13 lessons Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour taught us about marketing

Publish & Prosper‘s done it again. What I love about this podcast is that it’s not just about interviewing authors or book professionals, like a lot of the other ones. Lauren’s a big Taylor Swift fan and a Disney nerd, and it amazes me that she’s able to work this into podcast content related to book publishing. This blog is inspired by one of P&P’s recent episodes, “13 Lessons Taylor Swift Has Taught Me About Marketing.”

Let’s get into it.

 

Lesson 1: Build a community, not an audience

What is it that Taylor Swift has done or does in this sort of area? First of all, she has absolutely perfected the illusion of speaking directly to her fans.

She’s not speaking directly to any of us, although she used to, which is a part of community building.

She doesn’t speak to the general masses. She addresses her fans in a way that feels like she’s speaking to you. Whether that’s with her craft, any time that she’s doing an acceptance or thank you or anything, she always talks about her fans and how much they’ve given back to her. That is something that is actually easier for indie authors and creators to do.

Give the impression or reality that you are connecting directly with your audience. That you are not just this creator on high who is handing down content and then never engaging with your community ever again. You’re in the trenches. You’re on the ground with them. You’re responding to them, feeding back and forth between you. It’s not a one-way street, it’s a two way street. Or it feels like one at least.

That’s something that TS has perfected over time. She lets that community flourish on its own. Like the whole friendship bracelet thing. She started that from a line in a song. That’s it. And the fans took that and ran with it. And she embraced that fully. She never tried to take it over. She never tried to stop people from making friendship bracelets, or tried to ban them.

She sells merch that has friendship beads and bracelets and stuff on them. But she’s never tried to make officially licensed Taylor Swift bracelets. She fully embraced that movement within the fandom and supported it and folded it into the overarching narrative of the Eras Tour, but didn’t control it. She encouraged it and let it happen. A big part of community building is letting it build itself.

It’s also a scary part as a creator. It’s all fine and good when you have 50 million fans. But she really didn’t have a choice but to let it happen. When you’re that large and your fans are doing things, for the average person, their follower counts could range anywhere from 50 to 50,000, maybe a little bit more.

While building community is extremely important, it’s not so simple. Maybe somebody takes a line out of one of your books and runs with it. You’d have to drill down a little bit deeper. Building a community versus an audience is about letting them flourish on their own under the umbrella of your brand or of your content.

But you have to be the spark and the catalyst there. It was a line in a song. And somebody saw that, extracted it, and turned it into this phenomenon of grown-ass women creating friendship, which is actually kind of cool.

However, for the average creator or author, it takes a much deeper level of involvement. You can’t just hope that somebody read your book and pulls a line out of it and turns it into some sort of thing that’s associated with your brand. Like you’re going to have to be in that community, regularly engaging and having conversations. There’s good and bad that comes with that.

You’re putting yourself out there on the internet, and there will be times where that community’s not so fun. But if it’s important to you, if you’re trying to achieve a certain level of success or notoriety, it’s just something you have to do.

We don’t know if she actually named her fans at some point or if the world just kind of started referring to them as “Swifties.” Don’t just refer to your readers as “my readers” or “my fans.” If you can give them a name, people like that. No matter what age they are.

Little tiny micro-efforts like that draw people closer and closer together as a community, not just an audience or customer base. The scale with which she’s done some of these things as it pertains to building an audience is different.

You can do so many of these things as any size creator. You just have to scale it.

 

Lesson 2: Make your fans feel like insiders

Make readers feel like they’re participating in the experience. This is part of the community building. This is a part of that two-way street. If your community starts its own inside joke, whether you are the instigator of it or not, there becomes this running inside joke within your community that’s informing you about what your community is interested in. You can learn from that.

You can take that and say, okay, they love when I do x, y, z thing. We see this all the time with creators that have merch of things that the podcast host says all the time. They’re not the ones deciding what their repeat phrases are. The audience is.

One of the things that was really cool from the Eras Tour is that people became fans not just of Taylor Swift, but of the other people on stage with her. Including her dancers, her backup singers, and her stage band. And she leaned into that. And this became an audience participation and an audience insider thing.

