Speculative Short Fiction Deserves Love discussion

The only two stories I've ever seen really pick up serious steam on social media were "If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love," which was flash, and Wikihistory http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/08/wi...

BUT...Long Hidden has had a lot of social media buzz, as has Women Destroy Science Fiction, the Lightspeed special issue coming in June. (Full disclosure, I have stories in both).

The common factor in my opinion in both of those anthology/magazine examples is that they SPOKE to people. Authors wanted to be a part of them not just for the money but because they wanted to be part of something special. Readers wanted to contribute.

Just thinking out loud...

I agree that Long Hidden and WDSF spoke to people, and that they delivered something a lot of people were feeling a need for - but they also had pre-existing platforms (Crossed Genres & Lightspeed readerships, respectively) and engaged in heavy self-promotion. So there's more than one common factor, I think. Food for thought.

But where people talk about WDSF and Long Hidden as anthologies, it's harder to find people who will discuss them on a story-level. People are more likely to discuss the idea behind a thematic antho because they don't really *need* to have read it... They just need opinions about the theme. The time needed to actually read, think about and talk about stories is something people are less likely to come up with.

I've seen discussion and buzz spring up around Malon Edwards' "In the Marrow" (because it was short, simple & on io9) & Merc's "How To Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps" because... well, because it was amazing - and also very accessible. I wonder if stories really won't "go viral" unless they're short and/or simple?

I think it's possible that shorter is better when it comes to wider audience. Viral articles probably get skimmed at best.

There were a couple of people tweeting their way through reading all of Long Hidden, which I thought was awesome. I think Daniel Jose Older also tried an experiment with one of his recent stories where he encouraged people to tweet about it after they read it.

Maybe it takes an extra layer of engagement?

"Accessible" might be a better word than "simple". Merc's robot story was easy to understand, but it dealt with complex, emotionally hard-hitting themes and had a slightly nontraditional, list-based narrative structure. I worry that if we say stories won't go viral unless they are "simple", people will feel pressured to dumb down their stories, which is not at all what we're really after!

True.

Very true! I was going more for alliteration than accuracy, I think. ;)

Engagement with your audience definitely works - I know I felt pressure to start reading Long Hidden because I was feeling left out of the conversation - but I wonder how far that can work. Do you need a political topic?

Glitter & Mayhem was a great antho, but not a lot to talk about, ykwim? I can 't imagine what sort of "thesis questions" the editors could have tossed out there to get people engaged with the collection as a whole. :)

Good point.

There's probably also a big divide in terms of ability to go viral between stuff freely available online and stories that are behind a paywall (most of Glitter & Mayhem, the "big three" SF magazines, etc.)

Certainly the two anthology examples we've discussed have been on political topics - and political topics do tend to garner Opinions which get bandied around on Twitter - but I don't know that "If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love" was particularly political, except inasmuch as it talks about violence?

Ada wrote: "Certainly the two anthology examples we've discussed have been on political topics - and political topics do tend to garner Opinions which get bandied around on Twitter - but I don't know that "If ..."

Agreed. It was short, and it was beautifully structured, and like "The Paper Menagerie" it managed to tug my heartstrings in a way that did not feel forced or manipulated. It's only political in the hands of certain people who shall not be named.

Oh... I must have missed that part of the discussion, then. o_o;

's funny, I found "If You Were a Dinosaur" a little forced. ;) It might have been the context - I read it as part of a "best of 2013" list someone has put together where EVERY story was about violence and power. I was probably craving something guilt-free at that point.

"Paper Menagerie" I wish I'd read before it became the big deal it did. It was good, but I was surprised it was as lauded as it was. I found it very, very similar to a canon CanLit novel called The Jade Peony, so I had this "this has been done before" feeling. Maybe not with a paper menagerie, but thematically. I read Liu right before I "came back" to SFF, so my first reaction was "I guess these guys don't read much non-specfic".

Context, context, context. :D When, where and how a story appears is probably as important to its ability to grab on and not let go...

Hah!

I was mildly disappointed by "If You Were A Dinosaur", too. It was poignant and very well-written, but I went in thinking "YAY DINOSAURS" and then it turned out to be... not really about dinosaurs. :P Sadface.

On the other hand, I loved "The Paper Menagerie" - but then, I haven't read "The Jade Peony", so I suppose that doesn't contradict your point!

Agreed about the larger issue of context.

This isn't so much on the going-viral phenomenon, but on the context issue - totally agree. The "how" you mention is huge for me. If the story is on screen and not laid out well, that can seriously affect my pleasure in it. The when - if I read a piece of short fiction right after reading a powerful poem, I'll have a different reaction than when I read it after being immersed in a deep novel.
So maybe this does tie back to the going-viral question. Short fiction may be more affected by context than mediums like video.

