But in this instance I'm thinking about this from a writer's perspective as opposed to a publisher's, tho some of same still applies: if your candy pays well, it can supplement your work on a more complex piece.
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Free clipart rulez!
]]>There's no doubt that since the rise of the internet, much of the job of "marketing" seems to be to fill the internet with crap. Content, any content, as long as it appears regularly and is stuffed with the requisite amount of keywords, has come to dominate what many firms consider "marketing on the internet" for a decade now. But as anyone who's tried to find relevant content on the internet, or sifted through their spam email knows, we've developed very good filters for sorting through BS for actual valuable results. And when we start having problems curating all that noise, places like Google and now Facebook, do it for us, with (in Facebook's case, especially) dodgy algorithms that decide what we're actually interested in and what we should see.
The widespread hatred of what's happened with Facebook, in particular, is a constant gripe not just for users (I finally deleted my personal Facebook account, and kept only the fan page) but also marketers, who have developed huge followings that they now have to pay to reach. But as was pointed out by a speaker at the conference, this is all the fault of myself and my colleagues:
"We're the problem! We broke Facebook. They had to switch to promoted content because we were spamming people with garbage. 'Here's a picture of the sun! Do you YOU like the sun? 'Like' this picture of you like the sun!' WE ARE THE PROBLEM."
All that daily editorial calendar garbage we're spewing out to clutter up the web has given both us and everyone else who uses it information fatigue. Data overload. It's added to the noise in the world. It's made it harder to find valuable, relevant work.
With Google changing its algorithm to increase the ranking of content not just on clicks, but also by time spent on the page, there was a lot of chatter about what this new shift in the algorithm and the information overload was going to do to the types of work we produced to share in online spaces. Some brands and agencies already understand that if you concentrate on just putting out a few big pieces of entertainment, good stories, valuable information, you can cut through the noise, and they're putting out less junk. Others are still stuck spamming you value propositions and bullet pointed lists, hoping something will stick.
When I come home from the day job, I write novels. I talk to a lot of writers. And I couldn't help but notice how these two approaches - lots of content you hope will connect with someone, versus focusing on a few quality projects - mirrored the career strategies of many novelists. There are two schools of thought, generally: you write as much as possible, in as many genres as possible, writing three, maybe even four (or more! Many romance authors write more, and self-published authors often write a dozen or more novella length pieces a year to make a living wage), and hope one of them hits it big (the casino approach). Or, you write your book a year or every three years and you slowly build up a small but passionate audience over time, hoping that by investing in just one piece at a time, that in twenty years or so you'll have enough money through writing to live on.
The reality is that for many authors, the casino approach is simply the only way to make a living. They can't afford to wait to "maybe make a living writing novels" in twenty years. This is often how I see myself in my role at my day job. Shareholders aren't here for a ten-year return. They get quarterly reports. They must, at all costs (even and especially jobs) see growth, a return on their investment, from year to year. That means everyone must produce work, lots of work, to justify their existence, hoping that some of it, any of it, will hit. Most corporations are like this, investing heavily in busy work, in everyone working hard, without sitting down to strategize or prioritize. But the checks come on time (which is far better than I can say for publishing!).
The longer game, the exhausting game, and the game that has less of a likelihood for regular checks, is the long game of relying on building a career on fewer pieces. You may be able to invest more time, energy, and thought into them, but the reality here is that there's less chance of writing something that will connect with readers at the right time, in the right place. If publishing is a gamble, then the more pieces you write, the more tickets you've bought, the better chances you'll have, right?
In truth, I see merit in both of these approaches. Spam works. I see it work everyday. So long as spam works, we are still going to see a lot of spam. Junk posts also work. Some people really like the sun, and they will be happy to like your post all fricking day long. But investing in the longer game, the big tentpole pieces, the novel that took five years or seven years to write, can be just as good an investment.
What I suspect most writers, and marketers, will end up doing in future is a mix of both of these approaches. We'll always have a lot of junk. People like candy. But in talking about how he schedules content on his blog, one of the speakers this weekend pointed out that some candy on Monday, candy and spinach on Tuesday, a big thinky roast piece on Wednesday, candy and spinach on Thursday, and candy on Friday isn't a bad way to schedule content (I think that's a little too much candy for me, personally, but you get the idea). You give folks some happy junk AND a nice chewy piece that makes them think, and then you're not just adding to the junk on the internet, you're providing some value and variety.
This is how I look at using online self-publishing platforms versus traditional publishing sometimes, too. Self-publishing or digital-only is ideal for small fun pieces in universes like the one in my God's War books that are fun slash-and-hack post-apocalypse stories with bad ass heroines and bug tech. Traditional houses can get the newer, chewier, more complicated stuff that gets people excited on a different level, like The Mirror Empire novels. And having a diversity of work also means that I lessen reader burnout. It's not just all the same tired thing.
I'm a marketing nerd, fully aware of its dangers and its potential for inciting positive change. And I admit I look forward to the end of the internet garbage era of marketing, or at least a reining in, a tactical deployment of candy vs. roast, instead of an endless sea of endless suns.
About Kameron Hurley
Kameron Hurley is the author of The Mirror Empire, as well as the award-winning God's War Trilogy, comprising the books God's War, Infidel, and Rapture. She has won the Hugo Award, Kitschy Award, and Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer. Hurley has also been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Nebula Award, the Locus Award, BFS Award, and the BSFA Award for Best Novel. Her short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Year's Best SF, EscapePod, The Lowest Heaven, and the upcoming Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women.
I'm staying at a horror hotel here in Cleveland tonight while attending an ad writing conference. Oh, it's not a horror hotel on purpose. The first sign of trouble was when I pulled up to the front of the hotel to find six valets ready to whisk away the car. Who needs six valets? When I walked into the polished reception area I saw nearly a dozen people hanging out behind the front desk, many of them staring intently at the screens in front of them while just four or five guests seemed to be taking an awfully long time to get checked in.
I glanced at the sitting area near the front desk and realized the artfully arranged stack of books wasn't actual books but just replicas of books all glued together in a stack. They were just decorations. Like someone's idea of what would be on the table at a fancy hotel. When I finally made it to one of the dozen people behind the front desk, I was told I couldn't charge my corporate card, which I'd entered online, because the system hadn't retained the number, and they couldn't give me my key because they had to "go upstairs to make it," as if they were going up to forge it in Mount Doom.
I knew, then, exactly what I was getting myself into. I burst out laughing.
I had entered hotel hell.
The weirdness piled up. I waited twenty minutes for a key they never showed up, and used that time to explore my creepy hotel room, which had an empty glass bottle that said "drink me," a bizarre pencil-sharpener-looking decoration sitting alone on a shelf that turned out to be a bookend, of all things, and three eerie paintings of nude, headless women with waves of blood emanating from their creepy headless bodies. One of them was right next to the toilet, so you could watch these blood beads of sweat rolling down a disembodied naked back while you took a crap. It was the choice of art, even more than the dark colors, the too-tall sinks, the red plush chair with the footrest, and the halls that looked like something out of a Kubrick film, that made me realize this was likely the pet project of some rich privileged guy who had never run a hotel before. It was like a hotel built for the protagonist of American Psycho. It was the most incredibly out of touch hotel to have adjacent a convention center that I've ever seen. Contrary to popular belief, not all business people are dudes from American Psycho.
But the absurdity of it was so grand it made me laugh. I noticed all the weird little details. I delighted in the absurd horror of it. I returned to my room after dinner to find the door ajar and nothing stolen, per se, but the contents of the mini bar had been totally removed. All the drinks, the snacks, everything, like someone downstairs had suddenly realized that they hadn't put any prices on anything. The poor bellhop had the guts to ask me what I thought of the hotel "so far." And I haven't even told you about the elevators.
The truth is that I will remember this hotel experience more than any other generic hotel experience because it forced my brain into the surreal dream like state where everything becomes new again. We run through the routines of our lives so often that the brain often runs on auto pilot. Yes, I've been to a hotel a million times, swipe the key, give me the card, say the little pleasantries, I retire. That's it. That's the end of the story.
But there was that thrilling moment when the hotel desk clerk said, "I'm going to go upstairs and have this key made for you," and then discretely led me over to the bellhop and showed him the room number so he could escort me up that my brain woke up. It said, "Oh, this is something different. I need to pay attention." And suddenly I entered a heightened state of awareness.
This is pretty basic survival 101 stuff, and I understand why it happens. We don't need to be hyper aware of everything all the time. We move through much of our lives, especially as we get older, incredibly quickly. Hours bleed into days bleed into weeks bleed into seasons, and suddenly summer is over and we wonder where the time went. As children, time feels much slower because everything we experience is new. Our brains are constantly working to absorb and categorize new information. As adults, there is less and less new information, and with less new information to take in, the brain doesn't have to work as hard. Time flies by.
When we speak about creativity, or coming up with creative ideas, I often think of it like I'm trying to force myself into this state of increased awareness. I'm trying to wake myself up from the routine, the mundane, the "yeah, I've seen that all before." I want to force my brain out of its comfortable notion of what the world is and explore what it could be.
What if nothing is at all what we expect it to be? What if cats gave birth to rats and we used viruses to power cars, and what if a "family" had a minimum of six spouses and what if it was a grave crime to touch someone without consent?
I'll hear folks, often, saying they have an inherent resistance to some of the ideas in my books. Like, bug magic? Vegetarian cannibals? Parallel universes in an epic fantasy? But I've found that much of that resistance is the simple resistance we encounter when we haven't seen a thing before. When we have gone so long seeing particular types of technologies (warp drive! Teleporter!) that we accept them whole cloth, however impractical, because they are familiar, then it seems odd to point and say that merely being unfamiliar makes something less plausible. Funny enough, it is the unfamiliar, even in science fiction and fantasy novels, that gives us greatest pause, even when we say that's what we really want. Our minds have a resistance to it, a moment of pushback. "But wait! I don't have a box for this! It's a new thing! It can't be real!" We wake up. We interrogate. We fear.
Yet this is what I do all day as both a novelist and an ad copywriter - I look for ways to bust down preconceptions. To cut through noise. To disturb routines just a little bit so that people look at the world in new ways. Sometimes it's funny. Sometimes horrifying. Sometimes delightful.
When I look out at the world, I'm looking for ideas that disturb, delight, amuse. And I bring all those back with me and recombine them into something else. That's why asking what my influences are, or where my ideas come from, is such a meaningless question. Where does thought come from?
It all comes from the same place: it comes from the weird hotel, the out of place object, the ill-timed phone call, the story of a grandmother's war time exploits, the canary that ended up in the baked beans and made you wonder... holy hell how did that happen? It's about constantly working to make sense of the world, even and especially when it is absurd.
About Kameron Hurley
Kameron Hurley is the author of The Mirror Empire, as well as the award-winning God's War Trilogy, comprising the books God's War, Infidel, and Rapture. She has won the Hugo Award, Kitschy Award, and Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer. Hurley has also been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Nebula Award, the Locus Award, BFS Award, and the BSFA Award for Best Novel. Her short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Year's Best SF, EscapePod, The Lowest Heaven, and the upcoming Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women.
So. I suspect I have not yet lost my love of tragedy!
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