Attention Chain
Ryan Holiday has a process for marketing he calls "trading up the chain." Today, all of media has become interconnected. People pick up and re-report others' content in an attempt to arbitrage the information.
After writing The Obstacle Is the Way, Ryan started to receive emails from coaches saying that his book helped them win. He sent hundreds of copies to sports teams in an attempt for the book to catch on in sports and get featured in Sports Illustrated or ESPN for marketing. His friend asked if he eventually wanted to be a guest on her small sports podcast.
This gave him a chance to tell his story on his own terms and build Narrative Gravity
The podcast led to niche sites covering the story and showing it to the right people. Eventually, he reached the top of the chain by giving others a story to tell, and Sports Illustrated published an article, "How a Book on Stoicism Became Wildly Popular at Every Level of the NFL" — selling out of books.