Sarah wrote: "I think Daniel Jose Older also tried an experiment with one of his recent stories where he encouraged people to tweet about it after they read it. "

I can't imagine doing that! Just tweeting when a new story is up already makes me feel incredibly pushy.

Benjanun wrote: "Sarah wrote: "I think Daniel Jose Older also tried an experiment with one of his recent stories where he encouraged people to tweet about it after they read it. "

I can't imagine doing that! Just ..."

That's right, that was "Anyway: Angie" at Tor.com - and it worked! I don't read Tor.com as religiously as I do other venues, but if a story seems to be getting a lot of "buzz" I do check it out. "Anyway: Angie" was everywhere for a week so I read it (and eventually reviewed it), even if it was just Older creating all that buzz...

I think a lot of what drives buzz is people wanting to be involved in a conversation. With non-fiction and essays, people want to read and have an opinion of the issues; to talk on Twitter or Facebook about whatever people are talking about. It goes for stories too, though less often maybe because it's harder to really talk about a story? It takes a certain kind of close reader to want to dissect a text like that. Most readers don't get much further with a text than "I liked it" or "I didn't like it". Finding the meat is a tougher exercise, and something not a lot of people do.

This just reenforces my feeling that SFF needs (and hopefully is developing) a stronger critical community. More think pieces, detailed reviews, discussion spaces. Lit has it: if SFF is going to continue gaining mainstream credibility, it needs it too...

(Tangentially, I've beat this horse before, and Leah Bobet argued that SFF resists critical authority - that it's a less top-down community than lit is. Because, you know, who are our George Steiners and Harold Blooms and Marjorie Garbers? Would we welcome them if they showed up?)

I find that usually, when someone tries to set themselves up as a "critical authority" in SFF, I have to simply ignore them, because what they see in stories (either in terms of "meat", or in terms of things they dislike) is so wildly divergent from what I see that it just makes me upset.

But I also find that tweeting about other people's stories feels *less* pushy to me than tweeting about my own. It's an act of fandom, rather than an act of self-promotion. It's also an act of stating opinions - "Hey I really like this story, possibly for X reason!" - rather than making commands "YOU SHOULD GO READ THIS", which is important to me. Making tweets about one's own stories into opinions is much harder.

Ada wrote: "I find that usually, when someone tries to set themselves up as a "critical authority" in SFF, I have to simply ignore them, because what they see in stories (either in terms of "meat", or in terms..."

For sure, and people definitely have the same reaction to critics in straight lit (see: every english student who was ever told they "should" read a particular story a particular way). And yet in lit they remain, and they do drive te conversation. Person A writes a think-piece on Angela Carter and Person B responds with a series of scathing letters, followed by their own counter-argument in favour of Shirley Jackson, etc. On the one hand you get people who bristle because they don't feel anyone has the authority to talk down to anyone else about matters of opinion, but on the other you have a HUGE number of readers and academics who follow the discussion and use it to inform their reading and writing choices. These are people and venues who act as tastemakers, and even if they are controversial, that's where the discussion comes from.

SFF resists these critical conversations, probably a lot because people don't want to be seen as being pushy in spaces where fandom has always come from below. This is good in a distribution of power kind of way, but I wonder what it does to the conversation. How do we rally around particular stories, talk about bigger trends, and build on ideas if we don't have big, centralized discussion?

Charlotte wrote: "SFF resists these critical conversations, probably a lot because people don't want to be seen as being pushy in spaces where fandom has always come from below. This is good in a distribution of power kind of way, but I wonder what it does to the conversation. How do we rally around particular stories, talk about bigger trends, and build on ideas if we don't have big, centralized discussion? ."

Excellent point - and one that would make a really good Readercon panel, I'll bet. There are some critics who've taken on short story reviews: Gardner Dozois and Lois Tilton have been doing it for Locus forever, and come from a place of moderate authority, though their interpretations are hit or miss.
Tangent Online and Diabolical Plots and SFRevu do fan reviews of short fiction. But I'm not sure who reads any of those other than writers.
I don't have any kind of answer for how we rally other than Twitter. Twitter is such a great equalizer. But I also agree with Ada and Benjanun that it's far easier to tweet about others' stories than your own.

On a related note, people on Twitter are being encouraged to use the hashtag #WDSF to talk about the Lightspeed Women Destroy Science Fiction issue. That worked really well for #LongHidden, which genuinely felt like (and feels like) a community. I'm hoping it will work to foster conversation around WDSF as well.

