The Business: Breaking Out Of The Ghetto

Dragon Award winner and nominee Brian Niemeier (and my editor) put this out on Twitter today.

There are 2 main challenges facing content creators who dissent from woke media.
1. Creating high quality alternative content.
2. Exposure.

— Brian Niemeier (@BrianNiemeier) July 21, 2019

He goes on to talk about the necessity to read the people who could be part of our respective audiences, but haven't found us yet. In short, visibility and discoverability. In both respects, these are issues of marketing that most of us as authors are ill-equipped and ill-mannered to handle without going through some painful shifts of mindset. These are also issues that are too big for any one of us to handle by ourselves, despite some of us trying valiantly to do so (and to far better success than you'd think), so we have to get over this atomization and come together to be a team.

This is going to involve reaching out to people who are not authors, not publishers, not even in the business we're in at all. Instead they're in the businesses that get to those unaware audiences, but are already friendly to us for one reason or another; they're our readers, our friends, interested allies intervening for their own reasons, etc. Maybe they're celebrities with compatible followings (e.g. Adam Baldwin, Dean Cain), or they're connected to a bigger media outlet looking for fresh material (Bandai, esp. your team for Super Robot Wars, looking at you). Artists looking for clean material for their portfolios mutually benefit by working with us to make covers, posters, etc. for our properties- and I know as well as you do how often people do judge by the cover alone.

Fortunately we have the means to brainstorm how to go about this in real time now, try solutions, see what works, and then implement working solutions quickly. Let's get to it.