A Single, Viral Success Can Make A Huge Difference For Creators

A majority of writing advice when it comes to the business side of things is to remind authors that their career is a marathon, not a sprint. Generally speaking you get a lot more out of just putting one foot in front of the other, writing one story, and one book, after another so that you can build up your archive over time. Because the bigger your archive gets, the more your readers can consume, and the more people will have to enjoy when they discover you exist.

With that said, though, it's important to understand the effect that a single, big success can have for a writer... especially if they're depending on modern digital infrastructure and algorithms to work in their favor.

Because sometimes that single bump has long-reaching impacts.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!

Engaging The Machinery That Moves More Books

Authors have to worry about a lot of different numbers. So, I want to take a moment to talk about the kinds of numbers authors have to contend with, and the effects they can have on your career. And while a lot of these numbers are very small (especially in terms of the Internet), these goals can be hard as hell to actually reach. So if you have authors out there whose work you enjoy, keep some of these things in mind. And if you're an author who is looking for a call to action for your audience, consider trying to rope them into some of these options to see if it will give your career a bit of a boost!

Book Reviews

Book reviews are one of the most basic numbers authors are generally concerned with. After all, reviews mean that people are reading your books, and it provides a running commentary that might get new readers interested. However, consider that when a book receives at least 50 reviews on Amazon, this causes the algorithm to start advertising it to other users who are looking for similar books. And the more reviews someone gets, the higher up their book will show in searches, with the possibility of it being on the front page.

And while these numbers are for Amazon, remember that whatever digital platform you prefer, the more reviews a book has, the better off it is for you as the author.

Now consider the impact that receiving a few hundred reviews on your book might get. Perhaps you sold a bunch of books at a convention, or you had a Kindle Unlimited giveaway and readers chose to rate and review as a way of paying you back. This essentially kicks off the website's algorithm, which both gives you a permanently higher rating than books that don't have as many reviews as yours does, but it also provides you a jump in attention. Because when the site sees that your book is doing well, the machine registers that it is currently popular, and it starts pushing it to other people browsing the site, doing a bunch of free advertising for you.

Free advertising which could lead to you finding more readers, and making even more sales, than you otherwise would have without that boost from a big review number.

Social Media

Social media platforms are the lifeblood of all sorts of creators because they let us reach our audience... in theory, at least. And the algorithms that govern social media work very similarly to the ones that run the online bookstores. After all, these websites want to promote things that are popular, because that keeps people on the website and scrolling through their feed.

So what happens when you start acquiring big numbers on social media platforms as an author? Whether it's for your book, one of your other projects, or just sharing some of your thoughts on the issue of the day?

When you make a post that gets popular on a social media platform (particularly a big platform like Facebook or Reddit, but this also applies to Blue Sky and similar upstarts), the algorithm starts up and begins boosting your signal. For Facebook or Twitter, it's more likely to show up in the For You feeds for users who may not know you, since the algorithm is showing it around to people that are statistically likely to have a reaction to those posts. And on Reddit your post may show up on the front page of the site, meaning that anyone who shows up might see exactly what it is you were posting about. This exposes you to more people, and makes it very likely you're going to pick up a lot of fresh subscribers and followers.

And what does that do for you? I'm glad you asked!

Social media platforms favor people who have a large number of followers. So if you had 1,000 followers one day, and then after a successful post you found yourself with 10,000 followers, you'll find that your posts are now getting more distance, and being seen far more widely than they were before. The reason for that is the algorithm supports you in ways it didn't before, because one of the major priorities for the algorithm, and how it treats you, is the size of your audience. This, at least in part, determines your reach.

If you do very well you can even get paid by the platform, but I gave details on that in Can You Get Paid By Social Media Platforms As A Writer? Probably Not.

YouTube

Not every author is on YouTube, but there are a lot of us over there who are trying to court an audience by making book commercials, audio adaptations of our work, or just talking about the behind-the-scenes of being an author. Speaking of, shout out to Alice The Author, whose channel is packed with great writing advice and information!

However, a single viral (or even nearly viral) success on this platform also shows how a big splash can lead to permanent changes!

