Shea Serrano, Jonathan Abrams, and selling books by being nice: While We’re Waiting…

Happy Wednesday, Blawg Pound. Today we’re going to talk about a man named Shea Serrano, his relentlessly positive presence on Twitter, and how he’s used it to both make selling books cool — his own The Rap Year Book and more recently, Jonathan Abrams’ Boys Among Men — and prove that it is possible to promote oneself online without being a complete tool.

For this to make any bit of sense, you first have to know who Shea Serrano is. He’s a guy from Texas who makes his living as a writer. I first got wind of him through his work on Grantland, but he has written for a bunch of other outlets like Complex, the Houston Press, LA Weekly, and, before all of those, something called The Near Northwest Banner that a lady in his neighborhood printed out of her garage.

You may have heard of him because he’s a big fancy New York Times Best Seller now. He wrote The Rap Year Book, an aggressively silly yet quietly serious look at the most important rap song from every year since 1979. It contains a bunch of illustrations and diagrams done by his friend Arturo Torres, and the finished product is a hip-hop head’s wet dream of a coffee table book.

The Rap Year Book’s ascent became a bigger story than does that of most rap books, and was written about by the likes of GQ and Wired. Shea isn’t some famous money-printing name like John Grisham, so he did a self-described “old-school, sell-your rap-album-out-of-the-trunk-of-your-car-type-thing” and TRYB wound up on the NYT Best Seller list. In short, he promoted the hell out of it on Twitter, got a bunch of other people to do the same, it became a little movement, and he sold a bunch of books. He gave away prizes, bantered with booksellers, and did it all without being the annoying dude online that everyone with a blog fears they’re coming across as.

He does it, basically, by being a super likable guy. He lets readers and followers and whoever might ride with him into his life, and he does it without seeming all look-at-me about it. If he starred in an Ernest Goes To movie, it would be Ernest Goes to Hang Out with Shea to Learn to Be More Earnest. 

Have you ever had a day where you wind up on some stupid person’s Instagram page — it could be someone you don’t even know or follow — and you get mad because of how much you hate what you’re looking at, but then you can’t look away, and then weeks later you laugh at how mad you got? I have, and the point is that Shea’s Twitter isn’t like that. He’ll post pictures of his kids (twins “Boy A” and “Boy B,” and baby “Boy C”) or dog (“Younger Jeezy”) or wife (“Wife”), but with no pretense. He doesn’t set anything up to make it look posed or fancy or whatever. He’s just providing an actual look at his life and throwing a clever filter on it. I suppose my thinking this is due to my perception of him more than anything, but I think others feel the same way.

It’s usually cute and funny,

very important meeting happening in my backyard right between four powerful businessmen pic.twitter.com/6WWh8HA99B

— Shea Serrano (@SheaSerrano) March 7, 2016

and sometimes it’s sweet and romantic,

wife got put in the hospital the day before our wedding so we were just like "fuck it let's get married in here" pic.twitter.com/yJ5dyxSPak

— Shea Serrano (@SheaSerrano) March 4, 2016

and sometimes it’s both.

i knew i married the right one when the boys asked her to be Princess from Mario but she was Sub-zero to my Scorpion pic.twitter.com/0I2TSS473m

— Shea Serrano (@SheaSerrano) March 4, 2016

Combined with all the jokes and observations and general wit, the end result is this guy who just seems really fun and really funny and really sincere, and that’s the sort of guy you want to root for. That’s the sort of guy you want to support. That’s the sort of guy you’re actually willing to fork over money to, and it’s even easier when you dig what he’s putting out.

That’s the sort of guy you want to root for. That’s the sort of guy you want to support. That’s the sort of guy you’re actually willing to fork over money to

He’s also vulnerable, which makes him incredibly sympathetic. This is especially true if you’ve ever written something for public consumption. In short, it’s alternately terrifying and the coolest goddamn thing that ever was. You write something, and you click a button, and now the whole world can see it and tell you if it was good or bad. They can tell you if it was funny or lame. They can tell you if it was smart or dumb. When it’s any of those latter things, it’s the worst feeling in the world. I have a severe, visceral reaction when I see someone criticize something I’ve written, especially when it’s mean-spirited. Like, someone has to really hate what you did to take time out of their day to tell you about it. It sucks. I’ve gotten a little better about it — chalk some of it up to the vague evil of the great anonymous internet and don’t take it so personally, you idiot — but it still hits me hard.