One of her dancers was Kam. She gave him the opportunity to ad lib in one song every night. And the audience got really into that. And it turned into this thing where he said something different every night, and everyone would be like, “What’s he going to say?” Including her.

She participated in that, and it made it feel like we’re all here sharing this moment together of what’s Kam going to say tonight? What is he going to insert in this moment here? We’re all experiencing this together.

And that is something that she didn’t orchestrate that moment on her own. She noticed her community and fans being interested in this moment, and then allowed it to happen and then gave it more weight and more opportunity for it to happen.

If you are not sure what to do next, if you’re not sure what’s resonating with your audience, your fans, how to deliver more of what they like, this is how you find out. By letting them feel like they’re participating in this community as a part of this.

 

Lesson 3: Reward your biggest supporters

What is it that makes adult repeat visitors to Disney? What is it that makes people go back over and over again? The same thing is true with Swifties.

Because again, with the haters out there saying, “Why? All her music sounds the same. All the albums sound the same. If it costs $1,200 to go to the Eras Tour, why are there possibly people that are trying to go to more than one night? Isn’t it the same thing? Why are you rewatching the movie over and over again?” And the answer is the same as with the Disney thing. It is a continued delivery of the expectations that were promised.

Some of the things that Taylor does is where the sweet spot is. Delivering a good performance at every show. In terms of rewarding her fans for this cult-like behavior, doing extra things, secret listening parties and stuff like that, that’s the value add.

So for everybody that’s not Taylor Swift, what can you do? What can you deliver above and beyond what’s expected of you as an author or creator? For authors, what are some of those things you can do to reward your fans, your diehards?

The answer’s not: “I’ll do my next book with a foil cover or sprayed edges.” Who cares? We’re talking about real impact. What can you do above and beyond to deliver value? So that somebody’s going to buy every book that you write?

Indie artists, authors, and creators have more opportunities to do this than Taylor Swift does. As a non-Taylor Swift human being, you can go show up and just pop into a local book club that might happen to be reading your book.

You can do really cool Will Ferrell-style, like, I’m just gonna show up dressed as one of my characters and just have fun. Or I’m going to go to an L.A. Kings game dressed as Elf. There are things that you can do as creators that TS will never have the ability to do, because she can’t get that granular. So there are some really great opportunities there.

 

Lesson 4: Create anticipation before the launch

Pre-launch and product marketing are two things that TS gets a lot of negative attention for, but it works. This is something that’s really easy to translate for authors as well. Surprise drops? Sure. And has she done a surprise drop before? Yes. Has she built surprise drops into announced and anticipated drops? Also yes.

But for the most part, she’s very heavy on the pre-launch marketing. And she does a lot of different versions of it. Her pre-launch marketing style has evolved over time. Part of a lot of singers and musicians’ default pre-launch marketing is that release a lead single, right? TS doesn’t do that anymore.

She’s very bad at choosing lead singles. And I think that’s why she stopped doing it, because she was getting a lot of backlash for not being selective with her singles choices.

So if you’re saying, “Okay, I want to do pre-launch marketing for my book, but I don’t want to release any of the book content ahead of time, I don’t want to release the first chapter or preview or give people early access to the book.” You don’t have to. There are plenty of ways to find success without doing that.

Taylor has repeatedly used the idea of countdowns for things. It works. You can do that yourself as a creator. An indie author announced a new book who had signed a contract with Avon and she did a five-day social media countdown. She posted every day and teased out more information, and it was very reminiscent of a Taylor Swift launch.

Cover reveals happen that way, where the author physically covers most of the cover with a black box. And then each day, more and more of the cover is revealed.

If you’re rebranding something or leaning into a new aesthetic for a new initiative that you have going, there are different ways that you can tease this out and create buzz in a countdown format, even if it’s not literally a countdown. TS absolutely uses that. You don’t have to have a billboard in Times Square.

