The ONE Emotion That Makes Book Marketing Viral

That behind me is the skyline of St. Petersburg. And no, I'm not in Russia. I'm in Florida now. I didn't move. Again, don't worry. I'm here at nink, which is a very, very cool writers conference. And I'm here not reporting from the con. I'll report from the con another time. I'm instead here to talk about something very important, which is how you can gain attention on your books. The most effective way to do it as cheap as possible. I've never actually dove in deep into this topic before, but there's a few reasons that make me feel like now is the best time. First, I'm having Mark Schaefer on the podcast soon. When I say soon. The episode should go live in November, so maybe like two months from when this goes live. But Mark Schaefer wrote Audacious, which is an amazing book. It's probably my favorite, if not like top three favorite book that I've read this year, which is saying a lot. I read a lot of books. I read, like, usually one a week, sometimes two or three a week. So me saying it's in my top three favorite books is a big deal. Okay, it's a big deal because I'm not really a big deal. So it's actually not a big deal at all. But to me, it's a big deal. And maybe to you it's cool or worth checking out, because Audacious is about how you can stand out in a world of marketing. And what's really cool about it is. One of the biggest case studies in the book is Mr. Beast, which those who know I worked for Mr. Beast very, very closely there, and I've seen the inside of that operation help push that operation along. And what I want to share with y' all is what I've learned about how to really gain virality online, but not in a sort of, oh, I got a million views, nothing like that, and said how you can stand out in the minds of readers without spending a bazillion dollars on ads or learning all the different TikTok hooks. Because the truth is that we treat this like a video game, and it can be a little bit like a video game. A lot of the strategy advice I give is very data oriented. But there's a real art to this. And this art is about evoking one specific emotion in the minds of readers. And in fact, it's this emotion that the book Audacious is all about. And I don't want to steal Mark's thunder, because when he comes to the pot, we're going to talk all about this one emotion. But what I instead want to talk about is how you can create this emotion cheaply. Because look, we don't all have that much time and money, so how can we create this emotion without much time and money? So what is this emotion that I keep talking about? What is this one emotion that can help you sell books? It's awe. That's it. Aw, surprise. Spectacle is one way to achieve that. Spectacle is probably the most effective way to achieve that. That is literally what Mr. Beast is. It's spectacle driven marketing. Now Mr. Beast is one version of this, right? Big challenges, but that's not exactly cheap to do. He's regularly giving away hundred thousand dollars in videos. I can tell you it costs millions of dollars on average to produce just one YouTube video. So thank you, but no thank you, Mr. Beast. We're kind of going for the Mr. Least here, which is how can we spend as little money as possible? And look, I love Mark's book Audacious. And when I have him on the pot, I'm going to press him on this. He didn't write this book for authors. He wrote this book for any marketer. And a lot of marketers, what they consider small budget and peanuts is not exactly peanuts for us. Like if you're a CMO of a company making $100 million a year, you have a $10 million marketing budget, then having $100,000 to fool around with, you know, is peanuts. Except that is not peanuts. That's not peanuts. In the world of Authorship, $100,000 is a lot of money. That's like very few authors are spending more than $100,000 a year market themselves. Mind you, some are, some are spending a good deal more than that, but, but most are not even who are making a full time living. $100,000 is crazy. Never mind that to be the experimentation budget, $1,000 is actually pretty crazy for getting real. So we really need ideas under $100. Likewise, a lot of the advice we get online about running businesses and about marketing comes from well intentioned people, but who have teams. And I myself have to be careful with this now because I have a team and I've had a team for a long time in one context or another. I haven't been exactly a solopreneur for quite some time. So that, that is difficult as well because it's when someone has a team, they don't necessarily have to think about from a bandwidth perspective, they have more bandwidth. So what's small budget for someone with a team in terms of time is not exactly small budget for you just say, oh, yeah, we'll just take 40 hours. You know, we'll have three people or so on it. They'll maybe spend 10 hours each, and then I'll review for 10 hours. Like, okay, yeah, that's great. Except 40 hours, this is like half the time it takes you to write a book. And are you really gonna spend that on creating one audacious marketing campaign? No, you're not. No, you're not. So this is the problem, right? We're either told to basically sell our souls, the algorithm and get really good at, like, building all these hooks, which, by the way, I'm guilty of telling you to do that. We're told to just run these ads. Or how do we stand out? What do we do? We just travel around the country getting book signings? Fair, you could do that. That's also expensive and takes a lot of time. So how else can we stand out? Well, it's