You Can’t Judge a Book by its Marketing

When I’ve commented on bookish controversies on this blog before, it usually is in regards to “authors behaving badly” be they plagiarizing or trying to game the NY Times bestseller list. But this time I don’t think the author in question had any ill intent at all. I think that makes her missteps all the more tragic.

Audra Winter is the debut self-published author of a novel called The Age of Scorpius. What distinguished over any other twenty-something debut novelist was her gift for marketing. She engineered Scorpius into a viral sensation on TikTok before it was ever published. She seemed to have a genius for getting potential readers’ interest and hooking people with her worldbuilding. She also showed a gift for producing an excellently and professionally packaged book. She managed to get thousands of pre-orders for her book. Everyone was eagerly anticipating its release.

Then it was released.

Even if you haven’t heard this story before, you can probably tell where it is going. Especially when I tell you Audra is just 22 years old, and had been working on this book since she was 12.

The reading public panned her work. It sits at 1.88 on GoodReads right now, 62% of the reviews 1-star. Worse for Audra, the people who had been fans of her marketing were now angry and venting on social media, accusing her of scamming her readers. I don’t think that’s quite fair. I don’t think you can bootstrap this kind of marketing success for a project you don’t sincerely believe in. Audra clearly believed in her world, and wanted to share it with others. The problem was she was too close to the work (after living with it for a decade) for her to read it as other people would read it. She needed other eyes, editors, beta readers, to give her some objectivity and the chance to work on the book so the words on the page were closer to what she saw in her head.

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash