Storytellersunplugged

Last night, I watched my beloved Green Bay Packers lose the NFC championship game to the New York Giants. I was raised to love sports much in the same way I was raised to love reading: by near-constant exposure to both. You can see how this affected (twisted) me in my series of tie-in novels based on a board game called Blood Bowl.  

For those not in the know, Blood Bowl is a game of fantasy football, but this is the kind of fantasy that readers enjoy, rather than statisticians. It’s crammed full of elves, dwarves, ogres, and undead battling to the death over a spiked pigskin. To top it off, it’s full of parodic humor, covering the gamut from the Bad Bay Hackers to Killer Genuine Draft.  Sad to say, but such a mix is not for everyone.

Anyone who can read can enjoy it, of course, but those who get the most out of it must enjoy football, fantasy literature, and gag after gag. Some writers figure that trying to cover many niches at once increases their chances of lining up readers.  It should be X + Y + Z, right? 

In fact, it’s more like X ÷ Y ÷ Z. A Venn diagram that shows the small section where the readerships overlap would illustrate the point even more accurately. 

Simply put, most people specialize in their passions. They love either football or fantasy, but not both. I’m sure you can probably point out a number of friends who are more omnivorous. Maybe you’re even such a person yourself, but then you are the exception rather than the rule.  

This is one reason why they have different sections for fiction in most bookstores. They categorize novels by genre, which is the easiest way to divide them, if not always the most intelligent. Readers hungry to feed their particular passion for a genre know where they can go to get their next fix, something close (if not identical) to what has already proven to please them.  

Stepping outside a genre or blending them can cause a writer trouble. It makes it hard for the seller to figure out where to shelve the book, and it can irritate fans who are looking for a standard genre novel but end up with something substantially different. Or, worse yet, the blended concept might confuse them enough that they never bother to pick the book up in the first place.  

Still, I can’t complain about geeks liking what they like. We’re all geeks of one sort of another. As I define the word, a geek is someone who shows a true passion for something.  Just as you can have computer geeks, you can have sports geeks, film geeks, political geeks, and so on. Myself, I’m a geek for my kids, among many other things.  

Every summer, I go to Gen Con, the big tabletop gaming convention. For the past five years, Indianapolis has played host to the show, and Gen Con is late enough in the summer that it often shares a weekend with an Indianapolis Colts exhibition game. Those years, the football geeks (dressed in blue and white facepaint and wearing the their team’s uniforms proudly) rub shoulders with the gaming geeks (wearing fantasy costumes and toting bags full of books, dice, and cards). 

The looks the two breeds of geeks trade on the street corners can be hilarious. Each of them figures the other kind is nuts. But under the skin, they’re all geeks, they’re all showing passion for something, and they’re gathering with their respective tribes to celebrate this with every bit of heart they have.  

I could stand on the street between the stadium and the convention center and try to sell them my Blood Bowl books, but it would be a hard sell. Each tribe would roll their eyes at a different part of the pitch, but one good eye roll is all you need to spoil a sale.  

But those who keep their eyes on the covers—who think “That’s just the kind of crazy tale I never knew I’d been looking for”—they’re part of two of my tribes, and I love them twice as much. I don’t know if the math (or the royalties) work out in my favor, but who can be bothered with such things when you find such siblings under the skin?