A Tale of Two Book Covers (Part 2)

Sometimes you just can’t mess with a book cover. I mean, strictly speaking, yes, of course you can. You can always mess with a book cover, and the racks of used book stores are filled with horrid examples to prove the point. But this particular book cover…

This is the very expensive original artwork that Amazing Stories commissioned artist Phil Foglio to produce for the original magazine appearance of my story, “Jimi Plays Dead,” back in that wonderful but short-lived and terribly misguided period when Amazing was trying to ascend to the next level by becoming a full-sized “slick” magazine comparable to OMNI, complete with full-color interior illustrations throughout. I was given to understand that while the result was an absolutely beautiful magazine, newsstand sales never lived up to expectations, and TSR lost a sizable pile of money doing it.

Still, I do love this illo, to the extent that when the opportunity came up to buy the original art I did, and now have it hanging in my office. I particularly liked the clever way Phil worked his signature into the face of the amp and made it look like the old Peavey logo—except of course that Jimi Hendrix would (pardon the expression) never have been caught dead using a Peavey amp. He preferred Marshall amps, at least onstage.

Note: At the time I bought the original art, I of course also negotiated an agreement with Phil to use his art for a book cover. Remember, just because you own a physical piece of art, that does not necessarily mean you have the rights to use it for publication.  

So if we can’t mess with the cover art, what’s the next thing we can do to improve the presentation of the book on Amazon? Remember, for most people, their first look at this book is going to be a thumbnail, about the size of an S&H green stamp; a vaguely purplish and greenish blob, with a splash of white and red. So maybe the place to start is with the typography, to make the title bigger and clearer—and maybe I will do that, but not right now. Instead, let’s put this thumbnail in context.

There, this gives us a clearer idea of how people will first see this book: in the context of one of Amazon’s push-sell bars, either “Books in this series” or “People also bought” or something like that. And at this point I’m really wishing I’d taken a pile of screen captures before I began this exercise, to show you just how dull the original appearance was. All it showed was the cover thumbnail—even smaller, you’ll notice, as some of the real estate is occupied by the Kindle Unlimited banner—the title; the author’s name; the customer ratings—and there are only two of them, so there’s not much I can do about that right now—and the price.

Immediately, what jumps out is that the title is just a title, not a teaser. So the first thing I did was added a subtitle. What was simply Jimi Plays Dead is now, Jimi Plays Dead: Two Stories About Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll.  Immediately, the title is more engaging. Even truncated to the 40 characters Amazon allows in a thumbnail title, you learn more of what this book is about, and perhaps become slightly more interested in clicking the link. (Though that “2 customer ratings” remains a problem. We’ll have to work on that. But not now.)

Assuming you click the link, then, what do you see next?

 

Oh, that. And this is the point where I really wish I’d saved a “before” screen capture, because at this point the prospective reader sees the title, the subtitle, the ratings, a bit of pricing information, and just the top four lines of the book description—and let me tell you, the original book description was dull. It was just one gray monolithic block of text talking writer-to-writer about the conceptualzzzzzz…

Excuse me, I dozed off for a moment there. 

So I switched on my marketing persona, took a really hard look at that description, and thought: “Amazon is giving me about 4,000 characters in which to get people interested in this book and close the deal. They’re also giving me a rudimentary HTML editor. So what can I do with that?”

Well, first off, I’d better lead off with an opening that gets people engaged enough to click the “Read more” link and read the rest of the description. Then, I’d better tell them who the author is and why they should want to read this book. And then: Sales 101. Close the deal. Ask them to make the commitment to buy—and then shut up, stand back, and let them make their decision.

Putting the pieces together, then, I wrote this:

Remember 45 r.p.m. records? Remember how when you bought one, it was like rolling the dice? Sure, the "A" side was always the hit single you wanted, but the "B" side... who knew?

Here now for your entertainment are two stories by award-winning science fiction writer Bruce Bethke, packaged back-to-back together in a special "hit single" ebook. The "A" side is Jimi Plays Dead, Bethke's much-loved and Nebula-nominated story of the obsessed guitarist who will do anything to sound just exactly like Jimi Hendrix.

