‘Data Overwhelms, It Overflows’
The writing community, as a whole, can get tired of something. Just like a person, the whole crowd, from their outlawed prologues to their too-late afterwords, can talk itself into one planetary yawn.
And this is the case with platform.
Years ago, platform was the word, and the word it was, and its buzz vibrated in our nightmares and its phantasms implied our inadequacies and its terrors launched a thousand online courses for writers, many of those seminars and webinars and training bazaars run by people who had less platform than the people paying for them.
One of the problems was that it took us a long time to get the right words to explain what a publisher or agent might mean when sending us into Munchian screams by quietly asking, “And how’s your platform, dear?” We work with words for a living, you know. And so we couldn’t find the right ones. The right words. For platform.
- We meant salability. How’s yours?
- Salability through visibility. Who knows you?
- Salability through visibility as someone who knows what she or he is doing. Why would anybody pick up a book with your name on it?
- Salability through visibility as an expert who interacts with consumers. How many followers did you say you have?
This was always clearer in nonfiction, of course. That superb medical guidebook you wrote, for example. You mean you’re not a doctor? And no one more than three blocks from your home has ever heard of you?
And yet even in nonfiction, we failed to get the right messages across. I was asked recently by a very fine writer–and not without stern indignation–whether it wasn’t the publisher’s job to supply the platform for an author on current politics. This reflects a confusion we’ve allowed to linger. The answer is no. Not even one of the Big Five can make you a veterinary surgeon Great or Small, or a Skyfaring pilot, or a Fiery and Furious media pundit.
Here’s something else we got wrong. Platform is a factor in the salability of fiction, too. While you may not be dispensing twice-weekly advice on dog health or air travel or a failing presidency, you can still be asked, How many followers did you say you have? And Who knows you? And Why would anybody pick up a book with your name on it?
Particularly in the case of a strong debut, yes, we can look to the publisher help carry the load of establishing an author’s platform. And in all cases, publishers must market their books, and vigorously, and in alliance with their authors and their agents. And this is something everybody isn’t clear on yet, either, as you may know.
But if we look at platform now, things have moved along since the days when these were our fretful focal points. There’s a new factor to consider. Allow me to scare you, won’t you?
We have some very fine, if worrisome help on that, some new data, as it were.
‘What Is Real and What Is True’
My provocation for you today lies in new writings from Brexitian England. Dan Franklin is the gifted digital publishing executive who for longer than most digital directors survive in such posts was that creature for Penguin Random House in the UK, and before that he worked with Jamie Byng’s trailblazing Canongate in Edinburgh. Today he’s a senior commissioning editor at Pottermore. You remember Pottermore, don’t you? Rowling, Rowling, Rowling, keep those doggies Rowling. Sorry, I don’t know what came over me.
Franklin’s pathway through the industry has put him at the helm of some of the most advanced and best-funded efforts in digital storytelling. This is why his essay for The Writing Platform is important for you to read. It’s called Should a Great Writer Ever Feed the Dolphins? and it’s still sizzling hot, just off the digital griddle, landed on our plates on Monday (doesn’t everything?). It’s the text of a talk he gave for Bath Spa University in the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, co-hosted by the , a collaboration that includes Bath Spa digital author Kate Pullinger.
Franklin’s commentary charts our recent trek from those platform-pounding debates of a few years ago to today’s reality of truth (remember that stuff?) and data.
Let me sort out something badly fast for you: a publisher can easily tell just how much of a contrail your work leaves in the data sphere. Data reveals and defines where a platform stands, and where it doesn’t. Salability? It’s all in the data now. Your platform? They may no longer ask you but tell you about your platform.
Hoping that Franklin will forgive me, I’m going to pluck some lines from his essay (do read it all), pertinent to our meditation on platform today. I’m excerpting without a lot of ellipses and with a bit of license from the context of his piece. But I think it’s important that we hear him and think about what he’s saying from the author’s viewpoint.
Data overwhelms, it overflows. Perhaps this also accounts for the retreat back to the material world. [Think of the ‘print resurgence.’] In the face of all of this data is it coincidental that the publishing industry has rekindled its love for “beautiful books”?
There is useful data that flows and enriches like oil, and data like a monstrous sewer-bound fatberg which clogs up information systems. If writers are expected to make sense of the world by telling stories and truths about it, then unclogging this data blockage will be one of those challenges.
