How High School Debate Made Me a Better Author & Marketer

And the NSFW framework I use to craft compelling copy

Before I jump into today’s post, an announcement for my Bay Area friends: Join me and fellow debut author Jaclyn Westlake for our very first book event!

On June 5 at 7 p.m., we’ll be at Books Inc. in Berkeley to share our experiences working in Silicon Valley and discuss how they influenced our novels. RSVP today to reserve your spot!

RSVP so you don’t miss out on signed books & juicy stories :)

Now, on to today’s scheduled programming. If you’re subscribed to The Author Stack, this article will look familiar, but I wanted to repost it in case you missed it.

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Photo by Josh Anderson on Unsplash

The NSFW Framework I Use to Market My Books

Before I prioritized my career as a romance author (my debut Silicon Valley rom-com Love Apptually just released!), I spent over a decade in the tech industry, working as a content marketer for early-stage startups.

I’m often asked what are the top marketing strategies and tactics that can be applied to selling books instead of enterprise software. And the number-one framework I teach to aspiring authors and consulting clients alike is one I actually learned in high school speech & debate—way before I became a marketer.

If you’re thinking: but Alyssa, how can you label this marketing framework as NSFW when you were taught it as a literal minor? Good question and fair criticism!

It’s tongue-in-cheek, of course, but before I describe the framework, I always apologize for the profanity. Because it’s called the SHITS.

Yes, of all the ways you can market your book, you’re definitely going to want the SHITS.

Here’s why.

The Marketing Magic of Having the SHITS

As I mentioned, I first came across the SHITS in high school. When you compete in policy debate, you’re taught the following acronym:

• Significance

• Harms

• Inherency

• Topicality

• Solvency

The SHITS’ original use was to make it easier for debaters to remember the stock issues when crafting their arguments. But once you know how they work, they can be applied to any use case where you need to be persuasive and convince someone to do something, whether that’s vote for your resolution or buy your book.

So I’m going to explain each element of the SHITS, using examples from both bestselling debut rom-coms I love, as well as my own.

Let’s dive in!

Significance: What important problem does my character want to solve? And why should readers care?

Significance is critical to grabbing the attention of potential readers. If you want people to drop whatever they’re doing and buy your book, the first sentence of your blurb or description needs to frame what your character wants as significant—as something readers actually care about and can resonate with.

Let’s look at a few opening sentences of popular rom-com blurbs:

• The Hating Game: Lucy Hutton has always been certain that the nice girl can get the corner office.

• The Kiss Quotient: Stella Lane thinks math is the only thing that unites the universe.

• Red, White & Royal Blue: First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz is the closest thing to a prince on this side of the Atlantic.

• Love Apptually: Celebrity stylist Casey Holbright is used to being the sidekick in someone else’s story.

These openers all give an inkling of what these characters are facing, whether it’s pursuing a promotion or dealing with fame. They also immediately narrow the wide world of romance novels to their respective subgenres, such as workplace romance, STEM romance, or royal romance.

By getting clear on why readers should care about your book, you will also get more specific on which types of readers will care. And caring is the first step to adding your book to cart.

Harms: What bad things will happen to my character if they don’t get what they want?

In publishing speak, the harms are also known as the stakes. It’s not enough for characters to want something—bad things must befall them if they fail in their mission. This is what moves readers from simply caring to being full-blown invested in your story.

Here’s how harms are previewed in these blurbs:

• The Hating Game: Lucy can’t let Joshua beat her at anything—especially when a huge new promotion goes up for the taking. If Lucy wins this game, she’ll be Joshua’s boss. If she loses, she’ll resign.

• The Kiss Quotient: She comes up with algorithms to predict customer purchases—a job that has given her more money than she knows what to do with, and way less experience in the dating department than the average thirty-year-old.

• Red, White & Royal Blue: International socialite duties do have downsides—namely, when photos of a confrontation with his longtime nemesis Prince Henry at a royal wedding leak to the tabloids and threaten American/British relations.

• Love Apptually: But when her biggest client suddenly decides to dump her right before Fashion Week, she needs to channel some major main character energy.

These harms include consequences like a lack of dating experience, a tabloid leak, and a detrimental loss in income. But I’d argue that The Hating Game’s blurb is the best at escalating the stakes by explicitly stating what happens if Lucy wins or loses. Regardless of the outcome, I’m sold.

