Andrea Phillips's Blog, page 12

Fireside Fiction's 2015 Subscription Drive

Fireside Magazine was my very first fiction sale. That story was Children of Rouwen, published just a few weeks ago. It was overshadowed by the bigger release from a couple of weeks earlier, though, because Fireside Fiction was also my first (and so far my only) novel sale. That book is of course Revision.

Working with Fireside has always been a joy, even aside from that giddy halo of finding a publisher who believes in me; their processes are kind and collaborative in all the best ways. I've written about that elsewhere. These are good people, trying to do good things in the world.

And not just from where I sit, either. I'm not the only creator Fireside has done business with -- of course not. Fireside has brought us stories from celebrated writers like Daniel José Older, Elizabeth Bear, Chuck Wendig; early-career writers, like me and Sunil Patel; not to mention a never-ending stream of exceptional art from Galen Dara. Go on, look at the archives and see what they've been doing. It's wonderful.

One of Fireside's founding principles is fair pay for writers. As such, Fireside pays a whopping 12.5 cents per word for short fiction. That's twice what qualifies as a "professional rate" in this day and age.

And now Fireside needs me -- and you -- to keep the party going. This is the last few days of Fireside's funding drive. After years of stressful and funded-at-the-last-minute Kickstarters, Fireside is trying to shift over to Patreon and subscriptions to keep the lights on. 

On July 15 (that's Wednesday), they're going to have to take a good, hard look at the money coming in, and figure out what to do about a budget shortfall. It might mean lighter magazines, and so fewer stories for readers and less opportunity for writers, I don't know. It might mean Fireside starts slowly winding down, and a force for diversity and higher pay for fiction fades into the West.

Please, please, we can't let that happen. They need $21,000 to produce a full year of stories and art all-out. That works out to $1750 a month, and that funds a whopping 10,000 words of fiction, plus art and production costs. But as I write this, Fireside is only funded to about $8600 for the year -- that's less than halfway there. 

If you've read Fireside and thought the work was good, now is the time to step in with your couple of bucks. If you haven't, go ahead and do some reading back issues; I think you'll find Fireside is worth saving.

I'm putting my money where my mouth is, too. I'm a Fireside supporter on Patreon, and I've supported prior years on Kickstarter. You can contribute through Patreon too, or buy a subscription for three months, six months, a year. Join me in keeping this thing going, and maintaining a precedent where writers get paid in cash, not glory. It helps raise the bar for everyone else -- and you'll get some fantastic reading out of it, too.

The Always/Only Test

Lo these many months I've been using a quick rule of thumb to explain how I identify offensive, stereotypical, or even just atrociously thin characters through a variety of intersectional lenses. And I thought I would share it with you! It's called the Always/Only Test. It is very simple! Only two questions! They are:

Does the character always have that attribute?
Is the character the only one to have that attribute?

For our purposes "a character" can also mean "a class of characters in this story." So: people of color, fat people, disabled people, you name it.

Let's see how this plays out with, oh, sexual objectification of women. If your women always have sexiness as their role in the story, then what you have is not a character so much as the embodiment of a fantasy. If you only ever have women who are sexy, and none of the men are ever sexualized at all... hm. Hmmm. Yeah that's pretty sexist.

But if you have a story where men and women are both viewed as sexual objects and they also have more character traits than that.... awwwww yeah that's what I'm talkin' about.

OK, let's try this one: If black characters are always drug dealers; if black characters are the only ones to deal drugs.

If fat people are always eating donuts; if only fat people eat donuts.

If Fundamentalist Christians are always violently racist; if only Fundamentalist Christians are violently racist.

A yes/yes answer is potentially problematic and stereotypical, depending on what the character type and attribute is that you're using. If you all your lesbian characters obsessively love flying kites, this doesn't play into an existing stereotype, so it might be shallow characterization, but it's not actively hurting anyone. Fine! Sometimes shallow gets the job done.

