Fandom Superpowers

Lately I've been talking a lot about my small town and the community here. What I'm going to talk about now is the community we form online, which is sometimes our closest community of all.

I've had the same core friend group since I was in my late teens. We all met on a now-defunct writing website called Miss Literati. We shared a joy for stories–well-written or not–and suffered the same influx of insanity as the site began its decline. Obviously, those of us that wished to migrated to another site and remained in touch. Over the years, we've developed our own traditions, immersed ourselves more completely in each other's lives, and now consider ourselves honorary aunties to the littles that have joined our collective insanity.

In a lot of ways, we created a village through memes, ideas, constant support, and some tough love. Despite all of the (very valid!) warnings about talking to strangers on the internet, I'm glad we took a chance on one another.

Now then, there's another kind of online community that can be forged between people, and it admittedly is probably the most deranged in many ways. But they're oh-so-powerful. Yes, I'm talking about fandoms.

The only time I had an actual fandom was when I was on that site, Miss Literati. Since then, my work has dropped into obscurity. On the one hand, I really miss being internet famous. On the other, having a fandom of teenage girls ready to rip each other's hair out for even minor acts of plagiarism is a bit ... much.

Instead, I have greater experience being part of fandoms. One, in particular. The BDH or Book Devouring Horde. This is the very accurate name for those of that are devoted to the works of Ilona Andrews. (Yes, I've mentioned the husband/wife writing duo are my favorite creative geniuses a time or two. I have no plans of letting that fact escape anyone's attention. Moving on...)

Different from the friends I've made, my interaction in the fandom group is a lot more focused. It's all about things that remind us of a certain character or scene or book. I recently saw that someone had made a whole book bouquet of things that reminded her of IA books. There are wild theories and accusations thrown around. Guessing what comes next and which character was the one to pull off this maneuver or that scheme. It's cacophony, epic laughs, and all around good times. While you form genuine friendships with your online community, in a fandom, you only have to like the same thing and then match the other person's energy when they're geeking out about it. It's absolutely glorious.

To fully explain the ability fandom superpowers can have on an author's career, I'm going to be paraphrasing one of Ilong Andrews's past blog posts (to the best of my limited memory) about a major event: a self-published book, Blood Heir, rising to #1 in 3 different Amazon categories before it was published due to the BDH pre-orders. (Obviously, now that I'm looking for it, I can't find that particular blog post.) In a different post, published after the release of Blood Heir, there was this startling fact: it hit #5 on the NYT Bestseller list for Combined Print & Ebook. Because BH was a POD (print on demand) publication, the lack of physical copies sold heavily impacted the numbers. USA Today had a more appropriate placement for it: #2 of ALL books sold. Harcover, paperback, digital, audio, fiction, and non-fiction. ALL books sold in the United States at the time of Blood Heir's release.

To steal a quote from the Ilona Andrews blog post laying out all of this information: "This happened entirely because of you. You bought, you reviewed, you posted about it. You made this book a success. We didn’t have any publisher-backed advertising or marketing. It was all you and online ebook retailers. The Book Devouring Horde has spoken."

That's right. There was no marketing for this book. There was no publisher. Even more miraculous, most of those people read the first, rough draft on the website where it was released as a serial during the pandemic. They still bought the book. Many of them bought the book in multiple formats. (I started the serial, fell behind, then chose to wait for the print book to come out. Ooooh boy, it is one of my favorites.)

The point I'm making is: traditional publishing would have you believe that it is impossible to hit those kinds of numbers without being affiliated with one of the Big 5. (Or is it more like 3 now? How many mergers have they done? I forgot.) And in a lot of cases, they'd be right. After all, Ilona Andrews first started with the Kate Daniels series with Ace Fantasy (a traditional publisher). That said, it was their own skill and imagination that helped them create the BDH in the first place. My first introduction to them was through their self-published Innkeeper Chronicles and now I'm happily obsessed. All of that said, an author creates a book, a publisher sells a book, but only the fandom will decide what kind of success it will have.

In conclusion, the true Fandom Superpowers lie in the ability of people who love a thing talking about it. Praise it to the high heavens. Recommend it to everyone. And don't be afraid to express your joy in things. (Advice for everything, not just books, btw.)

Ironically, the only goal I ever had as an author was to grow a fandom of people who wanted to talk to me about my characters and ideas and wild theories. As someone who actually thrives best when pressured to do things, I need a group of people obsessed enough with my work to drive me to do more. Create more.

Anyway, as an absolute member of the BDH, here is the link to the newest IA serial they are currently posting on their website, called The Inheritance. I fully encourage you to join me on the Horde side.

P.S. Blogs do best with images, but sometimes there aren't many images that fit the post. So I'll just be dropping the site logo on all the posts without pics. (Because I have limited storage on this domain provider and uploading new ones is not feasible if they serve no purpose.)

The site logo