Depiction Part 29 - Depicting The Global Village

Depiction
Part 29
Depicting The Global Village
by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

The index to previous posts in the Depiction series are here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/index-to-depiction-series-by-jacqueline.html

These days, people are saying that globalism is dead, or that we have to fight back against the protectionism model that is emerging.  Protectionism has been tried, and it has failed abysmally (several times).

How do we explain this argument to a visiting Alien from Outer Space?  Can Love conquer even the chasm of misunderstandings between our visiting Alien and our warring human factions?

If we can't even build a Global Village, how can Earth be allowed to join the Interstellar Community?

Why can't we build a global village?  What would a global village be like if we could.

In other words, how do we depict the Earth of the future that is ready to be invited to join the Galactic Village of a thousand species?

What exactly is a village?

We've all read hundreds of Romance novels set in small towns, or about Characters who come from small towns.

The TV Series Murder She Wrote is set in a small town, in case you want a reminder.  It is a town with an amazingly high murder rate, but that's the story.
https://www.amazon.com/Murder-She-Wrote-Angela-Lansbury/dp/B00E8AVN9U/

A village is smaller than a small town.

It's more like a small Church Community - at most a few dozen families.  And even such a Community generally forms groups or circles somewhat isolated from each other.

Sociological research indicates this phenomenon may be rooted in human physiology -- which if true shows you how to create your new Aliens as people who do not have this limit and can't quite grasp what it is all about.

Here is a quote from a Wikipedia article on DUNBAR'S NUMBER -- some theoretical research from the 1990's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

--------quote----------
Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships — relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.[1][2] This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size.[3] By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain only 150 stable relationships.[4] Dunbar explained it informally as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar."[5]

Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.[6][7] Dunbar's number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.

Dunbar theorized that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained." On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues, such as high school friends, with whom a person would want to reacquaint himself or herself if they met again.[8]
----------end quote------------

It's a long article with lots of links you can get lost in.

But there is enough to give you an idea of what to change to create your Aliens.

Remember the rule in creating Aliens for a novel is that you can change JUST ONE THING for the whole novel. Just one postulate differing from science as it is known by your readership is enough to support a 100,000 word novel.  In a series, you can add one more with each novel.

So a "Village" of humans consists of maybe 100 to 250 individuals.

The "small town effect" of everyone knowing everyone else's business and gossiping about it might interlace a few multiples of 250 -- and there would be people "out of the loop" on some bits of juicy gossip.

Somewhere between 100 and 250 humans, a group will become aware that they need to "get organized."  They need to choose a leader, form a committee, create a group treasury to pay for stuff the group owns.

Here is a book series about a very OLD small town where a very new, young, Jewish Community is forming, choosing leaders and forming committees.  Everyone who has joined a new church will recognize this social process, but if you like Mystery (and what science fiction aficionado does not!), then you'll love this old series.

https://www.amazon.com/Friday-Rabbi-Slept-Small-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B00ZJZH6XK/

That's the first in the series and there are more in e-book, audible, and paperback.  The Rabbi Small novels are a major, famous series would now be classified as "Cozy Mystery" as it is very domestic and the murder mysteries are more like procedurals (though the detective is a Rabbi who solves mysteries with Talmud reasoning).

So this shows you how a small community "gets organized" while embedded in a larger community -- a village within a town.

Below 100 people, humans do not feel an urgent need to "get organized" -- to operate by "law" (written rules, or agreed on rules).  Below 100 people, humans don't seem to need a formally agreed on "leader" or arbiter.

We don't need a "peerage."  Last week we discussed how Kingdoms get organized and how that basic organization of government is being changed from Statistics based government decisions to "Big Data" based government decisions.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/04/theme-archetype-integration-part-5.html

With fewer than 100 people in a human group, you do not need a "peerage."

Above 250 humans, the group will not cohere without an organization core.

And above 300, any Leader will have to appoint or acquire lieutenants.

Think about the dynamics of a group of 100 or so.  I know someone whose family (parents, children, children's children) numbers over 100.  They do an annual group phone call to celebrate the Mother's birthday (as the Father has passed away.)

A family can number over 100 if a couple has 12 children, who all marry and have 8-10 children.  And there can be years when all of them are alive and adult.

