On a good day, my typical Facebook post gets a few hundred views and a handful of thumbs.
Well, I put one up on a Wednesday morning in July and it did 3,847 views, 404 clicks, and 88 comments. Nearly ten times my normal reach, and I’m still answering comments on it several weeks later.
I’ve spent the time since trying to figure out what I did differently, because I’m 78 years old and I would like to know these things before I run out of Wednesdays.
The answer turned out to be the opposite of what I assumed.
What I thought worked: the free book
I was giving away the Kindle edition of my newest book, Wicked Imagination, that day. Free. Not ninety-nine cents, free.
So naturally I assumed that’s what did it. Free is the loudest word in marketing. Free is what gets people’s thumbs moving.
Except the numbers say otherwise, and they say it pretty rudely.
That post got 48 reactions and 404 clicks. That ratio is upside down from every other post I’ve ever put on Facebook, where reactions run way ahead of clicks because most people scroll past, tap the thumb, and get on with their lives. Eight clicks for every thumb means people weren’t performing engagement.
They were going somewhere.
And the comments, 88 of them, dwarfed the reactions almost two to one. That doesn’t happen on a post whose engine is a giveaway. Giveaways produce silent takers.
Also worth mentioning: the free promotion across all channels moved 991 copies and produced zero sales and one review, and I’ve written about that particular humiliation elsewhere. So the free book wasn’t the engine. The free book was the excuse.
What actually worked: I gave them homework
Here’s the last paragraph of that post, more or less as written:
Now here’s your assignment, and this one’s due in the comments: tell me one thing you actually remember from my class. A book, a bad joke, a big goof on my part, a grade you’re still ticked off about, a moment that was memorable and fun. I’ll be here all day, and I’ll reply to everything.
For twenty-four years I taught high school English in New Orleans. The people reading that post are people whose essays I marked up in green ink, some of them forty years ago.
So I asked them for the one thing on this earth that only they possess, and that costs them nothing to hand over.
A memory of me.
And then I promised to answer every single one, which I did, and am still doing, because they’re still trickling in.
Why that’s different from everything else I tried
I built a thirty-day book marketing campaign in July of 2026 and killed it in the third week. Every single thing in it — the promotional listings, the letters to editors, the rank, the badge, the sale I scheduled and then cancelled — every one of those was a request that a stranger give me their attention.
Attention is the one thing nobody has left. Asking for it is asking for the last dinner roll.
The Facebook post didn’t ask for attention. It asked specific people for something they already had, that they’d probably enjoy digging up, and that nobody else in the world could have given me. Then it promised them something back.
That’s not a marketing tactic. That’s a letter.
The other thing I got right without meaning to
I promised to reply to everything, and then I did, all day, one at a time.
Turns out that isn’t just manners. Facebook decides how far a post travels based mostly on what happens in the first couple of hours, and 88 comments answered by 88 replies is 176 pieces of activity stacked into a single morning. The algorithm read that as something people cared about and handed the post to more people, who commented, whom I answered.
I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the point where a marketing blog would tell you to go reply to everybody in order to hack the algorithm.
Don’t do that. It’ll show. I answered those comments because a woman I taught in 1976 commented “I have always credited you for teaching me how to write.” And what am I supposed to do, not answer that?
The reach was a side effect of caring. Reverse the order and you get neither.
Now the part I’d rather skip
I could run this play again next month. It would probably work again.
I’m not going to.
Because what made it work wasn’t a technique, it was twenty-four years of standing in front of teenagers, and that’s a well with a bottom. Draw on it every month and my former students learn something about me they don’t currently know: that Mr. Day gets in touch when he wants something.
That’s the trade nobody in the marketing world will tell you about, because the marketing world only measures the withdrawal. It never measures the balance.
So here’s what I settled on. The reply promise stays permanent — that’s not a tactic, that’s just how I intend to behave. The ask goes away. I’ll write about teaching, about New Orleans, about the year a kid asked me if Hamlet was based on a true story and I had to think about it for a second. I’ll ask what they remember. Four or five times a year, with no book anywhere in it.
And then someday when there is something worth saying about a book, the relationship won’t be a channel I’ve been quietly draining.
What I’d tell another writer
If you have a group of people who know you, actually know you, from before you needed anything, don’t market to them.
Ask them for something only they can give. A memory, a story, an argument, a correction. Something that costs them nothing but is worth something to you because it came from them specifically.
Then answer every one of them.
You will not do this at scale. That’s the whole point. It doesn’t work at scale, and the moment it does work at scale it stops being the thing that worked.
Eighty-eight people wrote to me about a classroom that existed before Jimmy Carter left his peanut farm and moved to Washington DC. A few former students remembered lessons I’d forgotten teaching. One or two remembered goofs I’d hoped were lost to history, and were kind enough to bring them up anyway.
Not one of those comments sold a book.
I’ve got the numbers on my desk to prove that the whole month was a bust: the downloads, the rank, the single review from someone who shares my last name.
And I have 88 people who took twenty minutes out of a Wednesday to tell an old man they remembered him.
I know which pile I’d save from a fire.
Chet Day writes the weekly newsletter “Old Man Still Got Stories” from a back bedroom in Shelby, North Carolina. His books are at chetday.com/books. Want to reprint this article? Email me at chetday@gmail.com. I usually say yes.