The Reason Social Media Sucks For Everyone These Days (Not Just Creators)

Social media these days sucks. That's probably a statement you've heard before, and it's the sort of statement that sounds like the usual old person griping about how things have changed since their day. You hear it with fashion, movies, music, and every other aspect of life, so of course people are going to complain that social media was so much better when they were young, and in the prime of their life.

As someone who depends on social media for at least part of my living, though, you aren't imagining it. It really does suck more now than it did before... and if you're a creator, that's a storm that just might sink your boat.

And it doesn't look like it's going to get better any time soon.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more!

The Enshittification of Everything

I really wish I could take credit for this term, but alas, I cannot. Enshittification, or to use its more polite term according to The Chainsaw platform decay, is basically a microcosm of the capitalist mindset on fast-forward.

So how does it work?

Well, the first stage of the cycle is where you create a platform, and do everything you possibly can to attract a huge user base to it. You charge little to no fees, you provide great features, you keep it open to as many people as possible, and most importantly you provide something of value to your audience. Maybe you're a search engine that gives fast, accurate results, an online storefront that gives you access to a massive amount of products at a low price, or maybe you're a social media platform that gives people a smooth timeline, ease of use, and the ability to connect to all of their friends.

Once a platform has made itself valuable to the users (often by running at a deficit, or by barely breaking even), that's when it starts altering its priorities. Maybe your social media site or your search engine starts slipping in more ads. It's subtle at first, but they're bringing in revenue, and they aren't too big of an eyesore. Maybe your video streaming platform ads a second ad at the beginning, or has several ad breaks throughout longer videos. Maybe your digital store now has "recommended" products at the top of your search results that are paid placement from clients who want to make sure shoppers see their stuff first. The platform isn't terrible yet, but it's taking its first steps down the path to hell.

Just sign here on the dotted line, if you will...

The decay continues as the platform's greed increases. Now the platform is choking off the signal for average creators, trying to squeeze money out of them to force them to pay for ad space. This also stops users from seeing anything from their friends, family and community. The platform increases the cost to bigger clients for ads as well, making it a huge pay-to-play market. In the end, no one other than the platform is getting anything out of this arrangement.

By the time you reach the end of the decay cycle, you have a platform that is rotten to the core. It's trying to squeeze its clients, its users, and the service it was providing is being actively degraded as it tries to charge you for more, and more, and more. And when all is said and done, there will come a point where everyone on both sides of the corrupt middleman dusts off their hands and simply says, "No more." They abandon the platform, moving on to somewhere else, and leaving the platform without the blood and treasure it needs to keep itself alive. Maybe it backs up and readjusts its course, but it's entirely possible that the platform just dies, leaving a power vacuum for something else to try to take its place.

This is Happening To Social Media Before Our Eyes

If you've been watching the trash fire that is Twitter, then you've seen this kind of action in real time. While the platform had its flaws before Musk took over, he put on the gas on the enshittification process. He started removing features users liked (and firing a lot of people to reduce the overhead), charging for things which were previously included (the ongoing saga of how much users would have to pay for the blue check mark), and actively alienating both users and clients with the way the platform was run.

Twitter is, of course, not the only platform dealing with this kind of decay.

We see it with Facebook, where user signals don't travel nearly as far as they once did, and creators are constantly encouraged to pay for advertising if they want people to see their posts. We see it on Reddit with the removal of fixes and work arounds that helped keep many communities functional. We see it on YouTube as they enact more and more stringent guidelines on many creators if they want to be monetized, eliminating entire genres of content off the platform, and leading to a bizarre kind of doublespeak as people try to avoid invoking the wrath of the algorithm.

And we're all suffering from this. The users in our audience, the creators writing books, running blogs, and making videos, and the companies who want to find a place to sell their products or sponsor us as creators... we're all getting squeezed.

And it's why so many of us rely on straight crowd funding these days.

