So You Want A Fandom [#Publishing] [#MarketResearch]

Marketing Bros: 2016-2020 & Beyond

I'm writing this in the middle of 2020. The publishing industry is still undergoing rapid changes, not unlike the rest of the world.

Within the last four years, Amazon has opened 19 brick-and-mortar Amazon Bookstores. These are located in high-rent urban retail zones, of the sort where Barnes & Noble gained traction. I've visited the Amazon Bookstore local to Austin, Texas. It's within walking distance of a Tesla showroom and an Apple Store. The atmosphere is more industrial than a conventional bookstore, less of a meeting spot and more of a trendy outlet. Their shelves, as one might expect, exhibit curation in favor of Amazon imprints and the cream of the Amazon best-seller lists.

Yes, you read that right. Amazon imprints. The mega-corporation is currently nurturing its own in-house publishing arm. Amazon Publishing has launched 47North for science fiction and fantasy titles, Thomas & Mercer for mysteries and thrillers, Montlake Romance, and several more imprints. They have hired well-respected editors with Big Five experience. Their authors lose out on the self-publishing royalty rate, but they gain marketing muscle. Amazon Publishing is competing for legitimacy amongst industry insiders.

Simon & Schuster is currently up for sale, shed by its parent conglomerate, Viacom. A merge with another major publisher is likely, and the Big Five will probably be reduced to the Big Four within a year or two. [2021 ETA: Yup, they are the Big Four now.]

Amazon is also making strides with story content outside the literary realm. Amazon Studios original TV shows are gaining traction with mass audiences, making them a viable competitor to Netflix and HBO. Amazon Studios is currently in production on an adaptation of the popular "Wheel of Time" fantasy series by author Robert Jordan. If they give it a "Game of Thrones" budget, I wonder if it will be a similarly sized hit.

Amazon Studios. Amazon Publishing. Given that Amazon also snatched up AbeBooks, the biggest hub for rare and out-of-print books, I think it is clear that Amazon is striving to prove that they value stories and content as much as they value their business operations. Either that, or they are trying to own all stories and content, because they recognize that content is king.

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Anyone who ventures into the indie/self-publishing frontier will encounter various schools of thought on how to strike it rich, or how to build an audience. The basics are commonly agreed upon. They are as follows:

The story should be quality. This means it ought to go through a similar drafting process which trad pub Big Five books go through. It should be workshopped with industry insider beta readers, or worked on with a developmental editor—and only an editor with an impressive resume. (Remember, any shark can call themselves an editor). It should undergo a copy-edit for sentence improvement, and it should be proofread for typos.

Many self-published writers are tempted to skip over this basic guideline, because quality checks entail a substantial investment of time or money. These writers end up short-circuiting their writing career. While they might be able to sell a lot of copies of their first book using marketing savviness or gimmicks, they fail to sell follow-up novels. Their book garners bad reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. They earn a low or toxic reputation among readers and authors in their genre. It is so hard to overcome such constraints on a nascent career, many of these failure stories quit writing altogether, or they rebrand themselves with a new pen name and start over from scratch.

Another basic guideline is that the teaser blurb, or sales copy, should be competitive with best-sellers in the same genre. This entails market research. Like the story itself, the teaser blurb should be analyzed and workshopped. The process may even include seeking endorsements from celebrity authors.