The Strange Benefit Of Social Networking

First I have to thank the renowned editor, Victoria A. Mixon, for mentioning my blog entry of last week (*blush*) in her own blog where she wrote:

-------Quote--------
Author Jacqueline Lichtenberg has written a  long and eye-opening post contradicting the standard publishing wisdom, “You determine your own success or failure by just how compelling your story is.” Lichtenberg is looking at TV shows as fiction, as well as books, for which I think she builds a good case. Pay attention to what she’s saying, folks! This is the keystone.

Her post, in turn, refers to an article by Andrew R. Malkin describing his career in publishing promotions.

And Malkin refers to Seth Godin. I mean, these days who doesn’t?
--------End Quote-------

Victoria's blog is one you should subscribe to!  Here's the link to that particular entry, but just look at her others!

http://victoriamixon.com/2010/02/12/reading-up-on-the-business-of-fiction/

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So to this week's topic is about the mistake people are making when trying to understand online social networking, a mistake so huge it's invisible to the naked eye.

Victoria A. Mixon's reference to my blog post is a case in point on social networking that is more pertinent because I have no clue how she found my blog entry.  She might have picked it up on twitter or via the Agent Rachel Gardner's blog (which is rated #4 on Technorati's list of 100 top book blogs) or might have found mentioned on Galaxy Express here:

http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/2010/02/10-steps-to-making-science-fiction.html where the full title is
10 Steps To Making Science Fiction Romance A Contender

You see?  Social networking creates these nebulous networks where the networkers don't know where the information came from -- it's on the network!

So I was thinking about that "network" concept and how the e-world differs from the ancient world (pre-WWW) and I suddenly saw a pattern while trolling twitter.

I will attempt to connect three improbable dots and show you this pattern:

A) Puberty
B) Publishing
C) Commercial exploiting of social networking

As far as I know (which isn't very far) nobody else has discerned this pattern from these particular dots.

If you stick it out through this huge post, I may make you crazy.

Here's how it all came together. 

I had just filed my September review column for The Monthly Aspectarian, which is published on paper in the magazine, then posted to their website (lightworks.com) then finally archived at
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2010/

The books reviewed this year are posted on that 2010 index page and you could look them over and see what the ones you've read from that list have in common.

The September column is about books where the main hero is fully engaged in defending a particular USA city from some form of paranormal attack, and I noted some things cities have in common.  If you read those books carefully in close sequence you will see how the authors exploit the mechanics of social networks within cities that propel the plot dynamics.  But that wasn't the exact focus of my column.

Right after that I ran across another tweet on Twitter:

@michaelpinto: #kidscreen it's not until kids hit age 12 do they use social online services

Michael Pinto is Creative Director of Very Memorable Design, Publisher of Anime.com and Editor of Fanboy.com -- has over 2,000 followers on twitter, and his website is http://www.fanboy.com/

And I offhandedly shot back at him:

@jlichtenberg @michaelpinto #kidscreen "socialization" awareness of "other" may be primarily part of the reproductive urge?

To which he answered:

@michaelpinto @JLichtenberg actually most of the social media at that age is your immediate peers, so it's more of a tool thing

And the head-wheels start spinning! (I do love twitter!)

The image that flashed into my mind was the typical Middle School school yard during recess and the behaviors of various age-groups of children.

It's something I had noticed when I was a child and continued to notice throughout the years, and to puzzle over.

Watch the 4th Grade girls -- they gather in groups, sometimes larger, and they PLAY, they do things, they engage in activities, and the only things they say to each other are in regard to the activity (Dodgeball, jacks, races, games).

Watch the 5th Grade girls.  Some play, some gather in small groups and talk.

Watch the 6th Grade girls.  They ALL gather in small groups and TALK-TALK-TALK.

Something happens at puberty that shifts interest from the activity to the people.

Most of the focus of that talk is "I-I-I" -- it's all about Self.  But watch the 7th and 8th graders.  The talk is 'you' and 'look at that cute boy'.

There is a major shift of awareness we call socialization, and it is a shift from I-self to You-other.  There is a dawning (before puberty) of awareness that others exist, have feelings, and an inner emotional life separate from all activities.

There is a dawning of awareness of the inner emotional life of the Self -- and then a seeking of the mirror of the Self in Other.

The yen for BONDING starts, and it first manifests in those cliques gathered to talk-talk-talk.  I've seen groups of 4 or 5 girls walking home from school stop in the middle of an intersection, totally lose awareness of any approaching cars, and just focus tightly on talk-talk-talk and the talk is all about FEELINGS and interactions with others.

The search is for those who have similar feelings, and the process brings the individual's emotional responses into conformity with the majority or dominant individuals until a group is formed that has very similar emotional responses.

Last night I saw a feature on PBS about the psychology of investing, about neuroscience and other really detailed scientific studies of fear and risk and herd behavior among humans.  And one item struck me relevant to social networking.  The science behind human herd behavior has revealed how neurologically a human being will subordinate the individuality in order to be accepted by the group -- out of fear, out of risk aversion - out of the very sort of "Primal" responses Blake Snyder talks about in his SAVE THE CAT! books.

And that TV feature brought to mind that school yard full of little knots of girls chattering at each other, seeking emotional conformity and emotional bonding with each other (and talking about cute boys, of course, what else is there to talk about?)

Today's cliques of pubescent girls use texting and social networking, but as Michael Pinto observes, it's a tool to carry on the exact same transaction I had observed so many years in schoolyards.  Now they'll text each other across the yard.  But the transaction is the same - bonding self-to-other.  First in small groups.  But today's world is much bigger.

A couple days before that, I ran into the following news article on Yahoo that says YouTube is 5 years old (only 5 years!) and details the changes its advent on the scene has made.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20100214/tc_pcworld/theyoutuberevolutionturns5

5 years!  Today's pre-adolescents don't remember the world without Youtube and video-via-cell-phone.  It's just a tool they use to assuage their bonding urge.

Remember, some time ago I did several entries here about social networking especially as used by marketers:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/marketing-via-social-networking.html

The point of that post was essentially that advertisers who tried to use social networking to force a message to "go viral" in order to make a profit were shooting themselves in the foot by following the oldest adage of Marketing.

Mastering this oldest adage of Marketing is a hurdle as difficult to surmount for budding marketers as "show don't tell" is for budding writers.

It is "You Are Not Your Customer."

And I pointed out why Marketers can never succeed at using social networking to promote a product on purpose by citing successful social networking examples such as Linnea Sinclair.  (one of the contributors to this blog http://linneasinclair.com )

In social networking, YOU ARE YOUR CUSTOMER or you fail because the society will reject you violently and with extreme prejudice.

This rejection phenomenon is not new any more than puberty is new.

Way back when Science Fiction fandom (before Star Trek) was a tiny, closed community of people social networking via snailmail, it consisted of several circles of people who knew each other and knew different circles of professional writers personally.

Science Fiction fandom was so closed that people who took a new interest in the fandom without coming from an encyclopedic knowledge of the fiction admired by the groups were viewed as unwelcome intruders.

But of course, "science fiction fandom" was so tiny that even publishers of science fiction paid no attention to it.

Even if a book sold to all the social-network connected science fiction fans, that alone couldn't make it commercially viable.

A book's publishing overhead required that it sell to 100's of times as many people as ever connected to SF fandom's little in-group.  Sales volumes of books that sold to most of fandom and those that sold to no fans were statistically indistinguishable.  The "Hugo Winner" didn't sell enough additional copies to make a difference. Neither did "Nebula Winner" though when BOTH appeared on a book it meant something commercially.  (that changed gradually, year by year, and then SUDDENLY in the 1960's into a "Golden Age." You can look up dates if you like.)

Then came Star Trek in the late 1960's and with the conventions in the early 1970's and the explosion of "trekkies" as opposed to people like me known as Trekkers, started to change book sales patterns. (but Trekkies would buy spinoff novels but not follow an author into their own non-Trek works!)

