Shameful self-promotion

[rivkat]

Okay, so I posted a few days ago about the man who wrote an “eighth Harry Potter novel” and is getting some press attention (the link is to the Leaky Cauldron).

I stand by 100% the idea that it’s deeply problematic to present a millions-strong, largely female cultural phenomenon through the façade of a unique creation of a singular male. But I look at this guy’s undoubtedly successful self-promotion and I feel a pang. I want us to feel free to do that. I want more Luminositys!

And even within fandom, much less outside, I fear that not enough of us feel free to do that. Imagine your favorite HP author (or whatever fandom works for you) creating a website like this guy’s, adding art that looks a lot like the books’ art, using music from the films, not putting any disclaimer on it, and then sending out a bunch of press releases either to fannish or general news sources – would it make something twist in your stomach? Why? This guy’s not getting any C&D letters! Compare that to the story about Luminosity’s awesomeness, which (a) apparently came about because the reporter first talked to Henry Jenkins, not Luminosity, and (b) doesn’t include her name, at her request (and this is so very much not a criticism of her understandable position, but a point about the cultural and subcultural context).

I know I don’t feel very free to be forward. This is awfully hard to write: I want you to love the things I produce! Thus, I first want you to see the things I produce! Then, of course, love them. But I fear being seen as a crass self-promoter, dismissed and mocked. This has been brought home quite forcefully to me as I add a new fandom, my first since LJ took over “media fandom” as I know it. But I don’t think it’s entirely personal to me, and I do think it’s gendered. Study after study shows that women ask for much less in job/salary negotiations than equally qualified men, and that we give ourselves harsher self-evaluations, and these then affect what we receive.

In my professional life, I see the same gender divide – women require much stronger social ties before they’ll send out drafts of articles, even though that’s an important way to get noticed by senior scholars. The rise of SSRN (a preprint/reprint archive online) has been helpful there, because it allows people to post work while not “standing out” quite so much by person-to-person self-promotion.

Within fandom, we’re still working out proper conventions for self-promotion even when we do it. Nobody wants to spam uninterested parties. With SSRN, you put your work up, you give it keywords and an abstract, and you select which subject matter “network” and subfields it belongs to. Then various volunteers compile email newsletters that include everything posted that week within the relevant subfield, and – I think, because of something that happened to me – they may put in a work even when the authors didn’t select that particular subfield, if the editors think it’s relevant to their readers.

So SSRN is a bit like fandom newsletters/noticeboards, except that it moves on comparatively glacial academic time instead of fandom Wink of an Eye time. But SSRN newsletters rely a lot more on self-categorization. The norm is that you put your work on SSRN, and then it gets listed as a matter of course wherever you want to list it and maybe elsewhere, if you’re lucky. I haven’t done a comprehensive survey of fandom noticeboards, but it seems as if the mods usually pick up a fair amount in the course of their daily fannishness. This is understandable and efficient and I don’t want it to go away, but a fan whose work isn’t picked up as a matter of course has to speak up, which then interacts with a lot of our cultural training about when to speak up when you think there's already an ongoing conversation.

Technology changes the issues, for good and ill. The way I think of it is that our fannish gift economy asks us to put our wares out on the street, but discourages us from shouting out that we have shiny stuff because we might bother people – it’s the classic dilemma of advertising, to reach only the people who want your products when lots of those people may not yet know what they want! But online, the definitions of “street” and “shouting” are even more contested than the contours of conventional commercial street advertising. (And “gift economy” has problematics of its own, even apart from maybe cutting us off from otherwise available material rewards – if it’s a “gift,” then by giving it to you I create an obligation on you to respond somehow, but what if you think my gift is ugly and uncomfortable? No wonder you don’t want me pressing stuff on you! It’s risky! You don’t want to end up resenting me! There’s a great book by Robert Cialdini, Influence, that has a lot about how advertisers exploit the gift relationship.)