 

Lessons 5 and 6: Turn customers into participants, and make launches feel like events

Not just in terms of community building, but also in terms of pre-launch marketing. Make your pre-launch marketing interactive. This is something that Taylor has done on and off. She will create games for announcing the track list. When she was doing the Taylor’s Versions, she released (this is part of the next lesson) the re-recordings of her existing albums.

But as part of her efforts to make them worthwhile for her audience, she included tracks that were “From the Vault” on there, that were previously unheard. Bonus tracks. And she teased what those were by doing different interactive games online. So like a word scramble or a word hunt or something like that.

Most indie authors don’t have the ability to partner with Google to build in a massive Google search bar international scavenger hunt, obviously. But there are still ways that you can tease out new content, products, a brand, or a book by creating something interactive instead of just posting a static announcement post and then moving on to the next thing. And it’s fun.

You’re getting those engagement metrics if you’re getting people to leave comments guessing. One author announced her book in several days. Part of that announcement was not just the countdown of revealing things one by one, but she also actively asked her followers to leave a comment with a guess on what’s happening. So it became interactive.

Get engagement on your posts, which means it’ll get boosted to those people’s audiences, because they’re interacting with it. This was on Instagram.

Make that pre-launch, but also the actual launch itself, feel like an event. People should be excited that your book is coming out. Not just your parents and your friends.

Midnight release parties, whether they’re virtual or in person. Emily Henry, a very prolific author, romance author, has done this with the last few books that she’s released. Bookstores have done midnight release pajama parties for her book launches. That’s doable. Maybe not nationally.

Maybe you can’t have a whole chain of Barnes & Nobles doing this for you, but maybe your local indie bookstore will do a fun release party the night before or the day after.

Maybe you can do something online where you’re kicking off a readathon at midnight. We’re all going to read the first chapter together. There’s something that you can do to create an event, to make it feel like something that we’re all participating in together.

 

Lesson 7: Create the illusion of scarcity

Taylor gets a lot of hate for this. We’ve seen authors do this too; this is not exclusively a Taylor Swift thing. Say, a limited number of products were printed.

Lenny Rachitsky had 4,000 books, and once they were sold out, that was it. He said he wasn’t going to release any more. But following somebody with a massive follower base, if you didn’t get one of those 4,000, it’s possible you were pretty bummed.

This is the multi-step part of this illusion of scarcity. One, limit the number that were printed, or advertise that there was a limited number printed.

You can do things because it’s print-on-demand. You could create six different versions of the cover or whatever that might be. And once a week you release a new version of the cover. So it’s a new copy of the same book. It just has a different cover. There are people who would absolutely collect even the most minor of variations there. So I think scarcity is sliced a few different ways.

When you’re an indie creator, you don’t have the luxury of not producing that content anymore after a certain number. Your whole goal as a creator is to make money from your content. You’re not Taylor Swift; you can’t just say, well, 5000 copies and that’s it. But what you can do is limit the number of units per variation, which is also what a ton of creators do.

There are contemporary artists who will create a really cool print but 500 in strictly black and white. Then they’ll add color to it, and do 500 of that version. It’s the same thing. It just had color added to it. So you can create scarcity, but you don’t have to limit your income. You create scarcity within variations of the same product.

Scarcity in quantity, but also scarcity in availability. And this is something that Taylor Swift does that some people hate, some people don’t.

TS will release variants of albums in windows of time. You have 72 hours to buy this version of this vinyl, and then it’s not going to be listed anymore. There’s no quantity listed there. There’s no “there’s only a thousand of these made.” But you have 72 hours to buy this, and then we’re removing it from the website.

There’s that level of scarcity where it’s like, “Oh my God, if I don’t get it now, I’m not going to get it.” But now, of course, what has to go hand in hand with that is that they come back out again later. There is a second chance to buy them. Because that’s the follow-up.

That’s the really important thing that people miss when it comes to scarcity, whether it’s quantity scarcity or time-sensitive scarcity: you’ve created that feeling of like FOMO in people, or you’ve created that regret where they’re like, “Oh my God, I didn’t purchase the thing that I wanted to purchase. I hemmed and hawed over it too much, and I ran out of time, and I didn’t get it.”

