Yes, this is in fact related to the “Penguin Book” drama going on over on BookTok. I made a TikTok video about it already, but I wanted to explore the situation with more nuance. Before you bristle, I’m not here to rip on anybody, nor am I saying all author influencers are bad or problematic. I’m friends with a number of amazing author influencers, and they’re lovely people. Hell, I am one, myself, to a degree.
If you’re new here, I’m E. Prybylski, author, editor, book coach, mapmaker, and all around publishing pro of nearly twenty years. I’ve written two books about writing and publishing How to Write the Damn Book and How to Publish the Damn Book, and this is the AUTHORiTEA podcast where I spill the tea on the publishing industry. And that tea is hot this week.
The Scoop
For those of you who don’t know, there is a queer couple over on TikTok who wrote a picture book about gay penguins. They made a tearful video about how they ordered a (consistently changing but large) number of copies of their book to sell to local bookstores only to discover bookstores only purchase from Ingram. They then said Ingram wouldn’t work with them.
When people questioned this (because Ingram absolutely would work with them), they finally admitted that they couldn’t get into Ingram Wholesale (vs. Ingram Spark) and have been talking about starting a vanity press (yes, an actual pay-to-play press) to get them to the threshold of books published they need to get into Ingram Wholesale. They are complaining about being bullied and prejudiced against and crying foul pretty hard because the community overall is less than thrilled with them for this behavior.
As a queer person myself who is also disabled (one of the writers is blind) and who is also in publishing, I am… less than excited about the fact that they are trying very hard to lean into the sympathy of their viewers and leverage their queerness and disabilities to get attention. On one hand, I understand that influencers gotta influence. On the other, I’m not super excited about their marketing tactics and find them not only more than a little annoying but simultaneously a bit offensive.
These two gentlemen also make money as influencers by the sighted husband “playing pranks” on the blind partner. These pranks are pretty funny, and they are a sweet couple. Or at least they appear to be.
Behind The Curtain Of Influence
One of the things I’ve been doing with my free time lately (when I’m not painting or staring into the abyss, wondering WTF has happened to my country) is watching video essays on YouTube. I watch a ton of them on various topics from personal finance to philosophy to psychology to religion to… you get the picture. I also am a true crime junkie, so that’s a thing you know about me now.
In my wanderings through YouTube I discovered a whole cadre of creators talking about de-influencing folks and what influencers are doing to our society. As someone who generally places very little stock in influencers (and in reviewers and so on), I found this interesting, and down the rabbit hole I went. I’ve been studying influencers for months and examining all these video trends and how they do things and what techniques they use to create the illusions they create.
Because that’s what it is. Illusion.
Now, here’s where it gets sticky. On one hand, the illusion for a lot of influencers (bookish and otherwise) is that we have our shit together. Many of the people on TikTok and other platforms film in specific locations using specific lighting. Some wear makeup. Many dress a certain way. It creates a particular image of themselves that is their brand appearance. They have a voice, a niche, a lane, and they speak to that content. There’s nothing wrong with that. I have a voice, niche, and a brand, myself. This image of ourselves that we share with the world is, of course, not the whole story. We are careful with what we show and to whom and try and show up in a way that reflects how we want the world to see us.
My brand, for example, is very raw, unvarnished, and intensely authentic to who I am as a person. I film in my bathrobe a lot of the time because, frankly, wearing pants sounds like effort. I don’t wear makeup (and I never have), so I don’t wear makeup for the camera. If I have a blemish, well… there it is. If my hair is crazy, then that’s how we are today. This authenticity and lack of veneer makes me feel approachable to my audience because if I, a professional, can show up on the internet wearing my fuzzy bathrobe and my hair doing anime things, then maybe they won’t get judged for not being perfect either.
While it’s not as cold, sterile, and calculated as it may sound above, it’s still a series of branding choices because that’s how I want others to see me. I have also chosen to have my brand be radically me. I’m autistic as hell, and I spent most of my life masking, so I am choosing to go unmasked and authentic and raw because it’s the way I feel will connect best with the sorts of people I want to connect with. It also makes it easier for me to show up as myself because I don’t need to do anything but turn on the camera.
Other people will put a lot more effort into their videos, curating lighting, scripting, makeup, clothing, vibe, etc. That is not a bad thing either! I’m not here to dunk on those people. They are also making brand choices about how they want to show up. There is nothing wrong with that.
