I myself let my SFWA membership lapse this year. It seemed like the organization couldn’t really address, nor was it interested in addressing, a lot of what Charlie outlines. The problems with the Nebula awards are particularly odd, because they seem like such simple things to fix… and yet. In any case, during an earlier stage in my life I decided that when something is dysfunctional, it’s better not to be involved with it. So I’m sitting it out while the organization decides what it’s really about. Hats off to those who have the time and energy to devote to the issue. They obviously have a higher threshold for pain than I.

In the first three posts about Science Fiction magazines:Why Are the “Big Three” Dying?, Marketing in Meatspace, and Online Marketing, I wasn’t explicit about why I was focusing on marketing for the magazines rather than on their content mix. My assumptions were:

1) The editors choose what they like for the magazines, and will be uninterested and in fact probably unable to choose something other than what they currently choose for their content. Gordon Van Gelder, and Sheila Williams, and Stan Schmidt all have their individual tastes, and their content choices reflect their fidelity to those tastes. They choose stories that make them happy or satisfy them, and that’s that. I like pickles; I don’t like raw tomatoes. Sorry, it’s just the way it is. So I didn’t discuss what is right or wrong about their story selection, because I assume that this is essentially a pointless discussion. Instead, I focused specifically on how they might be able to advertise and promote their tastes.

2) The magazine’s general role. I see the big three sf magazines’ mission as being one of generally surveying the sf field. Of the three, Analog is probably the most focused in terms of providing a specific reliable experience, but they are all looking for a distinctive mix of stories: some thrilling, some happy, some contemplative, some sad, some funny, some techno-fetishistic, some sf, some fantasy (for those two that dabble in such things), some beautiful writing, etc. These are magazines with eclectic taste, aimed at an audience delighted by eclecticism. Just as its not my place to tell an editor s/he should have different tastes, I’m also not going to tell a magazine that it should have a different mission. I’m interested in how the magazines can succeed on their own terms, without readjusting their core aspects.

All of that said, there’s another way to grow an sf magazine.

Jason Stoddard alludes to it when he points out that steampunk, and cyberpunk, and epic fantasy all have their distinctive and highly enthusiastic fan bases. Unfortunately, the big three will never be able to satisfy a steampunk fan, simply because even if they put one steampunk story in every issue, they will still have six or eight other stories in the same issue that don’t do that steampunk tango. It’s very difficult for a generalist magazine to reach out to such targeted communities.

On the other hand, a new magazine, starting from scratch, probably could. There’s no reason a new sf magazine couldn’t be started that focuses heavily on, say… pimpled and testosterone-addled males in the fourteen to twenty-two year-old set. I’m picking this somewhat arbitrarily, but I’m also thinking about something I saw on Tobias Buckell’s blog about his experience in talking sf to a bunch of high school kids.

Some reactions that stuck with me were a couple students who were amazed that I was so young (aren’t most authors like, really really old?) and that I played X-Box 360 (discussions were had about Medal of Honor Airborne Assault and whether I’d played Halo 3 yet). Judging by the Halo comments, I should have talked about the sf-nal nature of Halo 3 and Larry Niven’s Ringworld, I would have engaged the audience a lot better. A lesson learned…

Halo is SF? Yeah, actually.

It says something about the state of the written sf market when we sf writers have a hard time connecting with the users of something as wildly popular as Halo. Technically, these users should be our bread and butter — and don’t tell me they don’t read. YA is doing just fine, and manga, too.

More and more, I think games like Halo are creating something I’m starting to think of as the New SF Vernacular. The visual mediums are becoming the definers of SF. We as book and short story writers, because of our long and hallowed history, may think we’re the real heart of SF, but what if that just ain’t so? What if we need to mosey a little closer to that corner of folks over there, instead of insisting those darn kids need to come over here?

In the past, the pulps defined sf. And they did it by targeting a youthful audience. If I hark back to the days of yore when boys thumbed through trashy pages filled with aliens and tentacles and ray-guns and girls in bikinis, I think that the new pulp tradition will have to take its queues not from the vernacular of print sf, but from video game sf. Before the pulps, there was Jules Verne, after, there was an SF section in the bookstore. These days, I think it’s games like Halo and Quake, manga, and Star Wars(groan of disgust) movies that are really defining sf in the minds of youth, and much of written SF isn’t well connected with this up-armored, visually eye-popping world that’s running parallel to our own. Kids know about picking up a plasma gun, and a low-grav space battles, but don’t know they’re playing in sf-nal space. That’s pretty darn interesting.

