What Is My Audience for Mecha or Military SF?

I was just thinking the other day about what my audience size is as I write "realistic" military SF with a mechas in it.  While I don't have any real numbers, I went through it as a thought exercise.  The goal was to figure out how to write my Cover Blurb for Neo Ace.  My first step was to determine the approximate size of the science fiction and anime audiences.

I used the number of registered users on Reddit for the rough statistics.  You can see that SF fans outnumber anime fans, but only by 22%  (anime is big as a genre).  There is a mecha forum, but it doesn't have many members compared to the anime forum, but I figured the numbers were low as anime companies in North America wouldn't sell to 1% of the market for mecha anime so I guessed the number was closer to 5% of the number of anime fans.  For military SF, there is no forum - weird, but not surprising as I can't find a marketing channel for this audience either.  I guessed that military SF fans were about 10% of the SF fan base as Amazon classifies about 10% of the SF books as military SF.  Publishers must be making money, so they'll publish what can sell.

Military SF / Mecha SF / Anime / SF Audience Overlap (click to enlarge)

Having come up with these numbers, I did a real quick Venn diagram with the overlap with the various fan bases.  Military SF and Mecha Fans belong to their appropriate larger bubble. There is a big problem determining the overlap where the sets of fans meet, but based on my past experience, here's what I figure.

Anime and SF fans crossover, and it is larger than what the diagram shows.  However, I'd be surprised if fans that read SF and watch anime overlap by more than 50%.  I think it is probably way lower, like 20 or 25%.  The number does go up if you include other non-written - say visual media (TV, movies).  I'm a writer though, so I'll go with the lower number.

Then, out of these two big audiences, you want the mecha fans and the military SF fans.  This is a sizable number of fans even at 10% of the overall fan base, and it would be wonderful to get both.  Military SF fans are mainly written media fans as there just isn't that much visual military SF.  Mecha fans by definition are visual fans as it is mecha anime. The crossover here is unknown, but I believe it is low again just because of the parent set numbers. 

So, based on all this, what do I do for marketing my Exocrisis Blue books?  I think the intersection of mecha fans and military SF fans is small.  I also tried to market my ebooks in the mecha forum on Reddit and I didn't get too many bites.  There were some fine folks who liked it and downloaded the book, but the numbers were tiny compared to the 1000 members in the forum.  I like both SF and anime so I cross over, but many people are more specialized.

Neo Ace is a military SF novel, but it has 30 ton combat robots operated by human pilots.  It is written to be realistic, especially when used with combined arms operations with regular military units.  Note that I used combat robot instead of mecha; this is the type of word phrasing I was debating on using.  Mecha is for anime fans, not military SF fans in general.  Mechs also implies western robots versus eastern mecha.  After looking at this, I'm going to be changing my marketing so it is aimed at military SF, the larger audience of readers (probably 5 times larger).  I think I went down the wrong road in my earlier efforts.   I still found readers, but not as many as I would like.

Anyhow, thanks for listening to my ramblings.


More Scifi Topics