Don't buy Joanne Penn's How to Market a Book

At the meeting this past Sunday, I mentioned how books for indie publishing are different than books for small businesses.  One of the things I mentioned is the centrality of money and research to small business publications.

Since I am revving up to indie publish, and spurred on by the conversation, I got a copy of Joanna Penn's How to Market a Book.  It is very well received on Amazon.  It has 5 stars with 134 reviews.  This depresses me.  Broadly speaking, I think this is precisely the sort of book that has been sold to writers over the years, saying it will help them get published but offering nothing of substance.

Most of it is personal anecdotes, which is a very far cry from data.  In particular, it doesn't answer the question of how many people did everything Penn did and failed.  What is the actual success rate?  What are the real financial, business and personal risks?  Penn doesn't talk about them, doesn't do much research at all, and often simply brags about her success.  She also repeatedly tries to sell the reader other books about the subject of her book, or directs you to other media instead of presenting it in her own book.

I'm about a quarter of a way through it and . . . it sorta stinks.  It starts off with a lot of the same cheerleading that you'll find in any marketing book.  But then something weird happens . . .

In a normal marketing book, they'd start talking money.  The only place Penn talks about money is estimating that it will take between $500 and $3500 to have your book professionally edited.  For actual marketing?  She bangs the drum of what she ridiculously calls "co-eptition", a clumsy portmanteau of cooperation and competition, but actually meaning cooperation - that an indie writer is best served by networking with other like-minded writers for success.

While I think that's a good idea for reasons artistic and social, she only offers her own experience as proof of this model.  This is one of the really serious departures from a how-to book on a small business model.  If a book on small business said something like that, they'd have some research to back it up.  I understand that indie publishing is a new field, so there aren't a lot of trade organizations or government data about the field, and it isn't like places like Amazon are opening their data vaults about indie publishers.  But one of the key jobs of a writer writing a non-fiction book is research, especially a non-fiction book.

Sure, I get it, you've succeeded.  (And much of the book reads like an extended commercial for her novels, I should add, which is also quite a bit different than a good book on small business.)  But it's bad reasoning.  The question is not whether Penn succeeded, but the extent to which her success was based on a specific plan of action that can be repeated by other indie publishers.

So, every time she tells some little anecdote from her success story, I roll my eyes.  Yeah, I get it, you succeeded.  Good for you.  But what are the NUMBERS?  The data?  What methodology did you use?  What arguments are you making?

Additionally, my scam-o-meter is going off, big time.  When a person tells me that, due to technological advances, you don't need to spend money . . . ?  That's a very slight variant of get-rich-quick schemes that are old as dirt.  When someone comes to me and says that they have a system through which you have to do something not very hard (network online) to get financial rewards?  I look in serious askance, particularly when they don't have verifiable data.  I just find it incredibly hard to believe that money doesn't really factor into success in marketing.  I mean, sure, I find it easy to believe that a publishing house style full court press doesn't work due to differences in the business model, but the idea that money is removed from the equation altogether seems beyond belief.

Some of the advice is good - such as the importance of understanding keyword searches - but her advice is, basically, "Read these other books."  Again, it smacks of a distinct lack of research.  Why the hell did I buy YOUR book if you're just going to tell me to buy someone else's book?  Isn't it Penn's job, as the author of a book that's literally about marketing books, to distill that research into usable form to assist your readers in accomplishing their goals?  I think so.  And it is commonplace in books about, y'know, real marketing and small business.

The short answer - it looks like Penn scammed me.  As I can afford it, fiscally, and have the kind of mind and education that is on the lookout for trickery, I won't waste too much of my time with this drivel - but I feel sorry for people who are lured into the promises of easy success and spend their time following instructions like "network with blog sites", without being given any concrete, specific advice what that means or where to go, instead of the nuts and bolts of real marketing in the digital age.

I will also point out that Penn repeats over and over that there are no rules, that the field changes constantly, that there are no guarantees of success.  All of this is true, but the frequency of the reminders feels like a cooling off process - where the author gets up your hopes and then covers their ass so when you try her advice and it fails, she can just say, "Oops, I guess things changed.  So sorry."

***

Going through various price strategies, Penn gives no concrete data.  So, a lower (or even free) price for a book at the start of a series MIGHT be a good idea.  Her "research" amounts to one interview with one writer.  What is the general effect?  I guess that would take research and that's hard or something.

She ends the section on pricing with advising a person to read another book . . . which is part of her strategy, I suppose.  "Co-eptition" in part works by inserting other people's works into your own.  But this has the net effect of reducing the value of Penn's book and creates a scam.

Again, this is a common scam.  You buy something and then learn that to get what you really want?  You've got to spend more money!  It would not surprise me if the book on pricing suggested yet more books to buy to get the information one needs to make rational marketing decisions (perhaps closing the loop by referring Penn's book) . . .

Which, while we're on the subject, makes me think about one of Penn's premises - that you should be ethical in your marketing.  I mean, I am not stunned that a person claims ethics and then engages in bait-and-switch tactics, luring you in to spend more money to get what you need from the book you bought.  The first thing unethical people do is appeal to ethics, after all, assert their honesty.

Let me speak to Joanna Penn: bait-and-switch isn't ethical, Joanna.  If you buy a car and find you've go to spend extra for the fuel tank, well, no one does that because it's unethical bullshit.

***

Chapter 3 is about short-term marketing.  The header is "no platform needed."  Hmm.

The sections about long-term and short-term marketing are the make-or-break parts of the book.  If you're reading these words, it's because part 3 and 4 broke the book.  I don't care if there are personal anecdontes in other sections so long as these sections provide useful information.

No stories.  Not recommendations for other books.  Information.

Let me go read part 3.

Done!

Nearly the first thing the author does is buy reviews.  At the book's start, Penn says it's terribly UNETHICAL to buy reviews, but in part 3, well, she describes how she gave out free books to people on her mailing list, asking them to review it ONLY if they liked it.  She included a smiley face, so I guess it's not trying to buy reviews . . . ?

