BIGGER ISN'T ALWAYS BETTER
on self-optimization, big podcasts, book sales, bite sizes, and clickbait
“There was no increase in book sales.” —Amie McNee’s substack on how her sales didn’t move from being on the Jay Shetty Podcast. Right now, the Youtube video has 104k views, 227 comments (this doesn’t include folks who listened to the podcast and didn’t watch on Youtube) so listeners exist, they just didn’t buy. I would actually love to see library request numbers from the podcast, as if we could ever get that data, because I think it would reveal a lot about books as objects for sale, and our current state of consumerism where people are protecting their wallets due to the chaos of financial uncertainty. BUT I DIGRESS (always digressing).
I find this fascinating (she did too, read the whole post!)—not because we assume there’s some sort of magic publicity pill to unlock the “big book sales” (which isn’t true in my experience), but because it assumes that books are treated like any other cultural object, or work similarly to an advertisement for skin cream, hair dye, or hydration liquid. All of these objects are promoted incessantly on podcasts (not necessarily ever part of the conversation on the actual pod, but lurking in the background of what these podcasts maybe never say aloud)—self-optimize. Guests are there to give advice, albeit for Shetty’s podcast in a space known for meaningful, authentic conversations, but if we’re being honest, they’re all falling into the category of “self-help.”
And the way books have been brought into the self-optimization culture (and self-help, though you’ll never see this as the label except in bookstores) & advertised in our world of social media (self-optimization products are an influencer’s wet dream—look at any Amazon storefront) is that we can crunch them down into six “takeaways” and don’t need to read the full book, they can be summarized by AI into two pages and marked as “read” on Goodreads, if you listened to the podcasts, well, didn’t you kind of read the book?
We all know this is untrue, context matters, deep dives matter, research around the takeaways is just as important as the “answer,” or narrative point, and yet social media (and increasingly media) is full of this not-exactly-clickbait content, but quickly digestible tidbits without the need for more research. It takes a specific type of person, a reader likely, to pursue the larger project beyond an abstract. But that’s exactly what an author is asking a listener to do on these bigger podcasts. There’s probably a whole conversation to be had about where and when reading audiences overlap with podcast audiences (is the middle of the venn diagram even that big?), but it totally depends on the show (and perhaps less on the book and the author actually).
It doesn’t matter if McNee had twenty hooks for the book in the episode, or how many times she referred back to the book (though I would have begged her, as a publicist, to have an actual number in her head while talking with Shetty—which feels very *marketing* and not very *authentic* and is funny because in companion pieces I’m usually telling an author to NOT mention the book), or what interesting phrase she used that caught in a listener’s brain—the question is still going to be: will they exit the media to find the book?
Media is hoping to keep you IN the scroll, so arguably social media (and I’ll include podcasts here), don’t want you to pause and look away for the book. Their first five goals are not to sell the book, but to create enough “takeaway content” that they can then use as clips on social media to produce traffic. Shetty’s podcast is definitely a part of this clickable content as he built an audience on Tiktok. I would love to know before booking an author with him how much of his Tiktok engagement transfers to actual listeners of the podcast. It’s good for an author either way, to have a few different videos on his page with their sound thoughts, but those videos, again, lack depth. They’re sharables—like eating a snack plate without doing any actual mental labor. So, are they converting book sales?
Even if McNee could have said the right curious, sparkling thing for folks to stop listening, search the book on retailer websites, and buy it—that’s three steps from listening to purchase (not including running to get your credit card in the other room). It’s not convenient. I am guilty of this too. I’ll listen to something or be watching something, I’ll look up the item and then I'll let it sit in my cart for weeks, eventually deleting or moving to “save for later,” or I’ll write down the title in my notes app to request from the library later, but I’ll forget. I just know remembered writing this that I have a book waiting for me at the library that expires on the 20th, so I need to go today.
The headline of the Youtube video gives away the whole scheme, “Blocked by Fear of Being Judged? Here's How to STOP Caring & UNBLOCK Your Creativity!” It’s screaming, “I am a lesson,” “get your advice here,” “you too can be creative,” “are you like the rest of us?,” “This is the place for you to turn your life around.” Dare I say (sorry Shetty), it’s the schtick of “just do these things and suddenly, you’ll be free.” No longterm work, no reading a whole book, no commitment—just an hour of your life and BAM! freedom.
In the Youtube notes, you’ll find the following (did I say six takeaways up there, I’m like a self-fulfilling prophecy!).
“In this interview, you'll learn:
How to Reclaim Your Creativity Without Shame
How to Make Art When You’re Struggling with Self-Doubt
How to Start Creating Even If You Don’t Feel Ready
How to Deal with Fear of Judgment and Being Seen
How to Turn Jealousy into Creative Motivation
How to Promote Your Art Without Selling Out”
And then, for convenience (see what I’m getting at here), a time stamp breakdown of where to find exactly what YOU need to self-optimize that are almost all written in advice-phrasing. You don’t even need to listen to the whole podcast, let alone buy McNee’s overture. The expert (McNee) has already spoken, what would be the drive to buy the book?
