When Marketing Fails: Embracing Human Connection in Writing

How leading with your authentic self is the only sustainable path for writers

A few years ago I was slowly admitting a very serious truth to myself: Marketing had let me down. 

As a content manager, the best part of my job was learning about an audience and then dreaming up dozens of ways to connect with them. The planning and organizing part? I was proficient at it, but it also made my eyes spin.

In my free time I’d sit and compare myself to other marketers (please don’t do this!), watching them set up endless marketing systems, content plans and social media campaigns — and I would marvel. How does anyone do that every day? Looking back, I can see now that the best part of my job lasted for about 1 to 3 hours a week. And the rest was … rough.

It took time to realize that some people in the world are very good at following a plan to a tee. They set a goal, they build some scaffolding and they set it in motion. And for what it’s worth, I’m a big idea person when it comes to that scaffolding. I love swimming in and around essay topics and self expression and finding ways for earnest, heart-centered writers to differentiate themselves without burning out. 

But my energy for this work dissolves in an instant if we are serving a metric. 

I used to see this as my biggest liability — the fact that my brain would flatten, seemingly out of nowhere. 

But now I understand a fundamental truth: Human connection is my primary driver in life. 

And I think it’s a primary driver for most writers I’ve worked with and met on Substack. Through writing — whether about our lives or the imaginary lives of characters who become as dear to us as friends — I think we are all making sense of our own capacity for human connection.

As I began giving myself permission to quit marketing and instead begin playing, I realized that we’re all just guessing. Even the folks who are good at planning and organization and sticking with something for a mind-numbing amount of time, they are — at a fundamental level — guessing. 

Why?

Because human connection hasn’t been completely toppled by an algorithm. 

And thank goodness for that. 

But is it really this bleak for writers out there? Well, I think it depends on how you look at things.

Kate McKean

wrote this week about why book marketing doesn’t work:

All the things we don’t have when it comes to marketing books supposes that there is something out there that would always lead to success. That there is a solid answer to the question how do we sell this book.

But there’s not! There are no answers! Publishers can usually only tell you what sold a book, not what will sell it.

Kate’s perspective might seem downright depressing, but I think it should be a huge dose of encouragement for writers everywhere. That for all the gatekeeping and struggles and literary rejections a writer may encounter, even book marketing is launched in the dark. This tells me that your and my best efforts have the potential of working, too. 

So what do we have left to lean on?

I think it’s important to recognize that we ourselves are inherently trustworthy. The same creativity you harness in your writing is the same creativity needed to bring your writing into the world — at least, I think they share very similar muscles. Whichever spark brings writing to life for you can also be trusted to help you navigate what’s best for how you share that writing with the world.

I also think that, as a person who is motivated by human connection, understanding my readers is the single most important thing that keeps me coming back to the work of writing. It is the failsafe when I feel myself wanting to float away. When I connect with myself and my growing understanding of readers,¹ this heart connection is what brings my spark back time and again. And it inevitably revitalizes my ideas for writing, creating resources and storytelling.

Practically speaking, I do think that for all the flashy mechanisms we may use to launch our work into the world, longevity is the writer’s secret sauce.

Staying in the game seems to be the real secret here — and building resources around us to help us keep going.

I don’t see a path forward for a neurodiverse person like myself if I don’t honor my limits around energy and socializing. Without creativity, courage and experiments, I would probably flatten out, too. And without the wonderful people in The Editing Spectrum and the other newsletters on Substack where I feel most at home, I don’t think I’d have much chance of hanging in here.

So that’s what we have to lean on here, folks. It’s connecting with our deepest motivation and longings. 

It’s recognizing that the work we do every day must have a regenerative quality in order to be sustainable. 

It’s letting ourselves return to the gift of playfulness and self-trust.

After all those years of thinking that I needed some secret sauce to get my writing into the world, it turns out that the long game here is friendship. 

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1. I use a Reader Persona to track an ongoing understanding of my readers. You can learn all about it in this post or buy The Reader Connection Blueprint here.