The Fates of Social Networks

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column explores the breakdown of social networking sites, which he seems to believe is the inevitable culmination of their life cycles:

Social Quitting

He focuses on Facebook and Twitter. Are they doomed to go the way of their predecessors such as MySpace? They've had a longer run, but he thinks they, too, are in the process of changing from "permanent to ephemeral."

Personally, I don't expect Facebook to fade away anytime soon like previous services that imploded "into ghost towns, then punchlines, then forgotten ruins." I can't speak about Twitter, since I've never joined it and, given the current turmoil surrounding it, I don't plan to, even though lots of authors make productive use of it. Mainly, I can't imagine myself conjuring up cogent, entertaining tweets several times a day, which seems to be the criterion for using Twitter effectively. I had a MySpace account during the height of its popularity. The site struck me as a visually exhausting mess, dominated by flashy ads and hard to comprehend or navigate. Also, if anybody I knew used it, I never managed to connect with them. I joined Facebook because it became the only reliable way to keep track of many of our contemporary and younger relatives. (People who ignore e-mails will often answer Facebook messages.) Later, numerous organizations and businesses I wanted to keep up with established dedicated Facebook pages.

Doctorow analyzes these "network effects," summarized as, "A system has ‘network effects’ if it gets more valuable as more people use it." Facebook's attraction of more and more customers has a snowballing effect; people want to go where other people they know are. When the volume of users reaches critical mass, the "switching cost" becomes prohibitively high for most customers. Leaving the service becomes more trouble than it's worth. As long as the benefits of the service outweigh disadvantages such as becoming the object of targeted advertising, most people who've grown used to the advantages will stick around. But, as Doctorow explains the current situation, social media platforms shift more of their value—the "surplus," in economics terminology—to advertisers rather than users. Later, they tend to get greedy and make things difficult for advertisers, too. Then the "inverse network effects" kick in: The greater number of customers and advertisers that quit the network, the less value exists for those who stay, so even more leave.

Although Doctorow doesn't use the term, his explanation reminds me of the "sunk cost" principle. If we've already poured a lot of time, money, or energy into something, we're reluctant to give up on it. We continue to invest in it because otherwise our previous efforts would seem "wasted."

In my opinion, although based on my own probably limited experiences and interests, Doctorow exaggerates as far as Facebook is concerned. I have no intent of abandoning it in the foreseeable future. Our relatives and real-world friends who use the service haven't begun to disappear. (In fact, one who stopped several years ago has come back.) Local businesses still post updates there. Our church has an active page we rely on. My various writing-related groups continue to thrive. As for the advertising, it doesn't bother me. How hard is it to scroll down to the next post? Besides, some ads alert me to products such as new books that might actually interest me. The occasionally outright spooky knowledge of my habits and interests many websites display (how does the weather page know what I recently searched for on Amazon?) has a definite downside in terms of privacy concerns. However, it also offers advantages by way of customizing and streamlining the user's internet experience. And how can I legitimately complain about Facebook advertising when I use the site to promote my own books?

In short, there must be enough people and organizations among my contacts who are as change-averse as I am, to maintain the site's value for me. And I can't believe I'm alone in that position.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Commercialized Holidays

Recently I saw a Facebook post lamenting the materialistic nature of the Christmas season nowadays. The holidays focus too much on buying and receiving presents. Advertisers swamp us with messages encouraging greed. Oh, for the old-fashioned, gentle, family-centered Christmases of his youth. Well, this person appears to be around my age (mid-70s), and I remember childhood holiday preparations characterized by frenetic seasonal advertising and feverish anticipation of presents. (Of course, we were ad-bombed by less sophisticated technology, and the store displays probably went up slightly later in the year, but it was the same general kind of atmosphere.)

In A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS, first broadcast in 1965, Charlie famously asks what Christmas is all about, as he despairs over the commercialization of the holiday, with even Snoopy embracing the hype.

In 1957, C. S. Lewis published an essay called "What Christmas Means to Me" (a title I'm almost certain wasn't chosen by Lewis himself, but that's beside the point). He says three things "go by the name of Christmas": First, the Christian religious festival. Second, "a popular holiday, an occasion for merry-making and hospitality." The third is "the commercial racket." Read this short essay in full to note how little that cultural aspect has changed, aside from the technology, since Lewis complained of it in the 1950s:

What Christmas Means to Me

A CHRISTMAS STORY (the BB gun movie), based on episodes in Jean Shepherd's fictionalized memoir IN GOD WE TRUST: ALL OTHERS PAY CASH, takes place in 1940; the real-life incidents underlying it probably occurred in the 1930s. The film shows a department-store Santa in an extravagantly decorated setting, with an assembly line of children waiting to declare their wishes.

According to Stephen Nissenbaum's THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS, an analysis of the shift from the REAL old-fashioned Christmas of drinking, carousing, and house-to-house begging (wassailing) to the domestic, child-centered holiday we think of as a "traditional Christmas," concerns about commercialization sprang up concurrently with the cultural shift. Even before the mid-nineteenth century, merchants aggressively advertised their wares as perfect for seasonal gifting, while troubled moralists warned of Christmas becoming "laden with crass materialism" and producing a "generation of greedy, spoiled children."

In short, every era's nostalgic imagination relegates the traditional, unspoiled Christmas of bygone years to their parents' or grandparents' day, or maybe the generation before that. More accurately, that ideal holiday never existed in the first place.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

How the Mouse Moves/ How the Toilet Rolls

I like sex, science, copyright law and order, privacy, and words. Not necessarily in that order.  I read a lot of legal blogs each week, and summarize what interests me as it/they relate to copyright and safe fiction-writing.

Privacy is a problem. 

Quoting Andrew Grove, co-founder, and former CEO of Intel Corporation:

“Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age. At the heart of the internet culture, is a force that wants to find out everything about you. And once it has found out everything about you and two hundred million others, that’s a very valuable asset, and people will be tempted to trade and do commerce with that asset. This wasn’t’ the information that people were thinking of when they called this the information age.”

Credit to https://tmtlaw.co.in/data-privacy-2021-the-year-that-it-was/

Active authors are more exposed because of biographies, the need to network, the necessity of online research. To digress about research, last night, I watched "Irresistible" (HBO is having a free showcase weekend, presumably in honor of St. Patrick. I enjoyed Irresistible very much. One scene that caught my attention was when an arrogant Washington DC power broker chose to demonstrate the thoroughness of political research by telling a farmer's daughter that they knew that she owns three cats and spends a lot of time online looking up a certain STD.

I also finished listening to a John Grisham audiobook, "Camino Winds", which also had a strong thread about lack of privacy.

Legal blogger Theodore F. Claypoole of Womble Bond Dickinson LLP discussed a recent move by the state of Illinois to prohibit the police from using citizens household electronic data without a warrant. 

https://www.womblebonddickinson.com/us/insights/blogs/illinois-prohibits-police-use-household-electronic-data-without-warrant#page=1

I assume that lawmakers don't prospectively prohibit behavior that no one has considered, so seems probable to me that some police forces may be using household data without a warrant.  How far could one go? The interesting site Hackaday reveals that obsessive people can keep track of their own (or of a family member's) toilet paper usage through a smart and connected bog roll holder that counts the spins.

https://hackaday.com/2022/02/03/keep-track-of-toilet-paper-usage-with-this-iot-roll-holder/

Imagine if that data got into the wrong hands!

For the lawfirm Steptoe, legal bloggers Stephanie A. Sheridan, Meegan Brooks, and Surya Kundu discuss privacy in the age of big data, with insights about retailers keeping tracking data on which customers return items (presumably that they purchased online.)

Quoting Steptoe:

"As technological innovations in e-commerce continue to explode, retailers are increasingly utilizing customer data to personalize customer experiences, prevent fraud, improve their services, and make money through third-party sales. New data analytics tools allow retailers to study a vast array of information—ranging from users' order history to their exact mouse movements—to better understand their customer base."

https://www.steptoe.com/en/news-publications/privacy-in-the-age-of-big-data-key-developments-in-retail-and-e-commerce.html

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=ac20ed1a-8b0e-45a3-b765-f7a50b7f72a6

One would assume that fraud-prevention is reasonable, but from personalized customer data, one could also infer whether or not a customer has a shopping addiction, and a company could discourage online shoppers from making legitimate returns.  The Steptoe lawyers discuss all aspects at length, and make a very valid point about right of publicity laws (which are a form of copyright laws).

Quoting Steptoe again:

"Right of publicity laws, which exist in similar forms in many states (both in statutory and common law form), prohibit the unauthorized use of a person’s identifying information for commercial gain. These statutes have traditionally been invoked by celebrities and other public figures whose names have been appropriated to falsely suggest that they endorse a product or brand. In these recent lawsuits, however, plaintiffs are alleging that retailers, publishers, and credit card companies violate their “right of publicity” merely by including their names or other identifying information on mailing lists that were privately sold or rented to third parties."

One of the assumptions about making an online purchase is that it is private, but what if it turns out to be less "private" than going into a bricks and mortar shop?