The "B" side, though—here's where you're taking a chance. Buck Turner and The Spud from Space is Bethke's published but forgotten tale of airports, garage bands, kids with dreams of making it big, and an alien who comes to Earth seeking intelligent life, but through an unfortunate miscalculation makes the mistake of landing near Hollywood. It is also, according to Bethke, who spent a decade in the music industry before he switched to writing fiction, at least partially absolutely true in places.

So the "A" side, Jimi Plays Dead: guaranteed smash hit, you'll love it. But the "B" side, Buck Turner and The Spud from Space: is it brilliant? Is it daft? Is it just begging to be optioned and turned into a low-budget movie?

Read it now and find out!

OVER TO YOU ►

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A Tale of Two Book Covers (Part 1)

I’ve been taking a really deep dive into marketing lately, to try to learn what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong, and where we can improve. The objective of Rampant Loon Press is to get people to buy and read books, after all. That’s our entire, fundamental, raison d'être. If people aren’t reading what we publish, nothing else we do matters.

And to be blunt, sales are a pretty damned good metric for measuring whether or not people are reading and enjoying what we publish. “Likes” and good reviews are all well and good, but numbers are what matter. And our sales numbers are not what I want them to be.

To improve our marketing, then, I have been sitting through a ghastly load of marketing webinars lately. I’ve already developed some pretty strong opinions on what makes for a good webinar. Most of them more honestly should be labeled infommercials, as they have about ten-percent useful content and ninety-percent saccharine enthusiastic fluff combined with pressure to upsell you to the next webinar, where the presenters promise to actually deliver all the information they’d said they were going to deliver in this webinar but didn’t. Fool me once…

Once in a while, though, I get into a webinar in which I learn some useful things and leave with some solid insight into what we’ve been doing wrong and how we can improve. Among other things, one of the areas in which I’ve realized I have been doing things really wrong is in our approach to cover art. 

For example, consider PRIVATEERS OF MARS. While I am not 100-percent satisfied with this art, I thought it got pretty close to the concept I thought would sell the book. If you read the book, this art suits it. The reviewers pretty much all got the concept: this is a sci-fi space western and a novella for people who still miss Firefly and Malcolm Reynolds. I think my favorite reviewer comment was that this book reads like three episodes of a really great TV series you wish someone would make.

If you read the book…

That’s the rub. The print edition makes a great artifact. If you were to see it on the racks in a bookstore somewhere, you’d probably want to pick it up and take a closer look. Once you skimmed page 1, you’d probably be hooked on the characters and the story and want to buy it.

A bookstore. How quaint. 

Unfortunately, here in the second decade of the 21st century most people will never get even close to a physical copy of the book, much less to clicking the Look Inside link. (Which by the way looks like complete crap. Amazon has changed the way they render Look Inside content again, so there’s another thing to fix.) The way most people will be exposed to the book will be in the form of a thumbnail, about this big.

What do you see? A brownish blob on a brownish background, with the word “Mars” as the only thing that’s readable? Not exactly enticing, is it? 

Now compare that to this mock-up cover, which I whipped together in about ten minutes using stock art. Between these two thumbnails, which one says “science fiction action/adventure” to you? Which one makes you somewhat more likely to click through to the Amazon sales page, to take a closer look at the book, and at that point, to finally see the opening line of our sales pitch?

Meet Jacob Rhys: scoundrel, brawler, gambler, drunk, and licensed privateer working for the Free Mars State—until the authorities on Ceres seized his ship…  

I liked the original cover. I liked working with the artist, to get a unique, commissioned piece of art that (mostly) represented what I thought would entice people to take a closer look at the book. 

But if I want to sell books in the reality of Amazon’s world, the cover is the first thing I need to change. Perhaps to something more like this: 

Go ahead. Click through. Never mind the “Look Inside” mess; it doesn’t look like that on my Kindle. (If you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber and it does look that bad for you, please, let me know.)

