[BRIEF NOTE] Red States versus Blue States in Literature Marketing

[rfmcdonald]

Charlie Stross, in his entry last Monday, cites a Warren Ellis interview in which the British SF-comics author argues that American regionalism determines where different types of comics get read.

A few weeks ago, I threw out the playful notion that original comics don't actually sell in the Red states of America -- that the political borderlines there are also cultural borderlines. Just as there are isolated political Blue islands in Red America, there are also island comics stores, to be certain -- but that the audiences for progressive comics are largely contained in the coasts and those few Blue states in the north. The broader sweep of Jesusland is a dead zone, to massively generalise.

So after that I got an email from a publisher I know. Telling me that he and his staff had been discussing the same thing. They looked at their sales documentation. And, in fact, it looks to them that they do the vast majority of their business in the Blue states.

So they're talking about changing their PR campaigns. Focussing on Blue America and those handful of island stores. They figure that if Red America isn't listening, then fuck Red America. And if you're in Jesusland and you can't get their books anymore, then frankly you should have tried harder to make your store order you the stuff you wanted to read. (And, for God's sake, I've been telling you that for years, so this shouldn't come as a surprise.)

Stross goes on to note that this has implications for other genres of literature as well, including his own genre of science fiction.

I can make a couple of crude guesses: I suspect the market for mil-SF (staple product at Baen Books) is probably red state heavy. And I suspect the sort of literary work you expect from the likes of John Kessel or Michael Swanwick is more of an urban latte-swilling cafe culture blue state thing. But I must confess I've got no idea whether high fantasy is a localized sales phenomenon, or indeed whether the market for SF in general (excluding those narrow categories I mentioned) is geographically stratified.

Written SF doesn't necessarily follow the same market rules as other media. But if it's a geographically distributed market, I need to know it, and to know how it's distributed, as well. For example, if 80% of my sales can be found in one half of the country, then obviously that has implications for any marketing I do. Again: (while I don't go out of my way to deliberately offend peoples' sensibilities in what I write) if folks in some areas aren't reading my work, then I don't need to tailor my work to meet their cultural requirements. (I hasten to add that this isn't a political thing: if I'm writing for an audience of small town or rural readers, they may well need different degrees of emphasis and explanation in my work than an audience of city dwellers.)

Writing is a form of communication, after all. And my own ignorance about who I am communicating with is something I should be addressing.

While this targeted approach to literary composition definitely has its advantages in producing literary works (of whatever genre) that sell, I can't help but fear that something will be lost in writing for a captive audience. Where will crossover literary hits come from? How will different genres cross-fertilize each other? Must Neal Stephenson's recent success constitute an isolated incident? Or, is there a strategy that can be replicated and reliably deployed, and if so what is it?

Stross ends the post with a plea for further information. I can only do the same.