The Feral Fandoms Podcast

Taylor Swift’s Playbook Can Supercharge Indie Authors If You Learn The Right Lessons

• Onley James & Shannon Ezzell

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SPEAKER_00:

Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode seven of the Feral Phantoms Podcast. Seven. James, male male romance author. Busy, busy person.

SPEAKER_01:

Pretty much. So I'm a little out of it. And I am here with Shannon. It's me. I have one client. She's exclusive.

SPEAKER_00:

She likes long walks on the beach. In your paladas, getting lost in the rain. The people at Dunkin' Donuts know me by name. I'm so mad. I ordered an extra large. That's how much caffeine I was looking for. And it sucked. It's a gamble. It's the beauty of Duncan. Is it gonna be perfect? No. No, no. Depends on who's working that day. Yeah. And how much they're in a good mood. Okay, so let's talk about Taylor Swift.

SPEAKER_01:

Hey, swizzle.

SPEAKER_00:

I have notes. I have so many notes. But yeah, so I did a fresh listen this morning because I wanted to get my listen opinion because after I hear a song over and over again, it kind of becomes an earworm and you just like it because it's popular on TikTok or like whatever. So you have to see the edits.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. It's like it gets in your head, and all of a sudden you're like, do I like this song or do I just hear it every six seconds?

SPEAKER_01:

This one is like one of the ones that you kind of have to marinate with. And know that, yes, Tortured Poets Department was poetry.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, so I actually liked the album. Like it feels almost controversial to say that I liked it. But okay, granted, there are some songs that I was just like, I will never listen to this one again. Pretty much. The only two no-skip albums I have for Taylor Swift are 1989 and Red. And that was back in her old school days when she delivered in a very poppy way, but like when you really listened and read the lyrics, you were like, shit, that's deep. And okay, so here's my here's my take on before and then I'll let you have your show. Show. Okay, my favorite song is Life of a Showgirl. It's so good. It's so good. The second favorite is definitely The Fate of Ophelia. And it's catchy. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01:

100 on the lid.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, it's and it's not even like a lyrics thing. It's just one of those things where I could just see myself listening to this on repeat. You know, we're happy.

SPEAKER_01:

It doesn't have to be that deep.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Ancel is interesting. How about Lee Romantic?

SPEAKER_00:

That's my next favorite. Actually, Romantic. And it gives me a very high school enemies. It's giving 90s. I could almost lay a teenage dirtbag over this. 100%. Girl. How do we feel about it? I like when she storytells, you know what I mean? Because a lot of her songs are, I don't know, about her life, but when she gets into that real deep storytelling mode, that's when I dig her the most. Anyone called me, honey. Yeah, exactly. Ruin the Friendship is very depressing.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah. Messages. Fucking friends. Yeah. Apparently, that's the hot take.

SPEAKER_00:

Um Elizabeth Taylor. I love Elizabeth Taylor. It's so good. I think Elizabeth Taylor is one of those songs that I need another listen kicks in for me. Sounds like that. Like a lot of songs I need to like kind of like really feel them. Like I need to look at the lyrics. I need to lock in. But things like Life of a Showgirl, Canceled, The Fate of Aphelia, like those are ones that like you hear the first time and you like the music and you're just like, okay, this is. People hate canceled. Because and I know why they hate canceled. Because it's very tongue-in-cheek. It's very her being like, you know, everybody gets canceled for everything. I'm being canceled all the time because getting canceled in the author world happens uh probab pretty much three times a day.

SPEAKER_01:

Um, I think this her fans, all these songs, there's theories. So actually romantic, they think is about Olivia Rodrigo. I don't know if you know about her. Olivia Rodrigo used to open for her, and then they had some kind of out. I don't know what happened. Olivia Rodrigo has a photo shoot of holding a severed hand that had a bunch of friendship bracelets on. She said performing for Taylor Swift fans felt like she was performing for a bunch of children.

