Welcome to My Omnichannel Romance Novel Discourse Media Platform

This used to be a romance novel podcast...

Shelf Love began as a podcast about romance novels over five years ago. But now… now, it’s an omnichannel romance novel discourse media platform.

You see, I started to write a post about the nature of podcasting. I had been wondering how long I could go without releasing a podcast to claim to be a podcaster.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized: it doesn’t matter anymore, especially for the audience reading this on Substack. More than half of you who subscribe to Shelf Love on Substack have never even listened to an episode of the podcast.¹ At this point, the majority of people in the world who have consumed “Shelf Love” content have done so through non-podcast content.

This made me think about something I started talking about in Who Owns Romance Reader Data? (answer: technology companies), and how traditionally-published romance authors are being encouraged (nay, forced) by their publishers to master creating TikTok videos as a way to grow their visibility with readers on #booktok.

You’d think that publishers would want writers to dedicate their time to writing the books — you know, the thing that can be sold and make them money. What purpose does it serve to ask authors to develop an entirely different skillset (creating videos) and encourage them to engage in the time-consuming audience-building activities that are better suited to a publisher’s marketing team? Does building an audience who likes your TikTok content even translate to selling more books? (Anecdotally, it seems like no.)

Source

It made me think that romance publishers had lost the plot (they have, in my opinion), but also — wasn’t I guilty of the same confusion when it came to how I spent my time cultivating an audience of critical romance readers as Shelf Love?

If I was a podcaster, why was I fooling around with Canva graphic templates, repackaging excerpts from episodes for Instagram Reels, writing text threads about romance for the platform formerly-known-as Twitter or Bluesky, and eventually writing long-form essays about romance with original research on Substack?

Buckle in babes — we’re diving into the death of traditional mass media, the rise of the omnichannel attention economy, the ecstasy of media, and the exhausted subject.

This post will use romance examples, but this phenomenon is not limited to the romance media landscape.

The Omnichannel Attention Economy

First: I should define “omnichannel.”

You can probably guess — “omni” means “all” or “in all ways or places.” It’s a term that’s increasingly used in business and marketing to talk about the shift from “traditional” business models where distribution did most of the work (you walk into a grocery store and you find food on shelves that you can buy), to multichannel (where information is communicated on a variety of channels, but in a disconnected way such as different channels for different consumers), to omnichannel.

What differentiates omnichannel communication strategies is the idea that the a consumer is at the center and benefits from consistent messaging across devices, platforms, and media. The theory is that consumers desire this integrated experience.

Source

You’re experiencing the result of omnichannel strategies when you:

• Search for “Ali Hazelwood” on Google and find lots of websites with consistent information about the author:

  • Author website

  • Retail websites with results for Ali Hazelwood’s books (such as Amazon.com or Bookshop.org.)

• Browse social media romance content and discover influencer content about Ali Hazelwood courtesy of publisher PR efforts.

• Search for contemporary romance books on Amazon and receive paid advertisements about Ali Hazelwood’s books.

• Read major and niche media publications and discover stories about the author or books reviews (such as Entertainment Weekly or smartbitchestrashybooks.com)

• Search for Ali Hazelwood on Instagram or other social platforms and find author-managed pages with information about the same books you can find on Amazon.

• Walk into Barnes and Noble and find Ali Hazelwood books on the front table.

  

• Search for tomorrow’s weather and get retargeted with ads about Ali Hazelwood books, as a result of all of that data indicating you’re interested in Ali Hazelwood.

This all makes sense for a consumer product, right? The result of all of this effort is people buy things, thus creating income to pay for all the expenses and labor that went into making this happen.

The idea is that no matter where the consumer spends time, they can engage with Ali Hazelwood. It’s all for YOU! This is for YOUR experience!

Except, how this works in practice is:

• Omnichannel is extremely resource intensive to execute for businesses:

  • In traditional romance publishing, that means that only bestselling authors will receive a level of support from the publisher that enables this. Mid-list authors are expected to pick up the promotional slack themselves.

  • In order to compete, indie authors are expected to do all of this as well, although they don’t scale on their side.

    • Result for businesses: doing more with less — stretching resources to the breaking point.

    • Result for consumers: “bestseller” media environment where a few books/authors are everywhere and everyone else is struggling to get any attention.

• Omnichannel is overwhelming for consumers:

  • Too many places to find information, too many platform accounts to keep up with. Not only are businesses everywhere: our communities, friends, family, and networks are everywhere.

    • Result for consumers: exhaustion and platform fatigue.

• Omnichannel becomes the norm, so consumers and creatives start to act like businesses:

  • As consumers, we’ve become used to being everywhere and posting in different places for different reasons. The more we consume omnichannel communication, the more we internalize that we are all content creators and producers. What’s the line between someone who posts Goodreads reviews for themselves or friends from a reviewer or influencer? If you’re posting the review on Goodreads, why not also post it on Instagram to share with more people? And if you’re posting on Instagram, why not make a nice graphic so it’s more engaging? It’s a slippery slope.