It's a family, though, and its organizing principle is likely to be Eldest Rules.

Today, in the U.S.A., that is not always the case, and even large families don't stay in touch.

250 strangers -- such as you might gather on Twitter or Facebook --- will look for some other organizing principle.

For humans, the "village dynamic" is essentially that the culture they hold in common rules them.

A "culture" may be viewed as a set of dynamic, unwritten, non-verbalized laws and rules.  A family has had this set of rules passed down generation to generation -- and it is, "eat your vegetables before desert" and "pick up after yourself" and "don't hit people smaller than you" and "ask to be excused before leaving the table."

Everyone living under one roof (or in the case of a village, the circle of houses next to each other, sharing a commons) knows the operating rules of the group.  And everyone watches out to be sure everyone else follows the rules.

Break a rule of the group, and everyone knows about it before dinner, and you'll never hear the end of it.

In other words, the culture imposes behavior constraints as the price of being resident within that culture and protected by it.

Members may gossip among themselves, but they will close ranks before outsiders.  Before outsiders, no member of the group has ever done a wrong.

We see this all over the world today -- from Chicago gang neighborhoods to villages in the jungles -- humans in small groups close ranks before strangers, but within the group they are savagely strict in imposing the group's rules.

Awash in the sea of humanity, we join our small-group societies, form local communities, and join Facebook Groups.  The first thing you get on joining a Facebook Group is "the rules" (such as no posting self-promotion -- or this group is for self-promotion.  Maybe the rule is no off-topic conversation, or nothing is off-topic here.)

So we're always reaching out and pulling back.  That's how humans behave.

Classically, it has been said the only crime is getting caught.

In a Village community, you know for a fact you will get caught, usually before sundown.  So you don't misbehave.  This is especially true in Gang dominated neighborhoods where enforcement is by violent means.  But in a church community, or say a Masonic Lodge, enforcement is by gossip.

Now, referring to the changes discussed last week as Big Data replaces Statistics as government's source of information on citizens, think about what will be possible with A.I. implementing Big Data.

In a small, old fashioned village, the culture enforces good behavior on individuals because the moment you do something wrong, those you respect and those you despise will all know what you did, and you will be ashamed.

Maybe your Aliens lack the capacity to be ashamed, or to understand how that feeling can deter a human from an otherwise logical course of action.

The human Village is run on statistics, or small data -- most people want you to pick up after yourself, so you do.  "most" being a statistic.

Statistics, as pointed out last week, don't capture information about groups of 250 or fewer individuals.  Government runs the macro environment for the general benefit, and there will be pockets of smaller communities that suffer because of it.

Nobody in Washington D.C. knows who you are or what your problems are, but they say on TV News all the time that they were elected to solve your problems.

What if they did know you?  What if you were friends with them?

That's what Big Data allied with Artificial Intelligence is about to allow.

In that Big Data/A.I. world there will be no criminals who aren't insane.

A mentally ill person will do things that are criminal deeds, but can't actually be held accountable for the criminality.  But healthy people will all behave well.

Why will they all behave well?

Because not only will the people working in government know ALL about everything they do -- but all their neighbors, friends, family, and everyone all around the world will know everything that's going on in their lives.

Facebook already links people like that -- so does LinkedIn, and dating sites, and job search sites.  There will be many other such applications linking small groups of large groups of people.

The moment you step out of line (text while driving, drive drunk, have a screaming fight with your spouse, spank your children in public, fail to show up for a PTA meeting)  -- the WHOLE WORLD will know.

Not that you're a celebrity, but that the deeds will register and disturb everyone.

Already, people post their whole medical drama history online -- gossip about doctors who are helpful (or not) -- chat about hookups, and share political diatribes.

We are becoming a social-global-village.  It is entirely possible that the globalization of business/trade and immigration was just a bit premature, and is now backing off a little to allow the social-globalization to continue.

When we are more aware of what "everyone" is doing around the world, it will be easier to move across borders, work across borders, ship trade goods across borders -- and eventually shift to a globalized currency such as bitcoin or blockchain currency.

So create your Aliens with a trait that humans don't have, an ability to "bond" personally with more than 250 humans and not feel a need to "get organized."

Or perhaps you will genetically alter your humans to be able to bond with larger numbers?