For those who haven't read my older entries on this platform, YouTube requires creators to have a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watched content within a single 365 day span before the site shares ad revenue with you. That is both a tiny number in terms of the Internet, and an impossible number in terms of what most creators can accomplish. And this is something I have some experience with, because I was with Azukail Games for their journey.

Because while Azukail Games had subscribers aplenty, the channel just could not get the view hours. Videos kept going nowhere thanks to changes to the site's algorithm, and it kept losing ground because the channel was several years old... this meant with every passing day it was having hours taken off the total view count.

What put us over the top (netting us over 1,000 hours) was a single video, The Problem With Pentex. This video essay about a niche aspect of the RPG Werewolf: The Apocalypse garnered a lot of interest (perhaps for the mention of the infamous copper merchant Ea Nasir), but more importantly the boost it provided to the channel's view hours (and to our subscriber count) permanently boosted the channel up to a new tier.

So while this one video didn't launch the channel into the stratosphere (it got 10,000 views, not a million), it put us on a whole other level that we have been climbing from ever since.

Your Numbers Make A Difference (Especially En Masse)

I've said this before, and I'm saying it again because more people need to know this. What determines the success of an author (or really a creator of any stripe) is how many people show up for them. It's your purchases of our books that determine whether or not we get royalty checks, it's your views and listens that determine whether we earn any ad revenue, and it's your likes, shares, and subscribes that determine whether social media websites are actively restraining our signals, or boosting them because the machine believes our posts will keep more people on the platform.

And while having an engaged and growing audience is great, those big jumps when something gets popular can be a serious hand-up.

Now, that doesn't mean that as an author you should bend all of your attention and will toward going viral, and that you should only make posts, write books, etc. that are geared toward said virality. Generally speaking, going viral isn't something you can really engineer (without a lot of money and effort, at least). However, a lot of folks don't realize that those kinds of successes have long-term effects, even if the initial event seems like nothing more than a flash in the pan at the time.

The Reason This Is All On My Mind Lately...

The reason this has all been on my mind of late is (shameless self-plug) that I've been hammering hard on a new ongoing audio drama channel over on YouTube called The A.L.I.C.E. Files. A dark sci-fi reimagining of Alice in Wonderland, the channel will feature an ongoing narrative about the events happening inside the mysterious Carroll Institute, as well as smaller, independent stories that act as stand-alones.

And those numbers I mentioned earlier, the 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours? That's proving EXTRA hard to manage.

Which is why I wanted to ask everyone who read this far to please do me a favor. If you could subscribe to the channel, and listen to the stories we've posted so far (but especially the most recent installment, 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories where we meet Dormouse), I would greatly appreciate the effort.

Because while we're doing our best to get as much great stuff out there as we can, we basically need something to go 10,000+ views viral to boost us up to the level we need to be at. And every click, view, and comment on the video gets us that much closer!

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- The A.L.I.C.E. Files (where many dramatized versions of my stories can be heard for free)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list.

Authors Are Viruses (And We Need Help Infiltrating The Wider Population)

We've all had that moment in our lives where we have seen something infecting the population. It started with just a few people, or maybe in a particular region, but then it started spreading. Maybe your younger siblings picked it up from their friends at school, and brought it home. And you and your parents, no matter how you tried, couldn't avoid it forever. Maybe it didn't get past your defenses, but maybe it did. And then you were a carrier, passing it on to your friend group, your extended family, and so on, and so forth.

Maybe it was a boy band whose catchy lyrics infiltrated your brain like an ear worm. Maybe it was a book series you didn't have an interest in, but the more you heard about it, the more you wanted to know what the fuss was all about. Or it might even have been that movie everyone had an opinion about, and you just had to figure out what it was for yourself.

Authors (and other creators) pass from person to person like viruses... and if we can't find a hold, and spread to the point where we've infected a sizable enough population to sustain us, we fade away and die.

These are the booster shots that help keep us vital.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more!

