by Ream
In this episode, join Michael as he dives deep into the world of fandom with special guest Dr. Georgia Carroll. Dr. Georgia Carroll is an expert in fandom studies with a focus on media and entertainment. Together, they explore the intricate balance between building a devoted fanbase as an author while maintaining authenticity and respect for your audience.
#79 Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Welcome to Subscriptions for Authors. Meet your co hosts, Michael Evans, sci fi thriller author of a dozen novels, and Amelia Rose, a semi romance author that makes six figures per year in subscriptions. Together, we will help you make more money with subscriptions and succeed in the future of publishing.
Michael Evans: Y’all this episode is gonna be so much fun. It’s about fandom. Specifically how you can build your fandom as an author. Specifically what being a fan even means and how we can balance that line between Making money from our stories, money that inevitably comes from our fans, not using our fans or commodifying that relationship where all of a sudden our fans leave, our fans feel cheated.
This is the tight, this is the tough balance of actually having a [00:01:00] fandom and actually being an author because it is this industry, entertainment, publishing that runs off of the love our fans have for us and the support they show our stories. And to speak about this topic is none other than Georgia Carroll, who honestly, I knew she’d be smart.
I had watched her keynote at the Taylor Swift Symposium, which you can find linked below. I had read her website. I followed her on LinkedIn. Yes, I’m one of those LinkedIn bros. So I knew about Georgia and I was like, I’m a fan really though. She is, she’s brilliant and is kind of infamous for getting her PhD in ultimately, you know, studying fandom, studying media studies.
The dissertation was all about Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift was a big part of it, which is very timely because obviously she started working on her PhD and working on her dissertation long before the Eras tour. But. You could say it’s the era for [00:02:00] her dissertation, the era for what she’s researching. And she’s quite literally an expert in fandom and an expert in everything that we’re doing here, because not only does she have a focus in Tyler Swift, which like, who doesn’t love that?
She also worked in YA book publishing for the better part of the last decade. So if there’s anyone who can help us build our fandoms and authors in Georgia, And she’s going to be speaking with us all today. So I hope you enjoy the conversation as always. If you haven’t liked, liked, and subscribed to this channel, we’d really appreciate it.
We’re just rebranded. We used to be the descriptions for authors podcasts. We’re now the storytellers of the world show. And we’d love if you showed the new show didn’t really vibe well, but yes, show the new show some love and subscribe. Or if you’re listening to it on a podcasting app, go leave a review, maybe share it with some friends.
so much. We’d love to make this one of the best shows in the author community, period. And we’re going to be doing lots of interviews, lots of fun segments, and we want to bring on just the best guests. It doesn’t necessarily mean the big names. It just [00:03:00] means people who are really smart and have really interesting insight.
And Georgia certainly loves people. I hope you enjoy this podcast. We’re going to get in this episode now. I’ll see y’all very soon.
Georgia, it is amazing to have you on with us today. It’s not often that we get to talk to someone who’s I don’t know if you like, the word expert, but I would consider you an expert in fandom. And I think that you, if anyone’s an expert in fandom, it is you. But tell us like, what Your journey is like learning about fandom, learning about storytelling and the impact that artists have.
And I was like, what got you interested in this? Because it’s something that like we all interface with, but not all of us decide to go get a PhD in it and study it.
five.
Georgia Carroll: Yeah. Thanks for having me excited to have a chat with you. But yeah, so I have always been a fan ever since I was a little kid. My first probably intro to fandom was Harry Potter.
I grew up right in the peak Harry Potter age. And so fandom was always [00:04:00] something that existed in the back of my mind. I started engaging with it online. And I was also really interested in kind of academia, media studies. And so when I got to university, this was back in 2013 I took a course at university called the sociology of celebrity.
And in that we touched on fandoms as well as, the culture of celebrity. And I went, Oh my God, this is something that I could study. And at the time I was working as a publicist for a comic con. So I was seeing a lot of fan celebrity interactions in my work. And I thought, this would be really interesting to study and to look at in more depth.
And I had to look around the literature and nobody was really examining what it is that makes fans want to engage with their favorite actors, their favorite singers, their favorite creators. So I did something in Australia, we have what’s called an honors year. So you finish your undergraduate degree and then you spend one year writing a 15 word thesis.
[00:05:00] And so I did that on supernatural fandom and why supernatural fans want to go to conventions and, pay hundreds of dollars to spend like
10 seconds
in the presence of the main actors. and I finished that and my supervisor was like, have you ever thought about doing a PhD? And I was like, , I’m 22 and I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.
