Taylor Swift is Not Going to Kick Off a Self-Publish Storm

Or, how to navigate moving from the "attention economy" to the "intention economy"

Taylor Swift, if you haven’t heard, is a superstar. She’s a supernova. She’s a fucking black hole, swallowing up entire galaxies and star systems that drift into her orbit. She isn’t just the center of all attention; she is the definition of attention. 

It’s no surprise that Swift’s new book about her world breaking Eras tour is also breaking publishing records. Swift has sold more than 816,000 copies of The Eras Tour Book within the first two days of release, according to leading industry watchdog Circana BookScan, as reported by Variety. This is just slightly less than former President Barack Obama’s best selling book A Promise Land, which sold 818,000 books in the same period.

Not bad for Ms. Swift, even if it was expected. This is the person who had the first album to surpass one billion streams on Spotify, became the highest earning female musician in history back in 2023, orchestrated the first concert tour to gross more than $1 billion, became the only artist to win Best Album at the Grammy’s four times, and boasts the most number one albums by a woman in history. As music critic Rob Sheff wrote, “The Beatles are the closest thing to a Taylor Swift that we have in history. She’s so completely transformed pop music.”

Neat! Swift’s book sales numbers are also slightly more impressive than Barry’s for two specific reasons: Swift’s book was only available at Target and she published it herself. Obama, similar to other notable figures, went through a large publisher (Random House), which helped with marketing, retailer partnerships, and publicity around the book. Swift didn’t use any of those resources for the same reason Swift didn’t use any of those similar resources when releasing her Eras Tour movie through AMC. She didn’t need them. See, Swift has a special connection to her audience that most other celebrities don’t. Swift’s audience is intention-based, not passively interested. When she does something, they are absolutely paying. She doesn’t need to ask. They just do. 

Naturally, Swift’s book and its inevitable success has sparked conversations about self-publishing and if this is the future for talent with sizable audiences. Can more musicians, athletes, politicians, pundits, and others with a relationship to the greater public bypass the machinations that have existed for centuries? Do you need a marketing and communications team if you’re able to hold a relationship with your fans? Do you need a publisher if you can bypass the relationship and work directly with a retailer like Target, upload through Amazon, or just direct people to your own site where you hire a third-party distributor to handle orders? 

Some people have pointed out that no one has Taylor Swift’s audience size, nor do they have her fans’ seemingly unconditional love. I agree — but more importantly, most people don’t have Swift’s guarantee of intent. In a creator economy, attention is only as important as the guarantee of intent or the guarantee of conversion. And that’s a metric that is far harder to measure. But not impossible. 

Measuring Intent 

The last few years of my career have been spent focusing on trying to read data for signs of intent. How likely is someone to do X based on inputs seen from Y. The most challenging part of the equation is trying to determine how to qualify value. Using Swift’s book, we can try to determine if this is low value (someone may read it if free and gifted), medium value (someone may go out of their way to add it to an Amazon wishlist or put a hold on it at the library), or if this is high value (someone will pay $20 upon release). Fans fall into different parts of these buckets all the time. Think of sports. Some may choose to spend $200 on going to see their favorite team play while others are happy to catch it at a bar if it’s on or check the score on their phones. 

Removing the socio economic aspect of fandom, which is critical and deserves its own essay, managing for intent gets looped into assumed costs. Typically, this is reflected in the advance that authors get with a book deal. If a publisher thinks that a significant number of people will purchase a book, then the advance is higher because the publisher assumes they’ll make more on the backend once the book is released. If the publisher thinks it’s a smaller audience or is less clear on the customer intent, the advance is smaller to limit any potential losses. If you’re self-publishing beyond a digital release, there is no advance. There’s just an assumption that your revenue will outgrow your costs. Bada bing, bada boom — capitalism.

The way we go about measuring intent is looking at historical data or historical trends. Someone like Swift makes it remarkably easy based on her aforementioned successes. She’s consistently proven she can get people to extend their fandom by paying for experiences. I often refer to this as the social capital longtail. People go to movie theaters and take photos of the screen despite hi-res images being available on Google. People go to concerts and record the entire thing or stage glamorous photo shoots with their friends.

In the 2024 value equation, the event or the experience is made more valuable by the ability to use those experiences for social capital or social reward after the fact. No one cares that you saw Barbie, but posting about it and dressing up helps to create connections with people on Instagram or TikTok while deepening relationships with friends in your own life. It’s a win-win. Since Swift is an attention magnet, and since Swift creates connections through a heavily populated fandom, her reach and ability to convert attention into dollars creates a world where she can publish her own book and not worry about it. 

There are other unseen data points that we can start to pull on. Consider BookTok. Publisher reports suggest that BookTok is made up mostly of women between the ages of 18 and 32. Nearly 60% of those between 16 and 25 said BookTok helped them discover a love of reading. Nearly 55% of the demographic said they turn to TikTok and Instagram for book recommendations. Astonishingly, more than 90% of BookTok readers are invested in young adult and romance novels. Those who participate in BookTok culture are also 3x as likely to buy a book.

