How to Nearly Guarantee Traditional Publication

A terrible idea that has a very high chance of success.

You’ve written a book. You’ve edited it once, twice, three times. Five times? Maybe ten. What’s next?

Most authors do not relish marketing, so if traditional publishing becomes an option, it’s often a tempting one. The problem is that it’s socially unavailable to the vast majority of the population. No one who knows “the real way” to get in will tell anyone. The public is left in the dark, sending query letters that will almost certainly never be read.

Below I will describe a strategy for entering traditional publishing that will work. It’s disgusting and expensive and most people would consider it unethical, but the probability of success, assuming one is capable of writing a few thousand coherent sentences in succession—it should go without saying that if you do not have a book, this advice is worthless—is quite high. If you still, for some reason, believe in traditional publishing, this is the best way to do it. I neither advocate these methods nor condemn them. I am a moral person, but it is easiest to understand systems from an amoral perspective, and so that is what I will be doing.

What to do, and how to do it

You need a literary agent—a high-status one who can get your work read by editors fairly and in a timely fashion—if you want to publish traditionally. There are a few ways to sign one.

1. Have preexisting connections, and cash in a personal favor.

2. Enter an MFA program, become a professor’s favorite, and get an introduction.

3. Just write a really good book. And travel back in time to the 1970s, when the gatekeepers actually read.

4. Spend five or six figures on writing conferences and author services (e.g., manuscript assessments, developmental edits) offered by people who know literary agents.

5. Grow a platform suggestive of a built-in audience.

Option #1 is unavailable to 99 percent of the public. Option #2 is time-consuming and unreliable. Option #3 relies on time travel. Option #4 is expensive; people routinely spend $25,000 querying to get $5,000 book deals. Option #5, by elimination, is the one we’ll be discussing.

If you have less than 10,000 Twitter followers, no literary agent will read you. It does not matter if you are the next Proust if you cannot get eyes on your pages. In the 10,000–24,999 range, you might get the biased, dismissive skim that is the closest thing to a “read” a querying author can get, but it’s hard to build on that, as any author who has queried can attest. The agent’s disposition becomes approximately neutral in the 25,000–49,999 range, and then slightly favorable from 50,000 to 99,999. On the other hand, if you can build a six-figure follower count, agents will start wanting you to succeed.

Here’s the problem. You can buy followers, but if you have a presence with massive numbers and no engagement, it’ll be obvious what you’ve done. An unaccountable overnight jump from 100 to 100,000 followers will probably trigger a platform ban. On the other hand, organic growth is unreliable, because social media is such a grind and so many people are screaming for attention, and the kinds of numbers that impress literary agents seldom “just happen.” Writing well will not help you win the social media game, and playing the social media game will take time away from your writing. If you’re going to do this, you have to mix the two approaches.

Step 1: Determine your target follower count, and the date—preferably, two or three years in the future—by which you’d like to achieve it. To compute this number, look at five debut authors in your genre who have received “significant” or “major” deals in the past ten years, and look up their follower counts—ideally, 12 to 18 months after launch—on the platforms you are interested in. Take the median or second-highest result. That is where you want to be, in order to get an agent’s attention. There’s no value in overshooting; it will cost you money and draw scrutiny.

Step 2: Map out your curve. Plan to buy followers slowly. Excluding events—viral breakouts, publicity boons—in which rapid growth would make sense, your platform numbers should be growing by 20–25% per month—not slower, but not faster. If you need to grow from 100 to 50,000, this will take 28 months. At this rate, you won’t trigger bans and, more importantly, platforms’ algorithms will read your growth as organic, leading to more favorable treatment, bringing in real followers, which you should always prefer. An added advantage of the slow start is that you can change tactics cheaply.

Step 3: You still need to do social media. Sorry, but there’s no way around it. A “platform” with tens of thousands of followers but no activity is just a mailing list, and if those followers are fake, it’s a worthless one. Don’t be greedy. The goal here isn’t to maximize your follower count. The goal is to get your numbers acceptable to a literary agent, with minimal effort. You’re not buying followers to rack up internet points; you’re doing it to get read. You aren’t seeking the highest numbers possible; you’re seeking a small boost so you don’t have to spend your nights coming up with cheap gimmicks (e.g., feuds with public figures, extreme political takes) to get attention. Instead, with your growth locked in, you can make your social media presence safe and boring, then focus on other things.