So yeah let’s spend the next five years. Actually, yeah, I was like 24. I was older than that, but yeah. The next five years of my life studying this in more depth. And it became, this big thing, when I studied Taylor Swift, and then she exploded right at the end of my, , my PhD, which became a good thing.
I got to, I got my work out there a bit more and, Got to do fun things like talk to you guys.
Michael Evans: Yeah. Wow. That is, I love that. Like you just, it’s just naturally following a passion and where it takes you. And it gets me interested because, obviously you mentioned [00:06:00] Taylor Swift and that is, that is the big, we’ll definitely get a Taylor Swift and talk about some of the specific insights from her, but just in general.
Like this notion of fandom I know that you talk about you’ve been a fan, you’ve traveled the world for your fandom, but what do you think it actually means to be a fan? Like, how do you define a fan of something versus just like a consumer? Cause I guess I use like Thai detergent or I go to McDonald’s I don’t think I’m fans of these things, but you look at a water brand, like liquid death, and it seems like they have fans, but like, where’s that line, how would you define a fan?
Georgia Carroll: Yeah. So I think it’s interesting. In that, in our modern society, we’re encouraged to become fans of consumer object, like historically we see that a bit less, but the more, capitalist our society becomes the more, we’re encouraged to become like, A fan of yeah, like liquid death, a fan of the Stanley cups, a fan of, things that you can collect and accumulate.
And to me, that’s one [00:07:00] sort of being a fan. I would almost more refer to that as being a loyal customer. You like the product. You will continue to purchase it, some people take it a bit further and it becomes more of their identity in a way. But I differentiate that from being a fan of what I call or I refer to as an object of fandom.
And that’s primarily media texts. So we have our, our books, obviously movies, TV shows music. And then I also put sports and sports fandom in there as well as celebrities and public figures more broadly. So it’s Objects
of fandom, where you can engage with either a text or a person that allows you to build a relationship, a community, and a bit more of a universe.
versus.
Versus, yeah liquid death has like cool marketing. I’m going to buy that. I’m going to tell my friends to buy that, but I’m not going to, join a community to talk about how cool I think liquid death is. And I’m not going to, write fan fiction about it. [00:08:00] I’m not going to go to a convention for it.
And I’m not going to like, try and create, engage with the creators. Like it’s two distinct worlds. And I think sometimes in marketing. People like to combine the two. But to me, fans and fandom are very much community based. And I discuss fandom as well as having three facets to it.
So we have community. You want to engage with others who love the same thing as you. You have participation. So you’re doing more than just, reading the book alone. You might be, sharing your thoughts online. You might be discussing potential ideas for sequel, what you liked, what you didn’t like.
You might be creating fan art. You’re going above and beyond just, reading by yourself. And the third is wanting to engage with the creator, engage with the the object, engage with, if they go to, for instance if we’re talking about authors, say you all want to go to if they’re at a festival and see them, you’ll want to see them at a signing, you’ll want to get your book signed.
You’ll want to do these things [00:09:00] where you engage with the world around it, rather than just going to the bookstore, buying the book, reading it alone. Like you’re a reader and you can enjoy a book. And you might even say that’s your favorite book, but you’re not being a fan and participating in fandom.
If you’re just,
it alone. having
the interaction where it’s you purchase, you read, you move on with your life.
Michael Evans: Oh, yeah. No, I’m right with you. And then I just start thinking about, okay you’re right. If someone just interacts the book, reads, and moves on with their life, they’re probably not participating in the fandom.
Whereas, If someone’s, I think it was it a signing with, it was like y’all fast and I was there. It’s like a big, young little book festival. And I think it was Victoria Aveyard that was there 1 year or may have been labor to go. I think it was labor goes line was like insane.
It was like, untenable. It was like, what is going on? Who is labor to go? And I, at the time, I didn’t really haven’t read or any of those books, but it was like, yeah, obvious that like she had an unbelievably [00:10:00] like just intense fandom. What do you think separates, the type of story that compels people to, travel thousands of miles to go to an author signing and, the type of story or the type of music, the type of media that it was good, but we don’t actually truly become a fan of.
Georgia Carroll: It’s so hard to answer that question because taste and trends are so personal and sometimes they’re so bizarre. If we had gone back in time. 10 years or even, okay, let’s go back in time. Five years to the year 2019. That was the year I started working in book publishing. And if you had told me in 2019, TikTok and Book Talk would change the landscape of publishing the way they have.