And then we come back to the audience. How real is the “audience” likely to be going forward? Are we in danger of creating artificial intelligence which makes authentic critical opinion, or simple and authentic audience feedback, impossible to glean? Is the future fake audiences posting fake reviews for fake books by fake authors?
There is a fast approaching, intertwined crisis of authorship and audience which we must face down. We are only just beginning to see the impact of data on the act of writing and how it is consumed, and the feedback loop that follows.
The crisis might become so grave that we cannot identify what is real and what is true – writers trade in truths and a corollary of that truth is the authenticity of the authorial voice. In this way, the teeming data of the ecosystem around our online selves threatens to stymie the development of literature in the digital realm.
I’ll be parsing this more deeply in another article soon. But for the moment, I’d like to leave you provoked, I hope, by these heavy surf flags Franklin is posting on the beach of our writerly future.
I need not remind you in 2018 how easily truth and lies can be blurred. You are surrounded by fact-checking operations that have sprung up, after all, in the past Trumpian year. And as data-harvesting and processing intensifies, can you see good literature, important stories, being shoved aside–no platform!–because “the numbers just don’t add up”?
Here’s one more line from Franklin: “We are left with the troubling possibility that data does not facilitate but instead slows and halts the development of literary culture itself.” What do you make of this?
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About Porter Anderson
@Porter_Anderson is a recipient of London Book Fair's International Excellence Award for Trade Press Journalist of the Year. He is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, the international news medium of Frankfurt Book Fair New York. He co-founded The Hot Sheet, a newsletter for trade and indie authors, which now is owned and operated by Jane Friedman. Priors: The Bookseller's The FutureBook in London, CNN, CNN.com and CNN International–as well as the Village Voice, Dallas Times Herald, and the United Nations' WFP in Rome. PorterAndersonMedia.com
Hey Porter – Thanks for the provocation. Though on a “scariness” scale, you’ve got some pretty tough – perhaps even nuclear-level – competition these days (and don’t we all?).
These days I often find myself overwhelmed, and not just by the rapid-fire changes in publishing and the related data-tsunami. And in response, I do find myself retreating to the material world (though not so much to materialism, if that’s implied). Even in the full awareness that my retreat might leave me with a metaphorical head full of sand, I find the peacefulness of it central to my sanity.
Here in my retreat, I still see and talk to neighbors – who seem remarkably sane in my unawareness of their digital thumbprint. And I still fall in love with books, regardless their format, or of their author’s platforms or digital-world mastery. I can see how masterfully manipulating the flow of the data-stream may have influenced my taking of their literary bait, but I remain convinced that I can only be truly hooked and landed by their having crafted something more than a shiny lure. It has to be worthy of love.
And I also remain convinced that I’ll never craft anything worthy of the love of any other sandy-headed readers without protecting my sanity. I suppose it’s naive, but at the moment it feels like more than the comfort of self-delusion. It feels like the survival of my creative impulse.
Thanks for the sane appraisal, and prod to peek from my retreat, Bro. An occasional dose of awareness is bound to keep the scariness at bay.
Hey, Vaughn,
Thanks for the note!
I do appreciate your interest in your sanity, lol, especially considering how little of it we have around us these days in the civic arena these days.
At the same time, this isn’t really about protecting your sanity so much as it’s about understanding the dynamics of how things are being done and selected and sold and presented in your world.
The Netflix algorithms, for example, are thought to be some of the best in the world, and yet they’re ultimately showing you far less than they’re putting in front of you because they have no reference to certain interests you may have. That’s what this question is about. How many actual people will be influencing others on book selection and when do what publishers are able to understand as good risks get squeezed down to a narrow set of options “approved” by data?
No need to stop talking to neighbors! LOL Give them my best.
But yes, keep looking out from under your tent. If you’re to approach the world with all that writing some day, that world won’t be those neighbors, and knowing that a bunch of them look like bots might be helpful in navigating the sprawl to get readers and sales.
Cheers and thanks for the note, good weekend, bro.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Hi Porter. You sure know how to ruin a Friday, but that’s okay, we all all getting rather used to it. This is provocative and fascinating, but this writer will always be pulled to the keyboard. So far, my love of writing has not had many monetary paybacks, but regardless–it’s a major part of my life. As is reading and discerning where a really good story lies. I guess I am counting on others out there in the publishing world from writers to editors to agents and those who run the publishing houses–to still want to see REAL writing and good books in the hands of the public. Also, one other thought. Yes, the press and the journalism of FACT is being attacked. But I believe was can win that struggle. If we don’t, then maybe a platform won’t mean anything anyway. Always good to get your thoughts, Beth
Hi, Beth,
Apologies for the ridiculous delay here. Some travel intervened (as usual, that’s my biggest obstacle to handling reponses well).
