How to sell a book when you're not a Literary It Girl

Just two girls, standing in front the internet, asking for it to love them

This is a bonus, free for all newsy subscribers this weekend because it’s a topic we’re obsessed with (and also going through), and want to know what you think.

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You probably read this title and thought - cringe, they’re struggling to sell their book, so they wrote an earny Substack about the tough reality of chasing your dreams in this economy.

Everything’s going really good actually!

(But also, like, keep buying it and loving it, and could you make it go viral on the internet while you’re at it?).

This newsy’s about a bigger philosophical question: Can you be a successful writer these days if you’re not a Literary It Girl?

Can you actually write something meaningful and cool with the support of a great publisher and agent and actually make it on the internet if you’re not famous for the enigmaticssexysmartchiccool aesthetic of your life?

Nylon’s Sophia June wrote a great piece about the phenomenon of the Literary it Girl earlier this year:

Literary It Girls may have the standard markers of what we think of when we think of an It Girl: they’re beautiful, stylish, and social, with a certain je ne sais quoi. But what really makes them influential is the creative ways they stage and elevate their work — both on the page and in persona.

Honestly? After having our book out in the world for two months now, Luce and I aren’t sure.

Your book is your badge

In our hyper-visual culture, visible book covers have become the gateway to how people want to be seen. They’re like the 2007 tote bag (New Yorker, she’s a thinker) or the 2011 craft beer (I guess I do things a little differently…), except deeper this time because you have to spend literal hours getting to know it (or, I guess, just buy it and arrange it beside your bed/just say you have).

Which brings me to this - can you break into the well-read, London, Toronto, New York book girl scene if you’re not from there, don’t live there and aren’t… living a certain life on the internet? Here’s how you can become it:

Three ways the Literary It Girl is created:

OPTION ONE: YOU’VE ALREADY GOT WHAT THE INTERNET SAYS IS ‘IT’

1. You’re chic and famous, and you make something (eg. Julia Fox writes a book or Internet Princess Rayne Fisher-Quann goes analog).

2. It goes viral because you’re chic and famous and to own (and be seen owning) your book is a reflection of someone’s personal cultural relevance.

3. It dominates media for a week, maybe two, but its ephemerality kinda doesn’t matter because you’re busy working on something else.

Sometimes I want to be a Cool Girl in a conceptual fall outfit (jorts, a cherry-coloured thrifted leather coat), a knee-high biker book and a book entangled in my earphones while I wait for my matcha to be made just to experience this feeling, but then I think that’s just because those women look smart and as though they have their lives together.

It feels like this was invented when Rupi Kaur’s period post went viral nearly 10 years ago; the internet woke up: this wasn’t just a place for your engagement pictures and 35mm photos. You could be a woman and a writer on here and really make a go of it.

OPTION TWO: YOU USE THE THE INTERNET TO BUILD YOUR ‘IT’ (requiring a lot of behind-the-scenes help)

1. Coco Mellors’ rise to fame (she has a gorge internet presence) is a perfect example of this. Chic woman writes a chic book, it hits the right moment at the right.

June’s article quotes writer Claudia Day on the je ne sais quoi that has to come together for this to happen:

“The elements [of a Literary It Girl] are: devotion to the object, luck, timing, what is shown, what is performed, what is held, and what remains mysterious.”

2. Relentless, continual, international PR support.

3. You must then, maintain it.

In a podcast episode of Say More, writer Miranda July speaks candidly to therapist Esther Perel about post-book burnout (her novel All Fours came out in May this year) and struggling to have the creative capacity to keep up with the publicity demands to push it fully into the world.

It’s like, the more you create (books/art), the more you need to reveal about yourself online (have a prolific social media presence), the more brands can latch onto you (money), the more fans can learn about you (connection), the more likely you are succeed. I cannot tell you how little I wanted to do this after our book came out.

OPTION THREE: THE INTERNET JUST DECIDES YOU’VE GOT ‘IT’ - WOOO!

1. A Gen Z content creator makes a TikTok about your book, and it goes viral.

2. Lots of people are like ‘Zomg I should get that book too, I need to keep up!’

3. It goes more viral, tradish media outlets take you seriously and want to pay for a photographer to come and shoot you in your understated home and do an article about how, despite everything, you made this beautiful thing.

4. Success ensues.

It’s like — Kendall Jenner holds a book on holiday, and it goes viral, the book sells out. As I write this, the hashtag #intermezzo currently has 135,000 posts on Instagram. While we were in the early stages of pitching our own concept, Luce sent me a TikTok of a random man whose book sold out after his daughter made a video that went viral about how poorly it had performed. You get the point.

