I think that art and story are products of a conversation, perhaps many conversations. Sometimes it’s the result of a conversation between the artist and their audience. Other times it’s can be a culmination of the conversation that the artist has between their own experiences and their own influences — and in both of these cases, artist and audience, or experience and influence, it’s a kind of battle between self and anti-self, which now that I’ve said that out loud is clearly a sign I’ve already crawled up my own ass with this very pretentious argument.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s talk about The Matrix: Resurrections.

The Short and Sweet

If you want the brevity review, without any kind of spoiler, it’s this: I did not always love The Matrix: Resurrections, even as I loved many things about it. The script is strong. The worldbuilding is wonderful. The emotional core is throbbing. It cuts away from a lot of the squirrelly academic philosophical claptrap that mired the two previous sequels, shedding them for something that is ultimately less about mind and more about heart. Feeling over fact.

It’s also got action scenes that feel airless and disconnected from their stakes, has an over-abundance of shiny-sheen CGI, and is unusually style-free and sexless — it projects a Silicon Valley version of Sexy, an imagined video game product of it divorced of Actual Sex, creating a PG-13 movie that is mysteriously R-Rated. Some of this is, I expect, on purpose, but it is occasionally jarring for a Matrix film to feel wholesomely generic in its design and style. (Exception to this: Neo-Morpheus, who wears some of the sexiest, baddest-ass shit. And Bugs’ sunglasses. I want those.)

Still, I’m thinking about it even now.

I keep thinking about it.

I keep wanting to talk about it.

Which is not nothing. And that leads me to:

The Value Of Being Interesting

The best thing I can say about this film is that it’s interesting.

This sounds like a low bar, but I assure you, it’s not. When I say that word, I mean interesting in italics — it’s interesting, I say, my eyes squinting a bit as I focus on the middle-distance. It also sounds like it could be a back-handed compliment, or a way to say I actually hated it without upsetting anyone, but that’s also not true, not at all.

What it is, is this: most Big Films these days don’t bring a lot of emotional or intellectual umami — that is to say, to me, they’re missing complexity and depth, lacking a measure of thoughtfulness that is reflected in art that allows itself to be a bit messy, a bit complex. It’s far more fascinating to have a story willing to be contradictory, to have a vision but to challenge that vision, and that’s definitely on the menu here. And that’s wonderful —

Because it isn’t always on the menu.

The 800-lb Hulk in the room here is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has essentially become the cinematic water we’re all swimming in. I delighted in, for instance, Shang-Chi, and don’t brook anybody their love of that movie. It had some of the greatest fight scenes in Marvel movies. It was a blast. (It also, like too many movies, has a floppy third act predestined by its own format.) When I turned it off, I also didn’t really think much about it. It was like a fancy fuckin’ marshmallow. I ate it. I enjoyed it. I’d eat it again. But it was puffy, happy sweetness and not much else.

But Resurrections… you know, there’s some puffy, happy sweetness in there, but it’s also weirder, gnarlier, not as easy to get your hands around. It’s willing to be complicated. I don’t mean to suggest that you’re going to find something here on par with The Lost Daughter or The Power of the Dog in terms of that emotional and narrative chewiness, but I just mean, this isn’t your standard blockbuster franchise film. It’ll give you some marshmallows, but it’s also got some texture there I didn’t expect to find. And part of that texture is watching a franchise, and a filmmaker, grapple with the legacy of that franchise. Part of that texture is in the conversation the art is having.

The Conversation Of Which I Speak

As I said at the fore, the conversation a story has — both before it ever reaches an audience and then, the one it has after — is really interesting to me. I sit down to write and I inevitably feel like that story is the conversation had between all the things I’ve experienced and all the other stories I’ve subsumed. I’m not unique in this. I think this is standard operating procedure, even for writers who refuse to believe it. I think some writers probably try not to have that conversation, and try to escape it, and I believe those writers are creating art that is worse for that rejection.

Films can be a little trickier, TV too, because they’re not the product of a single voice. Again I hesitate to cleave to too much haughty pinky-out nose-in-air pretentiousness, but we don’t have as much authorial (“auteur”) presence in film and TV as maybe I’d like. That’s not always the worst thing, and some of the strength of film and television is that, in the right circumstances, the agitation of smart creative voices working in chorus can make some fantastic storytelling. But there’s also the reality that such chorus is only as strong as its shittiest voice, so someone can fuck up the whole song by screaming a series of off-notes before falling off the stage, drunk.

Franchises end up trapped by this because they’re often shepherded forward not by voices but by companies. This is very basic, droll bullshit, and a softball of a critique, I know, but you get story-by-committee that is crafted out of formula and geared toward brand — that’s not to say you can’t get some truly interesting stories out of that process. You can. We have. We will again. But you also end up with a whole lot of narrative vapor-lock.

