Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Niche?

Today is all about niching! Do you need one as a book editor? What will your clients say or think?

How will they find you? And are niches necessary – or always a bad thing?

Tune in for some fresh perspectives on the topic and the details on what I have planned for Season Two!

Marketing for Weirdos: https://www.bearcoaches.com/m4w

The Tyranny of the Niche: https://offthegridclubhouse.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-niche

Transcript

Hello, and welcome, folks, to the Free Lancer. This podcast discusses all things publishing through a social justice lens. My name is Andy Hodges. I'm a cultural anthropologist turned fiction writer and editor, and I own a book editing business called the Narrative Craft. Please, please, please subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode, and sign up for my fortnightly newsletter in the show notes if you want more regular updates.

Now, today's show is the penultimate show in season one, but don't worry. I'll be back in September with a new season. And I'm gonna tell you all about what I have planned for season two at the end of this episode. Today's episode, meanwhile, is all about niching as a book editor or coach. And I'll start off by saying that when I set my business up, I felt quite a strong pressure to find a niche.

It'll make marketing easier, I heard a lot of people say. And there was all this advice floating around in the small business space about how important it was to find a niche for yourself and how you couldn't be a generalist. And I will say this created quite a lot of pressure in my mind because I liked experimenting and doing lots of different things. There's this beautiful phrase, a multi-hyphenate person, and that is me. So when I started my business, I'd say my early years were a little bit like a teen identity crisis, where I was trying out lots of different brand identities and seeing how they fit.

Now in this episode, I am not arguing against niches full stop. If you want to find a niche, a really specific niche, then go for it. But you don't have to. And in this episode, I'm gonna tell you why. So first up, I would say that whatever your business, it's really helpful and useful to spend the first year or two just experimenting and seeing what works for you.

You might find you really like legal editing or that fiction editing is for you or that you hate working on books or something like that. So take some time to find out what suits you and your personality. I know for myself, I do not like lots of bitty deadlines. I do not like projects coming into my inbox every day with deadlines every other day. I like to slow down.

I think that makes me a better editor as well. And that's why I have focused almost exclusively on books with just a few pieces of short fiction or the occasional academic journal article for a bit of variety. So enough about me. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about what some people in the small business world who I really respect have said about niching. And this was one topic that came up on Bear Hebert's course, Marketing for Weirdos, which I highly recommend, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes.

Now Bear discussed niching in a couple of our classes on that course, and I didn't quite get the argument against it. So I asked them specifically about it in a Q&A, and then I got more clarity. And here's the gist of the argument. So let's say you work in a field like life coaching, and I've picked that because it's very general on the surface, but you could take it in lots of different directions. So if you were niching as a life coach, you might pick a particular kind of person.

A niche might be a life point. You might work with people in their thirties or people in their fifties, for example. You might work with a particular kind of person in a situation, like somebody who's writing a novel or someone who's balancing working on their business alongside childcare or other care obligations. So there's all sorts of different directions you could take your business as a a life coach in. But the idea would be that a lot of the coaching ideas, if you go beneath the surface, are quite similar.

So the argument for niching here, and it's a market and a capitalist reason, is that if you pick a niche, let's say you decide to work with writers, then you would learn much more about writers' life context and the things that they find really difficult. And that knowledge would mean you'd be able to provide a more precise feedback to them and support, and it would also be more replicable. If you're working with people from lots of different walks of life, lots of different situations, the contexts and the concepts that apply to one small group wouldn't easily apply to others. Now even within writers, you're gonna have a massive diversity of perspectives. But the point or the market reason or the market logic behind carving out a niche for yourself is that some of that knowledge would be replicable, and then it would be easier for you to bring people in to your business and work with them, provide that service, and then for them to go off and, you know, be happy having been coached by you, the wonderful person.

So this also applies to products as well. Let's say I make key rings, and I could set up a business selling all sorts of different key rings to all sorts of different people, but it would all be a little bit vague. And who would my audience, who would my potential market be? But then if I set up a really specific niche, let's say, Gary Lineker fan key rings or something like that, then instantly, I'm gonna get a particular audience coming to me wanting those key rings, buying those key rings from me. So from a branding perspective, it would be much easier.

And because I'm focused, I could probably, you know, get better quality pictures or drawings or whatever. So there's all sorts of reasons why niching can be a good thing for your business. It can make sense from a a branding perspective, and it can make the products or service that you provide more replicable. And if it's more replicable, it's just easier to do. Like, if I go back to the key rings, if I had a hundred different designs, then that would be a lot more work for me than just one design.

So that's the argument for niching. And Bear Hebert's take on that is as follows. So first of all, it kind of dumbs down the consumer a little bit. If somebody lands on my website and they see fiction editor, cultural anthropology editor, and maybe I sell baked goods as well. Maybe I sell sourdough bread or something like that.

