This week, we welcome back San Francisco-based writer Lauren Sapala to the blog, with her new book on heart-powered marketing for highly sensitive writers, Firefly Magic.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Lauren a few years ago in this interview in which we discussed her book The INFJ Writer, which talks about how intuitive writers approach the creative process. That was one of the most insightful interviews I have ever done. When I came to know that Lauren was working on a marketing book for Highly Sensitive Writers, I knew it was something I wanted to read right away. Like other highly sensitive INFP and INFJ writers, I have a lot of resistance to marketing and “selling,” which feels like pushing something onto other people. In this interview, Lauren and I discuss how heart-based marketing is, in fact, the opposite of this “hard-sell” approach and how highly sensitive writers can use it to reach out and share their work with people who need it the most.
Lauren blogs about writing, creativity and personality theory at www.laurensapala.com. Her words have inspired me many a times when I have been in a writing slump. Check her out!
Welcome back Lauren! First of all, it’s great to have you here. Second, congrats on your new book! While reading Firefly Magic, I had many moments when I felt completely mirrored back. As I read, I also had lots of ideas popping up and actually felt excited about learning more about marketing! In your foreword, you talk about how Firefly Magic is not a “normal” marketing book in the sense that it does not talk about the nuts and bolts of book marketing, such as how to optimize Facebook ads or launch a killer PR campaign. Instead, it’s a book that gives us powerful “thought tools” to help writers (and I think other artistes) release their resistance to marketing and selling their creations. Can you talk a little about this? Who do you think will benefit from reading Firefly Magic? When was the seed of this book planted?
The seed of the book was planted when I started to do my own marketing work around The INFJ Writer a couple of years ago. Like most people, I jumped online and browsed around, reading this and that article, in order to figure out what I needed to do to learn how to market a book. What really struck me was the way that I emotionally felt during this process: intimidated, overwhelmed, turned off, anxious, and like there was something wrong with me because I didn’t “get it” and I wasn’t excited about it. Many of the articles I found online had a very aggressive, know-it-all tone to them, like, “THIS is the way you do it, and EVERYONE knows that.” In a word, it felt achievement-oriented, like I needed to have a bunch of concrete goals mapped out for myself and if I didn’t do that then I was just an idiot.
This is actually the way I’ve felt for a lot of my life. I felt this way in school, I felt this way in the corporate world, I felt this way at parties. I’ve always felt like everyone is doing things in a certain way to hit goals and gain status and rack up numbers and push-push-PUSH themselves forward, and I am just not wired to do things that way. I don’t work well with the whole pushing thing. So it’s no surprise that when I began to learn how to market my book I ran into these same obstacles again. But this time, instead of giving up, I started reading every marketing and sales book I could get my hands on, and I started examining my own inner (possibly limiting) beliefs around sales and marketing. I thought, “What if I could create an inner shift in my thoughts and emotions and create my own experience around marketing? An experience that is grounded in integrity, authenticity, and service? Would that feel better to me emotionally and could I move forward in that approach?” Well, as I tried it, I saw that the answer was clearly a huge YES. And that’s when I decided to write a marketing book geared toward people just like me, because I knew a book like this could be helpful to all of us.
Although you say the book is not about specific tips and tricks (and it’s not), it provides a lot of food for thought that highly sensitive writers will find immensely useful. One of the most helpful aspects of Firefly Magic for me was that we get to see how you have made marketing decisions around your own books. When you talk about pricing, for example, you talk about how the first goal for a new writer is to build readership, not make the most money they possibly can. You advocate setting an accessible price, especially for the Kindle version, something like $2.99. I remember hearing an interview with Steven Pressfield where he talked in a similar vein about how he wouldn’t even mind giving a certain number of books away for free. His logic was that the more the word is out about a book, the better it is for the book overall. While I mostly agree with this perspective, while I was reading your book, I also thought about how pricing the book too low or running something like a 99-cent promotion might signal that you value the book lower yourself. Might that not translate as a feeling of low value that translates to the reader? I think a lower price can possibly make someone willing to give something new a chance but they also may not be as invested in it once they get that thing. I know I am playing the devil’s advocate here (and I am at least 70% convinced about low pricing) and there’s no hard and fast rule but what do you think about this? How do you balance these different viewpoints? How much of your own pricing is based on the statistics of how books sell and how much is a feeling of what’s right for you?
Well, this really comes back to something else I talk about in the book: following your own intuition. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to experiment with different things (like price points), check in with how you feel about it, and then adjust your experience accordingly. So, for instance, you might have read my chapter where I talk about how $2.99 really works for me, and so you start out placing your Kindle book at a $2.99 price point, but then in the days and weeks after you notice that every time you see that $2.99 price on your Amazon page you just don’t feel right about it. It doesn’t feel good to you. So, you experiment again and put the price at $5.99. You notice right away that $5.99 feels much better to you. You feel lighter, happier, and more grounded in that price. Those kinds of emotional feelings are signaling that $5.99 is the right price for you and your book. And it doesn’t matter what anyone else says or what they think. That’s really what I wanted to bring across in Firefly Magic more than anything else: that the best thing you can do in your marketing practice is cultivate the ability to listen and follow your own inner signals, regardless of what anyone else says. I firmly believe that no one else knows what is right for you and your book like you do.