"Trekkies" is a derogatory term used to designate people whose motives are similar to those of "roadies" -- starstruck fanatics who follow rock stars around the country screaming at concerts.

Trekkies is an odious term because it's a static psychological state.  It's like an addiction.  Instead of making progress in life because of the interest, learning skills, gaining expertise, widening horizons, acquiring stabilizing associations and contacts with people above you on the ladder of success, the "trekkie" just sits at the feet and goes gaagaa.

"Trekkers" are active and growing people -- people on a Trek, a JOURNEY.  They are going somewhere.  All their efforts are toward an attainable goal and they do attain that goal.

Trekkers wrote amazing fan fiction, and many of those fanfic writers became professional writers (after a few were shut firmly out of mainstream publishing because they were known fanfic writers).

Fanfic generated social networks within networks, all connected, knowing each other or knowing of each other.  And those generated whole conventions where thousands of dollars changed hands just with the buying and selling of fanzines (on paper no less.)

More than that, the efforts of Trekkers produced the fan-run Star Trek Conventions (not the "shows" where the Stars posture on a stage, sign autographs for money, and disappear -- the CONVENTIONS where the Stars might drop in and speak on a stage, then go buy stuff in the Dealer's Room and converse with trekkers but ignore the trekkies).

The Trekkers got sucked into Science Fiction and invaded Science Fiction conventions causing an immense backlash of rejection because a lot of Trekkies got mixed in, and Trekkies didn't read the "right" books to be accepted.

This invasion changed the face of SF fandom and actually changed its prestige among publishers because of the large numbers of people and the among of money that changed hands. But individual authors didn't see TV show fans grabbing SF novels off the shelves unless they were TV show spinoffs.

Don't forget that YouTube effect. It's a 3rd generation video-entertainment-only development.

My own Star Trek fanfiction (text-only), the Kraith Series (which attracted 50 creative fan contributors who wrote and drew in my alternate Trek Universe) was nominated for the Fan Writer Hugo (SF Fandom's top award) (and lost because of that backlash of text readers against TV-fan invaders - resentment continues for that, too).

Kraith can be read for free online at
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/

Here's an image of the Hugo runner-up certificate :

http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/awards-jl/hugo/cert4a.gif

 

It's a good thing I didn't win the trophy because the Trekkie-invasion issue in SF fandom was incendiary, and the person who won really REALLY deserved it.

However, that was an inflection point, and today Science Fiction conventions and even Worldcon have "media" track programming (which was so resoundingly rejected at first).  If the resistance hadn't gone on so long, Worldcon would have been the Event that Dragoncon is now - media and gaming.

These are now two immiscible social networks in fandom, media and books.

Here are a couple of websites listing conventions:

http://www.scificonventions.com/
 
Here is the Locus list of cons: http://www.locusmag.com/Conventions.html

On #scifichat on twitter (Friday afternoon Eastern Time - Follow @scifichat for info ) David Rozansky (a publisher who runs the chat) advised writers aiming at text-publishing:

@DavidRozansky Attend literary-focused #scifi cons, like WorldCon or MileHiCon. Media-focus cons are fun, but won't help you. #scifichat

Of course he was talking about launching a career in book publishing, not media.

He also said that writers today need to develop their own following (of fans of their writing) before they can become well published, and the way to do that is social networking.

So far, nobody I've run across has pointed out what I have pointed out -- that for social networking to become a vehicle for your message, you must first and foremost be a part of that society. You Are Your Customer - or you are nobody -- in writing novels.

Any writer of heroic fiction has learned the principle of what makes a leader in real life.  A "leader" must emerge from the group he/she leads.

If you don't put that into your fiction, nobody will believe it.

In fact, implicit in the concept "leader" is "emerging from the Group to Lead."

But in our real everyday world, "leaders" are often chosen from outside a company.

Everyone who's gotten a job where they come in to manage people who were expecting promotion into that spot knows they have to weed their group of those ambitious ones before they can lead that group.  The first job of a leader is to bond with the group.  THEN they have to "separate" from that group (as Captain Kirk illustrated with his "loneliness of command" theme.)

In the real world, the CEO search goes OUT - rarely do top people get promoted from within.

In fact in order to get to such a pinnacle, a candidate may have to climb the ladder inside a company, then switch to another company and climb there a while, then get head-hunted as CEO of the original company that employed them.  (I've seen that career track happen several times lately in the real world).

Mystically, and practically, a "Leader" has to be or have been a member of the society he/she is to lead.  (think King Arthur)

But Marketers learn bone deep, "you are not your customer" -- it is their mantra.

Alienation on the one hand, and membership bonding.  A dichotomy and a tension line.

Marketers come into social networking determined not to "be the customer" but to "sell to the customer" - retaining the clinical distance, the emotional disconnection of an outsider but attempting to lead the herd into a behavior (buying this brand of product).

Yet playground training in early life, the very first pre-pubescent bonding experience, is not to follow someone who is not organically, emotionally bonded to the group.  And that dynamic turns up in individual investing habits, too.

Physicians learn to be "objective" and Healers learn Empathic Bonding (I explored that dichotomy in depth in my first Award Winner, Unto Zeor, Forever which is about the medical career tracks of physicians vs. healers).

The key element here is the Group Mind vs. Individual Mind and the relationship between them, as in the several novels about Cities.

I discuss that in my September Review column
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2010/  

(You should be able to access the actual column there sometime after October 1, 1010)

To be a leader, you must first be a member.

If you're not a member, when you behave like a leader you become a tyrant.

That's the playground principle the marketers who are trying to use social networking to move product are ignoring and they will regret it. It is a "Primal" principle that every writer knows in their bones, and it's rooted in (oh, yeah, you knew this was coming) ROMANCE! And it's all about reproduction, successful reproduction which involves rearing the young, which requires bonding.

Yes, successful commercial marketing is all about sexuality, all about the fundamental psychological components of which love is built.  

I discussed a possible solution to the marketer's problem in this post:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/fix-for-publishing-business-model.html

Now let's look at the world from a fiction writer's perspective again.

If we're worldbuilding and we get down to building the society Our Hero is embedded within, then we have to ask ourselves, who's connected to whom and how?

In other words, to create the drama that we wish to display, we must embed Our Hero in a society -- a social network.

Why is that? Why must worldbuilding include social networks we make up out of thin air?  And why is it so easy to make them up?

Because all heroes (even the villain is the hero of his own story) are "connected" -- like The Mob.  The Mob is a "family" or a network of families, some of which are connected by being adversaries, opponents, or rivals if not actual enemies.

Look at the "flip-outs" we hear about in the news.  A person gets fired, broods over it a while, grabs a gun and sprays bullets at the group which rejected him/her, or deliberately shoots at people who are members of a social network which has rejected the shooter.

A bit into the news cycle and we learn this person was a "loner" -- a nice person, quiet, kept to him/herself, had become distant from family (or had none) -- was not active in groups, volunteering, or any of the things you and I always do. But went out of the way to be "nice" while holding forth with opinions that separated them from the group.  

Watching such a news story unfold, it's so hard to understand why this person flipped out and sprayed destruction upon those who "rejected" -- because we get rejected all the time (sometimes 3 times a week for months on end) and don't grab guns and spray bullets.

Why does REJECTION hit some people in the VICIOUS BUTTON triggering a killing spree?

Or suicide.

Life rains blows upon us from all sides.  Mostly, we spend a lot of time feeling like punching bags and emotional garbage cans, recipients of other people's eruptions. We endure the flame wars on Lists and try to be very quiet until it dies down, or sooth things over off-list.  We engage actively with other people's emotions, but we don't kill them. 

What's the difference?

You and I are connected seven-thousand-ways-from-Sunday into dozens of social networks. Many dozens.  From that early playground experience to today, we keep adding networks.

