Dear—you don't mind if I call you dear do you? Whether you are following William Blake, the self publisher, or Dr. Zaius, publishing fundamentalist, you will want to promote your fiction. If you are self-publishing or subsidy publishing, you will quickly find yourself in street fight brawl. Oh my, you will need to bust knees with a pipe and deliver a proper beat-down with a heavy chain, to get noticed. No one else is going to help you when you are lying in the street in a pool of your own blood, because you came ill-equipped with the marketing tools necessary to survive in the world of self-publishing.
If you are working with a more traditional publisher, you will certainly be getting more support. Depending on your book and market, you will have the organization's marketing soldiers, capos, and hitmen, all outfitted with powerful weapons, working on your behalf, keeping the competition in line. Still, my oh my, it doesn't hurt to have a little extra protection under your direct control. It will help you sleep better at night, all tucked in, cozy and comfortable and cute as a button.
Before you have even begun writing a word, marketing considerations impact your fiction. Before a hit man dons his black gloves and loads his satchel with a high-powered sniper rifle, before a cadre of streetwise made men pulls stockings over their heads and locks and loads their shotguns, they first spend some time to understand their target to ensure the operation runs smoothly. Likewise, you should decide what reader you are going to target before you write. For what genre are you writing? Do you write romance, speculative fiction, mystery, fantasy, adventure, or another? If you know your genre, do you know your subgenre? For example, crime fiction includes detective fiction, legal thrillers, the caper, and—my personal genre favorite—criminal fiction like the Godfather. Writing for young adults is another subgenre.
Are you listening, dear? Oh my, I hope so. Please, don't be a dumb ass and do pay attention. It is so frightfully important to get things right from the start.
Once you have decided that you would like to write (or have written), than you might perform some market research and identify the conventions of the genre and current trends. If you want to increase the chance that your fiction will be read, you should follow the conventions and take advantage of the trends. Writing comes from the heart or imagination, you might think, which is fine and good until acting with your heart brings the house down on your head. Before know it, you step out for a smoke and the bogey man of self-indulgence garrotes you around the neck, your literary aspirations snuffed out. For Pete's sake, even genres like literary metafiction that defy traditional literature develop conventions of their own, so stop acting like a lone wolf, you silly Billy, and join the F----ing family.
Other Posts you Might Like