No, let us be clear.  She is giving away merchandise for positive reviews.  If buying reviews is unethical, this is unethical.  She calls it a "soft pitch with no pressure".  It is not.  It's trying to buy positive reviews.

(The ethical way to handle it, by the by, is simply to give out the books without mentioning reviews one way or the other, or a general call asking for a review.  By specifically asking only for positive reviews, she breaks the code of ethics she spoke about in such big letters earlier in the book.  I mean, sure, her readers don't have to give a positive review, but that's equally true of any reviewer who gets something for their review.  They CAN just take the money and give a crappy review.)

While unethical by her own standards and a mere anecdote, she says that 30 percent respond with 4 or 5 star reviews.  She does not mention if any give bad reviews - but I suspect few if any do, since she's specifically asking them NOT to review her book unless it's a good review.

She then says, in big ass bold letters that "Sending free review copies is totally normal and accepted in the publishing industry."  So it's okay because someone else is doing it?  Plus, these aren't merely review copies.  If that was the case, sure, but she's specifically asking for only good reviews, she's asking that people with bad reviews do not review the book.

She goes on to say that it's okay because she hasn't paid them.  Unless, y'know, a free copy of the book might count as "payment".  (Hint: it does.)

And the horror keeps going on.  She says that this only works with fans of your genre, and that you want honest reviews.  Unless, of course, they're bad ones.  In that case, she doesn't want them.

She includes a link to an article about targeting Amazon's top reviewers.  So, y'know, once again I've bought a book that references me to something else instead of giving me the data that I thought I had paid for.  She then goes on to talk about an Amazon premium option - giving a link to an interview she did with someone else instead of, I don't fucking know, WRITE A SUMMARY OF THE INTERVIEW.

Hellfire and damnation, this woman is a horrible writer!

Then she goes on to talk about book bloggers, how to contact them and such.  This part isn't so bad, but again, no numbers.  But, again, a link to a thirty minute interview Penn did with someone else.  Really?  I thought I bought a book and apparently I bought an advertisement for other products!

Then there's a section on "what not to do."  She beats the drum, again, about not buying reviews after starting the chapter on how she buys reviews.  It's unethical!

. . .

Okay, I know this thing is getting long, but here's the thing about ethics and advertising - I don't know where the line is but I do have some thoughts on the subject.

It is increasingly commonplace for companies to buy ads that look like copy.  It is not illegal, at least not in the US.  We have a very high level of freedom of speech, here, and specific jurisprudence (Citizens United!) that says spending money is identical to freedom of speech.

I do not think that because something is legal that it is automatically ethical.  But, on the other hand, I'm not sure why big, powerful companies can create ads that look like copy but individuals can't.  To me, that sounds hypocritical, or at least extremely naive (I believe that Penn, in his regard, is naive; it isn't like she did a lot of research into advertising norms as practiced on Madison Avenue).

So, where's the ethical line with marketing?  I dunno.  But I do know when you're giving away a book for free and asking people who don't like it to not review it, you're actually buying reviews.  So I know that Penn is being a hypocrite.

Ahem.  Moving on:

In 3.2 she finally gets to paid advertising.  Oh, joy.

She suggests paid promotional sites that have lists of avid readers who might be interested in your book.

On the other hand, she says one ought not buy email lists, calling them a scam.  Eh.  Spam works.  It's not illegal.  It's not even fundamentally unethical.  Americans have the right to communicate with their neighbors for commercial purposes.  It's the reason why spam isn't flatly illegal, it's the reason why mailing lists aren't illegal, or door-to-door salespeople.  There is no legal way to distinguish between people who engage in mass mailings (electronic or otherwise) or door-to-door activities who are there "legitimately", since certain kinds of speech are strongly permitted (religious and political, for instance) and because people's standards differ.

Penn's ethical biases are childish.  I understand that a person might hate spam.  I do, that's for sure, and I don't see myself using it, but she beats the drum of ethics time and again in ways that are absurd.

While offering no real proof, she provides more anecdotes about how she used paid promotions successfully.  She then goes on to talk about what Bookbub is and . . . says she has no idea if it works.  That it's expensive, requires a monthly fee, but each author has to decide if it works for them.

Again, data?  Fuck that shit.

Then she gives a fairly extended anecdote about her one experience.  It starts with the obligatory cooling off, saying that there's a large number of factors that go into things and an given person's experiences are likely to be different than hers.

That's why you need to do research.  Instead of just taking your experiences and writing about them, you attempt to create a representative sample, collate the data and present THOSE results.  That's what I actually paid you to do.  If I wanted anecdotes?  Jesus.  The Internet is FULL of anecdotes!  I did not buy a book for ANECDOTE!

Neither should you, by the way.

It's a crappy anecdote, too.  It's about her experience with Bookbub and she gives a very little data on how much she made - though only in the first two days of the promotion.  She gives some Amazon and Kobo stats for both the peak and a week after, but no numbers on total sales or money made.  Weaksauce.

Then she dismisses Facebook paid adverts by saying she's not a fan.  Again, anecdotes offered instead of data.  She mentioned Goodreads paid advertising but only mentions it, then Kirkus Reviews, a quote from one person who did well with it (that's what qualifies as research to her - she got one quotation, done and done!) and another anecdote on her experience with Kirkus (weakly negative).

Then she speaks about her experiences with traditional media.  It didn't work for her.  She gives reasons why she thinks this is the case, but without attribution, though some of it seems legit (not targeted enough, too long between seeing her and the opportunity to buy her book, no specific call to action - sounds reasonable, sure, but where's the data?).

Then Penn talked about hiring a publicist.  To me, a competent publicist would seem a godsend - someone who can efficiently and skillfully do the marketing tasks that a given writer might stink at and certainly has no experience with.

Almost nothing is given beyond a suggestion that you do your research and budget carefully to maximize your chances of successful.  I get the feeling that Penn hasn't used a publicist (no anecdotes!) and, as ever, no research.  She points out that it's expensive relative to the other techniques in the book.

VERY disappointing.  Even in my minimalist research at this point, I'm aware there are a bunch of different kinds of publicists.  Particularly, in this day and age there are a number that specialize not in traditional media but digital media, but also many others besides.  To characterize a publicist as someone who operates solely in traditional media is to do a serious disservice to their service, as well as to lead the readers of Penn's book astray.

