So I’m plowing through Guerrilla Creativity by Jay Conrad Levinson. I’m on another hot marketing kick, and I thought this could help some of my fellow authors.

“A good place to connect with your prospects in the hopes of making yourself part of their identity is their inner circle. You must join the inner circle that surrounds each prospect. That circle includes the person’s family, friends, car, toothpaste, coffee, sports teams, soft drink, beer, breakfast cereal, clothing, community, and a lot more. Most people have developed an intimate relationship with all of these elements of their inner circle and often describe themselves as Pepsi lovers, Wheaties eaters, or Forty-Niners fans.

The products have actually become like a family, through a long-term relationship based on familiarity and trust.”

How do you plan to get into the inner circle of the reader’s life?

I was reading a negative review of A Scanner Darkly over on SF Signal, and it reminded me of my little rant, Asimov & Rambling.

In Wikipedia’s Asimov entry, they say;

“Asimov was by consensus a master of the science-fiction genre and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, was considered to be one of the “Big Three” science-fiction writers during his lifetime.”

Now I haven’t read Arthur C. Clarke so I can’t comment on him. But there is a visible pattern here with the sci-fi writers of the mid 1900s that I think is worth discussing. Every writer has flaws, and if you read Asimov, Heinlein, or even Philip K. Dick these flaws will become evident in very short time.

As I said in my other post, Asimov was a terrible, filthy, dirty, rambler. His writing itself is pretty good. He uses good grammer, avoids the use of adverbs, and in general his text is pleasing to read. As a storyteller, I don’t have good things to say. His stories are slow and lacking in action. He’s fond of info-dumps and meandering through the headspace of his characters. To put it bluntly, the stories are just poorly executed.

Heinlein has his own set of issues. His characters are wooden–especially his secondary characters, who seem invented just to make the author surrogate character seem like a philosophical genius. He seems to have been unashamed in his overuse of adverbs. Like Asimov, he’s fond of info-dumps and meandering through the headspace of his characters.

Now we arrive at Philip K. Dick. Philip K. Dick is one of my favorite sci-fi authors. What he usually did right in his novels is something I wish all authors could adopt and learn. First, his novels are short. Rarely does a P.K.D. novel break 200 pages. When it does, it most certainly never breaks 300 pages.

Keeping novels short is good. It lets the reader know there is an end in sight, and it is easily achievable. It also shows that the author had to cram that entire story into those 200 pages. This demonstrates the abililty to get to the point. Philip K. Dick did this well. You usually have an idea what’s going on by page twenty-five. In contrast, Heinlein or Asimov are barely getting started by page fifty or seventy-five.

The problem with Dick’s work, aside from his fondness for adverbs, is that he wrote over fifty novels and most of them cover the same themes of paranoia, fascist police states, and the philosophical question; “What is reality?”

I like these themes. I like them a lot. In fact, I like them so much that I’ve been collecting Philip K. Dick’s entire body of work and have been slowly making my way through it over the past few years. But that’s just me. Many of the novels are hit or miss. I enjoyed A Scanner Darkly more than John over at SF Signal. But I also fully agree with his criticisms, and they are probably the criticism of the mass market for that kind of book.

The casual reader doesn’t care much for drug or addict stories unless the story has some other kind of compelling hook to go along with it, like the redemption of the human spirit or the desire to be a better person. Audiences can be suckers for that kind of stuff. A Scanner Darkly certainly lacks that compelling hook. It’s hard to sympathize with the main character. To make matters worse, the main character doesn’t seem concerned with self-redemption or being a better person in the first place. So you have a drug story that only goes down the negative path, and doesn’t use it’s greatest emotional asset.

The other problem is, even for an addict story is that P.K.D. seems to get caught up too much in the surrealness of drug use, which he uses to explore his dead horse topic of alternate realities.

What you end up with is a redundant theme of P.K.D’s work, explored through a mechanism (illicit substance abuse) which is not something most people can relate.

How does this relate to Asimov and Heinlein? Well, all of these authors are considered juggernauts of sci-fi, legends in their own right. By the sheer volume and precedence of their work alone, they probably deserve that title. But all of these authors have something in common;

They each have some terrible novels.

What’s interesting about this is they are hailed as sci-fi ‘greats,’ and yet, they seem at times to break some or all of the rules of both good storytelling, and good writing. How do they get away with it?

They showed up. In a burgeoning golden age of sci-fi, they churned out novel after novel. Where many other authors gave up or scrapped their works, these guys just kept writing, and writing, and writing. They didn’t let a bad novel stop them. Some of them even admitted they were bad writers, or that their stories were self-indulgent. Even when fully aware of producing bad work, they continued to release novels. They didn’t give up.

They showed up.

Sometimes to make a mark on the world, you don’t have to be the greatest or the best. You can put out shoddy work. You have the full freedom to make grave storytelling mistakes. It’s better if you don’t make the mistakes, and it’s better if you put out great work instead of mediocre. But that didn’t stop the legends of sci-fi from becoming legends.

When everyone else gives up, or stays at home… When everyone else quits or quietly goes away… that is the perfect opportunity for you to make an entrance.

Sometimes, all you have to do is show up.

There’s a story out on the AP wire about a study being done by Duncan J. Watts on music hits. If the name Duncan J. Watts sounds familiar, that’s because he’s the guy who wrote the brilliant Six Degrees; A wonderful book on networks and emergence. Here’s a snippet:

“In the social influence groups, once some songs started to be downloaded, others would try out those songs too, sort of the way a best seller list gets people to try out a new book, Watts commented.”

It’s not being on the best seller list alone that causes a book to sell–it’s the fact that other people are reading and talking about it. That mysterious phenomenon often referred to as ‘buzz’ in the marketing world. Here are a few significant points to draw from a study like this:

• A poorly written book can do well if people are talking about it.

• A well written book can do poorly if nobody talks about it.

• You can create buzz without being on the best seller list.

As for Duncan J. Watts? I’m sure I’ll be one of those people talking about his next book.