Trump, Self-promotion, and Books: The #1 Lesson I Learned from the Election
It’s over. Trump won.
What’s not over: Talking about how this election clearly demonstrated the power of media outside the realm of mainstream, “legacy” media like traditional broadcast news, radio, and print. Authors, publishers, and anyone who wants to sell books should be paying attention.
Gone are the days you used a morning television show or talk show in syndication as your pulpit to reach the masses or just enough of your core audience to move the needle and generate meaningful book sales. Trump met his voters chiefly on podcasts and through targeted social media campaigns. He didn’t go on “The View,” which ranks #1 in households and total viewers (2.5 million) among all daytime talk shows and news programs. He didn’t pay for a pricey print ad in The Wall Street Journal, which has about 4.3 million subscribers. No, he went on Joe Rogan and attracted nearly 40 million views in three days (outperforming the World Series opener between the Dodgers and Yankees). He also leveraged memes, posts, and influencers on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, X, and his own Truth Social. He proved that the old system is broken or simply dead and shined a bright light on the new one that probably started to take shape when flip phones became smart phones.
Book marketing and publicity used to be all about getting on TV, landing an excerpt in a high-profile publication, securing phenomenal reviews, pursuing display ads and print ads if you had the extra money, co-opting with bookstores so your book is prominently featured (if you had a lot of extra money), and praying that at least one of these strategies does the trick.
A revolution is afoot with today’s book campaigns. Any author who hopes to sell books, let alone become a bestseller, must answer the following questions:
Who—precisely—makes up your audience?
Where are they communicating—which form of media do they consume, and which “nontraditional” channels do they tune into?
Given that info, how can you reach these potential book buyers?
You don’t have to become a social media darling yourself or feel like you must attract millions of followers on some strange corner of the internet. But you do need to start thinking about joining this new orbit of conversation. As the old saying goes, you don’t want to show up for a bar fight with a knife when the other guy has a gun. New media trumps old.
Credit: Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash