Shocker, right?
I know this must be hard for some authors to contemplate. After all, marketing “experts” tell us we need to focus more on bringing in and keeping readers of our blogs who are solely “fans.”
I don’t think as many readers are solely “readers” as some would like to think.
Lots of People Wear Many Hats
Yes, there are lots of people out there who purely consume, who aren’t writers and don’t ever plan to become writers, who don’t imagine the “what ifs” of your story and pop out fan fiction once in a while or use stories as inspiration in another medium, who love to debate academic topics and the intersection of popular media with other hardcore fans.
There are also a lot of people who do some or all of those activities. They can help you build your fan base organically.
JKR Didn’t Plant the Seeds of the Reading Revolution; Her Stories Did
For instance, I know J. K. Rowling didn’t go out on the web, start a blog and a discussion forum for her books, and then tell people to go ahead and write fan fiction and draw fan art of Harry and Draco. That happened because of a particular kind of fan — one who is comfortable wearing more than one “hat.” I would go as far as to say that the Harry Potter series didn’t succeed because of its marketing to children, but in spite of it.
The first Harry Potter story I read was a fanfic on Fanfiction.net. The only reason I read JKR’s work — and subsequently bought all the books in four different language formats,watched and bought all of the movies, waited in line at release day parties, and spent countless hours online writing fan fiction, creating fan art, and debating the series was because I read that one story. In fact, I learned about what happened in the first four books before reading them, and it was only because there were so many compelling and well-written stories by fans out there to keep me occupied when smaller fandoms ran out of new material.
Put away your ego and think for a minute, fiction writers. What do want to speak the loudest for your work — your blog posts about the miracles of raw food, or you know, your books?
There Are a Heck of a Lot of Artistic People Out There, or How Disintermediation Changed Everything, Part 347
The old model used to work something like this: a person sees an ad in a magazine or a commercial on T.V., or maybe she notices a front of store display in the airport bookstore. The person buys the print book, reads it on the airplane, and really likes it. Maybe she tells her friends. Maybe she doesn’t. She probably checks out that author’s books first the next time she looks for something to read.
The new model sometimes mimics this old model, but sometimes it also works like this: a person is bored and Googles the genre of books she wants to read, urban fantasy. After reading the first few sites that come up and not finding anything, she decides to dig deeper and searches the blogs for reviews of a book someone mentioned offhand a long time ago, who knows where, that sounded interesting. The reviews on this book sound bad, but one of the reviewers recommends this book instead…
Fast forward a few months, and the person is now so into urban fantasy that she’s started a book blog. (Hey, it happens.) It turns out she lives in a small town with a library where the selections in the fantasy section rarely involve titles more recent than 1995. She’s grown up on Isaac Asimov, Robert Jordan, and Anne McCaffrey, and she wanted to write about dragons, but guess what? Dorothy, there really is a world outside of Kansas, and you can write about that, too! Next thing you know, she’s a panelist at a convention and is pushing her local college to start an urban fantasy book club, writing fan fiction when her own projects stall on weekends and running an Etsy shop that sells mugs with vampire jokes on them.
There were, and are, no accepted boundaries on the net, you see. Writers on the Internet have to worry about producing a new chapter every day or every month, or finishing a story at 12,000 words, or including sex and violence in stories without falling into genre constrictions on romance or horror. The entertainment, the art, the education, the message isn’t forced into neat little commercial, mainstream, kid-friendly, pre-sized packages. Most academic authors and too many commercial authors just don’t understand that. At all.
Worse, those of us who used to understand are listening to marketers and starting to forget.
The Culture Was Already There; You Just Didn’t See It
Without the transformative arts, the yearning of so many readers to be storytellers and not merely consumers would be frustrated, repressed, drowned in the bathtub of a consumerist society. The solely left-brained people have always had their shit together and ruled the world. Good on them. Societies wouldn’t function too well without doctors and firefighters. Our job, the job of the partly or wholly right-brained people, starts when the work day is done: to make life worth living beyond mere survival, to entertain people and to occasionally teach them something they couldn’t learn in a textbook.