This is keeping in context with her researchless style.  If she has never used a publicist, well, since she does no research, why should she look into the success and failures that other people might have had with publicists?  Creating representative samples isn't in her wheelhouse, apparently.

She spends, for instance, a LOT more time on getting a good photographer than a publicist.  Really?

Then she talks about a press kit, gives a few websites about them, and how to contact the press.  The amount of effort she puts into this is slightly strange given her attitude towards traditional media . . . though the reason becomes clear when she gives her multi-page success story about her press releases.

Remember, she can't guarantee doing what she does will be successful, but she really likes telling you about her personal experiences!

She also talks about her experiences with TV and radio.  Now we're in the world of outright bragging.  Around about her section about press releases, there is no longer any context about how this improved even her own sales.  She made no attempt to link her experiences with the press, TV and radio with anything so pedestrian as sales spikes or anything else.  She devolved into pure braggadocio.

Needless to say, not what I wanted to read.

Almost no talk about how much things cost or, really, any data at all.  Overall, her advice on short-term marketing is both "do as I do" and "don't expect it to work", personal stories that she seems to know don't mean very much, but yet are the focus of the chapter!

***

In chapter four, we get to long term marketing with a "platform".  It starts out with backlash against the idea of having a platform (I suspect I'm part of that backlash - a lot of it seems to offer much and return little, but always allowing a person to spend more and more time in the minutae of social media networking).

Since I think she's going to mention it a lot, Penn really loves the work "karma".  I dislike the way it's used in English, because it smacks of orientalism.  Karma is a Hindu and Buddhist religious concept about the accumulation of one's deeds on one's soul and the effects this has over multiple generations.  It is not "what goes around comes around", though it is used that way with great frequency.  I feel that's insensitive, if not racist.

That said, I have some interest in this section.  I am an engaging public speaker.  I would very much like to get up on stage and tell people who awesome and clever I am, convincing them to buy my books, stuff like that.  I expect to get some anecdotes, though.

It's worse than I thought.  It is clear that part of the reason Penn suggests this is because she likes it.  It's fun!  I'm told this repeatedly.  I'll make friends!  I have friends.  It's totally worth it!  Why?  Uh, because she likes it.  It is magic, she says.  She literally calls it magic.

It is not.  She calls herself an introvert, but I think that we need a bunch of new terms.  For a person such as myself, who constantly struggles against competitiveness, social media can easily become an incredible drag.  Strangers barging into my life, expecting to be taken seriously, who I often find are fucking morons.  I get competitive, then I get mean.

I don't think this is very strange.  Interacting with a large and shifting group of strangers is challenging.  Much in the same way that some people are better at groups, some people are going to be better at social media.  I greatly prefer speaking to large bodies of people than getting attention from strangers because of some post I wrote.

I am also very aware that during Penn's rhapsodizing praise of platform, there are no numbers attached as regarding publishing.  WHY a person selling books should create a platform is unclear for an indie writer (she rightly points out that traditional publishers love that kind of stuff, though having looked into that there's no good reason why for them, either - I think it's a legacy issue, harkening back to the days when speaking engagements and such were the only way for a writer to reach an audience).

Penn does say that having a good platform can become a business onto itself.  She gets speaking gigs, for instance.  She attributes this platform to her being a full-time author-entrepreneur.

But this is weak.  I mean, I speak well.  I would love to supplement my income with speaking gigs.  I'm seriously considering both interviews and podcasts because I think I'd be good at them and there's enough intrinsic joy in them that I would want to do them regardless of their "success".

(Interestingly, and I think this is a big lacuna, at no point does Penn talk about other kinds of marketing.  She doesn't have T-shirts, coffee mugs or other merch for people to buy relating to her books.  Hmm.)

Afterward, Penn talks a little about brand management.  She talks again about authenticity.  She fuckin' loves that word like crackheads love the pipe!

Let me be clear.  Authenticity doesn't mean very much.  I don't mean that a person shouldn't be authentic, but in the sense that the word has little meaning in a promotional sense, except as something you wish to inculcate into your fanbase.

OK, that's not actually clear.  What I'm trying to say is that it's great to have people think you're "authentic" but there's no real standard of what that is, artistically.  It is, at best, sublime.

Not to mention the little problem that maybe you're an asshole.  If you're "yourself" but you're a jerk?  Maybe you should try to be someone else, someone, I dunno, more marketable.

And, indeed, a lot of the advice is irrelevant of any authentic experience.  So, for instance, I should be authentic but also stay focused.  But . . . I, Chris Bradley, am authentically diverse.  I like different things.  Today, it's writing about this terrible marketing book.  Tomorrow, it might be something about my cats, or something political, or a recipe I like.

See?  Be authentic but consistent, stay focused . . . I guess it helps if you're that kind of person.

Otherwise, fake authenticity, I guess.

Then there are the calls to spend more money on other books as well as the inevitable interview podcast.  Because this book isn't about actually providing you with data, but bragging and advertising.

Then there's a very long section about pen names.  I'm not sure why, probably because it was easy to write.

I also think Penn dances around the gender issue instead of gripping the bull by the horns.  The truth is that it's harder being a woman than being a man in most cases.  (Though in the case of, say, paranormal romance author, being a woman is a pretty solid plan.)  But to say that, after going on and on and on about authenticity is hard.  If you're lying about being a man because you write science-fiction, are you being authentic?

It's a touchy issue and she handles it poorly is what I'm saying.  For my money, I would have preferred a simple practical guide.  I wasn't looking for ethical advice from this book, but marketing advice.  Whether or not it is authentic or ethical or anything else to craft a nom de plume but the marketing reasons to do so.  Whether an author then wants to ignore that advice because they find it distasteful can and should be up to them, I figure.

Then there's some stuff about websites, but it was so banal I skipped it.  If you're going to have a website, it's probably best to hire a pro.  Knew that!