SPEAKER_00:

Rodrigo has beef with Sabrina Carpenter too, doesn't she? Because Sabrina Carpenter was the next. So I think that Sabrina Carpenter and her dated the same guy, and Olivia Rodrigo wrote that whole fucking album that made her famous over Sabrina Carpenter. Maybe that's why Tate picked her next. That's why when you said that, I was like, wait a year you're so messy. See, Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo are pop stars involved in the public feud in 2021 after Rodrigo's song Driver's License was speculated to be about Carpenter and their mutual ex Joshua Bassett, who guess what? Nobody remembers anymore. Who? But you know who they do? Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, that's who they think romantic is about.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it makes sense, especially now that I see that's you know, with Sabrina being on Life of a Showgirl.

SPEAKER_01:

It's yeah, no, it's that's how she keeps everybody hooked. Because we know when the next album comes out, we get little pieces of her opinion on everything we've been reading. Because she doesn't say shit, but she'll be like, hey, am I?

SPEAKER_00:

It's like a wink, no. And that's something like authors need to really understand. It's not just bonding with your fans, it's they're in on the joke. Like nobody else is, and anybody who's not in the circle doesn't get it, but those who are in the circle are like, whatever, because we get it and you don't, kind of thing. Yes, and I think that's part of the reason why a lot of couples in like Asian BL and in just like BL in general never come out, but they never deny either because it keeps people hooked. Once you know that they are a couple or they're not a couple, then it just doesn't, it's not as interesting. But if you're watching everything they do and you're trying to decode every little hidden meaning, it just gives you that dopamine hit that you want. Because you could talk about it to people. You're like, oh, are they? Aren't they? Did you see this? Yeah, yeah. And so that's part of what I loved about like about Taylor Swift's marketing is that she does so many things that they've mastered in Asia too, but you never see other artists do here. It's interesting that Taylor Swift gets a pass when a lot of other artists don't, when they do try to be a little bit different.

SPEAKER_01:

I think it's because she's unapologetic. Like with this album, she's like, if you don't like it, I'm not the art police.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, that's the whole point of like canceled, is like she's basically just saying, like, I'm never going to be a hundred percent right. Like, I'm never going to do the right thing 100% because I'm a human being and everything. Like, people fuck up, you know? But nowadays, you're if you're a celebrity, you're never allowed to fuck up. You're not allowed to be too rich, you're not allowed to be too loud, you're not allowed to have an opinion that somebody might consider controversial.

SPEAKER_01:

More often, everyone's supporting a billionaire somewhere. They're like, I can't support Taylor Swift, even though she literally for fun scrolls GoFundMe, like it's social media, and just donates to people often. She gives tons of money to her employees. Everybody who's worked with her, like her dancers, she has the same bass guy from debut.

SPEAKER_00:

Put it this way: like, Mark Cuban is a but nobody he nobody talks shit about Mark Cuban because he donates money, he's a Democrat, he does all the same things Taylor Swift does. But somehow Taylor Swift is the elitist billionaire, like trying to be the commoner. But Mark Cuban gets a pass. And he buys the difference exactly.

SPEAKER_01:

She's a woman, she did make her own money, and then everyone saying that this is conservative dog whistling in this album does not know that she publicly came out against Donald Trump and got death threats up the ass. Like, she can barely go to football games. Now, when she goes to the football game, she has to have like a bulletproof thing. So, what do you want her to do? Like, she has stalkers sneaking in her windows. You're not gonna catch me defending billionaires this hard. So don't make me do it.

SPEAKER_00:

And then Elizabeth Taylor was good. Father figure makes me laugh because it's so mafia romance coded.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, you'll be sleeping with the fishes before you know you drown in whose portraits on the mantle of an MM romance. Do you know what it's about? I don't sold her masters, so she didn't know.

SPEAKER_00:

This is about the masters thing, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And then so she is him, so she's him in the song. Like he, you know, it's not Scooterbron, it's the original guy who sold it to Scooterbron. About he does shady shit like anyway. He said he so in the song, he's she's him, like, you know, I'm I'm gonna take care of you, da-da-da-da. And then in the next course, in the next course, she's her, and she's like, ah, turns out my dick is bigger. So she's talking about shit that happened to her, and people just aren't they're not getting it, they're it's not clicking with them. So it's a little corny, but she's always been a little corny.

