We Need to Stop Branding to Country Music (Metaphor) and Start Being a Global Pop Sensation

I promise, the metaphor makes sense

Okay, so, this post is gonna be a philosophical jaunt because I have been CHURNING in my head all week. Some of you know this is dangerous.

I just made this post on Facebook, which I’m gonna just post verbatim, and then carry on with where I’m going with all of this, because it’s at the heart of things:

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I’ve been crunching on a thing this week. Like: I’ve built my author career heavily the last four years around queer books and trans books. And I’m not looking to change that itself, but--I’ve also built my messaging around it. It was the messaging that sent my stuff viral again and again.

First, around a world where trans was normal and so was space travel and magic. That lit people up to the fact that there were books like this. I saw it happen again and again, four years ago. I used that to springboard into an actual career, when I thought that wouldn’t be possible with queer and trans books.

Then, around what if there was a world without the patriarchy? Same thing. People stopped, and turned and it pulled in readers and people who’d given up on reading because of lack of rep in their books.

When you’re on social media, if something works, you push it until it doesn’t. This one still goes viral, when I post it on occasion. But it’s not moving books like it once did, either.

Then, The King’s Weaver took off, with a single long hook that also still goes viral sometimes, but not like the craziness it once did. That one is also wrapped heavily around queer and trans rep.

And here’s the thing, though--I’ve had my head down in rhino mode for these years, barreling through all anti-queer opposition. Some of it’s been the platforms, some of it’s been comments or whatnot, some of it’s been the world at large.

And all of that IS relevant.

But in the meantime--Heated Rivalry happened. All the sudden, queer books are mainstream.

When I first published Good King Lyr on Wattpad in 2018, it was one of like TEN genderfluid books in existence. It was the ONLY genderfluid romance anywhere I could find. It neared 100K views at the time. It was needed.

I am used to, all through my writing career, barreling forward with all guns blazing and dngaf and waving my rainbow flags. I’ve had to be.

But, even if there’s been some institutional shrinking of queer books available and the book bans (which are so stupid) and shrinkage of characters in TV/movies - all of that is true - BUT:

The fact that the rep doesn’t exist isn’t true anymore. The fact that people haven’t seen themselves in books is growing less and less true, because dozens to hundreds of trad and indie queer books are published every year. HUNDREDS. Thousands across all the sweep of mainstream MM, too. Trans rep is still small, yes, but small like Massachusetts is small--there’s still a lot going on there.

What if we’ve got the message out there--and that message that “queer books exist! Ahhh!” is not the thing needed anymore? It’s growing less relevant.

What we need now:

“LOOK AT THIS GOOD STORY, Y’ALL”

Have we reached that point? I think we have??? Maybe a bit ago. Even with all the BS going on out there. Which is absolutely amazing.

I’ve spent a good part of my career, too, trying to tiptoe around places where bigots might buy and then trash my books.

I still have that reflex, but after the anti-AI mayhem, I don’t care. There’s zero way those reviews would hurt my books. Zero.

When you’ve been fighting long and hard and were there at the start of it, sometimes it takes a while to step back, unwind, and regear.

And I think about my show, and how the appeal for that can be MUCH much much broader than the surface area I’ve been counting on.

Because the point where something goes past “need to establish it exists” to “let’s just tell good stories” is whoa.

I don’t entirely know where I’m gonna end up with all of this, other than--I think it’s all very good.

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I started churning on this after being at the weekly call for Pierre Jeanty’s Skool last week (I swear, y’all, this is a place to be).

I was saying how it’s been hard to speak directly to queer readers on Meta—like how other marketers can call out “to video editors” or “to Macbook users” etc, I can’t exactly say “to queer readers” because of a whole bunch of regulations and restrictions. That’s frustrated me for a long time.

But in that conversation, he got me to back up and think about going broader, much broader than I have been. It was a lightbulb moment.

And it’s turning into a here comes the sun moment.

I said to Cassie yesterday, at another ungodly hour like this one: what if we’ve learned how to be Taylor Swift the country music star, but now we need to learn how to be Taylor Swift the international pop music sensation?

We have been told for years to niche down.

What if that’s a Schrödinger’s niche down, though?

What if we need to know who we are enough to know our tropes AND ALSO how to not be defined by them?

Taylor Swift built her first career in a niche. If she’d stayed in that niche, if her image and her marketing had stayed in that niche, she never would have reached the broad appeal that she has.

I think some of this was genre—so, this metaphor doesn’t 1:1 carry all the way. Like, I don’t think anyone has to give up their actual niche.

