"How do I market myself without feeling gross about it?"
"How do I market myself without feeling gross about it?"
This is the whole game, right? I mean, if we can all feel good about our marketing and we're reaching people that care about what we do, then it's easy to keep doing it forever.
Hi friends,
I saw this article on
’s charming Substack and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I ended up doing a whole thing because I really think this is the mindset block that’s stopping most people from making a real go at building a sustainable career. If you want more reading on this, I did two pretty epic posts you can read (along with dozens of other supporting materials throughout this publication).
I hear this question all the time and it’s kind of the whole game, right? If you can figure out how to market yourself without feeling scuzzy about it, then you’ll probably have success. If you can’t, then you’ll probably be doomed to obscurity.
Yes, there are instances where you could skyrocket to success despite yourself or market yourself with no success for years, but in general there’s a strong correlation between marketing success and overall success. I know personally it was a gamechanger for me.
Once you have an audience and you can make cool things, then it’s all about building better and better product-market fit that resonates deeper and deeper with your audience with every project.
It’s hard before you have an audience because you’re just guessing what people will like, but once you have even a small audience, it gets increasingly easier to build something that sits at the intersection of their interests and your interests.
My best advice toward this end is not particularly fun, but it is effective.
*** Please note that if you are reading this via email, Substack only sent out a partial version and the article will eventually stop without notice. If you want to read the whole 4,500-word article, then go to this website or download the app.***
Breaking you down
To get you into the right mindset to succeed, first we have to break down a lot of the beliefs creatives have about their work. This is meant to break you down to the core so we can rebuild you back stronger.
Almost nobody sees the thing you do. This doesn’t even include the suppression platforms force upon you (wherein barely 1-2% of your followers see what you post on most platforms). Even if you could reach every one of your followers, you still are being followed by effectively nobody in the world even if you have an audience of millions.
Even fewer people click on the things you are doing to buy it. Unless you can explain something succinctly in a way that resonates with people, they aren’t going to take action. A good result from a sales campaign is 1-2% of your audience buying from you, which means at any one time 98%+ of your audience isn’t funding your work. Even then, you usually have to make a dozen or more different pitches using slightly different angles to convince somebody to buy.
Even when they want to buy, they don’t have money. Over 66% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Roughly 1 billion people in the world make less than $1/day. Lots of people might want to support you, but they don’t have the money to spare.
Life is chaos and even when people want to follow up, they won’t. I feel like this is self explanatory, right? Nobody has their stuff together, right? This means you have to keep popping up to remind people, because they wait until the last minute to make a decision. They have other stuff occupying their time, just like you.
I fully accept all these things, and that’s difficult for even me to read. The most important bit to pull out is that people not paying attention to you or buying your stuff has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with what they have going on in their lives.
I talk with a lot of long-term customers during my launches who just lost their job, or got a cancer diagnosis, or ended up in the hospital, or had their only car break down, or just lost somebody close to them, or just moved, or…well, they just have stuff going on. Often, they apologize for not being able to support, which is very kind, but I never expect anyone to buy my work, especially is they just don’t have it in them to make it a joyous experience.
Those are just ones that connected with me, too. How many of my fans face the same adversity, but just never tell me about it? Probably a lot. Once, somebody messaged me after a campaign asking for a refund because they were in the hospital. Not only did I process that refund, but I also sent them the book because man that is a tough row to hoe and a free book makes it a little better.
Everyone in the world has their own stuff going on that’s more important to them than anything you are doing (unless it’s directly related to helping them deal with their own stuff).
Creatives think that people hate their work when they don’t buy. The truth is that most people never think about you at all.
I’ve been doing this for a long time and millions of people have been exposed to my work. Meanwhile, I’ve collected about 200,000 email addresses in my career. Of those, 45,000 of them are currently active on my email lists, and I make about 2,500 sales a year, with 800 people paying at least $1 for this publication.
That math surks, but it’s better than my friend’s client, that collected 4 million emails to get 100,000 engaged subscribers to find 1,000 customers.