SPEAKER_00:

Like, well, yeah, I mean, there's nothing to me, there's nothing wrong with being corny. Uh, I will say, Eldest daughter is giving me Elena Bellaswan feels because I'm a soft girl.

SPEAKER_01:

I don't like it when she does that. That some people are saying a white woman came out on TikTok and said when she said she's not a savage or a bad bitch, she's actually being racist against black women. And then the black woman came out and said, interesting. Tell me why when we said when she said the word is savage and bad bitch, why is that automatically take you to black? Tell us. So she's always said that uh she wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts. She's always been afraid of a cool bitch, she knows she's not cool. That's the she gets it. Just like I'm not cool, I'm not sexy.

SPEAKER_00:

But I think that is where a lot of people are like eye-rolling because it's like she is cool, she is hot, she's not because she has a lot of nerdy interests and she's not afraid to talk about them.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and I think she doesn't have a big fat juicy ass.

SPEAKER_00:

Let's talk about wood. Not my favorite. I would have to say it's the second to last favorite next to that wish list song.

SPEAKER_01:

Little wish list. It was weirdly never dreamt of a basketball hoop.

SPEAKER_00:

No, I think it's because it's kind of giving careful what you wish for. You know, it's oh, you can be a billionaire if you want to. I just want a little white picket fence and a nice yard and having kids with you. That's really easy to say when you're a billionaire. Easy to be like, oh, I don't care about it. I just want kids. And it's like, yeah, because you did the ambitious part.

SPEAKER_01:

You're fucking rich now. Even if you just had Travis Kelsey money, that's still I'll never have a third of that in my entire life.

SPEAKER_00:

You would still be a rich bitch. Good for you. And this is the thing. It's like, what is too rich? We're all supposed to be ambitious, we're all supposed to want everything, we're all supposed to like be able to have it all. Like, yo, you can be everybody wants you to have that. Where's the cutoff where you go from being rich to being so rich that now you're a twat? You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01:

It's once you start surpassing Well you're doing it too much, you're successing too much, you're dropping too many albums when other people's favorites are dropping albums, or you know what it is, and it's easy to hate people that are just continue to break records after record after record after record. People saying they hate the album, but checks your scoreboard, they're fucking listening to it, they're knocking on wood. And when I heard that song for the first time, I was giggling, kicking my feet. Listen, I don't know if you know who she's been dating her whole life, but it's these twink ass deep ass flick boys.

SPEAKER_00:

There's songs in this album that she wrote just for her. Yes, you know what I mean? She wrote songs that were just for her, and I get it. I mean, when you're in love, you want to fucking brag about it.

SPEAKER_01:

Never been dicked down like this before.

SPEAKER_00:

There are many hard to see mad right now, just punching the air.

SPEAKER_01:

There are skinny little twinks, and I just know. I just know. She also dated really deep. She did like the whole like deep musician guy.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, she dated Maddie Healy, which he talked about himself in the third person the entire interview. Like, what the fuck is that? And also, yes, she was really young, and he was not.

SPEAKER_01:

And fairness too, I think she dated uh Jonah. Was it a Jonas? She did date a Jonas brother. And she was like 20 or something, and he was like, I think 17, 18.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I'm actually kind of like thrown by the the amount of people over the last 20 years who even women, when you're like looking at the age difference in some of these relationships in Hollywood, you're just like nobody flagged that? No 2000s things get a little murky.

SPEAKER_01:

I never did it myself.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, not that was a little shady.

SPEAKER_01:

I think the only time I ever like dated somebody younger than me, I didn't even know their age until afterwards, and there was only a two-year age difference between us, but I made a note specifically about a quote that I saw that I thought was relevant to everyone was mad about all the variants, right? So Yeah, that's one of the things I wanted to talk about. You start, and I saw oh wait, I think I found it. Hang on. Damn it. It was something like variants don't create a demand, they feed the demand. So she's creating variants because there is already a market for it. So, like in like for you, you can create 20 different variants for your books because there's a demand for it. People aren't gonna get mad at you because you're not Taylor Swift, they're just gonna be happy that they have different choices. But I thought that was a good question. No, they get don't get don't get don't get a choice.

