Evergreen Content, Book Sales, and You! (Making More Sales By Avoiding Cheap Gimmicks)

If you're a fan of genre fiction, then you've probably noticed how trends tend to wash through it from time to time. Vampires were big in the early 90s, for example, and on the heels of Anne Rice they were absolutely everywhere. Then they petered out for a while. Steampunk got really big around the time the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film broke, spurred on by books like Boneshaker. Dozens of series have aped the enchanted school setting of the Potterverse, now, and we were up to our ears in YA dystopias after the success of The Hunger Games.

Numbers are up! Quick, get into that slush pile and grab EVERYTHING with a zombie in it!

Everyone has their own taste in fiction, and sometimes you're looking for a very specific flavor. But if you read a lot of the books that come out in rapid succession after something hits big, hoping to ride that wave onto the bestseller list, you're going to notice that nine times out of ten the only thing they have to offer is they belong in the same genre. They've got brass gears and clockworks, zombies, romantic vampires, and so on and so forth... but there isn't much to make them stand on their own two feet.

The problem with a cash-in book is that it's trying to imitate the identity of books that came before it. These books often lack a strong identity of their own, and thus they can feel sort of like a good book's mildly attractive cousin; not a negative experience, but not one that really sticks with you. Certainly not one you'd review and recommend to others. Even if a writer didn't set out to write a cash-in book (perhaps they just clung too tightly to the established story structure and beats of a genre mainstay, such as how roughly 87 percent of hopeful fantasy authors think they need to write a Lord of The Rings homage) they'll wind up with the same problem.

Evergreen Content, and Telling Your Own Story

There's a concept I came across as a blogger, and it's one that is heavily steeped in the marketing side of things; evergreen content. Basically the idea behind content that's evergreen is that it never goes out of style, so people are always going to be looking for it. Because when something stops being relevant, and goes stale, the traffic's going to drop off, and it stops generating income. On the other hand, something that pulls a steady stream of views, reads, and sales is always going to be an earner, allowing you to get paid for it for years to come.

Which is, of course, the dream.

Give you an example of what I'm talking about, here. The article What Was The Satanic Panic? The Forgotten Witch Hunt of The 1980s is a piece of evergreen content because it discusses a period of time in history. This moral panic is over, so the facts about it aren't going to change. At the same time, though, it's a distinct event that remains relevant since it's tied to American history, pop culture, and the stigma associated with everything from Dungeons and Dragons to violent video games. As long as there are moral panics in the United States (a trend that goes back to the founding of the country, and shows no signs of stopping), then this particular article will be relevant.

Contrast that with the blog post 3 Ways Pathfinder is Losing Its Identity With The New Playtest. This post was a flash-in-the-pan piece that was a reaction to the playtest for the second edition of the Pathfinder roleplaying game, and it had a very short shelf life. The playtest was only out for a year, so anything this article had to say was only relevant for that brief period of time... on the other hand, there was a lot of interest in the subject, and in that short period it did draw quite a lot of views and reads. But no one's come back to it since the full game was released because anything is has to say is no longer valid.

So what does that have to do with your book?

Well, take a step back and ask what the primary selling points of your book are. Is it a solid story that stands on its own as a mystery, an adventure story, or a tale of the macabre? Or is your major selling point that you have zombies in it? Because if that's the case, then you're probably not going to get a lot of traction when that gimmick is no longer pulling in audiences the way it did when The Walking Dead was a fresh network success. You might see some renewed interest when the shambling undead come back into style, but it can take years for that tide to come back in.

What Makes A Book Evergreen?

Unfortunately, this is the part where I shrug my shoulders and gesture vaguely at the market. However, I do have a few general recommendations on how to hold off your book's freshness expiration date as long as possible.

- Don't Hang Your Story Fads and Gimmicks: The key here is that it's perfectly fine to include elements that might be part of a fad, but not to make that the whole of your story. Write a spy novel that happens to have vampires in it, rather than a vampire novel about spies, if you see what I mean?

- Keep Your Story Authentic: When steampunk first started getting popular, lots of people tried to get in on the genre by randomly including brass accents and gears in their setting descriptions and cover design to widen their story's genre labels. While this gave it the appearance of being part of the genre, it was the literary equivalent of just putting on a cheap plastic mask so you could say you were wearing a costume at the bar. Rather than gluing some superficial elements onto your tale, develop what makes it truly unique; people know when they're being pandered to, and generally they don't like it.

- Make It Stand Out: There's nothing worse for your shelf life than just aping what other books are doing, even if you're trying to follow in the footsteps of the classics. While it's important to be able to look at enduring books and ask what makes them last, it's equally important to spin those into your own story instead of just trying to trace them while changing a few minor details. For example, there are probably hundreds of Lord of The Rings imitators out there, but only one of them is Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

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That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife!

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