Cover art. Just one of the many things I’ve learned I need to change if we’re to improve sales and reach a bigger audience. Stay turned for more. 

—Bruce Bethke

 

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Econ 101: Opportunity Cost

 

There are plenty of people who are eager to tell you how to write. (Or more accurately, eager to sell you their book/program/webinar/master class/whatever that purports to teach you how to write an award-winning bestselling novel at home in your spare time, without all that messy trial-and-error and practice and learning by doing stuff.) There are almost as many people who are eager to tell you exactly what to write, or when to write, or why to write—

[Actually, that last one doesn’t seem to be a problem. Most successful writers I’ve known only started to wonder about why they wrote what they wrote after they were successful. When they were first starting out, for most of them writing was more of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. As one particularly well-known and award-winning author I knew put it, “Why do I write? Because I can’t not write.”]

Hmm. If the how, what, when, and why are already covered (and then some!), what else could I possibly teach you? How about… 

What not to write! There is an open niche! Now, how do I turn this into a two-hour webinar complete with slide deck and accompanying workbook and follow-on consulting services? Hmm again.

Wait. Whoa. Deep breath.

Somewhat more seriously: I will admit that I am sometimes tempted by the teaching path, from time to time. My parents were both teachers. I did a stint as a TA in college, and another stint teaching in a Federally funded arts grant program, which I’d rather forget. I do get offers to teach writing every once in a while, which usually are withdrawn in haste the moment the offering party discovers to their abject horror that I do not have at least an MFA in Creative Writing. [My God, how did this happen? He somehow managed to become an award-winning and world-famous writer without being properly nobbled and gelded by an accredited university English department! What went wrong?!?!?!]

But I digress. Which is precisely my point.

If I were to take something like a teaching position somewhere, in the English department of some backwater university or small-town college, I wouldn’t want to teach Creative Writing anyway. What I would want to teach would be something like ECON 101: Economics for English Majors. Because one of the things that was really drummed into my head while I was serving on the SFWA Board of Directors, and that has been reinforced by repeated experience ever since, is that most creative writers don’t have a flippin’ clue about how real economies actually work, on a macro scale, a micro scale, or anywhere in between. They can’t even balance their own checkbooks. 

Yet they continue to create fictional worlds in which human societies run on utter economic nonsense—Star Trek is particularly egregious in this regard—and then, if their fiction is successful, they presume to extend their fantastic notions into the real world. After all, it made perfect sense in their imagination.

It is charming, in a childish and naïve way. Sort of like the little kid who tells you he’s going to tie a big bunch of balloons together and fly away to the Moon.

_______________

So let’s begin a conversation about practical and tactical economics, as they apply to writers and publishers. My purpose in writing about these subjects is not to convert you into a Hayek-quoting Chicago School-believing free-market libertarian—Lord knows, we have enough of them in the SF field already—but to give you some insights into the changes we’re going to be making here at Rampant Loon Press and Stupefying Stories in the coming months. More importantly, I want to give you some ideas to think about as you develop your own writing career. 

First up, let’s consider a concept that has had a very direct impact on my own life and writing and publishing career, and thus on the fortunes of Rampant Loon Press, and which therefore has been very much on my mind lately: opportunity cost.

Opportunity cost is, to put it very simply, the cost of doing something expressed in terms of other opportunities not pursued. Every decision you make carries an opportunity cost, sometimes trivial and sometimes life-altering. Every time you choose to do something, you are also choosing not to do something else, and usually several other something elses. 

It seems obvious, right? When an opportunity presents itself, choosing whether or not to follow up on it should be an easy problem to solve. If I choose to do this, what else am I giving up? Except—

• Your resources—time, money, and energy—are finite. You will never have the resources to pursue every opportunity that comes along.
  
  
• You will always be making your decisions based on incomplete information.
  
  
• You will never know the true opportunity cost until after—sometimes long after—you have made a decision and chosen a path of action.
  