I probably would have laughed at you. And I worked in YA publishing at the time, like the way that phenomenon has come along and changed the landscape completely for the kind of book that historically we would not have [00:11:00] associated with chart topping with, crazy sales with huge media tours.
Last year I worked for a major publishing house and we had a very famous book top author come to Australia to, to do a tour.
And it was the biggest tour we have ever done with an author. And she writes, book talk, smutty romance. And to see that was our biggest ever kind of phenomenon 300 fans lining up in a shopping center on a Tuesday afternoon to get their books signed, as the industry, we would never have foreseen that.
So sometimes it captures you by surprise, but I think, and I also think authors can never create just, again, book talk is changing things because you can write to the tropes, you can write to the formula, but historically. It’s always been a bad idea to try and write what you think is going to be a hit or write what you think is going to create a fandom because it doesn’t work like that and we [00:12:00] can never we can never create ourselves something that is definitely going to be picked up by the fans.
Obviously, there are trends like over time we’ve seen like the Twilight trend and then everything was like vampires and werewolves and then, We we saw, a bit more of that, like magic y not magic, but like your shadow and bone and your your shadow hunters and that kind of trend.
And then now we’re onto the romance where we have just all the romance sub genres and your romanticy Obviously, Fourth Wing is the big one which I also worked on, and that was crazy to go from us reading a manuscript and knowing everybody in house was like, oh, this could be something big, but none of us expected how big it was going to be, and just how much of a fandom was going to be created, because often, we’ll read a book in house.
I no longer work in publishing, but when I did, we would read a book in house and we’d be like, this is really good. And then it would fizzle out because, you can’t ever pick it,
but no, as [00:13:00] an author, all you can do is create a work that’s meaningful to you. Because fans can tell if you’re not authentic about something. And if you’ve just created, you’ve thrown together some tropes to try and go viral on BookTok and sell some books, but you don’t actually care what you’ve written about, and then you’re trying to engage with your fans, but they can be like you’ve just written this for the sake of writing it.
They’re not going to connect with you in the same way as if they know it’s your passion and you’ve labored and you care about your world and your books as much as they do. That’s the difference. You have to care and be seen caring for your fans to want to engage with you and to want to build that relationship and to ultimately spend money on you because they want to see you as someone kind of authentic and worthy of their money and time.
Michael Evans: Oh, okay. It’s super interesting because. You talk about this word that I know a lot of authors, I know you know it too, that word engaging with fans, right? I’m totally with you if there was a way to predict a universal hit machine it would have been figured out a [00:14:00] long time ago, and we probably all wouldn’t know about it, but we would know about it because they’d be like, topping the charts all the time.
So there’s, it’s much more alchemy and art than any sort of science. But when it comes to engaging with fans, that can be scary. That can be scary for a lot of us because we talk about fandom and you say these three things, right? Community, participation, and engaging with the creator or the object.
And it’s interesting because when you look at like music fandoms, we’re definitely gonna hit, we’re not going to leave this conversation without talking about Taylor Swift. But thinking about like that type of fandom or fandom around an actor or celebrity, right? Object and the creator are like somewhat similar.
If it’s a, it’s an actual actor or an actress or as just a, maybe a forget reality star, right? Like they are the object of obsession, the object of fandom. If it’s a musician, it’s it’s not them, it’s their music, but they are the one performing the music. But if it’s an author, there’s not much of performance.
[00:15:00] Technically you don’t even know, need to know what an author looks like, or even. What their real name is or their background or where they’re from. So what does engaging with fans look like for authors? Because I think sometimes at least in my head, I don’t know the only one, but you get conflated with this traditional celebrity and how they would engage and then how authors engage with fans.
Georgia Carroll: as well, a little bit in TV fandom. With writers and some of the actors who are known for a character, but they themselves are not that character. So when you see a fan meet them, it’s like the fan wants to meet the character, but they’re meeting a human person who is not that character.
So it’s we have these different senses of self, but with authors and it’s a hard one because in my time I was a and I spent a lot of time reminding authors. To stay away from a lot of what the fans were saying, because you don’t want, obviously an author’s work is very personal to them.
