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I grumbled on facebook about how awful the first-period royalty numbers are for The Mystic Marriage so I won't do it here, except to note that it would help immensely if people who have a local bookstore (including Barnes & Noble) would go in and ask them to carry it. (You might suggest that they put it in the SFF section, since LesFic readers seem to have given up on me.)
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One of the pieces of advice you see offered to new authors is to leverage whatever existing fanbase they have. You can certainly see the effects of this sort of thing when a "debut" author moves from being a popular fan-fic writer to their first commercial venture.
At one time, it would have seemed axiomatic that my first novel publication would have fallen more in the realm of medieval history, or medieval-inspired fantasy. That was the focus of most of my historic research, it was the topic of my first several stabs at writing serious novel length works. And it would have made it a lot easier to translate whatever degree of fame I'd achieved in nearly four decades of SCA activity into interest in my novels. But it's a bit harder to spin SCA fame (such as it is) into interest in a 19th century setting. Harder, at least, if one is trying to be thoughtful about relevance-of-promotion.
At one time, one might have thought that having some small amount of name-recognition in the filk music community might translate into a bit of useful interest and "buzz" for one of their own. But by the time my novel came out, I'd drifted away from filking (and had been essentially forgotten as a writer even before then). Filkers have, in general, been enthusiastic supporters of novelists who had been active in the community. But memories are short and people move on.
One of the awkwardnesses of being published by a lesbian press is that there's an assumption that the only relevant market for your books is the lesbian community and that you will have contacts, networks, and existing fans there who will jumpstart your writing career. So while the official marketing is aimed at that market, there's sort of an assumption that there's no need to "market", as such. And that has been a real handicap for me. Of all the potential readerships for my books, that's one where I have essentially no reputation-base at all. LesFic readers are fanatically loyal--but if you aren't part of the community, you don't get the benefit of that loyalty.
I'm slowly beginning to build new connections--a new reputation. It's a makeshift sort of thing, cobbling together fragments of intersections. If I'd wanted to leverage all my pre-existing fan-bases in a calculated way, I suppose I should have written a story with a medieval-fantasy setting involving textiles, language, heraldry, and music. Hmm, I suppose there's still an opportunity to insert some heraldry into the plot-sketches for Tapestry. If anyone's still buying my books by the time I get to writing it.
* * *
One of the pieces of advice you see offered to new authors is to leverage whatever existing fanbase they have. You can certainly see the effects of this sort of thing when a "debut" author moves from being a popular fan-fic writer to their first commercial venture.
At one time, it would have seemed axiomatic that my first novel publication would have fallen more in the realm of medieval history, or medieval-inspired fantasy. That was the focus of most of my historic research, it was the topic of my first several stabs at writing serious novel length works. And it would have made it a lot easier to translate whatever degree of fame I'd achieved in nearly four decades of SCA activity into interest in my novels. But it's a bit harder to spin SCA fame (such as it is) into interest in a 19th century setting. Harder, at least, if one is trying to be thoughtful about relevance-of-promotion.
At one time, one might have thought that having some small amount of name-recognition in the filk music community might translate into a bit of useful interest and "buzz" for one of their own. But by the time my novel came out, I'd drifted away from filking (and had been essentially forgotten as a writer even before then). Filkers have, in general, been enthusiastic supporters of novelists who had been active in the community. But memories are short and people move on.
One of the awkwardnesses of being published by a lesbian press is that there's an assumption that the only relevant market for your books is the lesbian community and that you will have contacts, networks, and existing fans there who will jumpstart your writing career. So while the official marketing is aimed at that market, there's sort of an assumption that there's no need to "market", as such. And that has been a real handicap for me. Of all the potential readerships for my books, that's one where I have essentially no reputation-base at all. LesFic readers are fanatically loyal--but if you aren't part of the community, you don't get the benefit of that loyalty.
I'm slowly beginning to build new connections--a new reputation. It's a makeshift sort of thing, cobbling together fragments of intersections. If I'd wanted to leverage all my pre-existing fan-bases in a calculated way, I suppose I should have written a story with a medieval-fantasy setting involving textiles, language, heraldry, and music. Hmm, I suppose there's still an opportunity to insert some heraldry into the plot-sketches for Tapestry. If anyone's still buying my books by the time I get to writing it.
