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This is part one in a series of posts about finding and building an audience as an independent author.
Imagine for the moment that you were the only person in the world writing furry fic.
Note: This is not a discussion of the merits/value or lack thereof of the furry community and fiction that follows its tropes. Nor will it become one.
I say again, imagine for the moment that you were the only person in the world writing furry fic. How this would come about in the first place is somewhat beside the point, but imagine what it would be like for a member of furry fandom to discover your writing. The world is full of books and stories, but here you are, writing works that speak to an aspect of their lives that nothing else in existence does. Your audience will not be the biggest but they will be the most loyal and enthusiastic audience you could ask for, because you give them something else they can't find anywhere else and something they desperately want.
The World's Only Furry Author would not be a New York Time's Bestselling novelist, but you would have a devoted fandom that would be more than capable of supporting you and your endeavors, and be perfectly happy to do so, too.
If you're trying to catch the eye of the publishing world, conventional wisdom would have you write conventional things. Sure, you're supposed to come up with something new to make your work stand apart from every other conventionally constructed novel with broad appeal, but you aren't supposed to be so different that you're not turning in a conventionally constructed novel with broad appeal.
"This could be a great story, but why is the main character a fox? Most adult will think it's a kid's book, we can't market a book with this much sex in it to kids... and the people from the internet will hate it because they'll get that it's a furry story. The furry audience just isn't big enough to support this kind of book."
See, in the conventional world of publishing, all the people that your sexy fox/foxy sex story might appeal to are being weighed against all the people it won't, and it will be found wanting because to the publisher, more copies are always better than fewer. They can afford to think that way, because they have a much larger supply of author and manuscripts to choose from than they have the ability to print, and to a degree they have to think that way, because they're trying to support themselves as an industry and pay a lot of salaries and do right by their investors and so on.
As an author? If you're not trying to break into big publishing, you can't afford to think that way and you don't have to. As the World's Only Furry Author, you don't have to pay anyone else's salary and you can't fire yourself and get a new story to tell if you wanted to... but you don't have to, because it doesn't matter how many people will reject your story for being basically unappealing to them or failing to comply with the conventions they're used to. All that matter is how many people will find it appealing. You aren't being fined a dollar for everyone who doesn't like your book.
Look at it this way: if you sold a copy to every man, woman, and child on earth and then suddenly we discovered a lost colony of humans with another six or seven billion people living in glass domes under the ice of Europa, would you be lamenting the fact that only half of humanity had read your book, or would you be celebrating the coup of having sold over six billion books in the first place?
So if you have two or three or five or ten thousand people reading your books and are making a nice bit of income off of it, what does it matter if six billion people don't know about and/or rejecting it?
But maybe The World's Only Furry Author is thinking, "But wait! If I can write a book that two thousand people will love, why not twenty thousand? Why not two million? I'll just write a new book that's like my last one but I'll change out the part that made people reject it."
So you take your fox tale and you make the the characters humans and you release your book and...
Nothing much comes of it.
Your old audience doesn't care because your new book doesn't speak to them. Your new audience never materializes because you have left the equivalent of a well-stocked private lake and are now basically casting your line into a parking lot that used to be a lake before it was drained and paved over.
It is a better career move to be The World's Only Furry Author than it is to try for conventional success as a conventional writer.
Obviously you can't be The World's Only Furry Author, because the internet is full of that shit and people do it for free because the publishing world only accepts stories involving be-furred protagonists in certain narrow contexts, which mostly don't speak directly to the interests of the diehard furry fandom. Some of the better furry authors are making money off their work in various ways, I'm fairly sure, and if they're not, they should be.
And the fervor with which the furry fandom embraces the multiple authors and other artists who produce work that speaks to them just underscores the real point here, which isn't actually about furries: you can rarely go wrong serving an under-served market.
Don't worry if your writing lacks broad appeal. If that's the case, just don't sell it to broads. You just need to figure out who it does appeal to, and figure out how to connect to them... or, alternately, get your work in a position where other people can figure out if it appeals to them and connect to it themselves. Doing that means letting go of the fear of rejection and any concern for those readers who won't find your work appealing, because for every one reader you attract, there may be ninety-some who click past without stopping for more than a second and a few who feel the need to tell you how disappointed they are that you've wasted their time.