Franchises get so big, so insular, that they end up having conversations only with themselves. It’s the ants-in-a-death-spiral circuit. A big franchise chases itself, round-and-round, getting bigger and bigger but never really changing its shape. It’s just a larger circle, a bloating loop.

And in this particular era, where we have franchises that have been around for 20, 30, 40 years, the pattern is becoming well-established. They want to keep a franchise going, but don’t just want to continue it straightaway, but also don’t want to reboot it, so you get something that is half-ass reboot, and half-ass continuation. You get a non-committal story that says, “Well, we need the OLD CHARACTERS to come back for the OLD AUDIENCE, but the KIDS TODAY don’t wanna watch the OLD CHARACTERS hobble their way around, so we need NEW CHARACTERS TOO, but also, that story that worked the first time worked again, so let’s bring back THE DEATH STAR ZUUL MICHAEL MYERS SPIDER-VILLAINS so we can lean on all that old stuff, and we’ll shake up the puzzle pieces a little and then, ta-da, movie made, pattern affirmed, back up the money truck.”

It’s not that this is all bad, or creates only poor art, but it’s getting a little predictable. “Oh hey the kids are going to find the ancient mcguffin and then a new evil rises but it’s actually the same evil we saw before and then at the end the old character, who we’ll call Indiana Venkmanwalker, shows up (maybe CGIed if the actor is dead) and nostalgia swells with the music and ta-da they beat the new-old evil with the power of narrative sentimentality and a cool new weapon.” It’s fine. Sometimes I’m a sucker for it. I’m only human. No harm no foul if you are, too.

But ennnh.

Ennnh.

Enh?

There are a few movies that break this.

Mad Max: Fury Road gives zero fucks if you know anything about Mad Max and isn’t going to bring back the Old Actor or an Old Story and is just going to do what its own protagonists do, which is hard-charge forward through the oil-soaked nuclear sand because fuck you, that’s why. Witness.

Into the Spider-Verse remixed the Spider-Man formula so much and so well that it truly felt like a new thing — it felt more like art that was having that conversation between experience and influence, and because it used characters we’d never really seen before on a screen, it didn’t worry so much about everything else. And all the references were incidental, more curious than critical to understand. (I’ve not seen Far From Home, to be clear, so I have zero idea how this plays there. No spoilers on that, if you please.)

And then you have The Matrix: Resurrections.

It too, is in conversation with itself as a franchise, but you can also feel it in conversation with itself as a story, as a filmmaker, as actors. It wants to both grapple with its own impact and try to leave it behind. It’s self-referential in ways that are both cheeky and profound. Yes, it’s still kind of doing the pattern of TROT OUT THE OLD CHARACTERS, BRING IN THE NEW ONES, THE BAD THING IS BACK BUT WITH A TWIST, GO. But it also seems to know it. And wants to fuck with that — and you — a little bit in the process.

The result is a story that becomes altogether more thoughtful and emotional than I expected. The first movie amped me up. The second and third left me cold — I like parts of them a lot, love some other parts, but they really fell in love with ideas more than story. This new one, though, feels smaller. More intimate, more personal. You could do away with the fight scenes entirely (and should, because again, they mostly don’t work). It has things to say about the internet, and society, and itself.

It doesn’t always work. But when it does, it really does. And I admire something that reaches past the formula, climbing up and over the walls of its own franchise, to try to do something different and more… peculiar. This is that. It’s worth seeing just to experience that. I’ll be thinking about it a lot.

The Spoilery Bits

This is just disjointed stuff I liked or maybe didn’t like about the movie.

It will contain spoilers. Stop reading now if, well, you don’t want those.

I liked the synthesis of machines and people, and think that’s part of the synthesis of the conversation this movie is trying to have.

Niobe? WTF. Okay? I guess? Sure?

Swarm mode, bots, a society willing to believe things based on feeling? Incisive stuff, if a little quickly-handled. Just the same, I dig it.

Neo is mostly a tourist in this movie. Turns out, that’s for Reasons, I suppose, but sometimes it felt like he was mostly shuttled from one place to another. He did not have, at any point, the urgency of a character like, say, John Wick. Again, this is on purpose, but still. I did really, really appreciate a man at odds with his own reality, feeling trapped in it, locked into it, while seeing beyond it and feeling the madness of being so out-of-sync. As a human and an artist. This rang really true, given our current Pandemic Reality, which itself feels like a modal we can’t escape.

I also like that Keanu is a little looser, loopier in this. He’s more… well, Keanu.

Fuck yeah, Trinity. God Carrie Anne Moss is great.

Neil Patrick Harris owns again.

Groff, too, nails it, though he sometimes leaned into a Smith-like cadence, but then by the end of the movie seems to have forgotten it.

I’ve had some people ask me about the queerness or transness of this film, and I am 100% sure I am not the person to be deciding that. I am glad for Lana Wachowski and her vision, is what I can say.

