This Is How You Create Stuff And Sell Lots Of Books

A double espresso of *WOW*.

Hi! This is a quick Everything Is Amazing update, featuring two particularly amazing things.

First: writer, adventurer & filmmaker Brendan Leonard (you may remember I interviewed him last year) is just about to launch this:

Sign up to it here.

I urge you to sign up to this thing.

No, really, you absolutely should. He’s so great at this stuff.

Oh go on.

Here’s the link again.

(Great job.)

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Secondly, here’s an incredibly lovely example of how social media - and the internet in general - really should work. And it’s all down to cunningly engineered curiosity.

1) In 2019, author Amal El-Mohtar wrote an amazing book with Max Gladstone, called “This is How You Lose the Time War”.

2) Amongst other things, it won the Nebula Award for Best Novella of 2019, and the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 2020. (And, presumably, sold quite steadily.)

3) Three days ago, a person on Twitter called “bigolas dickolas wolfwood” posted a picture of the book cover along with the words: “read this. DO NOT look up anything about it. just read it. it's only like 200 pages u can download it on audible it's only like four hours. do it right now i'm very extremely serious.”

4) This tweet, with all its infectious, mystery-driven enthusiasm, went massively viral, as fans of the book leapt in to yell about how great it is, pushing it in front of millions of new readers.

5) The book rapidly rose to being, late last night [deep breath] the 7th bestselling book of ALL BOOKS ON AMAZON.

6) El-Mohtar is basically laid face-down on the couch right now screaming what’s going on in the absolute nicest of ways (blog post here):

And the lesson is:

• positive recommendations and wildly expressed enthusiasm on the internet can be mindbogglingly powerful

• if you make people genuinely curious, you can sell a lot of Art

• you should read This Is How You Lose The Time War. It’s really great. (And 50% discounted, right now.)

Just the loveliest, all of this.

Okay! Back in a few days. (And here’s that link to Brendan’s thing again. DO IT.)

- Mike