All About "Going Viral"

We've been hearing the phrase "going viral" for years. Artists or properties are, "viral sensations," and that's how we hear about them. And it makes sense. The idea is that a piece of art, a book, a story, a video, etc., has infected an audience. People who witness it, whether they become genuine fans or they're merely participating "ironically," spread the material. They share it with their friends and family. They post it on their social media pages. They put links in the comments section of articles and videos, and they talk about the thing in question on forums.

They are acting as carriers, and the more people they expose to the book, creator, etc., that they like, the more of a chance there is that new people will get infected as well. Not everyone, of course. Some people just don't get infected, no matter how many times they're exposed... but enough of them will.

For the love of god, shut up about that book, already!

The problem that a lot of us are running into these days is, well, it's becoming harder and harder for us to spread our signal, and it is having a real, detrimental effect.

Consider, for a moment, the way social media worked 5, or even 10 years ago. It wasn't perfect, but the algorithms at least attempted to make sure that people who followed you would see the posts you made. Facebook groups, subreddits, and even YouTube as a whole was focused on doing things that kept users connected to the creators and contributors on their platform. Twitter was, arguably, the king of this era because it allowed you to have direct access to creators and celebrities, no matter their status.

These days, though, social media platforms are focused more on promoting sponsored content, and creators who give them money. If you are one of those influencer-level folks (100K subscribers/followers or more) you are still surviving and spreading a bit, but even those operating at this level are having their signals throttled.

And all of the new-fangled social media platforms that have come out? They quarantine users, making it impossible for you to spread to them unless someone brings you and your content inside their bubble.

Whether we're talking about Discord, BlueSky, or a lot of other, similar platforms, they separate users from one another. Unlike platforms like old Twitter, which could have popular posts absolutely rip through the feeds of its users, spreading from person-to-person extremely quickly, Discord and its close family have everyone separated onto their own servers. So while you might have localized outbreaks if a particular piece of media gets popular within a particular server, you are not going to have the sort of spread you could have on open platforms with active discoverability, where people can rapidly transmit something to one another across groups, friend connections, etc.

All of this is to say that the modern landscape we're all trying to survive in is not the one that existed even a few years ago. If that old landscape was one where hordes of zombies ran roughshod over the whole of the land, we're now in one where obstacles stop populations from coming into accidental contact. What that means is that, if we want to get an old-fashioned virus going, then someone has to purposefully go into communities where people are, and start biting them.

Sadly, if we do that as creators, people will often do their best to shut us down or kick us out because they don't want to be our Patient Zero for what we're making. Which is why, at the end of the day, what we really need are other people to start the infection going for us. And that is really hard to get folks to do.

So if you're one of the many folks out there who are wondering what you can do to help a creator you like, just bite someone on our behalf today! Make a social media post, leave a review, subscribe to a channel, and tell your friends and family about a thing we made that you think is cool. Maybe they won't succumb to your bite and become one of our fans... but maybe they will. And if you bite two friends, and they bite two friends, then pretty soon you'll be responsible for your own viral event... and we need all the help we can get!

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

Writing a Bestseller is Like Winning The Lottery (How Facing Facts Can Help You Beat The Odds)

Have you ever stopped to consider what the odds of writing a New York Times bestseller actually are? Well, in case you haven't looked it up yourself, both Forbes and Free Money Finance say that your odds are about 1 in 200. On the one hand, those odds are significantly better than winning the Powerball (about 1 in 238,000,000 in case you're thinking about buying a ticket), but those odds still aren't great. Especially if you've got to put in sweat, blood, creative juices, and years of hellish effort just to get that one ticket ready.

Come on, baby, papa needs a new laptop!

It's pretty easy to find that discouraging. However, if you can face the facts, and accept that you probably won't beat the odds, you'll actually find the game is a lot easier to play.

Ancient Greece, Acceptance, and Spinning The Wheel

In case you're not an etymology geek, the word happen comes from the Greek hap, which referred to chance and fortune. While today we think of happiness as something we have, as a commodity generated from inside ourselves, in the ancient Western world happiness was something that literally happened to you. It came and it went much like luck, ebbing and flowing with fate and favor. And while people still had bad times, the philosophy of the language was basically that you accepted what the gods and chance gave you, because there was nothing you could do about it one way or the other.

