Parasocial marketing and indie literature

AKA how to achieve literary success in the era of infinite content

(Pixelated) literary author Delicious Tacos, flanked by Noah Kumin (of the Mars Review of Books) on the left (facedoxxed) and (pixelated) L0m3z (of Passage Press) on the right. Screencap from Urbit Assembly.

How does one go about selling a novel?

The reason this is an interesting question is because, as far as I can tell, most publishers have no idea how to do this.

That is to say, most publishers are incompetent at the task of increasing book sales. This doesn’t mean that they can’t increase book sales, it’s simply that they don’t have a reproducible system for making that number go up if it isn’t already increasing.

To be more precise: they have no reliable systematized methods for taking XYZ novel with flat or low sales and increasing sales at a profitable rate (as a self-published author, I’ve learned that it’s trivially easy to burn money on expensive online ads that don’t convert into book sales at all). Existing book marketing strategies are functionally decades old: purchase ads, get reviews placed in key outlets, secure blurbs, arrange a book tour.

And so on.

These strategies are effectively fixed and only yield inconsistent results.

What publishers do know how to do is to do the same thing, just with varying levels of investment depending on a book’s (a) predicted sales or it's (b) current sales.

This makes sense when you realize that their entire model is effectively the VC-model applied to content: make a large number of bets on a large number of books, and double down marketing resources on the select few that achieve outlier success until you power-law your way to financial success with a JK-Rowling or E.L. James home-run level event.

In publishing, it’s power laws all-the-way-down because they no longer have the interest or ability to reliably drive sales in the “middle”-range of success (in the before time, we used to call this the “mid-list,” before it seemingly evaporated).

This problem of sales is, of course, an order of magnitude more challenging for the self-published indie author (i.e., for people like me).

I originally published my novel in July of 2023 with zero platform and zero literary connections (writers: please don’t do ever this). Here’s what my sales numbers look like now:

Burgercels—I see you. Leafcels—I see you. Anglocels—I see you. Teutoncels—I see you. Kangaroo-cels—I see you. Brazilcels—I see you. Tier-2-Eurocels—I see you.

I’ve sold about 250 copies of novel—except roughly 100 of those orders were from a free Amazon promotion timed to coincide with the

Tooky's Mag

& Carousel reviews being released.

So, what I’ve actually accomplished: 150 books sold in about 7 months and 14 reviews on Amazon.com. This micro-morsel of success comfortably puts me as “above average” as a self-published author, but it’s obviously still well below where I’d like to be.

I’m like any other artist: I want more of your eyeballs. I want to collect as many eyeballs as possible and then, when I’m dead, offer them to God as proof that my existence mattered. It’s perhaps petty and vain to think this way, but you will have to grant me these terrestrial vanities. I’m just like—psychically burdened by an infinite cosmic vacuum of notice-me-senpai energy.

So, the easiest thing for me to do is to copy the marketing strategies of others—if this was the early aughts, we’d call this process something vaguely cool like “guerilla marketing” (this was back when oblique allusions to Mao were impotent and therefore tolerable, from the time before we figured out that the Chinese could do technocapitalism as well as we could).

So—a question: who has sold a lot of self-published novels?

I can think of two writers: Delicious Tacos and Mike Ma.

Parasocial friendship as an escape from the content-mines

We care more about who's writing something than the writing itself. We count on who is writing the fiction to inform us as to how "true" its content may be. Instead of ruminating on how the novel makes us feel, we wonder: Was this inspired by their real life? Who was such and such character in real life? How historically accurate was the story? Is it really like that to be alive in such a place? What do they look like? How do they dress? We turn to our phones, Google who they were, or how the art was made even as we read or experience this art in real-time. The ‘meta’ – in this case, content surrounding the art – is needed as much as the art itself.

The ‘Clancy Steadwell’ moniker is my attempt to shun these needs.

• From “auto-neurotic as-fiction-ation” by

  Porn Name Pseudonym

A literary persona isn’t an exercise in pure narcissism: it’s also a marketing device.

Mishima’s books are more interesting because we know how interesting the guy was in real life. The same goes for Houellebecq and many other authors. This is in addition to their work being excellent purely on its own terms.

I’ve been reading

Delicious Tacos

here and there for something like ten years now—possibly longer. In some of his earlier blog posts—back before doxxing and trying to ruin some random person’s life wasn’t completely normalized—he’d do this bit where he read a list of Google search terms that had inadvertently led readers to his autofictional blog, which notably did not include any actual pornographic visual content. Invariably this list of terms would be a stream of ultra-charged porn terms and some sprinkling of epithets. It was a funny, ingenious type of bit—the furthest thing from “book marketing” you could possible imagine, yet it no doubt contributed to his breakout literary success many years later.