about this emotion. Ah, but how do we evoke this in people? I'm going to give you three ways and three examples that you can do this with. And I think by the end of this podcast, you're going to. Hopefully it's my goal, they'll have an idea specific for your story and for your books that you can apply this to. And look, here's my challenge. If you listen to this podcast and you go, michael, I can't figure this one out. For me, I like what you're talking about. You're crazy. But, like, my kind of crazy. And I just still can't get this to work for me. Like, please email me@hellothorpsidek.com comment on this podcast on YouTube. If you watch on YouTube. If you're watching YouTube, you're really not seeing much of that. You're just seeing, like some random Skylab behind me. I'm walking around, it's like dark. But my bias is free to borrow, to edit this podcast. And we have way too much else on the plate. And I've been traveling and doing a million things like this is my one window, midnight on a Wednesday night to film this podcast that's going to be going live next week. Absurd. Don't you know? Don't know. I recommend the lifestyle to everyone, but I love it. But that's enough of the aside. That's enough of the aside. We need to get into these three reasons and three ways, really, that you can market yourself audaciously, that you can create consumers all on less than a hundred dollar budget. And the first is a wild prop. A wild prop. What do I mean by a wild prop? So what I mean by a wild prop is getting something that readers would resonate with your genre. Okay. Like, if it's fantasy, maybe it's a sword. If it's romance, wow. My mind goes to lots of different places in romance. Not all of it's PG. For this, this podcast, cursing's fine here, but. Oh, my God. Sorry. I just had like a fish jump that was like, scary. My mom, like, tells me not to, like, walk around strange places at night. And I'm always like, mom, you're silly. But there's these moments where I'm like, maybe she was right back to the podcast. We're just gonna ignore that. Now I'm wondering if that's like an alligator or something. I'm just gonna like, walk the other direction. It's cool. Cool. What you need to know about props is that these are cheap ways for you to basically get, like, mind sharing someone's mind. You can essentially define and make a prop part of your brand so that when you share social media posts, people kind of associate that with you. Even in your newsletter, people immediately go, oh, this prop, this person. And ultimately it's not about just like picking, ooh, a sword, but something that really stands out about it. So maybe it's a really, really big sword. Maybe it's a really, really tiny sword. Maybe it's a sword made out of a really funny material. Maybe it's just a weird colored sword. There's lots of ways you go just swords in the world of romance. There's the author, Deanna Roy, who's done a great job of pickles and the pickle verse and making that a huge part of her brand. Think about it. Very ineffective way. She's just, oh, here's a picture of a pickle. Yeah, that's my. That's what it is. These props become social objects, right? And essentially these social objects are things that when folks see them, they think of you and your stories. And when folks think of you, they think of the object. And it just perpetuates being able to be shared around. It stops the scroll. It makes people go, what is this? I've done this before. I've done this on all of you all. Yep, I have my tricks. I use these tricks on you guys too, but in good ways because I'm trying to help you mark your books better. I'm trying to help you in your author career. And I've done this with pencils y' all didn't remember. Maybe you weren't around yet. You could be new because we've grown a lot since the spring. But I did this weird campaign with the big pencil. Created a song called Big Pencil Energy. I'll make sure James links to it somewhere in the description here. Created a music video for it. Traveled the world with this big four foot pencil. Engraved Author Sidekick. I'll have James show some images and link to some things on my Facebook profile the previous post. But go back into the archive and find them. Pretty fun. Really, really fun. And people still like at ning they were talking like Michael, where's your pencil? Everyone remembers me from that pencil. But interesting because it got everyone's attention and that pencil was not exactly expensive. That pencil literally was like maybe when I count shipping a hundred dollars, it was of custom four foot pencil. And I swear I got like thousands of people to see it and it stuck in their mind. I wasn't just seeing it, it was like really sticking in their mind. And it was fun too, right? It was fun and it sticks to me and my brand because I'm trying to help writers. And what makes the pencil stand out? Well, it's not just a pencil, it's a big pencil. It's a four foot pencil. Spoiler alert. I'm not going to share real exact details, but I have an even bigger pencil plan. It's already ordered and it's making a grand return around the holidays this year. So stay tuned. I've been working hard. Not too hard, don't worry. And I can't wait to show you my big pencil. You might even be able to touch it depending on where you're going to be in the fall. Because I do want sharing is caring. There's definitely enough to share of the big pencil. So you can already see that's something that is funny to talk about. And again, it gets people to laugh and it's something good, right? You want to entertain people