SPEAKER_00:

Some people do get mad. But it's like one of those things where you know I tell people they're not Pokemon, I have to catch them all to you and let the other ones go. No, it's just marketing. It one, it's just marketing, but two, I only have a limited supply of things that I work with. I only have 30 books that I've written. I've only been doing this for years, like at least in the MM space. No, like there's a cat voice. Oh no, poor Lobo. Are you scared?

SPEAKER_01:

That's enough. Well, the cat just beat the shit up for no reason.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I'm the editor. Larians. Well, I just launched my artist editions yesterday.

SPEAKER_01:

And they're so pretty.

SPEAKER_00:

Shout out to T-Reader. Oh my gosh, I love her so much. She sends me memes all the time about K-pop demon hunters.

SPEAKER_01:

I said, Talisha, I'm in the shop. What are we doing? She goes, Ah, I got it. I said, How many do you have? She's one of the people that bought a mystery swag bag. And I messaged her and I said, Talisha, you have it all. There's nothing in this bag that you don't have. She bought two. I said, Talisha, what are we doing, babe? We just got money to burn.

SPEAKER_00:

She's in the UK. I think some people do. I think some people think that like I'm their favorite charity. They just like my books and they want me.

SPEAKER_01:

She bought two mystery bags and then she's like, Can I do a giveaway? I have all this stuff. I said, I know, bitch. I know. I told you you didn't. She's like, but yeah, just in case. I'm telling you, there is no just in case.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I will tell you that we're making these character cards, this artist that I'm working with, and they're just gonna be cards that we throw randomly into the box when you ship something.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

So like people can collect them, but they won't necessarily know what they're gonna get.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, they are Pokemon cards. You said you promise no Pokemon cards. Lies! Lies. Everybody rewind a minute and 30 seconds back, which goes, they're not Pokemon cards.

SPEAKER_00:

You don't have to collect them all. And you know how I know this? Because I am looking at my shelf of tiny tan toys from fucking McDonald's. And you know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_01:

It's crazy because we were doing them for Presley, my sister-in-law.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, no, she got them all. In Asia, you just walk up to the thing and you push the button and you tell them which one you want. Here, they're like, whatever, bitch, just take your toy and go. I don't care if you've got seven.

SPEAKER_01:

Come back tomorrow for another happy meal. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Meanwhile, in Asia, they're like, How about we just give you the toy you want and you go walk somewhere? Eat. Go eat your vegetables. Well, actually, McDonald's isn't nearly as unhealthy in Asia as it is here. Yeah, you can get vegetables here. Yeah, exactly. What are they talking about? Yeah, but no, like, I mean you know me. I'm a huge stray kids fan. I get every photo card, all of them, and I never know what I'm gonna get. And if I was really dedicated, like some of these people are, I would trade them with other people. And people do that, they trade them to get the full set of whatever they're missing. And yeah, you know, until people sell random shit in there.

SPEAKER_01:

But I mean or complain that they already had it. Yeah, I couldn't have been more clear that this was leftover stuff.

SPEAKER_00:

Most people were happy. We had a few complainers that were like just could not wait to run to the reviews to be like, like, we told you. They're like, how dare you give me what I paid for? Like, I don't know what they wanted. But most people were happy with everything. Yeah. I mean, I thought there was gonna be kickback about the price of the artist editions because they're so expensive. I mean, part of it is going to charity, so like, but I I mean, we sold 30 just yesterday. Like, and luckily you don't have to fulfill any of those.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I have to request the fulfillment. Okay. I wish you were the one individually paying for them.

SPEAKER_00:

I'd be poor. Yeah, I think that that's what Taylor does really well. Also, when she was cancelled with that whole with can't yeah, and she really got cancelled the fuck boots down. And she did exactly what I would do. She disappeared, she took some time, she reinvented herself a little bit, she came back and she owned it in a way Reputation is my favorite album. What catapulted her from like A-less celebrity to like God tier, you know?

