Wearing your fandom

Automatic Noodle: The Shirt!, something that I think more authors should look into doing when they release a book

Image: Andrew Liptak

Annalee Newitz's latest novella Automatic Noodle is a delight: at once a cozy story about finding and making community with one's peers, while at the same time serving up some sharp commentary about the nature of online misinformation campaigns, propaganda, and how to overcome the dismal state of our online culture.

The story follows a group of robots who're awakened after being shut down for months to find that their employer has fled their debts, they have the opportunity to reopen the ghost kitchen in which they've been working to serve up food for their community.

Newitz did a cool thing to accompany the book's release: they launched an online shop (designed by Mike Monteiro of Mule Design) that offers up some merch that ties in with the book, and in a neat meta twist, it's a site that mirrors the one that the robots set up for their own shop in the story. Newitz's store sells the same merch to their real-world readers as the fictional hungry customers can buy from Automatic Noodle (the restaurant). Even better: the site's URL is the same as its fictional counterpart.

This store offers up not only the book, but a nice range of other things: a s̶h̶i̶r̶t̶ torso cover (in a variety of colors), stickers, pins, sweatshirt, hat, tote bags, and some other items, all branded with the store's in-story logo of a robot hand holding a pair of chopsticks and noodles over the Golden Gate Bridge, designed by Lucy Bellwood. There's also a blog in which Newitz has written about their book tour and a bit about the world.

What I really appreciate about this site is that it's a way to reward the book's fans and readers, and it's something that I think more authors should attempt to do.

I wrote a little about this in Cosplay: A History, but clothing is one of the ways that we signal our interests and style to other people. As various nerd things became cool over the last couple of decades, there's no shortage of distressed DC, D&D, Marvel, Nintendo, Star Wars, and other shirts that people wear to show off that they're a fan of said property.

I've seen a small handful of authors do this sort of thing over the years: fantasy author Brian Staveley put together one of those "Property of XX Athletic Department" shirts for the Ketteral soldiers from his books and partnered with Legion M for some other items, Mary Robinette Kowal released a neat collection of mission patches that tied in with her Lady Astronaut novels, and then there's Brandon Sanderson, who has an entire store loaded with swag, art prints, signed books, and quite a bit more.

There are also times when authors get a nice boost when their work is adapted for big films or TV shows, which leads to things like apparel for House Atreides or merch from The Expanse via a couple of Kickstarter campaigns thanks to the publishers who've partnered with James S.A. Corey for various projects. (The Syfy channel also whipped up a couple of promotional shirts that I frequently wear.) And of course: let's not forget the juggernaut literary franchises like Harry Potter or A Song of Ice and Fire, which have no shortage of merchandizing opportunities.

There's a caveat here: the time and effort that goes into setting up a merch site, products, and the design is not nothing, and with any sort of product, you have to play a fine game judging the appetite that's out there for one's fan base or readership. Nobody wants to invest several hundred dollars in shirts that will end up moldering in a box in a basement. But it's also not an insurmountable challenge to overcome.

But these sorts of projects could be a useful tool for maybe not building an audience, but rewarding or reinforcing one in the long run. It's a way of providing fans and readers with a way to take the story that they enjoyed into the real world, allowing them to express their fandom in a tangible way.

There's certainly an opportunity here, especially if an author happens to have a good following or have a breakout hit. It's been done before: Tor sold an official shirt for John Scalzi's Redshirts back in 2011 (which honestly, that's the lowest of low-hanging fruit) through Zazzle (no longer available), but I would love to see things like shirts with logos for GrayCris, PreservationAux, or Adamantine Explorations from Martha Wells' Murderbot series, the Colonial Union or Colonial Defense Forces from Scalzi's Old Man's War series, the Imperial Radch Navy from Ann Leckie's Ancillary series, and so forth. (I thought about something for Cosplay: A History, but couldn't really think of something interesting. Now, a shirt for Transfer Orbit...)

There are companies and designers who cater to this market: heavyweights such as Out of Print, which focuses extensively on book merch, as well as VoidMerch, run by Jordan Shiveley out of Minneapolis, MN, who's partnered with authors such as Eric LaRocca, Premee Mohamed, and Matt Wallace for dedicated collections, as well as some outstanding metal-inspired shirts for authors ranging from Shirley Jackson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, J.R.R. Tolkien, and a whole bunch of others. (I'm really coveting this Le Guin shirt right now.)