I’ve harped on this for a while, but part of BookTok’s whole thing is the physicality of it all. Your video is boring without a book to flip through, to hold up, to demonstrate just how much you love books. A kindle won’t just do…for the most part. If we summarize all of this data, we get a young female audience super interested in romance and young adult culture who show a willingness to convert their attention into physical products. I’d argue there’s a pretty strong overlap with Swift’s fanbase, even if a portion of BookTok fans are not Swift fans or vice versa. You get a consumer group willing to spend money to partake in a community, and who understand the importance of a physical object or physical experience to demonstrate a level of fandom. 

Precedent and demographics fill in one part of the equation. Projecting future demand for the person or topic in question fills in the other part. Are people likely to be interested in Taylor Swift a few years from now? Are they likely to be interested in the Eras tour? Certain people are topical, and that means attention is frontloaded, as is the likelihood of converting attention to dollars. Others are nonurgent, suggesting there will always be an audience willing to pay, but that audience is inherently smaller. The first defines Swift’s Eras tour even if it doesn’t define Swift. The latter defines, like, World War I. Understanding this intent wave also explains why we’re seeing Swift and her team smartly push out everything now. Monetizing the level of attention and commitment that may become more fleeting in years ahead capitalizes on impulse buying. 

I want to make this explicitly clear: commanding this level of intent-based conversion is extremely rare. Swift knows this, and she knows that because she holds that relationship with her fans, she can go out and do it on her own, in a timely manner, and not have to worry about the intermediaries that others rely on to help find success. 

Understanding how intent is measured will also help make clear why it’s nearly impossible for 99% of other creators to pull off the same strategy. Or at least, creators we assume could pull off the same wrap around attempt. It starts by examining the infamous 99% chart. 

Everything is Power Laws, Until it Isn’t 

If you’re reading about conversion probabilities through better understandings of intent-driven behavior, you’ve very likely seen the below chart. Power laws dictate so much about where we give attention, and why that happens. But what really draws me to power laws is how much they reflect the problem with trying to convert attention into intention. You can use power laws to explain any number of problems in a supply heavy industry, but I’m going to use a Ben Thompson graph showcasing Netflix viewership for a series or film compared to the number of titles available on the platform. Less than 5% of all titles generated more than one million views. Less than 1% of titles generated more than 250 million views. Drop-offs are steep in power law dynamics. 

Music, books, and the creator economy all follow similar charts. You can see a collection of those examples in the examples below, compiled by Michael Tauberg. 

If you’re like me, looking at these charts spurs one very specific question: if the attention ratio is low when looking at the entire sea of available products, then how likely are you able to convert the attention you are garnering into an intentional purchase? Swift’s examples above aren’t just to show how popular she is — no one needs to prove that. It’s to show how capable she is in turning that attention into intention. Here are some examples where that didn’t work out anywhere close as well: 

• The Black Keys have more than nine million monthly listeners on Spotify. They have sold more than 20 million albums. They also recently canceled a stadium tour due to lack of sales. 

• Jennifer Lopez has more than 24.2 million monthly listeners on Spotify. She has sold more than 100 million albums. She was the second most searched person in the world in 2023. She also canceled her tour due to poor ticket sales. 

• Kevin Costner helped to revitalize the Western genre with his performance on Tyler Sheridan’s Yellowstone series, which is Paramount Global’s number one running series for the last five years but failed to move that audience to theaters with his Horizon film. It made less than $30M at the domestic box office.

• Grace Africa, a popular TikTok creator with millions of followers, hosted a meet and greet at VidCon in 2023, but those millions of followers didn’t convert into even 100 fans showing up despite the convention drawing roughly 55,000 attendees. 

We now have to go about diagnosing the chasm between attention and intention. Even if we argue that Taylor Swift is several times larger than artists like The Black Keys or Jennifer Lopez, it’s the same phenomenon — Swift has proved again and again that she can convert attention into intention, while others have assumed they can only to be proven wrong. This goes back to how we value consumers. The Black Keys and Lopez have fans who will absolutely pay $200 for stadium tickets, but the vast majority of their fans are in the middle value section. If the concert was cheaper, they may go (again, the socio economic part of this is hugely important) — but they may as well very likely be happy streaming music and reading about their lives without having to pay a cent. They can’t guarantee the level of intention needed to support the type of tours Swift commands because they can’t produce the same ratio of high level consumers. 

The cost of events have increased, right? This leads to a decrease in the number of outings people are willing to pay to attend. But the supply of “content” has also steadily increased, so you get a worse ratio of attention to intention. Look at theaters. I love this point from Matthew Ball: “Altogether, 2024 is currently trending for roughly 1.8 tickets sold per American, fewer than in 2022. Even if 2025 rebounds to 2.5 or so (which would beat 2022 by 8%), it looks like the pandemic will have accelerated the decline in per capita theatrical admissions by roughly 15 years.” Audiences are choosing to see less movies in theaters (and yes, the supply is also down which undeniably contributes some percentage to theatrical attendance declining), so those they are choosing to see — the attention to intention pipeline — come with a higher level of value attached. It’s gotta be worth something more than being able to watch a movie on streaming at home. 

