25 - Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood
For MicroBlogVember
I never actually read This Is How You Lose the Time War, but I followed a lot of writers and writer-adjacent types on twitter (I guess I still do but I simply never open twitter now) at the time and I say without a hint of exaggeration that every single time I opened my timeline for a solid 6-9 months (before it was out!) I saw people pushing it.
I know that a lot of marketing works via just showing you something enough times that your brain starts to think it's a thing you're supposed to check out ("Guys I love my new chair!"), but I can be a spiteful asshole. Hit a certain saturation point and I deliberately won't check something out because I feel like I'm being astroturfed.
I mentioned this prompt in a previous post re: viral marketing, and I'm sure plenty of Actual Analysts have studied the conditions which allowed the now infamous Bigolas Dickolas tweet to push Time War into stardom. My extremely armchair gut-check thought is that it was a random happenstance that allowed two otherwise separate spheres to intersect. How many Trigun fans - or even more broadly, anime/manga fans - are out there reading Hugo-list novellas? Or the other way around?
(Aside: I was at Worldcon 76 in San Jose watching the awards ceremony on a giant projector screen in the exhibit hall's pop-up bar, where they'd laid out a whole bunch of couches and tables and whatnot for the occasion. I said "yeah!" when an announcer for Best Graphic Story said "Osamu Tezuka", and an acquaintance/peer who shall go unnamed literally shushed me and made a sort of elementary-school-teacher-like "tone it down" gesture of holding their hand horizontally in front of their nose, tilting their head 30 degrees, and moving their hand downwards while staring me in the eyes. The other Asian guy on the same couch who shared his rendang with me left about 5 minutes after that, and I left about 5 minutes after that.)
The answer is almost certainly "more than you might think", but pop culture (or hell, just culture) is so atomized now. Just the other day, I saw someone post the following:
...the woman administering mine [covid shot] asked about my tattoo. As it turns out, she’s a huge fantasy fan, but she’s never heard of Brandon Sanderson. 😮
I told her about some of his books, the Stormlight Archive in particular, but it’s like… do y’all know how weird it is to meet a huge fantasy fan who hasn’t heard of Brandon Sanderson?
I both pity and envy this person, the former because they seem so trapped in a tiny little bubble of what they think is worth knowing about, and the latter because they seem so content to be there. I consider myself to have (relatively) diverse tastes and it feels so difficult sometimes, like I'm just skimming the surface of a dozen different spheres, never having enough time to check out all the things I want to check out. How easy it would be to just be a Marvel guy, a Star Wars guy, a Sanderson guy. Such clarity! Such focus! Alas.
To get back on track, this random crossing of the streams pushed Time War to the top of the Amazon list like four years after the book came out. I have to wonder how many other opportunities for this sort of audience-crossing lightning strike are even still out there.
Back during the rise of internet streaming, you'd hear plenty of stories of indie games (often with "simulator" in their title) getting big specifically because they got some popular youtuber to play them, because their audiences are so mindbogglingly huge that even a tiny fraction going out to buy the game was a huge shot in the shoulder. As far as I'm aware (and I'm really not, so take all this with a grain of salt), all the Big Streamers now tend to play the same dozen or so big-name games that everyone's already heard of. How are the proverbial streams going to cross with that? Fortnite collabs I guess?
Like, how many people went out and read Mistborn (which, as established earlier, is already a huge sphere within its specific field) because of that one weird Fortnite collab? Probably a non-zero amount, but also probably nothing as visibly viral as the Bigolas Dickolas stuff, right? I dunno.
I said in that earlier post that part of the dream of social media is this supposed shot to go viral and get big via pure chance, but that publishers have taken advantage of this to comparatively downsize their marketing in favor of just seeing what rises to the top, often because of... well, pure chance (or astroturfing, I guess).
Trying to read the trends is probably about as reliable as reading tea leaves. I'm not sure I want to become the kind of person who obsesses over this stuff, but I've seen plenty of suggestions for how to increase the "virality" of a work. You probably want to actively sprinkle in easily-sharable, "memeable" moments; the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series is the undisputed master of this. I went to a panel at a con once that was all about how to include "fan-friendly" elements (like, sigh, hogwarts houses) that gently prod people into posting about themselves or their OCs through the lens of a work. You could make something cross-genre in a way that's easily-readable; I don't know if it ever came out or if it was any good, but I definitely remember a lot of agent-types talking about a book titled "Mage Against The Machine" and how they all wished they signed it because it was so easy to sell based on the title alone.
Or I dunno, just get it in front of as many eyes as possible. Put it on Netflix, where even if everyone immediately stops talking about it after two weeks because they put up all the episodes at once, more people will check it out by sheer brute force. I've met plenty of people who never watch anime... unless it's on Netflix. Like Trigun Stampede.
Right about here I thought about relitigating Stampede's problems, but the post has already long exceeded the "micro" part of MicroBlogVember, and you can always just listen to back issues of the podcast if you care about my thoughts on that show. Take care out there folks.
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