Legal bloggers Tim Gole,  Jen Bradley,  Clare Arthur, and Rishabh Khanna for the Australian law firm Gilbert Tobin take an entertaining and informative look at behavioural advertising and targeting.

https://www.gtlaw.com.au/knowledge/algorithmic-profiling-online-behavioural-advertising

Quoting a fractional example of their writing:

"You’re browsing online, looking for those new running shoes that are going to make you fitter in 2022. You close the browser and open a social media webpage and soon notice ads for those very joggers and similar products. Congratulations, you’re a subject of algorithmic profiling and online behavioural advertising.

You’ve probably already had similar experiences many times over. You’re likely aware that your online behaviour is tracked, and that there is a lucrative market in the advertising space for the purchase and sale of internet users’ profiles that are based on users’ online behaviour. What you may not understand is how your information is collected and behaviour is tracked, and the algorithmic profiling that occurs to serve you with this advertising."

Having ranted about this very phenomenon, I really liked their observations!

For the last word in global privacy, there is a study by TMT Law. 

Global  Privacy 2021

All the best,
Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/ 

 

 

 

Sex Toys In The Subway And Other Lowdown Delights

Immediate tease disclaimer: I blog about copyright-related issues. This is that.

Sex Toys for boys but not for girls?

How fair is that, in an advertising context, in the underground? Well, there was a law suit by Dame.com against the MTA. Apparently, the MTA's rules have or had no issue with advertisements targeting erectile dysfunctional males, but they drew the line at displaying inserts for ladies.

Among other things, Dame claimed:

“The MTA was disproportionately applying their anti sexually-oriented business clause to women’s pleasure advertisements, which is unconstitutional. They allowed erectile dysfunction advertisements to run while denying us…”

Legal blogger Jeff Greenbaum for the law firm Frankfurt Kurnit Klein and Selz PC  offers legal analysis. It looks like the court may still be out (to coin a phrase) on whether MTA patrons will be treated to mind boggling illustrations of fun stuff for ladies anytime soon.  There appear to be illustrations on the fkks post.

Lexology link:  

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=ab7aa941-372e-48cb-8c8e-538b29d576a8

Original link: 

https://advertisinglaw.fkks.com/post/102hbky/selling-sexual-pleasure-on-the-subway

 

The Illogic of tracking-based advertising.

Upon reading Seth Zawila's legal blog for the UK-based law firm Robins Kaplan LLP about how the UK's supreme court blocks a multi-billion class action suit, this writer's mind wandered to a personal peeve.

Lexology link: 

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=c7fe7d8e-992e-4a63-a9d4-48e534c982c2

 

Original Link:  

https://www.robinskaplan.com/resources/blog-posts/2021/11/united-kingdom-supreme-court-blocks-multi-billion-dollar-class-action-suit-against-google

"The claimants alleged that Google misused the data of millions of iPhone users under the DPA by tracking user internet usage even when users were assured in notices that they would be opted out of such tracking by default."

Apparently, to pass the smell test of the supreme court in the UK (and no doubt in other supereme courts) one has to show actual, provable financial harm, not merely annoyance or exposure to the risks of identity theft.

It seems to me, the wrong people were suing.

How often have you purchased a product online (happily, voluntarily, without clicking on anyone’s ad), only to be bombarded later with adverts for the exact same product?  Where is the return on investment for whoever makes Origins Bar Pulls in paying AdNonsense to show ads to a client who has no further interest in buying more of what they already bought? 

Once one has made a purchase, paid reminders are a waste of the producer’s budget. They can lawfully and appropriately email the customer directly.

Why not further personalize the obvious result of purchaser-stalking by posting “Thank you, Rowena Cherry, for buying 30 of these exact bar pulls. We hope you don’t return them! (As you did the Glide-Rites).”

It would have made more sense if Celeste had stalked me with ads in the footer of an online newsletter.

I wonder whether authors who pay Facebook and their like for pay per view targeted ads are wasting their marketing budget in similar fashion? Perhaps one should pay for click-throughs, and not for "impressions". 

Bar pulls, by the way are not sex toys. In no way do they resemble a Prince Albert piercing.... but one simply had to get that (link) in.  One will do it again. 

https://metro.co.uk/2018/04/27/prince-albert-piercing-7502229/

Does mentioning a couple of products make this writer an influencer?  Highly doubtful! For a start, one is not being paid, and one receives no perquisites.

Bad??? Influencers:

https://www.squirepattonboggs.com/-/media/files/insights/publications/2021/11/brands-influencer-marketing-practices-in-regulators-crosshairs-on-both-sides-of-the-atlantic/brandsinfluencermarketingpracticesbrocure.pdf

An international ensemble cast at Squire Patton Boggs has developed an 8-page .pdf about the influence of influencers, and on what regulators are cracking down. Or should that be "down on what regulators are cracking"?  That sounds too Yoda to be natural.

The lawyerly writers on influence peddling of the marketing kind are Marisol C. Clark, Daniel Carlton, Alan L. Fricl, Rosa Barcelo, Kyle R. Dull, Natasha Marie (none of whom to my knowledge have anything to do with anything seamy-/sex toy-/or subway-related other than a familiarity with what is in the regulators crosshairs). For businesses they dryly and most professionally recommend a comprehensive review of online advertising practices.  (One agrees.)

Problems with regulators mostly result from misleading advertisements or claims, or from misleading by omission.

Writing as a questionable logomanic, this writer would say that almost ALL advertisements by their very nature meet the definition quoted by Squire Patton Boggs lawyers of causing the average consumer to take a transactional decision that they would not otherwise have taken.

Weaselly words and claims abound on television.  So, too, does execrable grammar. More of that another time.  A great deal of good would be done for literacy and education if advertisements were required to be copy-edited by a grammarian. Moreover, for the sake of critical thinking, rather than the government suing advertisers, there ought to be community service spots parsing some of the adverts. It would be far more amusing.

For instance, ranting a tad here, if a new Medicare Part C program offered crowns, caps, implants, bridges, deep root scaling and/or planing, they would surely say so.

Thus when a very attractive nonogenarian male croons at you about fillings, extractions and dentures, and so much more, you should realize that you are getting Amish level dental coverage free with your seductive-sounding plan.

On the other hand, some of these FRRRREEEEE  programs being advertised with benefits varying by zip code appear to be very thinly veiled income redistribution program. Color me critical.

Critical thinking is a valuable defense against the dark arts of advertising.

By the way, SFWA and AG are probably still offering LIG Insurance consultations to SFWA members.

https://www.ligmembers.com/sfwa/

Parting word:

Delightful word of the day: logorrhea

If you know someone who likes both words and poop jokes, pass it on.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry SPACE SNARK™ 

http://www.spacesnark.com/ 

Xmas Musings

I've just read a recent book about Dorothy Sayers, SUBVERSIVE, by Crystal Downing. One theme to which the author frequently alludes is the concept of living by an exchange model, an expectation of behaving certain ways to get equivalent value in return. For instance, Downing emphasizes that Sayers cautioned against the mind-set that doing good deeds guarantees one will "go to Heaven" or even enjoy prosperity in life. At the current season, this idea reminded me of Christmas gifts, naturally. We often speak of "exchanging presents" or having a gift exchange at an office party. Ideally, we'd give presents that reflect our awareness of what the recipient really wants, without any consideration of what we might receive from that person. In practice, our gift-giving is often constrained not only by what we can afford but by the anticipated size and monetary value of the present we expect the recipient to give us. If we spend a lot more in giving than the other person spends on us, we might feel miffed at the discrepancy or embarrassed at having put the other person in an awkward spot. Conversely, not spending enough on a gift may distress us because we fear the recipient will think we're stingy, or we might even feel guilty about not giving what we "should."

This subject reminds me of two short essays C. S. Lewis wrote about Christmas as celebrated in Britain in his time. You can read them here:

What Christmas Means to Me

Xmas and Christmas

In "What Christmas Means to Me" (a sappy title I seriously doubt Lewis chose himself), he distinguishes three things called "Christmas": The first is the religious festival. The second, a secular holiday devoted to merrymaking, "has complex historical connections with the first" and, in mid-twentieth-century England as in our contemporary culture, is joyfully celebrated by millions of people who don't practice Christianity in any other way. The third phenomenon, which Lewis says "is unfortunately everyone's business," he calls "the commercial racket." Note that this article was first published in 1957! Here's where the topic of gift exchange comes in. He laments the modern pressure to give presents or at least send cards to everybody we know, a custom he maintains "has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers." Not only is this obligation exhausting and a hindrance to the "ordinary and necessary shopping" we still can't avoid, "Most of it is involuntary." While I think "most" is an exaggeration, Lewis amusingly summarizes the hapless shopper's plight thus: "The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own."

