The obscure academic discipline that could help you land a book deal

And help you sell more books (or whatever you’re selling)

Photo by Siniz Kim on Unsplash

If you understand fan culture, you can have the creative career of your dreams. And the even better news is, some very smart people have already built a framework for you. I’ll outline that framework in just a minute. But first, let me explain how I got here.

I’d been edging up to a new theory about the creator economy for the best part of a year, and then one Saturday this past March, I found myself in a packed convention center, staring around dumbfounded, and I actually FELT a thought crystalize in my brain. We’ve been thinking about platform all wrong, I realized. All this time, we’ve been trying to reverse-engineer success when the simplest solution has been slapping us across the chops. No reverse-engineering is even required!

If you’d witnessed the spectacle, you might’ve felt the same: More than 25,000 people were jammed into the Richmond Convention Center’s main exhibit hall, milling past the vendor stalls and waiting in long lines to snap selfies with the likes of William Shatner, John Cleese, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and Corey Feldman.

So huge was the crowd you could not walk at your own pace. You had to wait for the person in front of you to move, and odds were high you could not see past them either because they had tentacles sticking up all over their heads, or a giant plastic scythe strapped to their back, or something like this going on:

I took this photo to impress my toddler. Like, look, mommy sold a book to a t-rex.

Other people wore homemade Iron Man costumes complete with stilts. Store-bought Spiderman body stockings. Tiny, sexy dresses featured in anime shows I’ve never heard of, much less seen. There was a LOT of Harry Potter cosplay, Star Trek cosplay, Star Wars cosplay, and more than a handful of cosplayers—men and women, young and old—decked out as that Margot Robbie character with the ripped tights, spiked bat, and pigtails. I can’t remember her name, yet I know what she looks like, and that fact proves my point about as well as anything could.

Media has become so mass, and fandom has grown to be such a vast and powerful cultural force, we all get opted-in by default.

The term for this phenomenon is “pop-cultural osmosis.”

Standard definitions of the term, like the one you’ll find on TVTropes.com, generally refer to the way works of high art become known to the masses through allusions, references, satire, and parody. For instance, you may not know Donatello’s sculpture very well, or at all, but you recognize his name from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The same process works for pop art. You needn’t have seen Jaws to know it’s about a shark. Likewise, I’ve never watched those DCU movies featuring Harley Quinn, but I recognize her distinctive look, and just now I recalled her name, simply because I’m a person living in the 21st century. I’ve never seen an episode of Dr. Who, either, but again, I have a vague sense of its content. (Something about time travel and a telephone booth?)

This experience is so common we barely discuss it. But once you start paying attention to the phenomenon of fandom—both the firsthand kind that makes people construct elaborate homemade costumes, and the kind we all unwittingly inhale like cultural secondhand smoke—you see Everything Everywhere All at Once. (See what I did there? Haven’t watched that movie either and yet.)

You start to see how, for better or for worse, fandom now performs many of the functions that religion, physical communities, and civic organizations once performed, and that if John Donne were writing today, he’d say, “No stan is an island.”

You also begin to understand why Media Studies professors trek all the way to Dubrovnik, Croatia to interview Game of Thrones cosplayers, and why tenured anthropologists study Twilight fan fiction, and why the University of Iowa Press now publishes all the leading works in the burgeoning yet still little-known field of “Fan Studies.”

At least, that’s how it’s worked for me. Amidst the worldwide reopening, I’ve grown obsessed with fandom as a lens through which to see and understand the modern world itself. For a hot minute, I even thought of writing a book titled No Stan is an Island: How Fandom Replaced Religion, History, and Culture. It was going to be a fiery, stinging rebuttal to Robert Putnam’s classic Bowling Alone, which describes modern-day Americans as lonely and isolated, bereft of community ties because organizations like the Ruritans and the Masons aren’t as popular as they once were. Like no, Putnam, you’re wrong!!! Fandom-based affiliations are in fact providing what orgs like the VFW used to provide! Well, everything except the crappy wedding venue!