Despite the name of the genre, most characters in romance novels don’t set out to fall in love. Romance may be what they need in the end, but the Significance and Harms in these stories are all about what they want—and what’s at risk if they don’t succeed.

Inherency: If what my character wants is so important, why don’t they have it by now?

Something has to be standing in the way of your main character—otherwise, your story would be resolved in just a few pages. And where’s the fun in that?

This inherent obstacle could be internal, like an inability to trust others, or external, like an antagonist. In romance—especially in enemies-to-lovers or second-chance romance—the love interest and the antagonist are often the same person.

Here’s how inherency shows up in these blurbs:

• The Hating Game: After a perfectly innocent elevator ride ends with an earth shattering kiss, Lucy starts to wonder whether she’s got Joshua Templeman all wrong.

• The Kiss Quotient: It doesn't help that Stella has Asperger's and French kissing reminds her of a shark getting its teeth cleaned by pilot fish.

• Red, White & Royal Blue: As President Claremont kicks off her reelection bid, Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret relationship with Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations.

• Love Apptually (part 1): Her dream job quickly unravels into a nightmare, however, when she learns Evan never agreed to hire her and has zero intention of ditching his gym-rat attire—not for his own board of directors and definitely not for a fashionista who cares more about Prada than Python.

• Love Apptually (part 2): But just when their rivalry turns into something more, Casey discovers a bigger threat than flip-flops at the office. To prevent Evan from losing the business he built from scratch, they’ll need to team up to save his startup—and his reputation.

In The Hating Game, Joshua is Lucy’s inherency because she can’t fall in love with him and beat him at the same time. Stella in The Kiss Quotient is trying to gain sexual experience as a woman with autism, and Alex and Henry’s relationship in RWRB is under constant threat from the paparazzi.

And not to toot my own horn, but in Love Apptually, I offer two inherencies: First, what’s keeping Casey from succeeding at her new gig is her love interest, Evan himself. But just when they’re finally getting along, another antagonist comes along and puts both their careers at risk.

The more obstacles you can throw at your characters, the more tension will inevitably build. And tension is what compels readers to not only pick up your book but also race to the end.

Topicality: How does my book align with its genre’s conventions and tropes?

Topicality is one of the more difficult elements in the SHITS to define, precisely because it’s about definitions in the first place.

Staying on-topic is important to debaters who are trying to make a case for or against a particular resolution—just ask my opponents who accidentally thought the Kyoto Protocol was about coyotes and proceeded to talk about animal welfare (my team won, obviously).

When it comes to marketing your books, however, topicality is more about your genre’s conventions and tropes. It’s essential to provide signposts in your marketing copy so readers can quickly assess whether they’d be interested in your book.

• The Hating Game: Nemesis (n.) 1) An opponent or rival whom a person cannot best or overcome. 2) A person’s undoing. 3) Joshua Templeman.

• The Kiss Quotient: Her conclusion: she needs lots of practice—with a professional. Which is why she hires escort Michael Phan.

• Red, White & Royal Blue: The plan for damage control: staging a fake friendship between the First Son and the Prince.

• Love Apptually: The most infuriating part of this whole ordeal? Evan’s got the rock-hard body to make even cargo shorts look good.

The Hating Game and Love Apptually are pitched as classic enemies-to-lovers romances, and the former makes that obvious by using a dictionary definition in the blurb’s first sentence.

The Kiss Quotient plays up the love coach trope, while RWRB subverts the fake dating trope with its fake not-dating plotline. So even though all these novels are rom-coms, each is approaching topicality in a different way.

Some writers, usually outside the romance genre, misconstrue tropes as lazy or formulaic, but what they’re missing is how readers—either consciously or subconsciously—rely on tropes to quickly identify the types of stories they love.

Conventions and tropes aren’t limiting; they’re liberating. Consider topicality as the fast pass to the right readers for your book.

Solvency: What are the benefits my book will deliver to readers?

In policy debate, solvency (also known as the solution) is about whether a plan actually solves the problem it claims it will solve.

But with book marketing, the second S in SHITS isn’t about solving your character’s problem—it’s about your book being the solution for your reader.