So, for my thought exercise in SF magazine revitalization (with a monty-haul unlimited budget and unlimited business connections, of course :-) ), I’m thinking that I want to go after young males who speak a different sf-nal lingo than I grew up with, and I’m going to go and meet them on their turf, instead of wishing that they’d come and meet me on mine. Introducing…

Armored Magazine

I can already see the body-armored marine on the cover, with a spatter of blood on his faceplate.

Armored Magazine would be a combination of military sf short stories, action and shooter game reviews, and geek technology articles. Sort of a cross between WIRED, Popular Science, Baen Books, and Maxim, all with an SFnal and young male pimple and testosterone focus… and lots of things would get blown up. I’d make the magazine a standard format glossy color though-out, and I’d be targeted at the boys who play Halo3, Quake, Half-Life and other shooters. The fiction would be comprised of a couple of blistering adventures per issue. In terms of placement, I’d look to place the magazines in gaming stores and package them as free trials with Xbox 360 goodie bags… you get the idea. The main thing, though is that the focus of the entire project is on a consistent, reliable experience. Every month, readers would get another super-charged dose of large guns, wide-screen space opera, cool new tech, and things that explode. Consistent product for a targeted market with a clear selling point. In this case: Shit Explodes, Dude!

Between subscriptions and advertising, I think it would work. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t provide much of a market for the kind of sf that I write, so I’m still cheering for the big three.

So, what should the sf magazines be doing to maximize the medium?

1) Website Look-and-Feel

In all honesty, their websites do need to be updated. This is just a packaging question, but it’s absolutely necessary. Perceptions are made and defined in the online space – for many users, their experience of your website is, in their minds, actually their experience of your entire product and organization. If you’re clunky, or confusing or poorly designed, readers transfer that impression onto your product and organization.

A magazine website should reinforce both for new and old readers that the magazine they subscribe to is exciting and interesting and worthy of excitement. As authors we spend a lot of time worrying about how good a cover we get with our books; for magazines, their website packaging is just as important. In many cases it will be the first, and sometimes only contact that a magazine has with a new, undiscovered reader. It should make a positive impression. We talk about sense of wonder a lot in science fiction — video games like Halo 3 actually do a great job of this with their snazzy tv ads and packaging — sci fi mags can have their websites become significantly more evocative and more enticing. I’m not saying they need a lot of high tech bells and whistles, they just need some exciting looking art. They pay artists all the time to create images for their covers, it wouldn’t hurt to put some of that look-and-feel excitement into their websites.

2) Prioritizing Desired Outcomes

The magazines need to prioritize what their websites are supposed to accomplish, first and foremost. Personally, I think their priority should be 1) acquiring new paying subscribers and 2)creating a relationship with their readers both paid and non-paid. Figured in terms of the real estate on the page, this means they need to be spending a significant amount of area on telling people where and how to subscribe and how great it’s going to be for them if they do. On HCN’s website, I had between three and four different places on the site where I would advertise either full subscriptions or else free trial subscriptions, enewletter signups and RSS feeds.

If you look at a consumer magazine site like Yoga Journal, one of the things you see immediately is the button and cover image that entice someone to subscribe and get two free gifts. Not only is there a button telling me where to go to subscribe, there’s an included (immediate gratification) reason to do so. If you scroll down to the bottom you see a massive embedded form and the opportunity to subscribe again. — and if you look at most other consumer magazine sites, you’ll see a similar mix of ads for the magazine along with embedded subscription forms. They devote a lot of real estate to their sell messages because that’s what they really really want. They’re providing other kinds of added value as well, but they’re solidly focused on their message — subscribe, sign up, buy — and its reflected in the layout of their site.

3) What are you selling?

After you’ve got a snazzy looking website and have prioritized that you want to sell or get the reader to do some action, you need to think seriously about what that action is and how you’ll entice them. In Yoga Journal’s case, they have a call to action (subscribe) and an immediate benefit for doing so (2 free gifts). In their case, these free gifts happen to be .pdf downloadable guides for things like “Yoga for Neck and Shoulders” and “Yoga for Back Pain” (not a bad come-on for someone who’s already looking at their site through a computer).

