Mackel Tour; Fantasy and a Christian Worldview, Part 12

First, check out other bloggers highlighting Kathryn Mackel this week. Ones I know include the following:
Jason Joyner – Spoiled for the Ordinary
TL Hines’ blog
Cheryl Russel – Unseen Worlds

Since I don’t have an interview with Kathryn Mackel to post, I decided to check out pre-blog tour interviews already posted online. I found a pretty comprehensive one at Infuze Magazine that covers a number of her books, including The Hidden.

Gina Holms did a nice interview last October on her blog Novel Journey. I like that one in particular because it highlights Outriders, the first in Mackel’s science fiction/fantasy series, The Birthright Project.

Ah, fantasy. Just the subject I was wanting to get to.

It dawned on me that one problem with Christian fantasy is the target audience. You see, those in the know say that most book-buyers are women, so the majority of books that make it into print are targeted to women readers. On CBA shelves, you see many more romance, chick lit, and women’s contemporary books than you do anything else.

So is this another chicken-or-the-egg conundrum? I mean would we really expect a large number of men to be buying romance, chick lit, or women’s contemporary for their own reading enjoyment? 🙂 So maybe the reason men don’t buy a lot of Christian fiction is because there isn’t a lot of Christian fiction out there for them to buy.

But marketing people want to provide product for their current customers, and there are only so many publishing dollars to be had. It would involve some risk-taking to really attempt to capture the men’s market.

I say, Why not take the risk? Aren’t the guys worth it? And here’s where fantasy comes into play. Fantasy aims at a cross-section of society and has at least as many men as women who read it.

Think about this: Are the Harry Potter readers only girls? Hardly. How about the Narnia readers? Nope, that’s a cross section, too. Dragons in Our Midst? A healthy number of both boys and girls.

So why am I mentioning series initially targeting young people? Because they grow up. What are the fans of Harry Potter, Narnia, Dragons in Our Midst going to read as adults?

And don’t be shocked by this—they already are becoming adults. The first Harry Potter book came out, what, eight years ago? So those thirteen-year-old fans of the first book are now adults—never mind the older teens who devoured every word.

So what are those boys-turned-men reading now?

No wonder fantasy movies are so popular.

Would that Christian book shelves had more fantasy as an alternative.