It also gets better at scale. If I had collected 2,000 emails, had 450 people on my list, made 25 sales a year, and had 8 people paying for my publication, that would be not great, even though the ratios are the same.
One thing I learned studying hundreds of companies of all sizes is that most businesses only work at scale. Their metrics suck when you look under the hood. Yes, there are also great businesses that work with just a few great clients, but they aren’t the ones that make the news.
Another thing I learned is that even the biggest companies in the world can’t get everyone to use their products, even for free. For instance, there are 8 billion people in the world and Facebook had 3.05 billion monthly active users in July 2023, which is a ton, but it’s less than half the world’s population. Open AI has been an internet darling the last few years and had 1.7 billion monthly users in July 2023. Tiktok has over 1 billion monthly users, which is a ton, but still not the majority of the world.
None of these super successful companies can get everyone to use their product for free, let alone pay for it. So, you should probably cut yourself some slack if everyone you talk to doesn’t buy from you. Facebook hires the best salespeople in the world and they can’t figure it out, either. Heck, only half of active internet users search on Google, and they have as much marketshare as it’s probably possible to have for a company.
I’ve been doing creative work for 20 years and maybe, just maybe if I stretch, I’ve been exposed to 8 million people. That’s a ton, but in a world of 8 billion people, that’s only .1% of the population that have even had a chance to make a decision about my work.
There are still literally billions upon billions of people who have never been exposed to my work at all.
At the end of the day, you should feel good if 10% of people you talk to care about your work (with 1-2% of your engaged audience loving it enough to buy it), and 10% will hate it, but that means 80% have no opinion. They saw what you want to put out into the world and gave a collective shrug of “meh”.
So, if you want to make $50,000 on your $50 product, you need to make 1,000 sales, which means you need to have access to 100,000 people in your audience, which means you probably need to expose yourself to somewhere between 1 and 10 million people to find that audience. We’ve certainly had $50,000 launches with just a couple thousand on our list, but those were very, very motivated buyers who were ready to buy from us immediately.
If you’re failing at this, it’s probably because you’re simply not balancing the math equation properly. It’s not you, or people hating you. Like with most things, math is both the problem and the solution.
The whole of this work is swimming through the rejection to find that 10% who love what you have to say. They will be different to everyone, but if you want to make sales, you have to swim through lots of people who hate you, tons of people who don’t care about you, and a bunch of people who love your work but don’t, won’t, or can’t buy it to find that 1 in 100 person who will buy from you.
Building you back up
By now, you should be pretty well broken you down to the core. Once you are lying in a heap on the floor, then we can build yourself up again because there are several truths that work in your favor.
You effectively have been exposed to 0% of the world’s population, which means you have nothing but upside. There’s almost no chance you have spoken with as many people as me, and even I haven’t talked to 99.9% of the world. So, you have at least that many people. Even if 99% of them don’t like your work, that’s still millions of fans waiting out there to meet you.
It is statistically impossible that in a world of eight billion people that a bunch of people don’t have the same interests as you. Even if 1% of the adult population of the USA’s 258.3 million people share your interests, that’s 2.58 million people. If you expand that to a global scale, that’s 6.6 billion adults total adults, and 66 million who probably, on some level share your interests.
It’s financially impossible in a capitalist system that if you show those people something that interests them that some percentage of them will pay for it. You can do a really, really bad job and still make a lot of money if enough people know about it. If even 1% of 1% the adult US population will pay for your work, that’s 25.8k people. If you expand that to a global scale, that’s 660k people who might be willing to pay for what you’re doing. There is nothing but opportunity out there. You just have to find them.
If you gather enough people who care about the same things you do and make something that tickles that interest, then you will be successful. It’s literally impossible for you not to be successful if you dump enough money into finding enough people who have enough money to support your work.
Hopefully that gets you fired up. It always fires me up to know even with as much work as I’ve done, there is tons of opportunity out there to succeed if I just do the work.