Would anyone agree that most of the stories that go viral tend to be contemporary, or near-future? ('In the Marrow' is very recognizable as only slightly removed from today).

'Immersion' is an exception, but it's the only one I can think of.

Maybe it takes an extra layer of engagement?

--This I think is true. With a viral article, or even an essay, you can scan it, see a paragraph or bullet point or two that you agree with or think is funny, etc., and rebroadcast it, but with a story, you really want to read and enjoy before you do--and I think that slows down the process of things going viral.

Is part of the reason because one of the drivers of virality is participation?

By sharing an article or image, I can "sign on" to an opinion. I can even take to my own blog or image editor and refine the message to highlight what I think is most important, or to add my own perspective.

But if I share a piece of short fiction, what am I signing on to? How do I add my own perspective? Is there a way that I can participate with the piece or its aims at a level beyond: "Wow, check out this great story!"

If I'm not the writer, what's in it for ME if I share a story on Twitter or Facebook?

That's an interesting point. Maybe the thrill of being retweeted as others latch onto it?

I had an odd viral moment some years back, as I won a contest on Nathan Bransford blog. Then when I put the winning entry online, it got passed around (mainly in reader communities... not so much writers or people I know). For readers passing around, short helps, as does humour. But the big thing is getting noticed in the first place. I think the biggest block that stops people recommending stories is they haven't read them in the first place, because they don't get as much initial promotion.

It's notable that viral moment is the most attention anything I've written has ever got... but in no way is it the best thing I've ever written. It's just the one that got attention from someone with a big audience.

Stuff like art and news often gets promoted by people with a big audience. Anthologies sometimes do. But individual shorts usually don't get anything like that.

I like sharing stories I like, because I hope that my followers enjoy them too. And because it's a 'reward' for the author/venue that have published an enjoyable story.

I don't do it nearly enough.

I don't really see anything in it for me. I just like doing it.

I guess it's difficult to judge what going viral is. There's the buzz of social media commentary, and there's the number of hits on a story.

The only data I've seen is on a Nature's Futures story which for the last year has had a metric button so you can see how many hits a story has had, how many time's it been retweeted, etc.

here's one of my story's metrics.

I hadn't realised that about Nature. It certainly would show if one of their stories went viral. I'd say for my two stories, the metrics is in line with my observations. That is that one got little to no attention and the other got some. (Now I'm curious whether any of their stories has gone viral, but seems like the only way to check is to check each story.)

Deborah sez: "I guess it's difficult to judge what going viral is."

I think this is a great point. Does "going viral" in this context mean that a story is tweeted and blogged about by handfuls of people who are paying attention to short fiction?

Or do we mean that it explodes outside of our corner of the world and is shared by thousands of people?

Matthew wrote:I think this is a great point. Does "going viral" in this context mean that a story is tweeted and blogged about by handfuls of people who are paying attention to short fiction?

Or do we mean that it explodes outside of our corner of the world and is shared by thousands of people? "

My hope would be the latter, but the former, in this context, might "count" too. Because, let's face it, most published SFF fades into obscurity immediately after publication. I think I'd "measure" whether it generates any kind of conversation, rather than set a threshold at a certain number of hits. What makes people pass around articles and essays, but not short stories? What distinguishes the short stories that DO get passed on?

On the topic of metrics, Scigentasy shows "views" on their site, which I always find enlightening. Stories seem to range from 800 to 4000 views. I'm still looking for the pattern. -.-

It's interesting when stories that are neither this-week current nor classics get called into the light. Earlier this year a friend posted about "Moths in the New World," a speculative short story by Audrey Niffenegger, originally published in 2011. Thanks to my friend's recommendation, I read and enjoyed the story, and posted about it myself, and several other people read it at that point too. The story had originally run in the Guardian newspaper--whatever burst of virality it had was over--but then somehow it was found again.

The Guardian is a *huge* platform, though, and Niffenegger is a best-selling author, so both those things no doubt help with rediscovery.

We've had two stories go viral:
"Spar" by Kij Johnson
"The Things" by Peter Watts

Both continue to receive significant monthly readership despite the stories being years old. Peter's was mentioned by Simon Pegg, Felicia Day, Will Wheaton, and various other celebrities with huge followings within a few months of release. It's the most-successful (in terms of readership) story we've ever published and nothing is even close to catching it. (Hundreds of thousands in the lead.)