I get your answer here very well, and of course what you’re saying resonates with me.
I think the worrisome part of all this, as Dan Franklin is suggesting, is that few algorithmic “deciders” (that’s a Bush-ism, lol) are going to be calibrated to discover and promote real writing, good writing, as you’re of course devoted to creating.
The machines are programmed to find what’s salable. And as you and I know all too well–no need for me to name famous examples of our day–what sells best is frequently not what IS best.
So while ruining Fridays isn’t the goal, lol, I think it’s smart of us to be conscious of this. While no one wants to see good material compromised, there can be things at times that will make a work more salable, more responsive to a societal trend or interest, and when market awareness is part of a writer’s worldview, I think that writer has a better chance of being responsive to the sorts of criteria that algorithmic analysis–data–will pick up on and highlight.
Weirdly, while “the connected world” is in most ways a very good thing, for authors, I think it poses a new difficulty: the isolated, completely unique creation has new problems gaining traction.
I’m not saying that’s good, but that that’s the reality. And I think that authors who maintain a good grasp of such market realities are the ones likeliest to succeed while, I hope, not being driven by those realities to go against their own instincts.
Thanks again, hope the year is off to a good start for you!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Hello Porter. Thanks for muddying the waters about data by offering up a post on data–haha.
Three things.
1. Over time, I came to think “platform” and “platform-building” were terms being used by agents and publishers, less to serve authors than themselves. They wanted to upload or offload or download a big chunk of their own responsibility, and dump it on writers. If a book succeeded, the agent/publisher would reap the rewards along with the author. If a book failed, that would now be on the writer, because of a failed “platform.”
2. I decided that, whether or not I laced on a new pair of Nikes to race after every new shiny thing in self-promotion, I was going to remain an obscure novelist. So be it. I’m a writer, not a carny barker.
3. I also decided that the burgeoning how-to industry for writers would never do much for literature, but would do plenty for those who were themselves skilled at promoting themselves. They would do this by merchandizing the highly appealing idea that writing can be taught as a kind of pseudo-science, or paint-by-numbers exercise that anyone willing to work can master.
I was wrong. There are four things.
4. Your main topic today is “data,” and its metastatic influence in the book biz, how it threatens, in Dan Franklin’s words, “to stymie the development of literature in the digital realm.”
If there is any response to this threat, not just to literature but to thought itself, I don’t know what it would be, except for writers and the “suits” in publishing to refuse to “pay to play.” Pay–with time, energy and attention–to play a game with rules as ephemeral as a Snapchat entry.
But whether or not some writers refuse to play, the publishing gatekeepers almost certainly won’t. It’s in their self-interest to make publishing decisions strictly on the basis of data. Who shall say me nay if I commit to projects based on hard data, not on the quaint antiques of experience and intuition?
Thanks as usual for another thought-provoking contribution to the writing life. Such as it is, in the age of platform-building and data.
Barry, I would point out one circumstance that doesn’t fit your thinking about gatekeepers’ reliance on data to make decisions.
That circumstance is the publishing of debut fiction. What an absurd idea! No sales! No data! No platform! No view except uphill! Why would publishers do such an illogical thing?
Perhaps because they know that data is not a verb and that fiction is its own platform. The promotion that authors feel is denied them is actually only effective for authors who’ve already made the climb. It gives only a tiny boost to debut novelists.
Perhaps the gatekeepers are rational after all? A successful debut depends mostly on a strong story, strongly written. Ain’t no data that can make that happen.
Don– You say nothing about the process by which a debut novelist gets the nod. Writers these days are encouraged to platform-build even before they have a manuscript to shop. Unless this is more fake news, I have to assume that all the “data” associated with platforms figure in the decisions most if not all agents/editors make.
As for a debut depending “mostly on a strong story strongly written,” that certainly has to be a factor. But the debuts that don’t sink quickly into oblivion are small in number. And I am sure you and the editors you work with know how to improve the odds through professional contacts, lots of review copies, promotion, etc. It must be like the art scene in New York. A sculptor or painter knows someone who knows someone. That person introduces the artist to a key art dealer. The dealer decides the work has commercial potential, and sets the “star machine” in motion to promote the artist.
