Will Your Most Popular Post Help You Sell More Books?
The plusses and minuses of stories with high SEO value as tools for book promotion
Before I discovered Substack, when I was seeking ways to promote my novel Glorious Boy, I started writing on Medium. Over the four years since, I’ve published more than 110 stories there on diverse topics, in a variety of Medium publications.
I’ve written before on the different advantages that Medium and Substack hold for authors, but one of the biggest differences is that Medium posts have a much larger potential audience for any given post because readers don’t need to be your personal subscribers, and publications there can introduce you to readers who wouldn’t otherwise discover you. Medium’s reach is increasingly global, and their external SEO is robust.
It’s far easier to promote nonfiction than fiction and far easier to sell fiction if you can talk about nonfictional elements within or around your plot.
This all seems like it should be a very good thing for an author who’s trying to promote a new book. It seems like it might even translate into a respectable financial return for popular stories with paywalls, like the post that reached this audience, which is 10-20 times my usual reach for posts on either platform:
I want to share this post with you and deconstruct both its predictable popularity and its perplexing returns, because I think we can all learn from these results.
What’s the story?
The story in question deals with a core mystery in my novel, namely the unexplained muteness of the “glorious boy” at the heart of the book.
For context, Glorious Boy was published by a small independent press early in the pandemic, when the closure of bookstores, cancellation of Amazon book deliveries, cutting of book review sections, and prohibition of live book events made it impossible for the novel to get traction — even though it got multiple starred advance reviews and was a far better novel than my previous bestsellers. By August of 2020, I was desperate for anything that could help me grow my audience for the book.
As you should know if you write books, it’s far easier to promote nonfiction than fiction and far easier to sell fiction if you can talk about nonfictional elements within or around your plot or research. I’ve gotten on national radio and TV shows to talk about the family history behind earlier novels, but those same shows would never have had me if I didn’t have a nonfictional “hook.”
Likewise, it’s far easier to interest readers in pieces about your book if you can highlight nonfictional aspects of the story that might help them in their own lives. That was my thinking when I focused one of my Medium posts on Einstein Syndrome, the condition that causes my young character Ty to be a late talker. This is the post that has since attracted 22K views.
Here’s the post in its entirety:
Is Your Child A Late Talker?
The reason might be Einstein Syndrome
Little Albert Einstein was a handful. He threw tantrums, resisted potty training, ignored anything or anyone he found boring, and didn’t speak his first word until the age of three. His parents (remember, this was the 1880s) feared he was “mentally retarded.” His teachers despaired of his ability to learn. He still had difficulty talking at age nine.
In all these respects the world’s most famous genius resembled other brilliant thinkers, such as physicists Edward Teller and Richard Feynman, musicians Arthur Rubenstein and Clara Schumann, and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker. Today there’s a name for the pattern of development that all these extraordinary people shared as children: Einstein Syndrome.
Was Einstein on the spectrum?
Vanderbilt U. Professor Stephen Camarata was himself a late talker. His son was a late talker. And as a doctor of speech science, Camarata now conducts research on speech delay, which, he says, is too often attributed to autism.
What’s important for parents to remember is that, while most children with autism are late talkers, most late talkers do not have autism. Alas, this distinction is often lost on doctors and other clinicians who diagnose autism without fully exploring other possible causes of speech delay. This error can lead to needless pain and heartache for families of bright, healthy children whose late talking is actually a sign of mental precocity in mathematical, musical, and analytic thinking.
I began researching Einstein Syndrome for my novel Glorious Boy, which focuses on a four-year-old late talker in the 1940s, when speech delay was still regarded as a sign of “retardation.” The confusion and pain that this misunderstanding often caused plays a central role in the story. Unfortunately, as I learned when a child in my own family was speech delayed, this symptom still can cause needless worry.
Otherwise engaged
Parents of young children are forever checking to make sure that their child’s development is “normal.” Pediatricians use percentile graphs to measure growth, skills, reflexes, and — yes — language ability as a gauge of healthy development. When a child “fails” to speak even a few words by age two, it’s naturally concerning.
It’s worth remembering, however, that language isn’t our only, or even our primary, means of communication. Emotional connection doesn’t depend on speech. Body language, eye contact, touch, and shared activities and experiences, such as music, also bring us closer together. These different forms of attunement can be key to understanding the mind of a child with Einstein Syndrome.
While it’s not known exactly why these kids are slow to talk, the likely explanation is that their brains are simply preoccupied with other more urgent business. I saw this firsthand when my great nephew was little. He could watch a prism for hours, studying the color beams and refractions of light, discovering cause and effect as he silently moved the prism in and out of the sun. He also loved plants and sound. He needed no one else to entertain him and was not much interested in company. The world itself kept him fully occupied, and his second birthday passed without a word.
At three, that changed. By four, he was talking up a storm, but certain aspects of his earlier development remain in evidence six years later. His current fascination is botany. He spends hours in the woods, studying geology, flora, and fauna, memorizing scientific names and filtering conversation through this passion: “What are your favorite animals? What are your favorite plants? Why?” He has the preoccupations of a scientist.
Another language
Will my great nephew turn out to be a genius like Einstein? I have no idea. But he’s an interesting child with rare curiosity and independence. He’s highly self-directed with clear passions. Far from being a worry to his parents, he’s a comfort and an ever-surprising delight. Above all, he’s his own person.
And that’s the beauty of kids like Einstein. They don’t care what others think. They won’t worry about conforming or not conforming. They’ll find their own way without a lot of anguish — as long as others don’t try to change or block their passions.
They’ll also find their own language. Some of these children are born musicians. Their language might be piano or the violin, or conducting an orchestra. Others are scientists who naturally learn to think in physics, chemistry, or biology. Still others are mathematicians who communicate in numbers. Get on their wavelength, and you get to go along for the ride.
