JamesM said:
I think the symbiosis thing is what's hard to get my head around, as a writer. As a reader, not at all. In that mode, I head to the bookstore, look in my section and think, "oh, love this book, and here's one that looks a lot like it. I'll give it a try!" Then I merrily go on my way, new book in hand. But as a writer...then I think, "wait, why are they reading that book, rather than mine!" Guess that's something to get over and to try to keep in perspective.
It is counter-intuitive like a lot of things about the fiction market. People expect things to be dog eat dog competitions between products, like sports teams. But as you know from your reading experience, that isn't how fiction readers shop. Which is why fiction writers are happy to team up, because readers from one will often drift to the other and some will become fans. But the process happens whether authors promote together or not. You cannot stop fiction readers from browsing. Every movie adaptation brings in new readers and some of them browse. They'll go from sub-category to sub-category. People freak out when one sub-category becomes popular from some hits and then expands with more titles as publishers use symbiosis to capitalize on the new readers coming in from the hits, because they assume that the popular thing will eat and destroy other things. That is never what happens. Instead, some of the new readers coming in browse outward and a different sub-category gets some hits and expands also, bringing in new readers and so on and so on.
So it's not a matter of wait, why are they reading that guy's book instead of mine. It's a matter of hey, they're reading that guy's book so they might like mine too. They read books! So anything is possible. Symbiosis is one of the fiction authors' best friends. The more bestsellers there are, the more readers there are and the more the industry can expand and fund new writers.
And as far as marketing, I get what you're saying, Kat, about the limited marketplace. However, the vast majority of my sales come from e-books and almost all of them from Amazon. To the point that I bit the bullet and enrolled them in Kindle Select, so I could put them on KU. Since that time, I have someone reading them just about every day. Yes, I am contributing to the take-over of the world by Jeff Bezos, but it's where my sales are.
Kindle Unlimited is their subscription service where you have to go exclusive to Amazon and some authors have done very well with it. There are ways to market/promote that are particular to KU and a lot of its successful authors have given advice and network with each other to help with promotion via KU, so those are things to look into. But recently Amazon has thrown out a bunch of authors from KU for violating their policies on the service, so you do need to be careful about production and marketing strategies and promotional efforts there so as to not upset Amazon or have subscription readers feel cheated.
The other issue with KU is that it mitigates symbiosis by in fact turning authors into direct competitors. Instead of authors getting paid according to the rental usage of their titles on the subscription service like something like Spotify, Amazon just has a set pool of money for everybody and forces authors to fight over who gets it. So that means in the KU service, fiction authors are competing with each other for eyeballs and page reads in a set room and with non-fiction authors who are selling expertise/information as well. Symbiosis still can happen in KU and authors can team up for promotions, plus do other promotions that e-book authors do in general. But you do have some very peculiar circumstances attached to that particular area.
Luka said:
Or do you think I'm reading too much into it.
I think you missed the point of what was being said entirely, but that's not really related to marketing fiction.
It could just be a possibility that most people who read SF are male which leads to most people writing SF being male which leads to most reviewed SF books being done by and about male SF authors.
Men get reviewed more often for fiction in general, not simply SF. And the science fiction audience is near 50-50 men and women. In authorship, it is also about 50-50 gender split. A lot of book reviewers who review SFF are indeed men, but that they are men does not mean that they have to review mostly men authors. It's a bias that discriminates against women authors in the SFF field. As I've been trying to point out, the idea that women only read women authors and men only read men authors is off-base and has led to discrimination in the industry, such as actively keeping women out of writing military SF, that most people are trying to lessen. It's an unnecessary limitation of the audience and of sales, so publishers and booksellers are finally trying to do less of it. As much as you would like to erase some of the problems women authors have had in SFF and elsewhere, Luka, these are things that women authors have been dealing with for a long time.
