If you have already visited the “services” tab, you know that my rates are flexible. Still, what follows here is something akin to a “free” tier. The cheapest, and most accessible way to utilize my marketing skills is, of course, to do it yourself. Below, you will find a toolbox of methods, philosophies, and general best-practices that I have honed across my 20 years (give-or-take) of goofing off on the internet. I now present to you…

THE     SHAPE    OF    POSTS    TO     COME

“Create an Anxiety Relievable by Purchase”

The above sentence, from Infinite Jest, naturally, is one of the purest distillations of “marketing” I have ever seen. Despite all of the changes the world has undergone in the last 30 years, the point of an advertisement is still to create an anxiety relievable by purchase. The methodology for producing that anxiety has changed significantly, however.

As our lives have moved increasingly online, and social media is showing us constant windows into the way that other people live, the most effective marketing strategies foster something like a simple fear of missing out.

Social media can be used by anyone to say “look at the buzz surrounding this thing! Conversations are happening! Why don’t you come join us?” Nobody wants to be left out.

Nobody Likes To Be Advertised To

Every single post you make online is an opportunity to build goodwill for the brand (whether personal, or an actual business). Posting a joke, posing a question, or otherwise participating in conversations is as valuable to the company as posting a link to purchase a book. When somebody sees something that makes them laugh on social media, it forms a positive association with the person who posted the thing.

By offering people content that they might want to see anyway, you can build up goodwill and extend your reach in an organic way. Once you have established an authentic place in the online ecosystem, and built up some legitimacy, people will be significantly more receptive to attempts to sell your thing.

Gimme Gimme Gimme

Ignore everything you have ever heard about putting “calls to action” in your posts. Offer instead an invitation. When you constantly ask people to buy a product, you receive diminishing returns on it. A kind of messaging fatigue sets in, and they tune out. By inviting people to be a part of a conversation, you avoid this.

Hypothetical:

“Buy my book, today” is a call to action. Blunt and off-putting, or worse, it comes across as outright greedy. Plus, the door immediately closes behind you.

“Can you predict the twist?” is an invitation. It builds anticipation that something exciting happens in the book, and it keeps the conversation going.

It’s Possible to Take a Voice Too Far

At time of writing (March, 2026), it would be nearly impossible to replicate the successes of the Denny’s Tumblr account, or God forbid, the Wendy’s Twitter account. People have grown tired of the “company hires a social media intern and then forgets about them” approach. You don’t want to sound corporate, but I wouldn’t recommend being—for lack of a better term—feral, either (it’s been done). All you really need to do is remind the audience that there is an actual person behind your account, and that you are excited about the work that you do. 

Hypothetical:

“Thrilled that my newest book has received a very positive review in Publishers Weekly” is the kind of message that comes from a faceless corporate skyscraper. It has had all of the personality sanded off of it by all the hands in the marketing and legal departments.

“I am going to commit [crime] against [company]” is the feral voice. Even in the case of negative reviews, all you’re doing is signifying a kind of antisocial behavior, which is not how you become a valued member of the literary world, or any world!

“HUGE thank you to The Millions for including my book in their roundup of the most anticipated books of Fall among some of my favorite writers” is the sort of sweet spot to shoot for. Whenever possible, you should remind people that you are an engaged member of the community/niche/whatever.

Double Check Everything on a Phone

Your graphic design. Your website layout. The line-breaks in your caption. Everything!

Most people are going to be interacting with your online presence via their phones. Even if the stuff you created was created on a computer, make sure it looks good on a phone!

Make it Bigger, Make it Shorter

Give only the bullet points on socials. You want convince them to stop scrolling, and draw people over to the secondary site (where your thing is available for purchase) in as little time as possible. You do this by giving just the important stuff.  Once you have someone on a secondary website, away from the threat of the infinite scroll, then  you can slow down and give them more information about your thing. It’s the same logic that used to guide newspapers: front page news with big headlines, and then a more detailed analysis further into the paper.

That said, if you have a lot of info to convey on social media, try to spread it out across multiple images/slides/posts and keep your text BIG and EXCITING.

Each Product Should Have A Distinct Look

Color schemes. Fonts. Imagery. The specifics are up to you, but they should be consistent. Over time, you will create an easily navigable visual language that your followers can intuitively read. They will see a color combination, or the layout of a graphic, and they will think “oh, this is news about [book]” before they have even read a single word.

Other Things

Algorithms reward faces! Get some people in those photos!

Make sure that your captions are exactly how you want them! Various algorithms will throttle traffic to posts whose captions have been edited. Not many people are aware of that!

(I believe this is an anti-harassment measure. If you posted a picture of someone and said "I love this guy" and started to rack up likes, you could then change the caption to say "I hate this guy" and make it look like all of those likes were in support of something negative).

And finally, The Easiest Way to Get Someone Excited About Something is to Imply That They Already Are. It’s like saying “the moment you’ve all been waiting for.” This is one of those ain’t-broke-don’t-fix rules.