There's no shortage of inspiration here: have a dystopian cyberpunk thriller? Put together a corporate logo for the company in question. Space opera or hard SF novel? Put together a mission logo or ship graphic, which can be used for patches, shirts, stickers, etc. Fantasy novel? Look at any shirt aimed at a traveler or tourist for inspiration. Paul Tremblay's Horror Movie is ripe for an in-universe shirt or poster.

When there aren't official releases, fans will find ways to fill this desire: I have shirts for Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles and House Atreides (Dune), the Pur'n'Kleen Water Company (The Expanse), AgriGen Corporation (The Windup Girl) that people have designed and put up on the various apparel platforms like Etsy, Tee Fury, or Threadless.

The publishing industry isn't terribly good at doing this sort of thing beyond producing one-offs, for structural reasons. Publishes are rightly focused on producing a book, often from authors that are essentially independent contractors: their focus isn't necessarily building an author's career or following, but whatever book they've got under contract. Publicists are overworked already, and while art departments produce art and designs for covers, these are things that are often farmed out to contractors.

When merch is discussed, it's generally coached in marketing terms: stickers, tote bags, patches, etc., things that can be given away at a convention or to influencers. But this is different from rewarding fans: to drum up attention for a title, rather reward a fan's enthusiasm. As a result, these sorts of efforts fall to authors and whatever energy or connections they can muster. But I do think it's a way that publishers can help their authors in the long term by fostering and nurturing communities around their fans and their catalog as a whole.

This doesn't also have to be limited to just authors and books. Magazines and public radio figured out a long time ago that tote bags and stickers are great for visibility. I have a handful of tote bags from publishers like the Folio Society, Saga Press that I regularly use, and I've often been tempted to pick up ones from Barnes & Noble, Bear Pond Books in Montpelier, or The Strand Bookstore in New York City. (I'm waiting until some of the ones I have fall apart or go missing before I add more to the pile.)

This isn't a thing that would work for every author or every book. Some books come out with a lot of fanfare and die on the vine. Some authors don't initially have the readership to warrant this effort and some have a lot on their plates and most certainly don't want to take the time and energy for something like this.

In an ideal world, ancillary merch is available as an option to an author when it makes sense to do so. Maybe they're looking for something to accompany their debut novel, or maybe they've well into their career with an existing fanbase. A publisher already has some of the basic infrastructure that can produce this sort of graphic design work, and maybe that means having someone on staff who specializes in ancillary merch. Or maybe they have some sort of partnership with a designer who they can turn the author over to work out their own deal.

I can see this starting as a conversation with an author, maybe as early as the contract negotiations, and if an author is interested, they can work together to produce some basic designs that can then be flipped over to a printer for whatever you're looking to make, and then offer them up for sale to fans through their existing sales channels or via the aforementioned apparel platforms, timed to accompany a book's release.

The publishing world famously runs on thin margins, and they've worked out all sorts of ways to try and figure out how to drum up additional sales. In the last couple of years, we've seen bells and whistles like sprayed edges, variant covers, and special deluxe editions grow beyond what specialty publishers offer to readers, and I think that this is another step that a publisher could take to reward readers who want to show off their fandom and help their favorite authors.

Ultimately, the goal is to do one thing: increase the visibility of individual titles and authors by taking them off of the bookshelf or eBook reader by displaying them in the real world where other people can see them. This is a great way to celebrate one's favorite authors and stories. Wearing a shirt might not lead to a direct sale of a book, but if you come across someone wearing a Murderbot or Expanse or Dune or #WhateverTitleYouCanThinkOf, you've found another one of your people in the wild. That's a powerful thing, and reinforcing that sort of community is something the publishing industry should be doing more of.

In the meantime, we'll have to rely on those authors who have the energy and resources to put together their own campaigns: I hope that we'll see more of them do this sort of thing. In the meantime, I picked up one of the Automatic Noodle-branded shirts as soon as I learned about its existence, and it's definitely something I've enjoyed wearing.

Thanks for reading. What are your favorite book-related shirts or merch that you like wearing? Does this appeal to you as a reader, and what types of book-related shirts / stickers / patches do you most want to wear? I'd love to get your thoughts: drop them in the comments.

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