SPEAKER_01:

Because I I'm just curious who on Kanye's team leaked the other part of that phone call that actually cleared her, where she did say, I don't really know how I feel about make that bitch famous. I don't really like that line, or whatever she said. And they cut that part out of the phone call. And then I don't to this day, everyone says it was Chris Jenner. They think she's this like a secret Swifty. I don't think she did that to her own daughter. She sold her own daughter sex tape. True. So I still to this day wonder who leaked that. But when she came back, the true Swifties were like, I don't give a fuck. I wasn't a Swifty back then, I was doing crazy shit.

SPEAKER_00:

I appreciate when you part of me wonders if it was all just a publicity stunt, because I know so many people like on the inside. Like, I have a friend who works for a A-list celebrity, and so much of it is manufactured, so much of the stuff, like of people dating is manufactured, so much of the drama is manufactured. There are A-list celebrities who call paparazzi to tell them they'll be someplace, just so they could be like, stop taking my picture. But I mean, like, of course, and it's just so it have all been an elaborate, like, publicity stunt. Yeah. And if it was, good on all of them. I don't think so. I think she has some emotion. I don't have any skin in the game. I guess. But I remember when it happened, there was people who were like, oh, when it came when her side of the story came out and it was proven, then everybody was like, hmm. It's weird that somehow she got a hold of the other side of the phone call. How long has she been sitting on that? You know, like, was it all planned because she did have that other side of the phone call? Or did somebody defect somebody else? Somebody else leaked it. It wasn't well, it might have been Taylor Swift, we don't know, but yeah. But honestly, it could have been anything. It could have been Taylor's lawyers going to people being like, Hey, if you can prove this is, you know, there's something, you know, if you could prove our side, you know, and they leaked it that way. Just put in a uh Taylor Swift took my video off of YouTube. Like, no, she didn't. Taylor Swift has no idea that you used her song in a wedding video. She doesn't. YouTube. It's why Ren, the music artist, is so famous. Because you, when you're signing up, you have to basically say whether people have the rights to use your whole song, your whole video when they're reacting to your stuff. And that's why you'll see a lot of reactors pause and like talk and then start the song again and then pause because you have to have these breaks. Ren was like, I don't care. He's like, if you're gonna talk about my music, have my video, like yeah, watch the whole thing, it's totally worth it. And he skyrocketed because of that. I will tell anybody who wants to be a YouTuber, Stray Kids and Ren, if you talk nicely about those two fandoms, they will come running. They will shoot your YouTube channel to the stratosphere in very small measure. They call them renegades, like the Ren fans, they call them renegades. Like, they love to hear people find Ren because he is so like different. Like his music is everywhere, he raps, he's sings, he plays guitar, he does like all kinds of stuff. And I think that that's why like when people are like, Oh, they she copyright striked me. I'm like, no, she didn't. She has no idea that you used her song in a video. She's not Taylor Swift, a monumental corporation who has hundreds of employees that she has to keep going easily.

SPEAKER_01:

She could for the rest of their lives without doing another thing. The exact same albums, well, with vault tracks, and we still want the reputation vault tracks. I don't care if you don't re-record the album, that's fine. You own it now, that's great. Release the vault tracks, bitch. Okay, I know you're getting dicked down, you're busy. Go ahead, release that. That they would outsell the original, you know what I mean? And the her fans would literally not listen to anything that wasn't Taylor's version. And Taylor's version is such a thing with the Swifties that just so interesting. And she's like, Yeah, who would think, like, who would do that? You know, like who, and then she did it. It's revolutionary to the music industry, and new artists are paying attention to masters and owning your own art. And she just got her master's back, and that's her life's work. Uh, it would be like if you, I guess if you're traditionally published or something, owning your own book, owning your own story, like selling that away.

