Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

Does outrage marketing work?

I don’t know and it would be very difficult to find out but here is some speculation.

The public/social media persona of some authors can be characterised as belligerent, contrarian and attracted controversy. I’ve mainly discussed on this site right-wing figures but to varying degrees, this description can apply to people of any ideology. The author’s motives for acting in this way are debatable and perhaps unknowable. Some people have strong views, some people are naturally prickly and there are non-authors who troll and pick fights on social media for apparently no reason other than they enjoy it.

However, it is reasonable to believe some authors indulge in this behaviour as a form of marketing and even if we assume other motives, it is an open question whether controversy does or does not impact the sales of their books.

How might it help sales?

The paradox of the age for writers is that it has never been easier to publish a book and also has never been harder. It is easier because the tools for publishing are technologically advanced and commonly available. Word processing software makes writing physically much easier, there are tools for spelling and grammar checking, books can be distributed electronically and there are services for easily publishing a book. However, book publishing has become less profitable, reading as a form of entertainment competes with new forms of entertainment such as video games and older forms in new formats such as the streaming of music, TV and films.

Authors now write in a more crowded market in which even moderately successful writers struggle to make a living.Standing out from the crowd is difficult and name recognition matters. Social media provides a way of advancing a personal brand but that carries with it exactly the same problem — how to stand out from everybody else.

Of course a viral tweet will bring a degree of recognition and will bring in new followers. Getting more social media attention means, in principle, more people who will see social media posts promoting the author’s work. Many kinds of social media posts can go viral but controversy is both the riskiest and most reliable way of driving social media engagement in the short term.

So some authors may see a possible way forward: pick controversial/trolling-like positions, promote those positions to provoke a backlash, get free publicity and hence (maybe) more sales.

That’s the theory. I think credibly it is a process that works for Larry Correia but I can’t claim that there is any way to check in terms of sales. Correia has the advantage that his controversial stances match the author persona he projects on social media and that persona also fits the style and genre of the books he writes AND those stances (particularly on guns) fit with the audience for his books. If I just consider notable Puppies, the approach has worked less well for Brad Torgersen and notably there are mismatches across the board for Brad, he’s just not as good at projecting a tough guy persona online, and his actual novels are less well-targeted to a specific demographic and there’s not a thematic connection between his culture war topics and his science fiction other than it being vaguely backwards looking.

But we’ve no kinds of experimental controls here. It is just as plausible to assume that Larry Correia is just a more entertaining writer than Brad Torgersen. I’m not about to rush out and buy either of their books but if I had to read a novel by any of the notable Puppy figures from 2015 for entertainment I’d pick Correia.

How might it harm sales?

I think this is more obvious. Controversial opinions and online belligerence are going to make some people dislike you. Those people are less likely to buy your books. If you are sufficiently obnoxious, the backlash may cause a publisher or an agent to rethink working with you. If you are very obnoxious, the related controversy might make it harder for you to have a visible presence at conventions. Even just having a vague cloud of negativity around your name might lead to more rejections. Worse, a belief in an author’s head that important people have a negative view of them will undermine their own confidence.

I’ve got a working hypothesis but really no good way of testing it. My hypothesis is that for outrage marketing to work you’d need the following:

  • You would need a thick skin and be psychologically up for being controversial online regardless.
  • Your belligerent online persona is something you would need to be comfortable with in the long term.
  • The topics on which you are controversial should match your character and your work thematically — or at least not be sharply at odds with it.
  • There needs to be some match between the controversy and the audience for your books. Not every fan of Correia’s books owns a gun but gun-owners are a sensible demographic for him to market to.

For example, I don’t like cars much, so imagine I decided to become a notable author and to do that I’d also just be hyper-obnoxious about cars, people who drive, and the car industry in general. I don’t mean long posts about pollution or car-related deaths, I mean calling anybody who drives a murderer and implying that people who like cars have a messed up psychosexual desire for death by machine [I don’t think that – this is a hypothetical other me who is trying to be obnoxious].