Yes/no and no/yes can be a little trickier. They are by and large better than a straight yes/yes, but can still be kinda not OK. If you have a Wall Street film where all the Jews are greedy, but actually all of the characters are greedy, that's less troubling than it would be otherwise, though it probably still bears extra scrutiny. Or if you have a single greedy Jew who hoards food, rejects close relationships with others, and engages in self-harm behind closed doors, you have a complex and multi-faceted character who isn't a caricature of the avaristic Jew, though again: still bears extra scrutiny.

And then no/no means you're probably looking at an awesome, super interesting, complex, and non-hurtful character. 

This rule of thumb can't completely solve the thing where media is sexist, racist, ableist, all the -ists. But as a writer and a consumer of media, this tool helps me to put my finger on what it is about some media that bother me, and also where I may be falling into hurtful stereotypes in my own writing, too. Maybe it can be useful to you, also! Let me know what you think.

 

How to Not Be a Bullying Mob: Version 1.0

I've been very concerned the last few years with how easily we are rallied into howling mobs baying for blood on social media. There's a certain joy to being a part of it, the feeling of being just and righteous and striking a blow for good. It's a very human, natural behavior, and it cuts across all lines of belief and political stances. But it also does a lot of damage, especially because sometimes there's no true villain involved -- just regular, flawed people, and mobs that pit them against one another.

It's one of the most crucial tasks of our new era to work out new social norms and etiquette to deal with the implications of social media. How to be kind to one another, even when we're angry, even when we disagree about things that are important. So I'm taking a stab at what that kind of etiquette should look like.

The guidelines I've used are aimed at allowing people to express their anger, but in ways that don't wind up targeting specific people for harassment. The more general guidelines as I see them are:

Don't escalate a disagreement by crossing privacy barriers or bringing in uninvolved parties.In general, target institutions and non-human entities by naming them, but not people.Be mindful of when an issue isn't yours, and you're just adding fuel to an inferno.

I obviously don't think I've solved the problem of people being outraged on the internet. (But man if I did, Nobel Prize Committee, you know where to find me!) This is more like a jumping-off-point. At the very least, we can collectively start thinking about what just and appropriate behavior is.

Social norms like "don't bite your friends" and "sneeze into your elbow" go a long way toward making civilization more bearable to live in for all of us. And the first step to adhering to social norms is figuring out exactly what those norms should be.

Imaginary Friends

A few years ago, my friends at Stitch Media had a wonderful idea. What if you could give your child a book, and have the events of that book spill over into the real world? It would require a little help from the parents, of course -- but as parents, we already bring the Tooth Fairy and other small, personal sparks of magic into our children's lives. What if you could expand those little sparks into a full-fledged adventure?

And so Imaginary Friends was born, a concept for how we could provide a story and framework for children and parents to build something magical together.

That's how I came to write Circus of Mirrors. You can call it an interactive children's book, but that's not doing it justice. It's not an app where you can click on the flowers and watch them sproing. It's not a book with a website attached to it. This is a story where the characters are the child's friends, where they rely on the reading child to help them out of a pickle again and again. This is a book that lets the reader be the hero.

And the world of this book is, I think, full of whimsy and delight: magic mirrors that take you to an enchanted circus; cotton candy that tastes like lightning; the Strong Lady and the Bearded Man. Also: a mean witch! A mysterious fortune teller! A missing magician! This is a story full of love and sadness, mystery and deception, unbridled joy and mild sibling rivalry.

Right now, Imaginary Friends is being Kickstarted. But it's already down to the last couple of days, and it's not quite there yet. If you'd like to visit the Circus of Mirrors, get your ticket while you can. 

"Ready?" Sofia asked.

Max pulled back for a moment. "Wait a second," he said.

Sofia squeezed his hand as tight as she could. "Come on," she whispered. "Don't you want to have an adventure?"