Or maybe your Aliens can bond with fewer -- say 20 people -- before they need objective laws to govern the group?

Take a few thousand Aliens and Humans and strand them on a space station floating between the stars somewhere (maybe they don't know where) and see what happens.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Suspension of Disbelief

I recently read SIRE AND DAMN, the latest (I hope not the last, but I fear it may be) "Dog Lover's Mystery" by Susan Conant. It started me thinking about the conventional but "unrealistic" elements mystery authors have an implicit agreement with readers to treat as believable, similar to the theatrical convention that actors can speak "aside" to the audience without being heard by any other characters onstage.

Most obvious is the convention that makes amateur detective series possible at all. We have to accept as normal that a hero or heroine not involved in law enforcement, an investigative profession, or the criminal underworld encounters dozens of murders in his or her daily life. It's the phenomenon that gives the small Maine town in the TV show MURDER SHE WROTE a higher per-capita homicide rate than Baltimore or Washington. Sometimes the author offers a sort-of rationale for the protagonist's repeated clashes with violent death. Walter Mosley's series protagonist Easy Rawlins, a black man in post-World-War-II southern California, builds a reputation in his community for solving problems people don't trust the police to deal with. Similarly, Barbara Hambly's "free man of color" in antebellum New Orleans, Benjamin January, after unraveling a few mysteries in which he accidentally gets entangled, becomes the person his friends and acquaintances—black, white, and mixed-race—turn to when delicate problems arise. Most "cozy" mystery series, though, simply ask the reader to accept the premise that a chef, a writer, or (as in Susan Conant's series) a dog trainer will trip over a murder or two every few months.

Likewise, we expect the murderer to be revealed as a member of the heroine's circle of acquaintances, not someone from out in left field she's never met. In the classic tradition established by such authors as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, pinning the crime on a character not included in the roster of suspects would be considered unfair to the reader.

The more hard-boiled varieties of murder mysteries, the kind with a higher level of onstage violence, feature another "unrealistic" convention: The hero or heroine usually gets knocked unconscious at least once per book. Yet he or she recovers (sometimes after a credible period of recuperation, sometimes "unrealistically" fast) and soldiers on through adventure after adventure with no sign of permanent brain damage. Given all the recent media publicity about the dangers of concussions (in children's athletic programs, for instance), we have to accept the hero's phenomenal toughness and good luck as part of our genre expectations.

More often than chance would predict, early in the story the protagonist comes across just the bit of specialized or confidential information that she'll later need to solve the case. This example seems to me a borderline case; the effectiveness of suspension of disbelief depends on the author's skill in planting the information in the natural flow of the action. It stretches the bounds of credibility, however, when the amateur detective just happens to overhear a fragment of dialogue that conveys the vital piece of missing information. There was a TV series about a crime-solving priest and nun that, although it was lots of fun, did that kind of thing too often. One of Elizabeth Peters's suspense novels satirizes this device when the heroine sneaks into the villains' lair and eavesdrops on them, lamenting that nobody conveniently says something like, "I will now go to the dungeon and check on our prisoner, who is in the third cell on the right."

In general, any reliance on coincidence to solve the mystery is problematic; an author might be allowed one such incident every now and then, but a little bit of coincidence goes a long way. There can be a fine line between disbelief being suspended and (as Marion Zimmer Bradley used to say) hanged by the neck until dead.

Then there's the direct opposite, Tolkien's "secondary belief," when an author draws the reader so deeply into a fictional world that it comes to life for us. No "suspension" is needed, because we experience the secondary world as a realm that could truly exist on a different plane of reality.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The TV Shows "Leverage" and "Psych"

"Leverage" is a show that could be mistaken for a USA Networks "Characters Welcome" show, but it's a TNT "We know drama" product. One revels in Intimate Adventure and the other avoids it strenuously.

Now remember from last week that the purpose of all fiction is to attract eyeballs so advertisers can warp behavior and extract money from viewers, but that purpose is strenuously resisted by all viewers/readers for a good reason.

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

So they're always trying to figure out "which genre" is more popular, more compelling for audiences.

The only problem is they're going about it all wrong because advertising only modifies the behavior of the younger demographic, not the elder, but the elder is more interested in fiction and has more money to spend (though not discretionary spending money, they buy bigger ticket items, but not much on impulse).

