Hi! We haven’t talked since high school, but I just wanted to tell you about this amazing opportunity that totally isn’t a pyramid scheme. #BossBabe
Please don’t do that. I don’t want to join your Herbalway or Beachagenix or whateverthefuck.
I am not a “social media maven.” Often, when I see people with that title in their profile, selling their services, I’m curious why they have so few followers and shit interaction. Like, why would I hire you to teach me to promote myself if you can’t even promote yourself?
I’m just a guy who sells books and subscriptions to his Substack. And I’ve had some success at it. Part of that success comes from looking at what has, and has not, worked for other people. This article is far from comprehensive. It’s the opposite of comprehensive. It’s a wee peek at some shit that worked for me and might work for you.
Step 1: Take ten years building up your social media following.
Okay maybe not.
I never used Facebook ads to grow my following, although I understand that is a thing that can be done. Maybe I will one day, but I’ve been busy and didn’t want to waste money figuring out all the wrong ways to do it. An important bit of advice I can give, however, regards how to build that audience. Basically, you should be telling stories—there are many ways to tell stories—that are in line, more or less, with what it is you’re trying to sell.
If you’ve just created a meme page where you get a ton of followers because you’re an expert meme thief and you get lots of interaction that way, don’t be surprised if people ignore the posts advertising your homemade organic GMO-free raspberry flavored ass lube. Conversely, if your entire persona is about the benefits of ass lube, and you’ve built a following of lovers of ass lube, you’re doing it right.
This next one probably doesn’t apply to you, but I want to vent anyway. It’s about fucking famous people. That “fucking” is an adjective, not a verb.
There are a few famous people I’ve followed because I think they’re goddamn hilarious, and they have big followings because they’re famous, but then the ENTIRETY of their social media feed is just “see me at this location” or “buy my book” or whatever. It’s strictly used to promote themselves and nothing else, and it’s boring as fuck and I quickly unfollow them. What’s more, despite these people often having millions of followers, their interaction is shit. I have 161,000 followers on Facebook and get better interaction than some famous folks with millions of followers because their posts are fucking boring. In other words, don’t be boring.
Recently, the New York Times published an article titled “Millions of Followers? For Book Sales, it’s Unreliable.” And as a hilarious example that is full of schadenfreude, far-right fucknut Piers Morgan, who has almost 8 million followers on Twitter, sold fewer than 6,000 copies of his 2020 book Wake Up: Why the World Has Gone Nuts. And yet! Somehow, it has 8,131 ratings on Amazon.com, most of them 5-star. Hmmm … but its bestseller ranking (BSR) for all books is a lowly #183,124.
My self-published sweary history book came out only few months after Pier’s book did, has sold a lot more than 6,000 copies, and it’s currently at #1,815 for all books. I only have 567 ratings. Could it be that in addition to being a piece of shit who wrote a shitty book who maybe has fake followers, that maybe he also paid for fake reviews of his book? Or maybe he just has followers who don’t read. That would scan.
In his defense, at least he’s not anti-vaccine. Still a douche though.
Now I’m going to give an example of someone who does it right. I mean other than me. I’ll use my own example too, but I want to give an example of a guy who technically I suppose is a competitor of mine, but I don’t see it that way because there is plenty of room for sweary history books.
He goes by “The Captain”. He has over 100,000 followers on Twitter, over 350,000 on Facebook, and over half a million on Instagram. This guy has me thinking I should probably start an insta.
Anyway, he’s an example of doing it right, building and staying on brand. He built his audience by writing exactly what he’s selling. Often, it’s his own short quotes, which he put in a book titled Feel Free to Quote Me, and he sometimes did longer history stories that he compiled into a book titled Fucking History. It’s kind of similar to what I do except that the stories literally involve the history of fucking, in some way or another, and it also doubles as something of a dating guide. He has a new book out as well that is another compilation style book that is self-help oriented titled Speech Therapy. Spying on his Amazon BSR, his books sell well and get lots of positive reviews.
And looking at his social media, part of the reason why his books sell well is because he knows how to sell them. He sells them by talking about them. But there is a right way and a wrong way to talk about a book you want to sell. Note that this doesn’t just apply to books, but really anything. I’ll get to that in a minute.
Now I’m going to switch back to me. I googled “byline blind” in quotations and nothing comes up so I’m just going to say I coined the phrase. It means that when I post a history piece, which is something I do every fucking day, I put a “please buy my fucking book” byline at the end with a link to do so.
And it doesn’t matter if that history post is popular as all fuck, being read by a hundred thousand people or more, that byline doesn’t sell a lot of books. I’ve watched my Amazon BSR after a popular post, and it barely moves. Same goes for getting more Substack subscribers, because I beg for subscriptions in the byline too.
No, what drives both book sales and subscriptions is talking about the book and the subscription in separate posts. It doesn’t have to be a long post. Sometimes you can find a meme that relates to the post. Recently I shared an interaction I had on Facebook that explained why I don’t use the “c” word for referring to female genitalia, and as you can see, it was pretty popular.
I also don’t like “twat”. I think cockwaffle is far better than twatwaffle. The reason being that sexism only goes one way. Reverse sexism is not a thing. Misandry is bullshit. Calling someone a dick is not rooted in millennia of oppression. Shut the fuck up you whiney MRA piece of shit and if you don’t know what an MRA is read my article in TIME Magazine about them.
Anyway, there were a lot of people, not just women, who appreciated it, because they don’t like that word. I also helped boost the interaction of the post by adding additional comments:
Another thing I do that seems to work is a form of bait and switch. I pull people in with a story that they have to click to “See more,” and make sure there is no preview of the link. And at the end of the story, they find that it was a pitch to buy my book. These work like a motherfucker. Speaking of motherfuckers, here’s an example of such a bait and switch:
I’ve also had some successful posts that drove a lot of new subscribers. These were back when I first launched on Patreon, but note that I moved over to Substack so the links at the bottom of these two posts aren’t active. One is really long, and the other is short. Both worked well at getting a lot more paid subscribers.
Since then, I’ve taken to inserting interesting appeals for paying subscribers into the middle of each daily history post, trying to relate it to the story they’re currently reading. It’s also been quite successful, and there have been a lot of comments from people saying they look forward to my appeals for money because they find them amusing.
There are three takeaways I have from all this:
1. You must build your social media following based on what you’re actually selling. My friend “The Korean Vegan” built her TikTok based on sharing videos of what it means to her to be both Korean and vegan. And she rapidly built a massive following and her book is a bestseller.
2. You must actually talk about your products rather than just throw links up or relying on a byline.
3. Regarding #2, you must be creative in how you talk about your products. You must entice people with an interesting story or bit of information that drives their impulse to buy it because you’ve pulled them in rather than just blasted them with yet another boring ad.
That’s it. That’s all I got. Please buy my sweary fucking history book and subscribe to my sweary fucking Substack I know you’re probably going to ignore this because I just wrote about people being byline blind but maybe you’re not like those other people and you actually are reading this and you are going to buy something in which case I love you oh yeah here’s the link for my book and a little subscription button underneath:
When I received this post in email form, the line ended with "homemade organic GMO-free raspberry." As I was slowly scrolling, I expected "jam" or similar...and instead I SNORTED out loud from the hilarity. Thank you for the laugh!
FWIW, I wish that I could meet your Dads (and you) someday. Your Dads sound like really great people. I'm in awe of people who can live totally off the grid. My age and general health don't allow for the possibility anymore, but I loved living in the WI Northwoods back in the late 80s/early 90s.
Speaking of hilarious famous people, if you aren't a Facebook friend of David Gerrold, get in line. There are good reasons his account has a sitting list.