And sometimes if you see, historically, we’ve seen lots of big examples of this, but a fan [00:16:00] who might not like the book as much or have something to critique. And so we have to warn the authors, don’t take that personally. Don’t feel the need to go in and defend yourself. Don’t respond to any negative reviews or don’t, overly praised positive reviews, like some of being an author is letting the consumption of your work exist away from you.
So there is an element of not engaging with that because, we’ve seen too many times across all genres. of publishing authors go viral for all the wrong reasons because they’ve decided to, go on a rant about Goodreads or something that has been said in a newspaper about them.
And it’s just let people enjoy your work separately to you. Because sometimes we do have to be like, the death of the author also means you ignoring everything that he said about your book to an extent because it’s,
People can interpret your text however you want. But what authors can do is create a space for their fans to engage with them.
And that could even be through something quite anonymized. You [00:17:00] set up like a website. If you use a pseudonym or, on a platform under a pseudonym or whatever, but you give the fans an opportunity to say, sign up to your mailing list, and then you can communicate through newsletters that are tailored to their, the fan’s interest and feeding their fandom.
So maybe you’ll have like snippets or bonus scenes or answer questions from them. So you’re giving them a way to engage with you, but you can still remain impersonal. So it doesn’t have to be you. bearing your heart as the real person, the author, you can be the creator who is engaging through the lens of your work and still giving fans bonus content or insight or behind the scenes, like how you wrote.
And we see that again, a bit on TikTok, but not every author has to be on TikTok, obviously, because that’s very much showing your face and showing like I’m playing up into more of a persona, but yeah, you can show, behind the scenes of like your writing life. You can share like snippets of like even like a photo of you writing like a draft or the word like [00:18:00] the end.
And as long as you’re updating fans and taking them on the journey with you, they feel engaged and they feel like they’re a part of that universe. So it very much doesn’t have to be you as a person and you know you’re sharing updates about your life because that’s ultimately not what the fans are there for.
They’re there for you as a person. The author which is a separate thing to, you as the person you are with your friends and your family and, in your day job, if you have one, like you, you can have these two, two selves. And it’s about creating a world where the fans can engage with your author self.
But that author self also, again, I still have my publicist hat on, has to stay out of the weeds a bit and let the fans do their own thing, but give them a space to still engage with you as the creator.
Michael Evans: Yeah,
Love it. And the TV analogy, like TV characters in specific, I think is super helpful. Because, yeah, back and think about it.
Yeah, you don’t [00:19:00] think I was thinking about I love this show Outer Banks. I’m definitely a fan. There’s, Obviously like John B. And in in real life, he’s I don’t care. I want to know about the character, right? And he represents that character. It’s like the author represents the creation, but it’s not.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s, it’s really interesting. And giving them the space to engage with your fans is super interesting. But then I also think about someone like Taylor Smith, right? And the fandom she’s built. And I keep going back to these three principles you’re talking about, because they’re really good.
community, participation, and engaging with the creator object. And, Taylor obviously definitely gives her fans space. But I’m thinking about like Tumblr, and other types of content. Social media platforms that she’s engaged on. She definitely like chimes in quite often. What is maybe different about Taylor’s I, the word strategy almost is takes the authenticity out of it, but I feel [00:20:00] like there has to be a strategy.
What makes Taylor’s fandom and what she’s done different. And I know that you all know, great, because a lot of, as you said, a lot of your dissertation is focused on Taylor Swift. So there’s anyone in the world who can answer this question.
Yeah,
Georgia Carroll: I would definitely use the word strategy. It’s very much a strategy.
It’s all marketing when it comes down to Taylor Swift. I love it to death, but she’s a very clever business woman. But what’s different about Taylor? is one, she only engages in spaces that are very positive about her. So she is only engaging with fans that are like hyping her up and what I say about Taylor taking a few steps back, sorry, is she has created a universe that’s quite different to a lot of musicians and a lot of other fandoms we see where.
Fans want to engage, to an extent, away from the official text, the official person, the official industry. So they will want that touch point with them, [00:21:00] but they want to feel free to go and write fan fiction or go and, argue about what a song means or, do their own thing away from here where they don’t want the creator to see.
And, that’s going back to a lot of book examples, that’s where we see fans. Like they want to engage with the author and they do want to engage with it officially, but they also want to be allowed to go and do their own thing and have their little arguments and write their fan fiction, write their fan art.
And they don’t want the author to see that. And that’s fine. There’s like that separation of fandom. But Taylor has created a world where it all exists in her universe. And she’s almost created these rules. They’re very unwritten rules, but they’re rules where you have to participate in a way that’s very supportive of her, and in a way where you spend a lot of money on her, and in a way where you’re visibly emotional about her.