If I’m wrong, please set me right. You are certainly in a position to know.
Barry-
In selling debut novels to the Big Five, I have never once been asked about the author’s platform. Not once.
Publishers do get blurbs and push out review copies, ARC’s to booksellers and such. That helps. To a point. Fact is, very few consumers see PW or Booklist reviews, or read ARC’s or samplers. In store display and word of mouth are much bigger factors.
But I would point out that all of those things happen AFTER acquisition. Debut novels are bought for one reason only: they are terrific novels for which publishers can envision an audience.
And as to connections, they are nice but the vast majority of authors we take on at my agency are not referred. We meet some at conferences or via pitch slams, but even that is not what makes the difference. Most query. We read their manuscripts…and that is what excites us.
It all comes down to the writing.
Don, I appreciate your reply.
I know you’re talking about debut novels, but still, if “it all comes down to the writing” in publishing, why do we see Ray Rhamey serving up so many truly weak opening pages from bestsellers?
A Big Five publisher doesn’t care about an author’s platform, because a Big Five publisher IS the platform. It has all the clout, visibility, and influence it needs. Hence all the Big Five books in front-table displays, etc.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of all commercially published fiction titles are Big Five novels. I bet the number is very small. Unless you think of all other commercially published novels as “freight class,” those publishers should be part of the discussion. And they do care about platform.
Hi, Barry,
Thanks for this, and agreeing with Don below, as I do, I think it’s possible to take your reduction of the plainest point and give it a bit of nuance.
As you write: “It’s in their self-interest to make publishing decisions strictly on the basis of data. Who shall say me nay if I commit to projects based on hard data, not on the quaint antiques of experience and intuition?”
As we might amend it (in brackets): “It’s in their self-interest to make publishing decisions strictly on the basis of data [except when their understanding of valuable work and important voice and storytelling means that they perceive the risk of making a move not supported by the data]. Who shall say me nay if I commit to projects based on hard data, not on the quaint antiques of experience and intuition [other than consumers who realize that they’re being fed a diet of predictable, redundant material that reflects only the data-spotted norms of the moment]?”
In short, I think that what we have to do is recall that “past performance does not guarantee future success” and to look to that frequently heard maxim as something to remind industry gatekeepers about. I’d go so far as to suggest that they do know this. As Don is reminding us below, the departure that goes into publishing a debut can be just that.
In time, especially a time of much data-driven context, as Dan Franklin shows us, I think that the more authors and other artists of all kinds let go of the animosity and knee-jerk hostility they hold for “gatekeepers” and learn to look at the gatekeepers’ needs and efforts, the better chances they’ll have of succeeding.
The divide isn’t helpful, though I do realize it’s a common response for many.
Thanks much,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Porter-
In an age of resentment, when lies have the force of truth, when who you truly are matters less than what people say about you, then it is tempting to regard data as the the only reliable truth. It’s objective in a subjective world. There’s security in it.
A high platform, built of trustworthy data, places you above it all.
But platforms are shaky. They can fall. We can find that the data that made us feel secure was hacked or was biased by the parameters set for its collection. The data was never objective. We made it tell us what we wanted to hear. Our security was false.
Fiction has no platform but it does have force. That is because when it is bravely written it embraces our insecurity and through a story carries us through that. The authority we trust is not vested in the author but in the truth the author’s story conveys.
Fiction does not need gigantic sales to have big influence. What influences us is not the author’s biography or blog, but the way the author’s story reflects us, challenges us and changes us.
What Dan may be saying is that we misplace trust in data and that a platform does not make us secure. Only truth does that and there is no more effective way to convey truth than through a story.
Hey, Don,
Sorry for the delay here – travel, of course, again.
I don’t disagree with a word here, and I’m also very much aligned with what you’re saying in answer to Barry, as well.
I don’t think that Dan’s by any means recommending that data be held as a higher power than it is. It has all the flaws, immediate and potential, that you mention and more.
I do think, though, that his warning is valuable. If anything, it’s more so because he has worked for so many years as the digital leader in very large, high-stakes publishing scenarios. The fact that he comes away now concerned that an over-dependence on data could be counter to “conveying truth through a story,” as you rightly frame it, is important. This is a long-time expert in the field and he has emerged (like Willy Loman’s uncle from the jungle, lol) with worries we need to hear and think about.