  
• Here’s the real headache: every writer’s basis for calculating opportunity cost is different. What seems like a reasonable opportunity cost for Writer A might be an absolutely catastrophic cost for Writer B.
  
  [We writers are, deep down, a highly competitive lot. Whether we admit it or not, we are always acutely aware of how well we are doing in comparison to Writer A. This comparison will drive you nuts if you let it, and there is probably at least one column that needs to be written on the subject of how Writer A’s skewed cost basis is changing the sort of fiction that is being written and published now. That is a topic for another day, but this differing cost basis is what makes it so difficult to teach you how to decide what’s right for you.]
  

Someday, if we’re lucky, the Rampant Loon Press story will be a case study in business school, and it will be a study in opportunity costs. It will be a ten-year saga of a small business that was always going off in six directions at once and trying to do too many things simultaneously with too few resources, because the founder (me) was always bubbling over with curiosity and treating the company as an experiment and an opportunity to learn new things, and not as a business. It had some resounding successes, and some flops so bad they augured in and left smoking holes in the ground, because the one thing the founder didn’t bother to learn was how to make his successes repeatable, because he was systemically incapable of resisting fascinating opportunities and interesting digressions!

So that’s my job for the next six months: to learn how to better calculate my opportunity costs, and thus to learn how to resist the siren songs of fascinating digressions and focus on the RLP projects that have a very high probability of marketplace success. 

Hang on tight. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

—Bruce Bethke

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Blundering into Twitter

 

I’ve avoided Twitter for years, in part because the entire twittersphere seems to have the intellectual depth of a spinner rack loaded with competing bumper stickers, but mostly because in the early years of the thing I watched several good friends—novelists all, successful, best-selling novelists who had no trouble writing brilliant and well-received 200K-word books—reduced to babbling fountains of gibberish by the thing. One in particular used to send a wonderfully written 4-page letter to all her friends every Christmas, summarizing what had happened that year in her personal and professional lives and filled with uplifting and inspirational thoughts for the coming year.  

In her last few years she replaced that with a “Best of Twitter” letter that recapped her favorite Tweets of the year. Frankly, it read like the sort of incoherent word salad produced by people suffering from serious closed-head injuries.

Nonetheless, it seems we must come to grips with Twitter if we are to grow our audience. Several years ago Eric Dontigney created a RampantLoonMedia twitter account, which people seem to have trouble finding. One thing I don’t understand just yet: should I be telling people to “Follow us on Twitter @ RampantLoonMedia,” or “Follow us on Twitter @loon_media?” RampantLoonMedia seems to be the page; @loon_media would seem to be the author name attached to each post, just as ~BRB is attached to most posts on this site. 

Or am I completely misunderstanding the argot of twitterpatedspace? 

Meanwhile, to further confuse things, I created a Stupefying Stories account this morning, then noticed that space characters don’t seem to exist in the twittersphere, so I also created a StupefyingStories account.

Now I’m confused. How do I phrase the invitation? “Follow us on Twitter—[choose one of the following]?”

a.) @ Stupefying Stories

b.) @StupefyingS

c.) @ StupefyingStories

c.) @StupefyingStor1

d.) @ RampantLoonMedia

e.) @loon_media

More caffeine. Definitely, this situation calls for more caffeine. 

—Bruce Bethke

UPDATE: They’re all wrong. The correct answer is @StupefyingSF, or to use the fully qualified URL, https://twitter.com/StupefyingSF

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Notes towards a manifesto • 1

 

Truth be told, I don’t miss SF/F cons. I used to attend quite a few of them, not because I enjoyed the experience so much as because I felt it was a necessary thing to do to help promote my writing career. Doing a con always left me feeling drained, though.

At first I attributed it to the travel schedule, the late hours, and, let’s be honest, the drinking. Did you know that when you are a semi-famous science fiction writer, the fans will provide you with all the alcohol you can possibly drink? There was this one particular WorldCon where I ended up in a private party with a bunch of Japanese fans, who decided the author of “Cyberpunk” really needed to learn how to drink sake the right way, and he needed to keep practicing until he got the hang of it…

Decades later, the memory of my hangover the next morning still gives me a headache.

