Genre fiction marketing follow-up - Lou Anders and Mark Chadbourn

Filed by: Darren on October 24, 2007 at 21:02
Filed In: Books, Marketing, Publishing, Work, Writing

Sorry folks, another long, train-of-thought essay of exactly the sort I promised myself I wasn't going to get overly involved in any more. But then, there have been a couple of very interesting follow-up posts to my last post on George Mann's original thoughts about the apparently essential dilemma of marketing genre fiction to either the masses or the hardcore fans, which I felt I had to add to.

Firstly, 'The Big Book Cover Post: Wizards and Spaceships' from Lou Anders of Pyr Books; another specialist genre imprint that I have a huge amount of respect for.

Lou makes a number of good points, a couple of which I'd particularly like to comment on:

"Personally, I do not like the move away from illustration to design that I see coming out from a lot of houses (though it has its place for individual books - I'm talking about a general trend). I think to forgo illustration is to sacrifice one of the core strengths of SF&F and one of its unique selling points."

Generally, I prefer well-illustrated genre fiction book covers to ones that are produced with a strictly 'graphic design' aesthetic in mind. But that's just a personal preference, and doesn't hold true 100% of the time; I've seen some striking and well-designed 'graphic' covers as well. And as fantasy author Joe Abercrombie points out in the comments section of Lou's post: "I don't know that the wider audience ... are necessarily put off by genre covers, but they certainly are put off by REALLY BAD covers."

Absolutely right. It applies to hardcore genre fans and probably tenfold to the general reader. Genre fiction book covers ought to be a demonstration of self-confidence and celebration, yes. They should unashamedly wear their genre hearts on their sleeves, absolutely. If you're selling a book about dragons and want to attract the attention dragon-fans, then a dragon on the cover is a good idea? Just make sure it's a stylish, well-illustrated dragon that has a measure of genuine artistic merit in its own right, not some cartoonish, lumpen sketch, or even the dragon-fans might say no.

And what if the book has some genre elements, but has the potential to appeal to a wider audience - through the exceptional quality of the prose, or the range of themes, concepts and sub-texts the author explores, or the incredible catharsis inherent in the principle character's life story or situation, etc. - what if it's a whole lot more than a simple scion quest / space war adventure story? How do you strike the balance; ensure you don't cross that oh, so tricky invisible line? Lou Anders has an answer:

"...you do so neither by hiding / omitting your genre elements nor presenting them in an off-putting, garish manor, but by presenting them in a mature, intriguing, attractive, inclusive, compelling 21st century light."

Which, by the way, I think applies equally to everything from the cover blurb to the author photo on the inside sleeve to the content of the accompanying press release that's sent out with review copies, as much as it does to the cover art itself.

Returning to cover art, specifically, Lou also quotes from an off-thread conversation with illustrator / artist / designer John Picacio who sums up the reason why the genre really does need to give itself a shot in the arm when it comes to self-confidence and belief:

"The field must visually celebrate itself, rather than run away from itself ... When sf/fantasy publishing shows an insecurity about its visual strengths, that insecurity rubs off negatively not only on our audiences, but in the broader media, and we push ourselves backwards every time we do that."

If we, as genre readers and genre fans, stopped worrying so much about what the wider mainstream media thought about our books - taking it to the extreme: ignoring the mainstream media completely and focusing almost entirely on the specialist genre presses, blogs, webzines, print 'zines - then the mainstream media will soon get bored and leave us the hell alone to enjoy ourselves in peace, right?

Well, fantasy / horror author Mark Chadbourn thinks this could be a dangerous road to go down, and says so in 'Selling Fantasy by the Pound' on his JackofRavens.com blog.

Mark was a journalist for many years before he became a full-time fiction writer and also writes for TV here in the UK, so he's seen the impact of the aforementioned Long Tail economics on three media channels: music, print and television.

Mark's main argument against a policy of appealing to the core genre fiction fans centres on his experience of the music industry:

"...if it [the fan-focused approach] was applied to the whole industry I would have real problems. In the music industry, where I worked for a while, the marketeers have struggled. By focusing on the tribalist music fan that has emerged over the last twenty years, they have had trouble gaining breakout hits from genres. Attention shifted to marketing bland fare that would appeal to all tastes to gain those mainstream hits, and sales have fallen dramatically (yes, I know there are many other factors, but this is a core concern)."

