Promoting Strangers
what can I tell you about my characters that you actually want to know???
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
As I journey forth trying to find a path through the thickets of marketing my fiction, I keep hearing the advice to talk about my characters in order to draw in a potential audience. This is, of course, great advice!
But.
I’m just not used to that. It’s hard for me to think of aspects of my characters that might interest other people aside from me.
This is foremost a drawback to not writing to market, since I’m not sure what will draw potential rabid fans to my work. I know what I like about them, because I write for myself first and foremost. I have to write the stories of my heart, and I already know I love them.
However, the other half of the problem is that I’ve been immersed in the world of fandom, and writing fanfiction, most of my life. I don’t need to explain the characters I’m writing about in that environment. To get fellow fans interested in a story, all I have to say are things like:
In none of those set-ups do I have to tell you who the characters are, or why those particular plots might be entertaining. You either want to read about Hawkeye becoming an obsessive cat-dad, or you don’t.
This is not the case with, say, Agadart ver Kleelan.
She’s the lead in my love-triad romantasy story, The Queen’s Aerie, and she’s pretty awesome. I know that…but you don’t.
I have no shorthand to fall back on here other than basic tropes, and even those don’t fit perfectly. Is there identity porn? Yes, there is! Agadart is forced to give up her noble identity by her Queen in exchange for sparing her life. Why? …it’s a long (back)story. Wanna read it?????
That’s not the most alluring advertising for the story, is it?
I’m just stumped about how to tell you how awesome Agadart is without you already knowing who she is.
Other authors don’t have this problem. They seem quite comfortable talking about their characters.
I’ve been told to talk about my characters as if I were a fan talking to other fans, but one aspect that is missing in that approach is the community shared world. Fandom works because all of us in a particular fandom have a common language and frame of reference.
I don’t have to spend 15 minutes setting up “there is an alien spaceship in another galaxy that humans got to through a Stargate, and they are this ragtag group of misfits.” That would be Stargate Atlantis, and every fan of the show already knows all that. They know who Rodney McKay is, they know who Ronon is, they know what the wraith are. They likely know the ‘ship I mean when I say “McShep.”
Meanwhile, my character Agadart has a complicated backstory you don’t know and lives in a second-world fantasy land you have never heard of, surrounded by dragon shifters and layers of political intrigue leading, eventually, to war. That is very interesting, I’m sure you agree!
But interesting enough to read the story? To buy the book? To want to learn more about it?
Alas, probably not. Even when I serialized it here on the Scriptorium for free, not many people read it. That’s just how bad I was at marketing it.
I’ve talked in the past about how I tend to simply fling my work out in the world and move on. Yeah, yeah, I know that it’s a very poor marketing strategy overall, you don’t have to tell me. 😕
But what can I say about my characters that will make them as interesting to you as they are to me? For that matter, how can I describe the world building I put into all my stories that doesn’t come across as a series of bland Wikipedia articles?
This is not a problem I have with my non-fiction, where I can talk about the subjects that interest me all day long. Discovery writing? Serials and serializing? The history of text technology? Just try to get me to shut up!
Nor is this a problem I have with my fanfiction, obviously.
Is the solution just to “get over myself”? Make lists of character attributes? Pretend like I’m conversing with my characters? Imagine talking to myself?
One author who seems to have nailed her marketing is Elisabeth Wheatly, whose vids on TikTok and YouTube are highly entertaining, but more importantly, always draw you into the worlds she is building and the characters she is writing about.
I’m sure it’s not as effortless as she makes it out to be, but, damn, what’s the secret?
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Tell me one thing you love about Agadart. Tell me the one thing she does/says/believes that ALWAYS gets her in trouble. Tell me ONE thing at a time about her. Same with the world. Tell me one characteristic of that world that you really loved creating or exploring and why. Tell me how the characters get around in that world, how or what they eat. Build on one thing then another. I don't know if that helps, but as a reader, those are things I want to know.