Good evening everyone,
Don lost his internet service so I'm pitch hitting this week.
I took the time to peruse the news and I
must say I do not understand the Republican Party. They are willing, and they
admit it, to let health insurance slip away from 5 million children… That is
5,000,000 children that live here in the United States. If they want to be the
party of the future, my recommendation is that they learn how to hear and act
on what the majority of the people want instead of taking the word of a few as the
truth as to what everyone wants. They are myopic when it comes to doing what is
right and it appears they still firmly believe in revenge. Too bad.
I realize that five members of the
Supreme Court got their jobs due to a Republican president. However, I did not
realize that these five members of the Supreme Court still owed the Republican
Party for their jobs. I thought once they had the job of Supreme Court Justice,
they had it for life and were no longer obligated to the Republican Party; they
could make rulings that were right for everyone regardless of race, political
party or financial status. If they vote after the upcoming hearing about the
Affordable Care Act along party lines, they will be taking away health
insurance from up to 10 million people. Instead of helping and supporting, they
are aiding and abetting a small number of politicians who, so far, appear to be
unconcerned with the majority of the people living and working in the United
States.
And what is up with the Democrats? They gave up and became background - afraid to stand up to the Republicans. Why? Who is going to
stand up for what is right? And the Republicans are bowing to a few who are
making decisions that will affect in a negative way, in the long run, over 10
million people. Now I remember why I quit the Republican Party and why I'm not
in any hurry to become a Democrat.
On to other more interesting topics!
I started a class in online marketing
this week. One of the questions that I had to investigate in this last lesson
was who is my target audience? This has led to a most interesting research into
who reads what? And I have to say that the answers are so much different than
they were five years ago when we started Wormhole. Five years ago, science
fiction fantasy was read by over 10% of the population, particularly the age
group between 45 and 65. Those are not the same numbers now. Market share for
science fiction fantasy remains 10+%, but the target market has changed. The
target market now is young adult. Those good folks between 45 and 65 are
claiming that they are reading nonfiction if they are males, and romances and
crime/mystery/thriller's if they are women.
I read an interesting blog by
Carol Pinchefsky entitled "Why do people not read science fiction? Reading
from only one side of the brain." Even though the blog was put out in
2006, she does present some very interesting concepts: the use of the word
"science" and the fact that as a society the word science implies
school and work, and leads to dull and boring people. She also contends that
people are more interested in reading about here and now instead of
"future" in places beyond imagining. Another concept that she
presents is that "a number of science fiction fans are
left-handed..." She also suggests that many people already read science
fiction/ fantasy, they just don't call it that. Since Wormhole started out as a
science fiction/ fantasy, action adventure publishing company, this news is a
little startling.
According to Nielsen Books and Consumer
Tracker, science fiction fantasy has a market share of $590 million a year;
Religious books come in at $720 million; crime/mystery/thriller at $728
million; and the over-the-top genre is romance/erotica at $1.44 billion a year.
So I no longer have any idea who my target market is and what I should be
writing!
The one thing that I've discovered is
that e-book reading is picking up! It looks like an average of about 40% of the
population has read some kind of e-book on an e-reader in the last year. That
is up from the 20% of readers reading e-books five years ago.
Does this mean that we are giving up
publishing science fiction fantasy? I don't think so. I think we're going to
call it something else. Even the term speculative fiction carries some
interesting baggage. Right now I'm tending toward publishing "fiction and
nonfiction". I think that should cover just about everything that we would
want to publish.
As to our target audience – that's a really
good question. I know that some of the stories that we publish are good action
adventure military type stories that are very definitely fantasy; Tammy writes
absolutely incredible young adult; Colby writes for a more mature male audience
with his speculative fiction; Jeff and Ariel write phenomenal fantasy for
anyone; currently I am writing more for women over 45.
As we venture into a new website, I'm
wondering if our focus should be more on relationship building between author
and reader. Or at least that should be one of the key points to the new site. We
want to sell books, and maybe one of the ways to do that is to build a better
relationship with readers. Everyone keeps talking about the ideal customer, and
I think that that's going to depend on who the writer is for that month. This
might make marketing individual months a bit more of an adventure, but I think
in the long run it will make it easier to market individual writers.
Have a great week everyone,
Carolyn
All
images downloaded from Google Images
Fig 1 – Health care retrieved from affordable-care-act-timeline.png
Fig 2 -- The Plight of American Politics:
Hyper-partisanship | The McDaniel retrieved from www.mcdanielfreepress.com
Fig 3 – SciFi Fantasy flow chart
retrieved from lostbetweentheletters.wordpress.com
Fig 4 – SciFi Fantasy diagram retrieved
from www.riverdell.org
Fig 5 – Target Audience retrieved from conceptad.co.uk
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