They all wear sunglasses and it’s really obvious and I think that’s the movie literally making fun of itself, which both works and also feels clumsy.

I cannot stress enough how much the action scenes left me bored. Punches didn’t feel like punches, bullets felt like… I dunno, spitballs, it all felt weightness both narratively and in its impact. The fights in the first film are impactful, visceral, and this has really lost that. On the one hand, it showed me you can do a Matrix movie without any of the fight scenes, but also, the first three films are often predicated on having the DNA of Kung Fu movies, and this… did not, so it felt jarring.

JFC that Merovingian scene, one of the more irritating characters from the sequels shows up again? And is also annoying? And his exiles look like they’re from Spielberg’s Hook. Another huge fight scene that felt random and more like an obstacle in the narrative rather than something with necessity and urgency behind it. Obligatory. Almost an uncanny valley version of a fight scene.

Fuck yeah, Neo-Morpheus. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, baby. Those suits! Those suits.

David Mitchell, Lana Wachowski, and Aleksander Hemon created a helluva script.

Anyway.

That’s it.

YMMV.

Merry happy holidays. Buy my books or I die.

Detective John Dark’s daughter has been missing for two years. In his frantic and unfruitful search for her two years ago, John Dark overreached and was reprimanded and demoted.

Now suddenly back into the homicide department, Dark is put on a chilling case – a man who killed his wife in their locked house and then dressed the body up to resemble a deer, but claims to remember none of it. A few days later an impossibly similar case crops up connecting the suspects to a prep school and a thirty year old missing persons’ case.

Just as he is getting back into his old groove, a new lead in his daughter’s disappearance pops up and threatens to derail his career again.

Time is running out and John Dark needs to solve the case before more people are killed, and while there is still hope to find his daughter.

In the style of True Detective and Silence of the Lambs, WHITESANDS is a thrilling supernatural crime novel.

It’s true what they say. Writing is all in the revisions

In its first draft, Whitesands was a different book. The main character, Detective John Dark, wasn’t even in it. In the third draft, the book was set up with intervening chapters of John Dark being interviewed because of a thing that happens late in the book. It broke the timeline and slowed the pace so I took them out in the fourth draft.

The fifth draft, which I wrote SEVEN years after the first one, was written in one week in Exeter in the U.K., when I was invited to be a Writer-in-Residence. The final draft came after a thorough wringing of edits. It is what is out now and only mildly resembles the first draft.

But the first draft got the train on the rails, and the magic happened in the revisions.

I also learned there that, as much as I thought the opposite, I am indeed a pantser and not a plotter.

Don’t be afraid to let your influences show

A lot of writers avoid being too influenced by other books as they write, so they will read only non-fiction while they work or, as I learned Catriona Ward (author of the fantastic Last House on Needless Street) does, will read nothing at all. This is done so not as to be overly influenced.

I, however, positively wallow in my influences. I positively roll around in the prose and the structure of other books as I write. I actively try to use work I admire as a sieve through which I write.

In the case of Whitesands, my copy of The Silence of the Lambs was always within reach. The way Thomas Harris starts his chapters, the way he shows us the villain not through hints but by giving them the stage in long dedicated chapters. The pure depths of dread and bleakness.

I would read Raymond Chandler and try to emulate the feeling of his prose and the style of Mr. Dickens.

Seek critique and love the lessons

This is absolutely the best way to improve your writing. As I worked my way up into being a writer I knew that I had to learn how to write. There are, in my opinion, two ways to do this and you have to do them both at the same time; read books considered classics (or at least very good) and get your writing read and critiqued.

There will be a tendency at first to explain the critiques you are getting to the reader “Oh, yeah, I wrote it that way to keep people guessing.” or “That, they were in the house already. Most people are going to get it, I don’t need to fix it.”

You need to listen and remember that the work is not you. The points reviewers have for you are points readers will trip over as well. Fix them and learn from them, as painful as it may be.

Oh, and read more Dickens.

The details don’t matter if the story is there

There are parts of Whitesands that are pure police procedural. Only, I do not really know anything about the procedures of a police investigation except for what I’ve seen on TV.

However, the police procedural is like in Seven – it’s what we imagine a police investigation is like. I let the story take the front seat and made up any details that seemed to matter. Of all the people who have read Whitesands, only one person has mentioned it.
It helps that this is not a police procedural story at heart, like Seven. There’s a story being told that just happens to have detectives as main characters. Don’t worry if you are writing a space opera and don’t know how the gravity tech actually works. If the story is exciting it won’t matter.

Raymond Chandler himself completely forgot about a dead character in his first book.

Writing a book takes a loooooong time. Be patient.