Now, If you look at something like the asimovs.com ad for Analog (wierd cross marketing if I ever saw it), it’s interesting because all it says is “Analog — subscribe now.” It should probably be something like “New Subscriber Special: Save 30% off the cover price and get Paolo Bacigalupi’s new story “Pump Six” FREE!. It sounds cheesy, but it works (even if you insert a better known author in place of my blatant self promotion :-)). And in the online space you can keep testing your messages and your offers to find out what works best for your reader type. With tools like Google Analytics you can aggregate a huge amount of information on how promotional offers perform, and keep refining the pitch.

4) The Beauty of Free.

It’s obvious and lots of people talk about it, but “Free” is super enticing. That said, there should be a quid pro quo. I don’t really agree with the idea of putting out every story for free online, unless you have the massive readership to create substantial advertising revenue, which I’m not really convinced exists yet and may never exist because science fiction and fantasy seem decidedly niche — but I am in favor of giving away 2 free trial issues to someone who’s willing to provide their physical address. By arriving at the site and signing up, they’re already pre-qualifying themselves as significantly more interested in the magazine than a general shmoe off the street.

If they like the magazine, great, they’ll subscribe when the magazine bills them, but if they don’t right now, they can still go into a general list of direct mail marketing names, and they may turn out to perform down the road. The offer to sign up for 2 Free issues is a great way to get people to try out a magazine out, and in my experience, names acquired in this way performed significantly better than almost all direct mail cases. At HCN were seeing a 7-14% conversion rate from free trial offers when we billed after two free issues, as opposed to a 1% conversion rate on direct mail. Ultimately, it was a significantly cheaper way to acquire a new subscriber. Note how Yoga Journal mixes a soft offer (2 free issues) with a hard offer benefit (pay now and get a couple extra issues). This works really well. Really. I’ve tried it. It’s cool.

5) Relationship Building with Email Newsletters

Email newsletters work. Gathering the voluntarily submitted email addresses of potential subscribers is hugely important, because this defines a pool of people you can return to again and again for marketing. None of the big three magazines run an email newsletter. If they were to do one, an easy way would be to send out an email once a month, and include the TOC of the current issue along with enticing descriptions and also include one free complete story (quid pro quo – the readers get a free story, you get to keep trying to entice them to subscribe to read the rest of the stuff). This is a good trade both for a reader, and for the magazine. They get stories and a relationship with the editors at the magazines, you get marketing names. Pyr Books and Lou Anders do a good job of this. He interviews his authors, talks about different ideas that are in the zeitgeist, and unabashedly markets his products. And I’m happy to get his email newsletter.

The Good News:

The above ideas are just some of the basic tools I’ve seen used to acquire more subscribers, but given that most of them aren’t actually being used aggressively, or in some cases at all, it seems premature to assume that short sf market or the big three are predestined for death. If a magazine isn’t actively fighting for survival, its market almost inevitably shrinks. As I go through all the ideas above, plus numerous others that have been floated, it seems that there are enough low-hanging fruit for the magazines to start experimenting with a more aggressively entrepreneurial model. Frankly, there are so many possibilities, it’s mostly a question of picking and choosing what to do first.

Without knowing what exactly is happening under the hood at the magazines, it’s difficult to say what institutional barriers are actually causing their failure to reach out more aggressively, but at least at this point, it seems that there’s still growth potential, and circulation declines are not inevitable.

Direct mail, ie “junk mail” is *the* tool for maintaining magazine circulation. If you aren’t a major player on the newsstand (think Maxim), direct mail is the only way new subscribers will ever find out about you, and build a relationship with you. It was our workhorse at HCN and remains a workhorse, even as postal rates increase. There are other technologies that are worth discussing as well, but at root, this is the biggest part of the circulation management toolbox. With direct mail, you’re trying to do one of two things:

1) Subscriber Acquisition

While I was at HCN we ran several major direct mail campaigns each year, and numerous smaller ones where we traded and tested mailing lists from all sorts of different publications and non-profit groups in the hope of finding new subscribers. On top of that, we did tests of our direct mail package every year, splitting our direct mail into tests of the layout, the language, the pricing offer, and the envelope packaging in order to ensure that we were sending out the most highly performing package possible.

It turns out that little things like a cute cartoon on the cover of the envelope made our targeted readers more likely to open the envelope and respond. But we would never have known it if we hadn’t been constantly testing. We also tested the types of offers (ie Subscribe for a full year at $28 and get a gift, vs. subscribe for a half year at $14.95 and get X number of issues.). We also tested things like how quickly we ratcheted a subscriber up from an introductory offer to a full price offer. This was an ongoing process. There was always something new to test, and it made a real difference in how 20,000 pieces of junk mail performed.