And so now, the second time that you give them a second chance to go for it, now they’re more likely to bite the bullet on it because they missed it the first time around, and they don’t want to miss it again.

You have to be careful with that when you’re not Taylor Swift because that’s most closely associated with all those ads you see on TV: “Order now in the next ten minutes and you’ll get this.” But then two hours later you see that same commercial, so clearly it wasn’t that ten-minute window.

Certain entities and brands and people can get away with it. As an indie creator, be careful how often you do that, especially if you’re going to go back to the well and offer it again. Now, instead of timeboxing something, go quantity-based. So again, do variations of covers, or even interior content.

Maybe you have a story where there’s a couple of different alternate endings. It doesn’t have to be the cover. And once those are gone, switch it back over to the default cover, or there’ll be a different cover. Stick to what you said you’re gonna do, which limits your ability to monetize that content, in a way.

It’s something that you cannot overuse. You have to be delicate with how you use it.

“If you missed the opportunity to buy that version, here’s this version instead.”

 

Lesson 8: Let your customers choose what they want

The album that Lauren owns the most copies of is The Tortured Poets Department. They are all the same album. TS announced four different variants of the original album. Each one of them had a different bonus track. So they’re all the same base album, and each one has four different bonus tracks.

This was the album that, at 2:00 in the morning, she dropped a second half of. This was an example of her doing an anticipated drop and then a surprise on top of it. So it turns out that those four different bonus songs on the four different variants were all on that second half of the album.

She didn’t release this vinyl until six months later. When enough time passed that Lauren realized Taylor wasn’t releasing the anthology, she had to at least buy the version of the vinyl that has “The Black Dog” on it. And then, of course, six months later, she released the anthology. So she has that too.

That was a very long-winded way of pointing out multiple different ways that you can release both different variants and formats.

Meet your readers, customers, fans where they are, where they want to be, how they want to consume. If you’re lucky, you’ll get some rabid cult-like collectors like Lauren who’re just gonna buy all of them. Make sure that you have what they need in terms of format and product, which sounds simple enough, but quite frankly, most people get that wrong.

Ebook, audiobook, print. But also within that, hardcover, paperback, different sizes, large print editions, mass market, whatever you want to do there. There are different formats that you can make available to people.

And different product variants that you can make available to people. Why not do the same book with three different covers and let your customers choose which one they want? If you put out three versions of the exact same book but three different covers, your average fan is going to buy one of the three of them. And maybe they’ll buy the one they like the best. And that can also be something that’s informing you for future choices.

If you get even 10% of your readers to buy more than one copy of the same book because you offered them a variety of options, how is that a bad thing for you?

 

Lesson 9: Control your narrative

Your products are a part of your story. Story building, building your brand, and telling your brand story. Lauren has two different copies of the Lover album, which are the deluxe versions of the album that had four different variants that included journal pages at the beginning of the book, with an inside look into some of TS’s songwriting process.

TS pulled snippets from journal entries throughout her career that she included. And there’s four different versions, so there’s four different journal entries. That was an opportunity for her to give some insider look into what journal entries were being included in there. And that’s part of the brand-building.

It’s not just creating different variants and different products and giving your customers a reason to buy multiple versions of the same thing, but it’s also giving you an opportunity to control your narrative, tell a story or a different part of the experience, and build a part of the overarching brand.

There’s this author who shows up on TikTok a lot. She’s an indie author. She releases alternate versions of her books. She’s a romance author. She releases the regular standard version, and then annotated versions.

It’s the same book, but she’ll create a copy where she has author’s notes in the margins. And she’ll include character playlists and like, a little bit of insight into some of the behind the scenes of how she went about writing stuff like that.

It’s like DVD commentary, back in the day when movies would have the director or the actor commentary. Why not?

New product, new way to remarket to your fans, and a way to continue to build your narrative.