Perhaps the hardest of the three, this option requires almost 100% on the unpredictableness of the online world. It’s like you’re chasing the very middle of a Venn diagram that keeps shifting and requires a delicate stroke of crazy luck to hit right on target. It’s what keeps the advertising industry alive and content creators up all night and writing a possibly, potentially, if the stars align, commercially viable reality.

BUT, WHAT IF NO ONE ON THE INTERNET DECIDES YOU’VE GOT ‘IT?’

When you come from a small, isolated place

In our book, Luce and I write about coming from an isolated part of the world a lot. No one is flying you from Blenheim to go to a chic event at the Barbican to socialise with other It Girls to tag you in their posts and elevate you socially. You have to go on SkyScanner and hunt down that deal yourself. This is fine but expensive and exhausting.

This is also where the internet ebbs and flows on its own magic: you wake up each day at the mercy of a post, a tag or an email that could start a wave that could just change your life. Or, I guess, you decide not to care, shut your phone, and get on with your day job (and your life).

Not enough space for all the It Girls in this economy

The Literary It Girl’s a tight clique that’s hard to get into, and in many ways - rightly so - there are only so many paid Substack subscriptions in a recession to go around, and anyone who’s managed to make a living out of it exists in a virtuous, supportive circle that don’t want to fuck with its delicate chemistry.

It’s interesting because it’s where we reach the delicate edges of Shine Theory (women helping other women). Late-stage capitalism and the overlord power of the algorithms have magnified the feeling that something isn’t cool until the right person has said it is - or someone new has made some irreverent content about it, and everyone else agrees.

It also presses us up against another annoying reality: How women are expected to mine their lives for stories, but men tend to have more scope to write about things that face outward, like the economy or how to be a CEO. Journalist Rebecca Solnit writes about this in the opening chapter of Men Explain Things to Me and, more recently, Emma Gannon in her Substack, The Hyphen, eloquently. In my phone, I have a screenshot of a quote by writer Roxanne Gay that I return to religiously:

Words to live by or the very philosophy that will stop your book from selling to an internet-addled younger audience? Who’s to fully know or say.

Throwing it to the (internet) universe

We like to say ‘throw it to the universe’ to decide on our book’s fate, but throwing it to the internet here feels more correct. You keep feeding it and feeding it, and it’s never satisfied, but some singular person might just decide that day it’s the best meal they’ve ever had, and everyone needs to know about it.

Such are the rules that luck and fate and hard work all intermingle with. But the fourth element of that is the internet. And by the day, we seem to have less and less control over that.

The truth about us

I wouldn’t blame you if you read this whole piece thinking SYSCA has 3.3 million followers for god sake, what more do you want?!

The irony is also not lost on me that yesterday, we announced an event we’re doing in London later this month with gorge and esteemed journalist Pandora Sykes. We love her! We hope you come! We are still holding these two contradicting things in our hands: what appears to be ‘It’ on the surface and the backstage reality of… not.

Who cares? Not really us, to be really honest. But it does feel like I would probably make more money and have cooler clothes if the internet thought I was (A Lit Girl).

But this is a business built on the inner workings of women’s minds, less so about letting people into our personal lives, and often it feels like unless we want to buy ring lights and do that, there’s a limit to how far a tangible, real-life project can go.

For full transparency, we got a pretty substantial book advance, which we split down the middle each step of the way. I flew back to New Zealand to promote it on both of our companies’ credit cards. Luce and I decided to do an event in Christchurch at our own expense. Behind the shimmer and the thin veil of an online cult following, there’s a very real reality that too many books are published each year, and there are not enough readers to buy (all of) them.

(I couldn’t help but wonder) What is literary success if you’re not a Literary It Girl?

Before our book was published, our gorge agent advised us to write a list of what success felt like. We didn’t really care about chart-topping lists (although we’d also be lying if that would be, like, extremely cool) or even really sales. In the latest annual SYSCA survey, the overwhelming response to people not paying for the media they love was the cost of living crisis. Who has money in this economy anyway?

So, our list was small and simple: to feel proud of what we made, connect with cute readers at our events, avenge the shitty advice of men in our careers who’d tried to make us feel unaccomplished and small, and make people feel less alone in the world.

To be one glimmer of company in a chaotic, untethered permaweird world, feels like a lifetime achievement for two Worn Out Woman trying to carve out lives for themselves there are no well-trodden paths to follow in the footsteps of. However many people we become that for, well — we thought we’d throw that one to the internet.