And you would be amazed at how freeing that can be in a professional sense.

Let me give you an example.

As a quick for instance, not long after I released my pulp fantasy novel Crier's Knife, I held an ebook giveaway for it. As promotional devices go, these giveaways are a smart bet. People like free stuff, it increases the traffic to your page, and you see a lot more action than you otherwise might. I moved 700 copies over a weekend, which at the level I work at was a pretty decent success. My previous giveaway, which was for my steampunk noir collection New Avalon: Love and Loss in The City of Steam barely hit 500 copies, so I was making clear progress.

Was I involved in that process? Absolutely. I was the one who decided when to host the giveaway, I was the one who made the social media posts, and I was the one who made sure the book was ready for prime time, so to speak. I kept the comments going on the forums, and I was the one who drew as much attention to it as I possibly could. At the end of the day, though, the downloads were only partially determined by my efforts; mostly, they were determined by raw chance.

Every part of this process was affected by so many factors that were outside of my control. Facebook and Reddit's group algorithms decided who saw my posts, and more importantly who didn't see them. I also had no control over the reaction people had to my post. If they were in a good mood, or a bad one. If they decided to download my book since they liked free stuff, or if they down-voted my post because they didn't like something about my description. I had no control over who shared the link with other people, who actually read the book once they downloaded it, and of the people that did read it who left a review.

I was tossing a message in a bottle out into the ocean, and hoping against hope that a YouTube influencer with millions of fans found it, then told all their followers to go buy a copy. That didn't happen, but at the same time there was no guarantee that it would. No magic assurance that my book would become a success if I just tweaked these words in the description, or posted it on this platform as opposed to another one. There is no magic formula to bring a stampede of people with their dollars held out for more of your story.

And the sooner you accept that, the easier it will be to keep trying to make that very thing happen.

You've Got Enough of The Burden as It Is

Don't misunderstand me, here; this is your job, and you are a big part of what goes into it. You're the one who writes the book, helps with the promotion, and who is the face of your brand. You're the one turning up at shows, making your pitch, and getting people interesting. You are, in other words, the one who is buying the ticket.

You simply have no guarantee that the ticket you buy is going to be a winner.

You can, however, stack the odds in your favor.

I said this back in If You Write One Story It May Be Bad. Write A Hundred, And The Odds Are In Your Favor, but it bears repeating. The more you create, the more your put out, and the louder your signal gets, the better the odds you have of people actually discovering you. Much like how buying one ticket might only have a small chance of winning big, but if you buy a few hundred, or a few thousand, well, the odds are looking better all the time.

Because if you put out one book, one article, one YouTube video, etc., your odds of going viral overnight are pretty slim unless you already have a massive fan base of people interested in your work, or you have a gigantic budget to pay for the advertising machine it would take to acquire all those eyes. However, little successes add up over time, and every person you win over as a fan is one more snowflake to stack on your mountain. You pile them up slowly, and eventually there are enough of them to cause an honest-to-goodness avalanche.

Sure, there are some people who buy one lottery ticket as a goof, and win millions of dollars by sheer happenstance. Just like there are people whose books just happened to be in the right genre, or who told just the right story at the right time to get everyone's attention. There's no rhyme or reason to it, because it happens to good books and bad, to books that are heavily promoted, and indie darlings no one has ever heard of.

But don't you worry about that. Because whether the odds are with you, or against you, doesn't matter. Because sometimes your luck will be good, and sometimes it will be bad. But if you focus on telling good stories, on spreading the word, and on cultivating your little crop of readers, you'll get there eventually. Even better, you'll get there without "what-iffing" yourself inside out, wondering why other books got more attention, sold more copies, or got more likes than yours did.

