Writing For Furry Audiences
(I imagine that a lot of this isn’t news to most of my readers, but as I was thinking about furry worldbuilding and talking to a friend, we thought about how furry audience habits interact with the creation of new furry books, and I thought it was interesting enough to at least spend one post on. Let me know your thoughts in comments!)
If we’re talking about furry books, we also have to talk about the people who read them. The audience for furry books is separate from the audience for science fiction and fantasy—there’s some overlap, but the books that do well in the furry community generally don’t get a lot of run in SFF fandom, and vice versa, even SFF books with ostensibly furry elements. Barsk, by Lawrence Schoen, was nominated for both a Coyotl and Nebula award; Ursula Vernon’s early furry work (Digger, primarily) and her attachments to the fandom have kept her books popular with furries even as they have become less furry (and more popular in SFF).
Other than that, much as we’re trying to expand the overlap, the reality is that if you write a furry book you’re writing for a furry audience. So it’s worth talking about the furry audience as it affects your worldbuilding.
Like any community, furry has its in-jokes and lingo. If you’re creating a world with furry characters, there can be a temptation to use furry in-jokes and lingo. That will appeal to some of your potential audience, but also remember that these are characteristic of the world we live in, and they may be difficult to translate to your world. Associating a particular species with a particular sex act—one of the things the community here loves to do—probably feels a little out of place at best (and speciesist at worst) when translated to the real world you’re building.
But! On the flip side, one of the benefits of the furry audience, if your work leans that way, is a greater leeway when it comes to sexually explicit material in stories. Not that SFF is chaste by any means (far less than people think), but SFF books don’t tend to advertise/warn about their adult material the way furry books do. Part of this is out of necessity, because for a while, furry book sales happened most often at conventions, and booksellers had to abide by rules for adult material at conventions. But doing that also normalized adult material in stories to an extent that the SFF community hasn’t really embraced yet. Want to write a novel that explores your fetish in detail? It’s fine, slap an “Adults Only” sticker on it. It won’t even stand out.
Another quirk of furry audiences is that people have attachments to their species. Write a book with a skunk main character and all the skunks will at least pick it up to look at it. Some of you may take that into consideration when choosing a main character; my experience with furry authors is that they tend to pick main character species they have an affiliation with, not a species aimed at a certain audience. But some people have thought about what species would be popular. My main characters were all foxes for the first several books, and then I started to think it would be interesting to explore other species. Wolves and foxes are the most common species in the furry community as of the last count I saw, but they are also strongly represented in furry literature. There are lots of wolf protagonists and fox protagonists to choose from. Write about a skunk and fewer people will have that boost of interest for your book, but also there are fewer skunk books, so they’ll be more likely to give it a shot. At the very least, they will make sure other skunks are aware of it, and that’s a big help to any furry book.
Furry audiences also do enjoy SFF disproportionately to a mainstream audience—we are a bunch of nerds—but not all of them are passionate about SFF stories. “Star Trek but furry” will probably appeal to a lot of people, being already familiar with the Star Trek universe, but “contemporary world but furry” is probably the most popular setting out there, likely because it provides a world that’s easy for people to imagine themselves in.
None of the above points should necessarily define your story. Write the story you want the way you want to write it. But if you’re writing a furry story, the above are points you can keep in mind when planning it all out. When I write, I start with a story that interests me, and then I look at the audience and think about what parts of the story will still keep my interest, but might be adjusted a bit here and there. For example, maybe I find an excuse to add in one more sex scene, or add a side character with a species I haven’t written before. There are lots of small tweaks you can make in the balance of writing a story you want to write while also writing a story that will grab your audience.