Anthony Dobranski Online

Tag: social media

  • Social media is a bar

    Social media is a bar

    I worked in a bar once. It was the lone watering hole in a fifteen-mile radius, with a large clientele of tradespeople and blue-collar workers. The first rule I learned was to forbid entry to any man in a t-shirt.

    If you allow men in t-shirts entry, I was told, they will come in right after work, smelly and tired. The women will protest, the men will cause trouble, and the bar will have hassles and lose money. If men have to change clothes, they will shower first, make themselves presentable, and come ready to socialize properly.

    Social media is a bar. It has always been. No one seemed to care how you dressed, however, or what you said. Mostly, it was fine. We’d see our friends, meet new people, learn something. Sometimes we’d say something and all our friends would cheer. Sometimes we’d get into arguments. There were annoying people we knew, or kind of knew. Sometimes we’d avoid them, and sometimes we’d tell them how we felt. Whatever. It’s a bar. Patron beware.

    We knew the bartenders wouldn’t cut off the tipsy cutie telling you the media is run by aliens. We knew they wouldn’t limit the overbearing fellow who puts twenties in the jukebox and makes everyone listen to his favorites all night. We knew they knew about that table in the back. We knew what the bartenders would say if we complained: “It’s just talk. Maybe they’re LARPing. They pay their tab, OK?”

    Now the bar is cutting people off and throwing people out. Will it last? I’m curious.

    That social media served speech, and not liquor, has covered their butts for the last decade. Less so in the months to come, I think. The mediatenders will pay more attention. They might limit how loud patrons can be, and how many songs in a row get played on the jukebox. We all might have to shower.

    Does that sound good? Great. Enjoy it.

    Does that sound creepy, restrictive, unwanted? Tell us more. Feel free, in the privately-owned space, that has plenty of other people coming in.

    (Image from Business Class Tarot, © 2018 Branwellington & Cat LLC)

  • Hello CapClave – Trading cards now REAL!

    I’m paneling and reading starting today at CapClave in Rockville MD. It’s a very different kind of personal appearance than my work at convention booths, with panel discussions of literary topics, and a half-hour Saturday morning to read my work.
    In celebration, my social media promotion has slipped the surly bounds of cyberspace and achieved card form!
    The nine Demon picture cards
    It’s only the 9 picture cards, not the complete set of 55, which is still being published one a day on my social media: Instagram & Twitter @adobranski, Facebook @adobranskiauthor
    It’s also a small test run of this promotional idea!
    Any intrepid and review-minded readers who buy an Advance Reader Proof from me at CapClave get a card along with the posters I also gave buyers in Cincinnati. (And if you bought a book in Cincinnati, get in touch on Facebook or by email to dobranski outlook com and I’ll send you one!)
    Here’s my CapClave schedule – for full details, see CapClave.org and find me under “Participants.” See you there!
    Fri 6p – Whatever Happened to the Standalone Novel?
    Fri 8p – Who’s the Bad Guy in a World Without Absolutes?
    Fri 11p – How Graphic is Your Novel?
    Sat 10:30-10:55a – Reading
    Sat 11:00-11:25a – Author’s Table
    Sat 4p Politics in Science Fiction and Fantasy
    Sat 5p – Global Climate Change in Science Fiction
     
     

  • Fun with marketing – book teaser trading cards

    The image-driven firehose that is social media challenges the modern writer. I see some managing to do clever things with it, releasing aphorisms and motivational notes, and others just stupefied. Count me more often among the latter.
    Not long ago, writer, blogger and ace self-marketer Shannon A Thompson  posted about her book teasers, single-image character bios she puts out well in advance of her book’s release. I can do that, I thought.
    But I couldn’t. My efforts seemed both too much and not enough, and in retrospect I think Thompson’s style wasn’t playing to my strengths. I needed a way to put forward not just characters but the breadth of my story, and my own writing style, in bits and snippets – in a spirit of play.
    I did have a great cover, thanks to artist Julie Duong, and my banner showed me that I could make an unusual concept work. Early one morning three weeks ago, trying to get back to sleep after waking too early, I suddenly saw these in my head.
    Star Wars trading cards 1977
    These are my own Star Wars trading cards from 1977 (I have the first three sets of 66, complete). What’s funny about them is that they only make sense if you’ve seen the movie – even in numerical order, they’re more like a trailer blown up into individual frames and fallen all anyhow onto the floor. I imagined what it would be like to read them without having first seen the movie…
    The result debuts today on Instagram, and come out one a day between now and my mid-November book launch – 56 in total (7 x 8, a union of Western and Eastern lucky numbers). Here’s a sample:
    Three Demon trading cards
    I’m no artist, but I can run an image editor enough to add borders and fonts. I took Thompson’s great idea to use stock art for my character images – it helps that they’re mostly business people, and stock art sites are full of those – but I ran them through Prisma, the smartphone app that makes people look painted, which let me image the character’s personality, not just their looks.
    For now they’re on my own Instagram account adobranski. Follow it and get a little literary oddness in your daily feed!

  • Writer vs author (social media)

    This is a post about web marketing and how I am working through mine. TL;DR – avoid mistaking writer for author, mistaking content for news. (more…)

  • Robots vs. androids in fiction (go robots!)

