I was reading Odyssey by Jack McDevitt last week (was it last week?) and I read a passage where he mentions a museum gift shop. It was like a flash went off in my head upon seeing those two words. My subconscious mind had some sort of epiphany which my conscious mind is still struggling to parse into something useful.

It didn’t really have anything to do with the book or the context, but the words themselves. “Gift shop”. I’ve since figured out a rough outline of what it was that seemed to excite my subconscious and shall try to put it into words here.

Briefly, when selling something: Give them a gift shop.

Think of the museums you’ve been to. You go there for the experience of the art or culture on display, then you get something from the gift shop that reminds you of the experience and which you can take home with you. If you took the items for sale in a museum gift shop and sold them at a regular outlet in a mall, the sales wouldn’t be nearly the same. Because what you’re selling isn’t the item so much as the experience, and a way for people to take part of it home with them.

I’ve started thinking about how to apply this to my own work. How can I make my stories experiences first, and purchases second?

I’m reminded of Scott Sigler, who has figured this principle out quite nicely. From his website:

Scott reinvented book publishing when he released EARTHCORE as the world’s first “podcast-only” novel. Released in twenty weekly episodes, EARTHCORE harkened back to the days of serialized radio fiction and picked up 10,000 subscribers along the way.

His next podcast novel, ANCESTOR, drew 30,000 listeners and saw 700,000 episodes downloaded by fans. The buzz caused Sirius Satellite to pick up the novel, making it the first audiobook serialized on the satellite network. When ANCESTOR was released in print from a small independent publisher, it hit #7 overall on Amazon.com despite no marketing, no advertising and no media coverage.

See that last sentence? That’s pretty impressive. Scott created an experience (a weekly podcast containing the newest chapter of his novel), then capitalized with a gift shop (crazy Amazon sales). And here’s the thing…most of those sales are people who had already subscribed to the podcasts and heard the entire novel. But they wanted to take something home with them from the experience.

I’m reminded of Kevin Kelly’s Better Than Free and People Want to Pay articles.

Whatever your thoughts, it’s an interesting concept and one I will be devoting some further thought-power toward.

By the way, if you aren’t reading Jack McDevitt, I highly recommend it. He’s one of the handful of authors whose books I’ll buy simply because his name’s on it, and I haven’t been disappointed yet. In particular, I recommend the Priscilla Hutchins novels, to which Odyssey belongs. The first book in the series is the excellent The Engines of God, one of my favorite sci-fi novels of all time.