I've got the numbers myself, just from my own little corner of the Internet. In ye olde days, I could share a blog post from Improved Initiative, or even from right here on The Literary Mercenary on just Facebook, and it would usually get around 400 hits just from the groups I shared it in. That was my bottom floor. If it was a popular topic it could get up to 800 or 1,000. If I also shared it on Reddit, I could easily see it climb to between 1,500 and 5,000 hits.

These days? I'm sharing my articles in more than double the locations on Facebook, and it generates about 20-50 hits. On Reddit I'm also going into more subs than I ever did in the past, and I'm lucky if a single post even breaks 1,000 hits. For something to get more than that it has to really catch the attention of a community, and start a small firestorm of replies, shares, etc. And even then, the reactions from the community are worth so much less than they were in the past, making it a monumental task to even be seen, much less to make sales.

So What The Hell Are We Supposed To Do?

As I said back in Why Writers Hate All These Twitter Alternatives (Hint: It's Because They're Useless), all of us are caught in the whirlpool of the drain of enshittification. It's not just Twitter, or Facebook, or Reddit, or YouTube. It's not just Amazon, or Netflix, or any other titan of industry... it's all of them. They grow as big as they can, crush their competition so they're the biggest name in town, and then they start turning the screws until eventually there's no more blood left in the stone.

So what are we going to do? Unfortunately, the answer boils down to, "Try our best to survive."

And that also means we need to rely on our audience more than ever.

Surviving has a lot of aspects to it. On the one hand, we need to try to navigate the changing faces of the platforms we're already using, even as they decay right under our feet. On another hand, we have to try to keep an eye out for replacement platforms that give us more tools, a more direct connection to our audience, or which help us find a bit of breathing room. And while we're doing all of that we still need to find time to actually create new content, write new books, or whatever else it is we're doing.

And let me tell you... it is exhausting trying to navigate a sinking ship day in and day out while also keeping an eye on the horizon for a more seaworthy ship, and remembering to play enough music for people to hear us. And most of us could really use a life preserver right about now.

Support The Literary Mercenary

For folks who just want to do their part to help keep me making more content, please subscribe/follow me in these locations:

- My Facebook

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Trust Me, Writers, You Should Really Google That Idea First

It's a running gag that if you're a writer you probably have a somewhat suspicious search history. From how long it takes for a buried body to decompose, to what the effects of certain hallucinogens are, to the murder laws in particular states or countries, we often find ourselves in pursuit of rather strange information... and that's just for stories that don't involve magic, super science, and other impossible weirdness!

However, a lot of us should really run a few Google searches whenever we think we've had some brilliant, insightful breakthrough. Because a lot of the time you're going to find out that someone has probably had the idea already, and their take on the idea might alter the course you want to take with your own work.

Seriously, just check. Measure twice, write once.

As always, before we get started, I want to remind folks that I have a Patreon, and that's what keeps the wheels greased and the content coming out. Additionally, if you don't want to miss anything I put out, make sure you subscribe to my weekly newsletter while you're at it!

"Hey! They Stole My Idea!"

As writers we all have those moments where we are so convinced we've come up with a new idea, or a new twist on something that it just excites our imaginations and sends us into fits of creativity. And most of us have felt the cold steel of the pin puncturing that balloon when we've realized that we were not, in fact, the first ones to have this idea. And in at least a few cases, the idea has been around in the genre not just before we became writers, but often before we were even born.

What the hell? Who's been reading my notes?

For a perfect example of this, a younger writer I know practically had a meltdown while they were watching Wandavision. Because to hear them tell it, they were convinced that they came up with the idea of chaos magic... not just that, but they were so sure that the name in particular was something they'd come up with first, and that Marvel had somehow beat them to the punch. In case you're not familiar, Wanda's powers have been described as chaos magic for decades. The actual practice, which I talked about in What is Chaos Magic? for those who want to do further reading, has been around even longer. Not only that, but the term has showed up in dozens of fantasy novels, roleplaying games, and other intellectual properties since practically the 1970s.