So you upload photos of yourself screaming and crying and, like visibly reacting. And she rewards those behaviors with this attention. So she’s created a universe in which, you know, if you’re saying the right thing at the right time and she sees it, [00:22:00] she’ll go, Oh my God, I like, I love that.
Thank you. And then she’ll take it a step further and personalize it. So it makes the fan feel as though they’re the parasocial relationship or where they feel as if they know her is is reciprocated. And. Not every person could get away with this. She can only get away with it because she has spent her entire career building the illusion of herself as a friend to her fans.
So from the earliest days of her career, she’s released autobiographical music that fans can connect with. And she has, met specific fans and interacted with them in a way that makes them feel seen. So she’ll learn things about the fans. She invites backstage or to her secret sessions to be like, Oh my God, like I just saw you got a new haircut and you like that you and your boyfriend got engaged and that, you graduated congrats.
Oh my God. And it feels like she, she knows you and she doesn’t, it’s all like a politician. That’s a conversation for another day. Go watch my swift prosium speech, but it’s something that [00:23:00] really only she can do because it’s so baked into her brand that is. Who she is and what she does.
If a lot of other artists tried to do it or tried to do it, just after not having built that kind of background, it would come off as a bit phony, a bit try hard and a bit like they were encroaching in fans. Spaces like it can be done and it can be done very well But it’s very hard for anybody else to just copy paste taylor’s strategy and for the fans to necessarily want That strategy to be copy pasted like not everybody would want their favorite artist Randomly finding them on tumblr because tumblr traditionally is a very safe fandom space where you can You know Say whatever and do whatever in a very fan ish way away from official eyes.
So yeah, Taylor does it very well, but it is not something that I’d be like, everybody go be Taylor Swift because it can go very wrong.
Michael Evans: It’s interesting. It’s like what we can learn from [00:24:00] Taylor is like her business strategy is maybe not What we can all the time take from, but I think there is something interesting about Taylor that we can learn from that is really hard, which is you’re talking about participation, her rewarding.
Participation and ultimately that does come down to you mentioned that word spending money. And that is something that’s uncomfortable because, maybe you don’t take the same strategy that Taylor has used to build her fandom. That seems like a fair, actually, that seems like something that’s probably great advice.
Everyone listening. I, not every advice applies. Everyone probably you can’t be the next Taylor Swift is a good general piece of advice. Right? But in terms of something that we all really will face and struggle with. It’s okay, so we have this story we’ve created. We have this fandom that we hope to have and that we love and that we really want, but okay, let’s pretend fast forward this fandoms.
Burgeoning. We have this story. Obviously it is a business
Georgia Carroll: [00:25:00] making
Michael Evans: money part of being in publishing, but then there’s that weird fine line that no one quite knows it, but you know it when it is icky, which is When you commodify that relationship to a degree in which it’s not authentic anymore How do you know how should we approach that because I know my instinct at times I think many of our instincts.
It’s just like we want to give everything away for free That’s probably a long term business solution, but then how do we not do the opposite end which is where we almost and this is rough language, but it can feel like this even if it’s not it feels like we’re extorting our fans You
Georgia Carroll: Yeah, it’s such a fine line to walk and it is so complicated because like you said you I mean, I feel like it’s human nature and unless you’re like a finance bro or like a tech bro who just loves taking money from people I just want to be nice.
I don’t want to charge everybody like it’s uncomfortable. And [00:26:00] assigning value to our work can also be very uncomfortable. But the thing is when fans love you, they want to spend money on you. Bye. It’s finding it’s about the balance. So you can’t start charging fans for every single thing you do from day one, because they haven’t connected with you yet in your world yet.
And you’ve got to say you’ve released your first book. You’ve got to let them, engage with it, consume it, build hype around it. And then from there, once that kind of relationship is there and they like what you’re creating, Then, we see people and again, I guess like the booktalk world has made this easier in that there are a lot of different ways for people to, create limited editions and special editions and subscriptions and it’s all become a lot more normalized in a way that perhaps it wasn’t 10 years ago.
But we’ve seen fans love special editions. Like to me, I love shiny things. I like collecting things I love, but even I’m surprised sometimes at [00:27:00] just how many editions of the one book fans are willing to buy and they don’t always have to be that different from it’s not like you’re creating bonus content for each of those books.
