As you already know, I am committed to #BrandZero, where I won’t talk about major IPs on this site or on social media. In doing so, I will promote smaller brands committed to serving their fans instead of spitting on them.
However, Twitter buddy Kestifer points out an important way to improve upon #BrandZero’s praxis: avoiding oppositional marketing.
The flipside of Brand Zero is promoting New Hotness instead of the Old & Busted. After the hiatus, I’ll get on that, as well as doing some more classic pulp stuff in the pipeline.
But here’s the thing: Positioning your work as a counterbalance to converged dinosaur franchises isn’t enough. #StarWarsNotStarWars made sense a couple of years ago, but right now it doesn’t. That old gif of a dog staring blankly ascupcakes are pulled away is more entertaining than Star Wars is nowadays. Its not a high bar to clear.
I don’t care if its a sweeping space opera that’s “like Star Wars, but Good.” I don’t care if its an epic fantasy that reads like a mashup of Beowulf and Harry Dresden. I don’t care if the book is explicitly written to piss off the SJW Death Cult. (If its a good book, it will automatically piss them off).
Oppositional marketing isn’t going to get me to buy something. Give me a character I can give a shit about who faces obstacles that I want to see them overcome. The PulpRev and related indie fiction scenes have been making tremendous strides in the last 3-4 years, but the next step is cranking out characters that you fall in love with enough that you want to talk about them with complete strangers.
Everything. Boils. Down. To. Characters.
Oppositional marketing relies upon woke media sites picking up your content and running with it — something they will never do. When they do do it, it is usually to police their own ranks or punish someone who depends on them for social prestige.
By contrast, woke media franchises can and do use oppositional marketing to great effect, disparaging entire demographics to get critics talking and spreading the word. Good publicity is better than bad publicity, but bad publicity is better than no publicity.
For small IPs, oppositional marketing is a losing move.
Just as #BrandZero doesn’t talk about big brands, #BrandZero shouldn’t define the smaller IPs it champions purely in terms of opposition to woke extermism. It doesn’t give the audience anything to grasp onto, nor does it give any reason to engage with it. It’s just “waTCh mE triGGeR tHe sjW snOWFlakeS” — no fuel, no fire, no substance. Just whining like a baby.
Instead, the answer is what Kestifer mentioned at the end of the above quote: positively promoting your IP and your characters.
Instead of comparing your IP to some woke ideological stance, talk about what makes the IP good instead. Rather than place it in opposition to a big brand, talk about it in terms of aspirations or speculation. Instead of lamenting the sad state of modern media, talk up your characters and why readers should care about them.
Everyone knows what we’re against. Now, we have to say what we’re for. And I’m for Christ, for beauty, and for romance.
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Pick up a copy of Shining Tomorrow Volume 1: Shadow Heart before Amazon deletes it. And while you’re at it, leave a review when you’re done.
Rawle
How timely.
I just got an email advert that Lee Childs will publish a book on Heros. Specifically what makes a hero and why they endure.
I’ll be willing to read his observations. To see what his insights are.
His character is a great archetype and has spawned a spin off series by Diane Capri that I like a lot.
TL;DR
Regress harder and inculcate the virtues!
xavier
Sounds good. Let’s see what he has to say.
Rawle,
Agreed. This is his first non fiction book so I have demanding expectation on how he’ll treat the subject matter.
I might buy his book as I’m genuinely curious. Will you do a book review and evaluation of how his observations fit in or not with the pulp rev/superversive/cruci-fiction genres?
If so I’ll consider getting the book and commenting alongside you.
I want to be a novelist but will end up being an essayist 🙂
Lord can I glorify your creation as both?
xavier
Tell me when you do buy it so I can get my own copy.
Rawle
Ok I could do that.
xavier
I am with you 100%, especially in light of what you posted regarding “waTCh mE triGGeR tHe sjW snOWFlakeS!”
Back when the left cannibalized Amelie Wen Zhao, John C. Wright attempted an anti-boycott of her three-book series with the following explanation: “But I am perfectly willing to buy all three in hardback, merely to tweak the noses of these vicious, inhuman, dream-destroying bullies.”
Worse yet, he personally attempted to guilt-trip me–as in, he responded to me in his own comment section–via my own Christianity. He remarked, after his liberal appeal to “free speech,” that “Hell is the enemy, which sets us at each others’ throats.” This was in spite of him having previously admitted things like “Make no mistake: Zhou was [and] is a Leftist, who insults Trump apparently as automatically as a civilized person blessing someone who sneezes,” and “Myself, I know nothing about the book or the authoress aside from what I have recited here.”
John C. Wright called on me to not only financially support an avowed leftist, but to order her books–which were potential cultural poisons–so as to reverse her decision to pull them and to game the Amazon metrics. And to that, I would now respond with this. YouTube atheists also trigger SJWs, and yet, except for Wright himself via the purchase of his own works, I fail to recall him asking his readers to support their village fedora tippers.
Don’t be too hard on John C. Wright; everyone makes missteps and mistakes. He is no inverter, so there’s no need to lay into him like this.
But yes, the era of clickbait is nearing its end. Now you actually have to bring something to the table; deliberately tweaking people to get hate-clicks was an unsustainable model, and its weaknesses are easy to see now. The pop-culture Right’s attack reviews do not help anymore — everyone knows the score now, so one more complaining video won’t change a thing.