So why was he so convinced that he'd coined this term himself, and come up with the idea of a character whose powers are strange and unpredictable? Well, partially it was because he had a relatively bland and samey media diet, so he hadn't seen those movies, played those games, or read those comics. But mostly it was because he didn't do a quick search on the words "chaos magic" because he was so sure that no one else had this idea that he could just proceed with his story without checking.

To be clear, none of this meant the writer in question suddenly couldn't have chaos magic in his novel. The concept isn't copyrighted, and he could have continued on with his plan. The only thing that changed would be that if he tried to use the, "So, the magicians in my story tap into chaos magic," as a selling point he was suddenly going to have people with more genre savvy asking if his book was like X, Y, or Z property. Or, in some cases, accusing him of either homage (or just ripping off) an older property who had already fleshed out that idea.

And for some of us, standing in the shadow of previous books is enough to make us re-evaluate an entire project.

Measure Twice, Write Once

If you're going to check to be sure that someone can actually survive the particular type of stab wounds you're dishing out, or that gas tanks made after a particular year can actually explode, then it pays to do a bit of searching regarding what you think are the unique selling points of your story. Whether it's the type of magic system you're using, the particular genre blend you're trying out, or even the names of your secret societies you're titling your books after, just check. It saves you a world of headache later.

Because nine times out of ten the fact that someone else had this idea ten, twenty, or even a hundred years ago (the pulp era was strange, and full of bizarre creativity) doesn't actually stop you from putting your own spin on it. Whether you're trying to impress readers or an editor, though, it's important to go in with open eyes knowing what the market has already done with a particular kind of book. Because there's nothing worse than walking a well-trodden path absolutely convinced that you're the first one to ever discover it.

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, its sequel Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

From Galvanism to Google: Tropes That Are Killing Your Novel

Authors have to walk a very fine line between writing what they know and just making shit up. Unless you happen to be Ian Fleming (the guy who lived James Bond's life before he wrote the novels) you tend to rely on a combination of your own experiences and research. Unfortunately for a lot of authors "research" means reading books and watching movies written by people who didn't know what the hell they were talking about. As a result a lot of tropes which should really be put out to pasture keep cropping up again and again in a day and age where they really have no business being.

It is impossible for a single blog entry to cover every possible trope that needs to be brought to your attention; that's what TV Tropes is for. And, just so we're all on the same page, this entry is going to focus on tropes regarding technology and history (for those who want social tropes I already covered cultural appropriation and killing women as a source of motivation).

All right? All right.

Trope #1: Knockout Drugs

We've all read a book or seen a movie where these chemical miracles figured in. Just load up a hypodermic, put it in your crossbow or compressed air rifle, and you can bring down any subject with no muss and no fuss. Your hero might struggle valiantly to remain awake, but in a matter of moments it's going to be lights out no matter what happens.

What, this? It's perfectly safe. Just count backward from 10...

Have you ever wondered why anesthesiologists get paid so much money? You know, the people who take all of your vitals and then carefully administer you with a cocktail meant to keep you unconscious during surgery? It's because if they screw up by so much as a few milliliters it's possible for you to go under and never come up again. That means that unless the people chasing you and firing dozens of tranquilizer rounds at you have a concoction specific to your body chemistry you're either going to just get woozy, or die. Possibly one then the other if you're hit more than once.

While this trope might seem nit-picky it's actually a small representation of a bigger problem; namely authors who throw in science without making an attempt to figure out how it works. We're not talking hand-wavey sci-fi tech either, just everyday chemistry and physics that you can find explained on wikipedia if you need a fast and loose explanation of what you're trying to do.

Trope #2: Everyone Speaks Modern Colloquial Languages

Have you ever been scrolling through your list of TV options and inexplicably found yourself watching one of those ghost hunting shows? Well if you have then you might have been lucky enough to catch one where the crew went overseas to report on some foreign ghostly activities. Maybe they were looking into ancient battlefields in Romania, or creepy islands in Thailand. While it's flavorful, you can tell that the writers (yes, ghost hunting shows have writers) are running out of ideas. How, you ask?