Sometimes they are, sometimes it’s just, a different jacket or like a different color and obviously these things are very expensive for the author and sometimes it is
Easier
perhaps for an author to have some bonus content that they’ve written, like an additional scene. And that’s you could even release that as as a new ebook version, as opposed to having to go through like the whole printing process.
All of the different kinds of, you’ve got to think about adding value, if you’re trying to to ask your fans to spend more on you. Because what we’ve seen in backlash to some big books recently is that there are too many bonus versions that aren’t different enough and that, this is especially true when you’re working with a big publisher, that the kind of feedback is publishers are just trying to take money from you.
And, Oh, it’s just another copy of that. With a slightly different [00:28:00] color and fans are willing to participate to an extent. It’s you can’t just keep turning that out because it does start to feel a bit exploitative. If you, it’s just one or two and there is an added value, a bonus scene extra information about characters.
Extra fan art. There is a lot of potential there for fans. to want that and you want like a subscription based model where yeah, you, you release certain scenes and information and Q& A’s and backgrounds that is only accessible to those fans who are paying. Obviously that is seen as an added value for fans who have already liked and engaged with your content in the first place.
So you wouldn’t be able to set that up before, people have read your book because it’s like why should I give my money to you? But once they’ve liked it and, there’s a bit of a community forming, they’ll want to pay to get that quality. But it is all about adding value.
You can’t just, and even Taylor Swift gets backlash for that sometimes because. Does anybody need four versions of the same [00:29:00] album on vinyl? Does anybody need 30 merchandise collections? That, that aren’t always the highest quality, like you can’t just expect fans to keep giving you money when you’re not offering the big, the biggest return, but that value in that return doesn’t have to be something ginormous.
It just has to be something that think about it. Like I always say, think about it this way. Think about something you’re a fan of and that you would be willing to spend money on. So it’s I really love a Formula One team at the moment. That’s I’ll move over to my sports analogies. What would I be willing to spend?
10 a month to get in return. Would it be an extra video from a driver? Would it be a special newsletter, a chance to enter a competition that was only open to the fans who were spending that 10 a month? What I wouldn’t, I would be willing to, pay them that if there was a value add, but if they just want 10 a month to send me another generic newsletter, I don’t really want to spend that money when I could be buying extra [00:30:00] coffees.
So it’s all about value that fans want and so that’s where I always say research and understand your fandom and think about it from the perspective of yourself and your own interests.
Michael Evans: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is amazing. And it got me curious about something that I was reading on your website and I was like, Oh, this is such an interesting VIP fan experience.
This feels like when you’re feels very along with that. And, it’s interesting as a lot of authors, but as publicists organizing events are doing in person events. It’s but there’s also the digital aspect of it. What does. A VIP fan experience look like, and how would that differ?
From there’s obviously like the IRL author version of that, but there’s also the digital version of that, especially like during COVID, which you were in the industry. Everything went virtual during that period. Maybe share some insights on that.
Georgia Carroll: Yeah. So[00:31:00]
my
initial background in VIP fan experiences came from when I was working in the comic con.
And so obviously comic cons do this very well. You, there are two tiers at most fan conventions. It’s not San Diego comic con. They do things very differently, your local conventions especially if they’re like TV show specific or in a country like Australia where everything is smaller scale, but so you’ll be able to buy a token to get a photo or an autograph or both, with your favorite actor.
And so that’s where you walk up and you spend 10 seconds in their presence. Which is, enough for most fans, but for the really diehard fans, there is usually an extra tier. And at the events I worked there would be an option for platinum ticket holders to go to a cocktail party where the actors were in attendance for an hour and you could mingle with them.
And then there was, look, I would never recommend doing this just because it was always the most awkward experience.
To witness,
But you could pay to go to a dinner with the actors. [00:32:00] And so each actor would sit at a table with nine fans for two hours. When it went well, it was good. But when you also think about some people who would do that for, be willing to pay that money at a Comic Con.
It was also sometimes quite awkward. But that was the VIP experience. You got more time with the person. And so if we’re thinking about authors it’s very much going to be that engagement with you as a person. Like you can still be the author, but it’s going to be that kind of. Either in real life or yeah, over, over zoom, over some kind of video conferencing where to let the fans speak to you.
And now not every author is going to want to do that and that’s completely fine. But for authors who do there can be a lot of value in that because fans want the chance to ask questions, especially, or to hear from you. And during COVID in One of my previous jobs I worked my whole career has mainly been YA books, but I worked [00:33:00] at a specific kids and YA publisher at the time.