"Xmas and Christmas," a witty piece of satire, bears the subtitle "A Lost Chapter from Herodotus." It purports to be the classical historian's report of strange winter customs in the fogbound island nation of Niatirb. The writer describes the sending of "Exmas-cards" bearing pictures that seem to have no discernible connection to the festival supposedly being celebrated, such as birds on prickly tree branches. There's a funny description of the citizens' reactions to receiving cards or gifts from anyone they haven't already gifted: "They beat their breasts and wail and utter curses against the sender; and, having sufficiently lamented their misfortune, they put on their boots again and go out into the fog and rain. . . ." Herodotus concludes that Exmas and "Crissmas" can't possibly be the same holiday, because surely millions of people wouldn't undergo those ordeals in honor of a God they don't believe in.

This essay's description of the illustrations on "Exmas-cards," including "men in such garments as the Niatirbians believe that their ancestors wore two hundred years ago riding in coaches such as their ancestors used, or houses with snow on their roofs," highlights the way our images of a "traditional Christmas" often owe more to art, literature, and the media than to firsthand experience. Those idyllic snow scenes, for instance, and the songs about sleigh rides. If anyone in the modern U.S. goes on a sleigh ride around the holidays, it's most likely a staged event, not a spontaneous family outing. As for songs such as "Winter Wonderland," "Let It Snow," and "White Christmas" (rescued from banality only by its seldom-sung prologue, which frames the singer as a Los Angeles resident nostalgic for the northeast winters of his childhood), a considerable percentage of the American population sees white Christmases only in the movies. In the popular imagination, though, December is supposed to conform to the standard described by TV Tropes in this entry:

Dreaming of a White Christmas

As the page explains, "Unless a work of fiction takes place in a tropical or arid setting, or in the Southern Hemisphere, it will always snow in winter. . . . The snow will be there to look 'pretty'. It does not melt or turn slushy, nor is it ever coated with dirt or litter. It is never accompanied by freezing winds or icy rains." While our family lived in San Diego at some points during my husband's Navy career, we could tell when it was winter (aside from chilly nights and increased rain) because the distant hills turned green rather than brown. Growing up in Norfolk, Virginia, I seldom experienced snow in December as a child. We got it mainly in January. My late stepmother, a native of the coastal region of North Carolina, loved snow and always hoped for a white Christmas. Considering her birthplace, I doubt she ever saw snow at Christmas during her entire early life. Yet the ideal derived from fiction, movies, and songs shaped her vision of how the winter holidays were "supposed" to look.

Merry Christmas, white or green, to all who celebrate it!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

What's In A ... Face?

Much ado about...  faces is my takeaway from this week's legal (and copyleft activist) blogs. Not that "faces" equate to nothing. Far from it. And there's a lot of  facial violation going on.

Facebook is doing it. Amazon is doing it. Bad actors in the advertising world are doing it. EFF would like you to worry, and they may be correct (but never right!).

Electronic Freedom Foundation policy analyst Matthew Guariglia highlights how bad Amazon's Ring is, especially for passers-by whose faces are caught up by a Ring-using household's surveillance device and shared for all time with the police without their knowledge or consent and without a warrant or probable --or improbable-- cause.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/five-senators-join-fight-learn-just-how-bad-ring-really

Nathan Sheard, also writing for the EFF,  has a follow up, calling for an About Face protest.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/about-face-ending-government-use-face-surveillance

Legal blogger Sean C. Griffin, writing for Dykema-Gossett PLLC, discusses a class action lawsuit against Facebook's facial recognition technology, which matches up faces in their database with unidentified faces in uploaded photographs, and suggests "tags" to link the photograph to the person allegedly identified by Facebook as being in the photograph.
https://www.thefirewall-blog.com/2019/11/facebook-seeks-post-spokeo-review-of-biometric-privacy-class-action/

The question is, does a person need a concrete injury in order to sue Facebook?

Perhaps eventually, Facebook will misidentify someone in the background of an uploaded photo of what turns out to be a crime scene, and then the proverbial cat will be among the pigeons.

Meanwhile, the British grocery chain Tesco got itself into hot water when it relied on a Getty image license for a photograph of a celebrity.

Hallam Whitehead, writing for Virtuoso Legal, discusses the issues at stake when commercial use (as in advertising) is made of a celebrity's face without her knowledge or permission.
https://www.virtuosolegal.com/ip-insight-things-get-scary-for-tesco/

Authors who want a celebrity on their cover art need to obtain a model release from the model in addition to a copyright license from the photographer.

There have been advertising campaigns that have tried to "get around" the problem of a perfect but reluctant celebrity by using lookalikes.

Legal blogger Barry M. Benjamin, for Kilpatrick Townsend and Stockton LLP lays out  the issue of "false endorsements" and what can be done about it.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/documents.lexology.com/5294934f-5f6c-4a50-a40b-91407fd14f72.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAVYILUYJ754JTDY6T&Expires=1574613881&Signature=%2Bd891%2FmV5%2BEPeiBPRmHBDB86P0I%3D

or
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=c29600ca-8ef8-4ff6-a678-5a5ccb95b6f0

Also, author Po Yi, blogging for Manatt Phelps and Phillips LLP describes what Sandra Bullock and Ellen DeGeneres are doing to fight the pernicious problem of  "Celebrity Endorsement Theft".

https://www.manatt.com/Insights/Newsletters/Advertising-Law/Bullock-DeGeneres-Fight-Celebrity-Endorsement

This may not seem like it would affect us, but if we were to come across a photograph of a major influencer reading a paper copy of one of our books, a temptation would arise, wouldn't it?  Get permission!

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/  http://www.rowenacherry.com

PS. For our European readers, please check your caches. The authors of this blog do not intentionally track you, but Amazon, Facebook, Google and many others do so.

Flattery Will Get You.... In Trouble

They say that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery... until they call it plagiarism or copyright infringement.

And then, there are famous hairy features, attractive hairy features, mind you. If you pay homage to such things for fame and profit, you might violate a famous person's valuable rights to publicity.

Legal bloggers Linda A. Goldstein and Amy Ralph Mudge blogging for the law firm Baker & Hostetler LLP discuss  the lost case of iconic eyebrows and a product named without permission.

http://e.bakerlaw.com/rv/ff004c2750a3e46347a15e287b44be8e8af5c0ad/p=6238948

Celebrities forfeit a lot of personal privacy by virtue of being celebrities, but they retain the right to profit from their own personas--or to prevent others from exploiting their names and likenesses for commercial gain.

https://f.datasrvr.com/fr1/419/60144/ROP.pdf

This pdf from Alan L. Friel of BakerHostetler is interesting reading.

This writer's takeaway for authors is, never, never reveal that your hero's bedroom eyes were inspired by a famous living actress, or that your heroine is based on a reality star.

Also, if you want a famous person on your cover, be sure you have all rights.  Cover heroes can be tricky absent a signed, written agreement.

And then, there is the problem of asking for flattery, aka incentivizing reviews. Just because a lot of your competition does it, does not make it legal and safe.  The "best" reviews are freely given, not solicited and not paid-for.

Legal bloggers  Leonard L. Gordon  and Tyler Hale blogging All About Advertising Law for Venable LLP  explain.

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=6d4aa6de-5bf6-40e4-a101-150b24179f35&utm_source=lexology+daily+newsfeed&utm_medium=html+email+-+body+-+general+section&utm_campaign=lexology+subscriber+daily+feed&utm_content=lexology+daily+newsfeed+2019-04-11&utm_term=

Or
https://www.allaboutadvertisinglaw.com/2019/04/ftcs-snack-service-settlement-reminds-dtc-companies-not-to-incentivize-reviews.html#page=1

Although authors may not think that the FTC case about free food in exchange for a screenshot of a flattering review applies to them, it well might.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/ 

Real People And Temptation

Increasingly, authors are responsible in every sense for advertising and promoting their own works. Also, most people carry a camera with them 24/7.  It is not implausible that some time, an author might come across a photogenic person in a public place reading that author's book.

What a temptation!

The copyright of a photograph belongs to the photographer, doesn't it?  Should one snap first, and ask permission later?

If you ask, and your reader says "Yes", must you get it in writing? Yes! But what if your reader says "No"? Alas, then you cannot use the shot. Readers have rights. Persons in the background also have rights. As discussed in a previous blog, graffiti artists whose "public art" might be on a building or subway wall in the background might also merit your consideration.

Legal blogger Terri Seligman writing for the law firm Frankfurt Kurnit Klein and Selz PC discusses copyright and subway advertisements.

Law School Exam Part 3: Real People Real Stuff  (which is about adverts in subways that might or might not amount to a testimonial, and how to treat naming the person in the advert, depending on whether they are an actor playing a part or a real person.)

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=787417a9-87ee-4294-ae09-e3b5a34e3ed6&utm_source=lexology+daily+newsfeed&utm_medium=html+email+-+body+-+general+section&utm_campaign=lexology+subscriber+daily+feed&utm_content=lexology+daily+newsfeed+2018-10-26&utm_term=

What about if a fan takes such a photograph, and shares it with the author via email, private message, or on a social media site?

Even if my fan, copyright owner of the photograph she took at an airport or on a subway of a one-time World's Sexiest Man reading a paperback copy of one of my books gave me permission to use it on my website, could I do so?

