Why Content Marketing Is Your Secret Weapon (And Not Actually That Scary)
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Writing Things That Aren’t My Book
Let’s get the uncomfortable truth out of the way first: writing your book is only half the job. I know, I know. You didn’t sign up for this. You wanted to write beautiful prose about star-crossed lovers or teach people how to organize their closets or explain the intricacies of medieval warfare. You did NOT sign up to become a one-person marketing department.
But here’s the thing about content marketing—it’s basically just writing stuff. And last time I checked, you’re pretty good at that.
What Even Is Content Marketing, And Why Should I Care?
Content marketing is the fancy term for “creating valuable stuff that makes people like you enough to eventually buy your book.” It’s blog posts, newsletters, social media updates, podcast appearances, articles—basically anything that showcases your expertise and personality without directly screaming “BUY MY BOOK” every five seconds.
Think of it this way: content marketing is the literary equivalent of being interesting at a party. Nobody likes the person who corners you by the cheese plate and immediately launches into their sales pitch. But the person who tells fascinating stories about their research into Victorian poisoning methods? Or who has genuinely helpful advice about productivity? That person, you actually want to talk to. You might even want to know if they’ve written a book about this stuff.
The Beautiful Irony: Writers Are Uniquely Good at This
Here’s where it gets funny. Authors often resist content marketing because they think it’s some mysterious skill they don’t possess. Meanwhile, they’ve just spent months or years crafting a 90,000-word manuscript.
You know what’s harder than writing a blog post? Writing an entire novel. You know what’s more intimidating than posting on social media? Sending your manuscript to agents who might reject it. You’ve already conquered the hard stuff. Content marketing is like taking the stairs after climbing Mount Everest.
Why This Actually Works (The Science-y Bit, But Make It Fun)
Content marketing works because of a psychological principle called “reciprocity.” When you give people something valuable for free, they feel naturally inclined to give you something back. In your case, that something is buying your book.
But it’s deeper than that. Every piece of content you create is:
A trust deposit. Each helpful blog post, entertaining newsletter, or insightful social media thread builds your credibility account. By the time you ask people to buy your book, you’re not some random author—you’re that person who’s been helping them for months.
A discovery tool. Your content is working for you 24/7, like the world’s most dedicated unpaid intern. Someone Googles “how to start a meditation practice,” finds your article from six months ago, loves it, clicks through to your website, and discovers you wrote an entire book on mindfulness. You were probably asleep when this happened. That’s the magic.
A personality showcase. Your book has your voice, sure. But content marketing lets people get to know you across multiple touchpoints. Some people will connect with your Instagram stories, others with your newsletter essays, and some will discover you through that guest article you wrote. Multiple chances to fall in love with your work.
But I Don’t Have Time for This!
Let me stop you right there. Content marketing isn’t about posting 47 times a day or maintaining six different blogs. It’s about being strategic with the writing you’re already doing.
Writing a book about productivity? Share your research findings as LinkedIn articles. Historical fiction author? Post fascinating historical facts you discovered while researching. Self-help writer? Your morning journaling could become next week’s newsletter.
The secret is repurposing. That one blog post you write? It can become:
Three social media posts
A newsletter feature
A guest article for another site
A podcast talking point
A YouTube video script
You’re not creating seventeen different things. You’re creating one thing seventeen different ways. Writers do this all the time—it’s called adaptation, and you’re already good at it.
The Compounding Effect (Or: Why You Should Start Yesterday)
Here’s where content marketing gets really exciting. Unlike ads that stop working the second you stop paying for them, content marketing compounds over time.
That article you write today? It could be attracting readers in three years. I know authors who still get book sales from blog posts they wrote in 2015. It’s like planting an orchard—yeah, it takes time to grow, but eventually you’re eating fresh apples while barely doing any work.
Every piece of content is a permanent ambassador for your book, working tirelessly while you’re writing your next manuscript, walking your dog, or binge-watching that show everyone’s talking about.