 

Lesson 10: Repurpose your existing content

TS has mastered repurposing with the variants and deluxe versions. Annotated version versus just the standard version.

You can come to market with your sprayed edges or your foil covers or some of that other stuff too. Bookmarks and special things you can do to your covers. There are really great, fun, creative ways to do that.

Owning your own narrative is so important. Your content, your creative work, your audience, your branding.

We did an episode on the book she put out that was admittedly mediocre—but it was self-published. Just saying.

 

Lesson 11: Own your narrative

Something that Taylor Swift has exemplified over the last few years that a lot of indie authors and creators can continue to do really well is owning your narrative in the figurative sense, not just the literal sense. You are the expert of your own niche. This is your lane. Know who you are. Know what you do really well. Know what it is that you can deliver to your audience.

Know the reason your audience is your audience in the first place, and double down on it. Don’t worry about chasing trends. Don’t worry about forcing yourself to do what’s popular right now if it’s something that’s outside of your wheelhouse. Because the inauthenticity of something like that is going to hurt your brand more than it is help it.

Tell your story and stick to it.

 

Lesson 12: Create a clearly identifiable brand story

Your brand should be all of this. All of this goes together. Whether it’s your audience-building efforts, your product, your pre-launch marketing, your continued repurposing efforts, whatever it is, it’s all part of one overarching story. And that is your brand story. That is the story of you and everything that goes along with it, including your audience. And that’s how you get your audience to feel like insiders, like they’re included in this.

This is the story of all of you. You’re the captain of this ship. You are the lead singer on stage right now. Your selling includes everybody in the stadium with you, not just you. That’s really what it all boils down to with TS’s success and why she continues to dominate the market in every way.

The same can be said for many authors who we’ve read for years. There are movies that we’ve grown up with, and they’re still coming out today. This is where your brand has longevity. We’re telling a story together: you and your audience and your followers and your customers, and your fans. You’re creating a story, and that’s where it all comes together. And that’s what I think TS excels at more than anything else.

You’re all creators, so you should be good at storytelling.

 

Lesson 13: Always leave them wanting more

For each of TS’s products, she has embraced this idea that flexibility and creative control are important to her, and it should be important to everybody. She figured that out and realized that in her early years she was contractually bound to some things that weren’t the best for her brand. They weren’t very flexible.

So the moment she was able to take control of those things, she started doing a lot of stuff that would be most closely aligned with what we call indie publishing and selling direct. And all of these things that creators have at their disposal these days to really allow them that flexibility to build a brand so quickly.

Authors and creators are building brands, building themselves at record-breaking paces compared to if you were an author who started writing ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. It was so much harder to go out there and build an audience and build a fan base, and build essentially a business.

But now, the amount of tools we have at our disposal that contribute to the ability to do this quickly and effectively, is unprecedented.

When you have somebody at her scale, sometimes it doesn’t translate well. You have that flexibility and freedom to do it your way so that you can leave this lasting impression and continue to build that audience. That’s the key to what she’s doing. Her or her team’s tactics and strategies worked out great.

TS said, “I’m not going to do it the way everybody else is doing it in my industry. I’m going to go and do all this on my own, and I’m going to do it this way because it gives me the maximum amount of creative flexibility and control.”

You’re a creator and trying to build an audience or business and not be strapped to a cubicle 9 to 5 to earn a dollar. You want to build an audience as fast as possible and deliver content to the expectations of that audience, and the expectations that you’ve promised. You want to do it consistently.

You want to give fans all the products and formats that they expect and deserve, right? And do that in a way that allows for maximum profitability and creative flexibility.

 

TL:DR Recap

1. Build a community, not an audience.
2. Make your fans feel like insiders.
3. Reward your biggest supporters.
4. Create anticipation before the launch.
5. Turn customers into participants.
6. Make launches feel like events.
7. Create the illusion of scarcity.
8. Let your customers choose what they want.
9. Your products are a part of your story.
10. Repurpose your existing content.
11. Own your own narrative.
12. Create a clearly identifiable brand story.
13. Always leave them wanting more.

 

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