Then, she suggests an email list.  This part isn't bad, probably because Penn's career has been strongly influenced by her mailing list.  She's clearly anti-spam (which is fine, as I am, too, though in a truly useful marketing book I think that spam should be addressed as a potentially useful marketing technique; I do not pick up how-to books for ethics but data and options).

Really, she should have started out with this.  It is easy to do and a vital tool of direct marketing.  I accept that every author should have one as being obviously true.

Then she talked about blogging.  It's a good idea because it changed her life.  Once again, who cares?  Penn's personal story isn't the point to this!  I bought a book on marketing, not her life story, not a biography!

I dislike blogging as marketing - I mean, I hate it - so I won't be doing it and mostly skipped the section about how it changed her life.  Maybe if I had some confidence it would be about more than her personal experiences blogging, including research data about its efficacy, I would have slogged through it, but she's a terrible writer who should suffer in the pits of hell for her affronts to nature and humanity.

Indeed, I then stopped.  Clearly, there isn't much here for me since I'm not looking for ways to make ending my own life easier.  It's a terrible, nasty, boring book that doesn't redeem itself by providing useful research or data.

It is, unfortunately, typical of its breed.  Indie publishing is likely the right course for me, but the books about it seem designed to take advantage of people.  This is pretty normal in the publishing industry, though - a fair bit of publishing is about lying to writers, after all, and taking advantage of their hopes and inexperience to make a quick buck.

Criticism on Authonomy's post about sense in fantasy and historical fiction

I often click links and wonder, "Do people actually consider, do they really, truly think about the things they write?" Often, I feel the answer is, emphatically, “no”. In particular, the article here has a bunch of stuff that - upon inspection - isn't very true. Sure, it gets repeated all the time by writers and people in the publishing industry, but like many things often repeated but rarely discussed there isn't too much truth to the author's claims. Apropos of this is this blog post on verisimilitude for fantasy and historical fiction. It is terrible.

For instance, the blog post says, "[T]he author of a fantasy novel filled with invented creatures and magic must ensure that these elements exist within coherent systems and are subject to perceivable rules."

Really? First, I'm going to mention a kind of writing that gets scant respect from the literary types but has created many of the most enduring characters and stories of the last hundred years: comic books. If you have a fast paced story with colorful characters, it appears that consistency, much less verisimilitude, is irrelevant. Superheroes are constantly developing new abilities to get out of situations in a non-stop barrage of deus ex machina. The only reason not to acknowledge this is pure snobbery, because superheroes are enduring and popular, many of their figures and stories having become bedrock culture of the 20th century (and certainly the 21st).

(One of my favorite cases in point is Batman's cowl. Sometimes it's cloth, except when he gets shot in the head when it is revealed to be a helmet. I would say, “Choose, dudes”, but the truth is that I – or, really, anyone else – doesn't much care.)

But, really, it doesn't stop there – it's in most fantasy. Lord of the Rings? Remember Gandalf coming back from the dead after fighting the Balrog? Yeah. There was nothing inherent in the logical structure of the narrative to suggest, much less state, that would happen. It had happened to no other character and was not thought to be something that could happen by any of the protagonists, yet it occurred: Gandalf came back from the dead.

One of my favorite examples about how consistency in fantasy is a bugbear is Dracula. How, exactly, did Dracula get his ship into England, again? He killed all the crew, sure, okay, he's a vampire, I get that, but what mystical authority allowed the ship to find its destination uncrewed? And why should Mina have a psychic connection to her attacker, allowing Van Helsing and the others to track Dracula? There is nothing inherent in previously existing vampire fiction known to Victorian audiences to make this credible or coherent. It was clearly something added solely for the purpose of allowing the humans to confront the undead, pure deus ex machina.

I could go into more details - almost all fantasy and sci-fi books do this to some extent - but the key point is that while our ability to notice out-of-place things is real, equally real is our ability to see patterns that we want to exist. A big part of the trick isn't to create a setting where everything is plausible within a rigidly constructed framework - you could go quite mad attempting that, though some writers can make it work - but that the writing does whatever it takes, by whatever means it takes, to get the audience to see a pattern even if it makes no sense to do so by giving them reasons to see things your way. We forgive Tolkien because we want Gandalf to return; we forgive Stoker because we want Dracula to lose. Consistency or verisimilitude does not really enter into it.

Additionally, due to the power of the Internet, and the rise of fanfic, the extent to which the audience is not only willing but actively engaged in finding patterns where none were created by authorial intent is evident. Just as we see patterns in the clouds, the complex narrative of a novel allows people to see a great many things that any given author never intended (and it is even easier with series, written or otherwise) - thus the large number of people who sexually obsess about Draco Malfoy or Snape, which J. K. Rowling finds strange and incomprehensible, or pretty much any slash or ship related to almost any media. Verisimilitude need not apply. Consistency be damned. We see what we want to see and I feel that a big part of a fiction writer's job is to seduce the audience into accepting their narrative. (This isn't news, it's simply suspension of disbelief and there are many tricks to making it work – verisimilitude is merely one and not even the best one, I think.)

The author then goes on to say, "Historical fiction also depends upon strict coherency." Nonsense. I mean, complete and utter nonsense, and a lot of that is because it's impossible to get "strict coherency".

History, because of its incomplete nature and our inability to understand the internal lives of the people who lived it, is a moving target. As a historian, at any given time, there are competing narratives of just about any historical subject.

To pick literally the first one that came to mind, the authorial intent of Machiavelli's The Prince. Is it a handbook of political ruthlessness or a cunning satire? To this day, the question is unresolved. Some find it absurd that Machiavelli, who spent the rest of his life as a staunch republican, suddenly became obsequious to tyranny, finding it more likely that The Prince was meant as an insult to the de Medici and Borgia (and, indeed, the central premise seems to be that Cesare Borgia got lucky, so I think this is a very strong argument).  Others, of course, think that Machiavelli's imprisonment broke him and, in order to secure a job, any job, he wrote a toadying manuscript (also a strong argument). Which is it? Who knows? Both positions have some merit and we can't ask the writer.