Authors can extrapolate from the legal advice from David Oxenford writing for Wilkinson Barker Knauer LLP and the Broadcast Law Blog concerning things for authors to consider when podcasting in order to market books.

https://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2018/09/articles/more-podcast-legal-issues-remembering-sponsorship-identification/#page=1

The trouble with publishing a photograph with real people in the background is that it might or might not invade a real person's privacy. Think Love Actually and the airport scenes. Those background people would all have been paid extras with contracts and releases. Consider whether any two people might strongly object to being photographed together, even if their appearance in your publicity shot is incidental.

Finally, and nothing much to do with the topic, authors who own websites do not necessarily have to worry about complying with the ADA's web accessibility guidelines.

If this issue is a concern to you, and for more information, read the ADA Title III News and Insights Blog of Seyfath Shaw LLP written by Minh N. Vu.

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=ea4fa4de-f75b-4e9a-95f4-0d8c9f7b79f9

All the best,
Rowena Cherry

Leaking Clouds, Dark Days, Do Not Track... My Underwear

When marketing a novel, the received wisdom is -or used to be- that a reader must see the cover/title/author name at least seven times (presumably in a positive context) before that reader is inclined to purchase the book. Does it still work that way? Maybe. The ad-funded internet giants would like authors and publishers to believe that paid advertising works.

When marketing a song, the vinyl model was that it was worth giving radio stations one's blessing to play the song, because the more a song was heard, the more likely it was that a listener would like it, and the more a listener liked it, the more likely they were to buy the vinyl.

The internet is funded by advertising. Perhaps the biggest question is, who pays? (Quis solvit.)

For Crowell & Moring LLP,  legal blogger  Christopher A. Cole asks "Is the Cambridge Analytic Scandal a Watershed moment for the Ad-Funded Internet?

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=f81ed65e-14d4-4c3b-8a8e-509726507d88&utm_source=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed&utm_medium=HTML+email&utm_campaign=Lexology+subscriber+daily+feed&utm_content=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed+2018-03-30&utm_term=

The legal blog article mentions the use of blackmail and dirty tricks to influence elections, and also the use of information scraped from Facebook "friends" for the purpose of psychological manipulation.

There's a lot of passive blackmail and extortion on the internet, anyway, and deleting social media accounts is not a viable solution. Public figures and would-be public figures are obliged to join social media sites to protect their own names and identities. We writers probably all know of someone who had to become "thereal...." because his or her real name or pen name had already been taken by someone else.

That does not mean that one has to give these sites one's true birthdate (as long as one can remember the lie), or be bullied into giving answers to their questions. Remember, the more you reveal online about cousins' names and memorable streets where you have lived, and school names, and youthful crushes, the less choice you have when filling out those banking secret questions/answers that have to be changed every few years.

Moreover, ages are not private. In "A Dark Day For Hollywood..." legal blogger Tony Oncidi for the law firm Proskauer Rose LLP reveals the gob-smacking truth that a Californian law prohibiting online commercial sites' publishing of Hollywood actors' ages is unconstitutional.
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=7aad561a-cbc6-4723-825b-4fddc6cef270

Apparently, it's a free speech issue. If a commercial site wants to sell true information about how old you are, even if you object, they may do so.

For the law firm of Morrison & Foerster LLP, legal bloggers John F. Delaney and Aaron P. Rubin reveal that over the first half of 2017, Facebook received almost 33,000 requests from law enforcement for user "data" and 57% of those "requests" forbade Facebook to notify the users that their information had been requested by the authorities.
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=03dbdcc2-2c7b-4616-ba91-49e6482462a6

Coming back to Christopher A. Cole, he suggests that advertisers who buy into "data analytics" to target their pitches will need to pay attention to the sources of the "data".

"Data", by the way, comes from the Latin "dare" (to give), and its singular "datum" used to mean "that which is given".  How ironic! (I shall now go back and edit to add a plethora of "give" words.)

I cannot help wondering if everyone is missing the woods for the trees. By what metric do the purchasers of advertising know if their advertising budget is well spent? Clicks, perhaps?

If advertising is the problem, it is helpful to know how pay per click (PPC) works.
https://farotech.com/blog/how-does-ppc-work-a-beginners-guide-to-pay-per-click/

Christopher Carr of Farotech tells us that 64.6% of people click on Google ads when they are looking to buy an item online.

Why buy online? Oh, yes, it is convenient. Instead of a check out clerk knowing that you buy (insert most embarrassing product) ... you'd rather risk all the internet and the Dark Web too knowing your buying habits, and embarrassing afflictions, and monetizing the knowledge.

But, if you want to buy online, why not do the research, clear your cookies and cache, and go directly to the website without clicking a Google ad link?

Perhaps the problem is not the ability to buy online, or the convenience of clicking through. It's the aggregators' interest in TARGETING the advertisements. Even that probably does not serve the purchaser of the advertising or the recipient of the advertising. If I bought a houseful of perfectly fragrant and safe, 30-year guaranteed hardwood flooring three weeks ago, how likely is it that I want to replace my new flooring with more of the same this week?

As a Romance writer, what am I supposed to think about the advertising executives at a brassiere-selling business if they seem to expect me to rip my bodices and need replacement underwear every single day?

Which brings me to Under Armour. They've been hacked. According to Lifelock, (2 days after Wired,  Fox and NBC broke the story) approximately 150 million social exercisers using the MyFitness Pal app need to change their passwords immediately.

Another tip:
Don't let your computer or your ISP or the "cloud" store your passwords for you.
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/252437297/Firefox-bug-exposes-passwords-to-brute-force-for-nine-years
By Peter Loshin

IMHO, permissionless "targeting" is akin to stalking. The most elegant legislative solution would be to give legal standing and force to a Do Not Track request. Right now, too many sites ignore a "Do Not Track" setting and install tracking cookies regardless.

All the best,
Rowena Cherry

Grabbing Attention

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS essay expounds upon the "arms race" for our attention in the media. He compares the "race" between the purveyors of memes and the consumers of them to the evolution of our immune response in reaction to the mutations of pathogens.

Arms Race for Your Attention

A fresh meme—for instance, the exciting new game everybody's playing—hits the "attentional soft spot" by deploying "cognitive traps" that lure the target into an "escape-proof limbic dopamine loop." Most people do eventually escape, though, as they build up resistance to the allure. So the forces clamoring for our attention have to escalate their intensity and develop new tricks.

By comparing old-style advertisements to those we see today, Doctorow illustrates how much harder we are to captivate than earlier generations of audiences. I'm reminded of how tame the TV commercials of my childhood in the 1950s and early 60s were, in contrast to those on the networks nowadays. Viewing some of those old commercials on DVDs of vintage TV programs vividly highlights the difference. Although I wouldn't go back to the 50s unless a time-twisting genie offered to compensate me with wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, in some ways that really was a more innocent era. Of course, nowadays we can fast-forward through commercials, so the ads have to become really flashy and cool-looking to snag our attention and keep us from skimming past them. As for Facebook ads, the scam e-mails that flood our in-boxes, and phone solicitations (which appear positively quaint compared to the Internet messages), does anybody actually respond to any of those appeals? Strange as it seems to me, SOMEBODY must, or the would-be sellers wouldn't keep producing them.

Doctorow also remarks that the battle for our attention is waged for more serious purposes than selling stuff and hooking people on games. It has political applications, too. So it's important to keep our "immune systems" healthy.

As for us authors, how can we best attract the attention of potential readers—in polite ways that don't backfire by turning them off? I've never paid for an Internet ad (although I've accepted the offer of free ads on a review website, where at least people visit voluntarily and are interested in finding new books). Since I ignore those kinds of things myself, why would I expect potential buyers of my books to respond to them? I don't want to become one of the scammers (which is the only issue discouraging me from trying that "boost post" strategy Facebook keeps nagging me about). On the other hand, if I don't promote myself in some way, nobody will know my books exist. When e-books were a novelty, being an e-published novelist was enough to attract attention. When my former publisher Ellora's Cave, the pioneer of erotic romance for a female audience, was practically the only game in town for the erotic paranormal romance subgenre, being one of their authors distinguished a writer from the throng, at least in a modest way. Now it's become a prime example of Doctorow's thesis that potential audiences invariably develop resistance to each new "attentional soft spot."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Author Beware.... and Emoji have Rights, Too

In the desperate scramble to promote ones own works, it is all too easy to trample other people's rights unawares. Beware of the rabbit holes and quicksands that pockmark the online copyright landscape.

One might assume that, if Google or Facebook sells one a "keyword" for advertising purposes, they must have all the necessary legal rights and licenses to sell those names and words? Not necessarily!

In "Facebook's Misappropriation Problem: Selling Artist Names As Advertising Keywords", Chris Castle writes about the possible violation of celebrities' rights, in the selling of famous persons' names as advertising "keywords".
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-castle/facebooks-misappropriatio_b_14022706.html

Chris Castle focuses on Facebook. When someone considers litigation, one usually goes after the entity with the deepest pockets. The trouble with defendants with deep pockets (such as Google, Facebook, Amazon) is that they could probably make the process so expensive that the plaintiff's resources are exhausted.