There is no explaining what makes something go viral. Part of it is just being in the right place at the right time. Attempts to manufacture a viral situation are challenging at best, and I'm almost willing to go out on a limb and suggest that the hashtag viral attempts mentioned in this tread we're simply good marketing, but not true viral situations. Viral has a life of its own and goes way beyond your circle or even the next circle out.

That's a good point. Maybe "going viral" isn't something we can expect of any story. It can happen, but it's rare. Maybe we're talking about something smaller when it comes to stories. Going bacterial?

Sarah wrote: "That's a good point. Maybe "going viral" isn't something we can expect of any story. It can happen, but it's rare. Maybe we're talking about something smaller when it comes to stories. Going bacter..."

"There were localized epidemics of extreme enthusiasm for this story, but the CDC says there is no risk of a pandemic" :-P

Just curious, how big a readership are people talking about when they've been using "viral" in this discussion? 10k, 100k, 500k, bigger?

Neil wrote: "Just curious, how big a readership are people talking about when they've been using "viral" in this discussion? 10k, 100k, 500k, bigger?"

I think of a sff story as having gone viral if it gets attention in a national-level non-sff site--like, say, if it got mentioned in salon.com or something. That's probably too demanding a standard, but I think of viral-ness as meaning jumping your original confines.

So you are talking mentions rather than resulting readers? I tend to think that viral behavior must include a corresponding abnormal spike in readership and a long-term tail with higher than normal readership & occasional small spikes.

Neil wrote: "So you are talking mentions rather than resulting readers? I tend to think that viral behavior must include a corresponding abnormal spike in readership and a long-term tail with higher than normal..."

I take a mention in some non-sff, national-level forum as indicative of exactly that spike in readership, etc., that you describe (because I'm assuming that that's how the story comes to their attention). In other words, I agree with your measures--I just use the other thing as a sort of shorthand.

Sadly, that isn't necessarily the case. Stories get mentioned outside their circles all the time, but very few of them result in meaningful spikes. Even fewer of those manage to grow legs (triggering more mentions outside normal circles), which is when I consider a potentially viral situation to have begun.

I've used this graph to demonstrate viral spikes at Clarkesworld:


Points three and six represent situations I would consider viral, complete with aftershocks and long-tail.

*nodding*

I was taking the mention as an after-the-fact sign, but if stories get mentioned outside their circles **prior** to a spike, then yeah, I can see how the mention itself might not be enough to create a spike. I guess I'm back to the stage of bewildered musing: I really haven't got clue as to why some stories take off. And as for what numbers qualify as having gone viral, I'd go with whatever you or other publishers say.

Neil, I think you've got access to great stats. I'll admit I didn't really think about the difference between mentions and reads, since I don't have any way to tell who is clicking on a link and staying to read a story, and who is just passing through or boosting signal.
I think I expect lower numbers for a viral story than for a cat picture - just a different definition for one medium vs. another. Your examples are concrete, which is nice.
I guess I just want to think that a good story can have legs.

Francesca, your message 35 cracked me up.

Yes, the triggering mention would be before the spike. If it is enough of a spike, you should see secondary mentions that add to the original spike or create aftershocks days, months, or years later. Sometimes the aftershocks can be bigger than the original spike. (The friend of a friend can be the one with the HUGE audience.)

Definitely. A cat picture will always have a larger viral potential than a short story. That makes me sad, but despite this information, I refuse to pepper stories with cat pictures. :)

I enjoyed Francesca's comment also.

Hee, thanks you guys--I aim to please :-)

Neil wrote: "Definitely. A cat picture will always have a larger viral potential than a short story. That makes me sad, but despite this information, I refuse to pepper stories with cat pictures. :) "

I think we've hit upon the magic formula: a story composed entirely of cat memes.

"engaged in heavy self-promotion". There you are. I see a lot of tweets when a story comes out, but that's not a dialog. What's a path that strikes a dialog? Stories in anthologies have a better chance because they can bounce off each other. Themed anthologies, better yet. My opinion.

Perhaps, but the average readership for an anthology is low enough that it would barely register on the viral scale.

Neil wrote: "Perhaps, but the average readership for an anthology is low enough that it would barely register on the viral scale."

I've seen the numbers, but that makes me so sad. Themed anthologies are some of the first things I remember reading, and I still gravitate toward them.

Sarah wrote: "I think we've hit upon the magic formula: a story composed entirely of cat memes."

*laugh* Oh, gosh. I cannot get that out of my head now... It would be hilarious!

I'm still focused on buzz as a dialog, and the sparse landscape of short fiction reviews and reviewers. Does anyone know of a service like NetGalley but for short fiction? There's a gap between sale and publication which would be great for reviews.