Just on the other side of the mirror, the mysterious colored lights of the circus glowed, warm and promising. The music urged them to come closer. A crowd they couldn't yet see cheered. The scents of fresh popcorn and hot sugar drifted toward them.

Max smiled. "I'm ready. Let's go," he said.

Karen Memory

Let's just get this out right away: Elizabeth Bear's novel Karen Memory is a flawless jewel of a book. This has all of the qualities of something I wish I'd written: inventive, thoughtful, fun, with elegant prose and a plot that winds around itself into a perfect, self-contained knot.

It starts with the voice. First-person Karen Memery herself is a rich and fully realized person with her own distinctive cadences and color. Frankly the voice alone is so enjoyable to sink into that it almost doesn't matter what else happens in the story at all. Spending time with Karen listening in on her thoughts is that good, you guys. She feels like someone you've almost met before. Someone you might even run into today waiting tables at a truck stop in Montana.

This is a big deal to me, because a lot of books lose me at the prose level. I'm sensitive to choice of words, I suppose. And sometimes when a book doesn't have music to it, when the language doesn't flow right, it grates on me so much that I have trouble enjoying any other element of the book, even if the plotting and pacing are perfectly executed. This one, though: this is all music, and nary a sour note or an off beat.

But there's more to love here, too. Karen Memory takes place in a fictionalized Gold Rush-era a lot like Seattle. But this isn't the Old West we're used to; this is both more and less real than that. On the less-real front, we have that whole steampunk angle; this is a world that includes surgical machinery and a Mad Science Tax on your Inventor's License.

But for all that, this novel incorporates a lot of the realities of life in the west that tend to get glamoured out of the picture: the way Seattle was built up an extra level to deal with the sewage problems that came with high tide; the disproportionate number of "seamstresses" in Gold Rush towns, a euphemism everyone knew perfectly well meant prostitutes; virulent racism and its consequences, including the threat of lynchings and the law looking the other way instead of protecting people of color; sex trafficking; the true fact of a diverse and cosmopolitan city. 

That all makes Karen Memory sound relentlessly grim, but for all that underpinning of profound realism, this book is at its core fun to read. It moves slowly at first (but not too slow), letting you get your bearings in the world. Indeed, it starts out seemingly as a small-scale drama about a brothel vs. the law, or maybe vs. the religious folk. But the scope and the pace ramp up gradually and inexorably until by the end you've found yourself on a rollicking adventure full of explosions and fist fights, local and international politics, romance, and Saving the Day.

So good. So good. You should buy it. I fully expect this one to take home a bucket of awards next year, and if it doesn't, I... I might be a little angry. I'm already warming up my nominating finger, I tell you what.

Constellation Games

I have a half-written post in my queue about Leonard Richardson's Constellation Games from years ago, when it was first unfolding as a serial. I loved it then, and became frustrated with not being able to read more of it all at once, so I stopped... and didn't pick it up again until woefully later. But I've read it now, and I am so, so glad I finished it.

You guys. You guys. This is the book I wanted Ready Player One to be. This is a book that speaks to gaming as it is now, and will likely be in the future.

For one thing, Constellation Games engages deeply with the idea of games as an interactive art form that reveals a lot about the society that it springs from, and not mere ephemeral entertainment. Along the way it delves deeply and creatively into diverse mechanics and aesthetics games might have if they were developed with different underlying psychologies and priorities. And almost as a side note, this book delivers some of the most biting criticism of the games industry and what it's like to work in it than I've seen anywhere -- even in trade publications whose entire purpose is being critical of how the industry operates. This is a book that is deeply true. Painfully true. If you've ever wondered what it's like to work in games, this is it. Ponies Brilhantes 3 or poverty. This is exactly what it's like.