around your brand and this is exactly how you should be thinking about your social objects. So I give you a challenge to come up with social objects for your books and then try and find unique things you can order for $100. Now you might be asking me, Michael, where the heck did you get this? Two places. One is Etsy is a really cool place to find almost anything. Anything you can imagine just exists on Etsy that you can customize too. Second place, you can get things Alibaba. Sometimes people don't trust Alibaba I personally have had very good experiences. I've been ordering things in Alibaba for four or five years, random things like this, and I find it very useful. Shipping time is going to be long, and shipping is oftentimes expensive. But sometimes you can get some really cool stuff for like, 40, $50 that would normally cost, you know, $200 in the States. So that's the first thing. Now, what's the second thing? The second thing I'm revealing this week, my own strategy of this. But second strategy and really way to do this is gifting, right? It's really strategic gifting. Now, the thing about gifting is that you first want to understand who you want to give these gifts to. And you want to give gifts to, A, your super fans, if you have them, because they're more likely to spread things, and B, influencers in your space. So people have a following. Now, what is this gift exactly? The important thing is that the gift is unique to them. It's actually completely personalized to them. It's unique for them. It's not just a sign book, because think about it. Everyone's offering influencers signed books. And yeah, a super fan of yours will want a sign book. But is that really unique? Is that something worth talking about? Not always. It is for a lot of super fans, but not always. But something really unique is something that literally becomes a part of their life, part of their identity, because it's there, theirs. It's unique to them. So we're talking about a customizable gift that's cheap. Now, why would you ever do this? Well, look, for less than $100, you can oftentimes send out close to five customized gifts, depending on what you're doing. And with that, you can then, my God, think about all the places you can send these customized gifts to. You can send the customized gifts to influencers and get them to be like, oh, hey, like, build a relationship with you. They might even post it and share by proxy your brand and you didn't have so much to do it, and then you have a relationship with them in the future where you can actually have them share your books, et cetera, your superfans, they can share it and they'll build a closer bond with you. And this is, again, a very cheap and effective way to market yourself. So how do we think about these gifts and what exactly should it be? Well, the key is that the gift should actually tie in with your social object, right? And you'll notice that a lot of these things I'm going to are physical things. And there's a reason for this, right? In a world in which everything's digital, doing something that inspires awe, that stands out is key. And these little things go a super, super long way. So what are some examples here? So let's say you are doing science fiction. Maybe you have a huge rocket. You get like a huge stuffed animal rocket. You know what I mean? It's not, I guess not a stuffed animal, but a stuffed pillow rocket. And you go, this is my rocket. Okay, like that could be cool. That's like I would, I mean a six foot rocket pillow would stop me. Now you're not gonna maybe send a six foot halo rocket to all your friends? What if you sent to some influence a rocket with their name on it or some, a book they like or even one of the books they wrote on it? That'd be pretty cool if you're a sci fi guy. Like custom rockets, anyone? Now I don't know if you can find a custom rocket at sc, but odds are you could find something similar to it or a spaceship, something like that. I was able to find custom clapper boards on Etsy. I'm watching it on Facebook this week. Watching it, just sharing a picture of it. But this is part of our gifting program to top folks on Craterwood, which for those who don't know, Craterwood. Craterwood is the platform that turns your book or script into a movie or show with AI. It's magical. I've been spending an inordinate amount of time on it. It is so much fun, by far the craziest thing I've ever done. And right now we at the time of recording are still in beta, but we have it finally live where you can press a button, generate a scene. It's such a magical experience. And we're opening to the public soon. We have a wait list of well over 10,000 people. Now we're creeping up towards 15,000 people. So we've been careful in terms of rolling out capacity and really wanted to make sure that we're, we're being diligent here, but we're very, very excited to go live shortly to the public where anyone can join. But right now, if you want to join the beta list, just go to make Craterwood tv. We'll let you in as soon as we can. And we're just so grateful for all the interest. But with that how I get that word out to some folks. I reward our super fans at Craterwood, the folks who are using the platform a lot with custom copywriting Yep. They get a clapperboard, sends themselves customized, and I also send it to influencers. I am sending it to my favorite sci fi author. And I've gotten a few other people to say yes. It's pretty, like, for me, nerdy, but fun and cool, because I get to give to some of my favorite creative people this thing. And it's no pressure. I'm not