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| SFReader Forums > Writing > Small Press vs. Big House > Small Press Strategies | Forum Quick Jump
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Daniel
Carl Jung's Waterboy
      
Date Joined Aug 2003
Total Posts : 4515
| Posted 5/31/2007 3:13 PM (GMT -5) |   | | Although promotion and advertising are two of the most important components of small press suvivability, content also plays a very large role in making or beaking a small press venture.
I've been giving a great deal of thought to how new readers might be drawn to the SF small press and what kind of tactics might be used in the assembling of content (outside of notions of pure concept and/or theme). Below is a short list of ideas I thought might prove fruitful for discussion.
1. Making more noise about small press writers. This means, a small press venture might explore the potential gain in promoting writers as intensively as they do the writer's work. This is a model I've drawn from non-fiction book publicity which stresses author name, bio, and expertise above and beyond what I have ever seen in fiction. I wouldn't envision *every* fiction writer in a small press stable to perform in this fashion, but having one or more authors who can really make NOISE and not only about themselves as *writers* but nosie about their beliefs and ideas and even eccentricities might be helpful Every other media genre does this: Hollywood, Radio, sports, fashion, politics....
2. Providing a good dose of non-fiction and illustrative content to "sugar coat" the fiction. If I were running a small press SF magazine or e-zine today, I would make the ratio of non-fiction to fiction at least 3 to 1. Why? Because publishing short fiction attracts *writers* but not general readers. I think the general public has lost its tolerance for short ficiton adn they have to be *weaned*(or is that weened?!) back onto it.
3. Shorter stories. More action less "style." This last bit is self-evident: any writer with a decent style has it naturally; anyone affecting "style" hasn't got it yet and won't get it easily by aping someone else's technique. What many aspiring writers care about is technique and style. What *readers* care about is: character. Period. And gadgets and cool worlds and interesting tech and conflicts and sex and violence, etc but mostly they care about character.
4. Less "writerly" feel; to publications and websites in the SF field. Right now when you cruise around the SF small press it only takes about 2 seconds to figure out that writers have a stranglehold on the proceedings. Too many SF editors small and "prestige" (myself included) get caught up in the pro-dialogues and discussions and issue all sorts of guidelines and writer-editor banter in public. I think this just turns off anyone who might have an interst in the proceedings otherwise.
5. Fake it till you make it. This means if you are a SF editor start ACTING right now this very instant as though you no longer need to publicize ourself to wrirters (because if you are listed in a market guide somewhere you don't!) and start acting as though the general public *is* interested in what you are doing. Choose fiction which is risk-heavy and promote the heck out of it.
6. Tie-in to trends. Nobody does it. Everyone should. That means *trend* and that is something not probably 50 years ago but more like 50 minutes ago. Make of that what you will! It can be done!
Just some thoughts; I'd love to hear what others think on these issues.
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kaolin fire
Magazine Frontman
Date Joined Apr 2007
Total Posts : 289
| Posted 6/1/2007 4:27 AM (GMT -5) | | This means if you are a SF editor start ACTING right now this very instant as though you no longer need to publicize ourself to wrirters
I can't imagine someone needing to publicize themselves to writers, except insofar as they're a large segment of the eventual readers. We've been flooded with submissions from the day we opened.
Choose fiction which is risk-heavy and promote the heck out of it.
Hell yeah. :)
As for the rest, it's kind of funny (and kind of depressing), but GUD's "thing" is swinging almost entirely the other direction. We don't want to be populist--we know we have a small, ever so small, market. But we believe our market is out there in enough numbers to make it viable--the market of people who want the language attended to as if it were every bit as important as the story, and vice versa. Outside of the "literary" market, I really don't have the sense that people care about language much--and inside it, you're lucky if there's an arc of any sort. ((yes, these are broad generalizations, but ... this is what I'm getting at ... they are to some reasonable extent true; and I'm speaking mostly short-form fiction, as I think the shortness of the form exacerbates the split)). What we're hoping to find is the crowd of people seeing something lacking both in traditional genre and traditional literary shortform works (besides length!).