All the ghosts speak English.

That's eerie... how did they know we're American?

Of course any author with a shred of craft would never screw something like that up so blatantly. He would at the very least go to a Google translator program and get a phrase from the ghost's home country. Sometimes that's all it takes, but sometimes authors forget that language changes over time. Put another way that Arabic phrase you're seeing now might work in modern day Dubai, but if your heroes have mysteriously traveled back to the 7th century then chances are good it would be gibberish to anyone who heard it.

Language changes and adapts, and if you're going to play with it then you're opening a big ole' can of worms regarding it. On the one hand it's good form not to have your medieval sword-swinging British badass call someone "dude" on page two of your book, but it's also a good idea to remember that words like warlock have a unique cultural and geographic origin before you start using them in the wrong cultural setting.

In case you're curious, warlock is a British term that was imported from Scandinavia and other parts of Northern Europe.

Trope #3: Everyone Has Cell Phones (And No One Uses Them)

Technology often dates the books we read, and the cell phone is just one of the latest revolutions we use to date when a story takes place. If they're big and blocky we're looking at a story in the 1980s or 1990s, and if they're sleek and computerized we have a modern day or future thriller. The problem with cell phones, just like the problems with any other form of mass-produced technology, is that it will change your story.

How's that you might ask? Well I'll give you a good example.

I wonder what other forms of technology everyone has?

Some time ago I was given a job editing a modern fantasy story. Our reluctant lead had gotten caught up fighting a dragon (long story), and during the "discover esoteric prophecy" part of the book he had to get a piece of information from the radio station he worked at (a co-worker's home phone number, to be precise). So he steals another character's car, tear-asses across town, gets into a wreck, and then has a tense cat-and-mouse through the station for reasons that are never quite revealed. The whole time I was reading this all I could think was "Why are you wasting all this time and effort when you could just call the station?"

The main character had specifically mentioned having a cellular phone. He had the Internet. He even had a home phone for whatever reason (but apparently so did his co-worker). There was nothing to stop him from dialing information to get the number, looking it up in a directory online, or just calling the station and asking the receptionist to give him the number off the piece of paper on the break room wall. All of these were approaches that would have taken less time, required less effort, and which anyone who grew up in the Internet age would have turned to first before getting in the car and driving across town.

The short version? If you introduce any piece of technology whether it's a radio in your wristwatch or a cybernetic Internet connection in your lead's left eye then you need to remember that technology is real to your characters. It's a tool they possess, and if it's something they use on a daily basis then of course it's going to be the first thing they turn to in order to solve a problem. Also, technology affects society. If everyone has cell phones with cameras in them, how hard is it going to be for a blood-soaked shoot out to stay quiet?

The answer, as modern governments have found out, is it can't be hushed up. Period.

Trope #4: Occult Books Just Sitting On Your Lead's Shelf

The plot device of the rare-and-occult-book is not new. It's the whole plot of The 9th Gate and a version of it drives the film Cigarette Burns. Books by their very nature have a certain mystique, and an occult book doubly so. After all if a book has a whole secret cabal associated with it then it must be really special, right?

It would, and that's why we create those plot devices that our protagonists chase after. Regular books that hold important plot information are just that though; regular, ordinary, garden-variety books.

Even these.

The problem with this trope is not the existence of fictional books that drive your plot. If you want to create a book specifically to advance plot and to convey information to your main characters that is fine and dandy. The Necronomicon and other tomes of its ilk are cherished relics in the halls of horror, after all. The problem arises when an author writes the phrase, "so he spent an hour reading through his occult books," or something similar.