2) Subscriber Retention

We ran a series of SEVEN renewal notices (plus an email reminder to those people who we had email addresses for), starting three issues before a subscription ran out, and running until four issues after a subscription ended. We continued to use lapsed subscriber names in our direct mail attempts for an additional two years, and we constantly tested our renewal package, both for layout, language and design to see if we could make a renewal series perform even a partial percentage point better than our control.

Retaining current subscribers is a huge thing for a magazine, and even though our subscribers sometimes complained about getting constantly nagged to renew (and claimed that they would remember on their own), it always turned out to be worth sending a seventh reminder to a lapsed subscriber because there was still a solid chance that that seventh reminder would work — and it was significantly cheaper to retain that subscriber than to go out and try to discover a new one to replace that laggardly renewer.

3) Some Thoughts and Guesses

Now, even though all the sf magazines have access to my mailing address I very seldom get direct mail from them. And I haven’t run across any exciting new offers coming from them. I don’t see differences in the prices I might get, I don’t see any special deals designed to hook me, I don’t see any “act now” language. I’d expect that I’d get two or three pitches a year from them. When I lapsed as a member of the Nature Conservancy, I used to get direct mail from them quarterly. They were unstoppable. Maybe I missed the direct mail from the sf magazines, but if I did, it means that the packaging and pitch weren’t strong enough to make me notice them — and that’s a problem.

My sense is that because the circulation functions in the sf magazines are either largely outsourced, or else run through a larger organization (ie Penny Press) that the big three actually have less flexibility with their direct mail systems and their testing and renewal processes than we had at HCN, where we kept a huge amount of expertise in-house.

This means that they’re going to be less entrepreneurial and less able to aggressively test, seek, and retain subscribers. In an expanding market, this may not matter. In a troubled one, it starts to look more like an emergency.

Overall, I think the institutional barriers in the magazines may be significantly more problematic for them than the actual state of the SF market. This cuts to the question John Scalzi raised recently about the magazines’ apparent unwillingness to do anything to save themselves. It’s possible on some level that they recognize the problem but other internal issues (ingrained habits, the logistics of mail drops and outsourcing, a lack of funding, a lack of staff expertise, to name a few) make it difficult for them to change.

Next up, online marketing options for the big three.

My perception however is that there are some specific things going on with the major sf magazines that heavily affect their success, and it doesn’t have much to do with the themes above. I’m riffing here based on my experience working at High Country News, where we spent a great deal of time worrying about expanding our readership and finding new subscribers online, and where we also had difficulty fitting into a defined niche. We also had concerns about aging readerships, which I see as being roughly parallel to the difficulties of being a general sf magazine. So I’m taking some of my lessons from my experience there, and also throwing in some of my own opinions.

I’d like to lead off by saying that sf magazines have been *the* thing that brought me success as a writer. I owe everything — my Hugo and Nebula Award nominations, and Theodore Sturgeon Award win, my readers, my agent, and a good chance at getting my novel-in-progress published — to the fact that I was able to build a name for myself in the short fiction arena.

I have a huge respect for what they do, particularly in helping get writers noticed who don’t fit into easy and marketable sf niches. If I wrote military sf, or high fantasy, or paranormal romance, I might never have needed the magazines, but because what I do is less easily categorized, the magazines have given me a huge boost.

Also, regarding magazines, its good to remember that even when a magazine is gaining in circulation, it is *always* losing subscribers. It’s just that they’re gaining back more than the number they lose. This churn affects the cost of maintaining a magazine’s circulation level. The higher the circulation is and the harder a magazine works to expand its readership, the more it costs to gain each new subscriber. This is a classic example of the economic concept of diminishing returns. The more you try to win over people who are only marginally interested in your product, the more you have to work (and pay) to get them, and the harder it is to keep them. When a magazine has filled its niche, it becomes increasingly hard to find new subscribers to replace the ones it loses.

For magazines, it’s good to go after the low-hanging fruit – the people who best match your demographic range, your overall philosophy, etc — these are your core markets. During the good and easy times, your core market comes and finds you — for example Yoga Journal, a health magazine, is experiencing phenomenal growth, thanks to major demographic trends.

My impression is that all of the major sf magazines came into existence during the fat days of short fiction. There were no video games, or twenty zillion channels of tv. There weren’t so many fun sf movies and sf series out there. The magazines were in a demographic sweet spot. Now they’re not.