Are there factors you can quantify? Sure there are. But they're only a tiny slice of the pie, and the sooner you learn to accept that luck is a huge part of whether you succeed or fail, the sooner you can get back to work without that huge weight of worry on your shoulders. Do your best, and let the rest take care of itself, because you cannot force fortune to turn your way.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Understanding Cascade Sales/Views, and Why More Products Means Steadier Earnings

One of the most common pieces of advice I see from writers is that you should always work on a series, because it's a guaranteed income. While I don't agree with that wording (nothing is guaranteed in the world of entertainment), the nugget of truth they're trying to get at is sound. In short, if you write a series of books then you are getting your readers invested in a bigger project, and making them feel like they're obligated to buy the next one in order to see what happens to their favorite characters. However, you don't have to write a series in order to net yourself more readers; just by virtue of writing a book that a reader liked, they're going to want more from you.

When they go looking for it, that is what I call a cascade.

Once the rapids get them, they're all yours.

In short, whenever you release a new piece of content (whether it's a book, a blog, a video, etc.), you're tossing a rock into a pool. Whether the initial splash is big or small, it causes ripples. Those ripples represent the way the impact flows outwards, and how even a modest initial splash can still have meaningful repercussions down the line.

I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about.

So, for those who don't know, I write a gaming blog called Improved Initiative. Not all that long ago I put up a post titled The Non-Problem of Making Monks Fit Your Setting. Short version is that there were some people out there who had cognitive dissonance about mixing "Eastern" martial artists with "Western" fantasy, and thus they just banned these kinds of characters. I wrote the piece pointing out how it's really not all that much of a stretch to include multiple kinds of fantasy in a single, collaborative project, and gave some examples of how you could make it work. As long as everyone follows the rules, you should be fine. I'd also written an older article, 5 Tips For Playing Better Monks, which I linked in that post, since I was talking about monks and such.

Apparently this was a sore spot in the gaming community, with a lot of people agreeing with my points, and an equal number of people vehemently disagreeing that you could ever have more than one strain of fantasy active in a given game. That led to some rather spirited debate in the comments, but it also led to a lot of people sharing the article around. While it snarfed up about 10,000 views in its original release run (not bad for one of my gaming articles), the advice article about playing better monks also got a thousand reads and change out of the deal. Which meant that, in addition to how well the actual post did, I got another couple of bucks to put in my pocket as a related but separate post of mine also caught some of those ripples.

That is, essentially, how a cascade works.

Keep The Cascade in Mind

Whether we're talking about book sales, article views, blog reads, you can get a cascade out of nearly anything. And often times it's the things you don't expect that yield some of the biggest results.

Which is why you need to always look at the impact something could have, and make sure you set up your marketing in such a way that you get the biggest possible splash onto your already existing content.

Or that the new fire re-ignites old ashes, if you like that metaphor better?

 

For example, when I wrote an article about Bartitsu, which is basically Victorian-era MMA, I made sure that I linked an article about Glima, which is Viking-style wrestling, just in case it got popular with the fight crowd. I always make sure to link back to my archives when I write new articles, making sure I can direct the flow of interested eyeballs to go read older pieces in a particular category. And when I come out with a new book, I make sure to mention My Amazon Author Page so that interested readers can see the whole spectrum, instead of just the latest installment.

Any given cascade might be a one-time runoff... but it might not be. There's always going to be a few readers out there who don't just read one article, watch one video, or buy one book. They're the ones who bookmark your site, who favorite your channel, and who add your work to their wish list. Those people were just curious readers when they clicked your initial link, but now they're budding fans.

Once you get those readers going deep down the rabbit hole, they're yours. But you need to make sure you gave them more than just one thing to look at. Because some readers will just walk away after satisfying their initial curiosity... but those who want more are going to happily dig through your archives, pick up older works, and just have a merry time spiking your views and sale counts.

As long as you left them a signpost for where to go next, that is.

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Why Cat Videos Will Always Be More Popular Than Your Novel

Before we get started, watch this video.

That video was 31 seconds long, shot on a shaky hand cam, and absent a single piece of real dialogue. It's been reposted thousands of times, and the original posting had over 100,000 views in the first month. People all over the world watched this video, and instantly told all their friends about it for days and days. Their friends watched it, and the process repeated itself. In fact, I will almost guarantee that 50%-75% of the people who share this very post do so because of the cat video on it.

I can confidently say that this will never happen to your novels. Or to my novels. That isn't a statement on our status as writers. It's just that you cannot compete with this. Here's why.

