Innovation comes from the root for “new” and “now,” which is definitely not what we think of when we create more of the same. My intention with this brief essay is to look at how we dress up the new and now so it doesn’t freak out the seemingly “tried and true.” I realize this may be a thankless task, but it wouldn’t be the first I have undertaken.
As it turns out, the issue is not just envisioning what could be new and now. It’s how do I convince those holding on to the imagined predictability of more of the same that the new and now is the inevitable future. It’s worth looking at, because it could very well be the next big breakthrough.
The current landscape of publishing has become a strange hodgepodge of tricks and technical tools to fool the algorithm.
The current landscape of publishing has become a strange hodgepodge of tricks and technical tools to fool the algorithm. Most writers, like myself, probably couldn’t tell you what an algorithm actually was, but nonetheless, many of us live in fear that we will go unnoticed by them. We somehow intuit that these 1s and 0s control the priority of who and what gets seen on the Internet. What scares us most is that there’s a giant flashing warning sign that we writers should ignore these bits and bobs at our own peril. That peril, we have been led to believe, is obscurity.
Landscapes are a view of the geography in front of us and surrounding us. There’s no punch sheet as to what’s missing from that picture or what could be there. There’s simply what appears to be there. While trying to define a landscape with the intention of marketing a book, I have spent hours trying to figure out where the gaps in my strategy are and what’s missing, and by extension, what needs to be added to it to fill out the spaces that exist in this ever-changing world in front of me.
While certainly important, seeing what’s missing simply tells us the old story. History shows us we have to have XYZ in our plan or we aren’t going to be noticed. It’s all those things we think we have to lay on the alter to serve the new algorithmic gods. Unfortunately, this viewpoint only delivers more of the same, so that the old story is told repeatedly in the vain hope of it creating something new.
In contrast, if we were to see not just what’s missing, but what could be there but isn’t, we are really defining innovation. Algorithms deplore innovation. Give me more of the same and I can develop a priority and something that approaches predictability. The book sellers will tell you they don’t really want anything that disrupts this vision. If they could predict how a book would sell, they’d waste a lot less time and money, and their calendars would be a lot less busy.
The problem invariably comes back to predictability. The unpredictable nature of selling books is evident with a walk into any bookstore or worse, any online bookseller. There are gazillions of titles that promise new and shiny, but usually deliver safe and formulaic. In trying to sanitize the process of success and sell more, algorithms are today’s answer to the built-up grime and goo of not knowing what will succeed. They are, to continue the metaphor, today’s Mr. Clean.
In actuality, the challenge is not too much AI, but our stuckness in wanting predictability in an increasingly unpredictable world.
In actuality, the challenge is not too much AI, but our stuckness in wanting predictability in an increasingly unpredictable world. There’s no blame in this. It’s scary out there. So we begin to look for ways to influence the algorithm. There are lots of folks who will tell you they’ve got this one, and for some amount of 1000s of dollars they’ll share their answer.
The novelist and screenwriter William Goldman, once famously said about finding success in Hollywood, “No one knows anything.” I think the same can be true about trying to prod the algorithm so that it will then take you on that magic carpet ride to virality.
Nonetheless, we authors turn our lonely hearts toward the new diviners. Make me known! Raise my book out of the sea of noise that encompasses the 50 million other titles being published this week.
There was a time when writers simply wrote. We’d put it out into the world and it would either be found and read in the few months it would be allowed on the book shelves or end up dying an ignoble death on the remainder shelves. Then Print on Demand (POD) reduced the overflow that fell into the great wasteland, but caused another problem for authors . Instead of being granted a couple months on the bookstore shelf the timeframe began to shorten. I recently read a book has two weeks now to make it or it faces a threat worse than the remainer shelf: obscurity, obsolescence, and a dumping onto the great byte heap of uninfluential verbiage. I wonder, do those words get recycled or do they simply increase an author’s carbon footprint and contribute to our literal changing climate?
The Eightball algorithm says with a smirk: ”Things are hazy, come back later.”
So, we continue our quest for greater influence, and hope our books will somehow rise above the fogbank, knowing no more than we did when we plunked down that first $1000 to influence whatever that algorithm really is.