This was originally made as note meant to be personally sent to a user known as allbaycoyote. However, after seeing that this information would be beneficial to more than just the two of us, I decided that it would be better if the fandom at large got to see it. Enjoy the read, and please check out allbaycoyote's work.

From what I've seen so far in business, having a good product is only half the battle. In order to be successful, one must be skilled at both making a high-quality product, and selling said high-quality product. Getting people to buy is a completely different can of worms, and lately, I've been doing whatever I could to figure out a reliable strategy.

The first thing I did was the usual tactic: research the demographics of the furry fandom, and then compare it to demographics on reading. Apparently, the average person will only read one book a month with moderate variance across different demographics. That's minuscule compared to the hundreds of images a person can look at in a single day. One would think that this alone would be enough to explain why literature is doomed to always lose-out to visual arts in the furry fandom, but there's an important caveat to remember: the amount of money a person can donate remains unchanged. If one instead considers the idea that literature can provide entertainment longer than a picture or an animation can, even if the same amount of work is put into both, then it's actually quite puzzling why people would donate their money to artists who cannot provide for them as effectively as authors.

I pondered this idea for an extensively long time. Eventually, I turned my attention towards how people go about looking for content, and then it all made sense. There was a time before the Internet, where people couldn't bring their stories out to the public without the help of a company with industrial-level resources. Those companies would filter everything down to whatever content they thought would make the most money, and then publish those pieces of content. This kept the playing-field relatively small. Nowadays, anyone with an idea and a computer can post their content online for the entire world to see. This ultimately changes the way the game is played, so with that in mind, I now present to you the thesis I kept in my personal notes after being hit by a sudden stroke of clarity:

We live in an information age where everything is trying to grab our attention. We're faced with ads, friends over Facebook sending us funny pictures, website algorithms trying to recommend videos for us to watch, and much, much more. There's billions of different things we can do while we're on the Internet, which is why people are both unable and unwilling to give each and every piece of content a fair chance. Without thorough analysis, they have to resort to whatever is the most eye-catching, which is why clickbait pervades Youtube, and visual art almost always wins over literature in FurAffinity. It should also be said that this phenomenon makes us form habits such as, but not limited to, clicking on the next video if the first few seconds of the one we're on doesn't catch our interest. This, combined with the ever-increasing convenience in our lives brought on by things like overnight shipping, Alexas, Roku-sticks, and the like, have all conditioned us towards instant-gratification. It's hard for a person to take the time to get interested in a chapter book when they could just look up some funny videos, or check up on their 103 Facebook friends, or gawk at at an art gallery, or similar.
The Internet has become the the world's stage, and anyone who tries to browse it will instantly be washed away by a tsunami of content. Amidst this endless flood of information, where a person can do nothing but grab at the first thing they see, how do we signal people over to our stories? It's nearly impossible to make the first five seconds of a chapter book sound interesting, and many people will turn away the moment they see the chapters, because they know it will take time to appreciate when they could be doing so many other things. Hell, it even seems that all of the popular books nowadays: Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, The Chronicles of Narnia, and the like, are only popular because a bunch of bored teenagers needed a way to burn time while they were at school.
Or at least, one would think that. The thing about delayed gratification is that the gratification does eventually come, and once you get a taste, you'll want more. Think about this: why would people continue to admire these stories outside of school if it was nothing more than a way to burn time? The answer, is that they read enough of the stories to get interested. They were like deisel engines: hard to start, but long lasting, unlike the Internet's usual endless flurry of bottle-rockets. Chapter books still have worth in today's world; they're just harder to market.

For the past few days, I felt like I've been shouting a sales-pitch into an empty void, but now I know that it's the polar opposite. Instead of an empty void, we're in a giant echo chamber filled with millions of people shouting sales pitches at millions of consumers, and the flashy/share-friendly content of some people gives them a louder voice than the others, effectively drowning out the rest. From the way I see it, there are two ways to deal with this problem:

Option one: get all of the authors together, and shout in unison. If we were organized enough to centralize our content into one website, and then contribute to a massive fund for advertising of this one website, then we'll become much easier to notice. In fact, even authors who wouldn't want to be a part of the website would eventually have no choice but to join, because of the positive feedback loop it would create:

1. Many authors centralize their work into a website.
2. The centralized authors achieve more success than the dispersed ones.
3. Some dispersed authors decide to join the centralization.
4. Repeat with an increased impact because the website is now a larger entity.

Option two: instead of trying to scream louder than our competition, try to advertise by talking into the consumers' ears. The instant-gratification of today's world applies to people as well as content. People will have hundreds of 'friends' on Facebook to make posts towards, but true, quality friends, that one knows a lot about, cares a lot about, and take the time to meet in person, are becoming more rare. However, we're fortunate enough that the fringe nature of the furry fandom has caused 'the art of quality conversation' within it to degrade at a slower pace than mainstream society:

Inclusion and belongingness are central themes in the furry fandom: compared with members of other fandoms such as anime or fantasy sport, furries are significantly more likely to identify with other members of their fan community. On average, half of a furry’s friends are also furry themselves.[76]:123–133 Furries rate themselves higher (compared with a comparison community sample of non-furries) on degree of global awareness (knowledge of the world and felt connection to others in the world), global citizenship identification (psychological connection with global citizens), and environmental sustainability.[76]:18 (Shamelessly ripped from Wikipedia.)

Furries are a more closely-knit group than other fandoms, meaning that word-of-mouth advertising- not just shoutouts on Facebook, but actual 'one-friend-personally-recommending-another-a-book' word-of-mouth, will be more effective here than in other fandoms. Quality friends take the time to listen to each other, and are willing to endure the boring beginning of a chapter book if their friend sincerely thought they would like it. Whether or not this alone is enough for successful marketing is questionable; if it is, then why haven't we heard stories of it happening? Though, I still see this idea as being a possible source of momentum for a story, if it does start out with some initial success.

With everything being considered, I'd like to know your thoughts.