Over the last several years, High Country News‘ circulation held steady or grew very slightly to 24,000 readers – not amazing, but still a relatively healthy statistic in a time when many news magazines are losing readership (flat is the new up!) – but that number hides the fact that there was quite a lot of work going on behind the scenes to keep replacing the subscribers who churned out of the system.

So, what’s going on with the big three? Are they really meant to death-spiral because of aging readership, irrelevance of content, the advent of the oh-so-sexy internet, and because no one wants to read short fiction anymore?

My personal sense is that the falling circulation isn’t so much a problem of the short sf market as much as it may be a problem of the internal culture in the magazines. Specifically, their lack of marketing.

Cory Doctorow has posted some thoughts on ways the magazines might leverage the internet for better marketing, and they’re good ideas, but there’s a lot more that could be done, much of it more basic than what he describes. If I haven’t bored you out of your skull already, stay tuned for Science Fiction Magazines Part II, tomorrow, when I talk about the basics of marketing in meat space.

From: Tony Stanley
Subject: re: the people of sand and slag
———————————————
fuck you

I’ve responded to him, asking him if this is a proposition or an editorial comment, but haven’t heard back yet.

I actually have a fair amount of sympathy for Dr. Hendrix. Yes, he was rude in the way he couched his concerns and he’s been deservedly pummeled for it, but at root I think he was voicing real concerns and I wish that he had been more effective and less inflammatory when he raised them.

Here’s the major offending quote:

I’m also opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free. A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they’re just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they’re undercutting those of us who aren’t giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.

The biggest argument against this in my mind is that authors and their writing are unique. Even if readers can get all of Cory Doctorow’s books for free, I assume that his writing being downloaded for free doesn’t necessarily set the value of my own digital content at zero. We will attract different audiences and satisfy different urges. Books are not a monoculture, and readers go to the content that satisfies their interests. This is why I think the webscab concept has a flaw.

The reason workers unionize is because on the individual level they are entirely replaceable. Only as a large group do they have bargaining power. I don’t think that’s entirely true in the writing space.

At a guess, free downloads of written content is a far less dangerous threat to the craft and profession of writing than are something like video games which provide powerful immersion and the illusion that the user is actually participating in the storytelling. When I lie awake at night thinking about the demise of writers and the craft of writing, it is video games and movies and ten-thousand on-demand channels of free TV that scare me most.

That said, there are some dynamics about giving away digital content that I find worrisome.

Many new writers feel that proffering online content for free helps drive their offline sales. But the concern may not be so much the technique works now, as that in the future, when we have decent media readers and can comfortably read a book in a digital format, (essentially when the difference between the print and digital experience shrinks to zero), when hardcopy publication disappears, that we may be setting bad precedents.

Currently, free digital content and hardcopy print content are apples to oranges comparisons. The real question is will people buy an authorized copy of an ebook, when they can get it for free from whatever the next version of Kazaa is, or will they have been trained to value digital products at zero because of a long history of authors giving away their online content?

Any book that I download right now doesn’t give me the same satisfaction as having the real physical product so I can be reasonably expected to still crave the print product (or to want to give the print product to a friend for Xmas or whatever), but I expect that technology will solve that problem, much as it’s solving the problem in the music industry.

With music, the result is that I have a lot of music on my computer that I didn’t pay for, and will never pay for, and yet nonetheless enjoy greatly. Would I pay for Britney Spears? Heck no. But she’s still fun to listen to, and I’m not deleting her, either. I’ve got her product, and I haven’t paid her a cent. And she’s not the only one. For video, I just watched every episode of Heroes (which is great, by the way) and didn’t have to watch the commercials or pay for the downloads. Yeehaa! Yeah, I’m an asshole, but that’s what a free-for-all digital landscape provides: an opportunity to act in amoral ways. So far, writers of entertainment have escaped this technology juggernaut, but our time will come.

Right now, when a print copy of a book is still the preferred method for entertainment reading, giving away content online looks like an excellent idea. But when a new generation of readers comes up — ones who don’t romanticize the experience of reading the printed page anymore than I romanticize vinyl lp’s — all of them equipped with digital readers that are lightweight, durable, easy on the eyes and hold zillions of books, and when a printed version of a book is both expensive and difficult to get a hold of (requires shipping or a trip to the bookstore which may or may not stockit), what will they expect to pay for a digital book or short story? Are we essentially, over the long haul, setting the value of a digital book at zero? And if that’s the future medium that we will all eventually be migrating to, is that going to be a problem? I think that this is the question that Dr. Hendrix was really attempting to address. He was saying that he is worried about where we’re all headed, and frightened by the changes which are already here. He didn’t ask for a dialogue and thoughtful discussion about these questions, but I wish he had. They’re worthy questions.