saying you have to go post about it, nothing. But it's relatively inexpensive to the tunes of, like, less than $30 per person. And if you're targeting people who, like, are either, like, big readers of yours that you want to keep coming back, or sometimes even better, like influencers and people who are, like, in your space, it can be a great way to build relationships, and it can tie to your social object, which for creative way. One of our social objects is clapperboards, because we're turning storytellers into directors clapboard. So those are two ways. But I promised a third. Promised a third, and I promise now we're getting away from physical goods, because I know physical goods can be scary, and I get it because they are a little scary. But the third thing is creating stories, memes, or contests that subvert the expectations of folks in your genre. Essentially, how can you create something that gets people to go, oh, wow, this is wild. And the best way to do this cheaply, why we use objects oftentimes to create awe is because of the spectacle nature of it, right? Objects create spectacle. We are social creatures. We love looking at things. We love being around things. This is why, like, spectacle. If you're going for the spectacle strategy, ooh, big pencil. Ooh, I got my clapperboard. Spectacle is one way to create awe, but another way to create awe is unexpected humor. Right? This is how we can create awe in people. Unexpected humor or unexpected drama. Okay, now drama, to me, oftentimes feels hard to, like, make sustainable marketing strategy. Not going to tell you not to, but it's tougher for me to imagine that. But humor, Humor can be a very sustainable marketing strategy. So how do we lean into being funny? So the first thing is citing an example. This is a wild author and, oh, my God, I don't know if anyone's seen him yet. I sent him to so many people. I feel like Quan Mills is now my spirit animal. Kwan Mills. Look up Quan Mills on Instagram. I'll link it down below. The profile is insanely funny. It's these pen parody romance covers that are, like, just so bad. Like, one of them, the COVID is like, my baby daddy is a bedbug. It's just like ridiculous. It's hilarious. It's hilarious stuff. You, you will look at the page and you'll laugh. You'll be like, this is just like, this is a parody on essentially spicy romance. Now the thing is, what an interesting funnel into spicy romance books. Like, to be clear, like if I'm a size variant student, I'm reading this laughing because it's just like, oh my God, imagine if this was a real book. But he can also again, create real stories. That's his legion into oop. This is how I get intention. And his videos are so simple. The hook is just, here's the COVID of my book and I wrote it. And he didn't actually write the book. It's a joke, but it's really, really interesting. So what can you do to create interesting scenarios, but again, draw awe in people? And again, humor is a great way to do that. Super cheap. I mean like, you can create a cover canva, mock it up, doesn't need to be anything special and show like an interesting concept really, really quickly. So like, what if you did like funny thriller concepts? You could do like, you have to be careful, but I'm mentioning real names, but you could mention like historical things that are funny. There's just endless, endless opportunities to create like humor when it relates to books, when it relates to different fandoms, when it relates to different passions or interests related to books. And I think that like humor in itself is just such a good way to do this. Another kind of format that you maybe have seen is on X, which it is a toxic platform, but I don't really use X. But I try and understand what happens there. And there's this guy called Chase Passive Income and his username is Chase Down Leads. And he's just a parody on entrepreneurship. So he gets a bunch of entrepreneurs to follow him and it's essentially like, you know, making fun of hustle culture. Like all these things, it's hilarious. But. But it's a great lead gen for entrepreneurs. It's great. It's great. So I encourage you to think about that. I'm actually thinking of leaning and doing something on that front myself. I've clearly leaned heavy into these other areas of inspired marketing. I haven't had the gumption to do that one yet that I think I very well might. So if you guys have any suggestions for a way that I could be funny and lean into storytelling culture and parody it in a way that is tasteful, respectful, but most of all can make People laugh. I love to hear suggestions, but isn't that just a great way to do things? You can have fun. You can have fun. And again, that stuff is what spreads. Because again, people want to laugh. Laugh is awe. You go, oh, my God, I didn't expect that. Holy crap. And once you see it a few times, like, you know how it is, the joke doesn't awe you anymore. The punchline already hit. So, like, all of it's about awe. And that's another great way to induce awe in someone that's, again, accessible to anyone. So, personally, for me, I love starting with, like, a big social object, then using that to inform a gifting strategy, and then if you're really good, from there. Your sort of strategy of how you induce awe for your brand from a humor standpoint stems from there. And you could imagine how I could theoretically create an account on social media with a very big pencil who has some very erotic thoughts about writing. That'd be right. That'd be a little while. That'd be a little while. But wouldn't you want to go