There is this weirdly pervasive idea among the general populous that authors are just allowed to do whatever they want with regards to their work. Whatever whimsical ideas come to them, they can just follow those ideas however far the muse leads, and then when the book is done they hand it over to the company, and they get handed a big fat check to go off and do it all again.
Oh, if only. Unfortunately, this is the made-up, manic-pixie-dream-girl version of being an author that only exists in TV shows and movies, largely as a way to make a very boring job look exciting to those outside the author's own head. In reality, authors who are trying to make a living are bound by the market, and even more explicitly, by the tastes of their audience. And I say this with all the love in my heart, and as someone who still has a lot of sensory issues surrounding food, but a lot of readers are particularly picky eaters. Until they aren't.
And that means we have no idea if what we're doing is going to work or not... which is frustrating, because we still have to try to predict the future like our lives depend on it.
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| Which we've found, time and again, is basically impossible. |
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Nobody Knows What They Want Until You Give It To Them
I raised a lot of complaints a few years ago in my post Variety May Be The Spice of Life, But It's Often Too Risky (As A Creator), and it mainly focused on the issue of how so many people will find one thing that they like, and then stick with that one thing come hell or high water. And this takes a lot of different forms. You'll have readers who only read a very specific niche of books, or even a single series of books over and over. You see this habit in gaming where, as an example, you'll have players who enjoy the World of Darkness, but they only ever play 1 of the dozen interlinked games set in that world, and they don't even want to look at the others. Or you have people who played Dungeons and Dragons once, and decided that was the only game for them, they aren't interested in anything else.
And as a creator, this can be a truly double-edged sword. On the one hand, if you find something that resonates with an audience, then you have folks who will buy your books, watch your videos, listen to your podcast, etc. However, if you try to go off in a different direction, or to do something unexpected, you may find they aren't interested in coming along with you. It's the equivalent of people who only want to hear their favorite band play their greatest hits, but nothing else. However, even if you stay within that wheelhouse, people might get bored with what you're making, even if it's ostensibly what they want to see, and what they were asking for.
And you can get trapped into playing things safe, even if that's no guarantee that you're actually going to get the interest, attention, views, and sales that you want.
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| What floor was it supposed to be on, again? |
I feel some examples might work best here to illustrate my point.
Consider the supplement 100 NPCs You Might Meet At The Tavern. This was my 11th supplement I'd written for Azukail Games, and it is one of the most generic supplements one could ask for. It was the latest entry in a rather crowded field, and judging by the numbers it should have sold all right, but not amazingly.
This is the best-selling supplement I've written, and it's currently Platinum on Drive Thru RPG.
Why is that? Was it the format? The subject matter? The fact it was general use for most high fantasy games? Was it the low cost? Was it that it hit the market before generative AI flooded everything so badly? Or did the preview just jive with enough Game Masters that they wanted to snap it up? There is, unfortunately, no way to know, or I'd be rich right now.
Trying to interpret those sales is maddening, but trying to read the tea leaves is an unfortunate necessity of the job. And I'll fully admit that while I've written dozens of NPC lists in the same vein as this supplement, none of them every did that well. And some of them, like my recent 100 NPCs To Meet After The Zombie Apocalypse, still haven't even cleared the Copper level requirement of 51 copies sold.
Unfortunately, audience input isn't usually any more reliable as a source for decision-making. As an example, a lot of readers have wanted me to write more adventure modules, particularly for my Sundara: Dawn of a New Age fantasy setting. However, for all the requests, my recently released A Night At The Slaughterhouse Inn hasn't received much in the way of interest. I have a vocal contingent of folks who enjoy the stuff I've written for Changeling: The Lost, but while 100 (Mostly) Harmless Goblin Fruits and Oddments To Find In The Hedge has hit Electrum status (one of my top sellers on Storytellers Vault), the follow-up supplement 100 Unusual Things To Find At A Goblin Market barely cleared Copper status despite members of my audience directly, and repeatedly, asking for it.
What makes this even more complicated, though, is what's riding on the outcome. Both my publisher and myself have bills to pay, and we pay those bills by writing games, supplements, and in some cases novels, and selling them to the public. If the things with my byline on them don't move copies, neither of us will be able to stay in the black. And since we don't have much of a discretionary budget, we need to make sure that, even if we don't put out hits, they can't be duds. Which means that when something seems to do well (even if the reason why it did well is a completely unreliable guess) it's a straw we have to grasp at because it seems like a better idea than closing our eyes and firing blind into a dark room, hoping there's a target, and that we can miraculously hit the bullseye on it.
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| When you've only got nickels and dimes, you can't afford to lose them. |
So how do we avoid this damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't sort of situation? Well, that is where you all come in as the audience! Because you are the ones who have the power to actually move the target in front of the shot so that it lands.