Even standing in line we exercise networking skills.  The worse the situation at airports gets, the more we chat up the folks behind us in line, play canasta with the person next to us on the stuck plane, or entertain their kids.  Every point at which you find yourself in casual touch with someone becomes a conversation just like those play yard conversations - emotional interchanges that form social networked bonds. 

The people who dump on us are either members of one of our own networks and are dumping because they need a friend -- or they're NOT on our network but on some other that regards all members of our network as the source of all the problems in the world. Or source of best friends.

Either way, the emotional blows that rain down on us push us off center emotionally, and we push a little on our supporters, who push a little on theirs, and the blow gets absorbed by a huge number of people, soaked up and dissipated.

People on line now are almost all also on their cell phones!  That can annoy us, but probably because nobody's calling us right now.

Think how snow shoes work.

 Image From Here

Snow is not strong.  All those little crystals tend to come apart when you press on them.  Step on it with your boot, and you'll sink in.  Strap on a snowshoe and spread your weight over a larger area, and the snow will support you.

Social networking works just like that.

By being socially connected to many, MANY people, we become more stable.  We become able to soak up and dissipate blows that are way beyond our personal capacity.

(And I'm not even including any connection to the Divine in this -- this works even without any sort of religious connectivity!  Just plain humans supply enough support for most of life's vicissitudes.  Add the Divine and boost the effect to a whole new level.)

The sign of a mentally healthy person is that membership in many social networks.

Is the social network the source of sanity or the result of it?

Does it matter?

Wherever you find humans, you find social networks no matter how inconvenient or difficult the connections are.  (Even before snailmail social networks existed and functioned).

Who benefits from the existence of social networks?

The individual (as anyone who's on Twitter and Facebook knows) expends a lot of time and energy networking socially.

Marketers have poured lots of brainpower into trying to figure out how to get the effect that individuals get from networks without spending that much time or energy because it's just not cost-effective.

For every single shortcut they invent, they lose more respect from networkers who observe them.

Why is that?  What's really going on with social networks?

We, as Romance Writers, need to know because

a) all Relationship stories, nevermind actual Romances, depend entirely on the answer to that question. and

b) how in the world could we build an alien, non-human society without social networks and have it believed by our readers or accessible to our characters?  Where's the drama without social networks?

Why can't marketers duplicate our results?

Take a single company - advertising via social networking.

What do they expect as a result?

Emotional support in times of stress?

No.

They expect PROFIT and expect to measure that profit in INCOME.

Why do you social network?

What is the real motive in your heart of hearts when you click into twitter?

You might want to repeat a pleasure you've had - finding out what's going on, who's interested in what.  Some bit of random mental stimulation such as I've pointed out I find in twitter all the time.

That's what you get.  What company would want that?  What SEC form could they file for that?

But what's your real motive in networking (and blogging, even just reading blogs, is networking), not the conscious one?

The real source of PLEASURE, the payoff from social networking is the GIVING.

There's a whole mystical dimension to Giving and Receiving that I've discussed in my Tarot posts.  I don't recall exactly which of the 20 posts it's in, but you wouldn't understand it without reading them all.  Start with the most recent one of the 20 and follow the links back, then read them in order of posting date:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/12/10-pentacles-cake-comes-out-of-oven.html  

There's a spiritual charge we get out of just giving.

But to "give" there must be a recipient -- an element on the other side of the transaction that accepts what was given.  (for a blog, that's a reader who drops a comment).

With social networking, who's the recipient of the huge amount of energy out pour out?

Think hard.  It's not just the bloggers who drop a comment or link to the blog as I pointed out with the Editor and Agent and fellow Romance blog that linked to this blog.
  If it were JUST that first level commenter, it would be private communication such as on the pay ground.

It's all the people those people reach! And all they reach beyond that.

The real recipient of what you GIVE (that corporations are trying to avoid giving because it's too expensive in terms of the profit in money that comes back) the real recipient is SOCIETY.  The real recipient of what you pour out into your social networking is the network itself.  The social fabric of society.

That's why it's called social networking.

You as an individual participating in social networking are pouring your personal energies into a huge, open, black hole.  AND NOTHING COMES BACK.

But you experience pleasure for having poured yourself out.

The whole point is that NOTHING COMES BACK.

That network must be energized, constantly maintained by those who pour themselves out into it, "fruitlessly."

The existence of those social networks is the very foundation of our civilization and more, even of our personal SANITY!!!  And sexuality.  And successful reproduction, transmitting social values to the next generation.

The beneficiary of your social networking skills and contributions is society itself.

If you're not a member of that society, if you're not your customer, you really do drain yourself dry and get nothing for it.

If you are a member, you benefit by membership, but it costs you more than you will ever be able to get out of it, just like rearing children costs more than you get.  You pay it forward!

The benefit or profit that you, personally as an individual, derive from your non-cost-effective investment is really huge, though.

What you get from the existence of the society you belong to is emotional support, ethical support, moral support, even perhaps spiritual support, and ultimately the stability to absorb huge blows.  Ultimately, what you get is immortality in the form of posterity.

As long as that social network lives, part of you survives even if you have no progeny of your body.

I wrote about this a little in my two novels HERO and BORDER DISPUTE, which can be found on Kindle as a single volume:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002WYJG0W/rereadablebooksr/  

Free chapters at http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Because of your outrageous expenditures on social networking, you can rely on being sane and stable enough to absorb the blows that life flings at you because the energy of those outrageous events will dissipate into your social networks harming none, least of all you.

That is not a benefit a corporation can return to shareholders as a dividend, so they have no business doing business via social networking.

But let's look again at the history of publishing.

I've discussed this in prior posts here. A change in the US tax law regarding books kept in warehouses changed the whole business of publishing.

The essence of the change was that books became treated as if they were bolts or hammers -- just stock produced in advance and warehoused until sold.  Each year you keep books in a warehouse, you pay a tax on those books even though you haven't sold them and they've reduced in value.

It used to be that publishers would print thousands more copies than they could sell in a year, hold them in warehouse and sell through a trickle until it sold out - maybe remainder the last couple thousands.

Under that new law, about thirty years ago I think, the business of publishing was nearly destroyed and then shifted into modern publishing which is entirely for profit, choosing titles on a totally different basis than before that tax law.

Print runs were reduced, and titles were chosen only if they could sell out before the tax deadline -- shelf-life cycles were reduced by weeks and months.

Under the pressure of that, publishing grabbed at the Print On Demand concept, but even today that hasn't entirely caught on.

Under the old tax law which didn't penalize publishers who published books that "ought" to be published for literary or social merit, pricing was all about what people could afford to pay, or would be willing to pay.

Today, pricing is about how soon the e-book edition will come out.  And publishing in general is much more sensitive to price-points than ever because of numerous other shifts in tax laws that treat books as commodities not social treasures.
This image is from
http://blog.kobobooks.com/2010/02/04/when-publishers-set-prices-with-pictures/#
And you should read and ponder that whole article:

And today publishers and distributors and warehousers and all connected enterprises (printers, shippers) are in dire financial straits.  People blame that on the economic woes of the housing bubble collapse, or cyclical recession, or the impact of the internet.

But think about it more carefully.  Step back and connect all these dots in your mind.

Who benefits from PUBLISHING?

Well, publishing, as I pointed out with the story of SF fandom, Star Trek fandom, and the explosive blending of the two, generating fanzines, and from Star Trek fanzines, a plethora of fanzines devoted to other TV shows, spawning a generation of writers who transformed the face of Romance with SF-Romance, Paranormal Romance, Futuristic Romance, etc etc.  Other genres have experienced the same.

Why?

Social networking.

Remember the story of how I got into Science Fiction fandom?  I wrote a letter to the editor of a Science Fiction magazine and they published it - my first published words; instant addiction!  But they published my address, and I was instantly invited to join the N3F, the National Fantasy Fan Federation - a network of networked SF fan organizations, founded by the same man damon knight (small letters deliberate) who founded SFWA, the Science Fiction Writers of America, which I'm also a member of.