  • I’d have to be willing to be very rude to people online on this topic and them be rude back to me [I’m not but, again, this is hypothetical]
  • I’d need to commit to the bit – I couldn’t start liking pictures of cars or talk about how much I like Fast & Furious movies or the Herbie films.
  • I’ve no idea what kind of sub-genre would work well with extreme anti-car views? Solar punk? Cli-fi? Probably not fan-fiction about Formula 1 drivers.
  • I don’t think pedestrians are an obvious niche group to market to.

Is there any way of testing this empirically?

It is effectively impossible. If (somehow) you could have a set of fake author personas, with a set of books for each author, that (somehow) you could control for quality and overall engagement with the reader so that all other things being equal the books should sell equally well and then for each fake author follow a different social media strategy related to controversy…well that would already be several impossible things.

camestrosfelapton

42 responses to “Does outrage marketing work?”

  1. I suspect people who practice it — assuming there are some — jump to the conclusion that if they’re making money, the strategy must have worked. As JMS once put it, it’s very tempting as a writer to believe you’ve found The One True Path To Success.

    Liked by 3 people

  2. The big question is are people succselful because of the marketing or despite?
    I know someone who has enjoyed listening to Larrys work (the german version) and while he is not antigun(for a German), he is unaware/uninterested in Larrys opinions. Other problem is how much you are pissing people of, beeing progun is seen here as somethink typical American (sorry), other topics would be much more personal.

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  3. I suspect the real problem with outrage marketing is this – once you’ve gone down that route, you’ve burned off a certain number of (let’s say) car lovers who won’t read you even if you stopped the anti-car rhetoric (the long memories of the DeLorean fan), but the people who are attracted by your stance on those death-devices on wheels will only respond to ever-increases levels of anti-auto-aggression. Now you’re stuck with a small group of fans who can keep your sales up – but only while you keep up the game. Drop off the ipsomobile-hate even slightly, and you lose the hyperfans (who will find someone else to satisfy their car-hate), but not regain the car-lovers and car-neutrals.

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    • True but a small slice of a big pie is a lot of readers and some readers will only know your name vaguely and not your opinions. There is also some degree of amplification – succesful authors appear higher in rankings, get more reviews etc, so your cadre of fans who are sympathetic to your views help lift your visibility more generally.

      I don’t know how badly a controversial authors suffers either. Probably a lot more if you aren’t a man. Dan Simmons keeps saying stupid reactionary things for reasons that seem unlikely to be calculated or an attempt at outrage marketing but his career still keeps going.

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  4. I dunno, having read their works back before the Hugos became evil (i.e. back when they still got nominated), I preferred Brad’s stuff. At the time, it was anti-grimdark, in an age of much grimdark. Yes, it was old-fashioned, but at the time he wasn’t trying to be a macho tough guy/culture warrior. Which as we see, didn’t work out for him.

    Whereas LC is a noted gun-fondler, but back then I thought “whoo, trying way too hard”. Perhaps right-wingers can’t sense the stench of desperation coming off him — seeing as how so many of them had it. Maybe as a woman, I can just sense it better.

    Also, LC may be a genuinely ANGRY!!! guy, and mean, whereas Brad’s much calmer.

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    • I read their stuff in the Hugo voter’s packet one year, and I preferred Brad too. I was very obviously not in Correia’s target audience and saw nothing at all to interest me, but while Brand’s endings meant nothing to me and left me nonplussed I did enjoy the process of getting there.

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  5. The once in a while going viral due to outrage can work very well. But to use it as a regular marketing? That would give diminishing returns unless you and the people you want to reach believe in fuck all.

    I assume people read Dan Simmons despite what he says and not because of it.

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    • I’ve seen several times where someone got a massive bump from a bit of outrage that surprisingly went viral organically, and then they try to manufacture that same effect again and again, making “outraged” their whole online personality because they feel they have to.

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        • Simmons was pretty active until 2021. He was supposed to have a book out but it got postponed to this year but I just looked and it doesn’t look like it got published.