I wrote the first words of Whitesands waaaaaay back in 2009. I started and realized that I did not, in fact, know how to write, much less how to put together a novel. So I tried writing short stories, took a few lessons and started reading with purpose and discipline. I read Dickens because writers are supposed to, and then I realized why – every single fucking book by Dickens is a masterclass in characterization, prose and structure. I read Joseph Conrad (great prose, dull pacing and structure), Hemingway (prose again), Shirley Jackson (wow) and Chandler, Carver, Shakespeare… I learned to write. I then took another shot at Whitesands and another and edited and re-wrote and pitched to agents (unsuccessfully) and then to publishers (successfully). It took just about ten years from idea to publication. And it was totally worth it.

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Johann Thorsson is an Icelandic writer who enjoys cold drinks, puppies, pizza, a warm meal after a hard day’s work and books. His work has appeared in numerous publications in both Icelandic and English. Whitesands is his first novel

Johann Thorsson: Twitter | Website

Whitesands: Kindle | Paperback | Goodreads

About two months ago, I saw that Julia Rios and Meg Frank were looking to turn over the leadership of Mermaids Monthly to a new team. No experience required, they said!

I have no experience running a publishing business, so naturally I applied immediately. I assure you no one was more shocked than I when Julia and Meg chose me and my incoming co-publisher, Noelle Singh–also brand new to publishing–to take charge.

Meg and Julia generously donated a ton of their time to letting us shadow them as they put together the November and December issues, patiently answering questions, and yes, helping us plan the Kickstarter campaign (happening now! Go check it out!)

These are the things I’ve learned in the process of training to be a publisher while also planning and running a Kickstarter campaign (not dissimilar activities, it turns out!)

1. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for What You Want

Running a publishing business, even on the cheap, is not cheap. But we all thought it was important to A) pay staff as fairly as possible for their work and B) pay fair rates for writers, artists, and creators who contribute to Mermaids Monthly. We pay 10 cents per word for stories and while that doesn’t sound like a lot, it’s amazing how quickly it adds up. (Math! Who knew?!?)

Art licensed for a cover is $150. A piece of interior art is $50. Then let’s say we have three stories we love, for a total of 10,000 words. That kind of felt like the minimum amount of content we’d like to shoot for, and that meant we had to plan on $1200 per issue, times twelve, just for the content. Plus, building in money for sensitivity readers, alt text writers, editorial and production staff… We’d love to pay a stipend to first readers as well (and that’s a stretch goal!)

So do I wake up in a cold sweat at 4am some mornings agonizing over asking for $33,000? Sure I do. But making art is work, and creators deserve to be paid. Remembering that last part helps make it easier to ask people to pitch in day in and day out. In our opinion, it would be worse to ask for a smaller amount that wouldn’t allow us to pay our contributors what they deserve than to not fund at all. 

2. There Will Be High Tides and Low Tides

A Kickstarter is like a force of nature that you feel like you’re just surfing on, not controlling. It ebbs and flows. It’s hard to accept that it’s not something you can actually do a lot about. You just have to learn how to point the ship forward, stay steady, and try not to freak out.

One of the things that really helped us was planning for the low tides. Before we launched, we created a calendar of talking points so that it would be easier to keep posting when tired of the campaign or life in general. It’s hard to keep talking about one thing for 40 days straight, let alone during the holiday season! Some days we see more progress than others… and you know what, you just gotta roll with the tide and keep doing your best.

Or so I tell myself!

3. Folders Folders Folders Shared Folders

This is such a boring lesson in some ways but I cannot stress how extremely critical it is. We use shared folders for both Kickstarter planning and for publishing business.

When you first start planning a Kickstarter campaign, you’re all excited! You have so many ideas! You start collecting them and writing them on the digital equivalent of scraps of paper all over your desk! And ESPECIALLY if you’re co-ordinating with an international team–we have team members on the US East and West coast, in the Philippines, and in Lebanon–pretty soon those digital scraps are scattered every which way and you start forgetting about the awesome ideas that you had because you’re so busy moving on to the next on.

FOLDERS, people. Folders saved us. I know, it’s absurd, really, that it took us a few weeks to get used to it. You see, we use Slack, too, so we’d often brainstorm in real time in the Slack, which is really fun! And great! Because we’d get ideas! But then someone has to, you know, actually copy down those ideas, throw them up in a Google doc, and *make sure that doc is available to collaborators* (a critical point that is often overlooked by people. And by people I mean me.)

I started a folder called Kickstarter Year Two. In it, we threw in everything related to the Kickstarter planning–timelines, blog post ideas, contributor bios, cute graphics we wanted to use–and then we arranged them into some sort of order. Once we knew that everything was in there, it became way easier to say “Hey, who had that copy for the blog post? Oh, there it is–in the folder called Blog Post Copy!”

Easy peasy. Or is it??

More than simply HAVING folders, the team has to understand and agree on the foldering conventions, or else you have three folders labeled “January 2022” and documents languishing in some forgotten place that you thought you shared with the team but actually didn’t!