So people aren't gonna think this person specializes in fiction editing and sourdough breads. That means they can't be good at either of those things because they're not spending all of their time doing one or the other. It just doesn't doesn't work like that. I think most people would be: this is unexpected, but it's pretty cool. I can, you know, get my novel edited by the same person I can buy a loaf of bread from.

And, well, hey, if it's a fantasy novel, then there's gonna be lots of crossover with niche baked goods products. So there's this idea that the consumer is a little bit stupid or will only look at a product or service in one specific kind of a way. And it's just not like that. And the other reason, and this is the reason for you as an editor or coach or whatever kind of business you run, is that if you, if you let yourself be trapped in the idea of continually producing the one thing, let's say cozy fantasy fiction editing, just that, then that can be limiting for you. And it can also be boring.

People combine niches even within book editing in really interesting ways. So there's loads of different ways in which you can do it. And if you focus on this idea of, yes, I must find a niche, then you're potentially limiting yourself and you're potentially creating a more boring and less creative work environment for yourself. That said, you might be the kind of person that really, really likes doing the one thing. That is not me, but I know people like that.

And those people can get such a deep knowledge of a really finely tuned thing. I think these people work well in academia because there you're literally trained for several years to focus on a really small topic. So if that's you, then go ahead, find a niche. But the point is you really don't have to, not in the book editing and coaching world. So that was Bear Hebert's take on niching.

Now I'd like to mention Malini Devadas. She has other ideas about niching, and I really like this idea as well because when I spoke with her about niching, this took the pressure off for me. A few years into setting up my business, I decided to set up as a fantasy fiction editor. And I was really, really nervous about doing that at the time because I just thought I'd lose all the clients that I'd been working for, and I would have to put all this energy into making this big pivot, and that felt really scary. Malini helped me because she said, well, a niche isn't about the work that you do.

It's not your little tool house, and how you set up your office. A niche can just be for marketing purposes. And when I thought about that, a lot of the pressure and stress that I had about niching went away because I realized, yeah, I could still take in a history line edit or developmental edit that was both interesting and really well paid while still hanging up my shingle as a fantasy fiction editor. So letting go of the idea of a niche being something that you do and letting it just be something that is part of your marketing toolbox is one other really cool approach. And finally, I was on a session with Amelia Hruby for the EFA [Editorial Freelancers Association] about social media.

And at the end, we briefly discussed niching because Amelia has a really cool podcast episode on the tyranny of the niche, which I also highly recommend, and I will link to in the show notes. And Amelia said, well, what about fiction? And you, Andy, you do kind of have a niche. You have set yourself up in spec fiction, LGBTQ fiction, and cultural anthropology. Three very different things, but they are like three different niches, really.

So how does it work in fiction? I will say it can work in many different ways. So first of all, you can absolutely be a generalist, and I know generalist fiction editors. And that's because genres at the end of the day are there for marketing purposes. So within a specific genre, you will have marketing conventions that show up in prose.

For example, in YA novels, it's really common for minor characters to not give them a name, but label them in capital letters with something that describes their personality, like Total Lad or Stupid Guy or something like that. So that's a a marketing convention that shows up in a particular, not genre here, but audience. That said, if you do copy editing or proofreading, you don't need to know about that sort of stuff [well, you do need to know that example!]. So it's particularly easy, I would say, to be a generalist fiction editor if you're working at that level, because your knowledge is basically the style guide in the English language rather than a detailed understanding of and familiarization with tropes and story structure in particular subgenres and so on. I will say, the deeper the edit, so if you're doing a line edit, which is making heavy stylistic changes at sentence level, or a developmental edit where you're giving feedback on things like story structure, character arcs, etcetera, then you do need to know the genres and subgenres inside out.

So rather than saying for these kind of deep edits, you must be a niche in a certain genre, What I would say is you need to read the genres that you edit. That is so so so important. But if you put that to one side, you can absolutely specialize in multiple genres or in particular tropes. That's another way of doing it. Some will do it by POV.

Some people, for instance, refuse to edit novels written in omniscient POV. And I totally understand that because they can be really difficult. So in fiction, I wouldn't say that genres are niches, but I'd say that they can be a handy way of marketing yourself. It is reasonable that somebody looking for a book editor will type into Google or ask ChatGPT or whatever, can you recommend ten fantasy fiction editors? So people are searching for that kind of thing.

So from a searchability perspective, absolutely, it's useful to peg your name to a niche. And I know I've got people who've seen my specialism in both fantasy fiction and LGBTQ fiction and thought, woah, this is the editor for me. So I think that niches in fiction editing, they certainly don't have to be restricted to genres. They could be focused on many other different aspects of of the writing. And it's also okay to be a generalist too.

And I think it's a bit easier to be a generalist if you're doing the lighter edits than the heavier ones. But I also know editors with, say, thirty years of experience who are able to do really great developmental or line edits of multiple genres. So it just depends on the person, basically. With nonfiction, and I can only talk here about my academic background in cultural anthropology, it's a little bit different. So when we say that genres are like marketing conventions, that kind of paints them as like smoke and mirrors and not really about what's going on beneath the text.