My post here last week gives a suggestion for re-thinking the advertising model.

This time let's look at a couple of TV shows designed to "leverage" the current advertising model.

According to Nielsen, these two shows are duking it out over audience share.

Here's a quote from the Nielsen's rating service Feb 4, 2010:

http://tvbythenumbers.com/2010/02/04/psych-plunges-from-premiere-leverage-mixed/41143

---------
Robert posted last week about the 20% ratings fall Leverage suffered against the season premiere of Psych. Last night Psych got hit hard in a post-premiere slump, and Leverage was mixed, but topped Psych in average viewers and closed the gap in adults 18-49.

Psych slid almost 35% to just 2.856 million viewers (vs. 4.367 million for the premiere). It’s A18-49 rating fell to a 1.1 from a 1.5 for the premiere. The “USA strategy of moving dramas off Friday was a success” pronouncement may have been a bit premature.

TNT might have hoped for a big rebound for Leverage, but it was effectively flat. Down 4% in viewers to 2.913 million (from 3.020 million last week). But it got a little boost in its A18-49 ratings to a 0.9 from a 0.8 last week.
-----------

Read that again and pay more attention to the thinking that produces sentences like this (never mind the numbers). What's important? What's the point that's being made? (take careful note of how boring you feel this writing is)

Also note because it's really important that there are over 330 million people in the USA alone, maybe a hundred million TV sets and households maybe more.

Only about 3 million watching a particular cable TV entertainment show?

Of course a fiction writer would be thrilled to sell 3 million copies of a book!

But the trend I've been tracing in these blog entries on Tuesdays is all about the convergence of TV, Film and text into one mammoth Fiction Delivery System.

Here is an item that supports that thesis.

http://filmnewsbriefs.com/2010/02/fnb-exclusive-fourth-floor-makes-development-deal-with-analog/?utm_source=Film+News+Briefs&utm_campaign=94ca7cee2e-TUESDAY_FEBRUARY_9_20102_8_2010&utm_medium=email

Analog Magazine - the venerable SF vehicle - made a deal with a production company named Fourth Floor. Here's a quote from that article

---------
Production company and management firm Fourth Floor Productions has closed an impressive deal with the legendary sci fi mag, “Analog,” to exclusively develop the periodical’s content for the next two years. Fourth Floor topper Jeffrey Silver told FNB that his company will have rights to the stories published in the monthly (there are usually six or seven pieces per issue), and already has writers working on several stories.
---------

But it costs less to produce a book or text magazine than a TV show. The secret to the writer's business model problem is the ratio of the size of the audience to the cost of delivery of the entertaining item. That was the business model problem the "Dime Novel" solved so elegantly, and we need to invent one of those solutions to fix our current Fiction Delivery System.

So we're talking about a niche audience for "Leverage" and "Psych." Note that these 2 shows are not SF and don't use much in the way of special effects. They are relatively cheap to make.

With a writer's eye, you can contrast/compare these two TV shows and see immediately that "Leverage" has a more dramatic beat and includes hot love affairs and crumbling love affairs, as does "White Collar" where the lead character's main motivation is to reconnect with the girl he loves (but she almost never appears onscreen).

Psych has a buddy-story but not enough really strong Romance or even an interesting love story that might become a Romance.

Love is used just as a character motivation in these "action-drama-comedy" TV offerings, a background element, or backstory element, not the main plot.

"Leverage" is a little different this season as an ex-wife incident puts emotional pressure on a very tattered main character. It's one of those impossible to resolve Situations such as "Beauty and the Beast" dealt with, or such as Ann Aguirre deals with in her second Corine Solomon novel Hell Fire.

Hell Fire (Corine Solomon, Book 2)

Hell Fire is an excellent novel, by the way, searing triangle romance, breathtaking paranormal elements, intimate adventure, mature point of view and really solid writing craft. I will review it in my print magazine column.

http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2010/ -- is the index to the archive for my print column that goes back to 1993.

I talked at length about Ann Aguirre's novel Doubleblind which held my attention despite having elements I dislike in it because it's well written:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/doubleblind-by-ann-aquirre.html

Back to television.

The development of the deeper intimate relationships in a story-arc (a format that was forbidden before "Babylon 5" and "Dallas" proved it could work in prime time) glues the audience to the screen, but Hollywood still doesn't quite get that point.