Which brings in an earlier discussion on 'quality fantasy', which was actually sparked by another Chadbourn post, 'Are RPGs killing fantasy?', in which he called for fantasy writers to embrace their weird side and distance themselves from the clichés and standardised fantasy tropes made overly familiar by a plethora of fantasy-themed computer games.

Can you achieve all those aims at once? Can you write high-quality, literary genre fiction that's successfully marketed to a core audience of fans, yet still has enough break-out potential to escape the genre-ghetto and achieve mass-market sales?

Mark thinks you can:

"I love fantasy, science fiction and horror. I believe these three genres are appealing to mainstream tastes, if some way can be found to communicate their values to the casual browser. I'm afraid that an across-the-board retreat to the 'core fan model' will ghettoize them even further and lead to a long-term decline. The best way for the industry, I think is - to use music industry analogy - hardcore labels for the purist, and general labels to attract new users."

Well, surely this model already exists within the publishing industry, and has for years? If you'll excuse the lengthy aside and apologies to anyone not specifically mentioned by name:

At one extreme you have the very definite 'hardcore' independent presses - such as the UK's Tartarus Press, who cater for very specialist niches. Moving up the scale you find successful niche-indies like Pendragon (horror fiction in all its guises), Telos (TV guides and genre novellas) and Elastic (genre short fiction collections and anthologies). Then there are larger indies - PS Publishing in the UK, Subterranean Press, Cemetery Dance et. al. in the US - who produce a wider range of authors and formats across the whole spectrum of genres, and also larger specialists such as Titan (UK graphic novels).

Crossing to the 'corporate' ladder we start with smaller imprints, whose publication range may actually be narrower than the larger indies, but whose financial backing means they can usually spend more on advertising, marketing and online promotion and so reach a wider audience. Solaris are one such: self-declared as a midlist imprint, still relatively small but growing strongly and with the financial muscle of Games Workshop and the Black Library publishing operation behind them, backing up their online know-how.

Around about the same level are the genre titles that are published by major corporates who don't have a specific genre imprint - Penguin, Transworld, Hodder, Headline and co. all put out titles with varying degrees of blatant genre-ness as part of their overall fiction lists.

Finally, we get to the larger, longer-established, specific genre imprints of major corporate publishing houses, including HarperCollins' Voyager, Orion's Gollancz Books and Little Brown's Orbit. The latter, with the recent launch of Orbit US and Orbit Australia, now serves the three major English-speaking markets (four, including Canada via the US), giving it immense reach and influence. And they all bring a highly effective mix of established bestsellers and innovative new talent to the market.

Thanks to Gollancz and Orbit in particular, a number of new genre authors have been published for the first time in the past couple of years, and others who have established themselves in their local markets (Australian author Margo Lanagan) or via the independent presses (Joe Hill with his debut collection 20th Century Ghosts from PS, now a Gollancz author) have subsequently been introduced to a much wider audience; some of those authors even making national bestseller lists in the process (Trudi Canavan, for instance).

So surely, with that sort of established mix of 'hardcore' and 'general' labels, it's just a question of the writer deciding which audience their work is most likely to appeal to and then approaching a publisher who is geared towards publishing for that audience?

Well, of course it's nowhere near as simple as that, and Mark Chadbourn has a few further words of warning for the genre writer:

"But that is a fiendish and crippling trap for the writer. Once you establish yourself in one pool or the other it will be very hard to crossover and gain, on the one hand, the new readers and wider sales that sustain your career, and, on the other, credibility that is just as valuable a commodity in the internet-empowered world."

So it sounds like you can either - as a genre author - choose to write specialised, credibility-rich, literary fiction, knowing full well that you'll probably end up appealing to a much smaller pool of potential readers (writing for the Long Tail audience), or narrow your horizons; dumbing-down in the process, in order to appeal to the RPG-influenced, bland-fare consuming mass market and (hopefully) laugh all the way to the bank (moving your work away from the 'long tail' and into the 'short head', where the bestsellers feed).

Of course, you could try do both at the same time. Many authors do, either openly or - I'm sure - pseudonymously.

Or you could try to find another way: by helping the readership to raise its standards; to expect, to want, to demand much more from their genre fiction, and thereby move the mainstream audience closer to the credible, literary end of the spectrum. In other words, expanding the middle ground between 'long tail' and 'short head' (it would help if I had time to draw the graph, I'll try to add one at a later date) and creating greater potential for higher quality fiction to thrive.

