It’s no secret that black authors face unique challenges when it comes to making their work visible and connecting with audiences, but there are some agents and editors working to assist these authors by providing advice and support. Three key suggestions that reverberate through the industry are: write a good story, promote yourself, and know your market. Today, I hope to show how using transmedia storytelling practices can assist with these goals.
What is Transmedia Storytelling?
Transmedia storytelling is the art of telling a story across multiple platforms, with each part making a unique and meaningful contribution to the story world. Black authors can use this technique to amplify their reach and engage with readers. Transmedia storytelling might just be a part of the “brave” and “innovative” strategies that the agents in this 2012 interview with Publisher’s Weekly suggest black authors use to achieve “discoverability.”
Write a Good Story
In the article, Todd Hunter states that “good writing” is what “opens the door for further conversation”: “We seek books that appeal to a large commercial audience.”
How will you know if you’ve written a good story or if it appeals to a large commercial audience?
Why not try some element of the story out on a different platform, in a medium other than print?
Webtoons, animated webseries, and podcasts are all media types with potential to gain traction and attract a sizeable audience. If your story is good, more fans will flock to it, since likes, comments, and shares will trigger algorithms into prioritizing your content. If the story needs work, feedback from a smaller, more supportive audience could help transform it into something better.
Promote Yourself
According to the same article, agents and editors rely on their authors to “active in social media, attending to conferences, [and] building their brands.” Intentionally spreading your projects over different platforms and types of media can generate buzz about your project and help you engage potential fans you wouldn’t normally encounter. A great example of this is Tony Weaver, Jr.’s project, The UnCommons, a manga about a group of unlikely teenage heroes who try to stop an apocalypse. Weaver adds to volume to his story world’s universe by using the characters to engage real-life topics and placing them in intertextual situations throughout his instagram and TikTok channels.
Using transmedia storytelling to promote your story will not only attract the attention of audience, but also of agents, editors, and publishers who are constantly scanning the web for authors who know how to sell their own books.
Understand the Market
Finally, it’s important to understand what your readers want. This means understanding what kind of stories they like to read, but it also means understanding how they like to read it.
In the interview with Publishers Weekly, Ibrahim Ahmad explains, “It’s difficult to get books in people’s hands when there are so many ways they consume content.” He then asks, “How do you promote novels when people’s time and attention spans are so limited?”
Well, this comes down to what Todd Hunter says, “You really have to take the time to gauge what’s drawing people online, where they’re going online.” If fewer people are reading books and more and more are consuming content in different mediums, why not put out content that appeals to them in those mediums?
For black authors, these suggestions bear even more weight, because many of our readers have been deprived of seeing characters that look like them and have shared their experiences. For them to be able to physically see and/or hear those characters through transmedia projects is important.