Producers who make these emphasis decisions dance around the edges of the importance of Relationship, never mind the central core of Romance and its place in developing the mettle of a character. And this has something to do with the lack of esteem for the Romance Genre, though how the puzzle fits together, I'm not sure.

Like "Lois and Clark" or "Beauty And The Beast" a show's audience deserts when the romantic tension is resolved -- which means the plot-line they were following was the Relationship, not the Action.

A show like "Murder She Wrote" has a contrasting dynamic. The audience comes for the puzzle-solving and the Relationships just form momentary obstacles to the problem solving and neat tag-lines.

So television is wary of diving into a serious romantic-tension driven plot line because the audience will desert the show if the show is successful!

If you draw the story-arc out too long, people get bored (B&B) and if you do what every good writer (like Ann Aguirre) knows how to do -- "don't pull your punches" and drive that Romance right to the altar, then the show is over and the audience goes away.

If a show is pulling huge audiences, the advertisers don't want it to be "over" regardless of how that would validate the drama and the characters. If a show is losing its audience, the advertisers desert it first and there's no time for the writers to complete the story-arc. The producer gets a bad reputation.

So basically, a TV show premise has to be structured such that it doesn't HAVE an ending. Like action-drama or mystery, each week brings a new problem that is resolved in 44 minutes of air-time, and there's no end to problems you can throw at the ensemble. The story-arc is spice, not substance.

Star Trek originally was an "anthology" show - episodes that can be viewed in any order and still make sense. After Babylon 5, Star Trek reincarnations went more with the story-arc plot, series of shows to view in a particular order with major changes just once a season.

In either case, Nielsen rules story development, not the rules of good fiction construction that I've been harping on in previous posts here.

As with the cancellation of StarTrek:TOS by NBC, those Neilsen numbers still aren't accurate. The polling organization doesn't change its methods fast enough to keep up with changes in audience preferences.

Star Trek's Nielsen numbers looked non-viable to NBC because the real bulk of the audience was clustered around TV sets in college dorms -- back in the days when there was only one TV set per dorm floor and "demographics" hadn't yet been invented. Nielsen didn't have any dorm TV's wired and there wasn't technology that could measure the number of people crowded around a single TV.

Today the problem lies with online downloads and various alternative methods of time-shifting and gaining access. College dorms have wifi, people watch TV on their notebook computers. Source doesn't matter.

In between it became VHS tapes that fans would make and mail to each other -- sometimes in foreign countries (where the people would have to buy the right kind of VHS to play the kind of tape made at the source). Shows barely surviving in Britain had huge audiences in the USA via this method. Nielsen couldn't measure that.

As I pointed out in my last entry

http://filmnewsbriefs.com/2010/02/fnb-exclusive-fourth-floor-makes-development-deal-with-analog/?utm_source=Film+News+Briefs&utm_campaign=94ca7cee2e-TUESDAY_FEBRUARY_9_20102_8_2010&utm_medium=email

people will do anything (really ANYTHING) to avoid having fiction interrupted by commercials, except maybe the Commercials made for the Superbowl.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100208/media_nm/us_superbowl_advertising which is titled Alongside gags, Super Bowl ads plumb male psyche

For the Superbowl, it's almost as if people have already accepted that the point is the ads, and the broadcast itself is just to keep you busy between ads.

Here's a quote from that article:
----------
That would be a major victory for any marketer. With a national audience that could reach an estimated one-third of 300 million Americans, the National Football League's championship game is the biggest day of the year for advertisers.

Sometimes known as the Ad Bowl or Buzz Bowl, prices for 30 seconds of commercial time during CBS's broadcast topped out at more than $3 million. Most deals were done in the $2.5 million to $2.75 million range, ad executives said.
---------

1/3 of America's 300 million! Compare that to the 1/10th or 3 million who might watch "Leverage" or "Psych."

That 1/3 point hasn't happened for any fiction feature I've heard of yet.
Presidential campaign speeches don't draw like the Superbowl.

There is a huge battle behind the scenes of our fiction delivery system between those who want an advertising supported fiction delivery system and those who want a fiction delivery system supported advertising model.

So those people who sat through commercials in college dorm TV rooms (so they wouldn't lose their place to the standing room only crowd) are now older and watch TV online, streaming, bootlegged, or buying the blu-ray later.