follow the big pencil, which. If you want me to create an account with a big pencil that shares erotic thoughts about writing, I could do that. And it's all a cohesive brand. You see how you do that? And then it's like, oh, this is. I'm known for the pencil now, which. I'm like, oh, my God, this is so sad. Pencil's gonna get rid of my gravestone. You all will have much cooler things written on your gravestones. But it works, right? So, again, whatever you want to do, I am super open to. I want you to do it, but I'm just very passionate about this sort of marketing because I think it's fun. It's fun for the person doing it. It's fun for the person experiencing it. It's fan service in the best way, and it's how you can get attention and arbitrage that in a cheap way by being creative, not by understanding the next hook or what's going to go viral, but instead, how can I cut through the noise and create my own stage? I think that's, like, now more important than ever now. Some last things I'll say on this run are a Don't put too much pressure on yourself. No one marketing strategy should be what you put all of your eggs in. Just like no one platform should be what you put all your eggs in. Like, creator Wood's great, but I've told people plenty of times, like, don't spend money. You can't afford on the moving machine, et cetera, et cetera. Likewise, I still think data is really important. Like, I think you should test this too. Like, just like I built Reader Meter, which, by the way, you can go to Reader IO and join Reader Meter at ReaderMeter IO. It's an awesome platform that helps you understand when readers stop turning the page on your stories so you can make it better before you release it widely. Reader Meter is really cool. Here's the problem, though. You got to treat this whole marketing strategy of audaciousness and creating awe on people very similar to how you'd approach testing if your story is good and validating your story. You need to validate if something's going to create on people before you go and spend a hundred dollars on a big pencil, maybe go and create a post where you tease it and see people interested in that tease. And if they're not, maybe create another post where you tease something else and see they're interested in that. And if they are, you can reveal the thing and buy the thing and spend the money on the thing and just be diligent about the testing and experimenting. Because the same process that allows you to test whether a story is going to engage a reader allow you to test whether your marketing is going to drive awe or create awe or inspire awe, really in an audience. And that is really key. With all that said, thank you all so much for listening. I'm so excited with where we're going with POD and excited to have some great guests on. Excited to just continue taking things to the next level. Please let me know how I can help you all. I sometimes like these shorter sessions that are not like an hour or two hours long and are much more actionable and give you core insights. So please let me know if you like these because I can do more of these. I tend to do more interviews than sessions like this, but sometimes I just feel like I need a rant. And this was one of those weeks where I'm like, gotta rant. Boy needs to rant. So here I am. I'm wearing my Hollywood as Cook shirt. Can't see it, but I guess I'm a walking billboard at this point. I don't know what that means for me, but I guess I fully leaned into becoming a social object. I am the social object, and I encourage you to do it, too. I want to do a special shout out to Ross. Ross Pruden. I don't know if he's gonna listen, but Ross Pruden was the person who put me onto social objects. I think after we both read Audacious, he was like, michael, you'll love this. And he's given me a language to talk about this because there's some things that you know about the world and you kind of understand, but you can't put into words why it works or what it is. And Ross gave me that language. So thank you, Ross, for giving me the language of social objects. Thank you, Mr. Beast. I ran your gifting campaign last year and I learned a lot about gifting. That helped me learn a lot about what we're doing with Clap Rewards and all that stuff. And thank you, Kwan Mills, for making me laugh. That's it. I hope it would has an amazing rest of your day. Seriously, thank you so much. I'm so, so grateful. This has been the craziest last seven months of my life. And we're just at the beginning of the grand mission of helping storytellers like you rule the world. There's so much more work to be done, so much more exciting things to come. But we're about to tear down the next round of gatekeepers, which are the. Which is the film industry, and we're going to keep going from there. Yes, there's more to tackle, but we're not doing it this calendar year, probably even next calendar year. We got to fully cement the film gatekeepers. We got. We got something to do. But I am just so pumped for. For us, our industry and where this is all going. You are amazing. Your stories not only matter, they literally rule the world. So keep it up. I'm here to help. I believe in all of you. I believe in us. As a cuny, I bet my life for this community. For the last 10 years, this is all I've been doing and this is all I want to do. And I'm just so grateful that my weird, crazy dream took me in a place and direction that I couldn't even imagine. I just hope I can help you all do the same. So thank you. Thank you. And as always, don't forget. This is so true. Together we are boundless.