What Should You Actually Create?
The beautiful answer is: whatever you actually enjoy making. Because here’s another secret—if you hate doing it, you’ll quit. And consistency beats perfection every single time.
Love writing? Start a blog or newsletter. Prefer talking? Try podcasting or YouTube. Visual thinker? Instagram or TikTok might be your jam. Enjoy teaching? Create how-to content or workshops.
The best content marketing strategy is the one you’ll actually stick with. A mediocre blog you update weekly beats a perfect blog you abandon after two posts.
The Permission Slip You Didn’t Know You Needed
You don’t have to be everywhere. You don’t need to master every platform. You don’t have to post every day or become an influencer or learn TikTok dances (unless you want to, which would be amazing).
You just need to show up consistently in one or two places, be genuinely helpful or entertaining, and let people get to know you. That’s it. That’s the whole strategy.
Content marketing for authors isn’t about becoming a marketing expert. It’s about being yourself, sharing what you know, and letting the right readers find you. You’re already a writer. You’ve already done the hard part.
Now you just need to write some more stuff. And unlike your book, this stuff can be 500 words, published immediately, and doesn’t need three rounds of edits.
The Bottom Line
Content marketing isn’t a distraction from your writing—it’s an extension of it. It’s how you build the audience that will be waiting eagerly for your next book. It’s how you prove you’re not just someone who wrote one book, but a writer with ideas worth following.
And here’s the best part: you’re already qualified. You have knowledge, perspective, and stories that other people want. You just need to share them.
So go write that blog post about your research process. Record that podcast about your book’s themes. Post that thread about the writing lesson you learned last week. Your future readers are out there, searching for exactly what you have to offer.
They just need you to help them find you.
And unlike writing a novel, you can start right now, finish in an hour, and hit publish before dinner. If that’s not a writer’s dream, I don’t know what is.
An Essay Break (dedicated to Darryl Houston Smith)
The Door to Wonder: Why We Mourn Solved Mysteries
by Liz Dubelman
For decades, the question hung in the air like smoke at a particularly dramatic séance: Did Anastasia survive? Amateur historians pored over photographs with the intensity of people comparing their Tinder matches to their dates. Courts heard testimony that stretched across continents and generations. Anna Anderson’s claim to be the lost Grand Duchess became the longest-running case in German legal history, which is really saying something for a country that takes its bureaucracy seriously enough to have separate words for “the joy of schadenfreude on a Tuesday” and “the joy of schadenfreude on a Wednesday.”
People chose sides. They built cases from fragments—a scar here, a memory there, the way someone held a teacup (because apparently royal teacup-holding is genetically encoded). Some spent more time investigating Anastasia’s potential survival than they did on their own family genealogies, which honestly seems like misplaced priorities until you remember how boring most family trees are.
Then, in 1994, DNA testing crashed the party like a designated driver at 2 AM. Anna Anderson was not Anastasia Romanov. She was Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker—which, if we’re being honest, is a much more statistically likely identity for a random woman in 1920s Berlin than “secretly surviving Russian Grand Duchess.” In 2007, the discovery of two more bodies near Yekaterinburg settled it completely: all the Romanovs died in that basement in 1918. No one escaped. No one slipped through. The end.
The truth should have felt like relief. Instead, it felt like finding out Santa Claus is your dad, but your dad is also not real, and Christmas is canceled, and actually, joy itself was a lie.
What the Mystery Gave Us
The Anastasia mystery wasn’t just a question to be answered—it was a space to inhabit, like a really elaborate escape room that lasted seventy years and had terrible customer reviews from people who never solved it. People could live inside that uncertainty, could spend Sunday afternoons following leads that went nowhere, could write letters to researchers and track down witnesses who claimed to have seen something at a railway station in 1918. It was like being part of the world’s most highbrow true crime podcast, except it predated podcasts by about eighty years and nobody could monetize it with mattress ads.