After all, if you leverage topicality properly, all of your character’s problems will automatically be put behind them, thanks to your genre’s conventions. The lovers will live happily ever after, the mystery will be solved, and good will vanquish evil.

But it’s not enough for an author to meet genre expectations. Readers buy books to be entertained, surprised, thrilled, or aroused in some way. They want to be on the edge of their seats, so engrossed they can’t put a book down. How can you convince readers of the benefits of your specific story?

Authors can invoke a sense of solvency in their marketing through a variety of methods:

• Including comparison titles

• Sharing book aesthetics, teasers, and excerpts

• Promoting positive reviews and endorsements

• Generating word of mouth with ARC readers, book influencers, or street teams

Solvency works best when you enlist the readers who already love your work. You shouting, “This book is awesome!” won’t be nearly as effective as your fans doing the same.

Of course, proving solvency is more difficult for debut authors without proven track records, but with time, the benefits to your growing audience of readers will be so obvious that buying your next book will be a no-brainer.

And if you want to buy my book, Love Apptually, you can grab your copy on Amazon today!

To Summarize the SHITS

Now that you’re familiarized with the SHITS framework, hopefully, you can envision applying it to a variety of book marketing use cases: sending queries to agents, drafting blurbs and descriptions, crafting emails and pitches, and so much more.

Any marketing copy you produce—whether it’s on your website, social media platforms, ads, or newsletters like Substack—can be made more persuasive with the SHITS.

In summary, make your book marketing more compelling by checking off the following:

• Significance: Get potential readers to care about your book by giving your characters something important and relatable to want

• Harms: Raise the stakes by amplifying the negative consequences your character will face if they don’t get what they want

• Inherency: Create tension by giving your characters internal and external obstacles to getting what they want

• Topicality: Use signposts that signal your genre’s conventions and tropes to appeal to your ideal reader

• Solvency: Share the benefits your book will deliver to readers, especially by generating word of mouth through your existing fanbase

Once you get the hang of the SHITS, the rest of your marketing should flow naturally (lol, I’m so sorry, I’ll see myself out!).

Are you a writer looking for more book marketing tips & tricks? Subscribe to The Author Stack, where I’m sure I’ll be popping by in the future for more guest posts.

Now it’s time for this month’s moment of sunshine.

Your Moment of Sunshine ☀️

Every month, I share the things I loved most to bring a ray of warmth wherever you are.

Reading 📖

Source: Amazon

Dear Dotty by Jaclyn Westlake

There are many reasons why Jaclyn and I are friends, and one of those is that our books have so much in common! Although Dear Dotty is women’s fiction and Love Apptually is romance, they share an abundance of friendship drama, corporate sabotage, and even barnyard animal antics.

With major Sophie Kinsella vibes (the highest compliment I can give!), Dear Dotty is a hilarious and heartfelt story about living an abundant life and building a happily ever after for you and nobody else. Such a joy to read!

Watching 🍿

Source: MovieWeb

The Fall Guy

Between Challengers and season 3 of Bridgerton, this spring has been fantastic for romance fans. But when it comes to putting the com in rom-coms, I have to hand it to The Fall Guy, starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.

I honestly haven’t had this much fun in an adventure romance since The Mummy. It’s witty and charming and meta in the best way, as it celebrates stunt performers as the unsung heroes they are.

And I think I’ve discovered the key to executing the second-chance trope perfectly: have a desperate, lovesick character do whatever it takes to win back the one that got away. Watching Ryan Gosling wallow in his truck to Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” has to be hands-down the funniest scene I’ve seen this year.

Listening 🎧

POST HUMAN: NeX GEn by Bring Me The Horizon

Few artists have had the longevity as Bring Me The Horizon, but for over 20 years, this British pop metal band has been known for constant reinvention. And after long-awaited anticipation, BMTH’s seventh studio album, POST HUMAN: NeX GEn, dropped last week.

While That’s the Spirit still holds the top spot as my favorite BMTH album, this one has some solid tracks. I especially enjoy their more melodic songs, like, “sTraNgeRs,” “LosT,” “R.i.p.” and “DiE4u.” Just don’t ask me to explain why their titles are stylized like ransom notes because your guess is as good as mine :)

What should I be reading, watching, and listening next? Share your recommendations in the comments!