If the readership demands richer, better quality genre fiction, and the readership then votes with its credit cards and buys more of it, then the publishers of the world will respond by publishing more of it. And I know for a fact that this would make a lot of genre fiction publishers immensely happy.

Anyhow, I'm going to go away and ruminate some more, see if I can pull a few thoughts together into something resembling a reasonably coherent framework. Or a polemic. Or another rambling essay (most likely). Won't happen for a while yet though... far too much interesting work happening right now, and an imminent and much-needed holiday to enjoy as well.

Feel free to comment away if the urge takes you. I'll try to keep track, but can't promise anything like a coherent response for a couple of weeks or so...

Filed on: October 24, 2007
Filed under: Books, Marketing, Publishing, Work, Writing
Tagged with: genre fiction | George Mann | Lou-Anders | Mark-Chadbourn |

Print this Item

Send by Email

Comments

4 Responses to 'Genre fiction marketing follow-up - Lou Anders and Mark Chadbourn'

Andrew Wheeler on October 25th, 2007 3:43 pm

It's a beautiful vision, but...the world of "literary" fiction is not the mainstream at all. It's a small backwater, which moves fewer units annually in aggregate than the SFF genre (though the big hits are much bigger -- which of course means that the average sales are notably smaller). Trying to "break out" into literary fiction is an attempt to jump into a smaller pond, merely because they have better press. (Which is reasonable, if what you really want is good press.)

The real mainstream in fiction consists of two genres that are so large and important that they're not consistently called genres: romance/women's fiction and the thriller. If writers primarily want to reach very large audiences, they need to find ways to write in those genres. (Which doesn't necessarily mean abandoning SFF: the former has been combined with Fantasy very successfully over the past decade, and technothrillers are the merger of the latter with elements of SF.)

On the question of covers, I generally do prefer elegant, attractive covers over ugly ones, and I agree with you that SFF iconography can make a very attractive cover, done right. But there are segments of the market that very much skew towards ugly covers; Baen's great success shows this clearly. And I'm not personally so much of a snob as to want the people who prefer ugly covers not to have them, just because those covers make me cringe.
Darren on October 25th, 2007 4:20 pm

Hi Andrew -

Thank you very much for taking the time to read through that lot and respond, very much appreciated! :)

You're absolutely right, 'literary' fiction is a very small niche and romance / women's fiction / thrillers are the mainstream, absolutely. But what I'm driving at - in my horribly long-winded and round-about way - is that it doesn't necessarily have to be like that. I think that the status quo can be changed, and gradually is being changed - although as someone who actually works in the publishing industry (unlike me), perhaps you've got access to figures that can blow that theory out of the water...

What I'm hoping to do - if I ever find the time - is pull together a few ideas and try to come up with a few suggestions as to how publishers, authors and most importantly readers of better-quality, literary fiction can help to boost sales of that type of fiction, and in effect pick the whole sub-genre up and move it closer to the mainstream.

Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree entirely and one morning I'll wake up and realise I am, and decide to go get a life instead, but in the meantime it's something I'm interested in exploring.
craig parkes on October 26th, 2007 4:24 pm

I had previously posted something about cover art on my blog, but upon waking I realized something interesting; Solaris and Pyr are being *very* savvy in their cover choices. They (as well as Tor, I think?) have been using game artists to provide covers, and I think the potential for crossover between gamers and readers increases with this strategy.

Can it not be said that Solaris and Pyr are catering not only to hard-core genre readers, but also to the non-reading gaming crowd?
Mark on November 6th, 2007 9:38 am

I think for me the way to do this is by supporting the smaller presses. They have the luxury to experiment, it's just that most readers don't know about them, because the majority of book-buying decisions are made in the bookstore. If sales of the small press and indies could be enhanced, it would force others to pay attention.

Also, I find awards interesting. Whereas in literary fiction, the awards are judged nearly always by an independent panel, and not voted for by fans, it gives a chance to books sales of more innovative fiction. Fans voting for something simply makes an already popular book/author win. It is perhaps a popularity contest If a panel could consistently push newer fiction, then innovation comes, then perhaps greater respect. That's maybe why the Arthur C Clarkes bring a greater kudos. Just a thought...