In "Using The Name Or Likeness Of Another", the Digital Media law Project offers excellent guidance on using --or NOT using-- another person's name (or likeness) for commercial purposes (or advertising).
http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/using-name-or-likeness-another

This should be required reading for any debut author who is considering buying Facebook advertising "keywords" to suggest that fans of this or that (named) established famous author might like to buy the debut author's book.

A newbie might be safe from a lawsuit if he suggests that he writes like Shakespeare on steroids. Possibly the worst that could happen would be reviews to the effect that this newbie "is no Shakespeare". However, it might be considered rude to use the name of an author who recently declined the opportunity to write a cover quote for the newbie.

And  Jack Greiner of Graydon.Law chimes in with commentary "Could Key Words Mean Trouble For Facebook?"
https://graydon.law/key-words-mean-trouble-facebook/

The trouble is less one of trademark infringement, but more of "right of publicity"... the right to NOT have one's name used to sell other people's stuff without one's consent and without payment.

Perhaps, it would be wise and polite to obtain written permission from the owner of the name one wishes to use to promote one's book, or to reach their audience when a member of their audience searches for something related to the established author's books, and your stuff pops up.

It's not just the names and likenesses of real people that you disrespect at your peril. You have to watch what you are doing with other peoole's emoji, too. Even ones that are "free".
http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=06fecd27-418d-4629-b14c-1b0c376947ba&utm_source=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed&utm_medium=HTML+email+-+Body+-+General+section&utm_campaign=Lexology+subscriber+daily+feed&utm_content=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed+2017-05-04&utm_term=

As Kimberly Culp and Juan Aragon explain (for Venable LLP), explain in "Copyright Considerations for using Emoji in Commercial Ads:

EmojiOne, for example, provides a free license for commercial use with attribution. EmojiOne requires that commercial users provide a link to their website: such as, “Icons provided free by EmojiOne.” For websites, the link must be somewhere on the website, but does not require a link on the specific page. For printed ads, the attribution information must be in small text at the bottom of the ad. If attribution is an issue for an advertiser, EmojiOne offers custom licenses, which requires contacting the company directly.

This author has no idea whether or not Facebook sells emoji as "keywords", or whether any author would wish to use emoji in a book advertisement.

For newcomers to copyright concerns, the law firm of Kegler Brown Hill and Ritter, Jasmine J. Hurley blogs about the 5 basics of copyright
http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=793c140a-7fba-445b-86c1-08bfebce2fbf&utm_source=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed&utm_medium=HTML+email+-+Body+-+General+section&utm_campaign=Lexology+subscriber+daily+feed&utm_content=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed+2017-05-11&utm_term=

BTW, Happy Mothers' Day!

All the best,
Rowena Cherry

Depiction Part 1 - Depicting Power In Relationships

Depiction Part 1
Depicting Power In Relationships
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Depiction essentially means to symbolize, to draw a picture, a sketch that will evoke the essential attributes you think are singular or recognizable about the subject.

Depiction is a subset of Show Don't Tell. 

Depiction is based on an agreement between depictor and recipient. 

It's the brain trick that lets us look at a scrambled page full of LINES and "see" a map, and understand it as a depiction of a territory (real or imagined).

Writers depict both concrete and abstract elements in mere words.  Readers agree to accept the emphasis the writer's selection of certain attributes and omission of other attributes to "depict" a character, situation, philosophy, threat, conflict, or the stakes in a transaction.

If the writer writes, "It was a dark and stormy night ..." the reader may KNOW there were some street lamps or car headlights (or carriage lanterns) but at the same time understand that the main character's emotional "place" is inside the primal threat-zone that dark and stormy nights were for cavemen. 

The character is aware of the light, but seeing only the dark. 

Emotional tone is created by a mental filter that can be set to see only the rosy-sunshine or only the slimy-dark-shadowed crannies full of dirty snow.

Thus in a few words, a writer can DEPICT an emotional state by sketching a few concrete and familiar things, all in words.

Most beginning writers get this trick right away, and have a lot of fun with it.

The next, and somewhat harder trick to learn with Depiction is to depict the Relationships between characters in show don't tell.

A) Relationships are two-sided at least.
B) Relationships are intangible
C) Relationships shift and change (ARC just like Characters do, and in step with the characters changes).
D) Relationships are mostly subconscious -- the characters themselves are not aware of the dynamic parameters driving a Relationship.

How do you "depict" the dynamic changes driving a Romance? 

What does he see in her or what does she see in him?  Is what is seen actually there, or not?  Does what is seen change or Arc as the character Arcs?

Here is a previous post on What Does She See In Him:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html

Now we all know sex is about Power.  But Love is another topic altogether, and more about what you do with Power.

The Power dynamic underlies all Primate Relationships.  I'm assuming you all know that and have read a whole lot of primate studies, anthropology, The Rise And Fall Of The Roman Empire, and so on.

You know how Power -- the ability to Dominate, and the choice of when, where, and how emphatically to use that ability -- figures into all human endeavors.

The world your reader lives in is currently dominated by a Power Game that is all about tricking people into doing things against their best interests.

It's called PR -- Public Relations -- and I've discussed the mathematical underpinnings and history of this pervasive science of controlling people (you, your reader, your characters, whole governments, and reshaping the World Order).  It is the art of the Grifter and the Science of Merchandising.

From Wikipedia:
---QUOTE----
Ivy Lee and Edward Louis Bernays established the first definition of public relations in the early 1900s as follows: "a management function, which tabulates public attitudes, defines the policies, procedures, and interests of an organization... followed by executing a program of action to earn public understanding and acceptance."[citation needed] However, when PR pioneer Ivy Lee was later asked about his role in a hearing with the United Transit Commission, he said "I have never been able to find a satisfactory phrase to describe what I do."[4] In 1948, historian Eric Goldman noted that the definition of public relations in Webster's would be "disputed by both practitioners and critics in the field."[4]

In August 1978, the World Assembly of Public Relations Associations defined the field as

    "the art and social science of analyzing trends, predicting their consequences, counseling organizational leaders, and implementing planned programs of action, which will serve both the organization and the public interest."[5]

Public Relations Society of America, a professional trade association,[6] defined public relations in 1982 as:

    "Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other."[7]

In 2011 and 2012, the PRSA developed a crowd-sourced definition:

    "Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics."[8]

Public relations can also be defined as the practice of managing communication between an organization and its publics.[9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_relations
----END QUOTE----

Over about a century since 1900, the math and science behind manipulating people has gone from odd curiosity to major, serious, methodology for forcing large numbers of people to behave the way a small number of people prefer.  And this power has come into the hands of a small number of people who see nothing wrong with using the power of your subconscious against you and your best interests for the good of "society."

Think about the place of Publicity in our world.  Think about why it is that all these committees keep telling you that you have this or that problem in your town, your state, your job or the wages you get for the work you do, and then say just give that committee MONEY and they will solve the problem for you (by "supporting" this or that politician running for office.)

What does it mean "support" and why does it cost MONEY (especially the huge amounts of money they collect for political campaigns?)

"Support" is a euphemism for ADVERTISING.  It's not support at all -- because once such a Group spends that much money "supporting" by making and running ads, they expect (it's illegal ever to say it or write it down, but it happens) "access" to that politician.  And that means that the "supported" politician will do what the Group wants -- and that Group isn't necessarily bound to make the politician do what you want or expect.  You are, after all, the one being controlled, and the effectiveness of their control over you is measured by how much money you give them.

Now, read the Wikipedia quote and my last few comments -- that is a DEPICTION of the world your readers live in.  It defines what they will believe in your fictional depiction of your fictional universe -- and what else you will have to work to get them to believe temporarily.

Note that a depiction is a depiction as much because of what it leaves out as what it puts in.  Think of a caricature of a person's face -- a few lines suggesting other lines and planes that you fill in with your mind, and then you SEE the real person's image in the suggestion.

In Science Fiction, the plot is based on "action" (things people do that cause changes in their world).  The actions are usually taken on the basis of "science" (some extrapolation from the science that the reader is expected to know.)

Science Fiction is the playground for scientists -- after they do science all day, they take a "bus man's holiday" and play with science, way off the edges of what is known and into FICTION.

Science Fiction Romance has to have that element in it, but plot has to be driven by the RELATIONSHIP which is romantic in nature.

Today's romance novels usually include a lot of sex -- most often graphically depicted.

Yeah, novel-sex isn't real, but a depiction.  The reader has to fill in the picture. 

In a lot of Romance Novels, it's hate-at-first-sight not love, or at least not recognizably love.

The Conflict that generates the plot is in the Relationship.  The two forces that conflict to generate the plot are the male and female lead characters.

Very often, that conflict is a POWER STRUGGLE -- and the stakes of that struggle can vary enormously.  They might be fighting over a Throne, or control of an interstellar corporation, or influence over an AI, or for a Patent.  The possibilities are endless.