SPEAKER_00:

The person who wrote the vampire diaries, Smith, she she lost the rights to write her own characters. She had to write fan fiction about characters she created in a shared world concept on Amazon just to keep writing her own characters because something in that contract yeeted control of her own characters. And that is why I pay money to an entertainment lawyer, and I we sat on that Japan contract for over a year of negotiations because there was just certain things that they would not like concede to until we just got down to like the you know, you either yes or no kind of thing. And so many people don't know until it happens to you, like the whole masters thing that people getting discovered. I don't want to be a bother. I don't want like you know, I'm just gonna go. Exactly. You know, whoever you're working with saw your talent, they saw whatever, and they were like, Oh yeah, this kid's got something. It's a business to these people, it always will be, and they don't give a fuck. And that is like that hustle culture where it's just like if you want to make money, you can't be empathetic, you can't be nice, you have to be cutthroat. I think we're getting away from that in some aspects, but I don't think that will ever happen in the entertainment industry. I don't think they'll ever get away from that entirely.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I think it was what she did, it's definitely made people pay more attention to their intellectual property, especially creative types like yourself, people in music, your intellectual property, even if you're new to it, you know, don't let people take advantage of you.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, and that's the thing, you don't know until you know. When I wrote Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, I thought I had researched everything there was to know about indie authors. And then, like a week after I published, I was like, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. There's so many new authors who don't know even the basic stuff, and there's no trad pub like that's gonna do it all for them. Like you, when you become an indie author, you become your own business owner. I'm lucky because now I'm at a point where I have, you know, you and Molly and people that I can kind of like spread out some of the responsibility.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, then there's so many people out there with services like Breathless Lit and other people. You could easily find somebody in author services that can guide you, put you to the right printer. Like they just know the stuff. They're like, Well, there's this printer out of here, and there's this printer, and they can just guide you cost money.

SPEAKER_00:

Which that's where like the whole paying for an editor versus just publishing your book without an editor, don't you? Readers hate mistakes in books, pay an editor, but like a lot of authors who don't have the money are like, oh, it's elitist to say that my book is bad because I don't have an editor. It's your call. You know what I mean? Yeah. If you want to put out a book that people may get thrown out of the story by multiple errors, then my brain automatically corrects. And that's a lot of people won't notice. It's like a lot of people using the software to translate books or using Google to translate their books. A lot of German readers, they're willing to overlook that because they just want the story, you know. But a lot of them aren't, you know. So it's just hit or miss. And it's just what you're willing to. Me, I'm a Virgo, I'm a perfectionist. I can't stand the idea of somebody looking at my books and finding a mistake. It happens all the time.

SPEAKER_01:

One time we had a cover mistake, we misspelled psycho. Remember that?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, we misspelled on the cover of books that we had to order in advance. It would suck. Special editions.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, special editions. Yeah, that was uh nightmare fuel. Yeah, after I had shipped out 250 boxes, and let me tell you, these were a set of eight.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. With merchants, definitely not one of our boxes.

SPEAKER_01:

Nightmares.

SPEAKER_00:

If I ever boxes were showing up, responsible for she's gonna quit.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh my gosh. It was and then Psycho was misspelled, and the email started rolling in.

SPEAKER_00:

I have a whole character swap in my story. Like in Moonstruck, somewhere along the way, I in one paragraph switched two characters, Nico and Levi. Like I switched their names, which happens all the time. Like it happens all the time. So it got flipped through the whole story.

SPEAKER_01:

Was that before you had ARC or before you were putting out your chapters on Patreon? Yes. It was way catch that shit. Kai, but my name is Kiki, and I'm one of the arc readers.

SPEAKER_00:

They're quick with us. If I had my if I had had my readers then, it definitely would have gotten caught. But it was just when my Patreon was starting to go from like 32 readers to like more than that. Because Unhinged did well, Psycho did better. Moonstruck is where it the trajectory sort of like yeah, like my income doubled, then it tripled, then it quadrupled, and after that, it was kind of like yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Our best sellers unhinged in the shop. Unhinged, unhinged, actually, alternate paperback. That's what I'm always thinking about. They love the snakes. Well, they I think people are moving away from models.

SPEAKER_00:

It's really the the naked chest covers are always going to be. Controversial. Some people love them, some people hate them. It's why we do alternate covers because then it gives them the option of like whether they want they sell better or whether they want something more ambiguous.