The reason this matters is because when you watch content by creators, you need to understand that what you are seeing is curated, intentional, and chosen. The camera angles they use, the lighting they show, the types of things you see in their videos, the topics they discuss… these are all choices. And the bigger the influencer and channel the more intentional it typically becomes.
The two men I am talking about today have a brand, and a very powerful one. Their videos are curated and they have things set up and in frame in intentional ways. They have what they’re going to say planned and likely scripted. They know their brand, their audience, and what they want. And the whole job of an influencer is to reach out into the audience’s emotions and make them feel things.
As authors, our whole schtick is to make people experience emotions. This is doing that but in a slightly different way. It’s still all about emotions; it’s just evoking them through a different medium. And their goal in eliciting those emotions is to get you to watch their videos and interact with them (share, like, comment) and to purchase their products. They earn money off views and interaction (that’s what monetized channels do), and as such, keeping eyes on their content is one of their moneymakers.
Hence the planning, polish, and effort they put into their videos. Those pranks? A lot of them are planned, staged, and worked out in advance. You can tell there’s acting happening and that they’re planned because of the polish level of the videos. Nobody does that by accident.
Does that make it bad? No, of course not. No more than a stage comedian rehearsing his bit before you see him on stage is made “bad” because it’s not spontaneous. Nobody usually just walks onto a stage with a blank slate and comes up with a comedic routine immediately unless we’re talking about Colin Mochrie and Ryan Styles from Who’s Line, but even then the improv has some degree of planning and polish to it because that’s their entire art.
So, understanding that…
Here’s Where the Danger Lies
Most people are not evaluating content for whether or not it’s real. Influencers work because people believe the fantasy version of the thing they are being sold. The “get ready with me” videos are often filmed just for the sake of filming them, and then the creator promptly puts everything away and gets back into their PJs. They remove the makeup. Or the “morning routine” videos are shot over several days and create this idealized image of what someone does in a particular time without being at all time accurate. These clips are filmed, stitched together, and labels are applied (and voiceovers done).
If we lose sight of the fact that these things are done for the purposes of generating sales of products and/or of earning them income through views so they can get sponsorships or ad revenue, it becomes easier to be suckered in by things like the vanity press. If we feel like we know these two gentlemen because we see their content all the time, laugh over their pranks, celebrate their writing queer children’s books (which is worthy of note, to be clear) and hear their tearful struggles with publishing, we form emotional connections to them. Those emotional connections lead to a fanbase that wants to spend money.
Until I heard about the vanity press angle, them milking sympathy from fans by obscuring key points about their publishing methods to try and earn extra book sales was just eye-roll inducing. Don’t get me wrong, I get the grift. A lot of people use those exact methods to receive financial support from fans. It’s a common tactic influencers deploy. They’ll use whatever it is they have to their advantage to elicit emotions in their audience and thereby earn money. Whether that person buys their products to support them or whether they’re just watching and earning ad revenue by liking, sharing, and subscribing… they’re still earning income.
However, the fact that they’re starting a vanity press to try and get themselves into Ingram Wholesale rather than using Ingram Spark to get their books into stores? That’s a problem. First off, vanity presses are bad news. If you don’t know why by now, I’ve written posts on the subject all the way back to 2008 when I was a bitty baby blogger, and all you have to do is Google what a vanity press is to discover a massive trove of materials explaining why pay-to-play publishing is not a good prospect for authors. (We’re going to sidestep the vanity press vs. hybrid press debate for now because that’s another whole episode.)
Why Discernment Is Required
As someone who is on BookTok as a low-to-mid-tier creator (I don’t think I’m an “influencer” exactly, and I’m not monetized, nor do I have sponsors), I want to remind you that unless you actually know the person, you have no idea who they are. No matter what parasocial relationship you form with your favorite creator, you don’t actually know anything about what’s behind the scenes.
At the moment, the influencers I’ve been talking about have been setting fans on other creators criticizing them and making it out to be like it’s a campaign against them because they’re queer and disabled. There are some people out there probably behaving that way, and they definitely don’t deserve to be attacked because of their sexual orientation, gender, or ability status. I am not going to sugarcoat that.
However.
Most people asking questions about them at this point are doing so because they’ve noticed a trend. They’ve had several of these “emergencies” where they couldn’t sell their book to one place or another and have used contextual clues or suggestion to make it sound like discrimination in order to play on their people’s feelings. As a queer, trans, and disabled person, myself, I’m not really comfortable with that.