The mystery had texture and depth. It had room for human investment, conspiracy theories, and the kind of obsessive dedication usually reserved for fantasy football leagues or sourdough starters.
When Anna Anderson appeared in Berlin in 1920, pulled from a canal after a suicide attempt, she offered the world something precious: the possibility that history wasn’t finished, that the story didn’t have to end in that basement. She gave us a mystery with stakes, one where dedication and cleverness might actually uncover something miraculous. It was the original Cold Case, except everyone was arguing about whether there was even a case to begin with.
Court cases spanned decades because both sides genuinely believed they might be right. Evidence conflicted because the past is always incomplete, always open to interpretation—and also because forensic science in the 1920s was essentially “Does this look like her? Maybe? I don’t know, it’s been a while.”
Until DNA testing arrived, wearing a lab coat and carrying a metaphorical spray bottle labeled “NO.”
DNA testing doesn’t argue. It doesn’t leave room for “but what if.” It doesn’t care about your carefully constructed theory involving a sympathetic guard and a convenient body double. In 1994, science closed a door that had been open for three-quarters of a century with the decisiveness of a bouncer at an exclusive club, and something changed. Not just our understanding of history, but our relationship to it. The Anastasia question had been a kind of communal imagination, a shared dream that maybe the world could surprise us. When that possibility vanished, what disappeared wasn’t just a theory about survival—it was the wonder itself.
And frankly, wonder is in short supply these days. We can’t afford to lose it to something as pedestrian as “facts.”
The Stories We Need to Believe
Why do certain impossible stories lodge themselves so deeply in our collective consciousness? Lost heirs, hidden survivors, miraculous escapes—these narratives appear across cultures and centuries, defying logic and evidence with the kind of stubborn persistence usually associated with people who insist they’re “not lost, just taking a scenic route.”
Because they tell us something we desperately want to hear: that fate is not final. That the universe occasionally glitches in our favor. That somewhere, somehow, the underdog wins and the innocent escape and the story doesn’t end with everyone dead in a basement because bureaucratic efficiency and political paranoia make for terrible bedtime stories.
The Anastasia legend, like the stories of Amelia Earhart living quietly on a Pacific island or Jim Morrison faking his death in Paris (which, let’s be honest, would be very on-brand for Jim Morrison), suggests that the world is less fixed than it appears. That even when history seems to have written its conclusion in blood and bureaucracy—and let’s be clear, the Bolsheviks were very thorough with their paperwork—there might be a crack in the wall, a secret passage, a sympathetic guard who notices you’re still breathing.
These stories let us believe that individuals can slip through the gears of enormous machinery. That a seventeen-year-old girl could somehow survive the systematic murder of her entire family, flee across Russia during a civil war, and end up in Berlin with amnesia and a convenient inability to speak Russian fluently (Anderson’s Russian was apparently terrible, which should have been a clue, but people really wanted to believe).
We know, rationally, that these stories are almost certainly false. The evidence against Anastasia’s survival was compelling even before DNA testing. The logistics were implausible—” I faked my death among my murdered family members, escaped Russia during a civil war, and ended up in Germany” is not a strong origin story, narratively speaking. The claimants’ stories contradicted each other and themselves, often within the same conversation.
But we wanted to believe anyway, because believing felt like resistance to despair. And also because the alternative—that sometimes terrible things happen and that’s just it, that’s the end, no twist, no surprise survivor, no Hollywood ending—is frankly unacceptable to the human psyche, which evolved to find patterns in clouds and meaning in coincidences, not to accept that randomness and brutality sometimes win.
When Wonder Becomes Fact-Checked
There’s a particular kind of disappointment that comes when science solves a mystery we weren’t ready to let go of. It’s the emotional equivalent of someone explaining how a magic trick works when you specifically asked them not to. It’s not that we wanted to be lied to, or that we valued fiction over truth. It’s that the possibility itself was meaningful. The question mark was doing important work, and now it’s been replaced by a period, and periods are so final, so grammatically decisive, so boring.