SPEAKER_01:

As your shop manager, I'll let you know the alternate covers they sell since they're fully always available. She had to close the window, it was raining so hard. Like I'm not sure if you don't think I have a white noise machine. So that the alternate covers. I don't know if people are moving away from models. I don't know. I don't know the data on that.

SPEAKER_00:

Nora Phoenix does a literal survey of all of her readers every year, and then she spits out the data to all of us about like, do they still want Manchest? Do they not want Manchester? I don't know if she's put out her her survey. I think she does it in like March. But like I said, I always just do the model cover, and then a few months later I'll do an alternate cover that people can get if you don't like them.

SPEAKER_01:

I don't know that's that makes sense. Like I'll buy it, I'll read it. I think that's mostly in straight romance that they're doing the cartoons.

SPEAKER_00:

No, there's a lot of cartoon covers. You see it a lot in hockey romance, like sports romance. They love the love hypothesis. Yeah, exactly. Anything that's rom-commie, yeah, you'll see a lot of the cartoon covers. Disciplinary action.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, but it's not, but it's it's just more like it's not a human man. Yeah, it's just that was probably before you had money. You can sign like 900 different together in a man. You have somebody stalking men in Brazil. It's true. I do.

SPEAKER_00:

Hey, I'm looking for a guy that could pass for like 21, 22 um tattoos, preferably, you know, short hair, dark hair, like, or I'll say, This guy needs to have like a really Abercrombie look, and then he'll like send me a whole list, like a whole thing full of like half-naked men, and he's like, Do any of these float your boat? And I have to I feel like such a creep because I'm like a dirty old man. I'm just like, no, illegal. Well, the guy who actually all of the cover models for Jericho's boys, with the exception of Paladin, have all come from this guy, and they've all been custom photo shoots. So that's why I get like as many f shots of these guys as I do, is because I've literally paid for the entire photo shoot. But it's definitely a weird part of my job to be like, hi, I'm a 50-year-old woman and I need young boys for my covers. Creepy. It feels creepy, even though they're all adult. Even beyond their photos. It's gross. It's gross because you, a 15-year-old child, are thinking about the fact that you might be able to see that like happen.

SPEAKER_01:

We're just not allowed to have hobbies besides like knitting and we're not allowed to be cool anymore.

SPEAKER_00:

I saw Okay. I saw a girl yesterday, she's 46, she had eight-year-old twins. Well, somebody was like, Why would you ever do that? And she's like, Oh, you know, 20 years of infertility followed by finally having the money to have babies. Sorry. This is my uterus, so I'll do whatever I want. But everybody's everybody's mean on social media. We know that. Yeah, they're brave. They're so brave. It's really easy to be brave behind a keyboard. No, I think we did good. I think we can always do a part two of Taylor Swift because I think there's so much that people can learn from like her marketing.

SPEAKER_01:

It's so relatable to literary spaces. Oh, because it's art.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, yeah, art is art. She's basically a writer as far as like she's a storyteller who just puts her stories to music. Yeah. I feel like Ren is the same way. A lot of yeah, a lot of people they make songs that are just poppy and catchy, and like, and that's great because I love that too. But yeah, we can do a part two.

SPEAKER_01:

If the Swifties are here, yeah, exactly. Comment, like, review if you're a Swifty. Oh, are the Olivia Rodrigo fans here? Let us know in the comments. We're very nice. You guys are super nice. They are nice, right? We like the songs. Olivia Rodrigo. You said forever, and now I drive a little pasture street.

SPEAKER_00:

My album was great. Like a lot of like little, like there were some great songs on there. I think you can I think we've proven that.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm not loyal. Do I love Taylor Swift? Yeah. I listened to Olivia Rodrigo.

SPEAKER_00:

You are on Taylor, don't get it twisted. I don't think people love you. This girl will go to the mat for Taylor Swift. If you like us, rate, review, subscribe. If you're an author and you want more information, like how you can use Taylor Swift's marketing ideas for yourself, hit us up on the Patreon, and we will catch you on in the next one. Bye. On the flip side. Catch you on the flip side. I'm relevant.

SPEAKER_01:

Bye. Bye. Do I leave?

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Onley James

Host
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Shannon Ezzell

Co-host