![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylThe first session I attended as a discussion on discovery and representation of writers, particularly how female and minority writers — essentially anyone who isn't white and male — are under-represented in bookshops; how, recognising this to be true, fans and writers and publishers can push back against this; and how, in the age of Amazon and algorithmic selection, they can break free of their own preferences and discover new writers and books that aren't simply more of the same.
Gender plays a big part in marketing, especially in bookshops where male writers tend to dominate the table displays — one of Emma Newman's on-going activities is auditing the tables in branches of Waterstones — not just in the SF section, although it's slightly more obvious. There are obviously other factors besides the booksellers' preferences — marketing paying for slots etc — but there's definitely a male bias. It's obviously not the case that bookstores are packed with people who go into it to advance the agenda of the patriarchy by under-representing female writers; it's more a representation of structural sexism baked into the system. Even when women do achieve prominence, it's not always as straight-forward as it seems: in one example, someone noticed a table covered in books by Robin Hobb and thought it represented a challenge to the status quo, but when they mentioned this to someone in the book store they replied, "Oh yes, he's a really good writer..."
Given this, the question is, how do we discover new writers? Del Lakin-Smith noted that most recommendation systems, e.g. Amazon, are algorithmic and based on the principal that, if you liked this, then here are a hundred books that are almost exactly the same. This means that they're skewed by design and often weighted by commercial imperatives. The trouble is that taste is personal — what works for one person doesn't work for another — and that recommendations based on an understanding of someone's interests and the nature of the books requires curation; but curation requires real people and real people aren't as scalable as algorithms. Even curation is not without problems: the example of Steam shows that curators tend to bring social capital from outside, leading to the same people with the backgrounds gaining prominence and, through the positive feedback, coming to dominate opinion.
Blogging and podcasting and Twitter were suggested as a way to escape the echo chamber. Tea and Jeopardy has a parity policy and also covers a large range of different authors, e.g. both Joe Abercrombie and Gail Carriger, and breaks through the marketing walls. Many prominent book bloggers are female — it was suggested that people who buy books might not read blogs! — and Goodreads also provides a helpful to find new things. Emma said that she thought passionate engagement was important — she has been pushing Mortal Engines on people — and that including an author's Twitter handle in an enthusiastic tweet was good because it allowed them to see that someone somewhere was keen on them — if they're sat at their keyboard feeling down, a fanish tweet might make their day!
Ebooks, where buyers can't really browse the shelves, are very prone to algorithmic favouritism and are very much hit based with top selections driven by something external. Everyone noted that self-promotion via social media was often counter-productive — if all you're tweeting is "BUY MY BOOK!!! IT'S ONLY 99p!" you're not going to win any friends. As Del Lakin-Smith noted, it's easy to be an arsehole online; it's essentially the default setting. Authors need to to connect with individuals and to put themselves in the mindset of their audience, avoiding self-indulgence, and behaving rather like they do at conventions — one of the few places where it's acceptable to ask people to buy your book, because that's essentially what you're there to talk about. Part of the solution is about being a genuine person, going to conventions, being on panels, talking about your work, and engaging with fans and other writers. Emma's conclusion: "Selling is about being a human and engaging with other humans? Who'd've thought it?!?"
Following the panel someone asked about the positives of the internet. It was agreed that it made it easier for authors and readers to engage with each other via social media and for readers to evangelise about things they love. It also provided a way to find other opinions to help validate your own decision. Where traditional publishers act as gatekeepers, ensuring a basic standard of grammer and typesetting, they can also act as blocks on things that are non-standard; the internet allows things that might otherwise be kept out to exist.
Someone asked about the tendency to split everything into increasingly small sub-genres. It was noted that there were ways to break through this, including umbrella blogs, but genres generally mattered more to authors and booksellers with physical than readers and online retailers.
Gender plays a big part in marketing, especially in bookshops where male writers tend to dominate the table displays — one of Emma Newman's on-going activities is auditing the tables in branches of Waterstones — not just in the SF section, although it's slightly more obvious. There are obviously other factors besides the booksellers' preferences — marketing paying for slots etc — but there's definitely a male bias. It's obviously not the case that bookstores are packed with people who go into it to advance the agenda of the patriarchy by under-representing female writers; it's more a representation of structural sexism baked into the system. Even when women do achieve prominence, it's not always as straight-forward as it seems: in one example, someone noticed a table covered in books by Robin Hobb and thought it represented a challenge to the status quo, but when they mentioned this to someone in the book store they replied, "Oh yes, he's a really good writer..."
Given this, the question is, how do we discover new writers? Del Lakin-Smith noted that most recommendation systems, e.g. Amazon, are algorithmic and based on the principal that, if you liked this, then here are a hundred books that are almost exactly the same. This means that they're skewed by design and often weighted by commercial imperatives. The trouble is that taste is personal — what works for one person doesn't work for another — and that recommendations based on an understanding of someone's interests and the nature of the books requires curation; but curation requires real people and real people aren't as scalable as algorithms. Even curation is not without problems: the example of Steam shows that curators tend to bring social capital from outside, leading to the same people with the backgrounds gaining prominence and, through the positive feedback, coming to dominate opinion.
Blogging and podcasting and Twitter were suggested as a way to escape the echo chamber. Tea and Jeopardy has a parity policy and also covers a large range of different authors, e.g. both Joe Abercrombie and Gail Carriger, and breaks through the marketing walls. Many prominent book bloggers are female — it was suggested that people who buy books might not read blogs! — and Goodreads also provides a helpful to find new things. Emma said that she thought passionate engagement was important — she has been pushing Mortal Engines on people — and that including an author's Twitter handle in an enthusiastic tweet was good because it allowed them to see that someone somewhere was keen on them — if they're sat at their keyboard feeling down, a fanish tweet might make their day!
Ebooks, where buyers can't really browse the shelves, are very prone to algorithmic favouritism and are very much hit based with top selections driven by something external. Everyone noted that self-promotion via social media was often counter-productive — if all you're tweeting is "BUY MY BOOK!!! IT'S ONLY 99p!" you're not going to win any friends. As Del Lakin-Smith noted, it's easy to be an arsehole online; it's essentially the default setting. Authors need to to connect with individuals and to put themselves in the mindset of their audience, avoiding self-indulgence, and behaving rather like they do at conventions — one of the few places where it's acceptable to ask people to buy your book, because that's essentially what you're there to talk about. Part of the solution is about being a genuine person, going to conventions, being on panels, talking about your work, and engaging with fans and other writers. Emma's conclusion: "Selling is about being a human and engaging with other humans? Who'd've thought it?!?"
Following the panel someone asked about the positives of the internet. It was agreed that it made it easier for authors and readers to engage with each other via social media and for readers to evangelise about things they love. It also provided a way to find other opinions to help validate your own decision. Where traditional publishers act as gatekeepers, ensuring a basic standard of grammer and typesetting, they can also act as blocks on things that are non-standard; the internet allows things that might otherwise be kept out to exist.
Someone asked about the tendency to split everything into increasingly small sub-genres. It was noted that there were ways to break through this, including umbrella blogs, but genres generally mattered more to authors and booksellers with physical than readers and online retailers.
