Cory Doctorow has a Locus editorial, and it echoes some of the things I have been saying about the future of content, only framed within the world of science fiction writing.
But what kind of artist thrives on the Internet? Those who can establish a personal relationship with their readers — something science fiction has been doing for as long as pros have been hanging out in the con suite instead of the green room. These conversational artists come from all fields, and they combine the best aspects of charisma and virtuosity with charm — the ability to conduct their online selves as part of a friendly salon that establishes a non-substitutable relationship with their audiences. You might find a film, a game, and a book to be equally useful diversions on a slow afternoon, but if the novel’s author is a pal of yours, that’s the one you’ll pick. It’s a competitive advantage that can’t be beat.
Reading this in light of the recent marketing stats is interesting, because those said that word of mouth far trumps anything else — but also said that most game consumers don’t know who made the games they are playing.
One could argue that for most games, it doesn’t matter who made them, because they lack enough individuality for you to notice or care.
In the MMO community, I think we have long known the importance of the sort of personal relationship that Cory describes. I also think that much of the rest of the games biz doesn’t get it, but hasn’t needed to get it, in large part because they’re just not on the same spot on the technological curve as music is.
I also wonder how much of the games audience isn’t connected in the same way as the notoriously self-referential world of science fiction. (Then again, it’s not like the game developer world isn’t equally self-referential and insular!)
It strikes me, suddenly, how much of my own manner in dealing with the public probably arises out of my constant reading of SF/F, particularly when I was younger: Asimov editorials in the magazines, with that chatty tone; the fanzine culture — which I was never involved in, but read about a lot (I own a lot of books on the history of SF); even Piers Anthony afterwords in his books. I actually wrote Piers Anthony a letter, when I was a kid, and got mentioned in one of the afterwords, and got a letter back. A culture of fraternity, essentially.
Online games had that in the 90s, too, and I think still do, what with the ever-larger circle of blogs chatting about the hobby. It moved from rec.games.mud.admin to MUD-Dev to various forums and now to blogs, but it’s always been there.
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Whenever someone says they are selling a conversation, not a product, I check my wallet, to make sure it is still there.
I’ve heard what Cory referred to, the destruction of copyrights, conversation as product, Cluetrain Manifesto et al, as the Attention economy. While it does lead to a much closer bond between author and fan, it also leads to histrionics, BNF (Big Name Fans) and much wankery.
My personal bias is that I hate that crap. It’s artificial. I wouldn’t call Neil Gaiman a “friend”, even though his blog is in my RSS reader, and I’ve read some of his books. It is a facsimile of a relationship, and predicated on the purchase of products.
This blog is a conversation. Are we all full of wankery here?
I wouldn’t call Neil a friend either (though ironically, Cory is one). But I do think that there’s truth in what Cory says about how Neil has a relationship with his fans — read, customers — that is very different from the sort of relationship that we have with, say, James Joyce, who ain’t talking to us.
Oh, and to be clear — I think a product is being sold, for sure, but that the conversation is an enabler and marketing tool, and a means of building a following.
Well…
Something I’ve wondered for a while, (and this is less from any innate fannishness and more from the fact that when it happens to me, it creeps me out)…
What’s it like to walk into a room full of people who have had what is often a highly personal, highly emotional experience because of something you’ve communicated, yet, you’ve never met any of them? What’s it like for complete strangers to know your name, and have highly developed opinions of you without your ever having met or talked with them, or even anyone that knows them?
Well, but don’t we like Neil Gaiman? And doesn’t our (limited)understanding of him as a person reflect back on what we think of him as a craftsman? I bought a product today (“Beyond” from Marvel Comics) based on the writer is a good craftsman, the writer was friendly when my wife and I met him at a convention and I’m feeling good about Marvel as a publisher currently. I can honestly say price was not an issue; I didn’t check the price.
I don’t know if I’d go as far as “fraternity”, though the groups involved are often friendly enough to seem so. Neither would I agree with zabuni’s “wankery”, though his/her (sorry!) mention of “big name fans” rang true for me (in many but not all cases. There’s a lot of “cult of personality” in the blogosphere, that’s for sure.
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I think there’s a bit of the old chicken-and-egg here. Is Neil Gaiman’s writing popular because he has a blog, or is his blog popular because he’s a published writer? If he had never had any of his work published, would his blog be as well read as it is today? Personally, I think it’s his fame that has made his blog popular. I’ll accept that Neil Gaiman’s blog might maintain his popularity, but I don’t necessarily think it builds his popularity.
In my opinion, the reason why us MMO devs communicate with fans is because we realize they’ll do it with or without us. If I didn’t have a blog people would still talk about me on various community sites. I used to post on various community sites in order to stay in the loop and discuss issues important to me. True, I also did it a bit for self-promotion, to make sure I wasn’t forgotten easily. But, now I maintain my own blog mostly to discuss issues I think are important. I don’t post on there because I’m pimping something.
My thoughts.
I think that Neil Gaiman’s writing was popular before his blog was, definitely.