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          • Huh. Card doesn’t seem to have had anything this year. That said, the purge came a while ago. First the war blog was renamed, then it got hard to find, then it vanished. The forums are archived as of 2021, I think. Now it’s just promo for Card books.

            Oh, hey! OSC is going to be on Ben Shapiro! That should be fun.

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            • I remember when Card predicted Obama would turn black street gangs into a private army so that he could silence opposition when he ran Michelle for puppet president in 2016.
              He then tried to have it both ways — oh, this is just me the writer making a speculative story about the future so don’t call me a racist or a liar or anything but it’s entirely plausible based on my keen understanding of human nature.

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                • And no matter how many times they don’t put the Christians/Republicans in concentration camps or beat them up in the streets, people like Larry will parrot the same claims a decade later without any acknowledgment they’re wrong. All the heroism of a martyr but without the inconvenience of undergoing martyrdom.

                  Liked by 4 people

                  • Like poor Hoyt, who’s been wishing SO HARD someone would put her in a camp for, I dunno, at least 15 years?

                    Also like the nuts who say anyone who’s ever had a Covid shot is going to die in 3 weeks. Or months. Or a year. Or 10 years.

                    Which I guess is true when people who were already in their 80s and in poor health in 2021 keel over from natural causes. “OMG, grandpa died, I told you it was the jab!” Never mind that grandpa was 85, overweight, had smoked for 60 years and was in a nursing home after his third heart attack.

                    The Daily Show had a fun segment yesterday where they interviewed people outside Fux Nooz HQ about the supposed war on Xmas. “Look around!” some wingnut said. So the correspondents did, showing the Christmas decorations EVERYWHERE in 360 degrees, because that’s what Manhattan does.

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              • Not only was that super-extra-racist, but also sexist. Michelle could be president all on her own, and do a good job at it. Even Barack admits she’s smarter and tougher than he is.

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            • The Kids Today (and some of us oldsters) like the new hotness. As we see in your “Young People Read Old SF”.

              How many SFF writers who were hot in the 80s and 90s are still hot today, regardless of politics?

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                • I’d like to boast about the number of outstanding genre works I’ve put my kids onto, but I’d be telling lies. I got them to watch a number of iconic movies, but read? They read reference material for work, but not fiction for pleasure.

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  6. You may also convince people to buy your book as a symbol of the cause: “Make a car-owner cry by making my book reach the top 10!” Do they bother to read it once they’ve bought it? Do they care about the sequel? Don’t worry about it!

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  8. First off: A lot of readers aren’t active on social media in the first place, so the whole effect of this is probably smaller than terminally online people assume. (On the other hand many who work in book stores follow social media trends, and reaching them will help sales also among the not-online crowd.)

    Second, in general it’s probably true that having a high profile on social media helps sell books. But not all social media circles have the same value. If you’re trying to sell books, it’s more useful to have a high profile among voracious readers than among some other group where few people buy books.

    (And a good way to be seen by readers is to be popular among other authors, and have your stuff shared by them. See also the point about bookstore workers above.)

    This means that if you manage to build a following among both car-haters and book-lovers, you’re probably good. But if your outrage marketing towards car-haters also makes you unpopular among book-lovers, the outrage will almost certainly have a negative net value.

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  9. Another issue, I think, is that there is a definite significant potential audience who are susceptible to outrage marketing… but there are also a lot of people/grifters already actively marketing to that group, and a lot of them seem to act like junkies on the search for their next fix. They’ll jump to whoever gives them that fix, and they eat their own if they don’t feel like they’re getting what they need. ‘Audience capture’ is a thing, where the people marketing to them have to keep acting the act and one-upping themselves to keep things going. In general they’re not a loyal audience unless you’re already one of the big names, and not necessarily even then.

    (There have been people for years saying that Alex Jones was a psy-op by the government to make other conspiracy theorists look stupid by making him the obvious go-to example of the type.)

    Basically, I think outrage marketing is like ‘going viral’ in general: when it works, it almost certainly only works for a whole host of reasons many of which aren’t actually under your control. And once that’s your primary audience, you’re stuck trying to keep your house built on sand from falling over.