I was thinking about tagging as an answer to this – I bet some/many/most mods are already subscribed to particular del.icio.us tags. They allow newsletters to work the way SSRN does: a clearly structured way to say “include me in your update” that doesn’t require a public comment or individual email. (But is it proper fannish behavior to tag your own entries on del.icio.us? I felt too embarrassed to do it! Am I the only one?) The rules on the userinfo of the handful of communities I looked at generally were very clear on what they didn’t want to see in comments, and how to put fanwork info into a comment, but not about how to slide through via del.icio.us. (The bandom newsletter uses its own del.icio.us account, but doesn’t say it uses others’ tags.) There may be barriers to this that I don’t know about, not being a mod, but I would have loved to see, “if you want us to index your relevant posts, tag them [X] or [Xfornewsletter] through del.icio.us and we’ll check if they meet community rules and include them if they do.” It’s not necessarily a matter of being automatic, more seeming automatic -- as with SSRN, it’s the image that encourages participation.

Comments

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Most of the newsletters I'm aware of are straight-up repackagings of a day's (or week's) story-posts -- not individual LJ posts, but posts to story comms. So, spnnewsletter copies and packages everything posted to spn_gen, spn_roadhouse, and several others. I'm sure it's a lot of work on the back end, but the front-end is pretty simple. You put the story in your LJ, you make one announcement about it in a comm, and it proliferates from there without your having to do anything.

The only situations in which newsletters can't rely on comm feeds are when the users themselves don't announce in comms. Which... I guess announcing in a comm is the equivalent to sending a story out via email on a listserv: people can't know about a thing till you tell them about it. Some fandoms no longer have active comms, or never did; the gathering for such newsletters is much harder (and consequently much slower). But in most cases I've met, it's a pretty straightforward -- and freakishly centralized, considering -- process. The only reason to post to more than one story comm in a fandom is to catch the people who don't subscribe to the newsletter; and usually, that number isn't that large.

(The delicious idea isn't a bad one, by the way, except for the fact that I find very few people are systematic about describing or categorizing the details of what it is they're linking. Yours truly included.)

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I have just started using fandom newsletters, and I do like them. Newsletters offer a great way to promote your work without "shouting," which is a helpful way of drawing a line. But the various newsletters I looked at had different ways of collecting information; this is something that's likely to get more standardized over time. (So, for example, the SPN process sounds great -- but it's actually not part of the userinfo that everyone's directed to read before posting.)

The obvious disadvantage of adding a delicious tag search is that it does create more work for the mods for checking to see what's relevant.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how I figured out the process of spnnoticeboard; I guess it was a cross between ego-googling and interpreting the userinfo page. You're right, I'm not sure that other newsletters are quite as straightforward a set of aggregators, but I think most are.

I also don't know how LJ newsletters are handling off-LJ stories. since I can think of at least one Supernatural writer who has moved entirely to another journalling service, I imagine that's got to be an issue eventually.

[barkley.livejournal.com]

SPN (and other newsletters that I used to follow like sg1) also have watcher journals set up which friend the communities and individual posters. For instance, many of the recs posts are never posted to communities and still get picked up by the newsletter. So it does take a bit of initial self promotion to go seek out the watcher journal and friend/follow directions to get you on the radar. (And then once there, to send up clear signals i.e. This post has Supernatural Content In It That Neatly Fits In A Newsletter Category.)

[katie-m.livejournal.com]

For the SG-1 newsletter, at least, my memory is that anyone who a) friends the newsletter and b) doesn't ask not to be put on the watcher journal's flist gets watched. Then every now and then folks who've stopped posting about SG-1 get removed, to make the gathering of information easier.

[splash-the-cat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was the process back before we hit about 500 people watching the newsletter and the show ended. Now we've shifted to an opt-in model for the watchlist.

[murklins.livejournal.com]

My personal response: I always tag any of my own entries to Delicious that I think might be of wider interest. It's a really easy way to get a bit more of an audience, especially as I know more people watch my Del account than they do my LJ. But then, I also shamelessly self-promote to metafandom when I really want attention, so maybe I'm just not so easily embarrassed?