On the flip side, I think that (say) John Scalzi’s writing became hugely more popular because of his blog. There’s little doubt that it served as a bootstrapping mechanism for his popularity.
I also think there is a definite synergy that happens. There’s surely a large group of Gaiman fans who read his stuff regardless — but I suspect a smaller number of them would be buying sculptures, t-shirts, barely-related musical projects by third parties, promotional posters, and so on, were it not for the outlet the blog provides and the sense of community there.
Gosh, I’m having the experience and missing the meaning on this one. I’ll try to refrain from getting too snarky about Cory’s book released in SL, his inworld experience, the fatuousness surrounding this, and Hamlet nee Linden Au’s breathless characterization of Cory as among the top 10 avatars in SL even though he never logs in lol. It’s too much.
People claiming that online books given away for free help sales of print editions never prove this with actual reports and spread sheets. We can’t check it with amazon.com
And when I see a phrase like this, “The future is conversational,” as if only sci-fi geeks ginning up fan boy groups on their blogs are where it’s at, I have to marvel, what they never heard of Oprah’s Book Club, where she chats on her talk show about books, and the people in the audience get all excited, then they buy some tired book that was in the bargain bin five minutes before that.
What about chap books of poetry sold in book stores and the following poets and poetry readings? Imagine, to think that conversation is revolutionary, even though it’s not only what they had in the 19th century in the drawing room, it’s what they had like…forever LOL.
I think that’s part of the point, Prokofy — it’s a return to modes of interaction that have tended to go away in today’s world but were the default mode once upon a time.
Keep in mind that Oprah is still a glaring exception as far as mainstream media coverage of books goes, and that people thought she was strange for doing a book club in the first place.
Cory has pretty good stats on how his book has done, and he’s a firm believer that releasing the stuff for free helps, and he’s not the only one — all the folks in the Baen Free Library tend to agree.
On the poetry front — I know you live in NYC, so you may have a skewed view of this, but in most of the world, there aren’t any poets giving readings. In most of the world, there aren’t any poets. Poets are confined to living in the orbit of universities, for the most part, and give readings to students and professors. That conversation, vital as it is,is barely happening.
Raph, why would you think this happened first with Cory, or what would justify him thinking this happens only with sci-fi, and even my example of Oprah isn’t rare — she has millions of viewers many of them reading these books and spreading this concept to schools, churches, etc. I’ve seen this in the public schools in NYC where parents and children and teachers are all reading the same book. In Borders and Barns & Nobles they constantly bring in authors and you sit and chat with them — there are only 20-30 of you like on an SL sim and you have the capuccini too. Decades ago, we did this in college, with visiting poets and speakers of all kinds, particularly political — it’s the same thing on college campuses today. Long before Oprah, Cory, Barns & Nobel, the Internet, there were those foreign affairs councils where ladies who lunch would all gather to hear Bertrand Russell who would talk about his book. I guess I’m just saying that there isn’t some revolutionary break with the past, and then suddenly some revolutionary re-start of this cool new concept. It’s always been there. Books, authors, people who gather around and talk about them.
>He’s a firm believer that releasing the stuff for free helps
Helps…but is it paying the bills? There’s something about the talk circuit and conference circuit *about* the whole Creative Commons thing and all those tin cups out begging for money in places like SL clubs that lets me know that this free stuff isn’t working quite as advertised.
As for living in NYC and having a skewed view, the first poet I ever heard was in the Lampost Luncheonette in downtown Penn Yan, NY, pop. 3007. There are poets all over the place.
>In most of the world, there aren’t any poets.
Have you been to Russia lol?
Everybody’s always celebrating the Internet and social software. It’s just people LOL. We always had people. They’ve been around for like…ever.
Of course it’s just people. My point is that it’s a form of entertainment that has seriously dwindled, and a form of interaction between the creators and the audience that has seriously dwindled, under the impact of big media TV, radio, and yes, publishing too (though the audiences for books are small enoguh that it is there and in certain genres such as folk music where it still remains).
I came out of the world of poetry — I know it intimately. There really ARE damn few poets left, honest. It’s become an increasingly academic pursuit, and barring occasional stuff that pops up, like the slam movement, it reaches almost nobody. I very much dislike that this is how it is, but nonetheless, that is how it is.
I didn’t say the SL thing happened first with Cory. Frankly, it’s to SL’s benefit, and the benefit of its boosters to make a big deal out of someone like Cory showing up at all. It’s a publicity thing. Similarly, it’s to his benefit to make a big deal of it — he wants to sell books, and he wants to engage with his audience. And SL is definitely mostly in his target audience.
In the case of Oprah, my point is that she, as a major broadcasting figure pushing books, is unusual. Of course there are those who follow her broadcast who are reading books. That’s not my point; my point is access to the creators of the work, and whether they are engaging with the audience in the same way. Name other top TV shows that are pushing books the way Oprah does — then take all the hours of programming that represents and add it together relative to everything else on TV.
