You hear a lot of talk these days about finding your niche market. Many of the current business models rely on various layers of middlemen to facilitate the flow between artist and audience. The current trend in online creative business seems to be toward bypassing the middle-management layer and delivering the product or service directly to the end user. Finding True Fans for your work might be a bit tricky, but if you can attract a few loyal supporters of your work early on, they can be a great help in finding other fans for you as they spread the word about your awesomeness.
Pros:
- share marketing and advertising workload with enthusiastic fans
- a group of people hungry for your work and more of it
- positive feedback directly from your fans
- potentially fun and unique interactions
- potential self-sustainability if large enough fan base
Cons:
- can be difficult finding initial fans if don’t already know people who are interested (such as friends or family)
- occasionally obsessive fan (usually harmless, but not always)
- potentially extra fan maintenance
- see also John Scalzi’s The Problem with 1,000 True Fans
If you have the sort of project where a rabidly devoted core fan base would be helpful, remember that it’s a good idea to take care of your True Fans in ways that help them feel special–people like to be in on secrets and know about cool things before the release date. Plus, there’s also the possibility of developing rewarding associations or even friendships with your dedicated fans. If you decide to explore this model, and your project hits prime-time, if you don’t want to stain your reputation with your fans then ensure that you don’t make them any promises you aren’t willing to maintain regardless of your notoriety level. Your truest fans can turn into your largest detractors if you don’t honor your commitments to them, so cover yourself by thinking carefully about what you offer before you do.
Even if you don’t reach the theoretical 1,000 fan goal, accumulating a loyal following is rarely a bad idea. This model works hand in hand with all the other revenue sources outlined in this paper — your true fans both contribute directly and bring other, less devoted people to your work. And of course, if you do find enough True Fans who want to contribute to you regularly, this model has the potential to generate a living wage with which you can continue to produce more cool things.
Other posts:
- Part 0: Series Announcement
- Part 1: About the Series
- Part 2: The Five W’s
- Part 3: DMAIC
- Part 4: 4 Simple Steps
- Part 5: Time Vs. Money
- Part 6: Waves
- Part 7: Donations
- Part 8: Dividing Donations
- Part 9: Managing Contributions
- Part 10: Donating Whuffie
The Artist Business Models series is based on a paper written by Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell, with assistance from Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At the close of the series, the entire business model paper will be posted to Continuous Labs. The business model paper and blog posts are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license.
2 responses so far ↓
1 skzb // Oct 27, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Good post. I’m especially glad that you linked the Scalzi essay, which gives some perspective on it. Even if John is right, and I’m pretty sure he is, the approach has some benefit.
I’m glad to see you hitting hard about what to me is the big thing: if you are lucky enough to have loyal fans, don’t take them for granted.
Good stuff.
2 Matt // Oct 28, 2008 at 9:53 am
Interesting, but skzb is already on my “buy anything from this author” list and I don’t see any way that his production can be high enough to hit the $100/year mark. And, if it was, I suspect the quality would be low enough that he would fall off of the aforementioned list.
Given how much book prices have risen, I’m now spending about $2K/year on fiction that I read for pleasure and probably over $1K/year on reference books.
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