Innovative PR in SF/Fantasy

by Rose Fox -- Publishers Weekly, 4/3/2006

Science fiction and fantasy authors make their living pushing envelopes. It's no surprise that many of them are forging new paths in their promotional efforts as well as their fiction.

One approach is to offer online collateral to printed works. Jeff VanderMeer, whose blog drew the attention of editors and eventually landed him a publishing contract, is the leader of the pack here. "I really believe in what I like to call 'organic PR,'" he says, "which is to say, PR that can stand alone as a creative endeavor and only incidentally ratchets up interest in my work. This is the best kind of PR because I learn something creatively from doing it, it's more fun for the fans of my fiction, and it's also so much more fun for me to do." He's developing a ten-minute film that will be based on a forthcoming book and free to download from his Web site, and emphasizes that "it's not a 'movie trailer' for the book. It's just going to be a cool video that people will want to watch." His promotions and collateral are so extensive that Bantam Books is pointing their banner ads for another upcoming release to his site rather than to their own.

Canadian YA fantasist Maggie Wood has an array of Web site features geared towards teenage girls, including a book club and monthly giveaways of Wood's handmade dolls. "Each month, I offer one first prize of a faerie doll and one second prize of a book to my Book Club members," she says. "As second prize, I also offer as choices other YA books besides mine (as most of my members have already read my book), and I review YA books that I've read. The only thing they have to do is register with their email address, name, age and province/state, and this allows their name to be entered into my prize draws each month. If they want to better their chances they can send me book reviews, short stories, poems or artwork. I publish all their submissions and will put their name into the draw again for each submission they send me. Most kids are very excited to see their work displayed on a Web site."

John Scalzi has developed his Web site's readership from fifty daily visitors in 1998 to between twelve and twenty thousand today, and he points out that teens aren't the only ones who want to feel they've made a contribution. "People frequently come to blogs to read what the blog owner writes but stay because they're taking parting in a conversation in the comment thread," he says. "A successful blog writer has to lay an enticing table, so to speak, of good and varied entry topics, so that people will hang around and join in." Longtime blogger and copyright reform activist Cory Doctorow, who frequently displays and lauds fan-created covers for his books, agrees: "The one thing that's hard to substitute for is that personal relationship. You're conducting a conversation with a million people."

Readers aren't the only target audience for these writers. Scalzi sold one book to Tor and another to Subterranean Press after editors saw the chapters he posted on his site. Another success story is Cherie Priest, whose writing life turned around when a popular blogger promoted her small-press debut and it caught the attention of a Tor editor, who ended up reprinting it. "Living in Chattanooga, Tennessee," says Priest, "it's been easy to feel left out of the publishing world. But the Internet helps bridge that distance; it allows me to participate in forums, chats, groups and other collective events that I'd otherwise be forced to miss. And this, in turn, leads to the sorts of connections that get my book reviewed in independent magazines, book clubs, and literary sites. The networking power of the Internet is immeasurable."

Some publishers are selling books by giving them away. The pioneer here is Baen Books, who maintain an unencrypted electronic library of everything they publish. Tor Books recently announced that they will be adopting this system, a strong vote in favor of an idea that originally incurred much industry skepticism. Doctorow offers hard numbers that prove the giveaways worthwhile: "My first novel was released in 2003, and the same day Tor put it on shelves, I released it under a Creative Commons license" that permits completely free download and redistribution as long as the text remains intact. "It's been downloaded 650,000 times from my Web site and an untold number of times from others'. The [physical] book is in its sixth printing, so I regard that as a success."

Online self-promotion is still in its infancy, encouraging cautious innovation. Veteran author Diane Duane is trying out a technique developed by Lawrence Watt-Evans: readers send her monetary donations of any size, and she will publish one chapter of a new book online every time the donation total hits a certain point. She notes, "This particular version of the PIY-cum-POD paradigm isn't going to work well for someone who hasn't got an established fan base. We've yet to see how the project will work even for someone who does have one." Holly Lisle, author of several novels and some popular writing how-tos, offers an affiliate program for fans who advertise her books. "As far as I know," she says, "that's fairly innovative for an author, though it's common enough in other kinds of Internet businesses. The program is very new, and it's quite small so far, but people are making a little money at it (I pay nice percentages on sales) and it does bring new people to the site. So I'd say it's a good deal all the way around."

"The most popular blogs are the ones that update daily," Scalzi warns, "and updating daily is a hell of a lot of work. In short, it's like any long-term writing project, except that you're doing it on spec and there's no guarantee that it's ever going to pay off. It's not for everyone, and certainly no one should feel like they should have to blog. It's just another sort of opportunity to grow an audience, no more or less." Doctorow, however, firmly believes that downloadable text and online collateral are the key to encouraging an audience in the digital age. "What are people willing to pay for?" he asks. "Let's give them that instead of saying they have a moral duty to consume in certain ways. You can stand on the beach and say 'You ate less than half an hour ago, don't go in the water'; or you can sell people towels."