To niche!

From rant to rallying cry

Feb 20, 2023

There are two words I never want to hear again:

Too niche.

Before I became a publisher, I was a freelance editor for over 20 years, specialising in cookbooks and recipes. I’ve worked for publishers here in Ireland and in the UK and I’ve co-authored three books. Here are some of the things I’ve heard being dismissed as too niche over the years, either said to me directly or told to me by friends and colleagues who were trying to get a book published.

Craft beer is just a passing fad.

Pizza is too niche.

Syria is so 2011. People have moved on.

Mexican food is too niche.

Indian food is too niche.

And this one is my personal favourite, said to me last year by someone in the publishing industry here in Ireland: Nigella is niche.

If Nigella is niche, then why are any of us even bothering or wasting our time? We may as well just pack up now and go home.

Mainstream vs. niche

In mainstream media and culture overall, niche is seen as a bad thing. In publishing, too niche is the death knell for any book proposal.

And yet the first cousin of niche is fad. If niche is the misfit of the family, then fad is the annoying golden boy who can do no wrong, getting all the praise and attention. Publishers don’t want to take a chance on poor old niche but have no problem with books all about whoopie pies or clean eating or spiralizers.

I do realise that the very definition of mainstream is at direct odds with the definition of niche. Mainstream means the ideas, attitudes or activities that are shared by most people and are regarded as normal or conventional. Niche means a specialised segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service. They are polar opposites, so it might seem like I’ve set up a losing argument right from the start.

But here’s the funny thing about niche and mainstream. Sometimes, the niche becomes the mainstream. For all those people who said Mexican food was too niche, in the past year or two I’m not only seeing more and more Mexican cookbooks being published, but now there are books all about masa, Mexican desserts, vegetarian Mexican, vegan Mexican, even keto Mexican.

Then look at something like Squid Game – a subtitled Korean TV show, one of the most bonkers, most out-of-the-box shows I’ve ever seen, and people loved it. It was the number 1 most popular show on Netflix in 2021. Who would have ever predicted such a thing?

I believe that the media has a responsibility to use our platforms to move the needle forward in whatever way we can. We need to be leaders in the culture, not just chasing after the latest fashion or trend or celebrity. That makes for a pretty fail-safe business plan, but let’s be honest – it’s also pretty boring.

I’m not trying to be all rose-tinted glasses here. Even before I founded my publishing house in 2021, I knew that publishing is an expensive and uncertain business. Every single book we put out into the world is a fresh risk. We really don’t know if it will struggle to find an audience or if it will be a breakout bestseller.

At the end of the day, publishing is a business and we need our books to sell not just to keep the lights on, but to fund the next round of books. I get it, believe me. And yet I can’t help but feel that when it comes to food, the media has been playing it too safe for too long.

What we talk about when we talk about niche

At the same time that Mexican food and Indian food were being dismissed as being too niche, mainstream food writers were putting recipes for tacos and curry in their own books or columns or TV shows and no one thought twice about it.

This highlights the ugly underbelly of the mainstream. When we stick only to what we know and the status quo, it’s boring. We stagnate. But worse than that, it’s how the culture – wittingly or unwittingly – perpetuates injustice and unfairness. We need to be more mindful of our words and images and attitudes (Great British Bake Off Mexican Week, we’re looking at you). The mainstream message is that food doesn’t matter, but few things matter more. Food is fundamental.

You simply cannot write off an entire culture or cuisine as niche. I don’t think the 1.6 billion people living in India think their food is niche. I doubt the people living in the Philippines call their food exotic. It’s simply what’s for dinner.

When we talk about niche this way, what we’re really saying is, I don’t get it. I don’t like it. It’s not for me. We might also be saying, This thing is new and different and I don’t like change.

And that’s fine – I’m not trying to do work that is for everyone. The problem is when the gatekeepers shut their minds and shut the gates.

I’d always had a daydream of having my own publishing company one day, but the idea for my boutique publishing house really crystallised in the summer of 2020. We were still in strict lockdown here in Ireland, limited to a 2km radius from our homes, so like a lot of people I had a lot more time and headspace to think.

That was the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests in the US. One of the things that came out of those protests was the start of a conversation about who gets to be represented in media and culture – whose voices are heard, whose faces are seen, whose stories are told? Then that started to trickle down into the food media more specifically. Whose food gets attention, whose recipes are shared and who is writing them? Why can a homemade lasagne from scratch make it into a magazine column all about weekend cooking projects but not dumplings?