    • Result for consumers: consumers become overwhelmed, exhausted producers, but without clear material reasons.

I started a romance novel podcast for fun to share conversations about romance novels, and somewhere along the way, I started building a labor-intensive media platform that creates free content to financially benefit for-profit technology companies.

The Ecstasy of Media

Jean Baudrillard anticipated this eventuality in 1983 when he wrote Fatal Strategies and The Ecstasy of Communication. (He didn’t anticipate me starting a romance novel podcast that careened out of hand, rather the idea that contemporary society will expand and excrete “ever more goods, services, information, messages, and demands, surpassing all rational ends and boundaries in a spiral of uncontrolled growth and replication.”²)

Baudrillard wrote:

“We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication… the promiscuity which reigns over the communication networks is one of a superficial saturation, an endless harassment, an extermination of interstitial space.”

The ecstasy of communication so overwhelms us, that it creates “a catastrophe for the subject.” (That’s us: we’re the subjects.) Baudrillard believes that this creates a situation where “the objects themselves come to dominate the exhausted subject, whose fascination with the play of objects turns to apathy, stupefaction, and inertia.”

“For Baudrillard, the “ecstasy of communication” means that the subject is in close proximity to instantaneous images and information, in an overexposed and transparent world…

In other words, an individual in a postmodern world becomes merely an entity influenced by media, technological experience, and the hyperreal.”³

Mindlessly consuming media at all times is an example of the ecstasy of communication. Scrolling through Instagram Reels or TikTok videos with trending audio and endlessly regurgitated memes that you’ve heard repeated so much that you can speak along beat for beat but you don’t even know where it even came from — that’s what Baudrillard would call pure simulacra: a copy of a copy with no original.

The feeling that we can’t stop scrolling even when you’re not necessarily enjoying it is an example of our apathy, stupefaction, and inertia. Baudrillard gives the example of overlapping FM radio stations that crowded out the empty space between stations.

“The word is free, but I am not; the space is so saturated, the pressure of all which wants to be heard so strong that I am no longer capable of knowing what I want.”

Here, Baudrillard points to how all of this supposed freedom of choice actually leads to paralysis and the inability to choose.

We are constantly consuming media in the omnichannel world, but we are often doing so at the direction of an algorithm, rather than making an intentional, subjective choice. When we let the algorithm decide, we are being dominated by the object.

So what do you think? Is this omnichannel media environment a benefit to you? Or are you tired?

I’m tired.

The Exhausted Subject in an Omnichannel World

Let’s go back to how I started this post: what do I mean when I write “Welcome to My Omnichannel Romance Novel Discourse Media Platform”?

First, is Shelf Love a romance novel podcast if it’s actually also a Substack publication that arrives in your inbox, with derivative and original content on Bluesky, Instagram, YouTube, and Threads?

I’d argue that at this juncture, Shelf Love is an omnichannel media platform, not a podcast (single channel).

…but why the hell am I following the communication strategy playbook of a for-profit corporation for my hobby? If I really want to be writing about romance or talking to people about romance, (and somewhere in there, reading romance), why am I also a graphic designer, videographer, and social media strategist who is trying to optimize performance of completely different content from the actual thing I want to create?

I would argue that this is an example of how I have lost contact with reality and am caught up in a hyperreality. It doesn’t matter that this isn’t my job: I’m treating it like it’s my job. I’ve been completely consumed — as many of us have — by the models, images, and codes of the hyperreal, omnichannel environment, which has come to control my thoughts and behaviors.

When I look at that diagram above, with “you” at the center, and Shelf Love harassing and encroaching from all sides — I’m exhausted, and I bet you are too.

Baudrillard wrote about the “pressure of all which wants to be heard” — gosh, I hope I’m not just sending noise out into the universe!

“The word is free; but I am not” — I want to be free and I want you to be free to choose.

Practically speaking, materially: what does this mean? Like, I can divest from the aspects of this omnichannel media platform that bring me no joy and that are diversions from the actual thing I choose to create and that I hope people choose to engage with. But realistically, as a professional communicator who understands too well how the system is set up/rigged, I know that would essentially lead to even fewer people choosing to engage simply because it would never even be visible in an omnichannel world.

It’s scary to think about tearing down this media platform that I’ve built, even if its maintenance exhausts me. If a podcaster releases a podcast but nobody knows about it, does the podcast even exist?

I don’t know. I don’t have the answers.⁴ But I do want to keep thinking about how I can be more intentional — you know, exercise my subjectivity and ability to choose — about how I create and participate in romance discourse.

By the way: I am aware of the irony of using memes throughout this post to illustrate my points.

1. You can still vote in this poll here: https://shelflovepodcast.substack.com/p/notes-on-romance-novels-as-camp

2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/

3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/

4. Baudrillard writes about how when you live in a world without meaning, meaningless can be affirming. Still… still noodling on what that means for me, the queen of “I think we cracked that nut wide open.”