One of the most heartening aspects of your work is that you encourage people to follow their own sense of what feels right to them. In Firefly Magic, you talk, for example, about how every writer does not have to have a website. When it comes to social media, you give practical suggestions about how to make social media less overwhelming and how to have boundaries around it. But do you think social media is something you have to do? I know that lots of people focus on building communities through Facebook, for example, and it does feel like if you are not doing something like that, you are not doing “enough.” For me, having a Facebook page for my website feels like too-much-engagement. I feel as if I like to simply be a part of Facebook groups related to HSPs and empaths and contribute as and when I can. But I don’t feel excited about having to do that on a regular basis. What do you think? Would you say that’s a resistance to marketing or simply a style or preference that I should pay attention to? On a related note, do you think writers need to be on every social media tool available or can they engage in just one or two that speaks most to them?
In my experience, the difference between a normal “I-should-get-over-this” resistance to marketing and registering a true intuitive “no, this is not for me” also comes back to emotions. If you think about creating a Facebook page for your website and you begin to feel panicky, frantic, scattered, and like you want to push it away fast or get away as fast as you can, that usually signals emotional resistance. Anytime we go into fight-or-flight (even if it’s only slightly) it almost always means that something is emotionally triggering us. And when you’re in fight-or-flight mode, you can’t think clearly and you can’t give the emotions you’re feeling your full attention. Now, that said, just because you identify a marketing activity that you’re feeling emotional resistance around, that doesn’t mean you need to automatically push yourself into it and “get over it” either. So, for instance, to go back to the Facebook page. Let’s say you sit with the emotions and examine them and you figure out that, yes, the thought of this is triggering you and you’re just plain scared of it. That’s perfectly okay. You don’t HAVE to do anything you don’t want to do. In fact, a lot of the time, if we push ourselves into things before we’re ready, it only increases the resistance over the long term.
The other side of this is registering a deep, intuitive “no, this is not for me.” That deep intuitive no will feel much different from that panicky, scared energy. The deep intuitive “no” will feel much more neutral and grounded. However, I will say too, that it takes a while to learn how to listen to yourself and your own inner signals, so at first you may have to take a lot of time to feel into what a “yes” feels like for you and what a “no” feels like. Our modern-day culture is so focused on materialism, conformity, aggressiveness and violence, that it can be very difficult to step back and start listening to your own inner signals, as opposed to what everyone else says you “should be” doing. But you CAN get the hang of it.
In Firefly Magic, we get a behind-the-scenes look at what you did and did not do while marketing The INFJ Writer, Beyond the Shadow and Lo (your first novel based on your experience with alcohol addiction) and, of course, Firefly Magic. We learn through your journey and your examples, from your experience setting up special promotions to tweaking keywords and search categories in Amazon. One of the things you talk about is the kind of resistance that might come up when highly sensitive writers spend money on advertising their books. It might feel like “selling out.” You also talk about how advertising and promotion are different. Promotion, for example, might include sending out free copies of your books to influencers and out into the world. How has your own relationship to advertising and promotion change over the course of your three books? I know you do things intuitively, but if a new writer was to start off with a budget and divide it between promotions and advertising, what percentage would you advise spending where?
This really comes down to what kind of book they are marketing, because every book IS different. As an example, with The INFJ Writer I didn’t have to focus as much on promotion and advertising because the keywords in the title (INFJ Writer) did a lot of the work for me. With my memoir, I gave away A LOT of free books, but I also had to be very choosy with who I gave free books because the book itself appeals to a very specific audience. My best advice would be to start out with a budget that feels good to you, and then keep careful records of what gets results. This is also why it’s a good idea to try one marketing idea at a time, because when you try one thing at a time and give it a little time to work, you can much more easily see what kind of effect it’s having on your sales. If you try five different things at once and then see a spike in your sales, it’s not as easy to figure out what caused the spike.
So, let’s say you pay for a Goodreads giveaway and you get lackluster results: no new reviews, no sales. Mark that down in your records as something that didn’t work well for you so that you’ll know not to spend your money there in the future when marketing similar books. But, then let’s say you write an article or two related to your book for another website and you see an immediate uptick in sales of your book. Then you know that it’s worth it to spend more time in the future writing more articles for that site.
Your marketing budget should be something that is fluid and constantly being adjusted. It should also be something that you’re checking in on regularly and even journaling about, in order to remind yourself of what worked and what didn’t.