    Among the characters in my new novel is a collective of former package-delivery drones that, after a war, evolved themselves into a taxi service for their damaged city.
    From the earliest drafts, I saw them as small flying saucers, with only a central trunk/harness to carry goods or a seated cross-legged person. It took a little time before I saw the plot and character possibilities of robots without hands or appendages. It meant that they had continued to evolve themselves to depend on people, both as customers and even as mechanics, like Thomas the Tank Engine.
    I also gave them a limited vocabulary of green and red lights, suitable for bargaining over fares, but akin to the radiation-wounded Christopher Pike on old Star Trek. This made for a stranger, more labored interaction, but one familiar to anyone who has set a digital device.
    It also made it easier for the taxibots credibly to be taken for granted by the people around them while they — well, you’ll read it one day. 🙂
    This is a less common take on manufactured beings. (more…)

  • Catching up to success and building on it

    For the last month now, what writing time I’ve had all belonged to my new serial novel. I regret losing energy both on social media and on my first novel, but I can return to them. The experience of the serial is unusual and worthy of attention. By starting this in partnership with a media provider and basing it in the history of my own neighborhood, I had wonderful resources to draw on. The Forest Hills Connection organized a history lecture and reading, and the Northwest Current printed an op-ed about the history behind the novel. It was a huge privilege to start off strong, and a great leap of faith on the part of my media partners. I am lucky and grateful.
    I am still writing weekly, but it’s leveling off its ascent so I can get the other parts of my booklife in working order. I’m hoping that my quick bath in media will give me a new way to look at my first novel. The style is still fresh but my approach to selling it is tired. To get past the exhausted ADD TL;DR eyes of the publishing community, I have to dance around the complicated mixed-genre and real world elements, and the flawed less-than-heroic characters, that were the things which most interested me as a writer. The people who are my audience are maybe not the people who make a living selling many books to publishers. Self-publication in this light is like touring is for a band, a way to get the word out and find an audience. It would be a huge effort that looks very scary now, and not something I can enter into seriously before the fall.
    Put another way, though, every special event I got for the launch of Scientists was a missed opportunity to market my self-published novel in a public forum. As the serial proceeds and gets more attention, there are more opportunities. This is not a reason to rush an unfinished book to printing, but it is a reason to hurry an unfinished book to finishing.
     

  • Performance anxiety (Facebook edition)

    If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise. — William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell”
    I noted recently that writing has become a performing art, one where we writers all have to be promotional and public. I’ve been mulling that over in regards to social media. Specifically, Facebook.
    I made my first business career developing the consumer side of what we once called “cyberspace,” but I was quite late to Facebook. Most close friends who wanted to keep up with my personal life soon wised up and Friended my wife. My main reservation was Facebook’s awesome store of personal data (even now, my Facebook account is still under a different computer login than my work or personal logins), but it seemed harmless enough — shared humor, family updates and the occasional expression of political dudgeon by people whose politics I knew well.
    When I signed up for the Superstars Writing Seminars, I joined their very active private Facebook group for news and updates on the seminar, and by extension, on the writers’ individual careers. To my great surprise, a lot of those people Friended me on Facebook — most before ever meeting me, and the rest after a very limited interaction (though you learn a lot playing Cards Against Humanity, and none of it good.)
    I was bemused. Why on earth would these people want to Friend me? Did they care about my son’s new style of dancing to 80’s pop? Would they be as thrilled by the new retaining wall we’re getting as I am?
    My folly was in not recognizing that Facebook has become a public space to the exact degree that one is a public person — and performing artists are public people, and writers now performers. This for me makes Facebook an increasingly staged and risky place. In Soho where she lives, a major fashion model can go shopping without makeup and in sweatpants — but when that same model hits the stores at Mall of America, she is not shopping. She is making an appearance, as rehearsed and planned and calculated as any Oscar Wilde bon-mot.
    Thing is, I have plenty of friends, and extended family, for whom Facebook is not that space, and whose socializing there is more honest, more mundane, and in some ways more substantive. If I actually become a successful writer, commenting to me on a Facebook post will be the equivalent of meeting your friend for coffee when your friend is on a reality-TV show and has a camera following everywhere. Little-f-friends, are you ready for that? Am I? (more…)

  • Writing is now a performing art

    In high school my friends had a punk band called Prep H. They mostly played for fun, but I was easily persuaded to host a punk party where they could perform publicly one Saturday night. For the show they placed a round poster board sign in the opening of the bass drum, with their name hastily drawn in crude colored marker. It wasn’t much of a sign, but no matter. They were a band, and bands put signs in their bass drums.
    I have easy digital tools so my signage was cleaner, but I am no more a web designer than my friends were drum painters. No matter. I am a writer so of course I have a website.
    And a feed and a blog and, if I am smart, a presence. (I’m getting smarter.)
    Writing today is a performing art. I don’t mean in the sense of Harlan Ellison’s instructive gimmicks, writing full stories in bookstore windows over an eight-hour day, but an ongoing habitual performance. I’m not just talking about a good voice for readings and trimming those eyebrows for a photo. We need to write the copy for our stories and books, not just the text inside them; we need to think about cover art and head shots; we need to blog and tweet and post and make ourselves present as more than reviews in newspapers and spines on shelves. We need to get out there. We need to be public.
    It is a reality that most of us are unprepared for. (more…)

  • Making a busy life into a busy blog

    The blog has been stale although I have been busy.
    In posts across the web, that “although” is a “because” — you know you’ve read it, here and a thousand other blogs. Which is a problem. It’s one thing to know silent business is a missed opportunity to self-promote, another to make it an aspect of writing and not an intrusion. With Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife, I am learning how to change that.
    I am late to Jeff VanderMeer’s excellent fiction, but when the esteemed Paulo Bacigalupi mentioned VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, & Acceptance) on three separate panels at CapClave, I took it for advice — and I loved Annihilation. (The others wait for Xmastime.)
    But, in the dealer’s room at World Fantasy Convention, after VanderMeer signed my copy of Annihilation, I passed a table that had his book Booklife. Just the title made my heart both sink and rise. A booklife? What’s that? I want one. I really do. (more…)