But if you were writing a story about Machiavelli, you'd likely choose one of two contradictory narratives, or create a third narrative. At any rate, you're going to run into a lot of people who think you're absolutely wrong no matter the depths of your research.

All of history is like this - it is a fluid narrative that changes as we change. From the idea that the "Dark Ages" was a time of technological regression (go ahead and google "Carolingian Renaissance" to start to find out what modern historians actually think of that idea), or the causes of the American Revolution, our perception of history is almost always controversial in some regard. There is no such thing as “strict coherency”. What makes perfect sense to you is likely to enrage someone else.

(And a living issue: primary education textbooks are being rejected because the historical narrative does not match what various school boards demand to be true. History is a minefield of conflicting beliefs and opinion, ranging from the very naive to the well-researched and intensely sophisticated but equally contradictory and exclusive.)

So, creating coherency must first ask, "Who's coherency?" Lacking an objective standard, how does that even make any damn sense? (Answer: it doesn't, but you've got to know something about historiography to realize how history is constantly, almost necessarily mired in controversy.)

(I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting that writers fail to do research. I'm not saying that a work should not have some internal consistency. I'm just saying that "strict coherency" is nonsense regarding historical research for a historical novel – that the standard is irrational.)

And . . . then I stopped reading the article, I admit, even though I was mostly through it. Why bother going on? What bothers me is the extent to which these oft-repeated maxims are unconsidered in, I think, the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. The idea that they even MIGHT be wrong is totally undiscussed (as opposed to, say, the way fans pick apart the media they love, or historians continue to search for truth in the mists of the past). Still, writers love repeating them to each other. I think we should stop and reconsider them, really think about them, and maybe even think about why we are encouraged to think this way.

NaNoWriMo and the writerly culture of self-abuse - and a call to arms to stop it!

NaNoWriMo has been a very positive experience for me.  It's my first year of doing it and I'm very glad I have - it has been wonderful.  Still, I guess I'm just a critical person because there's one thing that vexes me: the extent to which wrimos are critical of their own work.  There is a persistent culture in NaNoWriMo that says to its participants that their novel will stink, that writing swiftly is somehow inferior to writing patiently, but there's no reason to think that's . . . true.  That's right.  My criticism is that you people think you suck when you don't!

My initial draft of this post included a lot of historical stuff about 19th century writers like Dumas and Tolstoy who have written enduring classics of literature on very tight schedules.  It is true.  Many of the finest novelists who have ever lived wrote in ways similar to wrimos.  My initial post included additional historical details about how this kind of writing fell out of favor due to changes in publishing that made centralized publishing houses more economically profitable and not because of the preference of the audience, and how that centralization lead to those publishing houses putting a premium on shorter works due to the cost of paper, glue and ink.  Yeah, that's right, all that "stay focused, write concise" stuff is primarily due to publishers wanting to save money on paper, ink and glue - it was never an artistic choice!  It was never a popular choice!  (Which is part of the reason why almost everyone who reads this will have their favorite works in some giant series like Harry Potter or Game of Thrones or whatever.  Most readers don't want their favorite novels to end!)  I ended up saying that modern comic book writers also write in a fashion similar to wrimos and they have created many of the most enduring cultural icons of the past hundred years.  In short, I talked a fair bit about why writing quickly, as wrimos do, does not lead to inferior art and a brief history behind the often cruel modern editing practices that have more to do with the cost of physical books than anything artistic.

But that was long and boring, so I just summarized it and am going to move on to what I think is the more trenchant argument:

The odd of you failing to suck are in your favor - you're probably an average writer.  There, I said it.  Your book doesn't suck, it's probably average.  Some will suck, but the odds of your book being truly bad are about the same as it being truly great.  And for most of you?  Your book is somewhere in the middle.

But here's the thing - being an "average" writer is pretty goddamn incredible.  Just like the "average" of any other artist!  In any other artistic field, people are quick to point out that their local music scene, art scene produces things that are lacking only big budgets of major distributors and are more in sync with the local attitudes and culture!  Local artists rock.  You are a local artist.  This means you rock.

I don't understand why wrimos attack each other like this.  If this was musicians instead of writers, we'd be pretty goddamn awesome.  I assure you that musicians don't stay around their local scene talking about how much they suck!  They instead talk about the conformity and banality created by the big labels, they revel in their idiosyncratic nature and local culture.  And people would come from far away to listen to the products of that local musical culture.

What I'm saying here is we should adopt that mindset.  We would find that the "average" of unpublished writers is about the same "average" for published writers, just as it is for musicians who aren't signed by big labels, or indie filmmakers, or pretty much anyone in the visual arts who doesn't have a studio in Manhattan.  Because, let me tell you, I don't think a bunch of rich white people in New York City are any better at determining what's good for the three-hundred and fifty million people in the United States any more than a tiny group of rich white people in LA are very good at deciding what we should all listen to or make into movies.  (And, of course, this doesn't even count everyone outside of the United States!)  Most of us live in a huge country with incredible diversity and it is ill-served, I think, by the New York City centered publishing industry.  We should break free of the strange notion that a small group of people far away from us in terms of culture, education, needs and wants should determine what defines good writing!  I'm saying we're as good as the local artists in every other field, who are very good artists.

I think we should adopt that mindset.  We are good artists.  We are making good art.  As good as all those other local artists out there that we thing are good.

Stanislaw Lem and the the possibility of communicating with aliens - a brief critique

I suspect everyone finds some writers to be beyond serious reproach.  I suppose for some people, that's quite a lot of writers.  For me, there are only a few.  Stanislaw Lem is one of them.  Lem is the writer I sometimes want to be - but only sometimes.  There is a bleak cynicism to his writing that I don't care to emulate and I know that he became a technophobe - I have a feeling that his life in some ways mirrored his fiction with the impossibility of real communication between people.  In Solaris, he wrote, "If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently."  I believe that could be adapted.  "If Lem had more of a sense of humor, his books might have turned out differently."  Even where his books are funny, they're not fun.  He wasn't that kind of writer.  I don't hold this against him, not by any means, however.  Fun wasn't important to him as a writer.