Giving freely and being of service is the essence of Firefly Magic and heart-based marketing. You talk about how you practice these values, such as by offering a free “ first session” to every coaching client. You don’t do this as a marketing gimmick but as a way to genuinely connect and give away something of value. The people you talk to may or may not become clients or friends. But the process of connecting, in itself, is enriching. You get to share in people’s lives and stories. But while you emphasize service and giving, you also talk about how walking this relationship-based path means that you will encounter all sorts of people – from kindred spirits to people who think you are being “weak” when you are giving in this free manner. You say, “This is a law of the universe. The more you do anything, the more you will get all the results, desired or undesired.” That’s so true and something I agree with completely. You also talk about how doing heart-based marketing means we have to also set better boundaries. This way of thinking really resonates with me, but while reading, I also thought that one of the reasons I don’t sometimes give this freely is because of the fear of getting entangled with the wrong people. Can you talk a little about how you have clarified your own boundaries as you have written more? How have they changed over the years? Are there some early “tells,” warning signs that highly sensitive writers should pay attention to?
Honestly, I think one of the hardest things about boundaries for Highly Sensitive People is that we’re constantly so hard on ourselves about not having firm enough boundaries. As an intuitive person, I get tangled up with people all the time, and for many years I judged myself for this. I would always think, “I should have known better. I should have better boundaries. I should have done this, this, or this.” Now, sometimes I do see early-warning signs and I heed them, but other times I don’t. And sometimes, I’m so intrigued by the person that I just don’t care and then I get burned. So, that’s the first thing I want to say, that I do believe sensitive intuitive people just get tangled up with other humans in a way that most other people do not. And there is nothing “wrong” about us because this happens.
However, if you really are interested in early “tells” of a toxic person, they are quite easy to learn, and once you learn them, you’ll usually see them quite easily. Number one is victim energy. The person who complains all the time, always has “bad luck,” always wants to talk about their problems, blames others, etc. A lot of time you can also see toxicity in body language: The person who is always slumped over, never smiles, speaks through gritted teeth, won’t look you in the eye. Then, of course, as we’re talking about boundaries, there is the boundary-violator: The person who invades your personal space, picks up your personal belongings without asking, tries to speak for you, eats food off your plate, etc. Each one of these “types” of people will make you feel a certain way when you’re around them and the way you feel will almost always be negative. You will either pity them, feel a strong dislike for them, or just want them to go away. These are examples of red flags.
Firefly Magic paints a great picture of what heart-based marketing looks like. You talk about how the very same things that makes highly sensitive writers think they won’t be “good marketers” – empathy, non-competitiveness, giving without calculations – are their unique strengths. You talk about how marketing can even be a spiritual practice. After all, it gets to the heart of many of our issues around ourselves and our relationship with others. “Hiring an editor and a cover designer to make your book the best it can be is nurturing a healthy pride in your book. Thinking up catchy tag lines and blurbs for your book is engaging your creative faculties and pushing them to stretch and grow. Doing a book launch and creating different types of thoughtful marketing campaigns is opening yourself up to the world and getting comfortable with vulnerability. Building a following on social media (tweeting at people, liking posts, commenting, sharing) is making yourself available for connection and friendship.” You also talk about how our issues with money and abundance are intimately connected with our resistance to marketing. In fact, you give journaling exercises at the end of each chapter to do a deeper dive into the root causes of why marketing can feel like such a burden to so many writers. Why was it important for you to include these exercises in the book? What one journaling question would you like to share with our readers today?
To me, one of the most important journaling exercises I include is to journal about how your father felt/feels about money and work and how your mother felt/feels about money and work. This is because this exercise had such a profound effect on me, personally. For years and years I was HORRIBLE with money, a total disaster, and I had no idea why. I had the most toxic, dysfunctional, abusive relationship with money imaginable. All that began to change when I started examining the beliefs my parents held about money and work, and how they had imprinted me with those beliefs, and how I was unthinkingly continuing to carry out the actions related to those beliefs. It honestly turned my entire life around.
After I did that inner money work, I started observing how so many people are walking around in the world on autopilot, really. So many of us are just carrying out the things our parents taught us, consciously or unconsciously, and we ceased to question if this is even working for us at all, long ago. One of the best things you can do for yourself as a conscious human being is to begin to unpack that baggage that your parents handed down to you, and begin to question it.
Thank you for the interview Lauren and for your work! I think highly sensitive writers struggling with both the emotional and practical aspects of book marketing will find Firefly Magic very insightful. Is there anything else you might want to tell them or add to this discussion?
The last thing I’d like to add is that it’s okay to make marketing mistakes. So much of the time writers feel isolated and alone, and we tend to judge ourselves so harshly about our writing. It’s very easy to be harsh with ourselves if we try a marketing experiment and it doesn’t work out. But the absolute best thing you can do is to treat yourself with kindness and compassion as you go through your own marketing journey. It’s okay to be scared, it’s okay to feel resistance, it’s okay if you do the wrong thing, or you don’t do something else that you wish you had done later. It’s all about experimenting and having fun with it.
Leave a Reply