Fandom is a publishing strategy, not a marketing channel

There is a moment in almost every book campaign meeting where someone says the word “fandom” and means “people we can advertise to.” I understand the instinct. It is also, I think, the single most expensive misunderstanding in Indian publishing right now.

A fandom is not an audience segment. It is a functioning society. It has leaders, norms, in-jokes, hierarchies, long memories, and a very finely tuned sense of who is being sincere and who is selling. You do not buy your way into it. You are either useful to it or you are noise.

What happens when the usual playbook is unavailable

The clearest way to explain this is to describe a campaign where I had no other option.

HarperCollins India published two biographies — one of Shah Rukh Khan, one of Salman Khan, both written by Mohar Basu. Neither star was involved in writing them. Neither was going to promote them. That removes, in one stroke, the entire standard apparatus of a book launch: no author interviews, no signings, no tour, no talk-show sofa, no cover shoot. Both books also went straight to release with no pre-order runway.

If you are used to building campaigns around author access, this is a campaign with nothing in the middle of it.

Except that it wasn’t empty. It just wasn’t ours. Both of these men have some of the most organised fan communities in the world — clubs on Instagram and X that have been running for years, with admins who coordinate, archives that are better than most newsrooms’, and a genuine appetite for anything that treats their subject with care.

So the campaign became: go and be useful to those people.

Both titles hit bestseller charts. Both held Amazon category-bestseller status for weeks. The Shah Rukh Khan title reached 271% sell-through. There was not one author interview behind any of it.

Why “channel” is the wrong word

Calling fandom a channel implies you can pay a rate and get a result. What actually happens is closer to a negotiation, and the currency isn’t money.

Fan communities already have the reach. What they don’t have is access, or artefacts, or legitimacy from the institution. A publisher has all three and usually spends them on media that reaches fewer people with less conviction.

They can tell. A fan club admin who has run a Shah Rukh Khan account for eight years can spot a brand-safe, legal-approved, engagement-bait post at a hundred paces. The thing that works is the thing that is actually interesting to them — an excerpt they haven’t read, a detail they can argue about, a piece of the book that rewards the depth of knowledge they already have.

The relationship outlives the campaign. This is the part publishers consistently underrate. Media coverage is a spike. A community that decided you were decent to them is an asset you still have next year, for the next book.

What this looks like in practice

Three things, in order.

Find who is already organised. Not “who is interested in this topic” — who has already done the work of assembling. Fan clubs, yes, but also reading communities, campus societies, subject-matter groups, regional-language book accounts. Organisation is the scarce thing, not attention.

Bring something only you have. A publisher’s real inventory is not ad budget. It is early access, excerpts, physical objects, the author, the archive, the cover process, the decisions. Nostalgia, in the case of those two biographies, did the emotional work that an author interview normally does — and the fan clubs had far more of it than we did. Our job was to give them something new to point at.

Give the community its own room. On Too Good To Be True, we set up a dedicated, fan-first Instagram handle for the book — deliberately separate from Prajakta Koli’s own page. That sounds like a small thing. It isn’t. A community that lives inside the author’s account is an audience. A community with its own address is a community.

The uncomfortable implication

If fandom is a strategy rather than a channel, then it cannot be the last line of the plan. It cannot be the thing you switch on six weeks out, once the media plan is locked and there is a bit of budget left.

It has to be there when you are deciding what the book is. When Too Good To Be True’s data showed a heavily campus-based readership, the 14-city tour got rebuilt around colleges and universities rather than bookshops alone. That is not a marketing decision made late. That is the campaign changing shape because we were paying attention to who had actually turned up.

That’s the part I’d argue for hardest. Not that fandom works — the numbers make that argument on their own — but that it works in proportion to how early you take it seriously.

The publishers who figure this out will not be the ones with the biggest budgets. They will be the ones who worked out that the audience was already there, already organised, already talking, and was mostly just waiting to be treated like it.