He is almost unique in sci-fi writers in having come up with an idea that actually bears scrutiny.  Unlike almost all sci-fi writers, who are generally an ideal of the moment kind of guys, writing about whatever techno-philosophical idea is in vogue at the moment, Lem really has legs.  He writes about the difficulties in communication between humans and aliens.  In his books, first contact fails.  We just don't have anything to say to one another, nor a vocabulary to describe it.  I have no idea if Lem was influenced by Wittgenstein, but all of his characters violate the final words of The Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus - "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."  The characters speak, but there is no content, because of the lack of shared experiences between species.

Moreover, I find in his work this very Orwellian idea that communication between humans is fraught with peril.  Between people who don't mean what they say because they're lying, people who don't say what they mean because they're ignorant, and people who don't say what they mean because they're incompetent . . . how do we talk to each other, again? 

I also find all of this a backhanded critique of Master Kong's assertion that the first question is always the rectification of names.  Before we speak, we've got to be sure our words mean the same thing.  In Lem, they often do not.

In other words, what Lem addresses is well-worn ground.  People from the ancient days to our own have questioned the efficacy of communication and the uses of communication.  And we think we can talk to aliens?  It is to laugh.

That said, I think I found a weakness in Lem's work and it is in the rectification of names.  What do we mean by communication?  I think it's possible that we will never share stories around a campfire, but I don't see the impossibility of successful feedback driven modes of informational exchange.  I think it's possible that we'll do something and, based on what we do, the aliens will do something and we'll be able to learn about the aliens thereby - if nothing else, what they do when we do what we do.

I think, furthermore, that we have a fair bit of experience dealing with things that have non-human forms of communication - like fire.  No, hear me out.  Fire has many of the characteristics of life.  It can grow, it eats, it produces waste, it can expand itself, diminish, all kinds of very life-like traits.  It is not sentient but we can engage fire.  We can lessen it's fuel and see what it does, change its fuel, cut it off altogether or rekindle it.  This kind of engagement is not considered communication merely because we have a predisposition to imagine that fire isn't alive because it doesn't bear sufficient similarity to ourselves.

I admit, this is Marxist inspired.  We learn about things according to what we can do with them - but I will add as we shape them, they shape us.  

For instance, the domestication of dogs.  The current theory holds that humans and dogs sorta . . . grew together.  Unlike almost any other animal, humans didn't decide to tame wolves and turn them into dogs.  A symbiotic, language-less relationship developed between wolves and humans - humans followed wolves to find game, the wolves fed off of our leavings, and this became a successful mode of behavior that created a positive feedback loop.  It was a kind of communication, wordless and inhuman, but substantial and real - each side learned from the other, though they certainly learned different lessons.

I don't see why this isn't possible with even very alien aliens.  (Though I will hold that it could be extraordinarily dangerous.  Wolves don't have planet destroying technologies and there's a fifty-fifty chance that the first aliens we meet will have such technologies, I feel.)  Through our mutual interactions, no matter what they are, because what we do effects the aliens and what they do effects us, that is a kind of communication.  Even if, as in Solaris, there is no set pattern of repetition - if we do A, B does not follow - even that teaches us.

I also reject the idea that we can't think non-human thoughts - or at least approximations of non-human thoughts.  This came to me, specifically, today.  I was laying down, thinking, and I started thinking about the way that computers use fuzzy logic.

To a human, fuzzy logic is, well, fuzzy.  It involves the participation of a set in multiple values.  In many ways, it is the native human method of thinking.  We understand that a person with an average height is somewhere between short and tall, that a thousand dollars is somewhere between being broke and being rich, in a unity of thought.

Computers, on the other hand, can't really do this.  By their design, all computers do nothing more than boolean operations.  Our native understanding of in-between states is not boolean.  Most people don't have any real experience with boolean algebra, after all!  Likewise, the specific interactions of human brains do not appear to be boolean logic gates.  There is simply no reason to imagine that human brains operate according to the mechanisms of boolean operations.

Yet, computers can approximate this knowing-ness that we humans possess organically through fuzzy logic databases interpreted by those boolean operations.  The process contextless data according to the programmed dictates of logic gates.  That's it.  Yet . . . there is communication.

It is fair, at this point, to point out that computers are human tools invented by humans for humans.  Absolutely.  I'm not saying that talking to an alien will be so simple, but use this to illustrate the point that naive human intuition can in some ways be understood by the quite non-human reasoning of boolean operations.  While admitting it's an approximation, and admitting all language is an approximation, I continue to assert it's better than nothing.  Which is, I think, the point of divergence from Lem.  

In short, I think that the people studying Solaris learned quite a bit.

However, this is a very . . . nuanced criticism of Lem's work.  Mostly the guy just blows me out of the water. 

Integration of writing and gameplay in video games

One of the biggest problems with video games, structurally  is just plain awful writing in the gameplay parts. Sometimes games can have quite brisk acting and quality writing in the cutscenes, but it's like no one wants to apply any real critical thinking to the game elements.  I might be bitching about this one for a while, because it's really hard to miss when you think about it. Woe is me for thinking about it!

I've started Hitman: Redemption. First, the title. I don't think anyone really considered what redemption means because, apparently, it's compatible with killing cops. Let's lay that one straight out. To protect an abused young woman the character somehow rationalizes killing cops. Not even corrupt cops, just any old, plain, ordinary in-your-way police officer is likely to get his throat slit – in the tutorial of the game, you're required to do this.  You can't avoid it.

Here's another example of baffling bad writing for the purpose of creating gameplay. Your character was KO'd and framed for a murder, and the hotel room was set on fire. Somehow, in the tiny number of minutes that it takes for a fire to spread, a detective was dispatched to the scene . . . and outside is a helicopter that seems to know YOU'RE THE GUILTY PARTY. That's okay, because in all the building surrounding the hotel, there are squads – multiple – of cops in them, including an abandoned library and then a maze-like, I dunno, drug bust?

It's the sort of thing that doesn't hold up to a moment's thought. When a murder is called in, yes, police are sent. Like, one or two. I know because I have, personally, reported a shooting. Cops take the description of the shooter, in this case, and drive around the neighborhood looking for the guy. This often works. Most people are not, after all, experts at disguise and stealth.

