Product

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brand

Users

Readers of literary-leaning speculative fiction (fans of Pratchett, Scalzi, Martha Wells, The Expanse) who arrive via a shared story link, social media, or search. Secondary audience: editors, anthology curators, and agents evaluating T. H. Mercer professionally. Both audiences need the site to read as credible and unhurried, not salesy.

Product Purpose

Showcase T. H. Mercer’s short fiction and essays, and convert readers into mailing-list subscribers. The primary path is: land on a free story (“Pest Control”) or the homepage feature, read, then subscribe via the reader-magnet flow for future work. A secondary commercial goal is driving sales of the anthology Moral Arithmetic. Success = subscriptions and anthology sales, not pageviews or time-on-site for its own sake.

Brand Personality

Quiet, warm, humane — and precise, spare, confident. The fiction itself lives in the tension between cold systems and the people caught inside them; the site’s design should hold that same tension: understated and literary, never gushing, but not clinical or cold either. Voice is direct and unpretentious (see About page: “Former engineer. Occasional cyborg. Storyteller.”).

Anti-references

• Pulp/genre-fiction sites: busy hero banners, stock sci-fi imagery, loud typography, garish color.
• SaaS marketing gloss: gradient text, hero-metric templates, eyebrow labels, identical card grids, numbered feature scaffolding.
• Anything that reads as a “content funnel” rather than an author’s own space.

Design Principles

• Restraint over spectacle — the writing is the product; design should get out of its way and let it read well (65-75ch prose, generous line-height, minimal chrome).
• One clear next action per page — every page ends in a single obvious step (read the next story, subscribe, buy the anthology), never competing CTAs.
• Warmth without cliché — literary and human, not pulp-genre and not SaaS-templated.
• Professional-grade at a glance — an editor or agent landing cold should read the site as legitimate within seconds.
• Every visual choice should hold the same tension the fiction does: quiet surface, precise underneath.

Accessibility & Inclusion

Standard WCAG AA baseline: ≥4.5:1 body text contrast, ≥3:1 large text, visible focus-visible states, skip-link, prefers-reduced-motion alternatives for any motion. No unusual constraints beyond AA; keep doing what the current CSS already does well (skip link, focus rings, reduced-motion-safe transitions).