Eventually, though, after eliminating the drinking and trying to change all the other variables and still not fixing the problem, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t the travel, the hours, or the overindulging: it was the con experience itself that I found exhausting. It was the having to be on, for hours on end and days at a time, all the entire while that I was at the con. 

My epiphany came when I once again found myself talking to a bunch of aspiring writers about how I made the transition from being a musician to being a writer, and how the great thing about writing fiction is that you don’t have to book a venue and rehearse and perform your stories. As a musician I loved working in the recording studio; I could spend hours in the studio trying to get the perfect three minutes down on tape and at the end of the session feel completely energized by the experience. But at the same time, I came to realize that I hated performing in front of a live audience, because no matter how well it went, the experience always left me feeling keyed up, while at the same time disappointed and drained.

Ooh. Little light bulb suspended in mid-air over head flicks on. When I’m at a con, I’m not being me. I’m on a sort of a stage, performing the role of Bruce Bethke®, Semi-Famous Sci-Fi Writer, for the duration of the con. That’s why I can never seem to get the con over with and get out of there fast enough. 

¤     ¤     ¤

There are introverts and extroverts, and people who land in all kinds of different places along the spectrum. Generally I’m an introvert, as are most writers, but I’m that odd duck that psychologists label an outgoing introvert. I can switch it on and fake being an extrovert, for a few hours, but the transformation burns a lot of energy and all too often I wind up waking up the next morning in the wolf pen at the local zoo, wondering how the Hell I got there.

So, here’s an unexpected benefit of the COVID-19 pandemic: it’s pretty much killed off the con scene. As an adaptation people have begun holding virtual cons, using various sorts of Internet teleconferencing software, and now that I’ve done a few of them, I find them a vast improvement. I’d be happy to do more.

Admittedly, as you can see from the photo, my current teleconferencing setup looks a bit… silly. I do have a really first-class HD web cam, but it hogs a lot of bandwidth. By putting this laptop on top of a stack of disused monitor stands I instead put the laptop’s good-enough camera at eye-level, thus avoiding that chronic crick in the neck I get whenever I have the laptop at desk height, and as an unexpected bonus I get remarkably good audio quality. I did a series of test recordings using various headsets—I have six or seven of them, I think—and was very surprised to find that I got the best voice quality from the laptop’s built-in mic. 

Hmm. Maybe I don’t need to buy that USB mic I was eyeing up after all. Darn. I love new toys.

¤     ¤     ¤

My most recent virtual meeting was with the Chalk Scribblers, a writer’s group based in London, and it was done using Google Meet, a platform I’d not used before but that I found worked much better than Zoom. I had an interesting time, and they asked a lot of good questions, some of which caught me flat-footed and thus remained stuck in my mind and provoked further thought. For example, one writer asked if I had any suggestions for how to maintain a work/life balance.

Honestly, that’s something I’ve never been much good at. I’ve always been a sort of work/work person, who has a great deal of trouble switching off Bruce Bethke® long enough to just relax and enjoy life.

And that, as I thought about it more, became my suggestion: 

Throw out all that stuff you were taught in school about finding your “inner voice” and expressing the real you and all that. Adopt a pseudonym. View your writing career as a piece of performance art. Perform the character of Famous Writer You®. Create a strong barrier between Writer You and Real You, so that you can stop performing that character 24x7.

Remember, Writer You is a greedy parasite, and if you don’t find a way to keep it safely sealed up inside a terrarium, eventually it will devour all of your time and energy, leaving nothing left for anyone else in your life. 

Submitted for your consideration,

—Bruce Bethke

_________________________________________

 

SEX! DRUGS! ALIENS! ROCK ‘N’ ROLL! ALL THIS AND MORE FOR JUST $0.99, OR FREE FOR KINDLE UNLIMITED SUBSCRIBERS!