The younger people are also watching online streaming, even on smartphones if they can.

The TV audience is not sitting in living rooms clustered around with family members, watching only what everyone in the family wants to watch. Many homes have TV's in the bedrooms, too. Larger ones. With blu-ray, wi-fi etc. People can take their notebook anywhere in the house and watch via the family wi-fi network.

Just as with the avid but changing Trek audience, Nielsen isn't keeping up.

Nielsen actually serves the advertisers who want objective measures of the number of eyes they are reaching with their commercials.

The Superbowl is watched "real time" -- fiction doesn't have to be.

The advertisers only care about the people who accept fiction with commercials. So advertisers aren't motivated to follow the ever-squirming audience that wants to get away from commercials.

Naturally Nielsen has missed another Trek sized call.

This time it's the TV show Heroes.

I've been seeing this tweeted on Twitter by crew working on Heroes -- yeah, their jobs depend on renewal, true, but these folks really understand the fiction being created here. Here's one of the posts circulated by a champion tweeter.

NathalieCaron New Blog Post!: Save #Heroes, Save the World!! http://bit.ly/8ZACx2 #SaveHeroes

That's the tweet that alerted me to this blog post about what's going on, and it's no coincidence it's on a Star Trek blog. Here's the unshortened URL unfurled:

http://insidetrekker.blogspot.com/2010/02/save-heroes.html

According to that post, it seems to me NBC is about to make the same mistake with Heroes that it made with Star Trek and possibly for the same reason, technology.

This post shows how decisions are made about what you may, or may not, be allowed to choose from as your fiction fix of the day.

The decision isn't about you. It isn't about what you need out of your fiction, nor really even about what you want out of your fiction. The fiction itself isn't important at all in this equation.

It's about how much product they can move. Or perhaps more importantly, about how much product THEY THINK they can move (it's all estimation, even though the math has become very elegant).

How can we make it about the quality of the fiction, about the satisfaction you derive from that fiction?

They failed to recognize and utilize the Romance elements in StarTrek:TOS and gave it the ax because they measured the impact of the show incorrectly.

They have failed to exploit the Romance elements implicit in Psych. They are tip-toeing around the Romance elements in Leverage, developing the angst more than the healing properties inherent in Love Conquers All. And now they want to abandon Heroes without crystallizing the incredible power of Alien Romance inherent in a bunch of The Talented in desperate need of bonding to become sane!

How can we prevent "them" from making these mistakes?

The commercial fiction marketplace needs a new philosophy and business model, such as I started playing with last week.

What we, as fiction consumers, need is a marketplace driven by the dynamic of serving a small (niche) audience that is wildly energized and supremely dedicated to getting their hands on this piece of fiction (in whatever format).

What they, as fiction purveyors, need is a marketplace that is huge and ever-growing, serving a widely diverse a demographic with little or nothing in common, maybe not even language (AVATAR being one recent example -- remember I noted how movies are made for an international market and cross-cultural understanding).

These are diametrically opposed requirements, but I think I hit on one way to serve both needs in my previous post.

The problem is that the smaller market is most desperately determined to get the most expensively produced fiction but they can't afford it.

Two solutions are obvious.

Reduce the cost (computer applications are doing that - see what scifi channel has done with "Sanctuary");

... or increase the size of the market (by using a story that appeals all across demographics)

Seems to me Alien Romance is the key to that, AVATAR being an example of a sort.

So we see a really fumbling and faltering TV fiction delivery system, making bad decisions.

Meanwhile, if you've been following this blog or almost any other writing blog, you know more than you could ever want to know about e-book publishing.

But solving the puzzle of why Romance in general lacks the respect we see that it deserves may require paying attention to publishing from yet several more angles.

Here is a blog entry where a really good Literary Agent talks about what makes her take on a client after seeing a manuscript sample:

http://cba-ramblings.blogspot.com/2010/02/craft-story-and-voice.html

In this blog entry Rachel Gardner says:

---------
Story refers to the page-turning factor: how compelling is your story, how unique or original, does it connect with the reader, is there that certain spark that makes it jump off the page? Is it sufficiently suspenseful or romantic (as appropriate)? Does it open with a scene that intrigues and makes the reader want to know more? Story comes from the imagination of the writer and is much more difficult to teach than craft (if it can be taught at all).
-----------

And I commented:
---------
I think the big clue is in the idea that a "story" has to "be compelling".

