Friendship and its discontents

Actually, I'm not going to talk too much about the discontents of friendship; but thanks to a first-year class at Bard College, I tend to love adding "and its discontents" to almost any noun in a title, the more abstract, the better. Try it, it's fun:

• Education--and its discontents
• Love--and its discontents
• The Gift Economy--and its discontents

What I'm actually going to talk about here comes from a recent Judge John Hodgman podcast on friendship, where the dispute was over this one woman's very precise--and open--way to rank all levels of acquaintance, while reserving "friend" for those particular relationships that merit that honor. 

Which might sound silly (but then, I'll spend hours reading about the history of post-apocalyptic pen-and-paper roleplaying games, so "silly" is a relative term), but John Hodgman made some very cogent points about the abuse of "friend" both as a term and as a concept. 

To wit, with the intimate-seeming nature of online interactions ("John Hodgman told me what he's thinking! By tweeting his thoughts!") and the narcissistic loss of non-friend relationship markers ("It's not enough that I work with my colleagues, they also have to love me!"), we've impoverished and cramped our notions of potential relationships. In sum, "What's wrong with calling someone an acquaintance?"

He's got a point; but in fact, I'm mostly writing this blog post because I so liked Hodgman's principles of friendship that he tossed off and I wanted to write them out (as best as I could hear them). This probably deserves to be made into a video or a needlepoint pillow, so hopefully someone will find it:

John Hodgman's Principles of Friendship:

Try to be around people who make you genuinely feel happy and not anxious, or sad, or weird or whatever.

Gently disengage from people who make you feel bad and don't care at all about how you feel--and don't care about those people anymore.

Do more favors than you ask for--remember it always hurts to ask.

Let people know when you are genuinely thinking nice things about them. 

But be alert to the more frequent times when you are not thinking about anyone but yourself at all. 

And then remember that we're all like this, we're all mostly thinking about ourselves. 

So if someone lets you down--

--let them off the hook. 

You're letting plenty of people down all the time in small and big ways and it's just how it goes being an individual human being. 

Don't sit on the same side of the booth at a restaurant, even if you're lovers. 

Don't leave a lot of voicemails; please don't write long emails.

And be nice.

And that's all you need to do.

Diplomacy--a perfect and terrible board game for anonymous online play (or maybe just not for me)

A friend recently linked to a Grantland article about the board game Diplomacy; and this friend commented that the game sounded interesting, but also sort of horrifying. "But," I eagerly posted back to him, "if you never played it, you only get some idea of how horrifying it actually can be."

I've played Diplomacy a few times: with college friends, both in person and online; and online with some random and anonymous people. In fact, after that Grantland article, I decided to sign back in to my account at playdiplomacy.com and joined a few games.

Now, as with religion, how you approach a board game like Diplomacy has a lot to do with you. So here's my favorite way to play: back when I was playing online with college friends, I was playing Czar Nicholas (or Kaiser Wilhelm) and I kept up an elaborate correspondence with other players in character; I even researched and discussed what historical uniforms my soldiers would be wearing at the time. Right there, that tells you a lot about what I like: I like roleplaying, I like story-building, I like specifics.

One other benefit--and horror--of playing with friends is that you already have an existing relationship with them. You think you know them. Which of your friends will pull a fast one to get what he wants? Which of your friends will stick to a deal even if another opportunity comes up? Of course, this isn't serious: at the end of the day, you are playing a game, and no soldiers actually get pushed out of territory. So you can't entirely judge people by their private, non-board game lives.

(Much better to judge them according to the "Would they hide me from the Nazis?" sort of game that some people play.)

Now, after playing for a few days online this time around, I resigned all my games, whether I was winning or losing. (Curiously, the games where I was doing the best were the ones where I was Austria; which, if you don't know the game board, is significant because Austria is surrounded by potential enemies.) Why?

Because it wasn't any fun. Would anonymous-player-63 turn on me? Who cares! It wasn't an interesting question since I had no other relationship with these people. Could they trust me? Well, that's a slightly more interesting question, but still not all that interesting to me. Why would I betray an erstwhile ally? To win. Why? Uh, because... winning is good? So now I'm playing with strangers that I don't care about, playing a game that I don't really care about.

And on top of that, it takes a lot of mental energy to go through all the scenarios, trying to figure out the best move to make.

So, for me, Diplomacy is best played with friends, probably while being stuck in a small room.

Some little experience in self-publishing

And I do mean "little." As part of NaNoWrimo in November, I blew off some steam/pressure over projects that I cared a lot about by writing some silly little things that I didn't care about all that much. Not to mince words, I wrote some ridiculous romance.

(And why not? Though there's a certain tendency towards conservative gender relations in romance, there's also the possibility for feminist and sex-positive work. Still, while I think this genre is OK, I have no personal attachment to it--no favorite authors to impress (or beat), no worries about repeating tropes, no dreams of being a great romance author.)

Then, for some extra fun, in December, I decided to put these two stories I wrote on Amazon. (It's what all the kids are doing these days.) Not under my own name, of course, but under a pseudonym. (And my first choice was already taken!) And I even sold a couple of stories?