Check your concerns
None of this is to suggest that you should “just wait and see.” As Dr. Camarata reminds us, there are many possible reasons why a child is late to talk, and it’s important to have your child evaluated early if there is a delay. But it’s also important to educate yourself. He tells the cautionary tale of his own experience:
When my son was labeled as having mental retardation (now called intellectual disability), I asked the psychologist why she believed that he would learn much more slowly than other children. It turned out that the test she was using was based upon his speaking and listening ability and not actually on his ability to think or to reason. So, the mislabeling of my son was directly due to misunderstanding the diagnostic process for late-talking children.
Remember that you know your child best. Trust your instincts and your common sense.
The post concludes with links to an excerpt about Ty from my novel, as well as links to buy Glorious Boy and a book on The Einstein Syndrome.
Strategy, strategy
I had a clear strategy in writing this article. I hoped to lure parents of late-talking kids, convince them that I understood Einstein Syndrome, and compel them to read my novel to get a deeper sense of the challenges, both avoidable and unavoidable, that tend to accompany the syndrome. I wanted my return in word-of-mouth and book sales, not direct payment for the article.
I was counting on three lures:
It’s about you, not me. The article wasn’t a hard sell of my book but an offering of information prospective readers might want and need.
Free for all. Initially, I made the post free, with no paywall. [On Medium, the paywall restricts reads to “members” who subscribe to the platform; non-members still get a few free reads per month, but writers get no payment for those reads.]
Strong SEO. “Late-talking children” and “Albert Einstein” were tags that would draw a lot of views. Anxiety around kids’ developmental milestones, especially around speech and autism, is off the charts among parents. And Einstein is evergreen, with the added kick that few of his admirers know much about his childhood or the syndrome named after him.
The good and the bad
The lures worked, in one sense. The hits keep coming. More than four years after publication, this story is still my second or third most popular post on Medium each week, drawing dozens of views and reads every day.
This would likely be very good news indeed if my regular “beat” were health or parenting. The readers who find this post through a Google search might look me up for more on those topics. But these readers evidently are not looking for a literary novel, not even one about Einstein Syndrome. Precious few have even followed the link to a free excerpt from the novel about little Ty.
What I should have realized up front is that parents who are worried about their young children’s development don’t typically have a lot of time for literary fiction. I likely attracted many more readers for the book through the article I wrote for Literary Hub about the history of the Andaman Islands in the novel. LitHub readers are more likely to be novel readers than parents searching for help on Medium. But I have no access to the numbers for my piece in LitHub, and the continuing popularity of this one Medium post seems like it really ought to have some impact on book sales. No?
For a very, very long time, people in publishing have described their approach to book promotion as “throwing it against the wall and seeing if it sticks.”
No. There’s no evidence that anyone followed the links from the Medium post to buy my novel on Amazon. I can’t trace that daisy chain precisely, of course, but I can tell you that I’d be ecstatic if total sales of my book got anywhere near 22K. Or if the dozens of weekly views this post is still getting translated to any ongoing sales to speak of. The curse of the pandemic still lies heavily on my Boy, and the popularity of this post hasn’t helped even a little bit.
And then there’s the peculiar matter of Medium earnings. After about a year, when I realized just how popular this article was and how little impact it was having on book sales, I put the post behind a paywall. Three years, 22,000 views, and nearly 9,000 reads later, my total “lifetime earnings” for the piece is less than $31. For comparison, my highest-earning Medium post (about my family’s biracial heritage) got less than 5,000 views and 2,000 reads but netted me $480. This isn’t exactly going to pay the rent, either, but it highlights the crap-shoot nature of Medium, where earnings depend almost entirely on “boosting” by editors to attract paying readers within the Medium ecosphere, and not at all on external SEO.
Is there a lesson here?
I’m certain there are masters of SEO who could correct my original assumptions and show me the error of my ways. I know that I’d have gained more online earnings from the popularity of this one post if I’d followed it up with more posts on motherhood, speech, and psychology, or if I’d launched a Substack on those topics and used the Medium posts to refer readers back to it. That is the greatest synergy between Medium and Substack — the power of Medium to snare new readers for your Stack— but that synergy requires topical alignment between your posts on both platforms.
Again, my goal was to interest readers in my novel, not to set myself up as a parenting expert. And to that end, I’d have to say that the only lesson I learned from this exercise is to lower my expectations around any particular strategy for book promotion.
For a very, very long time, people in publishing have described their approach to book promotion as “throwing it against the wall and seeing if it sticks.” The same goes for Hollywood, where screenwriter William Goldman famously said, “Nobody knows anything.”
I’ll just add, numbers don’t mean anything, either, and it’s madness to link the value of your writing with the numbers associated with it, whether those numbers are high or low. I know I wrote a damn good book. So do the people who somehow manage to find and read it. And that’s what truly matters.
There is no magic strategy for cutting through the noise of current events and competing titles, for grabbing the attention of people you think will be your ideal readers. Even when you have their attention, you can’t control what they’ll do next. You can only control what you do next.
My advice? Keep writing. When you’re finished, throw it against the wall. If it sticks, great. If not, try another wall. Either way, keep writing.
Thank you for this sane reminder! Author and coach Becca Syme periodically reminds her followers that while we wish Captain America were in charge of publishing, in fact, Loki's in charge. I mean, they didn't name it "Random House" for nothing. So. Much. Random. And yes, you wrote a damn fine book, several of them.
So interesting, Aimee, and my own experience with essays written to promote a new book are similar. (I quote Goldman’s “Nobody knows anything,” often. It’s a good, if maddening, reminder of the crapshoot that is creative success. And a reminder as well of the fact so much is based on luck—whether good luck’s beneficiaries want to admit it or are even aware of this at all.)