Depends on who I want my market to be. If I am me, I want to appeal to people looking for the cool new women writers, while still pulling in the folks who don't know who they are. So Beagle, Wilce, McHugh, Jones, and Nix.
Having that as one's sole criteria means you end up appealing to nobody; it's the LCD factor. What you want is to appeal to a definable audience, and shoot for crossover appeal outside of that market.
So you pick whatever names think will get you the largest defineable audience and the best chance of crossover appeal. You're not trying to appeal to everybody, you're trying to appeal to as many people as you can. :-p
That works--but that's a definable audience, is what I'm saying. The audience defined by that list of five names is different than it would be if you mixed it up a bit.
I find it hard to believe the marketing department didn't think of that--in fact, I'm quite sure they did.
We appear to be vigorously agreeing with one another. The question, if you like, is whether the five names they chose will get them the biggest possible defineable audience, compared to another five names they could have chosen.
OTOH, thinking about it, I wonder if it's in the long run a poor strategy.
If I'm someone who geeks out over the presence of Sterling and Shepherd and Ford on the cover (and the cover art), and buys the collection--and then I read it, and I find Wilce and Gunn and McHugh and Lanagan not to my taste--do I buy the next one? Or do I piss off, disgruntled?
Possibly, but I suppose the real hope is that you've never heard of McHugh, Gunn, or Lanagan and it turns out you like them just as much as Ford and Shepard.
In my case, Ford and Shepard are the two names that sell the anthology, Beagle is an important name I know, and the rest are either "I've heard of her" or "Who?" and Maybe, just maybe I'll like them. As it stands, I know Ford's work and he is hugely hit or miss with me. Botch Town, a current World Fantasy Award nominee for Novella did not work at all, but "The Way He Does It" was fantastic. Lucius Shepard is the real selling point for me.
As such, my vote went like this: Beagle, Shepard, Ford, Sterling, McHugh
Sorry, you just gave me flashbacks to The Project From Hell ten years ago. It was a different bit of publishing, but the same thing - we had raw material that could appeal to any number of specialized niches, if it were marketed in slices, and instead we had to pull out the very blandest and least-challenging items and come up with a promotion that would appeal to "everybody" when these were mutually exclusive audiences.
Needless to say, what we came out with was mostly pablum, and it didn't do very well, and the "lesson" the PTB where I worked then came away with was, "Nobody wants to look at fine art nowadays."
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no subject
Date: 2007-08-29 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-29 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-29 08:35 pm (UTC)Having that as one's sole criteria means you end up appealing to nobody; it's the LCD factor. What you want is to appeal to a definable audience, and shoot for crossover appeal outside of that market.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-29 08:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-29 08:51 pm (UTC)I find it hard to believe the marketing department didn't think of that--in fact, I'm quite sure they did.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-29 08:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-30 04:04 pm (UTC)If I'm someone who geeks out over the presence of Sterling and Shepherd and Ford on the cover (and the cover art), and buys the collection--and then I read it, and I find Wilce and Gunn and McHugh and Lanagan not to my taste--do I buy the next one? Or do I piss off, disgruntled?
no subject
Date: 2007-08-31 02:29 am (UTC)In my case, Ford and Shepard are the two names that sell the anthology, Beagle is an important name I know, and the rest are either "I've heard of her" or "Who?" and Maybe, just maybe I'll like them. As it stands, I know Ford's work and he is hugely hit or miss with me. Botch Town, a current World Fantasy Award nominee for Novella did not work at all, but "The Way He Does It" was fantastic. Lucius Shepard is the real selling point for me.
As such, my vote went like this: Beagle, Shepard, Ford, Sterling, McHugh
oh lord YES!!!1!!!
Date: 2007-08-31 08:43 am (UTC)Needless to say, what we came out with was mostly pablum, and it didn't do very well, and the "lesson" the PTB where I worked then came away with was, "Nobody wants to look at fine art nowadays."