The Wall Street Journal looked at how Theo of Golden took off and “broke every rule in publishing”. I loved the article because it celebrates a great success story (wonderful book, lovely author, hard work) but I think the title is fundamentally wrong.
I don’t think Theo of Golden is the exception.
I think it’s the playbook. Of the new publishing world.
Everyone thinks marketing = money (publicist, blog tour, ads etc)
The opposite can be true especially when you are running PLG which, luckily, books are!
What is PLG? 🤓 Product-led growth. In tech this is what we call it when the product itself drives adoption (not sales representatives or ads). Books are PLG because no budget can fix a bad/boring book or make people finish reading and shove it into a friend’s hand and say “you have to read this”.
A quick caveat, this goes for both self-publishing and traditional publishing. It’s for the author who got signed by one of the big 5 (maybe with an advance and sales in launch month, and not much more beyond that - I’ll write one day about why I don’t believe most of the conventional wisdom around pub day). It also goes for authors with indie publishers, even ones like Zibby Publishing with innovative, author-friendly models like profit-sharing and doing real marketing legwork for their authors. It’s also for the author who popped it on Amazon themselves.
How is it one size fits all? Because the role of the author has changed no matter which path you’re on. Distribution has changed. Your reach to readers has changed. Author, you are running a sales and marketing engine now, whether you signed up for that or not. THIS is the publishing world today and it’s what WSJ didn’t catch onto.
The good news: a shoestring budget can go far if you embrace this and learn the ropes.
I am 7 weeks postpartum so forgive the baby analogies, but just like we say eat-play-sleep, we also say crawl-walk-run.
That’s your new book marketing mantra.
Take another look at the WSJ article. Theo of Golden has sold 2.5 million+ copies because his niece did the unglamorous work tracking platforms, reaching book clubs, treating every single reader like a potential advocate. Those first crawling efforts compounded to 3,000 copies sold, the book was walking. They kept going and enough people shoved it into the hands of others that it ran and reached 125,000 copies in one month (before any agent, before Oprah aka the drivers that make PLG go viral).
That’s not breaking every rule in publishing. It’s exactly the publishing rulebook, just from a different version of the sport, and it’s the one we are all now playing.
How do you stop yourself from going insane while you have to tinker and chip away and become a marketer rather than seeing your book fly off the shelves from day one so you can get back to writing?
I always remember Kristin Hannah saying in a podcast interview (forgive me, I can’t remember which one having listened to so many) that The Nightingale didn’t take off immediately. It did reasonably well but it didn’t go nuts. One of her other books did relatively well and then readers of that book discovered The Nightingale and it became a phenomenon.
I think about this every time I feel itchy to run before the book is ready.
Your book doesn’t need a big marketing budget.
It needs patience, conviction and creativity.
And if you wrote a book, you have all three in spades.
Congrats to Allen Levi 👏🏼 (and his niece 🦸🏻♀️) on the success and the beautiful book.