Then I realized such a book would be out of date by the time it was printed. Because the phenomenon of fandom is in large part internet-based, it changes quickly and develops new qualities all the time. Any analysis of it should probably be internet-based, too.

And then I realized applications of this Fandom Theory of the World are probably more interesting to most people than analysis of the phenomenon itself. So, instead of dwelling on how fandoms explain absolutely everything, this post is about how Fan Studies can help you land a traditional book deal, and/or help you reach your other big-time artistic dreams, whether you’re a writer, a filmmaker, a visual artist or a comedian.

Before we dive into the how and why, let’s quickly define our terms via Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary.

What’s a stan? What is cosplay?

A stan is “a very very overzealous and obsessed fan of a celebrity/band/cast of a tv show or movie.”

Cosplay is “literally ‘Costume Play.’ Dressing up and pretending to be a fictional character (usually a sci-fi, comic book, or anime character).”

What’s a fandom?

“A fandom is a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of empathy and camaraderie with others who share a common interest. Fans typically are interested in even minor details of the objects of their fandom and spend a significant portion of their time and energy involved with their interest, often as a part of a social network with particular practices, differentiating fandom-affiliated people from those with only a casual interest.”

What’s a fan con?

“A fan convention (also known as a con or fan meeting) is an event in which fans of a particular topic gather to participate and hold programs and other events, and to meet experts, famous personalities, and each other. Some also incorporate commercial activity. The term dates back to at least 1942.”

What is Fan Studies?

“Fan studies is an academic discipline that analyses fans, fandoms, fan cultures and fan activities, including fanworks. It is an interdisciplinary field located at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, which emerged in the early 1990s as a separate discipline, and draws particularly on audience studies and cultural studies.”

As I said, I stumbled into all this pretty much by accident, attending my first fan con last year and enjoying myself enough to search out bigger cons since, like the one I described above, which is called Galaxycon and addresses not just one particular fandom but a whole universe of them, from Goonies to Clerks and beyond. If you’ve never been to a con, I can recommend going. They have a sweet and friendly vibe, a pleasant open nerdiness. You meet nice people. Interesting people. Obsessives, weirdos, folks like yourself. Cons are events at which lonely people can meet like-minded people in dinosaur costumes.

For authors and artists, cons also allow for real-time market research, and that’s crucial.

Why? Because merely by sitting there in your uncomfortable folding chair, or standing in line to overpay for a Coke Zero at concessions, you get to observe a mass of people interacting with their favorite art and/or their favorite bits of pop culture. You also get to watch them shop for fan trinkets and collectibles, too, because cons often feature a huge number of vendors selling everything from finely worked leather armor to $600 life-size Chucky dolls to self-help books based on the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe. I know this firsthand. I’ve sold a few hundred books at cons.

Even more recently, in the process of writing my new book proposal, I discovered a Fan Studies researcher just published a scholarly volume about the exact same subject I’m working on. With one move I landed on like 79.3% of all the complicated research I need. This is the stuff of nonfiction writers’ fantasies.

Just as importantly, I realized Fan Studies is a thing. There’s a whole academic discipline which combines a number of fields and approaches all to study the phenomenon of fandom. And, most important for our purposes, you and I can borrow these same approaches to:

• Find an audience for our work, solving the single biggest problem all creators face

• Better understand this audience

• Sell more of whatever we’re selling

How Fan Studies could help you get a book deal

Let’s say you’re a writer. You know you have to develop a platform to sell your work—first to publishers, then to readers—and nowadays that tends to mean racking up scads of followers on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, et all.

This is the model for most creative careers nowadays, in fact. No matter the genre or medium, it’s still true: Artists can’t just make art. They’ve also got to pile up a huge base of fans. Supposedly.

