This Explains a Lot

I came across this point in an article about marketing movies, but it seems to me that it probably applies to marketing books as well. For all people talk about the possibility of books “going viral” on the Internet, from what I’ve seen it hardly ever happens. A lot of author discussion groups talk about cultivating word of mouth and so forth, but in the real world even getting somebody who already likes your book to write an Amazon review is tough. So what’s going on here?

There is a chapter in Derek Thompson’s book, “Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction,” published in February, about how things go viral in the age of the internet. Basically, they don’t. Rather than spreading from individual to individual, Thompson, working from research done by Yahoo, argues that “Popularity on the Internet is ‘driven by the size of the largest broadcast.’” Things that spread on the internet are generally shared by one large host source (a celebrity’s Twitter account, a big media outlet, etc.) to many smaller sources with diminishing and discreet (in-person) shares from the infected pool. “Digital blockbusters are not about a million one-to-one moments as much as they are about a few one-to-one-million moments,” Thompson writes.

This potentially has huge implications for marketing books. It suggests that the most efficient path to success is to focus your resources on getting the attention of the largest possible media outlet and letting the rest of the marketing take care of itself. I don’t know that it’s necessarily true, but I will say that it fits my experience better than what is usually considered the “conventional” viral model. It might just be that viral popularity is more suited to things like YouTube videos that require little investment in terms of time. Books certainly don’t fall into that category. Go big or go home, indeed.

So I’m going to think about this, and see if there’s any good way that I can test it out to see if Thompson is right. Getting the attention of large media outlets was always difficult, so in a lot of ways this statement makes it sound like the old “gatekeeper” system is still in place – it just now operates at the level of media exposure rather than book acquisitions. In some ways it’s a little disheartening, but at the same time there’s no way to effectively hack a system if you don’t know where the levers are that make it run. It’s axiomatic that everything can be hacked – you just have to figure out how do it.