At this point you may be thinking, “well, how the fuck do you know if someone’s audience is likely to go out and buy shit?” It’s an age-old question. And I’ll be real with you – I’m not entirely sure. But I think the answer isn’t found in the Swift’s of the world, where we mistake celebrity and passive attention with active intention to do more. We have to look at creators who have managed to take far less attention — putting them into the mid-range power law chart — but convert that attention into an even more foundational base as a business operator. 

I want to talk about Colleen Hoover. 

A Superstar to Some, A Possible Reality for More 

Colleen Hoover today is one of the most well known authors on the planet…to middle-something women, teenage girls, and Hollywood executives trying to appeal to those exact audiences. 

Hoover’s journey as an author isn’t extraordinary even if the results are undeniably extraordinary in their own right. She started writing in her spare time and self-published through Amazon’s Kindle ecosystem in part because she wanted her mother to be able to read her books. Her first book, Slammed, found a small audience amongst influential book critics in the emerging BookTube sphere, leading to more Kindle owners seeking out Hoover’s stories. As her profile grew, and the number of downloads for her books skyrocketed, Hoover started attracting the attention of traditional publishers — and she decided to partner with Penguin Random House, the largest publisher in the world. 

Hoover’s audience is much smaller than Kevin Costner’s, The Black Keys’, and Jennifer Lopez’s. But she’s still managed to convert the attention she has into the intention to purchase something at a higher rate. Is it fair to compare these two worlds? One is a book that costs $2. Another is a concert that might cost $150 at minimum. One can be enjoyed in seconds from the comfort of someone’s couch. The other requires going out and committing to an evening. One is relatively low-effort and the other is not. I wrote about this a while back when talking about getting people into movie theaters and re-establishing the value equation for moviegoers in this moment of an abundance of supply.

If we break it down even further, incentivization is belonging, and belonging in 2024 is a combination of short lived physical events that create a long tail social currency. Barbenheimer was turned into a mini, short lived event that encouraged going to see the movie in order to partake in the phenomena through the subsequent act of posting photos and videos. The viewing experience is secondary to the experience of participating in a larger online trend. If a 23-year-old woman (a demographic that made up more than 60% of Barbie’s opening weekend audience) spends energy on creating the perfect outfit, buys tickets, and spends hours at a theater with the endgame being the online participation that occurs after, the perceived value of that original cost, energy, and attention required rises. 

Since the barrier to entry for Hoover was low, the snowballing effect was strong. More people sought out Hoover’s work, they became fans of her second and third novels, and by the time that TikTok came around (BookTok), Hoover was transformed into a celebrity built on the base of loyal fans and a wave of new readers who could continue her skyrocketing success. Ken Kelley wrote in a prolific 2008 essay that you only need 1,000 true fans to find success as a full-time creator. His argument, which quickly suggests that 1,000 is an arbitrary number that depends on someone's cost line, was that if you could convince someone to give you the equivalent to a couple of days' personal earnings, you could convince them to buy almost anything you put out. Kelly writes:

A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.

Perhaps the most impressive part of Hoover’s career is that as she grows her base, the conversion of attention to intent doesn’t seem to diminish. As the New York Times wrote in a profile of Hoover in 2022, “Her success has happened largely on her terms, led by readers who act as her evangelists, driving sales through ecstatic online reviews and viral reaction videos.” Hoover has buy-in from readers like a cult — and the passive requirement needed for intent to read a book on a Kindle transformed into people choosing to take the next active step in the attention to intention pipeline: going to the movies. 

It Ends With Us is Hoover’s eighth and most successful book, selling more than 10 million copies worldwide since its release in 2016. The book was adapted into a movie starring Blake Lively, and quickly became the highest grossing romance film since 2018. Women flocked to the theater because of Hoover’s book — something that we typically associate with genre IP, such as Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. That kind of attention to intention ratio is extremely rare and, while Hoover is a superstar in her own right, she doesn’t have the audience size of Taylor Swift. Size is critically important, but it’s all about intent. This is why it can be difficult to get fans of certain sports to watch docu-series about athletes. It’s a different ballgame. 

I have some qualms with Kelley’s “1,000 Fans” rule, but I do think he does a great job of getting at the underlining thesis. When attention fragments, and the value of attention alone diminishes but the value of building intentions grows. And this is extremely difficult to do because the larger circle of attention someone has, the more intuitively they feel about their ability to convert that attention into intention. What we can see, however, is those preconceived notions are being challenged more often. We’re seeing the fallout of fragmented attention battling tunnel vision intentions. 

It’s funny – we were told that whoever commanded the most attention would win. I think that’s still fundamentally true, but we need to redefine the levels of value we give to attention and start thinking about the cost of that attention, and what we want to achieve with that intention, a little differently.