Now, it’s mainly a numbers game. The more people you talk to, the more people will hear and make a decision about your work. The more people who make a decision about your work, the more will decide that they like what they hear, and the more people who will decide to buy.
Our goal then becomes finding enough people who care about your work without going broke in the process, which means you need enough runway to succeed.
Runaway basically means “money in the bank”. If you have enough money in the bank, or can find ways to keep refilling your coffers, for long enough to find an audience that wants to buy your stuff, you will make money. Almost all business go bust because they run out of runway and crash spectacularly.
Even if the concept of a runway is an easy one to define, it’s much harder to define what it means to you. Do you need to find 4 people to pay you $10,000 or 10,000 to give you $10? Do you have a 10% profit margin or a 90% one? How much overhead do you carry for hiring help? How much competition do you have for your work?
Books are hard because they are almost exclusively small margin, low cost, high competition products, and those are the hardest to sell. In general, you should endeavor to create a service based business first, as you build up your product line and audience because it’s exponentially easier to fine 1 person to give you $2,000 than 2,000 people to give you $1.
It is almost impossible to get somebody to part with that first $1. Once they see the value in your work, getting them to go from $1 to $2,000 is much easier.
Regardless of your situation right now, success is still largely a numbers game. If you gather enough people, you will almost assuredly uncover at least 1 willing to buy from you. It might be 5, 50, 500, 5,000, or 50,000 people, but there is a ratio where your business will start to bring in money.
Profitably? Well, that’s another thing.
Which is why we need to be strategic about where we share our stuff and how what we make, because both money and energy are finite resources that need to be replenishes.
However, there are really two main issues you are facing right now if you’re not having the success you want.
If nobody engages with you, it either means you haven’t done a very good job finding people who care or you aren’t making them feel seen. People engage with you when they feel seen. If you’re plight mirrors their plight or if you speak to their experience, then they will engage. Otherwise, they won’t. It’s not personal. We’re all selfish creatures, including you and I. Even if you don’t get traditional engagement, if they are reading your work then they are engaging through the work, which is the most important type of engagement for most writers.
If nobody buys from you, it means either you haven’t made something enough people care about, you have gathered the wrong people, you haven’t gathered enough of them, or you suck at explaining what you made. Every single one of these are fixable issues. You can start working through them one by one and shore up your business in the near future.
All of these problems suck, but even if you’ve spent years building ann unresponsive audience, you literally have 99.9%+ of the world left to find a new one.
If you aren’t where you want to be, you might need to:
Find more people (outbound marketing)
Make your publication better aligned with your perfect customer (branding)
Make people understand the value of what you have (sales)
Get people who love your work to buy again (customer satisfaction)
Make things more aligned with your audience’s needs (R&D)
If you get those things cranking, you’ll at least be on the right track. I suggest trying to get your branding and marketing message right first before you start to find new people. The easiest and cheapest fix in your business is always going to be getting the branding right so it calls out to the right people.
There are only two things you have to be great at to have a successful business; the thing you do and marketing.
Nobody likes marketing, at least at the beginning. We all want to do nothing but write all day, but so do doctors and plumbers. No matter the business, everyone is mostly stuck doing the administrative tasks that allow them to practice their craft. Nobody wants to fill our quarterly profits or keep their books accurate, except maybe bookkeepers. You should expect to spend 80% of your time doing tasks you don’t like, even if you have a business you love.
That’s why we hire people, but at the beginning we’re not making enough money to do so and break even, so we are usually stuck doing everything ourselves. However, if we can make marketing work, we can generate enough money to offload a lot of this stuff so we can focus more and more on the work we love.
Getting your marketing right so money flows
There are four major marketing channels you can use to stabilize your revenue. You should work toward being excellent at a minimum of one if you want to build a successful business. It doesn’t matter which one, but it is much better to be a master at one than pretty good at all four.
