LOVERS...

FIND 5000 LOVERS OF YOUR WRITING

Dear Aspiring Author,

Common advice to writers is to find five thousand lovers.

Fifty thousand is better but five thousand will do. Five hundred is a good start.

Don’t be discouraged if that sounds like a lot. The first five are the hardest. But they talk to each other and word spreads that you’re around and worth checking out. There’s usually a lull at the start… but keep faith, you’re looking and sounding great. They’ll show.

🚨ACTION POINT AT THE END WHICH MAY HELP YOU🚨

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Unfortunately there are some criteria for these “lovers”. First of all, ideally, they should not be people who have a personal relationship to you. Secondly, they should generally enjoy the kind of genre you write in. A common mistake people make is to say that “my friend really likes it. But they don’t usually read this kind of stuff.”

(Don’t know what genre you write? Read this.)

The good news? Substack is a good place to start. There are tonnes of lovers of writing here (not just writers we hope?) so it’s a good way to introduce your writing to people beyond your immediate circle. It goes both ways. Who on Substack are you a lover of? (Are you a good lover at that? More on this in a different post.)

You’re told that five thousand souls leaving a little heart on your post is a promise of future readers. This is often true. For some writers an engaged social media following is a promise of future book sales. Publishers like it as well. If you’re prepared to take on the challenge of building a loving audience of 5—to 500—to 5000 (on Substack or elsewhere) two things to say:

1. It’s a challenge. But it’s one you should at least consider facing.

The contemporary book economy favours writers who do their own self-promotion. This is a response to “The Problem of Too Many Books” (lament that here). Part of my reason for being on Substack is to empathise with my writers whom I encourage to build and find their audience (so we can get more money for their book deal when the time comes). I want to better understand the kind of work which goes into that. As a literary agent I have something of a head start (my followers are in the thousands—although it doesn’t show that? Substack Team please can you help?) It’s exciting generally because I know there are lots of my people here, writers.

Having said that,

2. It is not AS necessary for all genres.

An unknown literary novelist with a big following might look like an “about to be discovered” but those literary book readers are snarky tricky folk, reluctant to be led and quick to label you a “desperate wannabe”. For them you’re probably far better off being recommended by one famous cult author and then being heavily promoted in a limited circulation upscale journal that publishes quarterly.

Writer self-promotion is not one-size-fits-all.

There are commonalities but specific tactics depending on which genre you write. So if you haven’t already, please specify which genre you write by subscribing to the relevant section of this newsletter (you’re welcome to subscribe to more than one). Publishing people (who aren’t aspiring authors) there’s a section for you too.

The website attached to this newsletter is a work in progress. It will highly benefit from your expertise as a writer and a reader. In fact your existence is potentially invaluable to other writers looking to find their people—to love and be loved.

I am hoping the action point that follows will help my subscribers find a loving supporter, or even more excitingly, a critical collaborator (an engaged reader).

🚨 ACTION POINT HERE 🚨

(Mostly for the people with Substack accounts. Clue: it takes 5 minutes to make one.)

If you’re an aspiring author please can you comment on this post which GENRE you are writing.

Can be multiple full sentences/ONE WORD e.g.

“Hey Ivan I always thought I was writing LITERARY FICTION but now I think it might be UPMARKET FICTION. I’d like the bigger readership of UPMARKET having read about that in your Mean Girls post about genre.”

“FANTASY ROMANCE 💖”

“NARRATIVE NON-FICTION about my mother who served in Vietnam.”

“Very trenchant SUBJECT LED NON-FICTION about cats, for sure.”

“LIT FIC.”

So which broad category is it?

LITERARY FICTION or UPMARKET FICTION or GENRE FICTION (which genre?) or NARRATIVE NON-FICTION or SUBJECT-LED NON-FICTION?

(If you’re not sure which genre your book falls under, please start thinking about it here.)

Look at the comments. Identify other writers in your space. Consider privately messaging them. Are they looking for a reader? Are you? This is what the internet is good for. Stop waiting for the lovers of your writing to come to you. This process requires as much effort as it does generosity.

Find each other. Read each other. Help each other.

More soon.

As ever,

Ivan and Tilly