There was no helicopter. No police occupied deserted buildings nearby. A shooting is a very serious crime, right?  And there was actual evidence of a crime - the shot man.

Of course, sometimes police do surround a building with armored dudes with assault rifles. Absolutely. But generally as a planned raid or as a developing armed stalemate. That was not this situation.

Indeed, the fire would have vastly complicated any potential murder investigation. The person's throat was slit and then you set them on fire?  Are you a fucking moron? And then, because it's a video game and must be ridiculous, the building explodes. It would take days for the fire department to uncover any bodies at all, much less determine how they died . . . assuming it was possible, assuming the fire and explosions and collapsing building didn't destroy the corpse past the point of useful examination. At most, the protagonist would be a person of interest in the investigation because it would take some time – days – to determine if a crime had been committed at all.

After all, all the cops I had to kill to escape, well, I hide their bodies and no one saw me. What does the word "redemption" mean?

In subsequent play, too, there are cops everywhere who are still, apparently, looking solely for you. They are located in tunnels underneath abandoned buildings, they are on the rickety top floors of other abandoned buildings. There is literally no place where the police are not looking for you.

This is stupid. I understand what they're doing. It's a stealth game. You need people looking for you for there to be any, well, stealth. I think, though, that if you have to have people behave stupidly in order to put them in your game, you're not trying very hard. And, really, this one is just a goddamn gimmee. Have the missions be about infiltrating the dens of drug lords and crime bosses, or military bases, or whatever. Places that it is reasonable for there to be armed, alert security. But to imagine a world where every police officer in Chicago is looking for you, specifically for you, in places that it is both unlikely that your character – or anyone – would be, not to mention dangerous to be in, don't do that.

I think it will be some years, yet, before most games integrate story and play together. Some of the more successful games along this line has been done by Bioware, going back to The Knights of the Old Republic and straight on through to the Mass Effect and Dragon Age games. Though not done as seamlessly, the Bethesda – Skyrim and Fallout – seem to be trying the same thing. And for years, often with shockingly poor implementation, Japanese role-playing games have tried that, too.  But, right now, not even most computer role-playing games work to actually write the action scenes as much as the cutscenes.

But I long for a day when there it is routine to have guys at the office saying, “Why did the building explode? Did someone have a collection of oil soaked rags in there? Perhaps a collection of half-full gasoline cans and det cord?” There is no excuse for it, regardless of the type of game. If you want exploding buildings, put the action in a place where one might believe the building would explode – a chemical factory or fuel depot, the kind of places where explosions occur. Or make sure that the building being rigged with explosives is part of the plot. Something. It's not that hard. Or all the things that happen in video games, writing is among the absolute cheapest. You don't need buildings full of machines rendering 3D graphics, you don't need a hundred interns doing motion tracking or anything like that, it's just a few guys in a room with caffeine and laptops. It's even cheaper than music in video games. The cost would be superficial to the end cost of the game and you would produce a superior product.

We need a new word for people who work against the public trust within the boundaries of law; criticism of dismissing conspiracy theorists

To me, conspiracy theorizing is pretty weird because when you look at the definition of a conspiracy it's obvious we're surrounded by them once you strip out the risible language.  But it's hard to do because the risible language is built in.

A conspiracy is, according to thefreedictionary.com, 1. an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful or subversive act, 2. a group of conspirators, 3. Law an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action and 4. a joining or acting together, as if by sinister design.

That's . . . a pretty loaded definition because it leaves out of the realms of conspiracy anything that isn't illegal and even by the fourth definition, “as if by sinister design”. Conspiracy is, by a common dictionary, by definition at least sinister and usually illegal.

Going to thesaurus.com, I tried to find a word that was like conspiracy but accounted for things that were not illegal – like the word whose definition is “people working together inside the law but against the public welfare”. In a note to the entry “collusion”, they note that “cooperation is always positive, collaboration is positive except in wartime (working with the enemy) and collusion is always negative (working together in secret for a dishonest purpose)”. Conspiracy is a synonym with collude.  There didn't seem to be anything like I was looking for.

Yet, I find that unsatisfying, too, because there are all kinds of behaviors that are legal but nevertheless highly manipulative, such as advertising and propaganda (which is just advertising with a political message we don't like, really – how is the manipulations of North Korea propaganda but what comes out of our smear-happy, negative campaigning, lie-athon that we call an electoral process NOT propaganda?). There just seems to be no word, other than conspiracy, to describe when a group of people, often totally legally and with legal ends, nevertheless engage in unethical behavior to achieve their ends.

So what do we call a group of people who legally lie (and often their lies form the very basis of law) to achieve their ends that are destructive and terrible yet totally legal?

To take a fairly extreme example, how does one talk about the lies and distortions used to start the Crusades. A letter from the Byzantine Emperor asking for mercenaries was turned into a lurid account of Turks murdering Christians and desecrating the tomb of Jesus. None of it was illegal. One could argue that the Catholic Church and various governments that supported the narrative of the Crusades were simply interpreting a complex political situation in terms that could be understood by their illiterate and uncultured knights and peasants.  Sure, it's specious reasoning, but you could make it and just barely not be laughably wrong.

Yet, somehow, the lies spread by Pope Urban II and the kings of Europe do not fit the definition of “conspiracy” because it wasn't illegal or subversive. What was it, then? Just religion?

But a lot of politics and business is like that. What they do is not technically illegal and, honest, there was no malice of intent. Even with the credit default swap stuff that tanked the economy in 2008. Not a conspiracy. Sure, there was a coordinated effort by every top bank in the world to sell as many credit default swaps as possible all to increase their own personal fortunes, but that's not a conspiracy! That's just business.

But it happens again and again. Every bubble in the history of the modern world has been engineered to benefit a few. Every war has it's winners, usually the guys who sell guns. Yet when a military contractor uses political influence to shape an aggressive foreign policy, it's not a conspiracy. Nothing either illegal nor subversive is going on. It's just politics.