JIMI PLAYS DEAD

b/w “Buck Turner and The Spud from Space”

 Exclusively on Kindle  (for now)

 

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Assertions and Observations • 2

This is the future of fiction publishing. Seriously.

Whoever figures out how to make in-book purchases work is going to make a fortune.

I’m going to skip over a whole lot of research and case-building and begin with the conclusion. If it seems necessary I will backfill later, if I must, but the key points are these:

» I love books. Some of my best friends are books. But books, as you know them, are ancient artifacts. I won’t say they’re doomed—that’s far too dramatic—but they are headed towards becoming an evolutionary dead-end, purchased only by libraries, schools, and dilettantes.

» The people you need to be selling content to, if you are going to develop and grow your audience, are under 35 at the oldest and more likely under 30. These people will buy and read books, if the subject interests them, but it’s not their first choice for how to spend their entertainment dollars. Or second. Or probably even in the top ten.

» The crucial point to remember is that these people are digital natives. They have never known a world without social media or streaming video. An alien observer might conclude that they are cyborgs, with a large portion of their intelligence offloaded into their phones and information from the global hive mind being streamed into their minds as needed through their earbuds and tiny screens.

» While digital natives can read if they must, and will watch non-interactive movies from time to time, albeit usually in a social context, their primary sense of narrative and story has been formed by playing video games.

So let’s consider: what precisely is a novel? Three-hundred-some pages of prose printed on pulp paper, with a lurid full-cover cover and a self-contained story arc? A few hundred kilobytes of data on a hand-held device, that seeks to replicate the print-book experience in a more portable but more ephemeral form factor?

No. It’s a gateway into the world of the story.

¤

Writers like to believe that their fans are their fans. We can argue about it later, but the evidence is pretty clear. People who consume fiction content are overwhelmingly fans of:

1.) the world of the story

2.) one or more prominent (and usually heroic) characters in this world

3.) the person whose vision created this world (a.k.a., the “Producer” or “Director”)

4.) the people who actually wrote the parts of the story they like (a.k.a., the “Content Developers”)

So forget about “taking the novel into the 21st Century” or any of that fatuous and pretentious nonsense. In fact, forget about the novel, period.

The serious money lies in owning and building the map of the world.

No, not “world building,” as fiction writers tend of think of it, and definitely not in drawing actual maps, even though we all grew up entranced by the maps in The Lord of The Rings, to the point where for a time it seemed impossible to find a fantasy novel that did not have a map in the front matter.

What I’m talking about here is a cognitive map, and it must be dynamic, expandable, and above all, something readers can interact with. If you’re familiar with software, think of it as being like the map of the help system for a software product that’s still evolving. If you’re familiar with gaming, think of it as the map you might develop as you’re exploring a dungeon.

Except there is no fixed end point to the adventure.

Here’s where in-book purchasing comes into play. For a base price, you will buy the bare-bones framework of a “book,” and if you want to read that and just that, it will take you in a fairly linear way to a conclusion that is sufficiently satisfactory to make you want to look at buying the 2.0 version when it comes out. But remember: the linear, bare-bones book is only the gateway into the world of the story.

And the story never really ends.

There’s a secondary character you find interesting? For a small price, you can unlock extra content and go off on a branch that follows her story. There’s a place in the story that you found more interesting than the characters you’re following did? For a small price, you can unlock extra content and go off on a side quest. You wish you could hear the music that the writer is describing in the ballroom scene? For a small price...

You get the idea? A “book” is no longer a self-contained linear narrative with a story arc and a beginning, middle, and end. It’s a map of an imaginary world that grows organically over time, and seamlesssly crosses over into audio, video, animation, graphic novel, social media, and fanfic.

That's right. Fanfic. In addition to buying extra content, your readers will be able to earn extra content, and even to contribute extra content. At the simplest level: solve a puzzle; reveal hidden extra content. Actively participate in the social media side: earn extra content. At a higher level: write a piece of fan fic, and if it’s good enough to be accepted as canon, earn a lot of extra content credits. Write a piece of fanfic that attracts enough loyal readers, and it can become a new development branch and you too can join the team as a co-developer of The Story That Never Ends.