A lesson I learned is that while Google Drive is really convenient in a lot of ways, it does come with some drawbacks. First, as I mentioned above, it can easily spiral out of control to a thousand shared docs with no organization, making it really hard to find anything unless you remember exactly what you called it. Second, not everyone on the team was super comfortable with using the Google docs interface, and on mobile, it can really be a pain. And third, keeping track of access and permissions can be a little tricky, too.

So folders, yes; but everyone being on the same page about how they’re organized and what’s in them, also very much a resounding yes.

4. People Connect to Mermaids in Myriad Surprising and Moving Ways

I started the publishing journey with Mermaids Monthly because my feelings about mermaids have evolved in the last year, thanks largely to reading the publication. Way back in January of 2020, I thought of mermaids as cool, interesting creatures depicted in many different stories about humans’ deep and complicated connections to oceans and rivers and lakes all around the world.

As I immersed myself in the magazine, I saw so many reflections of how people understood mermaids. L.D. Lewis’s searing story in the January 2021 issue, From Witch to Queen to God, reimagines the sea witch Ursula as a powerful warrior against colonialism and slavery. The fantastic comic Andromeda by Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos and Seth Martel blends sci-fi and mythology together for a cosmic fairy tale in the February 2021 issue. The darkly horrific and yet triumphant story, How to Eat a Mermaid by K. Garcia Ley reminded me of legends (in Japan and elsewhere, and also explored in Vonda McIntyre’s novel, The Sun and the Moon) that eating mermaid flesh grants immortality.

It’s been an exhilarating journey for me, mildly interested in mermaids at the start of 2020, to running a magazine all about mermaids. Now, I see that mermaids are a complex reflection of humanity itself: how we are the other sometimes, how we feel like we don’t belong sometimes, how we, too, plunge into the unknown depths, and how we nevertheless survive.

I can’t wait to see more expressions of what mermaids and mermaid lore mean to other creators!

5. Kindness To Each Other Is Maybe the Most Important Thing

Running a Kickstarter is stressful. It is hard. It feel so weird asking for so much money, and if you’re anything like me, you can easily spiral into a whirlpool of self-doubt and self-recrimination (“What were you thinking, asking for so much?”).

And everyone working on the Kickstarter is a volunteer – we don’t get paid unless the campaign funds, and even then, there is no back pay. We’re all doing it on our own time in between work and school and family commitments and exercise and, you know, eating and sleeping and all those vital functions. Not to mention this is a holiday season with lots going on. So it’s pretty easy for someone to slip up, or forget to do something, or do something less well than it should have been done. I’m raising my hand here as someone who has definitely screwed up in the course of this campaign.

And so, I think, it’s natural to experience frustration with each other (and in general, of course.) With yourself, too. But the antidote to that is easy, actually. It’s to be kind. It’s to remember that we’re all human and trying to do our best, and we’re all united in that we WANT this campaign to succeed and we WANT to be able to publish amazing mermaid stories and poems and art throughout 2022! So, it goes a long way if we can recognize when someone is doing hard work; when we can thank them for their contributions; when we can be cheerful and positive towards each other by remembering that we’re all on the same team.

And the same goes for publishing! We’ve built in stipends for all the staff, but to be honest, the actual work it takes to run a small press is way more, in practice, than what the stipend covers, and we’re learning that. There’s still a lot of labor that we do because we care and we love what we’re working on. I would love to work on changing that, because ultimately this system of volunteers in publishing impacts accessibility and depends on relative privilege–that some of us have the time to, essentially, donate. But until we can upend the system and capitalism, we can recognize in each other that we are donating time as part of a community effort to nurture and build a thing we value.

The Mermaids Monthly Kickstarter campaign is live now, collecting funds for Year Two of the Mermaids Monthly voyage.

Bio: Miyuki Jane Pinckard writes stories about robots and magic. She’s always been afraid of the ocean but remains a big fan of mermaids and sea-creatures. Find her online at www.miyukijane.com and on Twitter and Instagram as @miyukijane.

Your immediate reading homework is this, from the NYT: MILLIONS OF FOLLOWERS? FOR BOOK SALES, IT’S UNRELIABLE. It’s behind a paywall, of course, so be advised of that if you are the kind of person who is halted by them — but I’ll do some summary of the article in question in order to dissect and reassemble its salient bits. The summary is this: it has long been assumed that people with huge social media followings therefore also sell huge numbers of books, and given the apparently low sales numbers of some of the celebrity books in question — which is to say, celebrities with considerable herds of fans following their every online move — it might be safe to consider that assumption to be a grandly bullshit one.

Big social media followings do not become big book sales.

I’ve said it forever, and it appears to remain the case, here.