My response as an editor of dotcoms_refresh: We do not officially require any of our editors to look through Delicious for links. Right now we mostly use a wide-ranging flist for our link collection, plus whatever things we individually come across during the day. Which is not to say we haven't considered asking our editors to check on certain Delicious subscriptions, or the dotcoms_refresh Del account's "links for you" page (where readers could conceivably tag links for our consideration). But since we've only been in production with the Delicious system for less than a month, we decided to keep Delicious as our holding tank for now, not as our discovery tool. Maybe we will change that in the future -- it certainly is an interesting idea, and maybe it would help us acquire more links from shyer fans, which I am always keen on. But for now, we have enough on our plates just remembering how to format everything correctly!

I suspect we are garnering quite a few links from Delicious anyway, though, as lots of our editors are Delicious freaks (um, me) and regularly haunt the http://del.icio.us/tag/bandom and http://del.icio.us/tag/bandslash tags.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the information -- I'm always amazed by the energy and dedication of people who mod communities like this. A lot of this is, I think, norm formation. I just got interested in thinking about what I've seen happen with SSRN -- which has encouraged a lot of younger academics to post their work more widely -- as compared to the related phenomenon in fandom. I don't know if delicious is going to be part of the long-term arsenal, but I can't wait to see what happens next.

[murklins.livejournal.com]

I think that if major newsletters decided to accept link submissions made via the "for:" tag mechanism in Delicious, it might catch on really quickly, especially in fandoms where Delicious is already in heavy use by fans (SGA, bandom, SPN, etc). The problem though is that newsletter mods are already looking in a number of places for links, and checking the Delicious account's Inbox adds another step. Several steps, actually, because you have to log out of your own personal Delicious account and then log into the newsletter account to access that page. (Typically, we use a Firefox extension to post links to the newsletter account which allows us to stay logged into our own accounts -- very handy, avoids a lot of tedious logging in and out.)

Delicious is going to upgrade soon, though, and with the new release (early next year, I think) there will be the ability to programmatically access the links in your Delicious Inbox. This means it would be possible to have a script that will check your Inbox for you and then maybe email out any links. Having something like that would definitely make me more inclined to incorporate Delicious into the link submission process.

Looking at Delicious tag subscriptions will remain problematic, though, because of all the link duplication you have to deal with. Also, lots of links that get tagged are older, so editors have to check the dates of the posts really carefully. It's a much more time consuming way of discovering newsletter content, one that I really can't ask anyone to do on a daily basis.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

That's a really helpful explanation. So maybe I want to push harder on self-promotion norms and encourage that rather than leaning on the tech!

[murklins.livejournal.com]

Self-pimping cannot be encouraged enough! Much as I love to ferret out less publicized work and discover authors who are new to the fandom, a newsletter editor's life is so much easier when the links are delivered to her door.

[murklins.livejournal.com]

Oh! And I meant to mention that one of the fabulous things about the for:user tag in Delicious is that you can mark that bookmark as private and the user you send it to *still gets it*. So you wouldn't have to take the risk of doing anything publicly -- it can all be invisible to those who don't have access to the newsletter's Del account. Even if you don't like posting your own fic to your Del account, you could still take advantage of this feature by keeping those links private.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

That sounds really useful and thoughtful about possible user needs. I used Delicious most heavily for my professional blog, as a hack before Blogger supported native tags. Now I use it as sort of a catchall, but it sounds like I should prepare to use it more flexibly.

[abbylee]

You may be interested in getting your co-mods set up to have multiple profiles. It takes a small amount of work [http://lifehacker.com/software/firefox/geek-to-live--manage-multiple-firefox-profiles-231646.php] and can end up creating a fabulous browser work environment.

Being able to be logged in to multiple accounts on the same website has increased my productivity immensely. Let me know if you want to hear more about how I use it to save me lots of time and fiddling.

(Obviously being able to do it right in Delicious would work best for you all in this situation. But alternatives are always better, especially if it relies more on your set-up than the website's.)