Will I get banned? I can’t make any guarantees, but small follower buys are unlikely to trigger bans. The web is full of bots, and there are probably a good number of them on your follower list already, without your ever having asked for them. If your follower count jumps by two orders of magnitude overnight, you could cause trouble for yourself. Giving yourself enough of a boost to lock in 20% monthly growth will not bother anyone. It will appear to the world as if you are just good at social media.

Will publishing spot it? In general, no. The authors who get caught for this sort of thing are usually those who do it in stupid and extreme ways. A number of authors have lost book deals for “review bombing”, which is not only unethical and toxic but also incredibly stupid—by directly harming other people, it draws scrutiny. On the other hand, 20% monthly follower growth is simply what, in traditional publishing, is supposed to happen—you’re just buying numbers so you get it with 15 minutes of daily investment instead of 240. Also, since your numbers will grow slowly, you’ll have plausible deniability. You didn’t even notice.

How much will this cost me? More than you want to pay, but less than querying. Don’t buy the cheapest followers you can. You want real engagement. You can probably build enough of a platform to sign a top literary agent for $5,000.

When do I stop? Literary agents sign about 80% of the authors they actually read—the quality of traditional publishing’s output indicates that their selectivity has little to do with writing—but read far less than 1%, and probably less than 0.1%, of the authors who reach out to them. Once you’re getting read, you’ll get signed. Once you’re signed, you should stop buying followers. You no longer need to do it, and you’ll be under more scrutiny going forward. You should instead work with your agent and editor on building a real audience.

An agent told me she “can totally tell” when people buy followers. They recognize when people do it stupidly. They don’t recognize that they are not recognizing when they fail to recognize someone having done it smartly. Consider a police officer who never uses his radar gun because he “can tell by eye” who is speeding. Of the dangerous morons driving 120 miles per hour despite traffic, this is true; of the ordinary drivers doing 70 in a 65, it’s not.

You’ll be using social media. Sorry. There’s just no way around it—if you want to be a traditionally published author, it will take up a substantial fraction of your day. You’ll be getting real followers, due to algorithms favoring you now that you have better stats, as well as bought ones. You’re not buying an audience; you’re buying assistance, so you can put more time into things you actually care about. No one is going to notice the small advantage the paid-for boost gives you; by the time you’re at risk of being studied that closely, you’ll no longer need to buy.

Is this illegal? I’m not a lawyer, and jurisdictions vary, but in general, it is not illegal to buy followers online. It is not fraud to make yourself appear more impressive than you are. You open yourself up to legal issues if you make financial claims or guarantees based on your platform, but that is something you should not be doing even if your platform is wholly organic. If an agent asks you what percentage of your followers will convert into buyers, you’re allowed to say, “I don’t know,” because in truth you do not.

What about the book? Oh, right. That thing publishing is supposed to care about, although text hasn’t mattered for a long time. If you’ve written a novel, it still has to hold together. A follower count of 100,000+ will make every agent really, really want to say yes, and may result in free (possibly unwanted) developmental edits, but if you’re completely incompetent with the written word, fiction is probably not the way to go. In that case, your best bet is to pick a nonfiction genre (e.g., business books) where ghost-written books are common and accepted. No method guarantees the ability to traditionally publish the book you want, but this method does guarantee that you can publish something, assuming you can write something. If you understand basic grammar well enough to pass a few college courses, and you follow the procedure above, you stand a 99% chance of signing a top literary agent, and a fairly high chance of being able to tell people you are “a published writer.” You will quickly discover how little that means.

If this idea is so good, why aren’t you using it? Because it’s not a good idea. It works—it will work, with extremely high probability—but not all things that can easily be done are worth doing. What is the prize, exactly? Most book deals aren’t worth the time, effort, and expense it takes to get them. I could afford to spend the $25,000 that it costs to query, but I don’t value what traditional publishing offers enough to do so. The same goes for the less costly, but time-consuming process of fabricating an author platform. Buying followers online does not guarantee easy money, or any money—at best, it is grimy money. What I describe above is the most reliable and best way to get into traditional publishing, but it is still lousy and probably not worth the debasement.