There is a lacuna in our language then. If we use the word conspiracy to talk about political, religious and economic manipulation, we're called paranoid because the events we describe aren't illegal or subversive. There is no well-round word with which we can describe the legal forms of manipulation of our culture, business and politics that also describes the profundity with which the system is controlled by small cabals of like-minded individuals. Legally. Openly.

This really benefits the, oh, let's call them special interest groups that control our government. We can't really refer to their multifaceted, yet legal, manipulations of the public trust in language that does justice to the seriousness of their actions. And we can't talk about something unless we have words that substantially describe what it is we're talking about. In this lacuna of words, a lot of manipulation is not discussed. Worse, when people dare call it conspiracy – because the behavior resembles a conspiracy save for it's legality – the very idea that this kind of collusion occurs at all is attacked. People who bring up the concentration of power in a tiny group of people's hands are just crazy conspiracy theorists.

We need a word to describe the legal manipulations of the system against the public trust, one that conveys the seriousness of the issue but does not bring to mind the specter of conspiracy. Until we have such a word, the people out there who are acting together, within the system, but against the public trust will have an easy go at it because we can't even TALK about them.

Thoughts on watching The Hunger Games movie

I realized another way that The Hunger Games novel, the first one, didn't work for me. I was thinking about this because I was watching the Rifftrax of The Hunger Games. Anyway, uh, Peeta lives.

The Rifftrax guys were going on pretty hard about their probable impending deaths and, yes, exactly, their deaths were probably impending. Now, really, if you look at it, Katniss – a skilled hunter and gifted archer – is the precise kind of person who has a good chance of winning the games and, in fact, she's the odds on favorite to win at the start of the game. For her to win, okay. Even for Peeta to win, okay, he is a strong guy, physically fit, clever, so forth and so on. But what are the odds of BOTH of them winning? Something that had never before happened in 73 years of Hunger Games? Basically zero, of course.

But then, thinking more (as I was watching the movie), I realized having Peeta win was narrative cowardice. I know that part of what the books were supposed to be about were Katniss' feelings for both Peeta and Gale. But what's better, narratively? A weak love triangle (Gale is barely in the books and don't expect to see a bunch of him in the movies, either) or Katniss having to kill Peeta to win. Think about that. At the climax, Peeta and Katniss have the drop on each other. Neither one moves. Cut to them being told if there is no winner of the Hunger Games, their families will be executed. (You need to do something like that so Katniss remains sympathetic. She doesn't kill for the selfish reason that she wants to live, but has to make a Sophie's choice.) Then, Peeta . . . does nothing and Katniss kills him. At which point she realizes that he did, in fact, love her and none of it was a lie, and she murdered him for the entertainment of the Capitol.

OK, here's the real kicker, too. You could still have the love triangle. Rather than Gale not really being in the next two books, you can put him in there all you want and he would be competing with Peeta's ghost.  It is notoriously hard to win against a ghost.  It would have also allowed Peeta and Katniss to develop real feelings for each other in The Hunger Games.

The book and movie both tried to make you feel the horror of the Hunger Games by killing the little black girl, Rue. I . . . didn't like that in either the book of the movie. Yeah, good going, put in black people to be killed so white people feel guilty. Not just the little girl but also Cinna. Jesus fucking Christ, really? You're really just going to put black people in to be killed so white people can save the world? Fuck you.

Anyway, that's how they tried to drive home the horror of the Games. But the little girl we barely know so her death means little. For other plot reasons, they should keep it in – in particular because it also shows that Katniss is making a connection with the people and is becoming a symbol – but it didn't really drive in the horror of the games. What would do that is killing someone we, the audience, has come to like rather than someone we had barely seen. To put Katniss in the situation of having to kill this really nice guy who drive the horror home in a big way.

By having them both survive, well, it was chicken. And weakens the overall story. It was a forced on happy ending, yay, the good guys win, which was inappropriate given the material of the book and movie.

**

I was also just struck, again, over the general stupidity of the games. The Hunger Games is literally a show where children are forced to murder each other. Worse, the richest districts have ringers – they train kids from a young age to do nothing but win the Games. So for districts 1 and 2, they have volunteer ringers. So, not only do they win most of the time, when they lose, well, they were volunteers. The other ten districts have kids selected by lot, who generally watch their children get humiliated and butchered by the kids from districts 1 and 2.

Like, whose idea was that? Because, let me tell you, it takes a LOT less provocation than seventy-four years of graphic child murder for the amusement of the ruling class to spark a revolution among oppressed people. Every time a child is murdered, that whole family turns instantly and irrevocably anti-government. Sure, most of them won't be hardcore about it, but some will be. That's tens of thousands of people ranging from merely committed to hating the government to actively seeking it's destruction. Not even counting those who are equally committed simply over their horror and disgust over children being forced to murder each other for the amusement of the capitol.

It doesn't even take a lot of thinking to work this one through. Riots started in LA because Rodney King's attackers were exonerated in court. King lived. The living conditions in South LA aren't nearly as bad as in most districts. Uprisings would be constant, every district would be littered with resistance cells constantly plotting the overthrow of the government. The districts would be under constant and massive police violence – we're talking constant ID checks, weapons checks, cops kicking in doors, public executions, the whole lot, if you're committed to something as spectacularly stupid as the Hunger Games.

Yeah, yeah, the author says (in the book, if you just watch the movie you have no such knowledge) that a district was destroyed and that suppressed the revolution.  Except that doesn't really work.  It often creates addition opposition because then the people more forcefully believe that it is a fight of life or death.  It wasn't the destruction of Fallujah that stopped Iraqi resistance to US occupation.  It was the US getting out of Iraq, first of pulling back to our bases and then massively reducing our troop presence.  The same was true of the US in Vietnam.  Who districts were wiped out, two million Vietnamese were killed, but even after three decades of fighting overwhelmingly more powerful countries -- the Japanese, the French, the US -- they still found the will to fight.  So, no, that's not really sufficient, either.

This confirms that it's really hard to make a plot.  But it makes me realize something else, too.  It's really hard to understand a plot.  I hate to say this, but it sorta looks like plot doesn't matter very much, even in plot driven stories.