GUD would _love_ to publish more non-fiction, really (but not "trend" stuff--we publish too slowly, for one; and we want more the shelf-life of respected anthologies than that of a typical trend magazine). Actually, that's one spot where we haven't been getting a glut of submissions--we haven't found the right hangouts to solicit from, perhaps--and we probably haven't made clear enough what we'd like to see. What I'd really like to get is something that could be declared a thesis, or something distilled and generalized (but not too much) from such. Or articles giving "our crowd" a deeper understanding of "other" things. Or something. I should be working on _other things_ myself, right now, and my brain is feeling sluggish.
This is a topic near and dear to my heart, though. I'm all for more discussion.
Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazine - literary + genre fiction, poetry, art, and articles
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Nicholas
Sage
Date Joined Jun 2006
Total Posts : 1041
| Posted 6/7/2007 1:53 AM (GMT -5) | |
kaolin fire said...
the market of people who want the language attended to as if it were every bit as important as the story, and vice versa. Outside of the "literary" market, I really don't have the sense that people care about language much--and inside it, you're lucky if there's an arc of any sort. ((yes, these are broad generalizations, but ... this is what I'm getting at ... they are to some reasonable extent true; and I'm speaking mostly short-form fiction, as I think the shortness of the form exacerbates the split)). What we're hoping to find is the crowd of people seeing something lacking both in traditional genre and traditional literary shortform works (besides length!
Kaolin, there is a champion out there preaching for this balance of story value and literary/language finesse. His name is Michael Chabon. He's pretty famous as a mainstream novelist--The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001--but he has edited a couple anthologies that purposefully selected writers who were trying to tell corking good stories, as writers did back before Joyce was christened supreme in the twentieth century literary pantheon. Nor does Chabon shy away from genre motifs--ghost stories, supernatural adventure, fantasy. Those anthos, McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales and McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories should be on GUD's bookshelf, if they aren't already, if only for the introduction in which he decries most modern fiction as consisting almost exclusively of "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story."
An indication that he is being heard is the fact that he was chosen to edit the 2005 Best American Short Stories.
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kaolin fire
Magazine Frontman
Date Joined Apr 2007
Total Posts : 289
| Posted 6/7/2007 2:08 AM (GMT -5) | | | | |
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Nicholas
Sage
Date Joined Jun 2006
Total Posts : 1041
| Posted 6/7/2007 3:19 AM (GMT -5) | | | | |
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kaolin fire
Magazine Frontman
Date Joined Apr 2007
Total Posts : 289
| Posted 6/7/2007 3:40 AM (GMT -5) | | | | |
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Nicholas
Sage
Date Joined Jun 2006
Total Posts : 1041
| Posted 6/7/2007 2:03 PM (GMT -5) | | |
Ahh! I recognize it now--it's been years since I read the Hitchhiker's "trilogy," all five of them. :)
The fact that Chabon, a Pulitzer Prize recipient, did a reading for the Speculative Literature Foundation, I guess just says it all. Someone with literary cred without the anti-genre snobbery.
I haven't researched this, but I've heard enough critics' rants against contemporary fantasy, horror, and other speculative writers to start harboring a suspicion: Do you notice that when they decry a current fantasy or horror writer, many of these critics will denigrate the work by comparing it to past works of speculative fiction? They'll say some variant of "He's no Poe or Lovecraft," "She's no Tolkien or Le Guin," etc. In an underhanded manner, they are ELEVATING those past works---which, when those works were new, generally received the same shabby treatment from the critical establishment.
