Here's what I know about marketing thanks to my time spent being a not-great person.
Marketing is not found in Facebook "trainings."
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Let’s talk about one of those writerly things that people want to know more about but only want to talk about it if it comes in one-size-fits-all packaging.
And I’ll go down to the underworld after dying on the hill that way too many people make marketing into “A Thing” and then even more people than that profit off other people’s concerns about marketing (you maybe read their stuff here on Substack, isn’t that neat). It’s a not-at-all virtuous cycle that I’d like to peel away from and talk to you today about…
A 2am phonecall
It’s 2 in the morning, and I know this because I just got off the phone with somebody at 1:45. They were, or are, I don’t think they’re dead yet, a professional liar. I don’t want to glamorize what they do, it’s predatory and conniving, but I was young and this is a story about me being stupid and doing stupid things. I promise this will go somewhere good though, just keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times.
Assuming these people are still alive, I remember them to be incredibly litigious, so let’s say the first professional liar’s name was “Dick.” Dick ran a company, though that suggests he filed paperwork and paid taxes when I’m pretty sure he didn’t, that employed a number of people to also professionally lie.
Dick ran a pickup artist company. And we spoke for about 2 hours about how I could absolutely join the team and help think up all different kinds of ways to make sure more people paid money to go to clubs and have one night stands or slip drugs into drinks via dumb magic tricks.
If it wasn’t clear to you, this was during a time in my life where I was not anywhere near sober and so terribly down an unmedicated cycle of suicidal depression that any job sounded good, especially if it meant a job where someone was going to pay attention to me and maybe someone else would want to get naked near me.
Not at all my finest hour.
But Dick was a hell of a salesperson and even though Dick never said I’d be paid or even contracted for any of the work I would do, nor would I receive any healthcare or reimbursement for any expenses, I was onboard quickly when he mentioned that I’d have very little oversight and I’d work with someone I knew already.
I knew him in the same way that you know someone whose text you read on a website, so I knew this person in that kind of vibes-only way, and we were unmedicated depressives with incredible insecurities who could be very creative with little prompting.
Of course I said yes.
Which is why at 2am my phone was ringing and I was then talking to, let’s call him Ulysses, because that’s easier to spell than his actual name. Ulysses and I would go on to become incredible friends for the year I spent coming up with different ways to make having one night stands appealing to people who really needed emotional support, a little therapy, and maybe a haircut or two.
Ulysses was lightly drunk, as he would be any time he had to talk to another person, and he’d frequently call me on his way being very drunk while I’d call him on my way to being very high. We were tasked with marketing two new projects, big giant DVD products from two Australians who spent hours talking on stage like Steve Jobs about charisma like it was rocket science and how they had cracked some kind of Fermat’s Equation about how you could, very easily, say a few things, move a certain way, and then end up in a number of beds on any number of nights with any number of women you were aroused by.
To be fair, those were two very charismatic and good looking guys who were both very nice to me when I met them. One of them long since abandoned the world of sexual assault and con artistry for a legit job as a product photographer (you’ve seen his work) and the other shifted to a new grift of dropshipping and crypto-currency. I still get emails from that guy from time to time, and he’s using all the same tricks on a whole new audience. How delightfully scammy.
Ulysses and I would spend about 3 hours every night on the phone and then join a conference call once a week to pitch our ideas. We’d get told they were too ambitious or too expensive, while also hearing that the company (allegedly) spent twenty thousand dollars to rent a hotel ballroom or first-class hotel suites for Dick and his friends.
What I remember most about these calls was how little I was listened to, and how often I felt like I was being asked to invent a way to reach a hundred thousand people while spending less than 5 minutes and fewer than a hundred dollars.
I will point out that after Ulysses and I were let go (we never got paid, but the marketing department was “too expensive”), they implemented two of our ideas in the post-dot-com pre-app days: a text messaging service to send “tips and strategies” to subscribers, and a mastermind group before getting dumped into a sales funnel where a guy would ask you for $5000 so you could hang out with him in a New York nightclub and watch him talk to a supermodel and her coke dealer.
That was a shitty year, though I did meet people who would later get arrested for sexual assault, people who would join in the January 6th insurrection, a guy who was fleeing Interpol, and quite a few guys who bought a lot of Ed Hardy shirts and mistook misogyny for therapy.