Networked networks -- social networks that take more out of you than they ever can give back.

Book publishing is just a larger version of fanzine publishing, and in fact grew out of it before fanzines ever existed!  The Gothic Novel - check the history of that back to the early 1800's.  Go back to the 1600's and the printing press revolution.  The American Revolution and the "Broadside."

Think about it.  That new technology was first adopted by amateurs doing nothing but social networking with a tiny, closed group of people who liked to read.

PUBLISHING is nothing but a giant social network of networks, just like the N3F.

They've tried to make it into a business, just as the marketers are trying to make social networking into a business.

It's a doomed effort.

Why?

Because of the nature of the social network.

If I'm right, and publishing is nothing but a social network (so large we can't see it as one), then the beneficiary of all the effort poured into publishing by writers, editors, publishers, marketers, publicists - the whole apparatus - only benefits SOCIETY.

The beneficiary of the effort expended is the network itself, which out-lives the individuals and carries their immortality forward.

The end result of all these social networks?  We call it "Civilization."

People think the definition of "Civilization" is from the root of the word and means CITY-DWELLERS.  (remember we started this with my September 2010 review column on books about cities being defended from paranormal threats).

Under the old tax law, publishing was treated like a social network that existed solely for the benefit of society.

Under the new tax law, publishing can survive only as a profitable business.

If I'm right, publishing is doomed until the tax law is changed back.  But I don't think even that will restore things because we now have the whole rebellion against the concept of copyright which is the foundation of publishing.

So the 3 things to connect:

A) Puberty
B) Publishing
C) Commercial exploiting of social networking

Publishing and Puberty - the connection is the way sexuality and the reproductive urge toward immortality creates social networks.

If I'm right, Publishing is a social network, or it used to be and needs to be by its nature.

That's why the concept of copyright has become an odious one.  Publishing practiced as a for-loss industry under the old tax law was justified in using copyright because it contributed more to the social fabric than it took.

Publishing was a member of society, a member of the network.

The tax law changed that viciously and I think forever.

So that now Publishing is the stranger, the intruder, the alien, the tyrant attempting to "lead" the social network without being part of it.  Publishing is no longer the customer but the marketer.  So morally it does not deserve the protection of copyright.

Marketing attempting the commercial exploitation of social networks is just an extension of what the bean counters are trying to do with publishing, make it

Marketing, advertising on TV, on the net, everywhere it intrudes, is attempting to lead without ever having been part of what it is leading.

The resistance is gathering.  It is the same force that a play yard clique generates to repel the outsider, the rejected kid.

And that force is the very force that powers sexuality.

Who will win?  Marketers or sexuality?

Lay your bets, pour yourself whole heartedly into your social networks, build your immortality, then watch to see what happens.

Perhaps the nature of publishing will change so much that it no longer is, at core, a social networking phenomenon.

If that happens, will you still read books?

Or will you just hang out on YouTube and watch videos and movies (yes, they're doing streaming of feature films now). 

Or wait!  YouTube is a social network, isn't it?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

A Fix For Publishing Business Model

I've hit on a new twist for fixing the Fiction Delivery System, and I don't think anyone has yet proposed this.

With imagination and dedication this idea could fix the broken business model of the freelance writer, artist, musician etc.

I also think that the USA would be the very last place it would be applied.

But I think this is the right concept to kick off a brainstorming session.

It would require inventing a totally new business and maybe inventing some professions and possibly some math, too. But the tools to do it all are "on the shelf" being ignored.

Business Model Problem

Let's start with an analysis of the problem as I see it (probably nobody else sees it this way, though).

I call the pipeline that brings us novels on bookstore shelves (or web pages), on paper or by download, on Kindle, Nook, or iPad, and films, TV shows, comics, animation, webisodes, and even fan fiction, the Fiction Delivery System.

Any method of delivering the storyteller's story to the mind of the fiction consumer is part of The Fiction Delivery System.

I have discussed on this blog various tech based developments and social evolutions that are bending, warping and re-inventing the Fiction Delivery System.

Web 2.0
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/worldbuilding-by-committee.html

And other topics a writer must pay attention to, such as the advent of Print on Demand, or Zero-Inventory, or Just In Time inventory, tax laws about inventory, ebook publishing, self-publishing, and all the rest you are familiar with because you read blogs.

If you've been following my analysis of changes in publishing, you are probably bored with it already. And everywhere you turn on the web, someone is bemoaning or embracing the changes which many young people just entering the field don't even see.

Publishers are going bankrupt (still). Distributors are going bankrupt. WRITERS are going bankrupt from "piracy" (iTunes, music torrents etc).

Recently, an article revealed that CD's are for sale on eBay containing ADVANCE REVIEW COPIES of books only in the submission or editing stage at major publishers. Pirated ARCs!

Amazon is fighting for control of ebook pricing, and just publically conceded to MacMillan -- yet, who knows where that will lead?

Meanwhile, at conventions around the country, I've been on many panels about the entire philosophical issue of Intellectual Property Rights.

This is a serious generation-gap abstract philosophical (maybe even Religious) issue that has financial repercussions, and worse reaches into the very foundation of the concept "business model."

Bewilderment and panic set in at the top of the Music Industry when pirated downloads via peer-to-peer networks first appeared.

The film industry soon followed as videos of pre-release or award-nominated films appeared everywhere. People recorded films off movie theater screens and hawked them on street corners. The Chinese and other countries grabbed feeds and distributed not just music and films, but software, complete with fancy imitation labels!

Some other countries do not share the USA's worship of Intellectual Property Rights (copyright, trademark, patent).

The older generations in the USA see "piracy" of books, DVD's, hardware, software as a crime.

Younger people and people in start-up countries with different philosophies see it as their Inalienable Right.

It's not "piracy" to them. It's "just business" and they are bewildered how anyone could object to what they do.

Worse yet, they are offended, horrified, repulsed, by the very impulse that makes us object to their behavior. How dare anyone restrict access to the product of anyone's imagination?

Really, philosophy does work like that. Emotionally, non-verbally. It really does.

A "philosophy" is not something you just espouse or learn. A philosophy is the very root of your personal Identity. It operates your emotions, motivates your actions, and provides the satisfaction when you achieve a concrete result.

Philosophy is what life is all about. But it only works when it's unconscious. Hence it is magically warded by a wall of boredom. You literally can not pay attention to a discussion of a philosophy that actually resides in your unconscious and does operate you.

Most Religions are Philosophies. What they teach you overtly is not necessarily what the religion is actually powered by. The real power (as in film scripts and books) is the subtext.

When the subtext is made into surface text, it becomes boring or ridiculous. Few people can focus the spotlight of consciousness on their personal philosophy and still espouse it consciously and subconsciously. Those few are generally regarded as "Philosophers."

After all the muttering and chattering I've done on this blog about the mechanisms within the Fiction Delivery System and about what the impact of technology and the social-networking phenomenon are changing, you can see that I like philosophy, I use it, and I inject it into fiction both on purpose and subconsciously.

If boredom didn't drive you away from all my posts on the Writer's Business Model, you should be able to see where I'm headed with this post. I didn't see it though until just last night.

We have the elements in place, we have the tools on the shelf, and we have the answer to what's wrong with the Fiction Delivery System and the writer's business model.

Pieces of this solution have been discussed all over the web on blogs, especially by Agents and publishers and writers. But pieces are now turning up in the major media (like Business Week, Forbes, The New York Times, and on and on).

Here is one article you should force your way through if you possibly can. The boredom wards are immense on this one, and I barely made it myself. Everything in me screams NO NO NO!!! But actually, this is a priceless opportunity to solve the real problem with the writer's business model.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution

That's the top of a long feature article in Wired Magazine.