http://ozment.livejournal.com
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kaolin fire
Magazine Frontman
Date Joined Apr 2007
Total Posts : 289
| Posted 6/7/2007 4:24 PM (GMT -5) | | | | |
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Nicholas
Sage
Date Joined Jun 2006
Total Posts : 1041
| Posted 6/8/2007 2:21 PM (GMT -5) | | | | |
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kaolin fire
Magazine Frontman
Date Joined Apr 2007
Total Posts : 289
| Posted 6/8/2007 2:23 PM (GMT -5) | | | | |
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Laura Stamps
Neophyte
Date Joined Jun 2007
Total Posts : 134
| Posted 6/8/2007 4:35 PM (GMT -5) | |
kaolin fire said...--the market of people who want the language attended to as if it were every bit as important as the story, and vice versa. Outside of the "literary" market, I really don't have the sense that people care about language much--and inside it, you're lucky if there's an arc of any sort. ((yes, these are broad generalizations, but ... this is what I'm getting at ... they are to some reasonable extent true; and I'm speaking mostly short-form fiction, as I think the shortness of the form exacerbates the split)). What we're hoping to find is the crowd of people seeing something lacking both in traditional genre and traditional literary shortform works (besides length!). This is a topic near and dear to my heart, though. I'm all for more discussion.
Bravo! I am a small press literary novelist and poet and also a small press publisher of my own novels and poetry books (although some are published by other small presses when they approach me about it). I am always having this discussion in the book groups and forums I belong to...the shrinking value of language in genre fiction. And IMHO it seems to simply be a matter of focus. Genre novels seem to major in action-driven plots and often the characterization suffers. Lit novels tend to major in character-driven plots, and sometimes you have a strong plot line, and sometimes you don't. I personally don't require a strong plot-line. I'm looking for a good ride. That can mean the character is developed throughout the novel, and that moves the plot along. Or it could mean the language is fantastic. I adore novelists who write with a poet's ear, a love for the music in words. I am always grateful I started out in this business as a poet, because it is a ruthless discipline that teaches you to write tightly and musically. Can't get any better than that, I think! :)
I would also love to discuss this further. Marketing small press fantasy fiction is near and dear to my heart as well. I have been in business for 19 years and have never seen so many drastic changes occur in the marketplace as in the last 3 years. It seems everything we used to do to market books doesn't work anymore, so we scramble to make changes and keep up. It's been a crazy time, although for me this year has been very good. With the postal increase coming I have gone from a print catalog and direct mail mailings every week and classified ads in print mags to 99.9% online marketing and selling through my website. Lots of changes that have taken me almost a year to complete (and I'm still tweaking!), but I can see progress this year, and my bottom line looks soooooo much better than it did when all this craziness started.
How about you? How have other small press fantasy publishers been coping with such a rapidly changing marketplace.
Laura Stamps
"Magickal Urban Fantasy Novels"
Kittyfeather Press
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kaolin fire
Magazine Frontman
Date Joined Apr 2007
Total Posts : 289
| Posted 6/9/2007 11:36 PM (GMT -5) | | I haven't really been in the business very long--helped with a magazine several years ago that went under (I didn't have much control over anything that went on with that, but it was a good learning experience). GUD is sort of a reaction to that, and what I and a few friends didn't like about it.
As far as marketing goes, though, GUD is my baby, and I do anything and everything I can to get it "out there". Mostly that involves chatting people up online, the odd ads in other mags (we don't do this enough, but printing + contributor costs come first), and ... doing reviews and holding raffles to bring people to the site. There's a tiny bit of monetization in ads on the site, but since the magazine content isn't free there isn't much draw there. Still, we're building reviews... and making connections... and people keep telling me it takes time and persistence. The persistence I've got. :)
Our bottom line is a gaping black hole, at the moment. We'd expected about the current uptake in hardcopy, but significantly more uptake in PDF.
Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazine - literary + genre fiction, poetry, art, and articles
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PK Lentz
Neophyte
Date Joined Jun 2007
Total Posts : 102
| Posted 6/20/2007 2:52 AM (GMT -5) | | Speaking not as anyone involved in small press but as a reader and a writer shopping a novel, I can mention a couple of key mistakes a great many small presses seem to make.