But that’s really, really tough, right? It can take years, years, and years years years years years to build up a significant following, and it also requires panache, extroversion, a gift for eye-catching visuals, and a talent for marketing. Plus LUCK, plus free time, because audience-building is a full-time hustle! And this when you probably already have a day job, on top of your creative work, on top of a family, on top of your 10,0000 steps! Even if you take a meta, everything-is-content, build-in-public approach, the workload is inherently unmanageable.  

So, what’s the alternative? Quitting? No. It’s aiming your work at a preexisting audience, and more specifically, aiming your work at a large, preexisting fandom. That way, you don’t have to build your own audience from scratch.

How would this work in practice? You’ll find more details in the links at the bottom, but quick and dirty examples might include aiming your work at fans of Daphne Du Maurier, or Brat Pack movies, or The Last of Us.¹

Fan Studies is all about your approach, and understanding how you can best assess and analyze whatever target market you’ve identified. Below, I had ChatGPT summarize some of the main approaches that Fan Studies scholars use. Then I boiled down their application in the bolded text.

1. Ethnographic Research: Researchers may engage in participant observation, interviews, and fieldwork within fan communities to understand fan practices, identities, and social dynamics. [You can do your own research this way, approaching it like fieldwork.]

2. Textual Analysis: Scholars analyze fan-created content such as fan fiction, fan art, and fan videos to examine how fans engage with and reinterpret media texts. They explore themes, tropes, and storytelling techniques employed by fans. [You can analyze fan art to understand what the fandom is looking for, what fans want, and what’s in demand.]

3. Audience Studies: Researchers investigate how fans consume and interpret media texts, looking at their motivations, interpretations, and emotional connections to the material. This approach often involves surveys, interviews, and focus groups to gather data. [You can interview fans yourself. For instance, I’ve lately been interviewing friends who loved Cheers as research for my new project.]

4. Online Research: Given the prevalence of online fan communities, researchers often employ digital methods, such as analyzing online discussions, social media interactions, and fan websites to explore fan practices and social dynamics. [You can hang out in Facebook fan groups, on Reddit boards, and inside Quora Q&As, observing how fans interact with and react to the material.]

5. Cultural and Historical Analysis: Scholars examine the historical development of fan cultures, tracing the evolution of fandom over time and exploring its relationship to broader cultural and societal changes. [You can become an amateur historian of the fandom, coming to understand it from top to bottom, from origin to maturity, etc.]

Once you’ve put the work into understanding the fandom/audience, you know who your prospective customers are. You have a sense of what they’re willing to spend time with and money on. You may also have a sense of where they’re hanging out, online and in real life.

This seems so basic, and still, I’ve never heard of an MFA program offering a class in audience-building or audience analysis. I’ve never seen Fan Studies mentioned in any mainstream news outlet or writers’ guide or dumb free download about digital marketing.

Why?????????????????

How come we’re all left to figure this out on our own, as if the whole “you must build your own humongous platform” thing is easy, simple, quick as a microwavable meal, or even a manageable set of problems at all, when nothing could be further from the truth? I’d love to hear your theories if you want to share. Feel free to leave a comment below or simply hit reply to this email.

Next time out, I’ll cover the super practical how-to of selling at fan cons and markets, including the materials you’ll need plus a few tricks and tips you’ll want to know ahead of time.

A Good Link

For Jane Friedman’s website, I wrote about what I call the Julie and Julia Formula, or how to turn your admiration of another artist’s work into a salable project of your own. I’ve also written in detail about using ready-built audiences and preexisting fandoms to substitute for a platform of your own.

As always, thank you for reading, and all best,

Cat

1. You could argue the entire approach I’m describing is what big studios and platforms are doing with their endless series of superhero flicks and shows based on video games or some other established, mega-popular franchise. It’s really not. Considering you and I have to avoid using anyone else’s billion-dollar IP and can only make direct use of public-domain stuff, I’m not much concerned that, on the basis of this one post, smaller-time creators will start churning out predictable summer blockbusters. Aiming your work at established audiences is a very wide and flexible remit.