And we had some great YA authors and we would set up basically what we would call like a virtual book club. And so we did this every month, myself and one of my colleagues But we would invite an author in occasionally when, schedules and the author was willing and, all the stars aligned.
And this was different because it was part of publicity and so the author wasn’t necessarily paid for this and it wasn’t like part of this VIP, event. Payment thing, but it’s still the same idea. And fans could ask them a question and could hear from them, a kind of a 10, 15 minute spiel about their upcoming book, about the background, about where they get their ideas from.
And it’s that like exclusive peek and insight that you can’t get in the same way, even from reading their like written words in a newsletter. And sometimes it wasn’t even live. Sometimes you can do like a VIP fan experience like an asynchronous one where fans can send in questions and you record like a special.
[00:34:00] video that kind of goes over it. That’s not like quite as special in that the fans want the ability to talk to you and have that reciprocated. I’m asking this question right now and you’re answering me in return. And and obviously what makes it VIP.
is It’s in a small group.
Michael Evans: Yeah.
Okay. This is, it’s fascinating. I know many authors who have done things in Zoom like that. I’m increasingly seeing at book signings, conventions, like almost these packages, right? Yeah. That you’re getting. So it’s super interesting. And it brings me back to when you mentioned, Like it’s about researching and understanding more fans, which I want to parse that out a little bit because what does it actually take to research and understand your fans?
Obviously there’s the broader readership, which, we can go to reads or, check our reviews. And get the sentiment there
which isn’t always healthy for many [00:35:00] reasons. But also it isn’t. Truly your fans. Like those fans are the people who are really in it.
How do we get to understand them?
Georgia Carroll: There are a couple of different things we can do. In the first instance, and honestly, this is what I even do. I do now, but I even did as part of my PhD research and element of it. It’s just. Keyword searching, reading conversations that, are happening on Tumblr, are happening on Twitter, are happening, on TikTok where fans are talking about your book.
Now, this can be not always, I wouldn’t recommend necessarily the author themselves always doing this because, Then you can get those like awkward things. If you hear something that you don’t want to hear. And then we go back to the same problem as reading your reviews. But if, you, you have somebody that you trust and you work with, or like a family member, a friend who you could get to do that kind of research for.
for you somebody else to go through the hashtags and the weeds that is a step [00:36:00] back. That can also help you. Obviously you can do it yourself as long as you, that you won’t get too intense and what feel the need to jump into those conversations. But that’s honestly, step one is just looking at what is out there where the fans are having the conversations.
Step two. Obviously, if you have the kind of fan group and fandom where you can access them, say through an email, through a platform for a survey at certain points that can be useful I’d be, you always have to be careful about the kind of questions you ask in a survey, but and you have to be clear about why.
You’re surveying them. Because you don’t want to give your fans the thought that you’re just collecting data about them to be like now I know everything about you. So there’s like a fine line there. And sometimes that’s like, why say if you’re selling
special
edition of your book, you [00:37:00] might, add a couple of questions at the end of the checkout process or send.
Something after that to be like, do you mind answering like three quick questions? Like, why are you purchasing the special edition today? Have you bought a special edition before? What are the three words? This is very much off the top of my head. Sorry. Yeah. What are the three words you would use to describe blah, blah, blah.
Do you follow me on these platforms? You can add it in a way to a way they’re already engaging as a kind of an optional bonus, as opposed to please fill out this big survey. But I would say step one, and this is what I recommend to everybody in every industry, go and look at again, sometimes it helps if you get somebody to help you.
That’s a step backwards, because sometimes I’m recommending this to, businesses and marketing just find your fans where they are and look at the conversations they are having, because that is what, They’re doing by default. And so that is, that is the authenticity and that is how they’re being.
And then that’s what you wanna replicate and capture and expand upon for them. [00:38:00] You don’t wanna exploit that, and you don’t wanna immediately assume that you can own those conversations and that everybody that’s talking about it will necessarily want to come and join your join your subscription and.
Give you money, but a lot of them will if you remain true to the tones and the ways that they are already engaging amongst themselves.
Michael Evans: Fascinating, yeah, no, It’s amazing advice and it gets me thinking like, cause you’re right. That is how you would do the first step of the research is the keywords and seeing what’s happening on online forums.