Skim fast through to page 5 of this article,

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/5/

then dig in and think hard as you read the part that starts thusly:

---Quote from Wired---------
In the mid-1930s, Ronald Coase, then a recent London School of Economics graduate, was musing over what to many people might have seemed a silly question: Why do companies exist? Why do we pledge our allegiance to an institution and gather in the same building to get things done? His answer: to minimize “transaction costs.” When people share a purpose and have established roles, responsibilities, and modes of communication, it’s easy to make things happen. You simply turn to the person in the next cubicle and ask them to do their job.

But several years ago, Bill Joy, one of the cofounders of Sun Microsystems, revealed the flaw in Coase’s model. “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” he rightly observed. Of course, that had always been true, but before, it hardly mattered if you were in Detroit and someone better was in Dakar; you were here and they were there, and that was the end of it. But Joy’s point was that this was changing. With the Internet, you didn’t have to settle for the next cubicle. You could tap the best person out there, even if they were in Dakar.

---End Quote From Wired--------

This is the SOLUTION to the writer's business model problem, and to the publisher's problem, and to the Cable TV Operator's problem, and to Film Studio's problem, and even the Music Publisher's problem. This is the solution to structuring the advertising supported business model to apply to FICTION, but it doesn't look like it on the surface.

If you've read all my previous columns, you may be able to get ahead of me here and see the solution instantly.

Read carefully down to where it says:

---Quote from Wired--------

Let me tell you my own story. Three years ago, out on a run, I started thinking about how cheap gyroscope sensors were getting. What could you do with them? For starters, I realized, you could turn a radio-controlled model airplane into an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone. It turned out that there were plenty of commercial autopilot units you could buy, all based on this principle, but the more I looked into them, the worse they appeared. They were expensive ($800 to $5,000), hard to use, and proprietary. It was clear that this was a market desperate for competition and democratization — Moore’s law was at work, making all the components dirt cheap. The hardware for a good autopilot shouldn’t cost more than $300, even including a healthy profit. Everything else was intellectual property, and it seemed the time had come to open that up, trading high margins for open innovation.

----End Quote from Wired-----

Now you have to read very very carefully all the way to the end of the article, then scan the comments (look at how many and how vehement those comments are. The emotion expressed betrays the existence of a philosophical sore point).

The Philosophical Argument in our society is OVER.

Any futurologist worth her salt will see that instantly, and the best futurologists today work in Paranormal Romance, (believe it or not).

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

All fiction is nothing but intellectual property. It has no substance. There is nobody in the next cubicle. Physical location does not matter. Couple that to the idea that intellectual property is of no value in the marketplace, and you have your solution to the business model problem posed by loss of control of copying.

A long time ago, Fred Pohl and John Campbell, two Science Fiction magazine editors of gigantic intellect and far-ranging abilities, taught us a problem solving technique to use in plotting stories. Take two insoluble problems. Put them in the same story. Let them solve each other.

The principle comes from Engineering, not fiction, and is one of those patterns you see reflected between reality and fiction that makes fiction believable.

Engineering creates concrete objects, things you can sell. Fiction does not, and therein lies the problem with the writer's business model.

Fiction is ideas. Emotions. Philosophy. Fiction is reality fabricated, warp and woof, into a rich, deep but imaginary construct that can have the power of philosophy (or even Religion) to bend and shape people's real lives.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/worldbuilding-for-science-fiction.html
is the post where I describe theme, philosophy, and the warp and woof fabric of fiction.

Worse yet, what the writer imagines and crafts into that fabric, can't even be proprietary because it's constructed "off the shelf" -- out of archetypes that can be unshelved and used by anyone, out of philosophies, pantheons, and cosmologies rooted in the ancient histories of all peoples around the world.

That's why film producers will not and can not read unsolicited manuscripts.
Ideas can't be copyrighted. Even the details can't be owned, the whole construct can't be owned. Any well trained writer could have created exactly the novel you created. And if you admit to the mystical view of the universe, it's even likely you lifted your construct out of someone else's imagination on the astral plane.

I've explained how that works in previous columns. It does work. It's happened to me. It's real. The stuff we feel so proprietary about actually drifts around in some non-material dimension, a shelf, where anyone can access it.

In fact, the most lucrative fictional fabrics are the ones MORE people have already accessed, and have possession of in their dreams and imagination. Popularity happens because more people recognize their own dreams within the fiction being offered.

I've explained that Marion Zimmer Bradley taught me that the book the reader reads is not the book the writer wrote (which she learned from her forebears). Everyone who reads just uses the story as a template to enjoy themselves in their own dreamscape.

Not only is fiction nothing but "intellectual property" (which this article in Wired has declared worthless in monetary terms), it is not now and never has been proprietary.

Seen that way, from a mystical dimension of archetypes and human spiriit, the entire idea that your dreams already belong to me and therefore I don't have to pay you for them makes perfect sense.

So how can we, as writers, publishers, artists, musicians, film producers, duplicate what this man has done with his drone-piloting circuit board business?

For a couple of decades (long enough for a whole generation of entreprenuers to grow up and start businesses) we have seen "open source" software leading the way. You give away free the intellectual property component.

How can we do that if the intellectual property isn't a component but the entire creation?

Newspapers led the way giving away intellectual property, radio blazed the trail, TV followed, today Newspapers are trailing the pack getting onto the web with "editions."

It's the advertising model.

But remember BBC? It was tax revenue supported, not advertising supported for decades. The ultra-conservative British are only now edging into advertising.

The world doesn't move in lockstep, but though the USA led in the advertising-supported business model, it very well may trail in the Open Source business model.

Unless, that is, the right person or persons read this blog and grab my idea of how it can be done. (I freely give it to anyone who wants to make the world safe for fiction creators!)

Now that you've read that entire article in Wired, stop and think of all the other things about "e-book piracy" you've read lately (there's been a lot of discussion on the EPIC Lists recently, too).

We're fighting to stop piracy. Theft offends our philosophy-bone.

Look again what this fellow in Wired, Chris Anderson, accomplished.

You give away the intellectual property, but you SELL the "thing itself" - a physical object.

That's how you make money in the new world. Selling physical objects cleverly assembled from off the shelf bits and open source intellectual property.

Physical objects add value to the Annual Gross Human Product.

Intellectual inventions and ideas are no longer valuable in trade, no longer add to the quality of human life and therefore have no intrinsic value.

How can a writer apply that concept?

We don't make things; we make ideas. We just arrange "off-the-shelf" components known as words using public domain templates known as archetypes.

The Advertising Model

That's it. That's the solution. But the current method is backwards.

Currently, someone has a physical object to sell. They use fiction to attract eyes to their product pitch known as a commercial or web-advertisement.

"I Love Lucy" sells toothpaste, not laughs.

Like all TV shows, it was invented to glue eyeballs to the screen during commercials, to deliver an audience to toothpaste advertisers. That's what radio and TV fiction is for, and the tradition goes back to Charles Dickens with novels serialized in newspapers to glue subscribers to a newsfeed sold at a profit.

Now look at ad supported TV fiction and think "reverse video" (like what happens when you use your mouse to highlight some text and the background and text color switch places).

It becomes fiction-supported TV ads.

Now we're getting close to applying the thinking behind that Wired Magazine article.

At present, the bits of story are almost smaller than the commercial breaks.

It's getting so hard to follow a TV episode, what with all the long breaks, that people are willing to wait and buy the DVD of the whole season, sans commercials.

People willingly pay for premium channels - but those channels are in financial difficulty as are the cable operators.

People want whole movies, not sliced and diced to fit in commercials.

Already you can buy TV's and Blu-ray boxes that are internet ready and configured to deliver a specific brand of streaming movie service (Netflix, Blockbuster -- proprietary lock on the hardware just like phone companies and cell phones!) Read about it in Consumer Reports:

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/electronics-computers/tvs-services/tvs/index.htm

The October 2010 issue of Consumer Reports features BEST TVS, and has instructions how to connect your TV to the Internet.