1) Poor or no investment in covers. Too many seem to treat them as afterthoughts. It may be unfair, but when I see a fantasy/SF cover that looks, at best, like something a metalhead would have airbrushed on his van circa 1984, I assume that the work within is probably amateurish as well. (Again, I know that's unfair). Quality within is important, but equally important to staying in business is making sure people KNOW there is quality within. Maybe you can't compete with the industry giants, but you can try your best to make your products look like theirs at first glance.
My recommendation (again, sans experience) would be to actively seek out (easy in this day and age) a suitable finished work already in existence and pay the artist a licensing fee, rather than calling for submissions, commissioning a piece, or producing it in-house. I don't know how much licensing fees are for semi-pro level genre art; I suppose they vary greatly, but if one thing can pay for itself in increased sales, IMO, it's a great cover. Oh, and in no case should you ever use a stock font that comes with Windows for the title and author's name! Contrary to some beliefs, the cover is perhaps more important in the electronic age than it was before, as now a customer typically sees a cover almost instantly, without even taking the effort to pull the book from the shelf.
2) The book's Amazon listing has no reviews... I'm 100% in favor of the underground over the mainstream, but sorry: if a book is ranked number 2 million on Amazon, I've never heard of the author, and there are no reviews, I'm 99% likely to breeze right by. Unless the title and description are the most fascinating, original things I've ever heard, I'm probably not going to take the time to Google for more info, as there are just too many other books out there. My solution would be to send out loads of free copies to volunteers, found easily on forums like this one, with the following condition: if you don't like it, keep it and do nothing; thanks for your time. If you can say something good and honestly rate it 3 stars or higher, please write a short review on Amazon. This isn't asking anyone to lie, nor is it bribery IMO. (I should add that the author bears responsibility here, too, and should make sure his/her Amazon listing works in his/her favor.)
This has probably all come up before. If anyone takes it for ranting, it's only because it's frustrating to see good work get buried for reasons that have nothing to do with the work. And, as a writer, it's frustrating to have to dismiss a press out of fear that the end product will not be something I can be proud of. | | Back to Top | | |
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kaolin fire
Magazine Frontman
Date Joined Apr 2007
Total Posts : 289
| Posted 6/20/2007 3:03 AM (GMT -5) | | PKL said...
1) Poor or no investment in covers. Too many seem to treat them as afterthoughts. It may be unfair, but when I see a fantasy/SF cover that looks, at best, like something a metalhead would have airbrushed on his van circa 1984, I assume that the work within is probably amateurish as well. (Again, I know that's unfair). Quality within is important, but equally important to staying in business is making sure people KNOW there is quality within. Maybe you can't compete with the industry giants, but you can try your best to make your products look like theirs at first glance.
My recommendation (again, sans experience) would be to actively seek out (easy in this day and age) a suitable finished work already in existence and pay the artist a licensing fee, rather than calling for submissions, commissioning a piece, or producing it in-house. I don't know how much licensing fees are for semi-pro level genre art; I suppose they vary greatly, but if one thing can pay for itself in increased sales, IMO, it's a great cover. Oh, and in no case should you ever use a stock font that comes with Windows for the title and author's name! Contrary to some beliefs, the cover is perhaps more important in the electronic age than it was before, as now a customer typically sees a cover almost instantly, without even taking the effort to pull the book from the shelf.
Agreed, thoroughly. I can't help but judge a book first by its cover--if someone has no clue what's aesthetic or gripping visually, I expect them to have less clue writerly as well.
PKL said...
