There have been two volumes of FWG anthologies published. While I don’t have the data at hand for how the first volume did, I do for the second; it was published in August 2018, and despite paying a pretty nominal flat rate of $20 per story, it has yet to earn its money back. (I’ll be up front and say that I don’t think original story anthologies published under the auspices of the FWG is a particularly good idea, but that may be a different argument.)
The problem of what “marketing” the Guild means is one I wrestled with in the past, when I served as president, and I never came up with a satisfactory answer. I’d like to think I did a decent job of getting the Guild’s name out at furry conventions, from running Meet & Greets to promoting it at panels to giving away bookmarks… but I really couldn’t figure out what else to do. I think we did a pretty good job of communicating our resources to members (chiefly the Forums, voting in the Coyotls, and later the Slack channel; the Telegram group wasn’t really “official” during most of my tenure), but outreach to non-members was always a challenge.
I think it’s worth stepping back and considering what we want the Guild to be for.
At its conception, the FWG had a grudge about the perceived respect – or lack thereof – of writers within furrydom, and frankly a bit of a chip on its shoulder about open archive sites. This was never stated explicitly, but you can see echoes of it in how the mission statement focuses on “elevating quality writers,” and the first couple of years of the Coyotls have separate adult and non-adult categories in large part because of very early fights over whether the FWG wanted to promote adult material at all. (Originally there was going to be an entirely seprate award, the Anansi Award, IIRC.)
The FWG was consciously modeled on the SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America), I’m pretty sure because that was the model Duroc and a couple other early participants could most readily use as a basis. The problem is that the SFWA is, at its heart, a union: it was formed to advocate for writers’ rights with, and if necessary against, publishers. The FWG has no real union aspect, though, and I’ve long suspected this is a hole in our entire underlying rationale: does furry actually need an SFWA? If not, just what should the FWG be?
On marketing, though, I will rephrase something that I’ve said before. If you ask the average literary science fiction fan if they’ve heard of the SFWA, it’s a tossup at best, but they have absolutely heard of the Nebula Awards. They are a capital-B, capital-D Big Deal.
The Coyotl Awards certainly aren’t the Nebulas, but they’re known outside furry fandom at this point. Non-furry publishers have mentioned their Coyotl nominations and wins. Tor mentioned their win for Barsk on the back of its paperback release. (Sure, at the behest of the FWG-member author, but: they still did it.) They are probably the FWG’s biggest asset in terms of marketability and promotion – yet that’s largely untapped within furry itself.
(There is one Coyotl Award anthology, published in mid-2019 by FurPlanet, edited by the late Fred Patten. I’m going to speak perhaps too freely and say that I wish this had been something the FWG had had a lot more involvement in than it actually did; its existence somewhat undercuts our ability to do an FWG equivalent of the Nebula Showcase anthology, which is something I really would have liked to see us try. Of course, that goes back to our biggest resource constraint: volunteer time.)
It’s just a huge can of worms in practice. Both Makyo and I looked into what it takes to become a 501© non-profit (and I suspect our predecessors might have also?), and without getting into the hairy details, we…didn’t want to get into the hairy details. It’s like setting up, well, a corporation, complete with a required board of directors and fairly rigorous tax filings.
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