I saw these conversations happening in the US and then the UK, but they weren’t happening in Ireland. In Ireland, 13% of our population are non-Irish nationals (and I’m one of them – I grew up in the US but have been living in Ireland since 1999). This diversity is not being reflected on our bookshelves, in our newspaper and magazine columns, or on our TV screens. Looking at the mainstream media, you’d never guess our country is as multicultural as it actually is. It is 2023 and that is just not good enough. It’s never a good idea to have monocultures in food and it’s not a good idea to have a monocultural media either. The media needs to diversify the stories they tell.

It’s often said that math and music are the universal languages, but I am building my publishing house on the belief that the two things that connect absolutely everyone, everywhere, are food and stories. And sometimes, food is the story.

If you imagine a Venn diagram with food in one circle and stories in the other, connection is what’s in the middle. Food and stories are what humans all have in common, no matter who we are or where we’re from. And I believe that when it comes to food, there is no such thing as niche.

Niche as excellence and expertise

I’ve been talking so far about niche as a negative, but here’s the other thing about niche. There’s a flip side to it, one that doesn’t get recognised in the mainstream media. The flip side of niche is excellence and expertise.

Think of Jiro Dreams of Sushi or the Chef’s Table: Pizza series. These are people who have dedicated their lives to their craft. And in these contexts, niche translates into worldwide fame, months-long waiting lists or queues down the street.

To be working in and honing a niche takes focus and dedication and time. You’ve probably heard the Malcolm Gladwell line about how you need to spend 10,000 hours doing something before you can become an expert at it. That’s talked about in a positive context, as something to be admired and to aspire to.

Or think about the Easons bookshop on O’Connell Street in Dublin or a Barnes & Noble store in the US or whatever your own big local bookshop is. Picture the magazine aisles in that shop – it’s almost all niche. There are magazines dedicated solely to running or tractors or crochet. And I love that. I love that there is a community of people out there who are so into this one thing that it makes an entire magazine on the subject commercially viable.

One thousand true fans

Another good thing about niche is that niche is where your people are. As a reader I was increasingly frustrated that so many cookbooks published in the past few years have been about quick and easy cooking, weight loss or whatever is currently trending. Where were the books for all the people who actually enjoy cooking and love food? So I set up Blasta Books, Nine Bean Rows and Scoop magazine specifically to embrace the niche. The irony is that this actually gives me more freedom, flexibility and creativity in who, what and how I publish.

Kevin Kelly is one of the co-founders of Wired magazine. In 2008, he wrote an essay called ‘1,000 True Fans’. Here’s an excerpt":

To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.
A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living – if you are content to make a living but not a fortune. […]
Now here’s the thing; the big corporations, the intermediates, the commercial producers, are all under-equipped and ill-suited to connect with these thousand true fans. They are institutionally unable to find and deliver niche audiences and consumers. That means the long tail is wide open to you, the creator. You’ll have your one-in-a-million true fans to yourself. And the tools for connecting keep getting better. It has never been easier to gather 1,000 true fans around a creator, and never easier to keep them near.

The smallest viable audience

The author and entrepreneur Seth Godin has a daily blog and a weekly podcast where he often reiterates Kevin Kelly’s idea. In May 2022 he wrote a blog post, ‘The smallest viable audience’, where he said:

It’s a stepping-stone, not a compromise.
The media and our culture push us to build something for everyone, to sand off the edges and to invest in infrastructure toward scale.
But it turns out that quality, magic and satisfaction can lie in the other direction. Not because we can’t get bigger, but because we’d rather be better. […]
The strategy of the smallest viable audience doesn’t let you off the hook – it does the opposite. You don’t get to say, ‘Well, we’ll just wait for the next random person to find us.’ Instead, you have to choose your customers – who’s it for and what’s it for. And when you’ve identified them, the opportunity/requirement is to create so much delight and connection that they choose to spread the word to like-minded peers.
Not everyone, but someone. And it turns out that ‘someone’ isn’t as easy as it sounds. When you strip away the alternative mantra of ‘you can pick anyone, and we’re anyone’, then you have to lean into the obligation of being the sort of provider that people would miss if you were gone. That’s not easy, but people with this sort of focus wouldn’t have it any other way.
Specificity is the way. It has nothing to do with absolute scale and everything to do with being really clear about what hook you want to be on and setting a standard for producing work that people connect to and are changed by. What could be better?

Flip the script

What could be better? We aren’t doing our work because it’s popular or easy. We’re doing our work because it matters. We’re in that space in the middle of the Venn diagram, connected by our food and our stories and the work we’re doing to put them out into the world, to make more room at the table.

So I’m flipping the script on niche. I’m taking back too niche and building my publishing house on it. I’m turning it into my manifesto, my rallying cry. Instead of too niche, I’m turning it into a toast:

To niche!

I originally presented this piece as a talk at Food on the Edge in October 2022