Research Into Marketing

Also: the importance of research!

When working on any relatively long piece of fiction, you’ll have research to do. Sometimes part of that work takes place before you write, if the whole plot hinges on an idea that may or may not be viable. If I was to write a story set in a lift which goes wrong, I would do a bit of research into lift mechanisms first, before I waste time writing a major plot element which might not even be possible.

But stories are imaginative, and most first drafts should be written without worrying too much about research. The key is to keep writing, not to find excuses to stop. It’s all too easy to get distracted and head off to look up vehicle speeds, or the colour of a certain poison. Just make it up! When you edit it later, that’s when you check those facts and correct mistakes.

The longer a piece of work, and the further it is from your knowledge pool, the more research you will have to do. If I am writing about a colony on Venus, or everyday life in sixteenth-century Japan, or atrocities suffered by Native Americans at the hand of European invaders, then I’ll have to dive into research.

In the course of research you will make a lot of notes. You may even become an expert in a certain field. And that knowledge is valuable in many ways, not just in writing the book.

It could be used for background information, perhaps in your newsletter aimed at fans. It could be used to write a sequel, or other stories with that setting. It could also be used to write articles, which double as gentle promotion of your work, or your credentials as a writer.

As an example of the latter I thought I’d reproduce an article I wrote for FOCUS, the journal of the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA). FOCUS is for articles, advice, recommendations, and reflections on the creative process of writing speculative fiction, and also on writing as a business.

This article was published in 2020, and my topic was AIs in science fiction: note that this was well before “AI” became an everyday word referring to regurgitation bots which ingest copyrighted work without permission, chew it around, then vomit it forth as derivative slop.