In a Power Struggle Plot, all the principles of Public Relations apply. 

So here are some headlines from which you can rip a story, a plot, a character, the stakes, and a major conflict as well as a multitude of themes.

http://www.businessinsider.com/7-ways-to-get-people-to-take-you-seriously-2014-5

That is advice on how to depict a character you want the reader to see as "in charge" or "powerful."  This is a portrait of your Alpha male or female.  That article tells you what attributes to give your POWER PLAYER to make readers believe that character is what you say he/she is.

--------QUOTE-----------
1. Let people talk about themselves.

People spend 60% of their conversations talking about themselves.

It feels good: Harvard researchers have found that talking about yourself activates the same brain regions as sex, cocaine, and a good meal.

"Activation of this system when discussing the self suggests that self-disclosure like other more traditionally recognized stimuli, may be inherently pleasurable," Scientific American reports, "and that people may be motivated to talk about themselves more than other topics."

Research shows that when people disclose information about themselves, they like each other more. It's also the primary way to form social bonds, or another way of saying it helps earn their respect. 

--------END QUOTE--------

Now come on - isn't that what your Mama taught you about "getting a man?" 

My question is, "Does this work on women, too?"

The 7th item in their list is not passive-aggressive tricky like item 1. 

But I think # 3 in their list is important for writers to incorporate into dominant character traits.

---------QUOTE----------
2. Win people over with the first introduction.

Esquire's Tom Chiarella perfectly captures how to make a great first impression. He writes:

    On the street, in the lobby, square your shoulders to people you meet. Make a handshake matter — eye contact, good grip, elbow erring toward a right angle. Do not pump the hand, unless the other person is insistent on just that. Then pump the hell out of their hand. Smile. If you can't smile, you can't be gracious. You aren't some dopey English butler. You are you.

Why is this important? Because paying full attention to someone is a way of showing respect, and social science confirms that we get respect when we give respect. Add that to the list of reasons that conscientiousness predicts success.

------------END QUOTE----

And here is a DEPICTION of an application of the PR principles of exercising POWER over others, regardless of whether it's really good for others or not.

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-starbucks-lures-customers-to-spend-2014-5

That one is about how STARBUCKS tricks people into buying things.  Grocery supermarkets do this, too, as do department stores. 

Mobile Advertising applies these principles.

I put articles such as these (and many others) into the Magazines I edit (or curate) on Flipboard.

You can find my Magazines at:
https://flipboard.com/profile/jacquelinelhmqg

It has a mobile app and a link on that page (big red link) leads you to the app you need if you have mobile devices.  Or you can read on a PC.

Because of the insane amounts of money available to political advertisers, the cutting edge of developing absolute power over large groups of people is currently with the Political Ad producers, directors, and the people using donated money to buy air time for ads supporting whichever side. 

Study the writing behind the political ads this season, and you will learn DEPICTION.

Those ads depict candidates -- they don't actually portray the candidates.  The ads are designed to lure you into filling in the gaps in the caricatures.  You imagine you saw what you most want to see.  It is the epitome of the grifter's art. 

Now, take your novel's Main Characters -- and write a POLITICAL AD presenting that character to the world he lives in.

Imagine your character running for public office in this current election.  What would the ads say?

What has this to do with Romance Novels?  Or Science Fiction Romance? 

The advertisers -- whether they're selling beer, Viagra, or people -- are attempting to use mathematically based skills to entice large numbers of people into a love-affair, a Romance, with whatever they're selling.

That's the nerve political ads try to hit (which is why negative ads often have negative effects, and yet they work because rough sex also sells). 

The political ads are designed to ignite a desire for affinity, to develop trust, to establish community.  And those are the opening moves in any "pick-up" that eventually leads to something serious.

To find your opening scene and opening line, study political ads that are designed to hook viewers and rivet attention.

Remember the A, B, C, D of RELATIONSHIP noted above.  It applies to political ad induced seduction romance as well.

You're writing fiction and so are the PR folks who spin out these ads (but they make more money).  They are using Science to create Fiction that entices you into a Romance.  How can you go wrong learning to do what they do for the Big Bucks?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Marketing Fiction In A Changing World - Part 6 - The News Game by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Marketing Fiction In A Changing World
  Part 6
The News Game
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Previous parts in this series:

Last week, Part 5:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/02/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world_25.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/02/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world_18.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/02/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/03/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html


In Part 5 I referred you to a non-fiction book about the history of science fiction in which some of E. C. Tubb's work called "melodramatic." 

Here in Part 6, we're going to extend the reasoning laid down in Part 4 and examine how the News Game has changed over decades (and why) -- which could indicate what it will be in another decade or two.

We also (as writers who want to stay in print) have to gain a grasp of the connection between non-fiction and fiction -- between News and TV Series -- and what Marketing has to do with that connection.   

Let's start with Name Calling as a writer's tool.  "Melodramatic" is a Name that Romance is often "Called" so it didn't surprise me that E. C. Tubb gained that epithet for what is essentially pure male-action-adventure writing.  His work is built on Relationship, and dips into Romance (he does great Hunks).   

The discussion of Name Calling here extends the discussion in the series on writing Dialogue,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/08/dialogue-part-6-how-to-write-bullshit.html

The most popular post in the Dialogue series is How To Write Liar Dialogue, and in a way Name Calling belongs there.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/11/dialogue-part-5-how-to-write-liar.html

Name Calling is a useful tool for giving a character depth without sketching an entire life history.  It adds "color" to a characterization. It's a great way to make a minor character hated by the reader so the death is a triumph. 

So why is it that "Name Calling" tags a character as worthy of a messy death? 

"Name Calling" is revealing your own personal opinion, ramming your opinion down someone else's throat.  Neither the label nor the tone of voice explains or reveals anything about the object discussed, but only about the speaker. 

That's why "Name Calling" doesn't "work." 

The objective is to harm the other, but the result is harm to the self. 

Name Calling is an aggressive act.  It's a great tool to increase the pacing and action-element in a scene.  Think of the bar scene where gamblers sit around a table.  One calls another "cheater" -- boom, bar-fight. 

When you "call" someone a "name" (or categorize or classify them together with others who share one of their traits), you are revealing your opinion, which says a whole lot about who you are and nothing at all about who the other person is. 

The statement the Name Caller makes about him/herself (regardless of what "name" is "called," or who is so labeled) is, "I am a person of very weak character, and I hate myself because of that, so I resent the fact that you are not weaker than I am so that I don't have to work to get stronger.  I am going to destroy you." 

It doesn't matter if the Name being Called is a prestigious label or a derogatory one.  The act of "Calling" reveals all.  This is an application of the writing rule: Show, Don't Tell.  You don't tell the reader that this character is weak.  You give the character a line of dialogue that reveals all. 

Putting someone on a pedestal above you by Naming them something prestigious reveals just how little self-esteem you have. 

As a Dialogue Technique, Name Calling is fabulously effective for communicating to the reader that the character doing the "calling" is in a peak emotional state (discussed in previous parts of this series on Marketing). 

That peak emotional state is so very treasured by Public Relations professionals for a reason. 

And that reason explains the connection between TV News and TV Fiction Series (and Reality Shows also). 

As explained in previous parts of this series, the state Advertisers treasure is the one in which emotion supplants rational thought as the driver of actions. 

The act of plastering a category-label on another person is done in this activated emotional state so you don't have to think.  Name Calling substitutes for the hard work of evaluating all the disparate traits that make this other person unique.

Name Calling is a technique for denuding a person of individuality.

Name Calling is a technique for creating a human "herd." 

For more on Public Relations and Herd Creation as the goal of Advertising, see the previous entries in this series listed at the top of this post.

Name Calling -- real, serious, professional Name Calling -- is a complex technique, and has been reduced to a mathematical formula by Advertisers. 

Professional Name Calling may turn out to be the source of our problem with the prestige level of Romance and the HEA.

It is possible that Romance has been the victim in a PR campaign -- or possibly we're just collateral damage. 

In Part 5 of Marketing Fiction In A Changing World, I did note in the discussion of E. C. Tubb's DUMAREST OF TERRA series that Tubb gives us an example of how to use words with precision and variety -- a lesson in why a writer must develop a massive vocabulary.  Choosing the exact word for what you must say lets you say it more succinctly - and that increases the "pacing."  Tubb is a writer to study for this technique. 

The Dumarest Series is erudite, deeply philosophical, and precisely focused on today's hotest thematic topics -- yet it is pure Action-Adventure and textbook Romance writing.  Tubb uses Theme exactly as I have explained in the posts with THEME in the title. 

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/05/index-to-theme-plot-integration.html

Tubb does everything I've explained, all of these techniques flawlessly executed simultaneously -- and makes it look effortless. 

And yet, the historical work on the history of Science Fiction that I pointed you to in Part 5 of this series, written by those who should know better, "calls" E. C. Tubb's work "melodramatic." 

Yes, name calling in non-fiction.

