Recently on Google+, Nathan Housley pondered whether science fiction authors should stop thinking of science fiction fans as their target audience and focus on making fans of their secondary worlds.
Here’s Nathan:
Between the current trends of science fiction marketing and that games audience link, I’m beginning to think that the future for science fiction writers is not to market to science fiction fans, but to market to those looking to be fans of their work.
For instance, WoW did not create some 10 million MMO fans, it created 10 million WoW fans. Attempts by RIFT and Wildstar and similar MMOs never managed to tap into this audience, and the successful competitors like Final Fantasy 11/14, Lord of the Rings, etc. managed to tap into fans of their primary works.
So instead of trying to market to fantasy fans or Star Wars fans, the latter of which are perfectly content with Star Wars, perhaps the way forward is to increase a potential customer’s interest in your work’s experience. Sanderson’s managed to do this with the various mysteries of the Cosmere, many of which have only been revealed in person and only hinted in his works.
Tradpub appears to sell the cult of the author. The cutting edge of indie is moving towards selling the cult of their worlds.
Is Nathan on to something here? Should science fiction authors forego marketing to science fiction fans as a category and target people who are seeking an escapist experience such as a particular author provides?
Possibly, though I’d need to see more specifically book-related data to be convinced. Taking Nathan’s word that WoW built its popularity by targeting people who wanted to be Wow fans–which strikes me as somewhat tautological, but what do I know?–I just don’t see game marketing mapping directly to books.
For one, there’s a bit of marketing element confusion going on. WoW is not a product. It’s a brand, whereas a book–or even a series of books–ins’t a brand. It’s a product. The author is the brand. That’s why publishers, both trad and indie, focus their marketing efforts on authors much like Blizzard focuses its marketing on WoW.
That’s also why bringing up Sanderson as an example strikes me as counterproductive to Nathan’s argument. He’s right that Brandon has built an impressive fictional multiverse, but if you ask the creator, he’ll be the first to tell you that the Cosmere is product, and he’s the brand. In fact, Sanderson is one of the main guys I learned author=brand from. And Tor certainly markets him in the traditional way.
A couple of nitpicks–one minor and one major: Star Wars might be an even worse example to cite than Brandon Sanderson. First, Star Wars fans are not perfectly content. In fact, there’s a major revolt brewing in reaction to TFA, Rogue One, TLJ, and the upcoming Han Solo movie.
Second, and more importantly, indie authors like Nick Cole and Jason Anspach are making a fortune peeling off disaffected Star Wars fans. If you follow their recent blog posts and podcast appearances, they explain that they made their Galaxy’s Edge project a smashing success by strategically targeting readers of particular SF subgenres.
That said, crafting a unique and memorable reading experience by which your fans can escape to a fully realized secondary world is an essential part of product differentiation. My fictional universe might not be as sprawling as Sanderson’s, but my Soul Cycle has been compared favorably to his Cosmere.
What you as a science fiction author want to do is stake out a niche within a subcategory of SF. Choosing the right subgenre is a delicate balancing act. If your category is too narrow, there won’t be enough money in it to support a career. Pick a niche that’s too broad, and you’ll have trouble standing out from the pack.
Once you’ve found your niche, give the fans in your category a fun and memorable experience that will turn them into your fans. It should be mentioned that, if you write science fiction, fans of your work will, by definition, be science fiction fans.
Finally, going out to the highways and hedgerows to find fans of your trademark experience runs counter to how Amazon’s algorithm works. As Nick Cole warns, hand-selling your book to random people who have nothing–most significantly, no buying habits–in common other than a taste for your work is the best way to kill your career.
Why? Because even if you achieve a high volume of random sales, that very randomness confuses the hell out of the Amazon algorithm. Remember: Amazon is a search engine; the third biggest on the internet, in fact. Its search algorithm isn’t designed to give you the exact results you want so much as suggest results you’re likely to buy. It makes these suggestions by looking at your purchase history as well as the purchase histories of people who bought the same products you did.
See where this is going? The way forward, re: author marketing is to teach Amazon’s algorithm to recommend your book to customers who’ve bought and liked similar books in the same tightly defined categories.
This requires a degree of writing to market preferences. On Amazon, you don’t want to create something so new and original that there’s nothing at all like it, because the algorithm won’t know who to recommend it to.
I learned that lesson the hard way, which is why my first post-Soul Cycle project will be a mil-SF mecha series. You do want to put your unique twist on your books to make them memorable, so the new series will retain my 90s anime sensibilities.
In the meantime, the Soul Cycle rapidly draws toward completion. I invite you to pick up the first three books in my award-winning series so you’ll be good to go when the fourth and final book hits.
Thanks again to Nathan for providing substantial food for thought.