Sable Yong always wanted to make a perfume. She calls herself a “frag-head,” having previously written about fragrances for Allure and hosting the podcast Smell Ya Later with Tynan Sinks. Still, producing a fragrance requires a seismic deposit of cash. That was money Yong didn’t have.
When HarperCollins imprint Dey Street tapped Yong to write an essay collection, Die Hot With a Vengeance, her dreams of a personalized fragrance came back. “This is what the [book] advance is for, so I can have money to make this perfume,” Yong laughs.
Yong self-funded the perfume, working with New York City perfume design studio Hoax Parfum to build the scent, which shares its name with the book. She considers it a piece of thoughtful merchandise—a branding venture for the engaged reader. Die Hot considers the state of modern beauty; a perfume seems like a logical jump to connect to the book. In the age of literary t-shirts and tote bags, Yong’s fragrance offers a new frontier of book marketing.
Considering the state of book merch
Book merch has exploded in the past decade. BookTok can be thanked for much of that, with rabid online fans gobbling up Etsy tees emblazoned with their favorite quotes. Romance novelist and TikTok favorite Colleen Hoover runs her own merch collection with crew necks and baseball caps, while Sarah J. Maas allows her popular fantasy novels to be licensed for copious amounts of key chains, stickers, and stationery.
These items are mass-produced methods of extending fan engagement, but not necessarily tied to the novels themselves. Yong wanted to avoid this type of book marketing.
“I don’t love the idea of making merch for the sake of merch, like a tote bag or a hat,” Yong says. “They might wear it once or twice and then they’re going to forget about it and it’s going to rot in a landfill somewhere.”
The perfume offered a different avenue to access reader engagement, by more intentionally tying sellable products to the contents of the book. It’s a beauty book; wouldn’t a beauty item be so much more special than, say, a bookmark? Better yet, Yong was able to run the process solo, asking Dey Street only for the nod of approval.
“This was early on in the editorial process,” says Carrie Thornton, vice president of Dey Street. “Sable wanted to combine her love of scent, which she writes about in the book, and how tactile the beauty industry is. She wanted the book to have an affiliate product, and so went about creating her perfume.”
Distilling Die Hot into a fragrance
In her mission to create an authentic book marketing product, Yong was intentional about the notes she included in the fragrance. She wanted the perfume to represent the book itself.
“I was trying to picture if my book was a person,” Yong says of her process. “I distilled it down to an evil wealthy woman with a stolen Birkin bag.”
Joey Rosin, independent perfumer and leader of Hoax Parfum, was tasked with bringing Yong’s vision of the book to the bottle. He read and loved the book, imagining alongside Yong what this collection of essays would smell like.
“There’s a nice tension between bitterness and sweetness, bright citrus things and dark earthy leather things,” Rosin says. “[It] feels like the tension bestowed upon a consumer in the beauty industry.”
Yong is now tasked with independently distributing her perfume. She’s selling it on her website, as well as a couple in-store locations, including Stéle in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She still has “240 bottles in [her] living room, stacked up in boxes,” but remains firm in her new vision of book marketing.
“A lot of what merch is meant to do is to act as a marketing signifier that someone can wear, almost like a wearable billboard,” Yong says. “Scent is so much more memorable because it’s the one sense that’s most closely tied to your memory and your emotions.”
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