Now, it is worth noting up front, before we dig too deep a hole, that the article is flawed in that it’s using only BookScan numbers, and BookScan is wildly unreliable in that it only captures print sales from certain sales outlets. It does not track e-books. It does not track audiobooks. It does not track library sales. Again, it tracks print books sold through standard print book sales points like Amazon, B&N, Target, many (but not all) indie stores. Author Katherine Locke noted on Twitter that they found Bookscan caught only 12% of the sales of one of their books — which, uhhh, is a pretty notable deficit. So, the numbers in that article are probably lower than in reality, and further, it’s capturing only one real set of authors: celebrity authors. In this sense the article could just as easily be an indictment against giving celebrities giant fucking book deals, which, y’know, I happen to agree with.

That said, I still think there’s something here to talk about, and that’s the question of what social media brings to the table for authors, their books, and the sales of those books to an audience.

Way back in THE OLDEN DAYS, in the BEFORETIMES, at the outset of this current wave of social media (Twitter, FB, IG, eventually not Tumblr, eventually yes Tik-Tok), it was a common refrain that an author had to have a “platform,” which was something of a corruption of the notion that non-fiction authors had to have a platform. For non-fic authors, that platform meant they had to have a reliable reputation in the subject matter at hand and/or some kind of demonstrable expertise in it. But the dilution of that became simply, “As an author, you should have a social media following at one or several social media sites.” (At this time, blogs were still acceptable. Remember blogs? Yeah, me neither.) It was a little bit advice, a little bit mandate. What that social media following meant or needed to look like was a set of teleporting bullseyes, and though I’m sure some publishers had hard and fast numbers they hoped to see, they did not share them with any authors I know.

The purpose of this social media following was unclear, though it was usually sold as some combination of, hey, be funny, be informative, earn an audience, oh and don’t forget to SHILL YOUR BOOKS, BOOKMONSTER. Drop the links, use the graphics, do the hokey-pokey and shake it all about. You’re an author! Also a brand! Standing on a platform! Asking an audience to love you with money! You’re like the Wendy’s Twitter account — be funny, be individual, be the best version of yourself, get attention, but also get them to eat your goddamn wordburgers.

The question is, did it work then? Does it work now?

I have thoughts.

(I mean, obviously I have them, because here I am, with this blog post. Sorry, did I say “blog post?” I meant, uhhh, really long Twitter thread. Shut up.)

Note that these thoughts are artisanal data, by which I mean, my anecdotal experience and observations. I do not mean any of this as boot-in-the-ass fact. Take it as you will.

Answer Unclear, Ask Again Later

Moving copies of books via social media does and doesn’t work, and that is about as true and as useless an answer as I can give, so lemme try to give it some dimension.

First, yes, both now and before, you can sell books on social media, though the primary and best way to sell those books is to not be the author. Meaning, you can sell books, just not your books. Which is counter to this entire point, where publishers tell authors to promote their own books, but there it is. I’ve mentioned this before but it really bears repeating: when an author does a guest post on this very website (which is definitely not a blog, we hate those now, remember), they get X number of clicks through to their books. That number varies depending on the book and the post, to be clear. Now, let’s say in addition to promoting their own book, they also mention another book they liked or loved — the link to that book will get twice the number of clicks than X. It’ll double. Nearly every time. You get more clickthroughs to books you recommend from other authors than you do your own books.

Why is this? I dunno. I’m assuming because we naturally have a gentle, simmering suspicion for anyone hawking their own wares. We’d rather hear about a book you love than a book you wrote. We want to share and participate in that kind of love. And we tend to side-eye sales pitches. Which is good! We should. If someone has something to sell, we should be just a tiny bit wary of their wares, and as always, consider the source.

Then Versus Now

The other thing to consider is that social media now isn’t the same as social media then. It’s obvious that times change, and so does everything with it, and social media is no different. It is, in fact, an entirely divergent animal from five years ago, ten years ago, and beyond. Like the coronavirus, it just keeps fucking mutating, man, and like with a virus, so much of its mutation is unseen, on the inside, its effects cascading long before we’ve really even figured out there was any change at all.

In the BEFORETIMES, social media was smaller, more nimble, and I think it was easier to establish yourself there. It still didn’t move tons and tons of books, but I do think you could find easier reach. Now, that user base is considerably larger — which sounds good, right? You wanna reach more people, so it’s good that there are more people to reach. Except, do you?

