I mostly deal with comic books, but after my foray at Monsterotica Book Con back in May (which I still owe a blog post about), I started dabbling in the waters of indie book publishing. After adjusting my Threads account to follow solely authors (because I didn’t know what else to do with it), I began to learn just how much indie comic publishing and indie book publishing have in common.
The frustration of trying to sell to an apathetic audience? Check
Being held to a higher standard as an indie creator than the mainstream? Check
Having your vision compromised by what you can afford? Check
Being told over and over again that MARKETING is the most important thing you need to do above everything else, or you’ll never make it. Check, check, and check.
And here we are with the poster child of that last bit.
And speaking of marketing… EGORAVEN: HEIR OF THE FIRST UNICORN issue 12 is now on PRELAUNCH on Kickstarter!
CLICK HERE FOR THE EGORAVEN PRELAUNCH
Audra Winter is a debut YA author of The Age of Scorpius, who primarily posted to TikTok, sharing teasers and updates of her book. She did the equivalent of hitting the indie lotto by going viral on BookTok, where she ultimately sold a total of 4,000 copies.
Then people started to receive and actually read her book. If the hype for The Age of Scorpius was to the moon, the criticism of it bore straight through the center of the Earth.
When I first heard about this, her Goodreads rating was standing at one and a half stars, with the main criticisms being that the book was “poorly written, poorly developed, and poorly edited.” The characters were “flat and flawless,” with an unlikeable main character, and Audra couldn’t even keep the spellings of her own invented words consistent. Overall, not only did it read like a first draft despite the numerous edits she claimed, but it also read like the first draft she wrote when she was 12.
Ouch.
Now, do I have to tell you about how she handled this audience disappointment with tact and grace? Of course not. Then we wouldn’t have Booktok drama. If her book read like a 12-year-old wrote it, her response was also firmly like a 12-year-old throwing a tantrum in public. She went on full defensive mode, deleting comments, making video after video of how all the criticism was just people being jealous haters and that they were all abelist for piling up on a neurodivergent smol bean who just wanted to share her writing with the world.
As of this writing, Audra has taken her ball off TikTok to Patreon, where she claims to have hired a team of editors and is rewriting the book, with a presale underway for the revised edition. A presale that’s not as robust as that first one for some strange reason. 🙄
So, what happened?
One of the main things that I kept hearing was that this is what happens when your talent is in marketing, not writing. That Audra was a brilliant marketer, and she has a bright career if she does that instead. With all this praise for her marketing prowess, and my penchant for self-flagellation when it comes to learning about marketing, I went to her TikTok to see what made her approach so special that it made many an indie creator sigh wistfully over.
Her secret? She just made TikTok videos. That’s it. I didn’t find anything unusual about any of her videos. Here was a 22-year-old just yapping to a camera with minimal final editing about her book, sprinkled with a lot of meaningless business jargon. That’s it. There was nothing brilliant or even minimally skilled about what she did. The only difference between her and the creators who wished they had her success was that she made the videos, while they didn’t.
She did the work. That’s it. (And depending on who you ask, she also exaggerated and outright lied about a lot of her accomplishments.) But before we all rush to open Tik Tok accounts, here’s the other thing. She also had the right combination of themes for her novel—a hot genre, an eye for art, and a zodiac gimmick that encouraged audience participation. Topped with a seemingly bombastic personality (ah, the arrogance of youth), she was able to achieve virality and massage that momentum for longer than most, and here we are.
But while people are gushing over her “marketing prowess”, they’re missing the one important key to the whole thing…
Audra Winter did the same thing that we’re all doing. She took to social media to talk about her book. The only difference is that she went viral, and the expectations set by that virality didn’t match what she was actually offering. The problem now is that every subsequent book she releases will be viewed with suspicion and overshadowed by this drama, even if she eventually produces a good one. The irony of the spectacle is that if she had written a good book to begin with, she wouldn’t even be a blip on any of our radars.
There’s actually a lot of conversations to be had here - how we’re pressured to monetize everything we do, and how we have to do it as quickly as possible, ability be damned. And any criticism, no matter how legitimate, is seen as an obstacle to that monetization. Maybe that’s the bigger story. That everyone thinks that marketing is the answer to everything, without thinking about whether what we want to market is even ready for the limelight.
I’ve even seen discussions on how new authors shouldn’t even bother with editors anyway because it’s more important to get out a book that most likely won’t sell than spend money on perfecting a book that still won’t sell. Wat? 🤨
And we wonder why people don’t trust indie creators.
Audra Winter had good ideas. But ideas aren’t execution. Ideas aren’t a final product that people actually want. You can talk about how great your book is, but if people aren’t resonating with your final book, then all your marketing did was just sell a product; you didn’t make any fans.
What you really want is the money that Audra made on all this. What you want is the ability to sell 4000 copies of your book. I get that, completely. But do you want to be an internet laughingstock in exchange? The money she made, she is now most likely squandering to hold on to what notoriety she can, in the hope of parleying it elsewhere. But no matter what happens, she’ll always have the reputation of being that sucky writer who got lucky on TikTok. But then again, who remembers the lady who jobbed the New York Times best seller list with her amateur novel, trying to score a movie deal? Maybe we’ll still remember Aubra Winter’s name in 20 years. Maybe we’ll forget it in a couple of weeks.
There are plenty of creators who don’t care if their books are actually good, as long as they sell them. It’s all about getting that bag, as the kids say. Just churn and burn those sales. Maybe if the money is enough, you won’t care that no one actually likes your stuff.
But is that why you got into indie creation in the first place?
Want to listen to me talk about this more? Check out the latest episode of The Ragin 2 The Vlogs Show on YouTube.
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