#in the hp vs twilight wars (remember those?)

[thespacelizard]

for the fandom asks: 4, 15, 23 and 24!

ask me fandom things!

4 - Pairing that makes no sense to you?

hmm. idk that there are any because i am cripplingly easy to convince regarding ships. one good manifesto or one decent piece of fanart and im like ‘you know what? i can see it.’

(One Good Fanart is how i ended up shipping frostiron. and also jarlaxle/kimmuriel is entirely rukafais' fault bc they made the idea so Compelling. and then i read lawful’s KimmRai scenes and im like ‘oh this is also Very Compelling’. basically send me a good fic and i’ll add it to the fuckin roster)

…i mean, i am the person who wrote orcus/vecna for a Bit. i’ll ship anything for $10

15 - Fandom you find annoying?

you know, i think i’m genuinely chill about most fandoms because i live in a bubble where i never encounter Other People. i simply do not have the haters temperament outside of liking to read drama that doesn’t involve me

does being annoyed at x-reader writers count? because for the love of god can y’all just have a Tag that you use on here so i can filter it out?? i don’t want to see how bad you want the call of duty man or the anime boy du jour to raw you while i'm just trying to find Fun and Relatable Writing Posts

23 - Age when you started reading fanfic?

oh god, i want to say like. 11? maybe? whenever quizilla harry potter fic was big i guess. i was probably more like 13 when i was actively going ‘this is fanfic and i am reading it’ because quizilla was just a rabbit hole of ‘i am taking a fun quiz oh now im reading terrible OC-insert pseudo porn that is high literature to my 11 year old brain’

24 - Funniest fandom-related story?

my fun fact that i like to bring up is that i learned about fanfiction.net existing from the official maximum ride webpage, where they straight up had it linked.

more fandom-related, idk if it’s funny, but back in ye olde sherlock days, when the ‘sherlock lives’ thing was A Thing, someone wrote it on a desk in my college, and I eventually found them (they were already in my english class, as it turns out). we made a bunch of posters and went and stuck them up around town in the (not quite) middle of the night. not funny per-se but it was fun!

[dinosaurtsukki]

haikyuu!! + things they were doing on the internet when they were like... 12

a/n: is this also a call-out post for myself and a way to make fun of things i did? yes

Hinata: playing those free to play weird-ass games on y8.com when he’s not fighting over the computer with his sister

Kageyama: watching ‘top ten best sets in volleyball games with slow-motion’ again and again until his sister taught him how to use youtube

Tsukishima: writing long essays that he posts on facebook about how much twilight sucks and how much he hates it. definitely had a twilight phase

Yamaguchi: secretly writing twilight fanfiction and posting them on wattpad. he got pretty famous for them but he’ll never talk about it

Ennoshita: played Feeding Frenzy a lot. like, a Lot. this man was a literal god

Tanaka: MAKING PUNK/EMO EDITS OF HIS FAVORITE CELEBRITIES. his masterpiece was punk harry styles feat. 6 earrings and a neck tattoo

Nishinoya: watching american ninja warrior compilations but the ones with ‘eye of the tiger’ edited over them to make them extra awesome

Daichi: coming up with his own inspirational quotes that are kind of terrible like ‘even though i’ve been beaten down, i’ll always get back up’ and posting them on facebook thinking that he’ll inspire people somehow

Sugawara: watching ‘Hetalia Ep. 25 VIETSUB|SPN|ENG subtitles pt. 2/28′ on youtube. either that or ouran high school host club idk this guy had a phase

Asahi: taking a whole bunch of those ‘what your fashion says about you’ quizzes until he eventually made one himself as well as a polyvore account

Oikawa: reading and writing doctor who fanfiction before eventually getting into sherlock and supernatural. yes, he shipped destiel. yes, the destiel canon thing on november ruined him

Iwaizumi: he was really into looking up random animal videos like ‘tarantula vs. scorpion fight’ and stuff like monster bug wars from animal planet and when oikawa made fun of his search history he figured out how to delete it

Hanamaki: vibing to the Phineas and Ferb songs playlist that he made on youtube (of course the aglet song is his favorite one)

Matsukawa: a true tumblr child and was there when this hellsite was first birthed. he remembers the tumblr wars between the fandom and the hipster blogs all too well

Ushijima: didn’t know what the internet was until tendou realized he didn’t have a skype so he made an account for him. until now, ushijima’s status still says ‘hi, wakatoshi here’

Tendou: watching a whole bunch of minecraft song parodies on youtube before eventually making them himself 

Semi: either learning guitar through youtube videos or looking up ‘how to play lucky by jason mraz EASY VERSION | NO BAR CHORDS’ 

Shirabu: he used only Google+ as his social media and wondered why he wasn’t getting any friends

Goshiki: this kid was blessed to be twelve years old when the lego movie came out so he most definitely just used the internet to listen to ‘everything is awesome’ again and again

Kuroo: definitely a fandom kid, one of those from the six major book fandoms (hp, pjo, hg). used to run a fricking roleplay group on tumblr and his oc’s always have a Dark Backstory