The Power Is Yours (Literally)
While publishers, studios, and marketers know how to play the game when it comes to manipulating keywords and pushing their products out there so that as many people as possible see them, they don't have the ability to force something to be a hit. All you need to do is look at the number of huge blockbusters that didn't even make back their budget, or the number of books that were supposed to be bestsellers that left the reading public cold and indifferent (you know, like the Robert Galbraith novels before it was revealed what famous phobe was behind that pen name) to see this in action. It is you, the audience, who decides whether or not something is or isn't successful.
Because it doesn't matter who wrote something, or how much hype was put into it, if people collectively shrug and ignore it. And, on the other side of the coin, it doesn't matter how small an indie creator is if people collectively decide, "This thing. We like this. We're going to tell all of our friends about it!"
Let's have some fun with math. I've done this before, but for a laugh let's do it again. And the number we're going to use here is 10,000, because according to some of the folks I've spoken to over the years, 10,000 sold books was the standard for a New York Times bestseller. It's arbitrary, but possible when discussing something blowing up in terms of support.
- 10,000 copies of a full RPG like Army Men: A Game of Tactical Plastic? I'd be looking at something like $110,000 in my pocket, and I'd be immediately working on fresh supplements for it.
- 10,000 copies of a novel like my sword and sorcery tale Crier's Knife? I'd be looking at something like $30,000, which isn't buy-a-house money, but is absolutely get-started-on-that-long-promised-sequel money.
- 10,000 copies of an RPG supplement like World's Oldest Profession: A Baker's Dozen of Brothels? That would still be worth around $3,000, and that would be one hell of a weight off my shoulders.
- What about 10,000 reads on one of my Vocal.media articles? Well, that would be $60... not huge, but not nothing, and hey, it's free to all the readers out there!
- 10,000 subscribers on YouTube is 10x the number of people it takes to unlock monetization, and if all of those people watch at least half an hour of content on the channel, it becomes an earner overnight!
- 10,000 followers on one of my social media platforms? That's usually around the time the platform monetizes you as a creator, allowing you to make money for posting on Facebook, Instagram, etc.
Take a moment, and realize just how small 10,000 actually is, as a number. A decent weekend at a mid-sized convention has 10,000 people in attendance. I've met people whose high schools had nearly that many people in them when class was in session. There are college campuses that easily have 10,000 people on them. I'm a part of dozens of Facebook groups and subreddits that have FAR more than 10,000 members in them. Now ask what 20,000 people all acting together could do. Now think about 50,000. How about 1,000,000?
That's the point I'm making here, and it's the same point that every army and labor organizer has been making for centuries. Because any one person only has a limited amount of influence or support they can provide. But as the chain letter says, if you tell 2 friends, and they tell 2 friends, and they tell 2 friends, then 30 connections down the line there's going to be a massive word of mouth about a particular author and the things they make.
So don't be a passive consumer of content who lets the algorithm decide what to feed you. Go out there looking for new art to experience, and when you find something that you think is great, tell people about it, and support the creators however you can. Because at the end of the day, all we can do is make the art... we need you, the audience, to participate for it to actually allow us to make a living.
Spare A Moment, and Click A Button?
Speaking of the power of a mobilized audience, I wanted to tag a call to action (or a request for help, however you read it) at the end of this week's post. Because my audio drama series that I launched in partnership with Alice Liddell, The A.L.I.C.E. Files, has been struggling uphill, and we're on something of a deadline. We just finished Season 1 a little bit ago, and we're gearing up to push the story forward... but we need your help.
In order for a YouTube channel to be monetized at all it needs to have 500 subscribers, and 3,000 watched hours. In order for it to be fully monetized (which means you get ad revenue, as well) it needs to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watched hours.
Right now we have 380 subscribers, and just over 1,800 watched hours... and we need to get those numbers filled up by the end of the year, otherwise YouTube is doubling the requirements, which is going to effectively lock a lot of smaller channels and creators out of ever getting their piece of the pie when it comes to being paid for the traffic their free videos bring in.
I just outlined the power the audience has, and I talked about trying new things to see if something outside your usual shows, books, and games actually piques your interest. So even if audio dramas aren't usually your thing, give this one a few episodes to grow on you! We've got weird Westerns, collections of two-sentence horror stories, Victorian nightmares, and more, all of it wrapped in a sci-fi reimagining of Alice in Wonderland!
So give it a chance to surprise you. If you like what you see then give the videos a thumbs up, leave a comment or two, and subscribe to the channel! And if you make it to the end of Season 1, leave a question on the Ask Me Anything About The Carroll Institute.
Support The Literary Mercenary
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That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!
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