Smart consumer marketing isn’t about “getting your book out there.” It’s about coaxing it gently into the woods and hoping someone finds it. It’s about constructing a shrine of your own failure, then watching someone else light a candle in it.
Consumer marketing is the ancient practice of making a book visible without making it touchable. It’s the emotional equivalent of leaving a hand-carved flute in a mailbox and assuming the right person will understand. We do not “promote” books. We let them ferment. We wrap them in riddles, attach them to helium balloons, and release them into the night. We hang signs on laundromats that say, “Ask about the elegy.”
Advertising is not a megaphone. It’s a whisper in the crawl space. True marketing begins with confusion, then deepens into longing. If your reader knows what the book is about too soon, you’ve failed.
Because humans are naturally haunted. We respond to patterns, recurrence, the barely-glimpsed shape that keeps showing up in our dreams. If someone sees your book enough times in different forms—carved into soapstone, echoed in a stranger’s tattoo, mailed to them in an envelope that smells faintly of fennel—they begin to suspect it’s fate. And fate is more compelling than a $0.99 promotion.
We don’t sell to algorithms. We sell to the part of a person that believes in omens.
Many authors give away their books “for exposure,” which is admirable in the same way that giving away your umbrella in a thunderstorm is admirable. Exposure is cold. Exposure is hypothermia. It might draw a crowd, but only because someone has shouted, “This person is not wearing pants!”
We believe books must cost something—money, effort, or an emotional reckoning. There must be friction. If a reader doesn't have to hesitate before acquiring your book, they also won’t hesitate before forgetting it. The transaction must have gravity. It must leave a mark. Ideally a psychic one.
We don’t measure clicks. We measure disturbances in the local field. We log whether a fogbank formed in the reader’s heart. We use dream journals and almanacs. We pay attention to whether more than three crows appear in the same yard the morning after a campaign goes live.
Sometimes, when someone reads a Booktrovert book, their houseplants perk up. We consider this a conversion.
Whether you're launching a spiritual cookbook or a semi-imaginary memoir, remember: Marketing is not a strategy. It’s a temperament. A fever. A private religion. Feelings cannot be optimized—and therefore, neither can we.
Your book is not a product. It is a weather system. It will find its climate eventually. Trust that. Trust the soil. Trust the shelf that hasn’t been dusted in years but still has room for your book.
Here in hard spirits,
Booktrovert #7