This proprietary-lock business model is at odds with the Open Source business model, and a major armageddon is in progress right over our heads. Just let the problems solve each other, and don't forget "Love Conquers All" is always the solution to fear.

Just look at the magnitude of the storm of change and resistance to change sweeping through the fabric of our world when it comes to advertising.

A recent Federal Supreme Court ruling struck down a law preventing corporations from spending unlimited amounts of money in support of a political candidate or policy. That'll be fixed by a new law, but look at the TERROR that ruling evoked and remember philosophy drives our emotions.
You've never seen the like of this much terror at a Horror film's first showing!

Why? Because politicians know that the target of advertising is under 40, that we have a demographic bulge of voting age young people, and that those people will do whatever the most ads say they should. (they WILL).

The obvious solution escapes the politicians because it would prevent them from selling their own messages to those voters by being the most prevalent voice.

So nobody is even talking about training kids in how to make commercials, thereby immunizing them to flimflammery.

I know this works because I trained my children that way. Kids can be trained to be commercial-immune by age 7 or 8.

But that panic among politicians is very real. They'll make a law to fix the ridiculous imbalance again, don't worry about that. Our interest here is the whole advertising process, and especially the business model of fiction supported advertising. (not advertising supported fiction, you see?)

Look at the degree of panic among those politicians and you can see the whole philosophy-driven panic means more than is apparent on the surface.

Something is at the breaking point in advertising business model.

Politicians can see we've got an emergency on our hands and you should never waste a good emergency.

Already, it's been proven by scientific research and admitted by major advertisers and advertising creation firms that people over 40 don't change their behavior as a result of seeing an ad (no matter how many repetitions).

You can't "sell" to older people, but they're the ones with money (and credit). This even holds true online. I've filled out surveys time and again only to get to the last web page and be told they have nothing to advertise to me. Hard scientific research shows its a waste of money to advertise to a certain cut of the demographic (basically readers).

Suppose advertising could sell your product to over and under 40 demographic?

If we turn the advertising model to "reverse video" - or "negative" - we might see the solution, provided we understand the problem.

Think fiction supported advertising.

Reverse the business model. Get out of the way and let the problems solve each other. Love Conquers All.

That reversal makes our intellectual property of monetary value again.

But you'll understand this only if you understand "what" fiction is and what a person does when imbibing fiction.

Fiction is usually regarded as a luxury. It's not.

Fiction is a necessity of life.

Why is fiction a necessity?

Because fiction is the food that philosophy feeds upon. And as mentioned above and in other blog posts here, philosophy is the life's blood of fiction as it forms and shapes the theme of any story.

People need fiction to keep them in touch with their own philosophy and to keep their philosophy in touch with reality.

Fiction keeps you sane.

Fiction is never "escapist" as it is so often dismissed as. Many readers feel they are reading to "escape" but once you understand what you are escaping to, the exercise of reading a novel takes on a whole new meaning.

Life without fiction is like sleep without dreaming.

Dreaming is not an "escape" from sleeping.

Fiction is not an "escape" from life.

Dreaming completes the exercise of sleep just as fiction completes the exercise of living.

Fiction leads you to an operational and usable model of reality you can live by (or die by). Fiction does that by taking you far, far outside your own reality so you can look back on it and see it as a whole. Fiction can never let you "escape" your reality. It rubs your nose in your reality by revealing a truth you could never see while walking in your own moccasins.

However, the "advertising supported fiction" business model has distorted that process of fiction imbibing.

The very point of imbibing fiction has been blunted by the INTERRUPTIONS for ad pitches, and those ad pitches can only be worth the money it costs to deliver them if the audience is young, so TV fiction is watered down.

Films get watered down, too, because eventually they must be shown on TV with commercial interruptions.

Interruptions and distractions cause people to make mistakes.

Texting while driving can be fatal, remember, and recent studies show that making laws against it don't prevent accidents.

Studies have shown that multi-tasking workers are less efficient than those who do one thing at a time, concentrating. (I've lost the link to the most recent study but I recall that I did place it in one of my previous blog posts here.)

Distracted drivers kill themselves and others via mistakes.

Consider the psychological condition of people who are awakened from sleep each time they enter a REM sleep cycle. (Sleep apnea can do that to you.)

As you must not be distracted from your work or your dreams, likewise you must not be distracted from your fiction.

With distractions, you miss the nutrient value of the philosophy. And you miss the pleasure of imbibing your fiction.

What if you could come up with an advertising model that does not distract viewers or readers from the fiction?

What if you give up the idea of using fiction as bait for eyeballs?

What would you replace the advertising supported model with in order to prevent distractions?

What if you could train young people to be immune to commercials (so we don't need laws restricting the amounts anyone can spend on political ads -- more money circulating is good for the economy, more points argued is good for democracy) and still move product to consumers efficiently?

What if you abolished commercials totally?

How could people who create material products induce people to buy their products without commercials? Without web-ads? Without animations on YouTube? Without distracting drivers with billboards. Without intruding on one activity to induce people to engage in another activity?

Note that film producers who are swimming in pitches thrown at them from every direction become so pitch-deaf they hire interns out of school to read pitches and the interns soon become too jaded to see a great script among the dross.

Commercials are pitches. They are desperate, frantic attempts to make you do something you aren't of a mind to do, at the moment anyway.

What if pitching was to become obsolete?

The film industry is moving in that direction with online websites that vet film scripts and provide a marketplace for producers to go find the exact script they want to produce without being bombarded with irrelevant pitches.

What could possibly replace pitching toothpaste? How could the world of commerce function without commercials?

Turn that question around. Why are industries still clinging hysterically to the commercials model of advertising, even though the world has changed and advertising is less and less effective simply because people get used to it and tune it out? When was the last time you were reading a news story and clicked on a banner ad for makeup?

That frantic battering consumers are taking is why congress was considering a law to prevent cable stations and TV stations from raising the volume on the sound when commercials come on. It annoys and distracts -- but they need to raise the volume to retain your attention as everyone in the room moves and talks during the distraction of a commercial break. People just totally dismiss the commercials. But those commercial breaks are still distractions, interruptions to be endured with an ever-increasing pricetag on our health and well being.

Why are these companies with good things to sell, things we need and want, so insistent on alienating their customers?

And Here It Is -- A New Business Model

If manufacturers of goods to sell can understand that fiction is also a product, a commodity, of value to a customer only when properly assembled (as a car is of more value when all assembled than it is as a stack of boxes of parts), then they will adopt this model.

Fiction imbibing is all about emotion. Writers work hard to get the rhythm of variance of emotional pitch paced just right. Suppose you had to endure six commercial breaks during the hour you reserve for sex with your partner? There's a reason the highest praise for a book is "I couldn't put it down" or "It kept me up past bedtime."

Continuity is absolutely essential to a good fictional experience.

It's all about building an emotional reaction with depth and texture, and you can't achieve that with interruption.

Think what it's like to be adding a long column of numbers in your head, only to be interrupted by a phone call, and have to start over, to be interrupted by the doorbell, and start over, to be interrupted by having to go to the bathroom. Maybe you'll get that column of numbers added, true, but how much less time and effort would it take if there were no interruptions?

Commercial breaks cost our society more than they are worth.

Think about how "the arts" functioned before commercialization. Artists (painters, musicians, actors) had Patrons who supported them with room and board etc., then presented their Artistic Product to their closest friends, as a prestige point.

Use that old idea, together with new technology, and think about what the Wired article said that I quoted above. Here it is again:
----------Wired Quote--------
But several years ago, Bill Joy, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, revealed the flaw in Coase’s model. “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” he rightly observed. Of course, that had always been true, but before, it hardly mattered if you were in Detroit and someone better was in Dakar; you were here and they were there, and that was the end of it. But Joy’s point was that this was changing. With the Internet, you didn’t have to settle for the next cubicle. You could tap the best person out there, even if they were in Dakar.
--------END QUOTE-------------

Proximity no longer is an issue.