2) The book's Amazon listing has no reviews... I'm 100% in favor of the underground over the mainstream, but sorry: if a book is ranked number 2 million on Amazon, I've never heard of the author, and there are no reviews, I'm 99% likely to breeze right by. Unless the title and description are the most fascinating, original things I've ever heard, I'm probably not going to take the time to Google for more info, as there are just too many other books out there. My solution would be to send out loads of free copies to volunteers, found easily on forums like this one, with the following condition: if you don't like it, keep it and do nothing; thanks for your time. If you can say something good and honestly rate it 3 stars or higher, please write a short review on Amazon. This isn't asking anyone to lie, nor is it bribery IMO. (I should add that the author bears responsibility here, too, and should make sure his/her Amazon listing works in his/her favor.)
Interesting point. :)
GUD would be posting more reviews on Amazon but you apparently have to buy something through Amazon first, and we've had no cause to do so besides wanting to post reviews. :/
And getting ourselves on Amazon is at the moment too expensive.
But we've got reviews on the site--how much would you say those count for?
Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazine - literary + genre fiction, poetry, art, and articles
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PK Lentz
Neophyte
Date Joined Jun 2007
Total Posts : 102
| Posted 6/20/2007 4:52 AM (GMT -5) | | kaolin fire said...
And getting ourselves on Amazon is at the moment too expensive.
But we've got reviews on the site--how much would you say those count for?
I was thinking more in terms of novels and collections, as zines are something of a different beast. Google a zine, and the top match will likely be its own website; Google a book and your top match tends not to be the publisher's or author's site, but its Amazon listing -- meaning that's what's getting the most page views. Bottom line, I suppose, is that you want your good press to be where the traffic is.
As a customer, I obviously tend to trust opinions on a 3rd party site more than a site controlled by the writer/publisher. But again, they are different beasts. With small press books you're often talking about a $15+ commitment, with no discount, for a single work which is either hit or miss. With a short fiction mag, you shell out less and get a variety of material.
But now I've descended into random thoughts. There are just too many factors to consider...
EDIT: I should add that GUD looks "good" cover-wise; clearly it's meant to appeal to genre readers as well as people who think genre is for kiddies. | | Back to Top | | |
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kaolin fire
Magazine Frontman
Date Joined Apr 2007
Total Posts : 289
| Posted 6/20/2007 4:55 AM (GMT -5) | | | | |
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kaolin fire
Magazine Frontman
Date Joined Apr 2007
Total Posts : 289
| Posted 6/20/2007 5:05 AM (GMT -5) | | | | |
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Laura Stamps
Neophyte
Date Joined Jun 2007
Total Posts : 134
| Posted 6/20/2007 1:17 PM (GMT -5) | | |
Amazon did a nasty last year, and kicked all of its reviewers off the site (and won't let us back on to review) unless they buy the books from Amazon. I was one of them. Makes me laugh, because one of my publishers has that book listed on Amazon, so I am an Amazon Author, meaning I have a plog on there too, BUT I am blocked from being a reviewer, because I don't buy my books at Amazon.
Really shows you Amazon is clueless about how reviewing works. Most of the Pagan or dark urban fantasy novels I review are given to me by the authors. That is generally how it works. Others I bought myself at my local bookstore.
Clueless even more so, because Amazon obviously must not realize how much stock buyers put in those reviews. How funny! So before you start handing out your books randomly in the hopes of scoring Amazon reviews, make sure those people have bought books from Amazon. Otherwise they will be unable to post a review on that site.
Laura Stamps
"Magickal Urban Fantasy Novels (Collectible, small press, signed editions)"
Kittyfeather Press
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PK Lentz
Neophyte
Date Joined Jun 2007
Total Posts : 102
| Posted 6/21/2007 2:18 AM (GMT -5) | | Yeah, I can see how Amazon would have to be careful with this. But basically you just have to buy any book(s), not the actual one you're reviewing, right? As DA says, I think that's actually more to prove that you're a real person than to drum up business.
It happens on IMDB, as well. I've come across some Sci-Fi Channel original movies which get awful reviews, but the first 1 or 2 (usually posted before the air date) make it sound like the best thing since Star Wars. Pretty obvious what's going on. | | Back to Top | | |
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