As if compellingness is a property of story that can be infused into words on purpose! It's not.

Whether a particular person finds a story "compelling" depends on the person not on the story at all.

It's a subjective response, not objective.

Writers who try to make their story "compelling" on purpose (rather than make the plot compelling which is just craft) will likely freeze up, stop writing, or produce something awkward.

So just write your story. Then find the audience it compels.
-----------

My advice will lead to pleasing a niche audience supremely, but not an "Avatar" sized audience.

That blog entry compelled me to post that comment, but you likely won't find my comment among the dozens instantly posted! It is a very popular blog of a very good Agent who knows the business of being an interface between publishing and writers.

To solve our problem, you have to work with the VISION of what the business of Fiction Delivery is about from the point of view of those cogs in the wheels of the system.

The Agent is the Writer's point of entry into that system, and if the Agent believes that compellingness is a property of STORY not READER then you have to look at it from that perspective in order to understand why a show like HEROES gets canceled (or not) and why shows like LEVERAGE pull only 3 million viewers.

Get a hold on this VISION and you will begin to see the convergence of these various media into a single mammoth Fiction Delivery System.

See that and you may be more effective at directing your career and re-casting the view of Romance in the eyes of the world.

Careers in Fiction Delivery

Here is a blog entry I saw mentioned on twitter

JaneFriedman Sadly prescient: Career Reinvention for Publishing Professionals: http://bit.ly/bP16EV

The link leads to an article describing Andrew R. Malkin's meteoric career spanning decades inside publishing.

Here's that link unfurled. Read this carefully:

http://publishingperspectives.com/?p=11406
This is the story of a man who can talk PUBLISHING without ever referencing a compelling story, plot, worldbuilding, background, character arc, or any of the things that matter to us readers and writers.

From Andrew R. Malkin's perspective, publishing isn't about "compelling stories" at all.

At most, he mentions one author's name - and without a word about what delicious, beloved characters this author has made famous! He never talks about the fascinating relationships among characters, the drama, the penetrating themes or pithy language as sources of the success of his own efforts to market them.

This is a description of a "characters welcome" character, a career marketer, a kind of person that a writer never, ever, encounters, but upon whom a writer's career depends!

The writer deals with the Agent, the Agent deals with the Editor, the Editor deals with her Managing Editor or Committee -- the book is contracted, edited, copy edited, designed, assigned a cover -- turned over to publicity (some writers get to know their publicist; most don't) -- and then some layers beyond that publicist, the property reaches this man's hands where it lives or dies without having been read by most of the people who packaged the product.

It doesn't matter how COMPELLING your story is or how marvelously smooth the craftsmanship when this man causes success or failure of the book.

The same multi-layered business model structure is used by TV and Film industries, eventually causing films to live or die at the box office on the expertise of a man just like this one.

This is the structure of the "Fiction Delivery System" the very existence of which is hidden from the writer. The writer is never trained in how to leverage the existence of these decision makers upon whom his/her destiny depends. The reader/viewer never hears about these people.

Read this man's career carefully:

http://publishingperspectives.com/?p=11406

Here's a quote from this career track summary:
----------
Last April, I decided to make another leap in order to expand my knowledge and experience in the book industry at a critical time. I left a trade house, Rodale, for Zinio, a digital publishing distributor known for their technology and marketing services, originating in magazines.
---------

Read that blog entry describing his history and his shift into the electronic book publishing industry and you may come to understand better "what" is happening to ebook publishing as the big guys take over, and why they do what they do despite anything we can do or be or become.

If you regard TV and Book Publishing as IDENTICAL industries, you may see the pattern I can almost discern in the shifting Fiction Delivery System structure.

Note that TV also delivers non-fiction (as do films sometimes).

The Internet and the Web, especially social networking, are bringing these two delivery channels of the identical product (entertainment -- even non-fiction is a form of entertainment) together in ways that aren't clear yet.

Andrew R. Malkin is a fellow I wish was a fan of my novels! Or my favorite TV shows. I wonder what he does read.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Homepage: http://www.simegen.com/jl/