In our last episode, we talked about why Word of Mouth ISN’T working for you. This episode is about how to make it work. A lot of the thinking here comes from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, published in 2000. If you haven’t read it, I can’t recommend it highly enough. In terms of nonfiction writing, Gladwell is in a class of his own.
His central argument is that when ideas spread, not everyone plays an equal role. To see why, consider a thought experiment. What if Mark Zuckerberg had launched Facebook at a nursing home instead of Harvard? People in nursing homes have very small social circles that are poorly connected to the outside world. A social movement has never started in a nursing home, despite there being tens of thousands of them.
Harvard is the opposite. It draws people from every state and dozens of countries. An idea that takes hold there is one hop away from reaching influential people everywhere. Once every Harvard student was on Facebook, everyone at Stanford and Yale wanted it. Then the big state schools. Then the high schools. Then everyone. That is how ideas spread.
Gladwell identifies three kinds of people who drive that spreading. Understanding them is the most practical thing you can do to help your book reach beyond your existing bubble.
Mavens
Thomas: A maven is a category nerd, someone who has read more books in a specific niche than almost anyone else, purely because they love it. I am a maven. I have a Goodreads list I created myself called Business Books on Failure, because I find you learn more from failure than from success. There aren’t that many books in that niche, but I’ve read most of them. Mavens collect ideas for the pure joy of it.
Mavens are typically the first to take a risk on a new author or an unknown book. They care deeply about quality, but not quality in the abstract. If you’re writing violent space marine action, your book had better deliver excellent violent space marine action. That’s the quality a space marine maven is judging you on.
Mavens are who you send free advance copies to. They’re also the people who curate Goodreads lists, and getting your book added to the right lists by a maven matters far more than adding it yourself. You can ask them directly, with a link, if you have a relationship with them. They’re the kind of people who log all 100 books they read in a year on Goodreads, which makes Goodreads a natural habitat for them. Fair warning: mavens are honest. Goodreads ratings are significantly lower on average than Amazon ratings because mavens are filtering and sorting, not rounding up. Their trust in the platform is part of why it matters.
Jim: I know who the mavens are in my genre and I reach out to them specifically. You have to know your material cold because you’re not going to fool them. And I don’t send every book to every maven. I pick carefully based on who’s the right fit.
Connectors
Thomas: A connector is someone with hundreds or thousands of friends across completely different walks of life. Where most people’s social networks cluster around one community, a connector’s network spans many. Gladwell describes tracing his own social network and realizing that most of his friends came through a single person who had introduced him to a different world entirely. I have a friend like that in my own life; he introduced me to many of the key people in it, including my wife.
Connectors are highly extroverted and high-energy. They connect people because they love doing it. You can’t manufacture a connector out of yourself if that’s not how you’re wired, but you can find them and get your book into their hands.
The key thing to understand about connectors is that they have to actually know you. A connector is not going to introduce a stranger to their network. There has to be a real relationship. This is why blog tours that hop from low-traffic blog to low-traffic blog exhaust authors without results: they’re reaching people inside their own bubble, not connectors. The most reliable way to meet connectors is at conferences, and that means talking to other authors, not only to agents and editors. Some of the most valuable relationships Jim and I have built over the years started in hallway conversations at events. Those authors became connectors for us and we for them.
Also remember: not all bloggers are connectors, and not all blogs are created equal. A quick way to gauge a blog’s reach is to check how many people are sharing its posts. Zero shares means zero reach. Hundreds of comments and shares means people are actually reading and engaging.
Jim: A connector won’t introduce just anyone to their network. Trust has to be established first. But once a real connector is excited about your book, it spreads from connector to connector very fast. There may only be 20,000 true connectors in the country, but once your idea reaches that network, it moves quickly and widely.
Thomas: For introverted authors who find this intimidating: you don’t have to be interesting. You just have to be genuinely interested. Ask questions. Listen. People want someone who will pay attention to them, and if you can do that authentically, connectors will like you. There is no shortcut, but it’s also not as hard as it sounds.
Salespeople
Thomas: The third type is the salesperson, someone who evangelizes a book relentlessly. Getting Things Done by David Allen grew its sales every year for five years after publication, the opposite of the typical curve. What happened is that people who read it became fanatics. If you complained about being busy near a Getting Things Done evangelist, they would not stop talking about that book until you agreed to read it.
A salesperson is different from a maven. The maven is who you go to for recommendations. The salesperson comes to you whether you asked or not. Both are valuable.
Salespeople are activated when they feel you are one of them. If your book takes a clear position on something they care about, they’ll shout it from the rooftops. When Thomas published his nonfiction book arguing against courtship culture and for a return to traditional dating, readers ordered cases of books and mailed them to journalists on their own initiative. No one asked them to. They were true believers. This can work in fiction too, any time your book resonates with a community’s identity or gives voice to something they already feel.
How to craft a message that spreads
Be controversial
Thomas: Controversial things spread faster. Even opposition spreads them: when people try to ban or boycott a book, they’re advertising it to everyone who hears about the ban. Animal Farm takes the position that communism has been tried and has failed. That made people angry, and it’s never gone out of print.
Jim: The Shack is another example. People were publicly warning Christians not to read it. That warning sent thousands of readers directly to the book. As of this recording it recently hit number one on several bestseller lists again. Controversy extended its life by years.
Be sticky
Thomas: A sticky book has a simple, memorable pitch that spreads easily from person to person. How to Win Friends and Influence People does this in the title itself. If you can’t summarize your book in one or two compelling sentences, no one else will be able to either, which means no one will pass it along. Jim, give me your pitch for one of your books.
Jim: What would you do if you woke up one morning and the darkest parts of your soul were gone?
Thomas: That’s sticky. It’s short, it raises a question, and it makes you want to know more. Craft that pitch and use it everywhere.
Be remarkable
Thomas: Remarkable doesn’t mean very good. It means shockingly different, something that makes people’s eyebrows go up when they hear about it. Amish Vampires in Space is a real book: Amish settlers evacuate a dying planet, board a spaceship, and discover there are vampires on board. It got on The Tonight Show. Comedians reference it. It may become a TV show. Not because it’s a great book, but because it’s worth making a remark about.
Many authors try to blend in, to write books that fit neatly into their genre. That can drive solid sales, but it won’t generate word of mouth. To get people talking, you have to give them something to talk about.
Advertise
Thomas: Word of mouth is often manufactured by advertising. People who live in separate bubbles won’t naturally reach each other, but a paid ad can throw a rock into a new pond and start a ripple. If your book is already sticky, remarkable, or controversial, advertising becomes dramatically more effective. All three together and you have the conditions for something to go viral.
Incentivize
Jim: You can also reward people for sharing. Thomas ran viral contests at Enclave Publishing that put this into practice.
Thomas: We used a plugin called KingSumo to run contests on the website. People got one entry for signing up and five more entries for each friend they referred. We gave away a collection of our books worth about $250, and the kind of readers we were targeting genuinely wanted that prize. People started recruiting every friend they could. We turned ordinary readers into salespeople without them even thinking of it that way.
This only works if people already like your book. Incentives don’t convert someone who thought your book was bad. They lower the barrier for someone who liked it but wouldn’t normally talk about it. They had a reason to share, and they did. Affiliate programs work the same way.
The full strategy is to connect with mavens and connectors, give salespeople something to believe in, make your message sticky and remarkable, don’t shy away from controversy, and when word of mouth stalls, advertise or incentivize to push the idea into new ponds.
