The Marketing of Fanfiction

Price and Place

by AgiVega

We have arrived at our second and third Ps, both of which are fairly small topics, therefore I’m going to address them in one article.

Price

The second P in McCarthy’s model is the price of the product. In fanfiction it is rather difficult to interpret ‘price’, as the only ‘payment’ we’re getting for our work are the reviews. When you’re trying to sell a ‘normal’ product, you need to find out what is the lowest price that you need to ask for in order to cover your costs, and what is the highest price that your buyers are still willing to pay.

When you’re writing a fanfic and putting a lot of work in it, you tend to believe that your story deserves lots of reviews. Don’t feel ashamed if you think so - you’re absolutely right. However, when it doesn’t get the amount of reviews you expected, you might get discouraged and think that you aren’t getting properly paid for your work. This might make you either abandon the story, or start pleading for reviews.

Pleading for reviews is a good idea, but don’t overdo it. I know it from experience that if you do, it may have the opposite effect on the reader than from what you intended.

It is perfectly okay to put a ‘please, review’ or ‘feedback is most welcome’ at the end of each of your chapters, but going into hysterics and wailing ‘no one ever reviews my fic! If I don’t get five more reviews in a week, I won’t update it at all!’ is a bad tactic. It gives the reader the impression that you’re setting too high a price on your story and it will make them review even less. If your fanfic is well-written, a real quality story, then the readers will pay you, very likely even over the price (the amount of reviews you expect for a chapter) you had set.

You have to note, however, that in various fandoms and on various sites, the readers’ willingness to reviews varies. Let me give you an example. When I was posting my latest novel-length Harry Potter fanfic on fanfiction.net (that was three years ago), the site didn’t have enhanced statistics yet, but other sites I was posting the fic on, did. On Schnoogle, the story got about 500 hits per chapter, and about 35 reviews per chapter. On Sink Into Your Eyes, it got about 400 hits and 15 reviews per chapter. It was the same story, and the review per hit counts were very different.

On fanfiction.net, since the site has had enhanced statistics, I have noticed that review per hit counts are determined by which fandom you’re posting a fic in. In Artemis Fowl, for example, it is natural that ten percent of your readers review. The same stands for the Bartimaeus Trilogy fandom. Ten percent is a very high count compared to the rest of the fandoms where usually only 2-3 percent of the readers care to give feedback.

When you’re asking (probably even begging) for reviews, take the reviewing habits of the readers in chosen fandom into account. In a ‘responsive fandom’ you can ask for reviews, and you will get them. In other fandoms, you can even threaten your readers to stop updating if you aren’t getting more response, and they still won’t review. However, setting a fairly ‘low price’ and thanking your reviewers if they submit at least five reviews per chapter will pay off. Later, when your fic gets more and more popular, you will be able to ‘raise your price’ and demand (although subtly and politely) more reviews.

Place

In marketing, place means the various ways you get your product to the potential customers. You may choose the ‘intensive distribution method’ which means you try to sell your product in any store where it may be bought by someone; or the ‘selective method’ which means you only target stores specialising in the sort of product you intend to sell.

In fanfiction, if you want to choose the intensive method, it is advisable to post your story on fanfiction.net that has at least a thousand categories with all types of fanfics. Some say they deliberately don’t post anything on fanfiction.net because it’s a site where the bad fics aren’t filtered out by careful admins, and you have to wade through loads of trash before you find a real gem. This is, of course, true. However, fanfiction.net gives you the opportunity to sell more than one sort of product at once. If your readers in the Harry Potter fandom liked your story, you can lure them over to another fandom you’re posting your new fanfic in. On more specialised sites that focus on one fandom only, you obviously can’t do this.

Also, according to my experience, you can’t get as many reviews on ‘specialised’ sites as you can on fanfiction.net. Specialised sites are usually much smaller with many fewer readers who have a smaller willingness to review. The readers’ unwillingness to review on smaller sites can be put down to the sites’ usually rather undeveloped review submission system. If the reader has to click on a link in the chapter to find themselves in a forum where they have to look for the thread they can review in, they will rather spare themselves the trouble and not review at all. Therefore it is advisable to find out as much about a site’s review system as possible before you start to post your fic there.

Best choice is to post your fic on sites that have a review-, author- and update-alert system. Sites like that spare you the time of having to visit them three times a day to see if you’ve received any more reviews, and they also help you get more reviews by alerting your avid readers that you have updated your story. Remember that readers on the average are lazy. They don’t like having to check on their favourite authors’ profiles every day, but if they get update-alert emails, they will be much more willing to visit your profile and even submit reviews.