And this is the question at the very base of all publicity and marketing—what drives book sales? But sometimes I think we forget that books are beautiful, we love to collect them, but they are experiences AND objects. They are entertainment AND objects. They are active objects (different from skin cream which can be used up or possibly fixes a problem), even if they are decorations. They are collectibles (Labubu eat your heart out, but they’re not wearable or easily trendy (maybe we should attach them to keychains and start publishing ACTUAL NOVELLAS. Maybe this is where poetry could have its object moment!). I’m sure if I tried I could publicize all our books as “fixing a problem” or maybe even “fixing a person” (but this could get creepy fast). Yet, people respond to that; consumers respond to that.
The comments on the video (90% of them) refer to personal journeys, thanking McNee for the encouragement and creative pep talk. It was obviously meaningful for people to listen to, at all stages of their artistic and personal life, but the conversation was a turn towards inner speculation, not seeking outer knowledge to continue the work. Podcasts (in the self-optimization camp and others) are not asking listeners to continue the work—the work is meant to be contained to listening. The end credits are meant to be an end point, a completed conversation around a topic, so why do we expect them to sell piles of books?
What these larger podcasts can do is bring folks to the author—did McNee’s website visits increase, did she get more subscribers to her newsletter, will companies, nonprofits, and colleges, see this as an elevation in her expert status as someone who can speak to creativity in a myriad of ways (speaking gigs), will she be invited to more conversations, how did it impact her overall “platform” even if it didn’t increase book sales? All of these are important factors in doing the podcast, even if the specific podcast didn’t garner sales, things that stem from doing the podcast very well could. It’s a net positive, of course, but a longview net positive, a career net-positive.
Much more likely to sell books in short publicity windows (at least in my experience): niche podcasts that have an audience built-in around a pretty particular experience. A satellite approach where an author is having conversations that aren’t only vertical (big podcast, big morning show, national newspaper review), but conversations that are horizontal across many types (and sizes) of media (regional, niche, in-person, in print, online, on socials, through newsletters, in essays and companion pieces).
Authors should have longview hopes, and I would encourage this in general. Longview goals would be: I want to be able to sell the next book, I’m hoping to boost my speaking and visiting credentials, I want to be on people’s short lists when they think about an author who writes x, y, and z (I remember when Kelly McMasters was invited on so many AWP panels, she literally couldn’t keep up with all of them. That’s a goal—people saw and knew what she was doing, they understand what kind of conversation and cohesion she could bring. She had become a known entity. She’s also a great thinker and conversation partner).
Yes, of course, we’re doing work deep into the specific book, but what comes after this is just as important a conversation to have (with an outside publicist, the inside house’s goal is to get this book sold, they are not thinking about your afterlife as an author typically). What’s the longer term goals that this [media thing] could open doors to? That’s why you would go on the Jay Shetty Podcast if it doesn’t sell books. It still broadens your audience, name recognition, idea recognition, it allows you to speak to the umbrella of work and not just the singular book we’re schlepping at the moment. When people Google you, if it’s a good conversation, it’ll show up higher in the results because of the audience size (perhaps the same for Youtube videos on creativity—it’s higher in the stack).
There is always a lot of talk of the “right now” of book publicity. If it doesn’t happen right now, in the month of your pub date, it’ll never happen. That’s simply untrue. But the way you promote a book has to look beyond that 6-9 month book push, which will not only give you career leverage, but a different view of what it means to bring art into business. Building a career does not come overnight, and very few authors are overnight successes, so build for the next rung in your ladder—the next “success,” the next meaningful step, the next opportunity for community and interaction and conversation. That will broaden the idea of “success” and limit the “all or nothing” around book publicity. The fight against clickbait is thinking long.
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You can read and listen to a sneak peek from Mary Ardery’s LEVEL WATCH at Salvation South, Susan Gregg Gilmore talks inspiration for The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush in Chattanooga Free Press, two of our books are finalists for big awards and I can’t tell you yet, Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s “Preamble to the West” was featured in The Atlantic, Michelle Gurule writes about her uncle’s incarceration for Electric Literature, and so much more on Twitter & Instagram.
To the books as "active objects" idea... I think a lot about the stats around how people buy more books at live events than virtual (which sucked for those of us with covid launches). How at the end of a good conversation, buying a book is an excuse to "approach the bench," to have a personal moment with the author, to turn a mass-created object into a personalized one, which imbues it with the kind of energy I'd guess makes it more likely to get read. I can try to sell 20 books by just trumpeting about my book on instagram or I can buy 20 myself and offer to send them out signed, one by one, and somehow that latter plan appeals to more people even though it's kind of dumb for the author to have to do the shipping. But, in magic terms, it's the ritual. It's the object becoming more than object, a transmission from you to me rather than simply a set of ideas one buys or not.
This entire essay is—as always for Pine State—a banger of a read, but particularly resonant with me today was that last graph about the career goals of publicity. Beyond just the book as an object for right now, to think about the artistic career as a long-game, and one that requires a bit of business acumen. Filing this one away to return to again and again, Cassie!