All of that said, in the larger sweep of things, I actually don’t think it matters what we do as writers. Keep it locked down. Give it away. Whatever. Technology is rewriting the way we live; art forms are going to change as a result. Books may just become one of those silly things that can’t be funded in a serious way because it will be impossible to recoup the cost of producing them, much as traveling play groups are few and far between these days but movies have replaced them. The technologies will sweep over us and some of us will adapt and some of us will stop writing.

Maybe someday, we’ll all be scripting adventures for people in a subscription-only videogame multiverse collecting $29.95 a month for our services and we’ll all be rich. Or maybe we’ll be funded for adding product placements to our freely available and wildly popular downloadable stories. Maybe we’ll look back and wonder why the hell we liked books so much anyway.

But, because I’m not ever-energetic, nor even sort-of-energetic, I’m also looking at ficlets in terms of time sink. I just don’t do that many things that are fun, unless I can see an additional benefit.

So if I’m looking to get my name out into a wider world than via blog or short story in a magazine, can ficlets help me do that?

Lessee.

It’s one or two links to get away from AOL’s ficlet community (one to your profile, which will have to be a good ad for yourself, and then another click to get to your website) — so, assuming that 600-1300 readers a week is what you get with your most successful micro-short (that’s what I’m seeing on the ficlet site right now), and assuming said micro-short is successful at generating a 1% click-thru rate to your author’s home page (the baseline of success response for a direct mail package), it means that 6-13 potentially new people per week will arrive at your home page, at least potentially interested in your fiction.

If you can get them within one click to another bit of content by you — either blog posts or a short story or a sample chapter — (let’s be generous and say 25% success on getting them to read enough to get interested and think you’re a good writer), so 1-4 people will read your story and be excited about you.

Now, if you’re lucky, you could have about a 1-10% paying conversion after they decide they really like you, say, at Amazon or off your own personal site… if you set up the promotion of the book effectively. ie the teaser material they saw on ficlets was reinforced by the teaser material for the book they saw on your website, and the navigation funnel is clear enough that they can then proceed to a buying decision.

I’d guess you have the optimistic potential to generate a sale every couple months, assuming you actually have a plan for what you’re going to do with the person once they click through to you. You might also hope to guide them to other sorts of behaviors, maybe get them onto your email list, or subscribed to your RSS feed. But if ficlets (or really, any sort of online promotion: anything from an interview to a banner advertisement to a link to you from another friend’s blog) is going to work, you need to know what you want people to do once they arrive at your site.

Now, back to the question of numbers. I’ve basically made up a bunch of numbers based on guesses and what I’ve seen in my own experience with website promotions, and even these numbers may be wildly optimistic. I’ve worked on other promotions where I’ve channeled thousands upon thousands of readers to a website and had not a conversion occur. Sometimes you can generate traffic, but it does nothing for you.

BUT… Here’s the cool thing: We don’t actually have to speculate about any of this. We could measure it with Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics) and establish real baseline info for various marketing strategies: how many people click thru from ficlets, how many follow your defined funnel and finally convert to the goal of buying a book of yours? You don’t have to be in the dark about the success of a new promotional method.

If you haven’t checked out Google Analytics, you absolutely should. It’s free and it allows a level of website usage tracking that is extremely useful. On other sites I’ve worked on, I’ve used it to monitor the effectiveness of design changes and advertising promos and it really helps me understand what’s happening with usage, on a day-to-day basis. I can see if an ad idea is a flop within a couple days. I can see if certain content is attracting attention or being ignored, I can tell if there’s something wrong with a purchasing process and I can see where people tend to abandon their orders. There’s a huge amount of information available that can in turn help you make rational decisions about what kinds of online promotion are worthwhile.

Back to ficlets… In my mind, a couple of things are attractive about the idea as a promotional item.

1. They’re short, and don’t require a great deal of time to create. So they’re low risk.
2. They’re related directly to the kind of content that I’m interested in selling. So the people who are reading them, and potentially becoming interested in me, are already going to be self-selected fiction readers, which makes them a more sympathetic audience than, say… video game junkies.
3. You can also post them on your own website, so you can double the value of the thing from a content perspective, allowing you to serve your established audience who already go to your website while at the same time reaching out to a potential new audience.
4. Hey, they really do look fun.