alanajoli | Urban Fantasy

amsaph yesterday and a contest and interview of

mdhenry, I've come to a realization. If urban fantasy authors weren't so prolific online and so incredibly friendly to fellow bloggers, I don't think I'd even be reading the genre.

No, seriously.

YA paranormal is sort of a different beast--I've been reading contemporary fantasy in the jfic and the YA sections since I was itty, either with children getting sucked into a fantasy world or having strange things happen to them because they picked up a magic coin. It's not a far stretch from those to books about kids with paranormal abilities, and from there, books with teens whose lives are intersecting with a supernatural world all around them. YA paranormal as a whole has always had a shape--real world kids interacting with crazy paranormal stuff.

Urban fantasy, however, seems to be the heir of a couple of different venues, but a lot of the tropes are born out of the horror genre. As a kid, I never liked horror. I don't like to be scared, and I've never liked scary movies. The word "thriller" tells me I need to avoid the product. But the majority of my reading these days includes zombies and vampires and werewolves--all traditional folk creatures that have run wild in the *horror* genre, and none of which, as creatures, would have encouraged me to pull a book off the shelf as little as three years ago. But when I started following

fangs_fur_fey back at the beginning of 2007 (maybe the end of 2006), not only were all of these great writers posting exciting things about using folklore, their writing processes, and just general fun stuff about their lives, they all seemed to be really cool people. And that personal connection is apparently what I needed to really start actively seeking out UF. (And of course now there are the Deadline Dames and the League of Reluctant Adults, which I'm following a little more regularly than FFF these days.)

lyster and I were talking not too long ago about internet presence driving book sales, and I'm coming to acknowledge that I'm the market share--I'm a person who definitively buys books based on my web familiarity with the writers, and I'll even wholeheartedly embrace a genre that wasn't really my thing if as a community, they're really awesome. It's an interesting way to think about what I read.

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Oh, not at all! I completely understand not liking particular subsets of the genre--and it really got me thinking about why I do read UF. Which, as you can see, isn't because I'm a big fan of the tropes. ;)

His comment was too funny not to merit a response. :)

That'/s true for me generally--I've tried way more books than I would have just because I enjoyed the person online. (Or someone I enjoy recced them.)

Friend recommendations have always been a big source for me also--I think it expands a bit when you not only have local friends, but all of the cool people you communicate with online! And of course, if you're "friends" with people whose blogs you read (truer of some than others, depending on how reciprocal they are), how could you not read their stuff when it comes out? :)

Yes! Mostly, learning a bit about the names behind the books has been an eye-opener in so many ways. I think the short form for expressing this is that while I have always liked or disliked books, now I appreciate the effort/mind behind them.

Word-of-mouth is generally cited as the biggest sales motivator. I feel like authorial presence/accessibility is a nearby shade on the spectrum, although I'm not sure why & how the two things connect.

This is a good question, and has caused me to think about the nature of buzz and hype and the rest. That is, aside from the obvious part, which is a gigantic publicity budget so that one sees refs to a thing everywhere, for a time, but those are shills. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.

I don't want to misstate--I have an awful cold so my head is reverbing like a mallet-struck cymbal--but I see two things happening, one the success of text, and two, the success of cult of personality. This is akin to the cult of celebrity, in which case someone so good looking, and in good parts, and whose life has been romanticized enough, creates interest just by being. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Junior did this--so much so that Mary could play engenues when she was way past the age most women were summarily kicked out of the industry, whose producers and directors wanted 'em young and nubile.

John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow made themselves personalities, Scalzi before he commenced fiction . . . CD was writing for a while, but I don't think anything was the kickass success that Little Brother was right outside the gate, after he made himself a personality. Neil Gaiman has made himself a personality. (He also writes well, which helps! :-)

Oh, goodness, feel better! It's no good having percussion in your head.

I quite agree that there's a celebrity writer aspect to many authors --particularly in comics and television, where the writer is also the brand. Many people are fans of Joss Whedon rather than being fans of a particular one of his shows. And I know several Whedonites who follow around other writers from the Whedon shows. I suspect the same is true with the Lost crowd. And in comics, the writer is often the brand starting from the story, but the developing into the personality. I highly suspect Alan Moore and Warren Ellis were just guys who wrote comics before they were eccentric brilliant personalities who people knew from their antics or online presence, possibly better than their work.

Although it's worked both ways, I think blogging does more sales harm than good in my case. Some authors annoy me* and others have a blog voice that's so similar to their book voice so that I think "author" instead of "story" when I read the book. I can think of only one author where I read the lj, deliberately hunted down the book, and loved it, and the book was non-fiction and so a different kettle of fish.

Getting recs from people on lj is another matter. I do that quite a lot and have found some fun stuff.

*Politics being one example. It's not that I stopped buying someone's books because they voted for the Satan candidate (good, smart people on all sides!), but I hesitated with a few because they were so preachy that they stopped being The Author and became The Political Organizer, and I had less interest in the latter's work or in supporting their whoring of their poor stories. This may be a hopelessly 3rd party view though.

I agree on that--I've been turned off by a few bloggers also, and I'm less inclined to read their fiction if I didn't like their blog. Some of the politicos I found quite interesting, actually, but I liked their work before and probably wouldn't have sought out their work based on their blogs. The worst scenario I had was where an author's blog pretty much bored me. She'd been recommended as a writer, but not a blogger, so I decided to check her out and see if I thought we'd gel. As it turned out, I was completely uninterested in what she was blogging about, and I still haven't bothered to pick up her fiction (which I hear is completely different from her blog).

So it definitely can cut both ways--and it's really just the UF bloggers who have struck me as people who I want to befriend and then read.

The UF crowd does seem to have a distinct personality that makes places like f_f_f so interesting and fun to watch.

Online presence for me also holds the problem of authors who trigger a negative visual reaction via excessive graphics, bad font, or something. I know online form isn't the book, but they're both in the aesthetic pot and one can trigger the memory of the other regardless of logic.

Edited 2009-03-02 16:17 (UTC)

*laugh* Luckily, LJ makes it easy enough to be inoffensive on the eyes. :) But yes, there's nothing like an unprofessional looking site to make you question whoever is hosting it (author, business, or otherwise).

Hmmm... I think I stopped reading it as much when I had to read the comments of the entries to really get to the meat of what was being posted. I love the concept of the questions for the members of FFF, and I completely understand why having each member post an answer as a separate entry would be cumbersome. But I started skipping the entries more when there wasn't something interesting to read right in the entry itself.

A lot of it is just a matter of time, though. As is probably noticeable from my lack of posting the past week, I'm having trouble keeping up with lj in general lately. I shift in and out of how good I am at following blogs, and the organization of group blogs like Deadline Dames and The League make it easy to catch up on the writers I'm most interested in, since they only post once every two weeks or so.

But I haven't really analyzed it, so those are just my off-the-top-of-my-head suspicions about my reading habits. :)

Urban Fantasy

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