Mighty Sons of Hercules: Market Research

In September I was talking with Alex of Cirsova Publishing about men's and women's tastes in fiction, and Alex mentioned that his mother had suggested marketing the Mighty Sons of Hercules short story collection to women.

That piqued my interest, so I threatened to do some market research using a highly unbiased source: my wife.

My wife has what I consider to be mainstream book tastes. Her favorite book is Brideshead Revisited. She likes romance novels, from the classics like Pride & Prejudice to modern renditions like Beach Read. However, she is not interested in the degenerate trash that has a surprising market penetration with women.

Thus, I reasoned my wife would be a good test case for Alex's mom suggestion: would women readers be interested in the Mighty Sons of Hercules?

I won't make you read to the end. The answer is "no". But I think it is illuminating as to why.

Issue # 1: The Cover

I considered wrapping the book in a brown paper bag like my generation used to do with our textbooks. I should have. The very first thing my wife said when I handed her the book was "this is a man book".

This is excellent reinforcement to the idea that covers matter very much for selling a book, and that covers ideally have some relationship to what is in the book. But it also tells us that some market segments will absolutely have a negative reaction to a cover. If you really wanted to try to market the Mighty Sons of Hercules to women, it would need an alternate cover for that purpose.

Issue # 2: the Women Characters

My wife did not find the women characters engaging at all. My wife said, "even if she needs rescuing, the woman should be the main character." In a romance novel, the woman is always the main character, and also almost always the POV character. In the short stories in this collection, the emphasis is on the sons of Hercules. So, the title is spot on, but this means that the stories are structurally uninteresting to her.

My wife considers herself a feminist, but my wife is the kind of feminist who stayed home to raise our kids when they were little. A romance story where the woman main character is rescued is fine to her, but she wants a story where that woman is the main character. All of the women in these stories are obviously side characters.

Issue # 3: the Structure

The huge contemporary romance novel market features a small set of plot structures that are endlessly repeated. The Hallmark movie. Trading up. Enemies to lovers.

The Mighty Sons of Hercules uses none of these structures. The basic structure of all the stories in the book is "wandering son of Hercules finds an injustice, solves it with violence". I find that pretty satisfying, but my wife did not.

If I were to propose an addition to Northrop Frye's structural analysis of literature, it would be to add in a continuum of plots that preferentially appeal to men or women. There are some pretty clear cases where books will skew almost all one way or the other. Genre literature is often highly gendered in this way. Take Forgotten Ruin or The Song of Roland versus Twilight or the Hunger Games.

But there are also clearly books that are more balanced in their appeal. Wuthering Heights is of this type. A more complex plot is certainly an aspect of this, but it is also possible for simple plots to have broad appeal.

Conclusion

This was a worthwhile experiment. A little bit of testing can be very valuable, and in this case we can usefully contrast Alex's mother's suggestion with my wife's response. There might have been a market for this kind of thing with women in the past, but right now women's genre literature features female main characters with highly standardized plots. If your story doesn't have those two elements, the women's market is probably closed to you right now.

In principle there are stories that have a balanced appeal to men and women, but when it comes to contemporary popular books that artform and market segment is dead. All of the examples I can think of are mid-twentieth century at the latest. Movies still have the ability to do this, but I struggle to think of a popular book outside of Harry Potter that has any kind of balanced audience.

I think it absolutely can be done, but current business practices make it harder than it otherwise would be.

Finally, since I liked the Mighty Sons of Hercules, I can shill a bit for Alex who recently teased Volume II. You can check it out on Kickstarter.