There's no such thing as occult books. The word occult means hidden or secret, and the word itself has taken on a mysterious air because of how often it's been used in thrillers and horror stories. If something has been written down and mass-produced though that's about as far from secret as you can get. What most authors mean when they use the term occult books is books about rare, obscure, or mystical subjects. This can be anything from academic treatises on the European witch craze, to obscure tomes about the changes the early Catholic church made to the Bible when translating it from Greek to Latin, to diary excerpts from a cannibal who was arrested and executed in Texas in the year 1902. They're just books... books about weird subjects, but books all the same.

The problem is that when you call them occult books we find ourselves wondering how someone not in a cult managed to get his hands on a secret grimoire, a hand-written account of the life of Paracelsus, or some other truly rare and obscure tome. You can't buy occult books at Barnes and Noble, but you can buy The History of Occult Symbols in America if you're willing to check the bargain bin.

If you want to make your hero's search for specific information feel more real then all you need to do is throw out some titles and author names. Talk about some databases he looked through. If your hero is not an expert in the subject though it's always better to phone a character who is an expert and to let that character deliver the information your hero truly needs to progress the plot. Don't just say you typed some key terms into Google and found everything about an ancient esoteric order. If it was that easy to find then you should be done by chapter four.

As always if you're interested in supporting me and the Literary Mercenary then you can stop by my Patreon page and become a patron today! If you want to make sure you get all of my updates then all you have to do is fill in the box on the right, or follow me on Facebook and Tumblr.

The Best Alternative to Google Adsense

Before we get started with this week's post, I wanted to let my readers know the Literary Mercenary has its first official shirt paying homage to one of the great rock stars of the written word.

Willy Shakes, telling it like it is.

This design, along with several others, is available in the Literary Mercenary's storefront right here. Tell your family, tell your friends, and let everyone know you don't work for free.

Speaking of not working for free, this week we're discussing Google AdSense and how unreliable it can be for those who want to make a serious living.

What Are You Talking About?

Anyone who's followed this blog for a while knows I have used Google AdSense for many years. I've outlined how the process works, and I've explained to many readers just how they too can enjoy the benefits of Google AdSense to monetize their blogs. Even when Yahoo! Voices shuttered its doors and the journalism market dried up, I knew that Google always had my back.

Or at least I thought it did.

That would be me. Way off in the background. Looking the other way. Minding my own business.

For those of you who want the nitty gritty details, I wrote a blog post about how Google kicked me out of their clubhouse and cut up my Google AdSense access card right here. I'd like to say it was an article about why it happened, but it seems when Google drums you out of the service you are not given a reason why you're being thrown out on your ear.

I told you that so you know, dear readers, that when I tell you there are alternatives to Google AdSense out there you can trust I know what I'm talking about.

The Best Google AdSense Alternative

Whether you couldn't get a Google AdSense account of your own, you had one and were thrown out, or you just don't trust Google and would prefer to use another company to monetize your blog, you've probably noticed there aren't many options out there. Google is one of the biggest companies in the world, and the amount of resources it controls online is intimidating to say the least. So when you go on a pilgrimage as an outcast from Google's lands, you are walking across the wasteland that was once Google's competition.

Here lies Squidoo, last of the line of trueborn content creators.

However, that doesn't mean there's no life after Google. In fact there are several Google AdSense alternatives that are robust, functional, and which will make certain that your blog or website has the capacity to earn you money as long as you keep your traffic up.

Rather than give you a list though, I'll just tell you which one I found to be the best value; Infolinks.

What Is Infolinks?

Seems pretty straightforward, doesn't it? Infolinks puts ads on your website or blog which are geared toward what your viewers want. All you have to do is keep creating good content, and as long as you bring in traffic you can leave the advertising part of things up to Infolinks.

Best of all, you don't have to worry about Google deciding to cut you off for reasons they won't divulge.

Sounds Good To Me!

I thought it might. Though there's a special added bonus as well; even if you have Google AdSense on your page, you can still incorporate Infolinks. So at the end of the day there is really no reason not to go check it out right here.

Just tell them the Literary Mercenary sent you, and don't forget to follow me on Facebook and Tumblr to get all of my latest and greatest.