At the same time, someone going out of their way to tell you they liked something you read, even if it’s just “good job” or fav-ing a tweet or whatever, is the best feeling. The whole reason anyone writes is because they think other people might like it, and the reward of other people actually liking it provides a rush akin to hopping out of an airplane. Never forget that writers have terrible, fragile egos.

Point is, Shea puts this stuff out there, and often. Maybe he’s different online than he is to people in real life, but I don’t suspect that’s the case. His digital self and actual self seem strikingly similar, which isn’t always the case. Isn’t it terribly awkward when you have a friend and you hate their online presence? I can’t be the only one who’s felt that, right? Shea isn’t like that, I don’t think. He is who he is who he is, and that comes through.

His writing is often stream of consciousness type stuff (I’ve been trying to rip it off for several paragraphs now), which is to say that he writes how he talks, and I imagine he talks how he thinks. As readers, we’re tapped right in there. He doesn’t throw out a whole lot of five-syllable adjectives or play with sentence structure like Brubeck did time signatures, but he doesn’t have to. You ain’t gotta write fancy. You only gotta say what you’re trying to say.

Wired’s Charley Locke said it better than me:

Serrano’s heartfelt approach to Twitter endears him to followers—and, unlike the duty-bound social media efforts of many, it allows him to experience organic delight alongside the reassuring community of his fans. “I’m 34 years old, and I still feel like I’m pretending to be an adult, pretending to be an author,” he says. “That feeling never goes away, so let’s all not pretend we don’t feel it.” Instead of affecting a falsely confident persona to sell his books, Serrano shows vulnerability and genuine surprise, and it’s easy for readers to revel in his accomplishments alongside him. Social media for authors doesn’t have to be an additional duty of self-promotion. It can be a way to help people form a community based on investing in the success of a shared friend—a friend made through Twitter, Yo! MTV Raps cards, and the pages of a book.

What I’m getting at is that Shea Serrano is an easy guy to like, and that’s a huge start. Somebody could be a great, interesting writer, but it’s harder, if only a tiny bit, to support them if they seem like a dick and/or an annoying overpromoter. This is all wildly subjective and can be totally arbitrary. I really really dislike, for instance, recommendations that contain the phrase “You should read it.” It does the opposite of make me want to read it on a completely immature level. Don’t tell me what to do, man. How the hell you know what I should do? Only my mama gets to tell me what I should do. Dumb, I know, I think there’s something to the idea nonetheless.

So when Shea got to promoting The Rap Year Book way back when, I was in on it. It was an inspiring little movement, a bunch of strangers online saying nice stuff and having fun together like some kind of impossible message board utopia. Sometimes a person will say that they want to buy the book but they’re short on cash, and someone else will buy them a book just because. It’s a happy little community.

Now, Shea is taking that whole community and using it to promote Jonathan Abrams’ upcoming book on LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and all the players who jumped from high school to the NBA, Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution. Abrams also wrote for Grantland — his NBA profiles are to sportswriting what ribs are to food — so he and Shea were familiar with each other. They apparently met in real life on two occasions, and that was all it took.

i'm emotionally invested in the success of @jpdabrams book cuz i met him twice & fell in love with him he's the best https://t.co/Dma9ecy7qV

— Shea Serrano (@SheaSerrano) March 8, 2016

Now this whole Serrano Army is mobilized in the name of getting Abrams on the NYT Best Seller list. Shea is doing the same sorts of things with Abrams’ Boys Among Men that he he did with his Rap Year Book, holding impromptu giveaways and promotions. The only requisite for entry is that you have to prove that you bought the book, which usually means sending a screenshot of your Amazon receipt. Abrams is doing the same thing himself, other writers and NBA Twitter types are joining in, and the whole movement is evolving anew.

Maybe it’s because I’m a fan of Mssrs. Serrano and Abrams, but I think it’s all just the best. It’s people helping people. It’s encouraging people to read. It’s encouraging people to support authors. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s all genuine. It isn’t sponsored tweets and #ad hashtags. It isn’t a social media manager running ideas by management and having them returned with their wings clipped off. It’s just two dudes who wrote books hanging out online and a bunch of other people joining the party. It’s nice, is what it is.

Now, there’s a chance that this whole thing is a work and that Shea is some kind of sociopath who has mastered sympathetic behavior and is playing us all for fools. I admit that that’s on the table. But I really don’t think it’s the case. If it is, please don’t tell me. It’s too much fun.