To a large extent, fans’ reactions to entertainment and art have moved online. I was writing fan fiction and original fiction as a child before I had even heard those terms used. The only difference between my creative output in 1989 and 1999 is that I stopped using pencils and crayons and moved to using pixels. Oh, and the results were (marginally) better.
People find creative outlets if they really want to. I guarantee you that unless you are John Grisham or Dan Brown, more than a few of your readers are aspiring or current authors, just like you. Treating them like they have three heads when they are more likely to be younger, more web-savvy and socially networking, and eager to discuss and debate your work is not a sound business strategy.
No One Cares About That Awesome Mocha Celery Shake You Just Made
..Unless you’re a chef selling cookbooks. As someone who only had time to operate as a reader and occasional blogger a couple of years ago, I can tell you that I read plenty of blogs, and not one of them was an author blog ostensibly focused on her books but in reality filled with post after post on recipes, childrearing, home repairs, pets, weight loss goals, exercise tips, and vacation plans.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the occasional tip on just about anything. But that’s probably not what I’m coming to your blog to read.
If I’m looking for a good recipe, I ask my friends or search for the food type.
If I’m ready to start a family or adopt children, I will look for websites devoted to that topic.
When I want to remodel my living room, I might check out some design blogs or the DIY Network.
When I need some animal lovin’ attention, I grab my own cat and arm wrestle.
If I need motivation to lose weight, I make a friend at the local YMCA or join a weight-loss online group.
If I want to visit Lake Tahoe, I hit up Expedia and GO.
See where I’m going with this?
No, Seriously.
I don’t know when that “avoid controversy at all costs” clause went into effect, but if this is the trend of the future for authors blogs, I need to break my contract.
At least one writer stopped discussing industry news because the stress of replying to comments and arguing with people about publishing took up too much time. Fine. Whatever makes you happy. You know what also takes up time? Twitter. Also posts on mocha celery shakes.
Houston, We Haz a Contradicshun
Don’t you just love how we’re supposed to examine everyone’s opinion based on how it might help them to advocate said opinion, EXCEPT for marketers?
Why marketers get a free pass on this rule is a mystery to me. It makes sense that people invested in the old way of publishing books, like the publishers, agents, in-house editors, and bestsellers, would be running around right about now playing chicken little and bemoaning the death of The Literary Age. They’re caught in a trap of their own making and can’t escape from it. Those who are smart adapt.
Marketers want to stay relevant, too. They have to sell books. The more people who are advocating their strategies, the more their books will sell. It makes sense that they would want people to discuss and worry over marketing strategies for each book.
The problem is in our quest to sell books, we’ve forgotten the number one marketing strategy: write more books.
Q: What are you doing when you’re blogging, tweeting, and worrying about how to bring more traffic to your blog and hopefully through it to your books?
A: You’re not writing your next book.
I realize this advice sounds hypocritical coming from a blog post. Sue me. When my first book is ready, my second book will already be going through its first round of editing, because I want to write the series linearly and finish it while the story arc is still tight in my mind. Maybe I’ll start marketing after the third or fourth book.
My Blog Is for Everyone, But Mostly for Me
You know what? I’m going to come clean and admit it. I don’t mind controversy all that much. In fact, I thrive on a healthy dose of controversy. It keeps the mind open to other points of view.
While I have come to know a lot of blogging authors and care about their personal well-being, as a reader? I’m interested in their work. I admire Tamora Pierce, but I don’t regularly read her blog to find out what she eats for dinner unless I am writing about a character modeled after Tamora Pierce who happens to have a cooking scene in the story.
There is a healthy balance between the personal and the public sides of discourse. Use your experiences to tell an anecdote or story within a post about a larger topic. That way, readers can know who you are without feeling like they’re reading about a neighbor they see once a year.
Maybe I’m saying this because I detest the Cult of Personality and the culture of celebrity so much. I’d rather have people defend what I say because they agree with it than because they like my cooking tips. I am not my work, and my work is not all of who I am. We can disagree with someone’s politics and like their books (sometimes), and we should be able to give and receive criticism of our work without connecting that criticism to ourselves.
More than that, though, I believe that it’s okay to have a writing or industry oriented blog as a writer. My readers of my fiction will already have all the best marketing I can give them: my stories.