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    • I think one example of constantly providing a fix is the way right-wing media constantly announces The Next Big Reveal which will prove J6 were antifa/the Clintons worship Satan/Obama IS Satan and a Muslim terrorist/Biden is Obama’s puppet/9/11 was an inside job/Hunter Biden is a Skrull, etc. And they never pan out but they keep churning them out no matter how absurd (like the recent fuss over Obama’s chef dying — he worked for Obama AND THEN HE DIED!!!!!).
      I have no idea if it works or if they’re just screaming to audience of bots.

      Liked by 3 people

      • Of course, as Fox News learned in 2020, an audience wound up that way isn’t loyal to you, and many will decamp to even more extreme source if you dare actually mention a truth that they don’t like.

        This sort of thing is why the ‘riding the tiger’ metaphor is so often appropriate.

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  10. Book publishing is consistently profitable; it’s just a very tiny rate of profit and growth, like 2%, which drives corporations to despair and bewilders other industries. It’s not a growth-based industry although it does have plenty of room to expand audiences because literacy has increased over the last 100 years. Every once in awhile, especially when there are merger/consolidations or recessions, the big ones do corporate stock boost moves of laying off people and making the remaining folk do multiple jobs for the same low pay while increasing the number of books they put out whether it makes any sense or not. More books are published now than ever before and more globally distributed, even before you get to the self-published titles, which are in the millions each year just in the English language market alone.

    Books are technically in competition with film/t.v., games (which has been going on 40 years, not a recent thing) & web entertainment, but the core recreational book buying audience has consistently remained around 25% of the population, not counting the highly profitable and steady education market. Those other mediums are also one of the few effective marketing venues for fiction publishing — adaptations are the best word of mouth, but adaptations mainly only happen with already big sellers.

    Sales & growth surged in 2020 with people stuck at home for part of the year, but consequently have declined a bit 2021-2023. Publishers expected a recession, but the populace of many nations has been very resistant to having a recession, despite the efforts of companies to cause a recession through price gouging inflation, lay-offs, refusing to fix supply chain issues, fighting organized labor, etc. So turnarounds are occurring though interest rates are not as low as the last bull markets.

    It is a boring, reliable, antiquated, irrational & counter-intuitive industry for which most traditional marketing strategies are of limited effectiveness and most effective only for top sellers that already have name recognition. In non-fiction, it’s 60% marketing, 40% word of mouth and author-based. In fiction, it’s about 80% word of mouth, 20% actual marketing. Fiction readers are marketing resistant, mostly don’t care about authors’ personal life or personalities & mainly buy books from browsing/symbiotic browsing or recs by friends & family (word of mouth.)

    In the 1990’s, the wholesale mass market paperback market — the powerhouse of fiction — shrank to one tenth its size. The loss was huge. Books became much less widely visible and browsers buyers were lost. The death of mall bookstores didn’t help either. Authors who had sold 10,000 to 25,000 copies of mmpbk through regular wholesale vendors without promotion now mostly did not. The amount of mmpbks were decreased in favor of trade paperbacks and hardcovers that bookstore chains preferred. Authors made higher royalties from those editions, but were selling much fewer copies than the bulk sales of mass market pbk, which has been more and more the case in the 21st century. When Amazon expanded the e-book market in 2008, fiction publishing started to make up some of the mass market pbk losses, but the main customers were e-books were casual, non-regular book buyers and high buyers who buy lots of books. Main publishers also had to keep initial e-book prices higher because otherwise it messed up hardcover sales/publication launches. It was not an identical market to mass market pbk and leveled off.

    Self-publishing authors were sold a bill of goods by Amazon, Smashwords and other companies trying out e-books that e-self-pub would destroy the rest of publishing & make them all lots of money as long as they promoted well. They faced the reality of the fiction market that this was not true. Self-pubs sell by the same pyramid as license pubs, but it’s a much larger sized pyramid – a bigger ocean. Amazon went after competitors and has severely limited the English language e-book market, but that may change down the road. Amazon has no magic way to make self-pub works sell, but if you pay them a truck load of money, they will use alogrithms that will make titles more visible which may work.