In a time and age when we are literally being dismantled, having our lives threatened, and disabled people hare having protections, support, and care ripped away from us, grifting based on those identities and preying on people who want to support those communities leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I get it. Capitalism sucks, and you have to get yours where you can get it. However, do we need to do so in an unethical manner? I don’t think we do.
I encourage you, friend, to take this as a bit of a lesson. When someone comes online with a sob story and tries to sell something out of it, it’s worth squinting at. This doesn’t mean you’re not empathetic to them. If they’re in a hard spot, showing some compassion is a good thing. I’ve made videos about hard times in my life (mostly mental health), and I am very visible about my struggles relating to that. Hell, last week’s podcast episode was all about that. However, I’m not trying to sell anything based on my challenges. Your empathy for me and kindness towards me may help lift me up in rough times, but if you buy my books or hire me for editing services, I would hope that you are doing so because of my expertise, not because you feel bad for poor E’s busted brain.
When you encounter people crying on the internet or talking about difficulties in their lives, it’s okay to vet them. To ask questions. To double-check things. In fact, it’s encouraged. Also, the bigger the creator, the closer we have to check to see who (if anyone) is profiting off the sob story. Who is benefiting from this and how? If it’s someone sharing their mental health journey to make others feel less alone, and they’re not trying to sell you something, go for it. If someone’s go-fund-me to pay for their cancer treatment needs funding, have at it.
However, in situations where someone is sitting in front of a wall of boxes full of their books, crying because the bookstore deal didn’t go through and suggesting it’s because they’re queer when the rest of us are giving them side-eye, it’s best to pause and do some study. Particularly if this is not the first time this scenario has happened for them. Who is benefiting here? How? What do they get out of it?
Those are the questions we need to ask. I encourage you to ask them even of me. Be cynical. Ask the questions. Get the information you need. Vet people. It’s how we avoid getting taken advantage of.
Finally, What Not To Do
I want to wrap this week’s episode up with a little advice for authors. The first bit should be obvious, but apparently it’s not as obvious as it seems. Friends, you don’t need to grift to sell books. You can sell books in good-faith ways. You can find your people and reach them without manipulating your audience. If you head down that path toward trying to bilk money out of people through playing with their hearts, people will find out, and it will backfire.
You can use emotional appeals in your marketing and get people’s attention without doing it in bad faith and without fakery. There are a number of creators who use emotional appeal to get folks all riled up. My friend Jason Dorough, author of Akithar’s Greatest Trick (The Teshovar Series), does it all the time by making sassy videos about his favorite font (Comic Sans) to get people good and annoyed and drive engagement. It’s always good fun and tongue-in-cheek. He’s not being dishonest about it, either.
You have creators like my friend Erika J. Algard (of Shirefordshire fame) who has a whole universe built around characters she plays. She uses emotions and acting in her videos to drive engagement. She is also a good quality human being who has morals and uses her powers for good.
Then there’s my friend Jared Gulian, author of An Olive Grove At The Edge Of The World who talked frankly and openly about his experiences with disability after he broke his back and has had to deal with navigating disability. He doesn’t try and play on his audience’s sympathies and, instead, shares a heartfelt, honest, genuine perspective on his life as a queer, disabled man.
Being honest, with your audience about your struggles and triumphs as well as being frank about selling your book is not a challenging thing to do. While being dishonest might earn you a lot of sales fast, and playing on people’s emotions is a surefire way to get engagement, it will have long-term negative effects on your brand and image.
It might feel like you can’t get ahead without some kind of sob story or without embellishing your life. Capitalism tells us to lean into that grift and hustle on it. However, in the end, genuine connection, honesty, and authenticity will develop a far deeper, richer fanbase who cares about you. Lying to your fans in order to bilk money out of them is a pretty gross way to do business, and it isn’t long-term sustainable. Instead, lean into your identity and self, and from there you connect with the people who will want to support you and who will get the most out of your works.
There you have it. That’s my rant for the week. I appreciate you taking the time and being here with me. As I mentioned earlier, if you’re here for my non-fiction books, I have the How To Finish The Damn Book series as well as my urban fantasy series Boston Blight. If you like the Dresden Files or the Iron Druid Chronicles, you’ll enjoy Boston Blight.
I’ll see you all next week. Stay safe out there, friends.
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