Also, women are not less interested in the hard sciences. Women have been routinely kept out of the hard sciences and out of jobs thereby and then promptly told that they don't like hard sciences. The same routine was used to try to keep women from being doctors and dentists, as well as out of tech and engineering, etc. And the majority of science fiction published by both men and women does not involve hard science in any case. The biggest sub-category of science fiction is space opera adventure.
If you want to stick to the position that women authors are pushing you out of the market and that women readers won't read your fiction, then you'll have to look at marketing to targeted groups of men. Forums on 4chan and Reddit are possibilities. Conservative Christian websites and networks may be a place to try to connect, even if your work is not particularly conservative Christian in nature.
I didn't know romance books were anymore stigmatized than SF books are... Their audiences certainly aren't stigmatizing them though they are probably equally as unlikely to win the Nobel prize for literature.
Category romance novels are socially stigmatized for men -- they are discouraged from reading them and can face social stigma if they do as the romances are considered inferior women's books (girl cooties.) There is a male audience for category romance but it's smaller than elsewhere. Non-category romance, however, sold in general fiction has less of that problem and bigger male audiences. And all the other types of fiction have male and female audiences.
AND FANTASY is taking a giant dump on SF. At least in my local book store. It uses three times the amount of shelf space and though while SF may be a lure for Fantasy I can't see the favour being returned.
That's again a common misconception in the market -- that one sub-category is eating the other, but that's not what is happening in the whole market. And it particularly doesn't happen with category SF and fantasy because the two are linked at the hip through their specialty publishers who fill most of the category market and have numerous authors who do both SF and fantasy (and horror as well). The success of fantasy titles helps fund SF publishing. Your particular bookstore may have a bigger fantasy set of shelves (they only split the sub-categories twenty years ago,) than SF, but in other stores that won't be the case. As we discussed earlier, the bookstore chains vary stock distribution by what their sales records are for each store/region. And independents will also look at what sells best for them in their location and adjust stock accordingly. But any bookstore is happy to order you a book if you want it and they don't have it on hand and if enough people are ordering sub-fields of books from them, then they'll increase stock in those sub-fields. And there is also the fact that a lot of SFF is published in general fiction by general fiction imprints and not necessarily sold on the category shelves -- but still is selling, including bestsellers. That's all part of the field.
Remember, the YA sections were not the size they are now before Goosebumps and then Harry Potter sent readers streaming into those sections. They expanded and not just the YA fantasy titles. So that meant the YA sections got a lot bigger in just a few years. You could literally watch them adding the shelves. But that didn't meant that adult fiction was declining -- readers sent into YA (which included some adults,) then went browsing into adult market fiction.
In the mid-oughts, I had numerous discussions, one in our fantasy forum here, with folk who were convinced that because fantasy was running through some more expansions that category SF was going to disappear. And one of the reasons that they gave for that was because women supposedly liked fantasy fiction better. (This was pretty funny because in the 1950s-1980s, the claim was that women didn't like fantasy fiction at all, despite loads of women fans and women authors, that it was a man's genre.)
My argument was that SF had been hit harder by the wholesale paperback collapse than fantasy because fantasy had been in the middle of an expansion at the time and so SF had been slower to recover and had not had any large expansions since the cyberpunk expansion except for a bit of one in military SF in the 1990s, that the bringing in of more readers from the various sub-category/YA fantasy expansions was causing some of those readers to browse into SF and that we were having more hits in SF and SF would have/was starting an expansion. And that's exactly what occurred. SF benefited greatly from the fact that Hollywood likes SF way more than they like fantasy as a more reliable genre for them and scooped up a lot of adaptations after having been less interested in that in the 1990s. The hits Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner, The 100, etc. and their film and t.v. adaptations boosted SF at the teen and adult level. The Expanse, The Man in High Castle, Handmaid's Tale, Ready Player One, The Martian, Annihilation, High Rise, Arrival, Edge of Tomorrow, etc. all boost up science fiction attention, as do non-adaptations or graphic novel adaptations such as The Walking Dead, iZombie, the Arrowverse, Star Wars, etc. -- all with tie-in fiction as well that brings in new readers. More adaptations are in the works, including some SF classics, which also bring in new readers. There are oodles of SF novels coming out on the big publishers' lists, current bestsellers like John Scalzi's The Consuming Fire, Andy Weir's Artemis, and prominent fantasy authors doing science fiction novels like Cathrynne Valente, Mary Robinette Kowal and Adrian Tchaikovsky -- all three of them optioned. So SF is doing well right now, in YA and in the adult market, both category and general fiction.