[murklins.livejournal.com]

Hee, you have skipped several steps ahead of me. I run multiple profiles for myself and couldn't live without them (gmail alone! but also dev work). I was thinking of maybe asking my co-mods if they'd be interested in a walk through on this topic, but not quite yet. The newsletter manual is already what you might call epic, and getting seven people through it all at the same time was challenge enough.

Anyway, good suggestion! We're still in early days yet, but I think in a few more weeks we might be ready to introduce more options and setup info. (Also, there is the fact that I will have to write more documentation. This does not immediately thrill me. *g*)

[abbylee]

Hee. My original write up was actually totally written with the assumption that you knew how to do it, and then I figured I shouldn't just assume that because I've seen your code and stuff that you already knew this trick. I've been surprised too many times by how many people don't; and it was one of those things I saw and passed over before I realized how much it would change my online life.

(Another separate profile advantage that does require documentaion - you can let people download a profile that already has all the bookmarks/logins/extensions they need.)

Also, if you're ever in a position to need someone to help with documentation type stuff, feel free to keep me in mind. I've got the advanced knowledge and beginner voice to cover both sides when I'm focusing. And it's always good to give back to the community.

(See, rivkat, we can self-promote on topic :) )

[murklins.livejournal.com]

Another separate profile advantage that does require documentaion - you can let people download a profile that already has all the bookmarks/logins/extensions they need.

For real? I had no idea. That definitely sounds worth pursuing, since the manual has an entire section devoted to telling people what they need to download and install before they can even think of doing anything else.

Also, if you're ever in a position to need someone to help with documentation type stuff, feel free to keep me in mind.

Dude, that is a generous offer. I may take you up on that. I have vague plans of making the manual publicly available at some point and I may very well want some more eyes on it before I take that step.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I am constantly amazed by the depth and breadth of knowledge in fandom (not to mention the ways that fandom helps develop various skills that are useful outside fandom as well).

[splash-the-cat.livejournal.com]

but I would have loved to see, “if you want us to index your relevant posts, tag them [X] or [Xfornewsletter] through del.icio.us and we’ll check if they meet community rules and include them if they do.”

That's actually a fabulous idea. I use del.icio.us for the SG-1 newsletter, and currently have a team of people go through the watch lj flist that we have set up and tag by category, and people are also urged to submit posts by email and in comments. But I like the idea of also having a del.icio.us tag as a submission option.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I'd be very interested to see if it works out, and if there's a set of people who use it instead of email/comments. Maybe it's completely idiosyncratic of me, but I'd be much more likely to use delicious tags than working myself up to go to a community and comment there/find the right email address.

ETA: in the comments above, murklins informed me about an awesome tag function that lets you direct a tag to a specific user and keep it private from others, for even greater customization -- I didn't know about it, though perhaps you did!

[natlyn.livejournal.com]

thoughtfulfan takes submissions via del.icio.us tags but only about four people have used this option.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I will check it out.

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

I totally one hundred and plus percent agree (especially with the gender issue--I see it all the time in academia, and clearly it's at work in fandom).

That said...I'll be wondering if Mr. 8 doesn't end up with a C&D (I've just been aware of it recently--there was some confusion as to who it was?--is he trying to *sell* it?) (I just gave a talk on HP fandom to a colleague's HP class today, and was talking about Lexicon and the 8th novel and etc. after a nice quick history of fandom, origins in popular culture, Victorian age, etc.).

And I think using the newsletters and tagging and all is an excellent idea--that's their function (although I am way behind on learning to use del and the other programs).

But.....really? I don't particularly feel the need to shove my fanfic out there--I write in some controversial areas (hobbit/man interspecies is maybe controversial only within some sections of LOTR, but it is, with past accusations of pedophilia thrown in on the grounds that hobbits are well short; RPS BDSM), fics that in fact will not appeal to a large segment of LOTR fandom (the hobbit fandoms and elf fandoms are way larger), plus I tend to throw in some sons of gondor fics, often dark, etc.