What it did show me was that if two depressives having rambling conversations could market sleaze without really too much challenge, then marketing wasn’t a bogeyman to be over-analyzed. And it wasn’t something to be feared, because I was a professional fuck-up and if I could figure out how to talk about things, then obviously someone who wasn’t high for 80% of their waking hours could do it too.
It took me many years to come to terms with that part of my life. The number of times I woke up clammy and sweaty in a hotel room to my friend badly fucking a woman before we’d go have omelets and I’d help him avoid his then-girlfriend (they’re married now with 2 kids). The number of nights I passed out and disappointed the best friend of a girl someone else was trying to hook up with. The number of late night drives through the Lincoln Tunnel wondering if we were going to get chased by any angry boyfriends. The number of times some trust fund kid would tell me that what I wanted to do was too expensive but then tell me I should fly to Los Angeles on my own dime so he could explain “West Coast marketing” to me (that’s not really a thing).
I am grateful for all those misadventures. They at the very least give me a way to explain marketing now without needing to decode things you’ve probably never heard of like “sarging” or “DHV” or “NC-OTN.”
So thanks, skeevy date rapists. You taught me a lot about who I am by showing me who I never wanted to be.
Authenticity isn’t something you can manufacture
If you cruise around writer-adjacent spaces enough, you’ll see a lot of people talking about permission and authenticity like they’re going to change the tilt of world on its axis.
Yes, they’re important, but let’s look at them divorced from our expectations.
Authenticity means being yourself, which isn’t so much about putting on layers around yourself as it is about removing layers to reveal yourself. There’s not a lot of authenticity in pickup artistry, as everyone has codenames and jargon and plenty of made-up bullshit to disguise that Mike from Vancouver is really Mike from Vancouver and not a guy training to be a Formula One racer or that Sandeep from Houston isn’t a guy with social anxiety, he’s an eccentric heir to a turmeric company.
You’re you, you’re always you. You’re always going to be you when you want to be and when you don’t want to be. You’re not always going to want to talk about your book, and maybe you’re always going to feel the need to, because social expectations scream “Market or Die!” (or is that “Profit or Die!”), but you’re always you.
You like what you like. You write what you write. You have a whole life of experience and you’re trying to communicate that to someone through the medium of something you made up rather than sitting down across from them and saying, “Okay so for a like a year or so I helped write bullshit on a website that helped people take advantage of drunk girls in bars all over the world.”
Authenticity is at the core of however you’re going to market. Which is weird, because I’m asking you to be honest and vulnerable while you’re also talking about this thing you made up.
So where does honesty and vulnerability show up in and around your fiction? In how you talk about it. In how you talk about the process. In how you talk about your intent. You did this thing, you made this thing, and you can damn well be proud of it and yourself. There’s no reason (and nothing to gain) from embellishment or hyperbole here, you don’t need to sweeten the truth up because of some foolish thinking that what you did isn’t enough or not cool enough.
Remember, Mike from Vancouver is a guy from Vancouver and he’s packed with an interesting life and ideas and hopes and dreams before we go pretending he knows anything about the thirteenth corner of the Hungarian GP.
What you did is enough, isn’t it?
Marketing isn’t a show, it’s you showing up
All the funny shirts and all the parlor tricks and all the little comments and chatting scripts eventually run their course. You can memorize “The Cube” and a “Yes Ladder” until you’re blue in the face but eventually there will be a lull in the conversation and you’ll end up in deep foreign waters where the bullshittery of trying to disguise that you want sex by any means necessary will be apparent.
I watched a lot of people do a lot of things to stall the deep waters. I watched guys inject steroids. I watched people buy shirts two sizes too small to make themselves look bigger. I watched people commit credit card fraud to afford the “right” kind of jeans or shoes. And eventually, yes, with enough drinking or a roofie here or there or just plain desperation, people went off to have lousy sex in cars or on cars or in bedrooms of untidy rentals.
And come morning, everyone would stagger around bleary eyed and unshowered, poisoned and lost, half-dressed, until they could find some amount of clothing to make a hasty escape from wherever they were no longer welcome.
Marketing, “peacocking” “catching eyes” whatever you want to call it, is what gets things started. They see you, they form some kind of interest, they engage in some kind of interaction with you, and then the marketing has done its job, so that other things can take over.
To put this in book terms: that pitch you’ve been over-engineering on Twitter got someone to click the link. But that pitch on Twitter is likely not enough to compel someone to click the “Buy Now” button and make a purchase. For that, they need to see the text on the page you linked to, which means you’re no longer marketing (not technically), you’re selling, which is a different kind of interaction.