Culturally, social media is a raging brushfire. It’s an apocalyptic stock ticker of news and rage and memes and condemnation and indignation and dunks, so many fucking dunks, dunks upon dunks upon dunks. (This is a harsh take on it, and I recognize there is a lot of vital work done there, too, and a necessary platform for social justice. But it’s also a platform for shit that masquerades as social justice, too, which is tricky. But that’s a whole other conversation.) We view social media — or, at least, publishers view social media — like it’s an audience-in-waiting. But it’s not. Everybody on social media is equal parts performer and product. We’re all on the platform, and the platform is a stage, and we’re dancing for the social media companies. So, it’s hard to get above all that and actually let people know about your books. This is an attention economy, and the way to get attention isn’t… y’know, a link to your book. I wish it was. But it’s not. And it’s not, in part because Twitter doesn’t want it to be. Which leads me to the next point:

Algorithmically, it’s also a brushfire. We know that certain things generate algorithmic attention — meaning, the unseen sentient elves pulling all the levers and yanking on all the ropes are interested in juggling tweets to the top that are attention-seeking, emotion-farming tweets. Will this make you angry? Will it make you laugh? THEN HERE, LOOK AT IT. Rage and memes and dunks and such. The platform rewards the brushfire. The algorithm says, “Fire is bright and colorful, people like bright and colorful and are likelier to look at it, so MORE FIRE FOR THE FIRE-LOVERS,” and then the elves splash around gasoline and lighter fluid while chewing through the electrical cords, cackling.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve mentioned, say, a book that is coming out or already out, and had more than one person on Twitter say, “Wow, I’ve never heard of this before.” Even though I’ve yelled about it. I’ve shrieked. I’ve done my ass-shaking buy-my-book dance. I’ll endlessly promote and then go to a bookstore event (or did, in the Beforetimes), will get done said event, will thank the bookstore on Twitter, and inevitably multiple people respond, “Oh I didn’t know you were in town! I would’ve gone!” (To quote Scott Lynch on Twitter: “Painful Coda: On top of this, social media algorithms are working dark sorcery behind the scenes to throttle the actual reach of anything fucking NORMAL that we try to talk about. You have 185k followers. Does that mean 185k people see your announcement of a new thing? Lol. No.” He’s right. They don’t. I suspect it’s closer to one percent, if I’m being honest. Ten percent at the optimistic level.)

Social media is stacked against you, now more than ever.

Think Of It This Way

You’re in a plane.

You have thousands of your books in boxes.

Below you, on the ground, are your readers. Somewhere. They’re down there. It’s fine!

You want to tell them about your book, so to do so, you throw thousands of copies of your book out of the plane, in the hopes that they get copies. They will not. The books will fall into lakes and rivers, they will smash car windows and oh god you just killed a schnauzer, you fucking monster.

Even if you tell your potential readers, hey, look for my plane, wait for my book drop, it won’t matter very much. You might slightly increase the number of people who find the books. But that’s it.

(Note: please do not do any of this, it’s a metaphor.)

(Though mayyyybe it could work. Anybody have a plane? I got books!)

What I Used To Say

I used to say this:

On social media, you can sell tens or hundreds of copies of your book, but publishers really want thousands to be sold. The true value of social media is connecting with other professionals in your creative space — you gather around the digital watercooler and get to talk to other writers, agents, editors, artists, booksellers, librarians. It makes you a part of a community, and you meet these people not to use as rungs on a ladder but as compatriots and cohorts and, in many cases, as friends who honestly understand what you do and get what you’re going through. Yes, of course, definitely promote your book because that’s what your audience is following you for, they want to know about your books. Just don’t bludgeon them over the head with it, and you’ll be fine. The goal is to talk about your books in an earnest, personal way, not to be manipulative or as a sales pitch but because it’s the best way to talk about your work. And the hope is that you create that essential background noise called “buzz” simply by making people aware, because awareness is the most difficult thing to achieve. Many of our books have died, smothered by the suffocating blanket of obscurity.

What I Say Now

What I say now is that the above is still true-ish, but it deserves an asterisk as big as a kaiju’s cartoon butthole — a monster caveat, an epic yeah, except.

Yeah, except social media is a fucking wood chipper. It is not necessarily a safe or sound place for an author to be. It can become as much a distraction as an asset, and it can give you some very good days, but also, some of your very worst days. Publishers asking writers to join social media — or other writers giving this as advice — are deficit if they are not making it very clear that social media is not always a safe space. It is not a place to casually muck about, or fail in public in any way, or any of that. The ground is unstable. Beneath it are sewer clowns, and they are very, very hungry. Social media rewards you for being noisy, but it eventually punishes you for the same. And god forbid you, like many authors, have some manner of anxiety or depression. Spoiler warning: social media isn’t there to help. Sometimes it will. Individuals will be there to help you, and that’s part of the good side. But there are just as many who want to do the opposite, who not only want to stick the knife in… but who really want to give it a twist. Especially, especially, as your platform — remember, the thing publishers wanted you to have and to grow! — gets bigger and bigger. A big social media following is open water. It is deep and it is dark and you are in over your head.

Publishers should’ve never viewed this as an extension of their marketing and advertising plans. Authors should’ve never been front-line warriors in this crusade. I understand why it was sold this way — it’s a mix of, “Hey, this is just like authors going out to events and talking to people” and “Hey, maybe we don’t have to spend all that marketing and advertising money now that there’s this giant free space where we can just shill books 24/7 with the help of our new unpaid salesfolks, authors.” (Note, this last point is also why there is current resistance to getting authors back out into the world. Some of it is, yes, because COVID is still scary and uncertain, but some of it is publishers seeing and saying, “Hey, we sold books just fine in the Quarantimes of 2020, why should we pay for authors to do in-person events ever again?” It will be necessary for authors and booksellers and other event-having staff to push back on this narrative, because it has been born, now squalling in its crib.)

