Are long tail keywords the best hope for Christian Speculative Fiction?
There is a long, but interesting, post about long tail theory in Publishing Perspectives this morning. The theory is 10 years old, according to the article. If you do not know, the basic idea is that long keywords of three to six words can capture an entire specific niche. Actually, that is greatly overstated and clouded with a lot of my own experience—but it’s close enough.
As a theory it ranks right up with using keywords in titles and posting headings. Marketers have been using this wisdom effectively for quite a while. The news in the article linked above is that it no longer is used much by the Big Six, at least it’s not nearly so effective.
Christian speculative fiction, Christian science fiction, and Christian fantasy are very small niches
The superstar Christian authors in these genre seem to be into horror more than anything. More than that, those not doing mind-bashing tales of unbridled evil write about a powerless, palatable Christianity. I reviewed The Patmos Deception recently, and it typifies this type of book. The spiritual content is religious not real, life-changing Christianity. I must confess that I’ve never made it beyond a few chapters of any Ted Dekker book, so I can’t talk about them—but they are too popular to have much spiritual truth in them IMHO. But I’ve read many Frank Peretti books until I gave up—partially because the topics didn’t interest me any more and a lot because of the non-reality of the Christianity depicted. For people who have had a ministry in deliverance and spiritual warfare, Peretti is simply sad—talking about real problems with non-real solutions. But that discussion is far beyond to content of this post.
In Twitter, long tale hashtags are minimally used
#christianspeculativefiction #christiansciencefiction and #christianfantasy are used a little—to good effect. But Xian High fantasy, Xian Epic Fantasy, and Xian Space Opera are not used at all. To further this end, I started eight Twitter Lists:
- christianspaceopera
- christianpoliticalthrill
- christianactionadven
- christianhighfantasy
- christianepicfantasy
- christianfantasy
- christiansciencefic
- christianspeculative
Please use and subscribe to these lists and use these as hashtags, as well as keywords. Maybe we can get something going. I must confess I don’t use Twitter much anymore because it is so littered with repetitive promotion, but let me know what you think of this idea.
Let me know, please. There’s got to be some way to help make our work easier to find.
So happens I have a couple books free for this. I’ll give it a shot and see if sells increase because of it. Won’t know until February. Thank you for posting this article. Blessings.