Kenma: youguysaregonnacomeformebut--- SONIC THE HEDGEHOG FANFICTION OKAY BYE

Yaku: playing Pet Society on facebook. is it such a coincidence to see him so decked out and rich now when his pet had the same lifestyle? nO

Lev: playing those papa louie games (papa’s pizzeria, papa’s burgeria, etc) and trying to force the game to crash by serving customers 500 chicken wings

Bokuto: as soon as he got a skype account, he’d pretty much voice call anyone and everyone he saw had an ‘active’ status on but his friends didn’t have the heart to switch their status to ‘inactive’

Akaashi: was the king of making ‘which ___ character would be into you (for girls and gays only!!!)’ quizzes that are very detailed. he’d even make a whole character profile with a ‘how you met them’ at the end

Atsumu: used to secretly watch episodes of ‘boys over flowers’ and ‘meteor garden’ on the computer when he was alone at home. eventually got into girl’s generation and super junior

Osamu: a master at playing poptropica and even had a whole gig making poptropica walkthroughs for other people. sometimes he’d play club penguin and get himself kicked out for swearing just for fun

Suna: looking up ‘demons by imagine dragons with lyrics’ on youtube and just playing it on loop. his desktop wallpaper says ‘don’t get too close, it’s dark inside’

Kita: didn’t know what the internet was until suna and aran took pity on him and helped him create a facebook account. until now, his profile pic is still a picture of his jersey number and he has 99+ unchecked notifications

Sakusa: his cousin introduced him to sims. except, sakusa doesn’t play ‘for fun’ but to vicariously live the average salaryman life through his virtual character (he named him steve)

▸ 🎕 ┈┈┈┈ 🎕 ┈┈┈┈ 🎕 ┈┈┈┈ 🎕 ┈┈┈┈ 🎕 ◂

taglist (check out my post for details on being part of my taglist):@montys-chaos​ @miyumtwins​ @strawberriimilkshake​ @pocubo​ @sugawara-sweetheart @akaashisbabydoll @laure-chan​ @therainroguefanfiction​ @atetiffdoesart @stephdaninja @oikaw-ugh​ @charliefredb​ @dramaqueenweeb1469 @tremblinghearts @applepienation @doodleniella @haikyuu-my-love @waitforitillwritemywayout @kattykurr @atsumusdomain​ @goodfoodxoxoxo​ @ah-kaashi​ @guardianangelswings @definitely-yours @amberalisa @whootwhoot​ @liz-multifandom-hotel @kac-chowsballs​ @procrastination-lady

[ginnyzero]

Publishing vs. Marketing Category

Okay, so book and writing community on twitter tends to have these flare ups of convos about books being shelved wrong and authors pointing out reasons such as their gender, or race, or even the content of their books being say, fantasy for them being placed on the wrong shelves in libraries and bookstores. Now, there is a human bias element to this. There are librarians and book buyers for stores who do see a female fantasy author and assume they must be YA no matter the content. Plus, everyone and their mother tagging things incorrectly on twitter or shelving badly on Goodreads.

Let’s dive into the INDUSTRY side of this though. The industry has two different and at times clashing categorizations of books, there are the publishing categories and there are the marketing categories. And while some, specifically some age targets and genres the marketing and the publishing categories will align, there are others that the age target and marketing target may be under the same “name” technically and then their aims completely clash.

Yes, I’m mostly talking about YA. (Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance can fall in here too.)

So, the publishing category of Young Adult, is pretty much what you’d expect. Young Adult should have protagonists of the age groups of 12 to 18, and most likely dealing with “coming of age” themes and “finding their place in the world” and quite possibly “being the chosen one.” I personally find theme categorization for age groups to be really limiting. But I read Brian Jacques from third grade on... so. .. yay fighting mice. (And I was into Star Wars at grade 7, like Timothy Zahn Star Wars. I am not the typical reader.) It’s just something to be aware of if you are querying agents because agents deal with publishing categories and not marketing categories. (And agents have biases too. Like, come on, Unicorns should not be limited to MG. How dull. Agents though will look for anything to clear stuff out of their slush pile, I guess.)

Young Adult publishing category books range between 40K words on the low end and 80K words on the high end. I’d aim for 50K words depending on age group. Remember, YA readers especially read upwards in age groups. So you’re 12 year old is going to be reading about 15 year olds and your later YA readers will have aged out into the adult category of books (supposedly. This is where MARKETING categories become a thing. More in a second.)

New Adult is not a thing. Until it gets a spot in bookstores. It is officially not a thing. Querying New Adult will get you nowhere. Don’t bother.

So, you’ve written your MS and it hits what you think are all the Adult markers, from age of the protag, to theme, to having ‘adult’ content such as sex, drugs, and violence. (Violence is so weird b/c we’ve normalized violence while keeping sex taboo. So, if your book has sex, it might be considered Adult, more than if your book has violence. Even then... marketing categories.) You’ve queried it as adult. You’ve got it through an editor and it’s been pitched to a publisher and they’ve picked it up and your marketing materials come out. And they, meaning the cover, and the blurb, all read Young Adult in their style and tone.