In the 1990's, people dismissed contemporary fantasy as minor, small and unimportant compared to secondary world fantasy, despite a number of hits developing and Harry Potter as well. In the late 1990s-early oughts, contemporary fantasy had a large cluster of bestsellers and was expanding, at the same time that there were expansions in horror (leading to establishing a category horror market,) and paranormal romance from the category romance market. So then suddenly contemporary fantasy was all important, the only thing that was selling was supposedly vampires and other types of fantasy would be wiped out. This did not, needless to say, happen. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, tie-in fiction, first of D&D and other RPG games, then their electronic game adaptations, as well as film/t.v. tie-ins, became very popular, leading into Star Wars and Halo tie-ins. There were lots of media think pieces about how this was going to kill off original SFF fiction in favor of the cheaper and fan-base guaranteed tie-in books. Instead, tie-in bestsellers brought in lots of new readers who then browsed outwards to original fiction and a number of tie-in authors who got their start that way went on to substantial original fiction careers. In 2009, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -- combining a work of classic literature with a modern SFF update -- was a big hit, followed by Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. So people thought those types of books were going to take over. They did not, they brought in readers. In 2006, World War Z was a big hit and there were several other big hit zombie novels the next several years, leading publishers to flog all their zombie novels for symbiosis, and even more when The Walking Dead t.v. series came out and the novel The Passage was a big hit. Zombies were supposed to kill off other kinds of SFF. They did not; they brought in more readers. Post-apocalyptic SF, first in YA and then in general had an expansion and was supposed to wipe out other types of fiction. It did not, it is a perennially popular sub-field that periodically has an expansion, often starting off an overall SF expansion and was part of the SF expansion going on.
Fiction novels build on each other. Fiction authors are helped out by symbiosis and browsing, but they are also helped out by variety. If you are doing something different than the hits you are noticing, that doesn't mean you're cut out of an audience. You have the potential of readers who are browsing in from those hits, and you also have the potential of readers who don't like the type of stories the hits are and are looking for something different.
But question, what if we don't want to self-publish or self-promote? Are there any doors that aren't common knowledge writers can use to break into the traditional publishing world?
Well first off, there is no such thing as no self-promotion for fiction writers. Whether you are working with a publisher or magazine or anthology or self-publishing, you will be promoting if you are publishing/selling. You get to decide what it is possible for you to do, how much, etc., but some sort of promotional attempts just to attract attention usually occurs. We're not just talking about marketing for self-pub authors.
Second, what you are asking about isn't marketing and promotion but marketing to agents and publishers to invest in. And I haven't forgotten about the literary agent thread request and I will put it up soon. But to answer your question, no, there are no secret back doors, no magic keys, no foolproof formulas for getting an agent or a license publisher. There are sometimes lucky breaks and there are basic things that writers can do to try and get a reading by agents and publishers and hope that they think it's something they want to go with. But they do not have Hollywood money, they do not do options, they know that fiction readers mostly don't care who you the author are, etc., so it comes down to their subjective judgment of the work. It's going out in your little boat and going fishing for someone to like your stuff. But we'll go over some of the things authors can do in the other thread. This one is about understanding and navigating the market promotionally.
Alchemist said:
I'm just catching up with this thread, but wanted to thank
@KatG - there is some pure gold here. You should be sainted for the time and energy you put into educating us plebs
I don't consider you all plebs. I just have a knowledge base. As authors, you won't need quite that much of a base. But it can be less frustrating if you understand how the industry works in book-selling, contracts, weird stuff like that.
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