¤

The mechanism for purchasing extra content needs a bit of finesse. People balk at spending actual cash to buy in-game content, and paying your fanfic developers in negotiable currency introduces ugly accounting and tax issues. Instead, you’ll conduct all transactions in in-game tokens—

No, not tokens. Amazon has made a mistake by calling their Vella transactional units “tokens.” That smacks of Chuck E. Cheese. The units of exchange must be part of the game. If you go into the bookworld of something like Star Wars, you’ll use your dollars or Euros to buy the “Imperial credits” you’ll use for all subsequent in-book transactions. In something like the bookworld Star Trek, you’ll use “Federation credits.” And if you want to take your credits with you when you change bookworlds, you’ll need to go through the Ferengi Interplanetary Exchange Bank to convert your currency… for a small price…

¤

As should be obvious by now, this is a huge project. There is no single “author” anymore. No one person could possibly create it all or continue to create fresh content. You will need a Producer to be in charge of running it; a design team to create the initial expandable map of the world; a core team of Content Developers to create and maintain the initial content, with sufficient redundancy to keep the thing from falling apart if key people quit. Different parts will need to be written by different authors, just by virtue of the sheer volume of content that will need to be produced. As I said, no one person could possibly do this—

Except me. I could do it—if I had nothing else to do, and about a half-million in seed capital to lay the groundwork and turn the vision into a serious project plan and a working prototype.

Now, who’s ready to invest?    

—Bruce Bethke

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Assertions and Observations

As threatened promised, here’s some of what I’ve learned from my deep dive into publishing market research. In no particular order and with no apologies for any overt cynicism:

• Children love stories. They love to have stories told to them, they love to have stories read to them, and as they grow up, they love to learn to read stories by themselves. If you have never seen the joy on a child’s face that comes when they realize they can read a story all by themselves, I feel sorry for you.

• But then, something goes wrong. By the time most children graduate from high school, they have had the joy of reading beaten completely out of them. As a writer, there is nothing you can do to change that. For a long time I believed there was something I as a publisher could do to try to change that, but I’ve since regained my sanity. The problem is systemic.

• Those few young people whose love of reading survives high school will have it further warped in college, by being repeatedly bludgeoned over the head with “important” literature to the point where they are nearly incapable of reading fiction for pleasure. 

• And then real life kicks in, and what free time they used to have for reading for pleasure is dramatically curtailed. They develop a sort of critical tunnel vision. By the time the reader is in their 30s, it’s almost impossible to get them to look at new fiction unless it promises to deliver exactly the same experience that they already know they will enjoy.

• The universe is not making any more readers your age. In fact, there are fewer people your age every day.

• There is usually a good reason why “they don’t write ‘em like that anymore.” Typically it’s because no one reads ‘em like that any more.The problem is compounded by the fact that literature is durable. Those dwindling numbers of readers who really do want to read old Heinlein juveniles can go back to their dog-eared copy of Rocket Ship Galileo any time they like. Or get it on Kindle, if they need a large-print edition.

• The book-buying and book-reading population is in constant churn. New potential customers are coming into the market and old readers are aging out of it every day. 

• The new readers coming into the market every day are shaped by their culture, not yours. They really don’t give a fig about what you liked to read when you were growing up.

• The sweet spot, such as it is, is readers between their early teens to their early thirties. After age 30, getting their interest is exponentially more difficult as they get older, unless you want to produce fiction product that promises to deliver a pre-sold entertainment experience they’re certain to enjoy.

• Therefore, your target market is people who have come of age in the past twenty years, at the outside—or to define some boundaries, between the inauguration of Bush the Younger and the end of the Trump presidency. To them, the Clinton presidency is ancient history, and anything before that is simply out of their realm of experience.

To be continued...

 

  

 

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