And this may be confusing because you wrote an adult book, why are they marketing it to YA? Like A Crown of Thorns and Roses? (Fae court romance is... err, dead on arrival btw.)

It’s because YA is also a marketing category which no longer equals the age group category. And there are some very popular book series you can thank for this, Twilight, Hunger Games, Vampire Academy, and Divergent are among them. These books were not only popular among teens. They were popular among their mothers. So, publishing quickly pivoted from YA being this age group category with certain things, to a marketing strategy to try and keep the attention of the moms of the teenagers with sex, and love triangles, and I dunno, forbidden romance. By the time ACOTAR came out, publishing decided maybe they should try for this college age, New Adult category so they could market these “sexy fantasy” type books to older readers and get the sex out of YA. So, they used ACOTAR to try and make New Adult happen as a marketing category for book buyers. It didn’t work. Because no one, like with Harry Potter, wants to split a book series across 2 sections. (And lo and behold Young Adult was kind of born because they didn’t want to keep the later HP books in the children’s section.)

And because it didn’t work, YA is now a mess. Because they still don’t want to give up those sweet, sweet, mommy dollars.

There is one very large aspect of publishing the author has no control over. Their marketing. Especially, their covert marketing done by the publisher. Covert marketing is the type of marketing indies salivate over, b/c covert marketing is basically the publishing house deciding where on the bestseller list this book is going to be, how much advertising it gets, does it get a fancy book launch, what is the advance of the author, when is it going to be published and will it have competitors in its genre that same month, who among the reviewers gets to read it, the style of the book cover, and more importantly, what, where, and how much book shelf space it gets in stores. Is the cover turned out? Is it at the front of the store? Does it get it’s own display? Or is it in the “new releases display?” Which book buyer at the chains gets to see it. How do Librarians get a hold of it and which ones? Because the buyer of say, romance, is not the buyer of young adult. The Adult scifi/fantasy book buyer is going to be different than say, mysteries. Same for librarians! There are more than one librarian in your system choosing your books! It is very important who your book gets to be put in front of, what they think of it to how it is going to be received and pushed on bookshelves. There was a very infamous romance buyer of a major chain store who refused to buy POC romances because she thought they didn’t sell.

If your book chain buyer, refuses to buy fantasy books or scifi books by female authors b/c they think they won’t SELL. Then, the publisher feels like in order to get your book to sell, they have to put it into a marketing category where it will sell, Young Adult. Because what do most of those “Young Adult” books have in common, women writers. (Urban Fantasy was almost an exception to the rule on SFF gendered authors. Then... UF became dead on arrival as they thought the market was glutted and yeah. Good luck on getting an UF published, you’d be better off writing paranormal romance. Same type of setting, different genre rules.) It’s not about the content of your book, or the age of your protag, or the theme of your book at that point, it is “What will make this book sell.” Publishing is an industry where profit is not a dirty word. Their job is to make your book sell and if they think it will sell better as YA, they will pitch it as YA.

Even if the book is written for, uses language appropriate for, and has content really intended for adults.

Be aware that Young Adult scifi is a very, very rare buyers market. For some reason, publishers don’t think they can market it? Dystopian yes. Scifi... no. So, if your YA is scifi, like either rewrite for adult or keep your eye open for that very rare time they’re willing to TRY and publishing YA scifi. Or, publish indie. (Dystopian is also I think DOA.)

Is this confusing? Absolutely! Because there are plenty of readers out there who are in the adult category, who don’t keep up with publishing trends, and don’t realize if they want vibrant fantasy books, they may have to look in the YA section of their bookstore. They’re adults. They want vibrant fantasy adult books. And I say fantasy because you see this happening MOSTLY with fantasy. It happens with other genres too, but it is a huge problem in fantasy due to, well, the combination of publishing trends (white, older, male) and the human bias. So, many times, if you want that cool marketed as adult fantasy book not written by a white older male, you are going to have to order it through the ‘zon because you aren’t going to find it most likely on your bookstore shelves. (Science Fiction is another kettle of fish. Outside of some very established authors, it’s not really publishing. It’s a very small category outside of indie. Like, Military SF was a thing for a bit in indie! Just... yeah. Sigh.)

Conclusion: Publishing category does not always equal marketing category. Even if the publishing category and marketing category are named the same thing. And it’s probably not going to change until something major happens that the big four are FORCED to change their current publishing and marketing methods. (Yeah, big FOUR now. Scary.) It’s a complicated system with the author having the most at stake and the least amount of control (and often the least amount of pay outside of agents.) I mean, when Disney of all corporations, doesn’t want to pay Alan Dean Foster his legal royalties for a book they acquired when they got Star Wars, there is a PROBLEM in the system.

Just be aware if you are going into this publishing game. I cover this and more in my FREE PDF “I Finished a Book, Now What? A Tongue in Cheek Guide to What Happens Next.”  Everything from editing types to querying to social media for authors.

It’s available for download on my website. https://ginny0.wordpress.com/books/