To know the market is to know your enemy

Attention spans, reading, and other legitimate hobbies

I was once asked what’s the biggest challenge for an indie author. Without thinking twice, I said: “being read”.

We laughed. The other person asked if I was being overly dramatic for comedic effect.
I wasn’t.

Let’s paint a picture.

As a wannabe author you need to have some sort of presence on the market. Your stuff needs to be available, otherwise people will never know about you. Your work doesn’t end by publishing a book, because the book needs to be relentlessly promoted. Since readers don’t usually take risks, it’s also a good to publish another book. You want to tap in a virtuous cycle: affectionate readers buying all your backlog of published works, one by one, while sharing them with the world.

It also helps, of course, to have a social media presence. Pick your poison: be it a tweet, a blog post, several rambling threads, a curated IG feed, or dances on TikTok, you need to be out there. It doesn’t matter that engagement rates can be lower than 1%¹, because the alternative is obscurity.

It also makes sense to showcase your skill. Writers write, so why don’t you… open a Substack, maybe? A Wattpad account? A Medium series?

Now rewind. Whatever your master plan to success is, there are thousands of wannabes exactly like you playing the same game.

And that’s not the end of it.

You may think you’re only competing with media of your same style. Worse still, you might think you’re only competing with authors in your same genre. You might think, well, if I write a obscure dark-fantasy-space MM tragic romance, low magic, with a tinge of undergraduate dark academia, I’ll be in a small enough niche that will reduce the competition.

And you’d be wrong.

You don’t compete with other writers, not directly.

Let’s roll back the camera. Your target audience is not spending all their free time by reading. They get entertainment from several sources, e.g. videogames, Netflix shows, youtube videos, podcasts, music, and hell - maybe even family and friends². All things you yourself most certainly do in your life instead of working on your book (or reading others’).

Even doomscrolling takes away energies that would have been spent reading, and it’s arguably easier to do. In this abundance of options, your potential reader might stumble upon your content. They might be feel a spark of interest, but those sparks are short lived. In the most likely scenario your reader might think, “interesting, I’ll check that later”, but later never comes.

Now don’t take this stunning revelation as an excuse to start a tirade on what you might perceive as a terrible betrayal. I don’t authorize you to use this post to feel entitled.

You’re not entitled to your audience’s time, and time is the most precious resource to go around. You share that with a dozen valid alternatives and several other less valid, but dopamine-inducing ones.

You could distribute your books for free (as a matter of fact, I did: Reality and Contagion and Consultancy Blues are on a pay-what-you-want model on Gumroad, because fuck amazon) but it wouldn’t change this simple truth.

You compete in the attention market.

For the longest of times I’ve had trouble adding a pars construens to this article, a positive spin on the whole deal that could make you feel refreshed and optimistic. And I’m still struggling. Reading might be doomed. Maybe in the future we will just shoot content-syringes in our eyes, who knows?

Cynicism aside, I still believe information is good. It’s better to know things rather than ignore them. If you realize that you’re competing for attention, maybe you can readjust your marketing structure accordingly. Or stress a little less over the lack of interactions on your content.

The question is not really “why ain’t they reading me?”, but “what else they might be doing?”.

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It’s been a while. I’m notoriosuly bad at updating and I’ve been quite busy. Hopefully, you, dear reader, still think this publication is competitive enough to get your attention.

I also realize I’ve written myself into a corner now, because I really need to talk about writer entitlement or rather how NOT to be an entitled prick.

In any case, let me know if you found this valuable, and maybe subscribe.

1. https://booklaunch.com/social-media-marketing-authors/

2. You’ve heard it here first, folks. Even getting shit-faced is an alternative to reading.