So what have I discovered through this whole process? A lot of little things so far: how to make my own covers from free images online and where to get cheap, semi-pro covers; how to upload stories to Amazon and how to add tags and create an author page; how to create a Kindle file in Scrivener. In other words, I know all the basics to selling ebooks on Amazon.

Now I've just got to get to writing stuff.

Sockpuppets and being nice on twitter, part 2

In Part 1, I went over the urge to create a sockpuppet account to support your product (because we take consumption cues from peers and sometimes it's just you trying to flog your product by pretending to be a peer).

In Part 2, I want to talk about more honest ways to get your name out there in a positive way, largely focusing on being a nice person in public.

How often have conversations about Neil Gaiman included the info that he's a really nice guy? I'm guessing it approaches 100% because he's a real nice guy. (I once saw him give a talk in a small room and someone's cellphone went off and she took the call and he didn't like it but he didn't make a deal about it at all.)

We could probably make a pretty good list of artists who are nice vs. artists who are jerks: Scalzi, Saladin Ahmed, Brandon Sanderson--all nice people who engage with their public, in blogs (Scalzi), on Twitter (Ahmed), through podcasts (Sanderson). 

(By contrast, a friend went to a Robyn Hitchcock show; and the next day ran into him (at a White Stripes concert) and said what a great show it was and Robyn's response was "I know, I was there." Which might be fair, but isn't particularly nice.)

God knows I don't want a world where everyone is nice. But it is a pretty good method for getting your product consumed in some way. So, instead of sockpuppets pushing your work, you make sure that your target audience thinks of you in a fuzzy, warm way.

How?

Give them something free and show them that you're interested in them: blog, Twitter, podcast, even a webcomic. (I just bought Kate Beaton's book and I've bought from Dorothy Gambrell before because I love their comics and I wanted to give back.)

That last might be the most surprising: if you give away your product, you may be able to get something back. 

I wish we had some data on this, but for now, anecdata will have to do, so... have you ever been inclined to buy a product because the producer was nice?

Sockpuppets and being nice on twitter, part 1

As promised, here is a post on sockpuppets and being nice on Twitter--or on podcasts or at book fairs, etc.

Problem: how do you get people to consume your product? 

People usually (and used to) want to be like their idols and socially higher-ups; so if you have a beer that needs drinking, put it in the hands of a king (UK) or a movie star (USA), and some people will drink it as easily as that. (Or for the historical view: peasants dress up like merchants, merchants dress up like nobles--and nobles enact sumptuary laws to keep the lower orders from dressing/consuming like them.)

But what about if people start taking their cues from their equals and peers? 

Then you need to your target to be surrounded by people who consume your product. This is the world of buzz and viral marketing, where you (the PR company) hires an actor or actress to order a particular beer at a bar, and do so in a way that ensures that other people see you buying that beer (or talking up that movie or whatever the whatever). And then those people who saw the original consumer start consuming that way and then other people see those consumers, et al.

But let's say that you don't have a company--you're just one person with a book that you've self-published.

(I like beer as an example, but let's be honest: we're talking about books.) You could try to get your book noticed by juicing the sale numbers--getting all your friends and family to buy lots of copies so that the book was in the Top 10 bestsellers. (Because, believe me, being in the top 10 will lead to more purchases. Nothing succeeds like success.)

But that's expensive; maybe we can juice your numbers through some free method, like positive reviews. But what if you're the only person who likes (or has read) your book?

Sockpuppets

Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game does a nice job portraying the Internets and forums, and how unscrupulous little monsters could use the anonymity of the web to juice the numbers/take over the world. That is, two super-bright kids start up important pseudonyms to get some ideas out there; but they set up alternate accounts/names to support those primary accounts.

And people do this in real life, especially on Amazon, where writers can feel free to post positive reviews under alternative names. It's not always easy to identify these false positive reviews, though I recently read a book for review which seems to have some sockpuppet-written reviews both on Amazon and Goodreads. My clues?

1. Verbal similarity: the reviews sound very similar to each other and the book.
2. No other reviews: on Amazon, these positive reviews were written by accounts that had no other reviews.
3. Private accounts with unlikely average ratings: on Goodreads, there are positive reviews written by people who have a) hidden their accounts and b) have average review ratings of 5 stars--so these look like accounts that are used mostly to talk up books.
4. Hyperbole: these reviews can't say enough good about this book that, to put it succinctly, no editor liked enough to publish.

The underdog needs sympathy

There's something I like about self-published authors--they are plucky and self-confident. (Note: Yeah, there's condescension mixed in there, but if it weren't for condescension, I wouldn't have any descension at all.) But when these self-published underdogs try to trick readers into reading their stuff, you run the real risk of losing sympathy and goodwill--which are arguably more important than good reviews.

Have you run into instances of sockpuppetry?

More tomorrow. Or as the book I finished ended: "to be continued."
Cite: Sockpuppets (TV Tropes); Sockpuppets (Wiki)