Why is "melodramatic" a name that's being called?

It's just a word.  It's a technical term for a specific genre of stage play. 

Oh, there's a lot of reasons to regard this label as a name being called. 

If we can understand the nuances of what's going on with this, we may be able to figure out where the opprobrium laving the HEA is coming from.  If we can figure the origin of that opprobrium, we may be able to fix that problem. 

An adjective like "melodramatic" refers to a quality which is only present subjectively.

The usage of Melodrama to refer to Science Fiction and Romance has changed the meaning of the word Melodrama over time. 

In the mid-20th Century, the Merriam-Webster definition was "...emotional in a way that is very extreme or exaggerated : extremely dramatic or emotional..." held true.

The word was used to refer to an "extreme" or "exaggerated" fictional situation - a caricature of reality.

The more modern Urban Dictionary says:
The state of being overly emotional - therefore often in a situation that does not warrant such a strong reaction.

Can you see the subjective judgment components of the term Melodrama?

What is "extreme?" -- well, that's your opinion, and might not be mine.

What is "exaggerated"  to you may seem in correct proportion to me, or even understated.

What is "overly" emotional?  What exact situation does in fact warrant 100% response? 

Should responses be metered by degrees of emotion driving them? 

Remember, we're discussing "degrees of emotion" in the context of PR, and Parts 3, 4, and 5 of this series of posts. 

This is all about Advertising which is the science of arousing emotion to a peak high enough to get humans to form a herd and follow the leader to buy a product (such as your book, for example) -- regardless of whether the herd is rushing to self-destruction (paying a lot for a badly crafted book).

PR (Public Relations) is the mathematical science of creating human herds and then gaining power over the herd's stampede.  Advertising is the main tool of PR.  Once you understand what's behind Advertising, you become immune to the herd-joining impetus of the emotions advertisers try to whip up.

Here's an article that gives you a "professional" slant on emotional content used to increase visitor response to a website:
http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/articles/emotional.html

So where emotion is involved, what does it mean "overly emotional?" 

Where that borderline between over and under is, depends on who you are and what else you've experienced.

Imagine two characters arguing about whether the argument two other characters are having is "melodramatic" or not.  As an exercise, write the argument the two characters overhear, and write their elevator conversation as one calls the argument melodramatic and the other says it's not melodramatic. 

Now review Part 4 in this series where we ended off discussing how Hard News used to omit any hint of opinion, and carefully reveal the editorial policy whereby they chose "important" stories and ignored others. 

In that kind of a Hard News organization, a JOURNALIST can't use the word Melodramatic -- except when quoting someone. 

The word melodramatic itself is commentary -- and Hard News is factual and only factual.  There are many such words that Hard News must avoid.  Interestingly, English provides many alternative ways to convey facts without ladling on opinion. 

So there are a hundred little tricks of the trade journalists used to use to keep all hint of opinion out of News Reports: word choice, syntax, tone of voice, and juxtaposition of topics are only a few. 

Another characteristic of Old Fashioned Hard News was that, while every outlet had an editorial slant (clearly delineated in editorials and never hinted at in News items), and each outlet selected things to report on according to their slant, they did not CRAFT A NARRATIVE.

Today, TV News (and most other media outlets) blatantly admits (via TV anchors) that they omit any item that "does not fit the narrative" being crafted, and they do those omissions merely to justify their editorial slant -- no matter how much hypocrasy oozes through the cracks.  They see nothing wrong with that because it's The News Game -- it's essential to the business model of TV News to create a "narrative." 

The very definition of News has changed, just as the definition of words such as Melodrama has changed. 

This discussion in Part 6 of Marketing is about where that change came from, why it happened, and what that means for the fiction-delivery-system into which you are marketing your novel. 

 Very few people channel-surf News programs and do relentless contrast/compare studies to sift out the few real Hard News Facts buried amidst the torrent of opinion.

Most people don't understand the reasons the use of the word Melodramatic disqualifies a piece as a News Report. 

Most people have no idea there is a Narrative being "sold" (via precise mathematical PR techniques).  And in fact, if you told them, they'd consider you a bit daft, or maybe a flat-out liar.

In Part 3 of this Marketing Fiction series, we discussed the movie Anchorman 2, and most especially the PR campaign that surrounded it's debut. 

OK, it's a funny movie -- but it's about the News Game.  If you're going to set a novel amidst The News Game, you must understand the game, and you must understand how very little of that game your readers believe exists. 
-----------------
Here's a quote that turned up on twitter from poster TheBlackBoard:

TheBlackBoard
"Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious."
—Peter Ustinov
-----------------
Anchorman 2 may be an example of that principle. 

In the SAVE THE CAT! trilogy of books on screenwriting, Blake Snyder makes the point (emphatically) that you must, at all costs, KEEP THE PRESS OUT OF THE PLOT. 

When you bring in news stories, your plot explodes in your face, your theme goes out the window, and your project flops...unless you really know what you're doing. 

So that's another objective we're pursuing here.  We have to really know what we're doing when trying to sell the HEA to readers who live in a HFN world portrayed on TV News as if HFN were the only reality. 

So, we're looking at how the News Game has changed (and why), and we're looking at the audience perception of that Game. 

Once you have both of these firmly in mind, you can use Press Conferences and Newspaper Items as plot-points in a way that viewers of TV News who think that news is "reality" can accept and believe. 

So changes in Hard News on TV have happened in lockstep with changes in Fiction. 

The reason can be seen as PR.

Public Relations software, Google tracking, all in service to Advertising can measure audience size, composition, and emotional response to a TV News or Series segment by segment, even minute by minute.  The News item or "Act" of the TV Series exists to 'set up' the audience's emotional pitch for the run of advertising that comes next.

Have you noticed how many more ads, more products, are pitched between segments of content than was the case 10 or 20 years ago?  Have you noticed how the runs of ads are as long, or longer, than the content-segments?  Have you noticed how the length of the ad-runs differs from hour to hour and day to day around the week?  Have you thought out the reasons for all this?  Writers need to understand.  Others can ignore it all. 

This new PR science is called "metrics."  All TV Network content choices pivot on "the metrics."

Driving that PR push to measure and quantify every aspect of the eyeballs attracted and held by the content-segments, is profit. 

The TV metrics' objective is to control which eyeballs are present for which commercials.  That's the opposite of online advertising which aims to choose the commercials to suit the eyeballs preferences. 

PR "metrics" is the business-model shift that caused a shift in content in broadcast and cable TV. 

The shift in content is easiest to see in News -- but is also visible in fiction. 

This business model shift in TV News is largely attributable to the advent of the Internet -- but more broadly, to technology, computers, data-mining.  You all know the NSA problem -- Big Brother Is Watching You out of your TV set, whether you're hooked to broadcast, cable or internet streaming. 

Cable became popular and brought us the giant, world-girdling news gathering and delivering organization CNN (Cable News Network). 

Cable was advertising driven (PR) but also subscription driven as you couldn't get it over broadcast airwaves.  You had to have cable, and that's a subscription fee.  In some cases, Government had to force cable to carry local broadcast channels. 

Cable still operates on this antiquated business model which is why it's collapsing.

Cable charges subscribers a FEE for a BUNDLE OF CHANNELS (most of which you don't want).  They make you pay for other people's taste.

That's why, for example, Fox Business Network (FBN) is bundled by Cox Cable (in the Southwest) with the Sports Channels.  FBN is a non-lucrative item to carry -- very VERY small audience.  Stuffy, abstract, numbers-strewn, full of abbreviations nobody understands and about nothing of any moment to most people.  But almost every single household lives and breathes SPORTS.  So the bundle taken together is profitable.

CNBC is another cable Financial News  channel and is in the general-tier subscription (Bloomberg is another).  CNBC is not a lot more entertaining than FBN but is bought by the Cable provider in a bundle from CNN which everyone wants.

Now, it is true that the Financial Markets Coverage is all about gambling, aggression, swagger, bluffing, playing chicken over shorted stocks, so the appeal to Sports fans is obvious.  Most professional investors are sports fans, or pretend to be for professional reasons -- you have to have something to make small talk about with strangers.

The Cable business model is to sign up subscribers who pay a monthly fee -- then go to channels and buy content to deliver to the subscribers, all wrapped around advertising. 

The Cable company has a department that markets TIME (between show segments) to advertisers.  Cable is a middle-man operation.  They get paid by subscribers and by advertisers who want glued-to-the-screen-eyeballs, and they buy and operate equipment and Content with the money they collect with hopefully some profit left over. 

With the Internet growing, people are "cutting the cord" to Cable -- just subscribing to the feeds they actually want.  That's why your Cable bill keeps going up -- fewer people subscribing means less income to spend delivering the same (bloated) number of channels.  Of course, taxes are adding to Cable bills, too. 

Another reason Cable bills are going up is DVRs.  People time-shift, and skip commercials, so commercial time is worth less because there are fewer eyeballs being delivered to the advertiser.  Cable operator gets less per commercial, but still has to pay for the program content -- so they stuff in more ads. 