Owned Media Channels: Owned media refers to the platforms and content that you have complete control over. These are the channels that you directly manage and where you can consistently communicate your message without relying on external parties. Owned media is essential for establishing your brand, building a loyal audience, and creating a hub where people can regularly engage with your work.
Paid Media Channels: Paid media involves any form of advertising or promotional content that you pay for to reach a broader audience. This includes ads on social media, search engines, display ads, paid influencers, sponsored posts, and more. Paid media is an effective way to quickly increase visibility, drive traffic, and boost engagement, especially when you're looking to reach specific demographics or expand beyond your existing audience.
Earned Media Channels: Earned media refers to the exposure you gain through organic, unpaid methods—essentially, it's the recognition you "earn" rather than pay for. This includes any media coverage, word-of-mouth, social media mentions, shares, reviews, and any other form of promotion that comes from outside your direct control. It's often seen as one of the most credible forms of media because it's driven by others talking about your work rather than by your own marketing efforts.
Borrowed Media Channels: Borrowed media, sometimes referred to as "shared media," involves leveraging someone else's platform to reach their audience. This type of media includes guest appearances, collaborations, or content that is published on platforms or channels not owned by you but where you have permission to share your message. The key here is that you're using someone else's established audience to amplify your voice, often through partnerships or mutual agreements.
Inside each channel there are dozens of strategies that might work for you. The Author Stack literally has dozens of articles on these strategies.
Personally, my business is built upon owed media, with a significant amount of borrowed media, a little earned media, and paid media sprinkled in to keep growth steady.
If somebody says “you gotta do this”, no you don’t. You can just do one of the other things listed above and still succeed. I know great businesses that do each of these well, while doing almost none of the other three, and still excel.
You can build a great business mastering any of these, and, if you are already great at one, consider partnering with somebody great at one of the other channels to grow faster and amplify your effort.
If you are going to hire, find somebody either better at you at the same channel (if you want to offload your own work) or a master at a different channel than you(if you want to scale faster).
How does any of this make marketing feel less gross?
This is the million dollar question, right? We’ve now gone over 3,000 words on building an audience, but how does this make you feel any better about actually doing it?
Because you’ll actually be talking to people who want to hear from you.
If you feel gross about marketing, it’s probably because one day you flipped a switch and started selling to people in your audience, even if they never for one second knew you were a writer or chose to enter your audience in the first place.
If you start promoting on your personal Facebook page, then you’ve probably got people who became friends with you in high school. If you only started writing 10 years after graduation, then they never gave permission for you to market to them about your work. Neither did your cousin or your old co-worker.
That doesn’t feel great.
When we grow our audience with intention, we are actively talking to people who chose to join our audience. They definitionally want to hear about what we do because they made the conscious choice to enter our audience in the first place.
Seth Godin calls this permission marketing. The more times somebody actively asserts they want to remain in your audience, the more congruent you should feel marketing to them.
This is why I believe in culling your email list at least once a year. If somebody isn’t opening, they might no longer be interested in what you have to say. Before I delete them, though, I send them a series of emails to make sure they really don’t want to be on my list any more. Often, somebody really does want to be there and either they aren’t registering or life happened and they got busy.
As long as somebody wants to be in my audience, I want them to be there, even if they aren’t buying, or opening. Many people over the years have told me that they don’t open my emails but they like that I show up in their inbox because it shows I still exist.
All of that is permission.
Another thing I offer in my newsletter is the chance to unsubscribe from any section without unsubscribing from anything else. So, if I’m doing a launch, people can opt-out of getting those emails. I also allow people to choose how often they want to hear from me. If they only want to hear from me weekly, monthly, or at launches, they can make that choice.
All of these permissions are set up so that I send emails to people who want to hear from me at the cadence they want to hear from me about what they want to hear from me. As long as people are properly informed, I can feel good about sending anything I want to them, within reason.
Making things is an act of service for an audience that wants or needs it. Even those supermarket ads that feel so gross to some people have lots of people waiting to gobble it up.