So I think I'm writing for a fairly small group and happy that way--and in my pro life, I'm out there trying to pimp my scholarship liek whoa, so I don't think it's reticence at this point in my life (and *when* I finish that vampire novel, yeah, pimp pimp pimpity pimp)--but not the fanfic.

Not sure that makes any sense...

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Oh, it totally does make sense -- I don't want to say you have to be trying to catch everyone's eye. It just seems to me that some of us have powerful internal censors that say "don't stand up!" even when another part of us wants to do so -- and even when the audience is exactly the audience we'd like to be reaching.

And, okay, let me say what I mean: I think those internal censors are reflective of some actual external sentiment. So it's not crazy to fear that people will think you're a jerk if you promote yourself too much. They may (and you may be!). That's why I'm interested in the types of structures that can channel fannish information.

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

*nods* I like the idea of making use of structures that function to spread information--it's not as if I go around dropping comments into random journals saying "read my fic!"

The more connectedness of information the better--and there's also a difference between certain types of promotion and well networking? Connecting? It's hard to define/explain, but I know it when I see it (in academia, fersure!)!

[ainsley.livejournal.com]

I've been on the fringes of LJ fic fandom for years, but just started writing this summer. When I wrote my first story, it never occurred to me to NOT promote it. But, then, because I have been around (and have worked on a couple of newsletters, before I discovered I hate it; the badfic scared me away from all fic for too long), I knew how to do so without seeming crass. (I hope.) I'm not a great writer, but I'm better than 75% of what's out there, so why shouldn't I? (It's also worse than 90% of what I see, but that's because I now know how to avoid the badfic.)

And some of that is definitely because I've given a lot of thought to shame. The whole idea of it is to coerce people into conforming, to convince them to act in ways that they don't want to act. So I gave up shame (it's a WiP, as my edits show, but then, so am I). If you look at shame like that, it's hard to not see how gendered it is.

I also look at promotion in a far broader sense. The HP 8th novel dude doesn't participate in organized fandom, AFAIK, so he promoted in ways that seem odd to me/us. But isn't what I'm doing right now, commenting in someone's LJ, a form of promotion? That promoting my fic isn't my motive doesn't change that this is networking, that it's self-promotion. Lippert didn't know how to promote through networking in the way our community networks and promotes, so he defaulted to what he knew. Which is probably why he, not we, is on the news, but that's a tale for another day.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Believe it or not, I perceive myself as pretty shy (which is wrong in a lot of ways, but not in all) so I need the comfort of familiarity before I'm willing to use promotional tools. Submitting to archives or mailing lists -- back when we had to walk both ways up the Internet, you know! -- was easier because that was my intro to online fandom and thus seemed natural. Whereas I have a tougher time, say, subscribing to a community that I know I won't read in order to put a fic up there.

I started writing fic after I came to the same conclusion you did, by the way.

And you're right about shame -- the problem for me is the difference between shame and not actually bothering people unjustifiably. Newsletters seem like a good phenomenon, replacing/going beyond the mailing list digest and the archive "what's new" section, because they are self-evidently for finding what people want to find.

The HP guy apparently was on ff.net, so he's not ignorant of the fact that organized fandoms exist, though ff.net seems to accommodate casual fans pretty readily as well. I think your point about defaulting to what he knew is a very good one (but also, of course, gender-influenced). And promoting oneself within fandom is different from promoting oneself outside it; maybe I shouldn't have pushed those together in the post.

[ainsley.livejournal.com]

While I have the feeling my perception of you aligns very little with your perception of you, and I don't perceive you as shy, I still believe it. Very, very few people perceive me as shy, because I'm outgoing and talkative, but it's a cover.

I'm not certain I could promote in communities I was unwilling to read; I did it once, accidentally, but I think next time I'll just let the newsletter in question know directly.

I feel as though I have something more to say, but the French and Indian War is eating my brain. 'See' you in the morning!