But I wonder if we need to learn to work outside our own niche marketing. A niche is a point in a mesh. It’s not the whole graph.

Like, okay, another example, still country music. Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” is a country song, it played on country radio. It was totally also not a country song. The messaging wasn’t to country music fans. It was to hip-hop fans. And queer fans. And Billy Ray Cyrus fans in the remix. And still managed to also land to country music fans, too. And fans of a good and catchy tune. The appeal was broad. It launched a career.

I’m at a point in my career right now where I’m not spinning my wheels on who I am and what I want to write—I know that. I know my branding up and down, and that might be part of the problem. My branding is heavily signaling my own country music.

And the marketing’s been slipping out from under me, which has been baffling me, because I know how to market.

But I know how to market country music. I am really, really good at that. But country music is just one drop in a VERY wide ocean. And if all my signaling is to country music fans—the international pop fans can’t hear me, if they don’t also listen to country music channels.

I think the platforms have changed, and also, how people engage with what I write has changed, too. My actual external niche landscape has changed and broadened and become more shallow in some ways, deeper in others.

You can niche down, but now, you have to market wide, I think.

And we’ve known that for some time, but in pieces—we’ve known that volume is important for organic socials, for instance. Bobby Kim’s entire method is built around that for TikTok, and it works.

We’ve known we need to diversify our approach outside of being in KU as an entire strategy or being ebooks-only as an entire strategy.

But I think we haven’t hit the full picture yet—and I’m not even sure I have now, I feel like I’m juuuust starting to grasp this.

That marketing isn’t one or two or three dimensional, and it never has been.

That, maybe, our slices of the pie we’ve been serving have worked for a time, but we didn’t know how the pie was made, so when we ran out we couldn’t make more.

There’s a reason big brands spend millions on Superbowl commercials, even if they can’t directly measure ROAS in a dashboard.

There’s a reason movements happen around viral moments, and a reason why creators like Alex Hormozi are purposely not trying to go viral or use big production values anymore. And people are saying no AI, and yet AI creator accounts that are marked as such pull in millions of views a day.

There’s like—there are so many pieces to this whole puzzle, because beneath marketing is psychology, and psychology is messy, but understandable.

So here’s what I’m seeing, in kind of a jumble, because no, I haven’t pulled this all together yet. But I’m getting there:

1. What we’ve been doing for years in authordom works with maybe 50% success as it once did. Sometimes more, sometimes less. I also think that some of this is similar to my “get out the word about queer books” problem—as indie authors, we used to need to teach people that we existed, that our books were good, that you could buy direct, or wide, etc etc. We don’t, by and large, need to do that anymore. The point of education has shifted. Same with a lot of genres. We are living in a maturing cultural landscape.

2. People are flooded by more and more interesting things on a daily basis. Their interests are both niche (algorithmically) and broad (at volume).

3. Booktok as a concept is saturated. Booktok as a vibe is jaded enough it eats itself.

4. We’ve known cross-platform surface area is important for a while now, but, I think it’s more than that now. I’m not entirely sure how it’s more than that, but, I think it’s needing more depth across platforms? That’s what I’m reaching for here.

5. Brands have multiple channels for multiple messaging vectors—multiple personas or avatars they’re speaking to. We might not have the time/energy for multiple accounts per platform (ye gods), but, I think similar things apply even at smaller volume.

6. I think we need to pay attention to cultural shifts and how people are interacting with books and media and our genre as much if not more than what others in our field are doing. Maybe much, MUCH more.

7. Formulas don’t work as much as the principles behind them do, now. We HAVE to learn why things work. It’s like—we as writers take a lot of pride in that we’ve gotten past the learning phase in writing where you’re sort of copying from a lot of sources to the point where you actually internalize good story, you know how it works, you know why something is hitting, etc. I think we need to reach that point in marketing, too.

8. What you say and how you say it is EVERYTHING. Which feels scary, until I also remember not to sweat it. Like: you do your work, you drill down to what is actually going on, you do your research. Then, you just proceed. You still test. You still work at different sides of a thing to see what lands. But the testing surface isn’t in that incremental iteration within a formula now so much as strategic drilling down.

We don’t need to toss out all we’ve learned, or all we’ve built—all of that is still valuable, and necessary. But, the difference being, it’s a facet now. It’s not the whole strategy—we need to build out in new dimensions.

Taylor Swift didn’t stop being Taylor Swift when she rebranded her message, her music, and her image. She expanded. She grew her possible surface area exponentially.

THAT is what we need to figure out.

-Novae