I learned quickly that the appeal of a silky shirt stops mattering when you’re drunk and trying to get the shirt off. The fun little limericks you learn to remember the “steps of seduction” don’t matter when you’re waking up with a mouth that tastes like a sewer next to someone who’s wondering how they got into this hotel room.
What does matter though, is the person beyond the shirt and the scripts. The person who’s present when the manufactured persona goes away. The person doing the marketing is always more valuable than the marketing they’re doing.
And it’s from that value we can extract something more significant than a catch-phrase or a hasty graphic to sell a book. Repeating the same pitch a thousand times the same way does not mean you’ll get a thousand sales. You might get some, but after a while, the pitch becomes more noise than signal and you’re actively making it harder to engage people.
Your best marketing strategy comes not from the bullshit of a Facebook “training” that tries to boil everything down to 6 steps that happen to cost you $49.99. Your best marketing is the compilation not of one thing repeated a thousand times, but a thousand different things seldom repeated. No Facebook or Zoom signup needed. Save your cash. Buy a good meal.
This is the point where someone asks “Well what things? What do I say? What’s the list of this thousand things?” and we’re right back to guys all trying to be individuals at the night club while wearing the same shirt in slightly different colors.
Talk about your work. Talk about what you’re trying to say. Talk about how you stand out from someone else and their work without knocking them down. Talk about why it mattered to you to write every Tuesday while waiting for your kid to get out of school. Talk about how much you hate marketing gurus so you’re just going to be honest, even when that means like you feel insufficient or like you’re doing something wrong that breaks some unspoken rule of algorithms and social media.
Instead of letting your shirt and jeans and credit card trying to make you look like you’re someone with whom someone else should get naked, be the sort of person willing to be emotionally naked and honest when you talk about what you love.
It’s going to feel weird, I get it
For that whole year of phone calls and night clubs and “scoring HBs” and all the other shit, I am disgusted with myself. It was a year wasted, a year I knew I was doing dumb shit or that I was a party to dumb shit and not once, despite feeling like I knew better, did I know better. The few times I woke up the only single person in a room of pairs, I felt such deep loneliness and envy that twenty-plus years later I don’t think I’ve forgiven myself.
I was me but not me. There was a performance of some version of me where I booted all the anxiety and self-loathing to the side so that I could make someone laugh. There was another version of me where I played equal parts older sibling and den mother, shepherding hungover girls out of unsavory hotel rooms before my friends woke up. There was another version of me who stole underwear and raided purses for drug money and who made sure everyone had fake names and false phone numbers so their girlfriends and parents and bosses never knew what was happening.
All of those people are me, sometimes amplified, sometimes not. And every day then, just like every day now, I get to choose which me shows up and which me does the particular part of the day.
There were times it felt weird to lie and make up some shit about who I was or what I was doing for work. There were times it felt just as weird to be honest about who I was and what I was really doing. And that’s all me too.
Your work is a part of you. Putting out an album of alt-folk or taking photos of yourself or writing a romance novel might feel more comfortable than being an obnoxious drunk at a club, but it’s still a part of you that’s out into the world for the view, visitation, and potential judgment of others. It’s scary, but differently scary.
There will be times where you’re going to be doing something or saying something and it’s going to feel like you’re the only person in the world at this club where everybody else knows what to do and does it so well while you’re wondering how the hell anyone is going to notice you, let alone like you.
There are going to be times where you’ll see people who you know aren’t always acting as their best selves, or who are taking all different kinds of shortcuts, or who are just shitty people doing dumb shit, and you’ll see those people succeed while you’re someone trying to do your best in a world where it seems like the best way to get what you want is to sacrifice some morals or boundaries or rules.
I am not the best person. I am a better person than who I was twenty years ago, but I am not some great paragon of behavior and choices. I am not a role model for what I’ve done or even what I do, and maybe at best I’m possibly worth noting because I’m in the process of trying to do better. So maybe don’t believe me when I say that you don’t need to follow that herd, spit out nonsense endlessly, repeat yourself to everyone who walks by, faff around with stupid tricks, or cut corners that violate what you believe in to end up where you want to go. You might feel like it’s the only way you’re going to succeed, but I promise you that it hurts more than it helps, and it’ll cost you later.
Keep doing you. Your way. All the time. There’s nothing to apologize for.
Love you. Talk soon.