Cable advertising metrics show a waning effect -- in the 2012 Elections, vast amounts of money went to Cable ads but barely budged the needle in most races.  People skip commercials, audiences are smaller.  PR formulae are being adjusted.

As writers, you followed carefully the Auction of Spectrum by the US Government a few years ago where they mandated the shift from analog to digital (that forced people to buy new TV sets or $50 set top boxes).  The conversation to spiffy new flat-screen (or 3-D) TV's in digital is almost complete.  I own an analog TV still, but never turn it on!

The spectrum auction re-allocated spectrum so we can have LTE phone-data service for smartphones.  It reserved some spectrum for Emergency Services.  It totally changed the foundations upon which TV signal delivery has been built -- and as a result, as people adjust their habits, Cable's business is less and less profitable.

And Advertising Firms are going NUTS!  PR still works, but their business model doesn't! 

A new generation of Advertising Executives are conquering this problem.  Google leading the pack.  The new generation of ad-execs grew up on a world dominated by Google. 

Internet Advertising is beginning to work, thanks to Google's "tracking cookies" that lets them sell your eyeballs to advertisers selling something you might be interested in.  It doesn't work yet, though.  They keep trying to sell me what I bought last week and so don't need anymore.  They need better spies.  They are inventing them.

With Cable came hundreds of channels -- with DIGITAL and INTERNET came thousand and thousands more channels, websites, blogs, YouTube, all kinds of ways to spend the little time you have to acquire information you need, and entertainment your frayed nerves absolutely demand.

I've noted on this blog how fragmented the USA has become -- nobody watches any one thing.  About a third of the country's 320 million watch the Superbowl. 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/04/us-superbowl-cbs-ratings-idUSBRE9130P720130204

This fragmentation of the market works against profitability -- but in favor of the Indie market. 

With streaming, on a Roku or Apple TV, or other device, you have access to Vimeo, Netflix, other movie deliveries, Amazon Prime with TV shows -- more hours than anyone can possibly watch.

If you track the rise of this fragmentation against the rise in the number of commercials  between content-segments, against the longer advertising-runs vs shorter content segments, you find something very interesting.

As advertisers have become more desperate, content-segments have changed the nature of their content.

This is evident in TV Series Fiction, yes, but much harder to spot.

It's most clear in the TV News. 

As advertisers have become more desperate for glued eyeballs, TV News has become more "narrative driven" and content has changed.

How exactly has content changed?

Where once opinion was prohibited, now it is required to be salted into Hard News.

Where once narrative was prohibited, now it is the only thing allowed.

Where once name-calling was prohibited, it is now reported on by other networks.

Where once mention of the existence of another network was prohibited, it is now THE breaking news story of the day that this anchor said that nasty about another anchor on a third network.

It isn't enough that Anchors yell at Guests who yell back, everyone talking at once, on opinion or analysis shows -- they yell at anchors on other networks! 

Where once the Lead Story Of The Day would be something you needed to know to figure out what to DO to avoid harm to you and your family, now the Lead Story is some bit of local-news gossip.

What's gossip?  Oh, that is another study that belongs in the Dialogue series.

Essentially, gossip is something of personal interest woven of emotional dynamics.

Today National News And Commentary shows focus on traffic accidents, road rage, mentally disturbed people shooting children, rape and other violent crime, and the subsequent court cases.

These are "reality show" drama topics popularized by Oprah Winfrey, but they are local gossip and belong in local newspapers aimed at the people with a personal connection to those involved (such as the Apartment Building Fire on the block behind your house - what happened? Who's responsible?  Who was killed?  That matters if you know the people -- otherwise it doesn't.)

Why are the 20 minutes you have to discover World Events you must know about (to plan your next vacation; to know why you couldn't get a call through to Europe) now occupied by local gossip, oblitterating the information you need?

Maybe it is a political conspiracy, but "never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity."  Or perhaps by profit motives.

Now, as a writer, I'm all for PROFIT.

But Cable profits are on the decline. 

What's really going on?

The same thing has happened to TV News as has happened in Book Publishing under the impact of technology.

As noted in a previous part of this series on Marketing, TV News, back in the day when it was news rather than gossip, was not a profitable department of a broadcast network.

Networks ran News Departments (and corporations owned Newspapers or Wire Services) for the prestige of it.  To get prestige, you had to deliver real facts, first and devoid of opinion. 

Just as big publishers were owned by bigger businesses for the prestige of it, and therefore could publish unprofitable but "important" books, Networks owned News departments and lost money but delivered Hard News.

Neither big corporation looking for a tax write-off cared whether anyone watched or read or paid any attention.  The few who did pay attention awarded them Pulitzer Prizes,  etc. 

The information feed to "the public" (e.g. the audience of a TV News show) was a by-product of the operation, not the point of it.

Then came Pac-Man Publishing where publishers ate each other, and now audience-fragmentation is weakening all Cable companies.

Both these trends were caused by technology -- innovations coming in waves of 20-year-duration.

The not-for-profit publishing operations suddenly had to turn a profit -- Accounting Department Ruled All Decisions. 

Publishers were taken over by "the bean counters" -- and where there used to be indepedent acquisitions editors who chose books to publish, suddenly those same people had to take a book proposal "to committee" (marketers, cover artists, PR department) who would have the final say on whether a book was published.

The Editor would later be reviewed for profitable choices, and could lose a job on the basis of not making as much money for the company as the editor in the adjacent cubicle.

And TV News operations had to go from delivering information to making a profit because the TV Series fiction wasn't making as much profit (because of falling audience numbers).

Not only that, but the PR science of "metrics" could now measure which news stories kept the most eyeballs glued to the commercials.  (I know it sounds ridiculous; but it is really happening.) It's not enough to make a profit; you must make the most profit.

Advertisers pay for your "free" TV News, and it's their metrics that determine what is or is not News. 

TV News isn't just on TV.  Check Yahoo News, AP, CNN, NBC, FOX, New York Times, any source you want -- correlate with the concurrent TV news -- same items handled the same way, only slightly different slants, and sometimes radically different narratives.

They call it the 24-Hour-News-Cycle -- and a number of Anchors have used those words with tension in their voices, with scorn and even derision (yes, I'm evaluating).

Note how there's an ad running before videos, popups and pop-unders evade your blockers.  The content of those news stories is chosen according to the responses to those ads.

The PR principle to remember when duplicating this research is that the "News" Stories with the highest emotional pitch (tragedy, pathos, horror, The Injustice Of It All, Victim-hood, etc) get the most responses to the advertising. 

You'll see this with the Healthcare Law coverage -- the focus will be on the joy of individuals who have been relieved of an injustice, and the utter hopelessness of victims who have become victims of an injustice. 

Watch how that coverage unfolds into the next Election - watch the emotional content.

The reason that statistics, facts, figures and even reality don't count, and just don't make the News, is that tragedy, pathos, horror, injustice stir audiences emotionally, thus cutting critical thinking out of their motivations -- right before a commercial run.

This shift in the relationship between Prestige and Profit has been going on for centuries -- since Guttenberg, actually.

The Aristocracy were Patrons of the Arts (not Patrons of News!  That was delivered by the Indie Writers called Bards -- some of whom had Patrons!) for prestige not profit.  With an Aristocracy dominant, you see the rise of Rumor as the main source of information. 

Trace the fall of the Aristocracy over centuries against the rise of the concept "Commercial Art" which is what genre fiction is.

Now we have almost all Art (even News Reporting) done as Commercial Art.  There is a minority practicing "Fine Art" -- but they have to find another way to earn a living besides writing.

Have we reached the end of this cycle?  Will e-book, website art, etc. draw Patrons (e.g. advertisers can be regarded as Patrons who must be pleased by content produced)?  If not, what happens at the end of this cycle?  Will we break out of this Historical pattern of Prestige to Profit to Prestige to Profit?

If you look closely at TV/Webisode/IndieFilm as an industry, you can see how, at this Profit-dominated point in this cycle, we are seeing Prestige and Profit confused, mixed up with one another, the line blurring.

In the early 21st Century, we have a situation where the only prestige you can achieve is by amassing huge amounts of money.  Power goes with that money -- but Prestige does not naturally come from fortune.  Your current fiction audience is under a trip-hammer PR Messaging campaign to convince them that the only way to Prestige is Profit, and in fact Profit is Prestige (there's no difference).

Prestige is a word/concept being redefined, just as Melodrama has been redefined.

The central problem we've been tackling on this blog is the problem of the Prestige of the Romance Genre in general and the Science Fiction Romance (and Paranormal Romance genre) in particular.  Why the general scorn for the HEA as a life-goal?

Perhaps we've been looking in the wrong direction for answers to that question.  Perhaps we are collateral damage of the tug-of-war between Profit and Prestige.  Romance SELLS gangbusters compared to other types of novels!  We have a Profit Producing Business Model in the exploration of the HEA and how to achieve it in your own life.  Is that why we lack Prestige?

If so, then our Prestige should rise as Profit becomes more prestigious?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com