In hindsight, I highly doubt it was in any way a conscious intention to become a literary figure (in fact, he freely admits that “showing face” on his blog was partly a mechanism for getting women to sleep with him).

He was just being himself.

Indeed, Mr. Tacos has done something that most writers are deeply envious of: he has, wittingly or not, turned his mental illness into a conversion funnel for his art (this is the dream of every writer, everywhere, but especially the alt-lit ones).

The persona he’s built around his compulsive sexual addiction—whether entirely true or not—is a more compelling sales funnel than anything else you could possibly imagine.

A lot of people would complain about this. They’d either (a) disapprove of his lifestyle on moral terms, or (b) attack it on the basis of a lack of authenticity. The former is a moralistic argument typically made by progressives. The latter is an anti-capitalist argument we are all familiar with. In the context of “building your platform,” the imperative to “just be yourself” is the marketer’s invocation to convert your lived experience—to convert your life—into a sales funnel.

Such is the power of self commodification. The inherent intimacy of this style of auto-fictional writing blends into the author’s public persona in a positive-feedback loop that mutually reinforces the persona and the sales of the work. This is not without cost, however. Any animal (including a human) that knows that it is being observed will modify its behavior accordingly. Public-facing authenticity is a contradiction in terms; it is most possible through the buffering intermediation of fiction that isn’t explicitly connected to your genuine person.

Another example of this process is Mike Ma, whose self-published novels Harassment Architecture & Gothic Violence have been enormously successfully by any objective measure of literary success, garnering thousands of reviews.

Ma’s YouTube channel.

Ma has long cultivated an online persona through a mix of absurdist comedy posting (originally on Vine, I believe) and through various forms of quasi-fed-posting that appears to have landed him on various federal watchlists (and no, I don’t for a moment believe he’s engaged in anything like actual terrorism—in this respect, he’s an online edgelord like any other).

As with Mr. Tacos, Ma has found a similarly resonant audience on the internet, although his social media presence is surprisingly siloed in that he does far fewer podcast interviews than

Delicious Tacos

does.

Auto-fictional exhaustion

The auto-fictional alt-lit novel is by now a trope in the indie literature scene. There’s a repetition and a mimetic cascading-effect here that has arguably come to define, say, the Dimes Square literary style.

This isn’t to shit on Dimes Square (or to offer any analysis of it better than

Mo_Diggs

has already done), but to point out a pattern that actually predates it to roughly the 2000’s era.¹

Katherine Dee

has made a lot of incisive points about identity and performative auto-fiction on the internet, and I agree with her general contention that this phenomenon isn’t a novel one. It was arguably Tao Lin who first enacted auto-fiction as a literary strategy in the contemporary era, but it subsequently mutated into a much more degenerate and navel-gazing version of itself since then. We’re all familiar with these kinds of books now, which more often than not seem to revel in what feel like increasingly performative displays of aesthetic, spiritual, and moral wretchedness. I’m not going to call out any individual names here, but if you’re familiar with the alt-lit space, you know exactly the type of book I’m referencing. They are all essentially copying one another.

It’s possible that the perceived prevalence of this trend is largely due to survivorship bias—maybe we’re just not noticing the novels of any of these people who haven’t cultivated interesting online personas of one edgelord-type over another. But my sense is that this is indeed the primary trend of our contemporary era—the collapsing of the distinction between the artist and their work out of reasons of sheer economic necessity (i.e. the writers who don’t do do this simply don’t get noticed).

I’m not as high on this as I used to be. There’s a sameness to the affectation of “look at me writhing in the mud of existential angst and sex and drugs and so on” and to an extent, the trend feels played out (and I say that as someone who read “The Pussy” and thought it was a very good collection).

That said, I don’t have any substantive moral critique of auto-fictional performance as an approach to gaining a readership. If anything, in an age of algorithmic selection of winners and losers, it may well be the primary source of gaining a readership. The age of the super-talented, platform-absent pseudonymous author is maybe just gone—forever—and nobody is going to read their work.

I’ve never been keen on sharing intimate details of my personal life with strangers on the internet. I don’t think it’s necessary for writing good fiction, but seven months into selling under 200 paid books, I can understand why people go this route. So probably, I’ll be leaning into it somewhat—hopefully, not to an excessive degree, but more than I had initially planned to.

In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.

1. I quite enjoyed his piece on Dimes Square from late last year.