I'll talk more about the process of connecting with an audience in part two.
Imagine for the moment that you were the only person in the world writing furry fic.
Note: This is not a discussion of the merits/value or lack thereof of the furry community and fiction that follows its tropes. Nor will it become one.
I say again, imagine for the moment that you were the only person in the world writing furry fic. How this would come about in the first place is somewhat beside the point, but imagine what it would be like for a member of furry fandom to discover your writing. The world is full of books and stories, but here you are, writing works that speak to an aspect of their lives that nothing else in existence does. Your audience will not be the biggest but they will be the most loyal and enthusiastic audience you could ask for, because you give them something else they can't find anywhere else and something they desperately want.
The World's Only Furry Author would not be a New York Time's Bestselling novelist, but you would have a devoted fandom that would be more than capable of supporting you and your endeavors, and be perfectly happy to do so, too.
If you're trying to catch the eye of the publishing world, conventional wisdom would have you write conventional things. Sure, you're supposed to come up with something new to make your work stand apart from every other conventionally constructed novel with broad appeal, but you aren't supposed to be so different that you're not turning in a conventionally constructed novel with broad appeal.
"This could be a great story, but why is the main character a fox? Most adult will think it's a kid's book, we can't market a book with this much sex in it to kids... and the people from the internet will hate it because they'll get that it's a furry story. The furry audience just isn't big enough to support this kind of book."
See, in the conventional world of publishing, all the people that your sexy fox/foxy sex story might appeal to are being weighed against all the people it won't, and it will be found wanting because to the publisher, more copies are always better than fewer. They can afford to think that way, because they have a much larger supply of author and manuscripts to choose from than they have the ability to print, and to a degree they have to think that way, because they're trying to support themselves as an industry and pay a lot of salaries and do right by their investors and so on.
As an author? If you're not trying to break into big publishing, you can't afford to think that way and you don't have to. As the World's Only Furry Author, you don't have to pay anyone else's salary and you can't fire yourself and get a new story to tell if you wanted to... but you don't have to, because it doesn't matter how many people will reject your story for being basically unappealing to them or failing to comply with the conventions they're used to. All that matter is how many people will find it appealing. You aren't being fined a dollar for everyone who doesn't like your book.
Look at it this way: if you sold a copy to every man, woman, and child on earth and then suddenly we discovered a lost colony of humans with another six or seven billion people living in glass domes under the ice of Europa, would you be lamenting the fact that only half of humanity had read your book, or would you be celebrating the coup of having sold over six billion books in the first place?
So if you have two or three or five or ten thousand people reading your books and are making a nice bit of income off of it, what does it matter if six billion people don't know about and/or rejecting it?
But maybe The World's Only Furry Author is thinking, "But wait! If I can write a book that two thousand people will love, why not twenty thousand? Why not two million? I'll just write a new book that's like my last one but I'll change out the part that made people reject it."
So you take your fox tale and you make the the characters humans and you release your book and...
Nothing much comes of it.
Your old audience doesn't care because your new book doesn't speak to them. Your new audience never materializes because you have left the equivalent of a well-stocked private lake and are now basically casting your line into a parking lot that used to be a lake before it was drained and paved over.
It is a better career move to be The World's Only Furry Author than it is to try for conventional success as a conventional writer.
Obviously you can't be The World's Only Furry Author, because the internet is full of that shit and people do it for free because the publishing world only accepts stories involving be-furred protagonists in certain narrow contexts, which mostly don't speak directly to the interests of the diehard furry fandom. Some of the better furry authors are making money off their work in various ways, I'm fairly sure, and if they're not, they should be.
And the fervor with which the furry fandom embraces the multiple authors and other artists who produce work that speaks to them just underscores the real point here, which isn't actually about furries: you can rarely go wrong serving an under-served market.
Don't worry if your writing lacks broad appeal. If that's the case, just don't sell it to broads. You just need to figure out who it does appeal to, and figure out how to connect to them... or, alternately, get your work in a position where other people can figure out if it appeals to them and connect to it themselves. Doing that means letting go of the fear of rejection and any concern for those readers who won't find your work appealing, because for every one reader you attract, there may be ninety-some who click past without stopping for more than a second and a few who feel the need to tell you how disappointed they are that you've wasted their time.
I'll talk more about the process of connecting with an audience in part two.
