Looking for readers?
It's hard to support yourself as a writer, and the Internet is swamping the world with content. How do you find fans in an over-populated literary universe?
Recently web guru Kevin Kelly proposed a new model for achieving artistic success in the Age of the Internets. As he outlines in “1,000 True Fans,” a novelist just needs to find a thousand dedicated readers ("True Fans") who will each spend at least $100 a year on your books/t-shirts/audiobooks/readings.
That idea made me really excited at first--a way for all sorts of starving writers to support themselves and keep writing. Niche writers, fan fiction, science fiction, and obscure poets could all survive and books would never die.
I'm still inspired, but the excellent (check out Agent to the Stars if you don't believe me) novelist John Scalzi has a little bit of reality for aspiring writers. It's not that easy to end up in Happy Happy True Fan Land, and it took Scalzi ten years to make it all work. Just read this essay:
"I became a strong-selling author (”Strong selling” = six figure total units sold in 2007) in a literary genre well-known for its fandom. Which is to say that before I could lay an arguable claim to having 1,000 “true” fans, I needed to create an overall audience of at least tens of thousands of readers/fans."
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$100/year per fan sounds like quite a stretch unless the writer churns out books at a Joyce Carol Oates-on-speed pace. 10,000 fans at $10/year seems much more feasible. Visual artists (and to a lesser extent musicians) are a much better fit with the 1,000 fan model.
Posted by: Pete | March 12, 2008 1:41 PM | Permalink to Comment