    Authors who have had long time online platforms that are not purely book marketing, like John Scalzi and Chuck Wendig will tell you that their online popularity does not translate into book sales. People who like their musings, including vocal political ones, don’t necessarily buy their fiction. Instead, they built audiences through word of mouth and then with distribution from license publishers. Chuck Wendig then juiced his sales because he did Star Wars tie-in fiction and then further when his disease-related post-apocalypse SF novel launched right as the pandemic hit. Scalzi jumped it by doing Red Shirts, a comic SF novel that riffed off of Star Trek.

    Larry was a bestseller before he started his outrage campaigns through word of mouth. His main series is aging and he’s branched out. There’s little guarantee that his gun lovers are bothering to buy his fiction books, but some will. Most readers, not being interested in authors, don’t know anything about it. Some readers who do, avoid his works. Fiction works are not a big draw for right wing customers unless your fiction is very, openly Red Dawnie about current issues. Supplements, clothing, dodgy financial investments, etc. do better with outrage marketing. Because the fiction market is weird.

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  11. Vance Packard’s “The Hidden Persuaders” was my first inkling that choosing one product over another wasn’t necessarily random.

    When an author has to be their own marketing director and sales force, their instincts might tell them, “Create a big stink and get more eyeballs!” Cars: be contentious as hell about how dreadful they are. Balance the screeching negativity with an antidote: self-propelled and mass transit alternatives. Get from A to B and feel unbearably smug compared to those revhead losers!

    Carrying this into one’s fictional output is a delicate tightrope act. One might get tagged as a single-issue campaigner with little to offer beyond that. Need to be a top-notch prose stylist to get away with it.

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    • To be clear, I regard internal combustion engines as a necessary evil at best and a despoiler of ecosystems at worst. And that’s *before* the discussion on preventable deaths, not just of humans but also of other species in the wrong place at the wrong time.

      Decades ago I went to Tassie and was horrified at the amount of roadkill. Where I live in NSW, it’s not as prevalent as before, and even bugs on the windscreen are hardly there anymore. I suspect it’s because there’s fewer of them to kill every year.

      Maybe if I had a blog & wrote fiction, I could fire up about it. 😄

      Liked by 1 person

  12. felapton my lad, this is an asymmetrical topic with a decades-long industry in American conservatism. if you read perlstein’s nixonland (and reaganland) you will come to understand how central “letters to people asking for money based on making them angry” is the financial juggernaut at the core of American conservatism. control of these mailing lists (and yes they do still use physical mail, though diminished of course) is literally a billion dollar question here in the states.

    if you have a relative who has ever donated to a conservative cause even once, you will find their mail full of dozens on dozens on dozens of fliers, mailers, fake magazines, fake charities, etc. all saying that the antifa tik tok black lives matters gay lesbian trans hillary obama communist socialist liberals will take their guns, trans their kids and make sure nobody ever likes a facebook post of theirs again, and if they don’t like it they should send $20 a month for the rest of their lives. if they do they get a bible with newt gingrich’s face on it.

    it is a provable market, that is, an incredible amount of money changes hands based on telling this population of people something who to hate and then just asking them for the money. there’s no “outrage marketing” broadly because there’s no industry for it anywhere other than in american conservatism, but if you’re after an american conservative audience, you’re a chump not to go where the money – quite empirically and provably – is.

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  13. “people who like cars have a messed up psychosexual desire for death by machine ”

    Well, there was J. G. Ballard

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  14. There’s an old saying that speaks to this: “All publicity is good publicity, as long as they spell your name right.” (Paraphrasing a quote attributed to P.T. Barnum.)

    That suggests you should invest your effort in making sure everyone knows how to spell your name; inconsistency isn’t a problem, since it’ll likely result in more publicity!

    Liked by 1 person

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