you.
I think the days of being happily in an author bubble are mostly over—you have to look outside it. We really should have been all along. The indie industry of publishing is mature; the surface area has broadened and gotten crowded. Even the rush of special edition specialness isn’t the same as it once was. Nor is selling to readers by hand on places like TikTok Shop. The people doing truly innovative things are the ones breaking past all of this, but, most people don’t seem to realize that requires actually breaking out of the author realm to look beyond it.
When I was first adding actual craft books to the writing I’d already taught myself, I bounced off of most typical craft books and shot straight to the screenwriting books. Or even the director’s books. At the time, I thought something was wrong with me in not wanting to “learn the craft” that everyone was telling me I should learn—really, I already knew most of that craft from my own hundreds of thousands of words already down in my teenage years, and I wanted the meat of story. And…that meat of story wasn’t in most writing craft books at the time. The fiction books told you how to write good sentences—the screenwriting books told you how to tell good stories. (Fwiw there are better craft books now…and I still haven’t read them, lolsob.)
I think we need to do the same thing with marketing. Many of us have absorbed all the marketing that authordom and Booktok can offer. More Booktok and authordom marketing practices are not going to be what takes us to the next levels in our business, and what’s becoming necessary next levels, even.
You need to be looking at trendy brand instagrams, at offbeat marketers, at accounts that go viral often—outside of Booktok. Pull in broader marketing Youtubes and Substacks, look at what other creators are doing with Youtube. Look at what’s happening in the vertical dramas spaces, because those companies have mass testing of ideas on lock.
Our competition isn’t other authors, or even, I think, other publishers. Our competition is any other source of entertainment that holds people’s attention—full stop.
Our world is full of entertainment. People spend hours of their day scrolling on their phones. Hours binging streaming and Youtube. Hours playing games. And, hours reading books.
But a lot of people like all of those things. And if a reader is currently spending all of their time hooked into a vertical drama app, their tbr is going to stay put for a bit. Or, if a gamer just got the latest book in a series they love, their latest game is probably on hold for a night or two.
It’s not enough, anymore, just to hook people to a book, either. That does still work, but it runs out fast because those hooks now need a place to land. They need a personality or cohesion of presence to velcro to and hang around a little longer than the single book or series they bought on Amazon. Before the next hook takes their attention in a different direction. And then the next one. And then the next one. Some will stay, but, there is just so much vying for people’s attention these days.
Email lists are one of our sharpest tools yet, but even that is not always enough. Not, at least, on its own—you need a strategy for what to do with your list that stands out from the other fifty author lists that reader is subscribed to.
Netflix is finding out this slippery attention slope the hard way, too. They bet hard, and sleazily, on audience capture as a strategy—hook people in and then raise the prices while they’re invested in the ecosystem. Dumb down the entertainment to be as broad as possible, and understandable while people are scrolling on their phones. But, they’re finding that people are not, in fact, captured after all if the entertainment isn’t holding their attention. And if the company isn’t one you can trust after broken promises.
It’s no longer good enough just to put good entertainment out there. It must be built around an ecosystem of entertainment, and trust, and honestly good vibes, if that’s a quality that can be defined. You have to tell a story about how your readers and viewers and any-other-media-consumers will travel through your ecosystem, too.
I don’t totally know how to do this. I’m working on learning as fast and as deeply as I can.
I don’t think this is something that can 100% be taught broadly for a specific method, either—there’s marketing principles, yes, which most authors actually do not know.
I know some of them. I know a whole fucking lot in authordom itself.
But that venn diagram of how much authors know about marketing and how much marketers know about marketing is like this tiny little overlap in the middle for most authors.
We are a drop in the ocean of marketing, truly. And, the way to break out for each person is going to look different. And that’s the point.
In authordom, we’re all trying to run each other’s companies. We proclaim that we’re here for the art and business is the necessarily evil—friends, it can’t be. You can’t run a business that way.
Business is an artform. So is marketing. It’s as deep and craft-heavy as authordom itself.
If you write the same book that everyone else is writing, it might sell for a hyped moment, but, it’s going to run out fast.
In the same way you need to write the books that only you can write, you need to market the way only you can market. That means delving deep into the marketing that excites you, delving into the craft, finding out why you’re stopping your scroll.
Figuring out how you can take that same feeling and format you see in something totally unrelated to books and pull it into your books.
You can get AI to help with heavy lifting here for sure—Fable and Sol are excellent at going out, churning through large swaths of information, and synthesizing it for you.
But you still have to be the taste maker, too.
Books are products. I know authors balk at that—they are.
We sell them.
Anything you sell is a product.
And, the beautiful thing is that marketing tactics and formats that work for other products might very well work for ours, too.
So I think it’s time to set aside authordom as the main source of inspiration—keep it in your back pocket, but go trawling. Notice everything. Be curious again, and be delighted.
Get the hell off author Threads (or at least, please oh please ration your time there, those mindsets will drag you down).
The world is so much wider than we were taught.
-Novae