Accept the Market You Have

All TV shows, comics, series of novels, magazines, and heck, even some entire TV networks have very specific groups of people they reach. Whatever your market is, that's the one you get, you're not going to get people from outside that market. You can try to get more people in that market interested in your stuff by raising awareness, but that's it. For some reason, not a whole lot of people seem to realize this.

Here's an example. Someone I know is a huge auto racing fan. She'll watch races live, on TV, subscribe to magazines on'em, and even watch documentaries on aerodynamics, or listen to radio shows about the corporate politics and rules changes. There is a TV channel focused on racing out there, so it would be excessively easy to get her to watch this channel constantly.

For some reason, this channel is constantly trying to attract viewers who aren't the sort to watch racing. Shows trying to attract the "hip-hop community" with one show, hormone-fueled teens with another, or reaching out to other overspecialized sports fans by airing stuff like bobsled racing. The logic is, they'll attract a "new audience" this way.

Let's say it works. A bunch of bobsledding fans start watching that bobsledding show... then the second it ends, they change channels again, because the rest of the channel's shows are aimed quite specifically at a market they aren't a part of. If they were, they'd have already been watching. And of course your diehard autoracing fans aren't likely to be big on bobsledding, so they wander off too. It's a safe bet that the diehard auto racing fans outnumber the bobsled junkies, or you'd have just made The Bobsled Network to begin with, so you're cutting down your viewership and annoying a bunch of people, particularly your main fan base. This is a stupid thing to do.

Now let's look at the Sci-Fi channel. They have (unless they very recently ditched it) a network policy that all their original programming must be serialized (a fact I learned mainly via the MST3k staff griping about it). The idea is, when you go out of your way to have shows where you don't restore the status quo at the end of every episode, you set up some Big Cool Plot Arc that'll keep everyone who watches the show coming back each week with nearly religeous devotion, watching how it all develops. I'm all for it, and I wish more people would follow the trend.

There is of course a downside to this policy. When you have a really good serialized show, you can't come in somewhere in the middle and enjoy it. Almost everyone who saw the first episode is going to be in it for the long haul, but you aren't going to be picking up any new viewers as you go along, unless you somehow give them the chance to see the entire series in order too.

Once again, say it with me now, Sci-Fi doesn't seem to understand this. They'll force the writers of a show to make it a serial, then whine later on when the ratings don't go up over time. You can't have it both ways guys. The best you can do with a policy like that is to give every show an ironclad end-date (in the 1-4 year range), make sure the writers have a plan to wrap everything up by then, and constantly stagger rerunnings of the whole series to attract newbies. For instance, by season three, you should have a 5-times-a-week slot that just loops every episode of the series in sequence (at a decent time, not, say, 2 AM) at least 2 slots for reruns of the most recent episode in your weekly schedule, and if you can make the room, the most recent 4 episodes in a mini-marathon on weekends. You have your diehard fans, you have a way to attract new diehard fans with the marathons (and the diehards you have as is will twist people's arms to watch those if it's a decent show), you've got enough second chances that people won't stop watching the show because they missed an episode and can't follow it now, and if you let the show come to a satisfying conclusion, you can most likely recycle this audience for some of your other shows, slowly but surely building up impressive numbers if you look at the big picture.

One might say this is totally impractical, since we're potentially dedicating 12 hours a week to every original show we have. On a major network, with highly competetive scheduling, this would be true. On a cable channel specialized in targetting a single market though, there's always dead air to fill in. For example, let me take a look at what Sci-Fi is going to be airing tomorrow. Aha. 8 hours of Quantum Leap, some other random old syndicated shows, a rerun of an original show, and a marathon of cheesy horror flicks that never saw theatrical releases. That's a full day of filler, and they have a lot more than one of them a week.

I've been using TV as an example so far here, because watching a given TV station doesn't have any direct cost involved (generally speaking). When you try this sort of "market expansion" tactic in costlier mediums, it can really blow up in your face, and cost you a fortune. Thus, you see less of it. It's rare that you'll see a cookiecutter romantic comedy for instance, where 70 minutes in, a futuristic biker gang starts rampaging through the city and kills most of the cast. People tend to acknowledge that romantic comedy audiences won't generally stand for something like that, and schlock fans won't be willing to sit through 70 minutes of sappy garbage when they can just watch some cheesy 80s schlock flick.

Webcomics are free though, and they too employ some pretty stupid marketting tactics. Well, really just the one, over and over and over again. For nearly any given webcomic out there, you can find a little add which promises something to the effect of big well-drawn pictures of topless girls! Maybe 1 in 15 actually delivers on this promise, while most are good clean wholesome sorta comics with non-threatening newspaper comic style art and structure. So uh... the sort of person clicking these ads isn't going to be the sort of person who'd get into your comic, or vice versa. This trend is honestly so common I have to wonder if there's an official Keenspot/space policy that all ads leading to their site must follow the format. Either way, it's a bad idea.