Once you align your work with people who want to hear it, then it’s no longer marketing. It’s service. When people are excited for your new things, it’s no longer scammy to sell them because they already want it.
It’s impossible to feel good selling something to a person who doesn’t want it. Best case scenario, it feels like you’re tricking them.
However, when you sell something to people who either already want it or don’t know if they want it yet, then all those othe problems fade away. No, you won’t always hit a home run, and you will have stuff that flops, but it will always be in service to an audience, which makes you feel good about marketing.
Then, it’s barely marketing at all.
This is not about you
If you want to have success, then you have to become comfortable with one more thing. Success is all about what you can do for the person buying from you.
It. Has. Nothing. At. All. To. Do. With. You.
The better you are at making people feel seen and show them the value they will find in your work, the more you will succeed. Even your personal memoir written in your own blood will only sell if you can get somebody to see themselves in those pages.
This might sound horrible, but it’s actually quite liberating because none of this is about you at all. It’s all about the reader. They are the protagonist of their own story, and sometimes they might use you as a conduit to explore and make sense of the world.
Even Stephen King can only rely on 1-2 million sales per book, and he’s the most exposure author in the world. Yet, still less than .005% of the world’s popular choose to buy his work.
You should not take it personally because it is not personal, even if what you have written is very personal. It all about what the reader has going on and whether it hits for them. Very little of it has anything to do with you.
There are a finite number of functions that people will pay money for consistently:
Curation of information/saving somebody time - If you are curating good information and people can trust you, then people will pay for it. Similarly, if you make a better sponge, then you’re saving time and people like that. They’ll probably keep buying your stuff until something better comes along or you break that trust. Either that or they just don’t have space for it anymore in their lives. Every act of curation is really about saving somebody time and energy.
Making somebody money - This is why finance blogs do so well, because you can tangibly bring this back to money. The same is true with couponing content. If you can save somebody $20, people will probably give you a few bucks for it. It’s easy math. I pay money to my financial advisor every quarter, but they make more than they cost so it’s fine.
Bringing something new/interesting/entertaining into somebody’s life - This is generally categorized as “helping people forget their lives and letting them dream about some other (better) existence”. Lots and lots of fiction falls into this category, but so does much of this publication.
Every successful product is designed toward one of these ends and will attract different types of readers. Some might overlap, but others will only want one experience.
Authoresque is primarily about curation and The Author Stack articles are about bringing a new perspective into your life.
Making somebody feel seen runs under each one of these functions. Every successful writer is really an expert at making people feel seen at scale. Giving people the shared language to communicate with each other is a huge skill and very valuable, expecially now with such a loneliness epidemic facing humanity right now.
If you are a good writer but your stuff isn’t resonating with people, it is probably because you need to double or triple down on making people feel seen by your work. It is what separates world class writers from very good ones.
The more you can fit into one (or more) of those buckets and build a world-class product that stands above the rest, or is remarkable as
says, the better chance you have of reducing your cost per acquisition and increasing your lifetime customer value, the two most important metrics in making this stuff work.The final thing I will say about this, and something that I’m still learning, is that the biggest market, when people are most likely to spend money, is when they are in transition.
Whether that is having a baby, or changing jobs, or starting a business, retiring, going to college, raising children, starting a new hobby, or any number of other things, if you want to make this stuff stick quickly, find a transition and drill down deep into it. That’s where you’re going to find a deep vein of gold.
This is true in both fiction and non-fiction. If you want to make a career, focus your work on a specific group of people in a chaotic moment of transition.
I have stumbled on this by mistake multiple times in my life, but I was only given the context to understand it recently. If you’re not having success, one of the first questions you should ask yourself if what transition you are servicing with your work.
What do you think?
Does this give you hope?
What channel feels the best for you?
How are you feeling about this now?
Let us know in the comments.
If you saw value here, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid member to help foster more of this type of thing. As a member, you’ll get access to over 900 exclusive posts, including books, courses, lessons, lectures, fiction books, and more, or you can give us a one-time tip to show your support.
Where to go next:
