Social-media marketing is horrifying

I was sitting on the couch last week, watching an episode of the PBS series Frontline because I’m a geek, when my flatmate walked in the door.

“Hi!” Flatmate said, hanging up her keys. “Whatcha doin’?”

“Having an existential crisis,” I replied. “Wanna join me?”

“Sure!”

This exchange alone should tell you everything you need to know about Flatmate. But this blog entry is about the existential crisis.

The Frontline episode is called “Generation Like”, and you can watch it here. I highly recommend it. It’s a terrific in-depth look at social-media marketing, and how successful YouTube vloggers and the like do it ... and what major corporations do with the data, which is of course quite creepy.

The DVD, which I did not buy.

But the existential crisis had nothing to do with Big Data. No, the existential crisis came about because of a girl interviewed in the documentary. Caeli, she’s called, and she is approximately the 59^th biggest Hunger Games fan on Earth. Seriously. There’s a website that ranks them. She got this title by spending four or five hours a day obsessively clicking, tweeting, liking, reblogging, and generally spreading all things Hunger Games across the internet. She promotes The Hunger Games until her hands are sore, but it’s all worth it, she says, because she gets little electronic pips called “sparks” that advance her in the rankings of Hunger Games fandom.

She’s about sixteen years old.

This is her.

So here’s the existential crisis. My first thought when I met Caeli, via the Frontline crew, was, “Wow, I wish I had fans this dedicated. That would be cool, and it would make my job as a self-promoting writer much easier.”

My second thought was, “Holy crap, I would never ever EVER want my fans to be this obsessed! I want to hug this poor girl and tell her to go play outside! And I want to strangle the Lions Gate marketing team that’s using her as free child labor!”

Now, I’m not actually going to try to dissuade any fan from being a fan. If anybody ever decides they want to be a Caeli-level superfan for Masks or Teh Novel or Street of Bakers or even a new project I’ve working-titled The God at the Back of the Bus, I will not try to talk them out of it. If people want to geek out, about my work or somebody else’s, that’s aces by me. Hey, I’ve probably spent an unhealthy amount of time already geeking out over the upcoming Winter Soldier movie, and I spent five days last week dissecting the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer. My glass house would not withstand any stone-throwing.

But I can’t help feeling there’s a difference between geeking out because you genuinely love something and geeking out because a huge marketing corporation has manipulated you into doing their job for them. I’m okay with the first one, and I will always encourage my fans--whether there’s two of them or two million—to do that. It’s the second one that bothers me.

Yes, I am a Winter Soldier geek. Possibly even a megageek. I am planning to attend a midnight screening. I designed a Bucky Cap T-shirt just so I could wear one. I am helping a friend out with a Winter Soldier cosplay. I am so excited about this movie that I periodically find myself making little happy “eeee!” noises under my breath for no apparent reason. But honestly, all Marvel had to do to get that reaction out of me was make a movie out of one of my favorite comics, and not put any sucky bits in the trailer. I’m excited because I love the character, and I loved the character long before the marketing people got involved.

Say it with me anyway: Eeeeeeeeee!

I was a fan of the character back when he was just part of a batshit-crazy storyline running in Captain America comics in 2004, and everybody assumed it would end with the Winter Soldier getting killed off because he was one of those characters who always died. I followed the character’s adventures as he adjusted to life as a free man in the twenty-first century, and I thrilled to his every rise and fall because I connected with him on a deep emotional level. The reasons for that affection are complicated and very personal, but they boil down to this—I liked this character before he was a billion-dollar franchise, for reasons of my own, and I will go on liking him whether the movie’s any good or not, for the same reasons. It’s pretty much independent of the marketing. All the marketing has to do is tell me that this thing I already love exists, and I will buy it. Hell, I still own the Daredevil movie on DVD, and I knew it sucked when I bought it.

IT STILL SUCKS.

But I’m not reblogging stuff four to five hours a day. I have no interest whatsoever in being the  fifty-ninth biggest Winter Soldier or Daredevil fan on the planet. I’m actually fairly careful about that; my family has a big, nasty history of addiction, so I watch for signs of addictive behavior in myself. I switch off the computer before it gets creepy. I will never be the kind of viral marketer Lions Gate is looking for. I am not Caeli.

And that, I think, is at the heart of my discomfort. For all I know, Caeli loves The Hunger Games and obsessively reblogs all things Katniss because she connects to Suzanne Collins’ novels the way I connect to my favorite comics. But I think there’s something terribly sinister about a multi-billion-dollar media machine feeding Caeli’s enthusiasm to the point of addiction. The marketing plan for Mockingjay Part One includes on-the-hour scheduling of things like when set photos will be released, what production tidbits will be dropped when, and so on. I would never tell Caeli to stop being a Hunger Games geek, or stop doing things online that she’d probably do whether Lions Gate were involved or not. But I’m massively creeped out by the idea that the Hunger Games marketing crew is trying to create as many Caelis as possible ... and that this is, no pun intended, the object of the game.

I don’t like the idea that something I make--out of love, because there’s no other reason to spend years making up stories for people I’ll never meet--might be used to encourage addict behavior. I don’t like the idea of exploiting kids. It bothers me on a fundamental level. It’s creepy enough that I can legitimately say that I wouldn’t want to be Suzanne Collins, even though I know it’s not her doing it.

Not even for this much money.

I worked a marketing job once ... for all of one month. I discovered that while I was great at spinning yarns--I was a fantastic liar when I had the motivation--I was absolutely wretched at selling things I didn’t like, and didn’t believe in. That job ended because I was supposed to be hyping a suite of software that supposedly did everything its competitor did, and more--but the software didn’t actually work, according to the engineers who were building it. I couldn’t write promo copy for something that was never going to work. I all but stopped sleeping, my grad-school coursework took a nosedive, and in general I hope I never have to work a job that awful again. I still remember watching my stressed-out boss claw compulsively at his own skin, scratching until he bled, because he couldn’t take the pressure. And he had it easy. He thought the software worked.

I like my job now. I have a tiny, tiny fanbase and I love them. I don’t have a Caeli, but I wouldn’t want a Caeli who didn’t volunteer for the job, and I wouldn’t want a Caeli who was reblogging until her fingers hurt. I think I’d cry. Even if Caeli said she loved it and wanted to be doing it, I would cry.

She said it during this interview, and I still cried a little.

Much as I love interacting with my favorite artists and understand the desire to do it even more, I love my fans. I want them to be happy and well.

I’d like to have a larger fanbase. I’m trying to get better about posting stuff and interacting with my fans and all the good social-media things I’m supposed to be doing in this age of self-promotion. But my marketing staff consists of me and my laptop, and I can only control the message as long as I’m the only one sending it out. If Teh Novel takes off, and people other than me get involved in promoting my work, I am fairly certain that my biggest worry will be that somewhere out there, a Caeli is getting hurt because of something I created out of love.

Look at this picture again. She's like me at twelve, but cooler.

So here and now, before any actual money or marketing people can possibly come into the equation, is my promise to you. On this blog, on Pocket Coyote, on Facebook and Twitter and whatever other platforms come along, I will share as much of my life with you as seems prudent and interesting, and whatever I share will be true and will be me. If it shows up on this blog and it’s not signed with somebody else’s name, I wrote it. If I post a photo, I took it. If I say it, I thought it. No calculation, no hyperscheduling, no pressure. Just me and my keyboard, with ink on my fingertips and graphite smudges on my arm. That seems to be what you guys want, and it’s something I’m quite willing to give.

And in return for all that--however much or little it’s worth to you--this is all I ask, and all I will ever ask.

I drew this in a coffee shop because I was bored.

First, take joy in what I make. Have fun. I make this stuff because I love it, and I share it because I want you to enjoy it as much as I do. If you’re not having fun, go do something else. Seriously.

Second, share your joy with others simply because shared joy is increased. Go ahead and tell all your friends how wonderful my stories are--but only do it if you think your friends will enjoy them, too. There’s a reason I make the Masks chapters available for free, and it’s not because I don’t think I can get you to pay for them. Some of you do (and thanks for that, by the way). I make the chapters available for free because I never want to have to work a horrible marketing job again, selling software that will never work. I make the chapters available for free because it’s the ultimate truth in advertising--because I will never feel like I’m selling you a pig in a poke when there is no poke. I don’t post free chapters because it’s good marketing, or because I’m so confident that you’ll buy my stories if I give you a free sample. I’m not confident at all. But if I know you can read before you buy, and you do buy, I know you’re buying because it makes you happy. I know I’ve shared joy. And that’s worth more to me than any number of dollars in the tip jar.

Third and finally, I do ask you to pay for my work--to pay what you can, when you can, where you can. I’d like to pay my bills with this stuff, it’s true. One of my great dreams in life, second to writing the kind of stories I love best, is to own a home of my very own so I never have to worry about where I’m sleeping next month. I would be over the moon if enough people bought my stories that I could do that. So yes, if you enjoy my work, I’d like you to pay a reasonable price to support it. I’d certainly produce more if I could do it full-time. But I know that life happens and money gets tight and sometimes you can’t put a dollar in the tip jar. And that’s okay. The joy comes first. Money is on my wish list, but joy is a lot higher up.

And that’s it. Those three things, in that order, are all I will ever ask of you, my readers and electronic friends. Enjoy the art, share the art if you enjoy it, and pay for the art if it’s worth it and you can afford it. Have joy, share joy, and tip your server if you can. If by some bizarre twist of fate you ever encounter a multi-billion-dollar marketing campaign for my art, please don’t be Caeli. Take care of yourselves instead.

What's in my name?

Recently, I’ve been reading Jay Conrad Levinson’s Guerrilla Marketing in an effort to figure out how I’m going to make sure Masks reaches the greatest possible number of eyeballs once it goes live in July. I’ve also had to go to a couple of social occasions where I’ve met new people and been asked to justify my existence. In my day jobs, I am an editor and a language-arts tutor, and since nobody really wants to hear my horror stories about comma splices gone wrong, the only interesting topic in my conversational quiver has been Masks, especially since my friends hype it so enthusiastically. This often ends with me passing out bookmarks or writing down the URL of this blog, and that of my not-up-yet-but-won’t-it-be-cool website, PocketCoyote.com.

At which point I get asked one question, so predictably that I can actually mouth the words along with my interlocutor:

“Where’s your name on all this? I don’t see your name anywhere.”

That’s right. You don’t see my name. My name will be on the next round of bookmarks, though not my full name—I’ve decided that, at least when I publish online, I’m going to go by R.M. Hendershot. But I’m not using that as my URL, my blog handle, or anything other than a book-cover ID, really.

Now, according to everything I’m reading in Guerrilla Marketing, I need to develop a personal brand and push it consistently. The simplest brand anyone can use is their own name—you’re the only you there’s ever been, and unless you have a really common name like Tom Smith, you can probably get pretty far on that brand without having to work too hard at associating yourself with it. And “Hendershot” is not exactly a common name, so why aren’t I using it more?

There are several reasons. In no particular order:

1. I pretty much hate my surname. It’s a bit weird, and rare, supposedly because it was originally a Middle High German word for a rear-guard unit who tended to get slaughtered when the rest of the army was in retreat. The story goes that anyone still alive who’s named Hendershot is the descendant of some of the toughest SOBs the German states could produce … but that’s why there are so few of us. I mostly know it as the name that causes total strangers to ask me if I’m a Nazi. (Only after they hear my name, though—I got my looks from my Jewish great-grandmother, and the resulting cognitive dissonance among very stupid people is often quite funny.)

2. I might change my name at some point, and having it in my URL then would be a pain in the butt. I was raised in a fairly conservative, religious family, and my father, in particular, has long waxed eloquent on the evils of feminism in all its forms, presumably including this shifty business of married women keeping their maiden names. (I think it’s perfectly reasonable, but that’s another blog entry.) I am single and have no plans to marry, but it’s not like what I plan and what happens have ever been similar. In a few years, I might well have a different last name. I don’t particularly relish the idea of picking a fight with my father—or worse, my hypothetical in-laws—over that name and why one version or another is not in my URL. This may sound absurd to people who live on the Internet, where you can call yourself Piffle the Wonder Unicorn if you want, but you would not believe the arguments I get into. If my URL is no particular form of my name, that’s one argument I can avoid. (The shouting matches about the name on my book covers, of course, are another matter—but you can’t have everything.)

3. My name is unspellable, and therefore un-Googleable. My own mother misspelled my first name on my birth certificate, and I’ve met only a few people in my life who could spell it correctly on the first try, or even the third. People consistently look at my surname and read it as “Henderson.” When my father was a boy, he was sent to the principal’s office for insisting that his teacher call him by his proper last name. (They finally settled the matter by calling his father in—from the local Army base. Captain Hendershot arrived in full uniform, with his name on his chest. The shouting match was memorable.) Now imagine trying to get teenagers all over the English-speaking world to type my name correctly into Google. I’ve had friends fail to find me online even when they had my legal, correctly spelled name to plug into a search engine. I have had trouble finding me on Google, and you’d think I could spell my name if anyone could. Give me a name people can spell, and Google, and look up on Amazon. If I must publish under my given name, I’m attaching a handle people can remember.

Which brings me to my primary reason …

4. Pocket Coyote is much easier to remember than any version of my name I’ve been able to concoct. It’s constructed of two common words that most English speakers can spell within three tries—particularly if they have any familiarity with my body of work. It’s a phrase that nobody’s using, aside from sellers of tactical vests who have a “pocket” model in “coyote brown” (note to tac-vest sellers: coyotes are mostly gray). The domain name wasn’t taken, presumably because nobody in the English-speaking world is insane enough to want to put a coyote in his or her pocket, except me. I give Pocket Coyotes away as prizes, and he’s become the mascot of this blog, so he’s obviously got more charisma than I will ever have.

And besides, he’s cute!

So I changed my tagline ...

You might or might not have noticed a slight shift in the profile image on the Facebook page yesterday. It’s repeated here on the blog. The mock cover used to say, “A novel about truth, justice, and making life up as you go,” and it now says, “A novel about truth, justice, and growing up with secrets.”

The reasons for the change are many and mostly uninteresting. The old slogan sounded too much like an Indiana Jones line; Trevor is more or less an over-planner, so he’s not really making life up as he goes and thus the slogan is invalid; several people told me to put something about growing up in the tagline to convey that the book is about teenagers (though in my experience, growing does not happen to everyone, and may occur outside the teen years if it occurs at all). Personally, I wanted to get away from the Courier font on the old image and go with the Batik Regular font I prefer for Masks materials.

But mostly, I was tired of the old tagline bugging me.

Marketing is a tricky proposition in the book world. The kind of temperament that can write a really good story—something exciting and truly original—generally is not very good at marketing. Great stories involve surprises at some point; marketing is very much about making a product fit into the way people already see the world. And in the case of books, it involves boiling the story down into a catchy line that people can remember—but of course, if the idea of a book could really be condensed like that without losing anything important, the author would have written a catchy line in the first place and not a book.

But with some recent and not-so-recent developments in the publishing world, most authors now accept that they have to do a fair amount of book marketing, including in the early stages before a book is published. This requires that the “message” of those materials be simple, consistent, and memorable. And because I am an inveterate do-it-yourselfer—my childhood toybox full of pipe-cleaner action figures, my closet full of homemade apparel, my memories rich with imaginary friends and the universes they inhabit—that meant coming up with that message myself, at least until I have someone else to help me out.

I’ve got a notebook lying around somewhere with a dozen “truth, justice, and” lines in it. The construction naturally suggested itself as de rigeur for anybody writing about superheroes, but the third word in the list is problematic. “The American Way” will not sell even if I should own the copyright to it; too many people now believe the American Way is, for example, Abu Ghraib, and it will be a while before that changes for the better, if it ever does. (And I’m not going to say what I think it means, because it doesn’t matter for this purpose what I believe about it—if I use terms whose meaning my readers cannot correctly interpret, I am using the wrong terms.)

I’d played with the “truth, justice, and” construction before. A Masks story I wrote and put out sometime around 2002 was titled “Truth, Justice, and My Way,” and involved a Frank Sinatra joke and the debut of one of my more popular villains. “Truth, justice, and secrets” worked nicely in the first trailer, but the more I thought about it, the more vague it seemed. Anybody can have secrets. I have secrets myself—but most of mine are fairly boring. What was so special about secrets in a book that was already about people in masks?

Ah, but growing up with secrets … that spoke to me. Rae and Trevor are still developing as people. Rae and Trevor at the beginning of the book are not the same as Rae and Trevor at the end, and by the time their saga is finished they will be still more different. And the secrets they keep—from each other, from themselves, and even from the reader—shape their growth the way a trellis shapes the growth of a vine. When the novel begins, Trevor has wrapped his life around the secret of the Very Bad Thing that happened to him while he was searching the world for his missing mentor, and even when that secret is revealed, there is another secret, buried deeper, that threatens to make an enemy of Rae because he can’t bear to share it with her. Rae, meanwhile, has patterned her masked life after a secret of her own connected to the coyote—a secret glimpsed in the flashbacks that appear occasionally in the book.

And somehow, those three ideas worked together in a way they didn’t manage separately. Truth—so much of this book is about Rae and Trevor seeking truth, or trying to prove it, or dealing with its ramifications. Justice—the story wouldn’t go anywhere if Rae and Trevor were not both convinced that justice matters, and that Cobalt’s behavior was fundamentally unjust. Rae in particular is concerned with justice, from her earliest experiences with a schoolyard bully (although I’ll admit she shades over into revenge for a while there). Growing up with secrets—they are both shaped by their secrets, and those secrets define the people they are becoming, for good or ill.

Plus, hey, this way I got to use the Batik font.

Pyramid marketing for books ...

Gathering fans on Facebook is hard. Period. On MySpace, you can invite people by the hundreds—it’s limited only by your willingness to sit there clicking that button hour after hour. Facebook, meanwhile … well, it’s a little tougher. I can only invite people on my personal friends list, and because I have this thing about having actual friends on my friends list and they don’t all have a legitimate interest in young-adult superhero fiction, it’s slow going.

So I’m going to bribe all of you to recruit for me.

Through the end of February, we’re going to have a fan contest on this page—that is, a contest to see who can add the largest number of fans. I think it will work like this:

1. Invite your friends to join the page. Simple, right? There’s a little button under the profile image that will let you spam your whole friends list.

2. But wait! There’s more! When you invite your friends, ask them to leave a comment on the page’s wall with the name of the friend who invited them. If a new fan gets more than one invitation, he or she is welcome to name all the people who invited him/her. I’ll keep a running tally of the names that get mentioned most. I do have a way of identifying new fans on this page, but I don’t know how they got there, so this is the only way I can track who invites whom.

3. The contest will end February 28, 2010. On March 1, I will announce the winner—at which point that fan and all the fans he or she invited will get prizes.

I’m still figuring out what those prizes will be, though, so I’m going to test this new blog system by inviting votes. I’ll list the options, and I encourage you to leave your votes in the comment section of this blog.

There will be two levels of prize—one big one-of-a-kind prize for the person who adds the largest number of fans, and a smaller, more easily replicable prize for both the winner and all the fans who nominated that person.

Possibilities for level one:

1. Original MASKS plushie, handmade by the author. Current plan is either my new fleece-coyote design (recently beta-tested on a Christmas gift recipient) or a doll of Rae or Trevor—recipient’s choice.

2. Original MASKS art—a signed Nicole Le sketch, again of the character of the winner’s choice. Nicole’s agreed to do contest art again if I bribe her with Flame Broiler. Derrick does not do contest art, apparently because he has more self-respect than Nicole. (I love you, Nicole …)

3. Naming a character in MASKS. I have to add a couple of people in the Fourth Draft—at least one male and at least one female—and I’d be willing to give away the naming rights to a character, within reason. (Keep it PG, and no profanity, please—but I’m more than willing to name the character after you!) Each of these characters will have dialogue and be the centerpiece of at least one plot point.

Possibilities for level two:

1. Exclusive MASKS wallpaper. Nicole’s got some art she’s saving up for Free Comic Book Day, but I have Flame Broiler coupons …

2. MASKS podcast—a limited edition, one-of-a-kind, limited-time-only audio recording of something related to MASKS. Maybe someone reading the first chapter or two …

3. An early look at the new MASKS short story I’m writing for Free Comic Book Day … which isn’t until May, so you’d get two months and some change to taunt people with it. There are ninjas.

Register your votes, for level one and level two. Remember—the person who brings in the largest number of fans gets both prizes, and everyone he or she brings in gets the level-two prize. I’ll also accept suggestions for alternate prizes, if anyone’s got any brilliant ideas.

If this works well, I’ll probably do more recruiting contests in the future, with more prizes, so your odds of winning something are pretty good. And with luck, sometime soon I’ll be able to give away autographed first editions …