A Kickstarter Discussion with Mary Anne Mohanraj

This is the first part of a two part conversation with author Mary Anne Mohanraj about Kickstarter and our writing. Part one starts here, and the second part is on her blog. The link to part two will be at the bottom of this one…

Tobias:

I’ve known Mary Anne since I watched her engage in what seemed like people-organizing magic, first putting together the online magazine Strange Horizons, and later putting together the SF/F publishing Coop. Now we’ve both found out that we’re engaged in creating Kickstarter projects for fiction (Mary Anne’s Demimonde Kickstarter can be found here), and we’re going to do a 2-part discussion with each other about them that will start here on my blog, and then migrate on over to hers!

Mary Anne, the first question I guess I have to ask is, can you fill me in on some of the other work you’ve been doing in the past? I remember the erotica anthology you created that had waterproofed covers (!) called Aqua Erotica. What other books have you worked on?

Mary Anne:

Oof — it’s a long list! Here’s the run-down:

- Torn Shapes of Desire (erotic fiction and poetry, in collaboration with Tracy Lee, an erotic photographer)
- Aqua Erotica and Wet (two waterproof erotica anthologies — it’s actually the whole book that’s waterproof, and it’s a very transgressive feeling for a book lover, to hold it under the tap!)
- The Best of Strange Horizons (the first volume of edited stories, poetry, articles and reviews from Strange Horizons, the online pro SF/F magazine I founded back in 2000)
- Kathryn in the City and The Classic Professor (two choose-your-own-adventure erotic novels)
- Silence and the Word (a second collection of fiction and poetry, some erotic, some SF/F, some mainstream)
- A Taste of Serendib (a Sri Lankan cookbook)
- Bodies in Motion (a mainstream novel-in-stories, Sri Lankan-American immigrant lit. — that’s the biggest book, out from HarperCollins in 2005, and since translated into six languages)
- The Poet’s Journey (a children’s picture book, illustrated by Kat Beyer)
- Without a Map (in collaboration with Nnedi Okorafor), a collection of essays, fiction, and poetry, multi-genre, in honor of being chosen as a Guest of Honor for WisCon, Aqueduct Press.

Those, of course, are the books that actually managed to get published — the list of books I’ve worked on is much longer, including a few that were under contract and written, but then the publisher pulled out (for a variety of reasons). And, of course, there’s the long list of to-be-sold books that most writers have in the works. My agent is currently shopping around my latest completed work, _Rasathi_, a YA fantasy novel.

The publishing business can be — erratic, to say the least, and subject to the whims of the market. It’s often about what the publisher thinks is hot right now — and that can change in a moment. Which is a large part of why I’m trying out a Kickstarter for _Demimonde_.

Tobias:

Okay, interesting! One of the reasons I wanted to try and do this Kickstarter project was for a similar reason. The Apocalypse Ocean is a 4th book in a series. Once it became clear that it was going to make sense for Tor and me to head off in a new direction I realized that trying to shop a 4th book in a series around was going to be quite the uphill battle. I didn’t think it was impossible, I’ve seen it done, but certainly it would be an unusual victory. Particularly since, while direct sales of that series were good, bookstore sales had slipped, leading to an overall graphic of flat, or just slightly rising, sales. Not a breakout hit, but not a failing series either.

Because of that I thought it was a perfect fit for a Kickstarter project. Obviously it seems you’re thinking that same sort of thing, that Kickstarter exists for projects that sit outside the usual specifications?

Mary Anne:

I think it works particularly well for that kind of atypical project. For a traditional book that fit well into what I thought publishers were looking for at the moment, I’d go the classic agent-to-publisher route; in my experience, that gives the biggest bang for the buck — or rather, the biggest up-front bucks. It also saves you from having to take on seven or eight other jobs in addition to the job of writer — you don’t have to also be your own editor, copyeditor, proofreader, layout designer, cover designer, printer, and hardest of all, publicist / marketer. Not to mention handling legal issues and foreign sales! For Bodies in Motion, HarperCollins did all of that, and I was very grateful — there’s no way I would have ever managed to get the Serbian translation on my own, for example; I couldn’t afford to travel to the Frankfurt book fair, and even if I had, likely no one would have listened to some random American author plugging her book.

But this new project, Demimonde, isn’t traditional in a variety of ways. It’s a mix of genres, first of all, which makes a lot of publishers nervous. My first book was fiction and poetry, and that’s a very hard sell to a publisher; I was really lucky a tiny press agreed to take a chance on it. Demimonde is science fiction and erotica, and while it’d be nice to think that meant that you got the science fiction readers and the erotica readers, I think many publishers would be afraid that you’d actually only get a tiny subset of both. The bigger press editors I’ve talked to tended to prefer to bet their limited budgets (more limited every day, sadly) on books that sat squarely in the center of their respective genres — a core-genre book is more likely to have a guaranteed reader base, unlike my wacky cross-breed.

Now, there are definitely some small presses willing to take risks on books that might be perceived as fringe in terms of audience — but small presses are hit even harder by the current recession than the big presses, and a lot of them are publishing far fewer books than they used to. I know that I have an audience of a lot of people who have bought my previous books (_Aqua Erotica_, for example, sold over 100,000 copies in the first six months of publication). So Kickstarter seemed like it might be a viable approach for funding the writing of this particular quirky book. But it’s harder than it looks to reach people, especially since this is such an unusual genre I’m working in.

I think you’re in a great position, in that you already have lots of fans of your first three books eager to find out what happens next. (I’m one of them!) I know that Tim Pratt has had a lot of success continuing his Marla Mason series on Kickstarter for exactly that reason. Have you been writing book four already, or are you waiting to see what happens with the funding? You have some other books under contract to a publisher too, don’t you? Are they taking priority right now?

Tobias:

At this point I have a book I owe Tor that I’m slowly working on. I don’t want to rush it. I’m also finishing up a YA called The Trove. But none of these have a strong deadline set in stone anywhere. I would like to finish them by the end of the year (or at least one of them), and on January 1st I’ll start The Apocalypse Ocean. Like you, I do think that Kickstarter is just one avenue for projects that don’t quite fit the mold. Ones that do, like those other two books, are ones that will be through New York publishers. They provide more money, exposure, and grow my readership in ways that I can’t on my own.

Now your work has characters and backgrounds that are non-Western, which can make it hard to sell projects and are certainly at least one reason you stand a little bit outside the mainstream. Do you think Demimonde faces a marketing hump due to that?

Continue to part two at Mary Anne’s blog…[may not be live just yet, I'll point directly to it as soon as I get the URL]

Mary Anne’s Demimonde Kickstarter here.

Filed under the topic Uncategorized on September 29th 2011 at 1:18 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.