The problem with publishers seeing this space as that value-add is that there are also considerable value deficits in place — put more colloquially, the juice ain’t always worth the squeeze.

And it can be a real fucking squeeze.

Beyond that, if you can navigate it, it’s not that social media cannot have value. And it’s not that you can’t still try to get blood from that rock. But to my mind it’s a place you go because you want to be there, not because it is a necessary or even useful channel to Sell Your Books. It maybe never was, but now in particular it’s just difficult to sell books in the middle of a brushfire. I’m there. I do it. I don’t know that it reaches many people at all anymore. I don’t know how much longer I’ll keep doing it. It’s not a fun place to be. I don’t enjoy it. It feels more like an obligation, one whose yield is minimal, like I’m plowing a mostly-fallow field.

I still like this space, of course, because I can engage with points and own the space and inject a little nuance. Not that this is a blog, of course. No no no those aren’t a thing anymore.

*stares shiftily at you*

Wait But Should I Get On Tik-Tok Immediately?

That’s the current advice I hear. YOU GOTTA GET ON TIK-TOK. BOOK-TOK IS THERE. YOU GOTTA BE THERE, MAN. YOU GOTTA DANCE AND SHIT. YOU GOTTA DO THAT THING WHERE THERE’S TEXT ON THE SCREEN AND YOU POINT TO IT AND MAYBE LIP-SYNC SOME STUFF AND PEOPLE ARE LIKE, WOW. YEAH. SHAKE YOUR BOOK. LICK IT. I DUNNO YOU GOTTA DO SOMETHING TO GET THOSE LIKES.

(Does Tik-Tok even have likes? Shit, I dunno.)

(I’m so old.)

I am not going there.

First, because I don’t want to.

Second, because nobody else wants me to, either. I mean, if you thought I was cringe before, just wait till I show up there and gallumph about like Jedi Kid, trying to hawk my bookish wares. Jesus. It’s horrifying just imagining it, and I suspect the real thing would be a thousand times worse.

Third, it’s not even the written word. At least Twitter requires me to exercise my writing skills (“skills”) in some capacity. Tik-Tok is just, oof. I’m an, uhh, behind the camera guy.

Finally, like with all social media, Book-Tok is powered more by readers than by writers, isn’t it? Same as it’s been elsewhere — it’s readers talking about and showing what they love, and that is what moves books. Word of mouth continues to be the primary driver for how books are sold.

The chain is this:

Publishers should make as much noise as they can about a book. Booksellers and librarians help carry that torch. And at the end of the day, it goes to readers. Readers who want to share their love of certain books, and whose love is (excuse the abject cheesiness here) the eternal flame that will keep burning for a story and for an author. That’s it. The author doesn’t need to be in that chain at all. And honestly, maybe we shouldn’t be. Except at the end, to sign it and answer your questions.

But, as with all things, YMMV. This is all pure opinion and conjecture. Others will have very different experiences, and that is as expected. You do you, pikachu.

Anyway hey uhhh buy my books or I die!

The Book of Accidents! Dust & Grim! Holidays! Books! Huzzah!

*immediately creates an OnlyFans account*

I’m so sorry. That post title is terrible. Terrible. I should not be allowed to continue, I should flog myself here and now, and yet, onward I go, stubborn and spiteful.

What I’m trying to say is, hey, look, The Book of Accidents is, for today, $2.99 for your gently humming, quietly vibrating, reality-enhancing e-book machine. So, for a penny shy of three bucks, you can get your haunted house that isn’t a haunted house, your scary coal mine, your scary THING in the BOTTOM of the coal mine, your serial killer who disappeared decades ago, your cycles of trauma broken and unbroken, your pain passed down through generations, your art that comes alive, your boy that feels too much, your emotional seawall. It’s a book that is truly twenty years in the making, and it means quite a lot to me, so I hope if you haven’t checked it out, this might nudge you into giving it a go. (And if you have the physical copy, this isn’t a bad price to secure a digital backup.)

Please tell others! Chase them with this good news! And a machete! I mean, don’t do that last part. No chasing, no machetes, please. I beg of you. Forget I said anything at all.

Your buy links:

Kobo

B&N

Apple

Amazon

And if you are kind enough to review the book and vote for it in the final round of the Goodreads Choice Awards, I will love you even more than I do now. Which I didn’t even know was possible!

Have fun at Ramble Rocks! It’s a park! It’s a coal mine! It’s an amusement park! So ramble on down and ride the lightning, won’t you?