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

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 clichÃ©s 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...

October 24, 2007 | Filed Under Miscellania | 4 Comments

M. John Harrison on his preferred flavours of fantasy

Just spotted - via Mark Newton of Solaris Books, writing on When Gravity Fails - that M. John Harrison has also been expressing his views on fantasy fiction recently. He's very clear on the subject of why he reads fantasy fiction, and what he wants - and definitely doesn't want - to experience when he does:

"When I read fantasy, I read for the bizarre, the wrenched, the undertone of difference & weirdness that defamiliarises the world I know. I want the taste of the writerâ€™s mind, I want to feel I'm walking about in the edges of the individual personality."

I agree wholeheartedly; in fact, the article as a whole neatly sums up the thoughts I was groping my way towards a while back (albeit far more eloquently, naturally).

Of course, being an immensely skilled wordsmith in his own right, M. John Harrison also writes for that same effect and as a result his work is incredibly intricate, and beautiful, and disquieting, and very weird, and sometimes just a little impenetrable and I'd heartily recommend it to anyone looking to push those aforementioned boundaries of their reading experience.

And yet - if I remember correctly from my bookselling days - I'm afraid his books just don't sell particularly well... which is a crying shame and exactly the sort of situation that needs to be turned on its head. But it does rather neatly illustrate SF Diplomat Jonathan McCalmont's point about the inherent problems with Mark Chadbourn's call to action.

Yes, if more writers moved towards writing the sort of fantasy that M. John Harrison both produces and appreciates, then we'd have a much richer and much more interesting literary landscape to explore, and this is altogether a good thing.

But given the currently prevailing business model in publishing, we'd also have a great many more writers who weren't able to earn an independent living from their work (that isn't meant as an inference or speculation on the state of M. John Harrison's finances or situation, I hasten to point out) or whose only outlet was the independent presses.

There would then be a great many more gaps in the mainstream market being filled by even more supermarket-fodder pap and the mainstream readers would still be sticking to what they know and still reading the same-old, same-old because that's all they have access to. After all, those big publishers aren't going to stop putting something out there, are they?

So, while I wholeheartedly agree with both Chadbourn and Harrison, I think McCalmont's argument is currently carrying the day: audience education is the key. More on that subject in a future post (time permitting).

October 6, 2007 | Filed Under Writing | 5 Comments

SF Diplomat responds to Mark Chadbourn

SF Diplomat Jonathan McCalmont posits an interesting twist on the point raised by Mark Chadbourn yesterday, by pointing out that the rot goes both ways: the tropes and stock characters of the fantasy genre are actually poisoning the well of wider-interest RPGs. It's difficult, he argues by way of example, to find a historical RPG that doesn't have some element of fantasy thrown in for good measure.

And in direct response to Mark's suggestion that fantasy authors need to innovate, Jonathan points out that there's an economic danger inherent in adopting too radical a stance: it's usually the readers themselves who demand stock fantasy and vote for it by way of their purchasing decision, so moving away from providing content for this market could prove financially damaging for the author:

"The problem here is that the vast majority of fantasy fans simply have no interest in innovation. If fantasy authors were to hear Chadbourn's rallying cry I suspect that the result would be a decrease in sales across the genre. The problem is not with the world of RPGs or lazy authors, it is the audience and until someone finds a way of evolving the tastes of that audience, the market will reward the writers who are able to pleasingly re-arrange old ideas and not those who present us with new ones."

Very good point, well made. Interesting to see how this one is developing. And I do have the inkling of an answer to his second point about how best to evolve the taste of the audience, but I'll need to work on it some more, I think...

October 6, 2007 | Filed Under Writing | Leave a Comment

Mark Chadbourn's call-to-action for fantasy writers

Just a quick note (as I'm still up to my eyeballs in work-related stuff) to flag up a very interesting post over on Mark Chadbourn's Jack of Ravens blog. It's about the changing landscape of the imagination, the changing role of fantasy fiction writers, and the challenge that fantasy writers face: of stepping out of the shadow of the RPG industry in all its multi-faceted forms and really pushing the boundaries:

"Fantasy authors need to find a new unique selling point. If they want to maintain their reputation as the elite of this field, they need to work their imaginations harder, start defining new territories, go to places that the gamers wouldn't (yet) dare to go.

"Who is up for that challenge?"

Damn good question. One I wish I had more time than I do right now to have a go at answering... anyone else want to chip in?

October 5, 2007 | Filed Under Writing | 1 Comment

File under: "Are we done yet..?"

Blimey. Apologies for recent radio silence, but I've been tied up for the last few days and no mistake. Last Wednesday, Mark Chadbourn's forum was hacked by a gang of ~~script kiddies~~ l33t hak0rz. Damn, etc.

Mind you, they were actually surprisingly polite about it - just left a sort of "your forum isn't very secure, you know..." message, and changed the colour scheme. I don't know, maybe they felt a bit guilty because it was such an easy system to break into. Which, whilst obviously rather irritating, actually turned out to be just the kick up the arse I needed to get the forum upgraded to a better software platform; something I've been trying to find time to do for a good six months or so. So I suppose they actually did me a favour, of sorts, when you think about it.

Anyway, net result: shiny new forum.

However, installing the new software did take up the best part of the two afternoons that I had originally ear-marked for clearing out my massively over-stuffed inbox and generally sorting out the office; something else that was long overdue and marked 'urgent' on the to-do list. So there went the weekend...

Won't be sorry to see the back of these things... At least, there went whatever was left of the weekend after Jo and I had spent the bulk of it feverishly slapping paint on the remaining few dozen square metres of upstairs walls and woodwork, in preparation for the remaining carpets being fitted yesterday. Not to mention all the dusting, vacuuming, shifting-of-furniture, rearranging of piles of dusty boxes etc. that went with it.

Still, the Evil Decorating is 95% done now - just the porch and hall to finish off, plus snagging (a builder-standard technical term for going round and doing all the odd bits that are always left at the end of a job, and one that I'm going to adopt for website work henceforth) - and just in time for Jo's folks to visit on Thursday. They're staying for the weekend, which means that I get to cook for Jo's Mum, for a change. Quite daunting, actually...

Oh, and just in case there are any doubters out there who don't believe we've really spent the last two years of our lives planning for, working on and generally living through this extension project - that it's all been an elaborate hoax for me to use as an excuse for not doing tonnes of constructive and productive stuff with my time - here are the before and after shots...

...oh, hang on, no. They're on the old PC. Which reminds me, I'll have to rescue those before it goes to the recyclers... maybe I'll post them another time, unless enough of you beg me not to... but they do exist, honest.

Right, that's that. Something more bookish to follow shortly, I promise - more New Arrivals to tell you about, and the start of a new (maybe even regular) feature: the 'Where Are They Now?' Files.

January 9, 2007 | Filed Under Miscellania | 2 Comments