That is such a startling idea. Think about it.

In Radio, and at the beginning of TV broadcast, one company would sponsor an entire show and become identified with that show.

Today "product placement" is starting to retread that concept. A Hero would drive a certain type of car, use a brand of telephone, eat a certain breakfast food.

Proximity doesn't count any more. You don't have to have your commercial inserted between scenes of a TV show. You don't even have to have your product be seen onscreen with The Hero.

Look at how people actually shop for things they need and want.

People focus on getting the shopping done NOW, and reading a book LATER.

When you're ready to buy something, you go to the store or website, use a search engine to find the best price or read the comments to find the best brands. You survey all the alternatives on the supermarket shelf, and pick a package that is either familiar (a replacement for what you used up) or pick something that looks interesting (an alternative to what you used up).

Or you have a problem in your house, and go to Home Depot to search for a solution, not even knowing if one exists. At that moment, your mind is open to suggestions, and that's when you want to see pitches for products, but only for products that address your problem.

When you want to buy something, you want to buy it. Either enjoying a leisurly shopping spree or dash in and out to get the boring chore of buying over with.

When you want to "buy" fiction, you sit down in your favorite chair and flip on the TV, DVD, DVR, or pick up a book, or flip on your Kindle and download the latest in a series you're following - whatever source, doesn't matter. Your mindset is the same. "I need a good story."

SHOPPING: "let's see what they've got" --- or "get me out of here fast."

FICTION TIME: "Now, what's been going on with my favorite character" or "Now I get to read this new vampire novel all the TWILIGHT fans are raving about."

When you're shopping, you're shopping.

When you're imbibing, you're imbibing.

Distracting you from your purpose will not win your approval, loyalty, or public support.

When you are young, and just being socialized, the first thing your parents teach you after you learn to talk is "don't interrupt your elders" -- which eventually becomes the teenager's skill of joining a knot of kids standing around the recess yard and just talking. You have to learn to join that conversation without interrupting, without diverting attention to yourself, without distracting them from the subject, without changing the subject.

What advertisers on TV do today is CHANGE THE SUBJECT.

That shows a lack of basic socialization.

Here's a blog entry I did on what business people do wrong when they try to adopt a social networking strategy, and why they do it wrong.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/marketing-via-social-networking.html

Even netizens learn, first and foremost, when you join a List, you lurk for a while and find out who's who and what they're talking about. You don't post off-topic without profuse apology and explanation of why this item is important to these people.

Good grief, Romance Writers have been exemplifying this technique of how to open an acquaintance with a stranger you've fallen in love with at first sight for generations! You'd think advertisers would have learned that by now.

Don't interrupt. Don't distract. Don't change the subject.

There are some fancy multi-syllabic names for the kinds of mental abberations that cause people to be unable to learn those simple rules of behavior.

But to date, advertisers have steadfastly ignored those rules because it seems to make them a profit. Suppose they could make a bigger profit by obeying those basic social rules?

How could they possibly do it, though?

You can't answer that question. You can't solve that puzzle. There is no answer. Now. Yet.

There's no way to solve that problem now because we are missing an entire profession, an entire industry actually.

The reason we're missing this industry (that would connect fiction imbibers with companies who have concrete products to sell) is a basic American attitude -- the one the Supreme Court highlighted with the decision to allow unlimited advertising dollars to flow from corporate coffers in political campaigns.

Free Speech.

Why is Free Speech such a core value it had to be in the Bill of Rights?

Free Speech is one of the results of the dual-valued philosophy behind the Constitution -- The Majority Rules, but The Individual Has Rights that the majority can not take away.

You can say anything you want. But you can't exercise that right in my house, my private domain, without my permission.

PRIVACY is a right which manifests in the prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure of property, and the protection of intellectual property under the exact same terms as that of personal property (house, land, possessions).

That attitude toward individual privacy (no wiretapping etc), make the solution to the Fiction Writer's Business Model Problem totally impossible to think, nevermind actually do.

The solution requires invasion of privacy and something akin to wiretapping your phone.

But it's already happening in the inexorable push to make a profit in an internet based, Open Source world.

Everyone you deal with has electronic records on you, and the prospects for "Big Brother Is Watching You" are not looming ahead of us any more -- they are far behind in what seems Ancient History to today's 20 year olds.

Traffic cameras, security cameras, Airport Security screening, Google, medical records, court records, media outlet file tape, ATM transaction records, bank records, cell phone records, gps on cell phones, -- you are always under surveillance and it's getting tighter and more public.

Anonymity in public and personal privacy have not existed for decades already, and a whole generation has grown up with this technology. Younger people don't see it as a problem, so it's inevitable that this solution will be implemented at some point fairly soon, when enough old folks have died off.

And here it is.

Connect the grocery checkout counter record of what you bought, of your buying patterns assembled every time you use the store discount card tab on your key chain, or make a website purchase, to your TV set or Cable Box or Sat box, or e-reading device (Kindle, Smartphone, Nook, whatever).

That's it, the whole problem is solved.

One more link in our chain of electronic records, and BOOM - no more distractions, no more interruptions.

How does it work to sell product?

Simple.

When you're ready to buy something, you are "in a place" mentally and physically where you are receptive to suggestions and ads would not be interruptions or distractions.

You walk into a brick and mortar store or click into a website. There you search for products and actively pay attention to what's pitched at you. The data gathered on you in the past allows the ads pitched at you to be chosen by characteristics you've evidenced in the past.

Already Google and especially BING customize ads and re-arrange what choices are offered to you in answer to a query according to other websites you've visited (Google is now using what sites you click on via twitter to customize responses to you).

It's getting harder, but you can still break out of your mold and explore other options. We may need laws to prevent shutting you into too small a box.

Using this fiction supported advertising model, when you are receptive to finding products that solve your problem, you are presented with options that would actually be useful to you. No distractions. No pitches. Just solid, reliable, true information about the products that solve your problem "what's for dinner?" "what sort of shoes can I afford to wear with this dress?"

As you troll through the supermarket, local mall, or websites, you choose products that suit you at prices you agree to, and you know all the alternatives.

A record is kept of what you buy, from whom, when, at what intervals.

With each product you purchase, you earn "points." (like frequent flyer miles, or credit card points -- an account is kept of what you've earned).

These points are TV SHOW POINTS (or streaming, dvd, dvr, ebook, Kindle, or even hardcopy book points).

They are worth such-and-so-many hours of commercial free viewing or reading.

Your life is totally changed from it is today -- when you're shopping, you're shopping. When you're viewing, you're viewing.

Watching the Shopping Network on TV or internet would probably count as shopping - and what you buy adds points to your Fiction Points account.

I can see two ways for this to work.

Either large companies like Proctor and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, Heinz, etc would award points for buying their products that you can use to see only certain TV shows that they sponsor by paying for production (or buy certain novels from certain publishers that they sponsor by paying for production).

Or a new kind of business would be founded to award points no matter what you buy -- but maybe apportion more points today for Tide than for Arm&Hammer depending on deals with sponsors?

The new business would be a clearing house. It would contract with Proctor and Gamble (etc) to get money, apportion money to fiction-creators, and contract with consumers who establish an account, like a credit-card account, and keep track of what you buy so it can award you access to fiction via points you earn by buying certain brands.

Both these concepts would probably fight it out in the marketplace, likely with other more "proprietary" based concepts.