Time

The argument about quantity over quality is a big part of this section. Novels, by and large, take a long bleeding time to write. Even if someone can manage the phenomenal pace of an author like Stephen King, there's still the months of review by editors, the art that has to be created for the cover, the promotion for the book, and additional time tacked on for any problems in the process. At the absolute best, a novel will take a year from page one to release date. Absolute best rarely happens.

Cat videos on the other hand can be produced at a fast clip, taking days or weeks at most depending on editing and whether the creator is setting up a certain situation. This means that the audience gets more hits of their drug of choice more often, and it leads to a constantly re-enforced fandom which can be very hard to create with books. Also, reading a book can take days or weeks. This video can be watched in half a minute while you're supposed to be working.

Medium

Not everyone reads. It's an unfortunate and painful fact, but it's true. Whether it's because of time, personal preference, or just a hatred that was instilled in third grade English class, there's only a certain portion of the population for whom a novel is a preferred form of escape. A significantly larger portion of the world has access to the Internet, and is willing to spend at least half a minute watching something hilarious and adorable on their computers, tablets, smartphones, etc.

Cost

This is one of the biggest reasons that books cannot compete with cat videos, much less with all of Youtube. An author who gives his or her work away for free is never going to be able to achieve financial independence through that work. Internet videos on the other hand have advertising revenue backing them, that means the creator gets paid if the audience takes the time to click an ad in order to support said creator. That's also the way blogs work. Blogs just like this one.

You have to convince people that your epic post-apocalyptic sci-fi story where a hybrid super soldier unravels a government conspiracy is worth $10. Users on Youtube can slap their videos up for free, and just wait for word of mouth to spread.

What Difference Does That Make?

This was the same question video game giants asked when Angry Birds got popular. A dinky little game produced by a handful of upstarts wasn't going to be a threat to their empire. Until it was. Video game companies who had thought nothing of the casual game market suddenly saw their profits shrinking, and they had no clue they were even in a fight.

Casual gaming is a lot like Internet videos in this sense. They're fast, engaging, portable, entertaining, and they can absorb users for hours. While both Skyrim and Conan the Usurper are more deeply involving than their casual counterparts, they require someone who can set aside the entertainment snack food and delve a little deeper.

How do You do That?

There are a lot of methods for luring people away from quicker, faster entertainments though there's no guarantee any of them will work. That's the nature of the beast when discussing marketing.

The first is to fight fire with fire. To that end authors may make trailers for their books, creating a visual experience that can suck readers in and make them want more. In addition to trailers authors may run vlogs, or offer free clips of themselves reading snippets of their books or short stories. Some authors go so far as to have a fully-acted cast, creating an old style radio drama out of their material.

Another approach is to focus much more narrowly on an audience that prefers books over the Internet's cat crack. Audiences like older Americans who don't use the Internet, academics who prefer reading to simply observing their entertainments, genre fans for whom the vistas of new worlds will always be a first love, and others of like mind.

Some authors realize that if you can't beat them, you should join them. These authors use the memes and popularity of short, simple videos to gain a following, and then slowly start introducing their books to that audience. It's more insidious, and it requires multiple skill sets, but this method can work wonders for those who know how to play on viewer's heart strings.

People Will Always Read... Won't They?

Probably. As long as teachers and parents instill a love of books into young people, and that love isn't destroyed by all the academic reading required in college, then there's always going to be a place for books. As long as people who see movies want to read the original source material, and as long as there's an audience that craves the fantastic and the horrifying, there will be readers.

You just have to be loud enough for them to notice you.


If you're looking for some more funny stuff about cats, check out all of their superpowers here. If your furry friend is suffering from a urinary tract infection and you want to provide a simple, at-home cure, check this out. If you want to keep up to date with my author activities, then follow me on Facebook, or check me out on Tumblr. A total list of my books, including the post-apocalyptic sci-fi mentioned above titled Heart of the Myrmidon may be found on my Goodreads page. Lastly please feel free to like and share any and everything you find here. Remember that this page runs on Google AdSense. If you want to see something in particular featured on The Literary Mercenary, just drop me a line and I'll look into it.