And there is some truth in that because certain features, structural features, of a story are gonna be common to all genres. Things like character goals and motivation. If you're writing a Western-influenced story, a Western-style story, then you're gonna be thinking about those things, whatever the genre, along with the more specific stuff. With something like cultural anthropology, that's a bit different. So if you're a developmental editor, and this question comes up all the time with academics considering developmental editing, you can absolutely edit other fields and other disciplines.

You don't have to have been trained in cultural anthropology to do a dev edit of a cultural anthropology text. That said, I do think that having that background helps – I'm a published anthropology writer, and I've worked in that field for many years. What that does give me is a nuanced understanding of subject conventions, disciplinary conventions, and also an awareness of what it feels like to have gone through that whole writing process itself. And when you add to that credentials, like published books with university presses and academic trade presses and so on, then that does make me a more compelling person for those people to choose to work with than somebody without that background. So having that writerly background in academia definitely helps with getting clients, but I absolutely think and believe that if you're a developmental editor, that is a very different thing to being a subject expert, a person in that discipline, and you can absolutely work in in other disciplines as well.

And you can choose what to specialize in too because your specialism is really how to sculpt that text rather than, like, finely tuned expert knowledge of what is happening in that field in that particular moment. 

Let me bring that back now to fiction. So does that mean that writers make the best developmental editors? I would say it's complicated. So first of all, some people are excellent writers, but they're just not very good at at giving feedback on other people's writing.

And with fiction, I like to compare this to driving a car, which is one skill, versus being a backseat driver, where you're sitting and giving feedback on somebody else's driving. Now developmental editors are backseat drivers. They are really good at noticing really finely tuned problems with that person's driving and making notes on that. That doesn't mean that they would be a great driver. Your ability to critique someone else in a productive and useful way, not criticize, critique, does not make you a good writer yourself and vice versa.

Some fiction writers have this amazing, amazing, like, creativity, and they can conjure up all of these fantastic, amazing worlds. But that's a different skill because it's not judging, but it's absorbing someone else's writing and giving feedback on it. So it's more like with fiction writing, it's your inner child that's dancing and playing away and everything. And then you have kind of an editor brain, which is a little bit different. So I think that some of the best writers could also be the best developmental editors if they develop those both those sets of skills because they know also what it's like to be in that position as a writer, the daunting [feeling], the overwhelm, etcetera.

So these things work a little bit different in my two niches, the fantasy / LGBTQ fiction and the cultural anthropology world. And that's interesting at the end of the day. With all that in mind, what did I end up doing? Well, I, over time, got a feel for the subgenres and genres I like working in the most. I know that I like short novels, so I particularly enjoy YA fiction for that.

I enjoy contemporary YA. I enjoy fantasy and so on. I do not enjoy 200,000 word epic fantasy novels, for example. So even within a genre, it's important to get a sense of what you like and what you don't. But I found it useful to realize that fantasy fiction and novels with LGBTQ representation are things that I get excited about.

And so I've sought that kind of work out. Same goes with cultural anthropology. I do very little editing now that's outside of cultural anthropology because cultural anthropology is the only academic discipline I know that allows me to bring in some of my fiction developmental editing skills as well, And I like that combination. So I've kind of niched, but, again, that's just for marketing purposes. That doesn't mean if if a really interesting project that I was competent at in a different area, let's say, a horror novel came into my inbox, then I would absolutely be interested in, like, working on that kind of novel.

So it really depends. And it's also okay to be a complete generalist or for your niche to be something completely different, like tropes or even the format. You might just want to edit books. You might just want to edit financial reports, that kind of thing. So my takeaway message here is to let go of this idea of the niche as being this thing that you have to find.

And it's not "you're on this quest to go on a one true journey to find your niche" because it just doesn't work like that. And besides, people change, the market changes, the world changes massively, and we rethink lots of things that are important to us in our business. So don't let yourself be limited by the pressure or the tyranny of niching. 

And that's it for today. Now the next episode will be the very last episode in season one, and it will feature a special guest, a therapist turned romance editor called Aimee Walker.

And we'll be chatting about therapists in fiction. And I love this topic because I think there are so many bad examples of therapists in fiction. We'll be chatting a little bit about why that is and what role therapists can have in a fictional work. The next session will also be a little taster of what I have planned for season two. So this season, I've heavily focused on small business pain points.

And there'll be more of that next season because there are a lot of pain points. But I'll also be expanding the focus to look at fiction craft topics as well. And you can expect more guests. And there'll be a Patreon account as well with some exclusive content. But that'll be very low key to start off with.

So thank you, everybody, for listening. Don't forget to take a look at the show notes for all the useful links. And if you want to keep in touch with me, sign up for my newsletter, subscribe, rate, and review. And I'll see you next time.