But for many of us, especially if we’re just getting started, if we have an established fandom and there’s already conversations about happening in our books. Amazing. But for those of us who are like trying to write or break into a specific sub genre or genre, do you think this process is useful for help?
Is understanding the fandom more broadly that you’re in conversation with? Because is it like [00:39:00] an interweb of fandoms? Because I’m thinking now there’s almost like fandoms around genres and sub genres.
Georgia Carroll: I
Michael Evans: Would this research almost apply to people who are looking to maybe figure out, again, we want to be careful about writing to trend, but at least understanding their fans more when you’re getting started so that you can maybe build a community and build your stories in a way that’s more likely to connect with them.
Do you see that as something that’s resonates or is this kind of part of the bucket of things that’s trying to find magic and it’s not worth it?
Georgia Carroll: No, I think it can be done. And I think it’s very useful, if you were applying to be a like to a traditional publisher to, get your book published, one of the first things that you’re asked is, what are market comps and how is your book different?
And that you can only answer those questions. If you understand what is out there, how fans are engaging and what, the gap in the market is that your book is different. answering. So it’s you want to write a romanticy you’re not going to go out [00:40:00] and copy fourth wing, but you might look at, you might say, okay, I’m writing a book that’s like fourth wing.
You might go and look at what fans are saying. You might be looking at the bigger conversations about it and you can be like, okay, this is what’s happening out there already. This is how the fans are engaging with the genre. These are the other books they’re engaging with. My book fits in this gap or my book is like this.
So I think it’s super important to understand the genre you’re writing for, the conversations that are already happening in that genre and knowing what books are out there because you want to know who you’ll be competing in the market with. You’ll want to know what you’re offering your fans that is different and it doesn’t often have to be that different.
Again, God bless booktok. I love it. I love it. I love a romance. I love a whatever they’re doing, but a lot of those, especially like at the moment, the sports romance books, you can’t even pick them apart from the covers, which again is a marketing tactic, but they’re all, a slightly awkward girl falls in love with a very famous athlete and they live happily ever after one or [00:41:00] two minor conflicts, like The story doesn’t have to be too complicated, but you have to understand what is working and what the fans want.
And that involves, yeah, research as you’re writing, as you’re getting started and as you’re marketing the book.
Michael Evans: Fascinating. This was an amazing conversation. You are awesome. I learned a lot.
But if we want to learn more from you, Where can we find you? Where can we find your work?
Georgia Carroll: Yeah, gosh, I’m all over the shop.
My website is just georgiacarol. com but I am also
On Twitter at Fansumption, F A N S U M P T I O N that was a handle I made up when I was doing my PhD and initially talking to other academics because I study fans and consumption. But I also just yell about things I love there.
So often, if you look at that, it will less be my research and more be me yelling because my hockey team is losing. Often spectacularly but I do share a lot of my work there, at the moment I’m also doing a research project [00:42:00] for F1 fans. Or about F1 fans and fan engagement. So I often link that there.
So if that’s something you’re interested in. You can find that there. But yeah, I would say my website, First Point of Call. I try and update the blog on there, but I’m a bit behind. Life has been a bit hectic lately. Because I was too involved in my own fandoms. I had Taylor Swift concerts, and Jonas Brothers concerts, and the Grand Prix.
Michael Evans: Yeah,
Georgia Carroll: I study fans, but I’m always a fan at heart myself. But yeah, website and Twitter, I would say your first two points of call.
Michael Evans: Love it. That’s awesome. All of it will be linked down in the description. I, Jonah’s brother concert sounds amazing. Nevermind, Taylor Swift on top of it, but Georgia, you are amazing.
Thank you for your time today. This was wonderful.
Georgia Carroll: Thank you for having me.
Michael Evans: And that was it for this episode. I hope you all enjoyed it. I hope you all had a good time listening or watching if you are watching. You know, if you want to learn more about how to build your fandom as an author, uh, how to grow your community, then you should like 100 [00:43:00] percent check out our free book. It’s called subscriptions for authors.
You can find it linked down in the description. It’s on the storytellers with a website at storytellers rule, the world. com. We recently came up with a new homepage for the site. We’re really excited, really proud of it. You can kind of see all the different portals that we want to help you actually build your storytelling career.
So be sure to check it out. If you have any questions, always feel free to let us know. And I hope you all have an amazing rest of your day. I hope you all have truly an amazing time building your own fandom. We’ll be in touch with more soon. But in the meantime, don’t forget, storytellers rule the world.