Book tours still happen. But they happen in a different way than they used to years ago, and they have definitely migrated towards “fandom” sorts of events. That’s part of why it may be working better with stuff like SF, where there already is a strong sense of tribal identity and fandom.
That’s also Cory’s point, that essentially, playing to the fandoms, to the existing following and maybe broadening it out a bit, that’s what the Internet permits. It’s more of the old school folk process than the big broadcasting model.
In most ways, big media was the break with the past. I see what he’s talking about, and what I talked about, as a return to the ways we had a century ago, where you had to engage with the audience, not just throw something up on the broadcast medium.
Well don’t you think it’s hilarious that this cutting edge high-tech 3-d Internet stuff turns out to be about…holding somebody’s little avatar hand ROFL?
>It’s a publicity thing. Similarly, it’s to his benefit to make a big deal of it — he wants to sell books, and he wants to engage with his audience. ?And SL is definitely mostly in his target audience.
Yes. What annoyed me about this which I blogged about serially for ages was the fact that Cory got a published book with this newfangled book publishing technology, but nobody else did…then the prize-winners of this Hamlet Linden contest finally got pushed (including by me) into releasing and/or selling the various versions of the technology to publish books…but publishing books (!) is still damn tedious in SL, unless you like lots of notecards or lots of textures uploaded at $10 a pop with your print set up on them like Guttenberg would have in Paint.
So all that is by way of saying we left broadcasting and went to narrowcasting. Progress?
>they have definitely migrated towards “fandom” sorts of events. That’s part of why it may be working better with stuff like SF, where there already is a strong sense of tribal identity and fandom.
Well, wait a sec. This is nonsense. Huh? How come a serious thinker like David Rieff, author of “A Bed for the Night,” about humanitarian crises, speaking at a Barnes & Nobles, is about “fandom”? Or any of those people featured in these book stores. What’s your idea of the difference between fans and readers then?
I’m just not for granting sci-fi geeks exclusivity to the idea of tribes, social networks, and warming their little avatar hands around cyber fires. We’re all doing that, and we’re not all sci fi geeks. Or did you think the story-telling of MySpace is all sci-fi geeks?
If you expand the concept of narration just a bit broader than the book in its left-to-right 400-page printed format and think of the story anyone wants to tell about themselves on their pages in any format, you’ll drop the fascination with the sci-fi geeks. Say now, I took a gut course on sci-fi once and I’ve read “Dune” and “We”. Aren’t we all sci-fi geeks in some tiny way?
>Name other top TV shows that are pushing books the way Oprah does
>Charlie Rose. Anne Coulter. I dunno. Or any other talk show in the universe. They hold up the book, it sells. That’s the formula.
>In most ways, big media was the break with the past. I see what he’s talking about, and what I talked about, as a return to the ways we had a century ago, where you had to engage with the audience, not just throw something up on the broadcast medium.
Ok, that partially makes sense, but I’m not liking the way that the trade-off for this return to the lovely narrative interactive pastoral scene you’re admiring is by way of both having to endure aggressive anonymity (Internet Fuckwad Theory) and giving up privacy (Internet Histrionics). I was trying to figure that out here:
I don’t believe history works by revolutionary breaks. That’s the Marxist idea, of course, there are always world-historical epochs always being shattered and reaching their cusp and breaking with the past, etc. That’s just a metaphor.
So it’s a medicine show?
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>That’s also Cory’s point, that essentially, playing to the fandoms, to the existing following and maybe broadening it out a bit, that’s what the Internet permits. It’s more of the old school folk process than the big broadcasting model.
The Internet permits that, yes. So this is a good piece of analysis, that yes, Orprah-like book clubs (they’d probably wince at the association) made up of sci-fi geeks gathered around one charismatic and sociable author are more possible on the Internet. But…it’s one thing to say they are more possible and some exist, and another to make the leap to saying “we’re all going to be done this and the Internet is going to be wall-to-wall geeky book-clubs in five years,” or that “the future of content is that we have to stop selling to the guy bowling alone and play to his group-grope on the Internet” — and that’s what so often seems to happen with even the good analysis on these 3-D Internet discussions.
[…] Making mega-groups with overt advertising or covert advertising of the "hey kids come have fun and dance on our island" messaging might be one thing, especially if the mega groups can subsume some smaller more localized groups, but ultimately, to really reach the Bohos in Paradise, the Groupitars have to have real groups. That’s going to force them to put on real events and do real stuff, and they haven’t figured out that if anything, the world online isn’t mass, and big, and viral like they thought, especially in SL, because of all the checkgates. If anything, they might come to the same conclusion of Raph Koster blogging about Cory Doctorow (which I don’t completely agree with) that the new social technologies only lead us back to the same old parlour games and parlour conversations, the same old little group around the campfire. It seems like an awful lot of trouble to have gone through, when we could have just turned to the people we live with, or next door to, in real life, to achieve the same effect, but then, for all kinds of reasons, they aren’t in touch with our souls, and Second Life is. […]