It’s completely impossible to know what reactions we’ll need to be ready to perform at points going forward when misplacing trust in data affects, wrongly, the best chances of the best storytelling (let alone valuable work that’s not the best and doesn’t have to be). But thinking of this now, looking at the reality of how easily misplacing trust in data can happen–and how damaging it could be–is worth considering ahead of time.
From my journo platform on which so much of the “Facts First” battle is being fought (“Facts First” being CNN’s slogan-response for its “an apple is an apple” ad campaign), it’s easy to tell that forethought is important. Looking ahead to how these things develop can be useful so that when the time comes to frame an argument on behalf of value and significance and grace is helpful. Many journalists today are wishing they’d been better prepared for the assault they face now.
Thanks, as ever, for your clear-eyed intelligence on this. Always welcome and helpful.
Hope to see you soon, it’s been too long.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
This piece made me laugh several times–before it terrified me. One can’t help but wonder, where is the space for the human being in this world we are so busy creating? All the virtual reality, data mining, digital identities, and all the rest can’t change the stern realities of existence. We are frail, mortal beings who need human contact and, yes, real art created by other human beings.
Vaughn, I’m right with you, including the regular chats with neighbors, who seem blissfully oblivious to all this stuff. I tend to look for one or two havens online (like this one) and disregard the rest. Sometimes I feel we writers are all Don Quixotes these days! Thank you, Porter, for this powerful call to action.
Porter, as a long time lab rat, I’ll tell you that data has to be meaningful. You have to ask the right questions. My husband does a lot of analytics and it’s the same thing–you have to know what it means. Just knowing a bunch of facts (and you have to trust your source) isn’t going to help you.
I enjoyed reading Franklin’s essay and agree with “We are left with the troubling possibility that data does not facilitate but instead slows and halts the development of literary culture itself.” Although we are social creatures and there is value in raising a barn together, when you think of the best art or music or literature, they’ve come into being because the person had the gift of silence and contemplation so they could bring it forth and develop it. This is borne out in my own experience and observations. Although I enjoy some group activities I prefer to work alone or with a small group of professionals. The very idea of collaborating with readers is nauseating. No thank you. I want to write what I want to write and it’s been a delight.
Franklin is right that all this data can slow you down. After all, first you have to make a judgment about where the data is coming from, who’s generating it, and if they have particular biases. You have to know whether the data’s any good. Better to create from the heart. At least you will please one person for sure. This last year has been entertaining with all the gloom and doom predictions falling flat. I’d say most people are terrible at assessing true risk. Thanks for the provocation.
ps: I didn’t know The Circle was designed with an algorithm in mind. Not bad, but not great either. I liked the premise but wasn’t satisfied.
Thank you for this. I’m saving the full talk to read later. As I try to stay off Twitter and out of the raging CanLit conflicts (which include battles about books that many people do not think they even need to read before opining, often viciously), I am feeling increasingly alarmed that the interiority of creativity and the book as a living object of questioning thought and meditation on a topic/theme (rather than a – to use this word in a different way – platform for opinion or position piece) are, well, doomed….
“The crisis might become so grave that we cannot identify what is real and what is true….”
“You have confused the true and the real.” [“Dhalgren”, by Samuel Delaney.
Couldn’t resist. I read Dhalgren about forty years ago, and this is one of the lines from that bizarre book that stayed with me, something I’ve pondered from time to time over the years: Can something be true and not be real? Can something be real and not be true? (What the hell was Delaney imbibing when he wrote that book?)
I think one way to look at this is to consider the difference between being smart and being wise. I don’t think there is any doubt that most of the world’s people have gotten smarter, but it does seem to have come at the expense of wisdom, especially the wisdom of the “commons”: common sense, common courtesy, common decency.
These days, it seems we’re overwhelmed with information, drowning in data, so much so that it might be becoming meaningless–just a lot of background noise in our lives. Instead of getting ‘smarter’, acquiring more data, maybe the goal should be acquiring wisdom. I suppose we can make machines smarter, but wisdom is still acquired by individual humans–the result of experience, plus knowledge, and, as Vijaya said, the time and space for quiet contemplation.
CK, When I was teaching, I used to distinguish between what’s real or realistic, and what’s true. There’s nothing more realistic on TV than soap operas. They all take place in the present, in settings that reflect ordinary reality. Aside from all of them being good-looking, the actors look and dress like people on any street. But there’s nothing truthful about what happens in soaps. By contrast, a successful fable, or an animated feature has nothing realistic about it–but can pinpoint truth beautifully.
Not real relevant to your comment, but ” couldn’t resist.”