In our modern age, we can fact-check anything instantly. DNA reveals identities. Satellite imagery confirms or denies claims. Digital records leave no room for ambiguity. Someone on the internet will absolutely tell you that you’re wrong about that thing you half-remember from childhood, and they will have sources. This is progress—we know more, we understand better, we waste less time chasing phantoms.
But something is lost when every door closes, when every mystery resolves into simple binary: true or false, real or fake, survived or died, Franziska or Anastasia.
The Anastasia mystery gave people permission to wonder, to imagine, to believe that extraordinary things might happen beyond the reach of official accounts. It let people be amateur detectives without having to actually solve crimes or deal with real crime scenes (which are, I’m told, much less glamorous than TV suggests and smell significantly worse). When that permission was revoked by scientific certainty, we gained truth but lost possibility. We traded the infinite interpretations of an open question for the single, immutable answer of DNA evidence.
Which is a bit like trading a Choose Your Own Adventure book for a regular book where the protagonist dies on page 47 and that’s it, the end, stop turning pages.
And yes, perhaps we’re better off knowing. Perhaps it’s more respectful to the actual Anastasia, who actually died at seventeen in genuinely horrific circumstances, to stop projecting survival fantasies onto her corpse. Perhaps the real tragedy is that we needed her to have escaped in order to make the story bearable, that we couldn’t sit with the reality of what happened without inventing a maybe.
But I think of all those amateur sleuths, now aging or gone, who spent Sunday afternoons comparing photographs and measuring skulls and tracking down obscure witnesses—basically doing the work of several PhD dissertations for free, out of sheer obsessive interest. I think of the believers who defended Anna Anderson through decades of courts and challenges, who remained convinced even when her Russian was bad, and her story had more holes than Swiss cheese at a shooting range.
They weren’t stupid. They weren’t gullible. Well, some of them probably were—there’s always a few—but most weren’t.
They were doing what humans have always done: choosing to live in the wonder rather than the certainty, because wonder leaves room for hope, and hope is how we endure unbearable things. Also because it’s more interesting than accepting that the universe is random and cruel and sometimes everyone dies and there’s no deeper meaning, which is true but deeply unsatisfying as a worldview.
The Tyranny of Knowing
The truth is important. But so is the door to wonder. And when DNA testing closed that door in 1994, when the last two bodies were identified in 2007, something disappeared from the world that we can’t quite name but definitely miss. It’s the same thing that disappeared when we learned how magicians do their tricks, when we found out professional wrestling is choreographed, when someone told us the “based on a true story” movie we just watched was based on a true story in the sense that it happened on Earth.
Maybe that’s why I remember feeling disappointed when it all turned out to be false. Not because I wanted to be deceived, but because I wanted to live in a world where sometimes, against all odds, the impossible happens. Where a seventeen-year-old girl could slip through the net of history and build a quiet life somewhere far from basements and bullets. Where the universe occasionally looks at its own cruel logic and says, “You know what? Not today.”
We don’t live in that world. We live in this one, where everyone dies, and mysteries get solved, and DNA doesn’t lie, and Franziska Schanzkowska spent her life pretending to be someone else for reasons we’ll probably never fully understand (though “attention and possibly money” seems like a solid guess).
But for seventy years, we got to wonder. We got to argue and investigate and imagine and hope. We got to participate in a collective mystery that spanned generations and continents, that brought together everyone from Russian émigrés to German courts to American scientists, all united by the question: what if?
And that was worth something. Even if the answer turned out to be “no.”
Especially because the answer turned out to be “no,” actually. Because if Anastasia really had survived, it would have just been history. But because she didn’t, because it was all a beautiful, elaborate, seventy-year-long mistake, it became something else: a monument to our desperate human need to believe that sometimes the story doesn’t end the way it’s supposed to.
Science gave us the truth. But the mystery gave us hope.
I know which one I miss.