I’ve used a service called BookFunnel to help grow my list for several years. In fact, many of you reading this probably found the Write More newsletter through a BookFunnel promo (hi! 👋). A whopping 54% of my subscribers have joined up this way, and it was especially useful in the early days.
It’s easy to use:
Multiple authors join forces for a free giveaway 🤝
Each author links to the giveaway in their newsletter, on social platforms and anywhere else that makes sense. This produces a powerful networking effect, with everyone involved borrowing from the combined reach. 🔗
Readers can browse the giveaway, which is usually a list of ebooks. Downloading a book is free but does require signing up to the author’s newsletter. 🗞️
That’s all there is to it. It’s author-friendly and, crucially, reader-friendly. No hard sell, no dodgy tracking, no underhand advertising trickery. I use the opening 10-or-so chapters of Triverse for these giveaways, which means anyone who enjoys the sample will probably then also enjoy this newsletter.
Anyway. I’ve been doing this for ages, and a week-or-so ago had my first rejection.
Yes, I was rejected from taking part in a BookFunnel promo. A new experience for me! In this case it was for a ‘sales promo’, rather than a newsletter promo, and I’d submitted my book No Adults Allowed. The promo was called ‘The End of Civilisation’, which sounded perfect for NAA’s theme of rebuilding after the collapse of society.
The rejection was due to the book not fitting the promo’s requirements. The organiser helpfully provided more feedback:
I had a read-through of the book's sample available on Amazon, and unfortunately it doesn't meet the theme of the group promo
We're going for a modern take on the apocalypse, which (usually) involves escaping a city in chaos and societal upheaval
Your story - which is beautifully written from what I saw - places the audience in an already-idyllic atmosphere, which a lot of readers checking this promo won't gel with
To be clear, I’m not complaining about this at all. It’s entirely up to the organiser what is included in the promo, and their explanation does make sense. NAA is set long after the actual apocalyptic events, and a big part of the mystery of the book is in trying to figure out what’s happened. NAA also starts with a deceptively utopian setting; the dark undercurrents only make themselves known slowly and insidiously in the background.
So, yes, fair enough. And yet 👇
Questioning everything 🤔
Being someone that overthinks stuff, the rejection made me ponder two aspects:
The ‘fleeing the city’ disaster-movie style story is clearly popular, and easy to sell. Why don’t I ever write something that is easy to sell? Why, Simon, why?
NAA is built backwards, almost. It’s not at all apparent in its opening chapters what the story is actually going to end up being. I think it makes for a better story overall, and reader responses suggest that it works well. BUT - it’s highly inconvenient for samples, or Amazon’s ‘read the first few pages’ preview.
A BookFunnel promo has to be thematically linked for it to make sense. But at what point does that common theme become repetitive? If the books in a promo are too similar, will readers be fatigued? How could they even make a choice between all the ‘escape the city’ titles?
Ultimately, I think this comes down to the tension between wanting to create art and wanting to produce something marketable. Very occasionally those two things go together, but more often than not it’s about compromise. Some of the authors in that promo will have had a passion for a story idea that just happens to fit into the sub-sub-sub-genre of escaping from failing cities. Others will have consciously designed their books for that market, calculating the story, characters and early chapters for maximum conversion value. Most are somewhere in the middle.
Amusingly, Tales from the Triverse - the story I’m currently serialising every Friday on this newsletter - was my attempt to build a story that had more immediate appeal to readers. My brain did this:
Observation #1: Crime fiction is popular! I’ll frame the whole thing around detective investigations.
Observation #2: Multiverses are going to be massive in 2022! To be fair, I was absolutely correct on that one - though I don’t think it actually helped me find readers. People didn’t go to see Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and then immediately hop on Substack to find a serial story by some random British guy, surprisingly.
Talking of multiverses, here are two that my variants currently occupy:
1️⃣ Triverse is a clever mash-up that can appeal to the huge audiences of three highly popular genres. I can reach fans of crime fiction, science fiction and fantasy! It’s got blockbuster success written all over the page. Conclusion: I’m a genius.
2️⃣ Triverse is an awkward intersection of genres that is off-putting for fans of each one. Pure science fiction fans aren’t going to like wizards showing up. Readers of contemporary crime fiction aren’t going to be ready for spaceships. High fantasy fans aren’t going to be interested in the pace of a police procedural. Conclusion: I’m an idiot.
Writing weird stories
The stories that I’m interested in telling, the ones that entertain me, tend to be slightly weird. They’re hard to summarise. I actively enjoy poking at genre and literary conventions and turning them upside-down to see what falls out.
Structurally, I could have written No Adults Allowed to fit more easily into the apocalyptic fall-of-society mould. It wouldn’t have been difficult to have an opening scene set during ‘the fall’: a dramatic, action-packed intro set before the main story. Instead, that information is discovered obliquely as the story progresses. It would be the same plot either way, but the story would be quite different.
If I look at the book with my marketing hat on, my advice to myself would be to add that hard-hitting, action-packed into. It would grab readers immediately and probably help sales. It would be amazing for the Amazon preview.
But that’s not the tone I was going for. No Adults Allowed is less about what happened before and more about what comes next; it’s meant to start with a lightness, an old-fashioned sort of ‘children on an adventure’ romp, before transitioning into a more elegiac and uncomfortable middle and a defiant ending. What the book becomes is different to how it starts.
In other words, there’s always more we can do to make our books more ‘marketable’. The challenge is in figuring out where to draw the line: I want my stories to be entertaining and approachable and easy to read, but I don’t want them to be cookie cutter or generic, or to feel like they’ve been written with an SEO guide open in the next tab.
All I can really do is write the books I want to read. There’s a lot of people in the world - some of them must think like I do. Right?
How about you? How much do you factor in the audience, and the need to promote the work, when writing?
Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash
Trying to predict the marketable is a fool's errand, for a number of reasons.
(i) Publishers (the big ones) have already decided what that is and it's celebrity authors, so the likes of you and I have no way in to that market.
(ii) It won't produce good literature. I firmly believe that no matter how good an author is at mimicking a genre or utilising its tropes, they will only produce great work when they're doing something they're invested in. Passion shows. If I'd try to write a fantasy western because fantasy westerns were popular, I'd have produced something flat and uninspiring (if I'd even produced anything without getting bored halfway through). I wrote Greyskin because that's what I wanted to write and if it's a genre nobody wants to read, then I need to suck it up.
(iii) It genuinely is very difficult. For all that some genres seem super marketable, in reality connecting with people is a crap shoot. Every bandwagon started, by definition, with a single, unpredicted success.
Write what you want - none of us are going to make any money at this anyway, right? So speak in the voice you want heard and it's bound to resonate with someone.
Terrific post, Simon. I may have to give book funnel a look.
One thing I've struggled with in pitching any of my novels is that I don't have good comp titles. I personally think this is a GOOD THING. And it boggles my mind that a publisher wouldn't want to be responsible for putting out the NEXT BIG THING with a story that hasn't been written fifty times already. But that's sadly not how the biz works. They buy what sells, even if what sells is recycled trash. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I've never written a book thinking about how I would market it later, and maybe that's a mistake. But if I don't have the freedom to build the world and characters and conflict organically, I don't have the joy or the feel the urgency to continue writing it.
I'd rather enjoy the process and produce something that isn't a reproduction.