The Case For Truth-Telling In Marketing

Here's the cover of The Visitor from Incel World. Notice anything different about it?


The byline is different, it's written by Barry Anderson, not Pat Powers. I'm using a pseudonym for this one. {Well, a DIFFERENT pseudonym. Pat Powers is not my real name, either, though as much as I've written under that name, it kind of FEELS like my real name, sometimes.)

There's a reason I'm using a pseudonym for the book, and that reason is the Amazon Algorithm, the mighty piece of software that sorts books for Amazon. Because I've written erotica as Pat Powers, if I use the name Pat Powers, the algorithm will categorize my book as erotica. And erotica books don't show up on searches as readily as non-erotica books do. So there's a distinctive advantage to having a book identified as not being erotica.

Especially when it ISN'T erotica, and “The Visitor from Incel World” isn't erotica, it's straight-up SF comedy, though being set in Collar World, it has plenty of fetish fuel and could be classified as a fetish fuel future.

I have what I call my “Birds of Prey” theory of marketing for my work. It's based on the rapid demise of the much-ballyhooed TV series Birds of Prey an early attempt to get the superhero genre started in TV. Birds of Prey was heavily advertised as being about the adventures of a trio of young, hot, sexy superheroines. There were shots of one of them writhing suggestively in the promos.

It worked, the premiere episode of Birds of Prey had excellent numbers, the best the Warner Brothers had ever had for the 18-35 year old male demographic. What it DIDN'T have was hot, sexy young superheroines. There was a trio of superheroines but they dressed dowdily in form-concealing cloaks and such, and they spent most of their time moping about what a bummer being a superheroine was. As a result, ratings for the show dropped precipitously, and it barely lasted a single season.

As soon as guys saw the first couple of shows they knew they were being hosed by the ads and they abandoned the series in droves.

I drew an important lesson from that: when you market a product as having quality A or quality B, you need to DELIVER on that quality in your product. If you don't, no matter how good your marketing, people will stop watching/reading/drinking/whatever it. What's more, they'll thereafter be deeply suspicious of anything you produce, because  they will remember how you hosed them that one time.

It's not just a VIRTUE thing to deliver on the qualities you market in a product (though of course it IS virtuous to tell the truth) but a matter of good business practice. True, your product may not sell if people don't like it, but that's got nothing to do with marketing.

You can tell Amazon whether or not your work is erotica when you publish it, by putting it in the erotica category. I have done that for all my Pat Powers books, because they are. But Amazon's Algorithm will also throw your book into the erotica bin (which means it won't show up in non-adult searches) if it THINKS your book is erotica, based on a number of factors. And one of them is the author name. An author like Pat Powers who writes erotica will be presumed to be writing another erotica book.

Hence, “The Visitor from Incel World” is written by Barry Anderson, a pseudonym that I developed just for my SF books that aren't erotica.

I was also planning on saying in my promotional copy for the book that it is not erotica. But I can't do that, because the Amazon Algorithm looks at your cover copy, keywords and promo copy and if it contains the word “erotica” your book gets classified as erotica.

Sigh.

And it doesn't stop there. “The Visitor from Incel World” is or rather, should be, the fifth book in the Collar World series, since it is set mostly on Collar World. But it can't be, because all the other books in the Collar World series are erotica and the Amazon Algorithm ... sigh.

I can at least tell the truth in non-Amazon venues, such as this one. But Jeebus, this is annoying, having to get around a silly algorithm based on ridiculous prudishness about sex.

I keep getting surprised by my own writing

So, what was the strange thing that happened when I wrote “The Visitor from Incel World”? My initial thought had been that this would heighten the contrast with Collar World, and make Collar World's nature more vivid to readers. And some of that definitely happened, in ways that surprised me, and I'm the writer, dammit! I keep being surprised by my own writing. My subconscious is clearly actively involved in writing my stories.

In this case, I wrote a line, “It's like living in a summer camp that thinks it's a city” which is the Visitor's reaction to the way people on Collar World conduct themselves. They're much more mellow and relaxed and open than Earth people, because their sexual needs are fully met, and they have every reason to believe that their needs will be met in the future. There's none of the sex anxiety (the equivalent of “food anxiety”) that we have on Earth, because they live in a sex positive society.

I had never thought out that people in a sex positive society might conduct themselves in a more relaxed and open way, and that this might be the first thing that a visitor from our world would notice, after they got over the public nudity and the public sex, of course.

But that's not the weird thing that happened.

The weird thing that happened was that the real focus of “The Visitor from Incel World” was on how the people of Collar World reacted to what Ariana Hufflepuff, the visitor from Incel World, said about Earth, and what her behavior and attitudes implied about Earth. She's a women's studies grad student at a New England women's college, so she's a bit of an unreliable narrator in certain respects, which is how Earth gets the name “Incel World” on Collar World. (By the way, what do the occupants of Collar World call their planet? Earth, of course.)

And the response of the Collar World residents to what they discover about Earth is what turns out to drive the story and leads directly to the creation of a sequel, not Ariana's response to what she sees on Collar World. I had not expected that.