The stand-alone (off the shelf) technologies to do this already exist. They just have to be linked up (as the fellow made new circuit boards to create his drone controllers).

a) Data about your buying habits from credit card, online sites, supermarket, mall, etc purchases, is all electronicized now.

b)Data about your viewing habits is available to your cable, sat, etc data supplier. Smartphone surfing, computer surfing, etc -- your IP address ID's you, as on social networks. You are tracked.

c) Companies that produce advertising (political organizations too) know how masses of people move -- they get that from a lot of data about individuals.

Connect the purchase-point activity to the DVR attached to your TV (or whatever new architecture we adopt).

Turn on your TV to watch, say SANCTUARY (as discussed last week

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/religion-in-science-fiction-romance.html )

..and you see it without commercials if you bought Tide, shopped a Toyota showroom, had your BMW serviced, or bought a Big Mac.

If you didn't buy the right product or brand of product, I'd guess you'd be interrupted with even more pitching commercials than now.

After enough of that punishment, you would start to pay attention to what brands provided you with commercial free versions of your favorite shows.

Since most of us time-shift using a recorder of some sort, the shows would be delivered to your automated recording device (or online library of shows) commercial free.

If you're reading ebooks (or even hardcover books) you would not pay money for them. You'd pay with points earned by buying whatever brands are connected to the fiction you want. The writers and publishers would be paid by the brand that sponsors the fiction.

It's not so different from the way film and TV gets produced. Production companies contract with networks and get money to create the show which the networks broadcast and sell commercial time during. Except, this way, there are no commercial breaks and no waste of money by advertisers.

Now how would you know, standing in the breakfast cereal aisle, which brand of cereal to buy to get the show you want commercial free?

Each package would carry a symbol showing what points you get for buying it.

That's why I think a new business is needed.

This would be an IT business that awards and redeems your purchase-points so seamlessly and automatically you don't know it's there.

You wouldn't have to know which show you want when choosing laundry detergent. You get points no matter what you buy, then you spend them to see whatever you want to see.

There might be several such competing IT businesses, each for a type of show (non-fiction, news, Science shows, Education shows you get college credit for, whatever categories shows fall into).

There might be several icons on a package indicating what credit you get for purchasing the product.

Commercials and pitches for products would be presented to you only while you're in the store, and could contain info on what shows you get for buying the product.

But they would be pitching at you while you're paying attention and deliberating over what to buy. They don't waste their money; you don't waste your time, and Congress doesn't need a law to prevent raising the sound volume during commercials.

TV channels, Cable providers, Sat providers, airwaves providers, even maybe production companies like Disney, would contract with these IT services to get money to make shows and deliver them to you. The IT service would get money from product makers that the product makers now waste on advertising to rooms full of people who went to the bathroom or hit fast-forward.

You buy your fiction (uninterrupted delivery) by buying a product.

Now there are two big holes in this idea.
1) Disparity of income creates disparity in buying habits
2) Niche fiction, things that aren't aimed at a mass market, might not get sponsored well enough to be cheap enough. Popularity would still govern availability of fiction.

The higher your income, the more you buy.

The people lower on the economic scale don't spend as much money. So they'd have less access to the very thing they need most to get higher on the economic scale -- fiction that inspires, non-fiction that instructs etc.

Those who spend a lot would have more viewing-credits than they need.

Those who spend little would have too few.

Free market forces would create a trading marketplace for these viewing-credits.

I would suggest the Free Public Library system should be the place to handle the trading since they already deal in fiction.

Most libraries are set up online already -- you can order or renew a book online at my library and the whole library system catalog is online so you can reserve a book your branch doesn't have. And most libraries now have computers set up for internet access via your library card (those that don't will soon have).

So a virtual or real visit to your local library could let you buy the viewing credits you didn't earn by purchasing advertised products.

So if you have no money, what would you buy viewing credits with?

What would people who have a lot of money, profligate spending habits, and a surplus of viewing credits want from you?

For that matter, what would advertisers want from you if you don't buy much?

Maybe some profligate spenders would donate their points to the library, as they now donate once-read books that are nearly new. The library would charge a few cents, as they now sell donated $30 books for $1.50 to sell them to you.

Or maybe the Library would use the points to provide you with access to the fiction of your choice (on-demand style).

Or other things might be bartered -- like filling out a survey, participating in a product trial, etc. I'm sure imagination will supply bartering tokens we could not possibly think of today. (maybe you could pay college tuition with viewing credits one day).

Uninterrupted viewing of the Superbowl could be worth something (though I know lots of people watch for the commercials).

This is a half-baked idea. But it could be applied to solve the publisher's problem, the warehouser's problem, the distributor's problem, the retail-bookstore's problem, the self-publisher's problem.

Writers, publishers, bookstores, etc are selling uninterrupted fictional experiences more than they are "intellectual property licenses".

Piracy is a problem only if your business model is to create and sell intellectual property.

If you get rid of the idea that intellectual property is personal property or proprietary property which you have a right to license (or not) as you choose, the whole picture shifts markedly.

If books, novels, e-books, stories of all sorts in all media could adapt to a "story-supported-advertising" business model, we might survive as writers.

A self-publisher could contract with one of these IT organizations so that people who buy manufactured products could use their fiction points to buy e-books, Print on Demand hardcopy, or other formats just as they would to view a TV show uninterrupted.

Writers wouldn't be selling their "intellectual property" at all. They'd give away their stories, and get paid for giving them away by manufacturers who see their products being bought in order to get access to the story.

The IT business wouldn't have to denominate the points in US$. The points would be like frequent flyer points, just points until you redeem them for Southwest flights or American Airlines flights. Thus they would become a de-facto international currency, and e-books in any language could be obtained using points earned buying groceries in any country.

Like the Wired article said, location doesn't matter any more.

The key points to this concept:

1) Intellectual Property is not personal or proprietary and is worthless

2) People want to do what they want to do when they want to do it and no distractions (sort of like courtship or even like sex). In other words, the driving is the distraction to the texting, so we need cars that drive themselves, which we almost have.

3) Fiction is a necessary nutrient, as vital as food, clothing, shelter, water, air, R.E.M. sleep, to sustaining life and sanity. Satisfaction requires no-distraction time-blocks.

4) Fiction is nothing but intellectual property and is therefore worthless

5) Uninterrupted TIME BLOCKS are of actual monetary value.

6) Given today's Information Technology based civilization, a lifestyle composed of uninterrupted time blocks is a commodity that can be monetized.

7) Connect point of sale information with point of fiction imbibing information and create a business model like the kind of "circuit boards" the fellow in the Wired article created -- don't charge for the intellectual property of fiction, but for the lack of distraction while imbibing it (i.e. charge for the circuit board not what it contains).

8) A new generation won't mind the violation of the basic notion upon which the USA was founded -- personal privacy and individual freedom. The new 40-year-olds in twenty years will be as vulnerable to this marketing technique as the 18 year olds are vulnerable to today's commercial-driven airwaves. But you won't need laws restricting how much money can be spent advocating a political position -- political ads belong in stores, not in stories.

I think that would fix the fiction delivery system and everything I see as wrong with it thusly:

a) it would provide a monetary base to produce and purvey fiction

b) it would provide direct feedback between fiction-imbiber and investor (manufacturer with something to sell).

c) it would stop the fragmentation of fiction into tiny chunks, forcing themes to be simpler and less satisfying than they could be. Thus fiction could become more effective as a lift to the spirits.

d) it would foster long-attention-span instead of the short-attention-span fostered in children who grew up on Sesame Street which has segments structured like commercials (or the TV Show HEROES).

but it would of course create new problems.

a) how do writers get readers to choose to read their books, spending points on them?

b) how do writers with a tiny audience survive the forces of mass marketing?

c) how do niche products attract sponsoring and keep their prices down since they can only reach a small market? How do you create these small markets? (social networking is the current best answer).

A host of other problems are inherent in this concept, but the current method is likewise fraught with flaws.

As Wired points out, this new economy is already revving up to full speed right alongside the old fogies clinging to the old economy.

My question is, "Has the old anything ever won out over the new anything?"

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com