I also loved this book's treatment of aliens as both more and less alien than usual. Often in science fiction, alien interactions are clothed in militaristic layers of protocol on both ends. Differences between species are for some reason danced around in the moment. But that's maybe a little unrealistic. If another species, as in Constellation Games, uses constant bonobo-like sexual activity as a social lubricant (so to speak), then surely both species would be aware of the difference, and individuals might communicate with one another regarding how to deal with it? Typically you'd see an all-or-nothing approach: either a human must accept this about an alien species and come to terms with it, or else a human must accept that an alien species cannot come to terms with some element of human behavior and must unfailingly refrain from it.

But in Constellation Games, the aliens and humans are equally aware of their alien-ness to one another, and their relationships are constantly and explicitly negotiating how to make everyone as comfortable as possible, considering those differences. "Are you OK with this?" At one point, the alien Curic makes a reference in passing to killing and chopping up a bunch of other sentient aliens to make crates out of them, and clearly thinks it's funny. It's just a detail, but that's the heart of alienness to the core: it's obviously acceptable behavior in the context of that society, but the idea is profoundly foreign and appalling in a human context. So how do you cope?

The aliens also don't have the hierarchical or militaristic social structures we're used to seeing in fiction. There really aren't chains of command or leaders, as such; the aliens who contact us are something of a communo-anarchistic society working multiple angles all at once, and trying to build consensus about where to best devote their resources and time to accomplish shared goals.

And then there's the human-AI interaction. Though the book is on the surface about first contact and about games, there is a substantial subplot dealing with human relationships with technology, with artificial intelligence and true sentience, and with a creator's responsibility toward the beings it creates. It's a very thoughtful examination of how those things can and would be treated both by our society as they emerge, and by an advanced society that has dealt with those questions for millions of years.

Constellation Games is in all a very thoughtful book full of ideas you don't see very often. Breath of fresh air, and fun to read, too, especially if you're in any sense a gamer or engaged in gaming culture. There's a lot going on under the hood of this book. You should read it.

The Grace of Kings

A couple of years ago, I read Mono no aware, a short story by Ken Liu. And it touched me so deeply and made me cry so much that I did something I'd never done before, and haven't done since: I stalked him on Twitter solely so I could tell him how beautiful that story was. (He was very gracious about it.)

I didn't know then that Ken Liu is a much-celebrated short story writer. But he is. He's even done the unprecedented, and won the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award for a single short story, The Paper Menagerie. This is all to say: when Ken Liu writes his debut novel, the world pays attention. And me, too. And this book, this book, The Grace of Kings: this is a book you want to talk about. 

The Grace of Kings is like A Wizard of Earthsea. This is the one thought that kept running through my head as I read, again and again and again. As in Earthsea, the language is spare, only what it needs to be and nothing more. Detail is used only as seasoning; but for the most part, the story is told in broad strokes, leaving out as much as it includes, if not more.

The Grace of Kings is stylized, like Chinese calligraphy. Scope changes fluidly from the broadly historic to the personal from scene to scene. This is not a book you can skim without missing pivotal events, because there is almost nothing in this book that is not pivotal eventually. Now you see the personal struggle of a general trying to make a difficult decision; now you see ten thousand men dying in a sentence or two because of the choice he made. 

This is mythology unfolding, full of larger-than-life figures, heroism and villainy for the ages. I appreciated this change from the very literal, gritty aesthetic you tend to see in epic fantasy these days; the feats described in The Grace of Kings aren't plausible, they're not realistic, but they are compelling, which is all that matters to a reader, really. 

The Grace of Kings isn't the book I thought it was going to be when I started. For one thing, it's not stylistically nor structurally much like Ken's short fiction. But even more -- and following there are spoilers -- I thought this book would be about the fall of an empire and an emperor. But this book moves far more quickly than that. If an insult is given in one chapter, revenge is taken in the next, time and again. Plans are enacted immediately, battles fought, weddings held. 

This makes the book astonishing and a little unbalancing for a reader expecting Tolkien-style epic fantasy where half the book is spent on endless marching through woods and mountains to get to the one place where the one important thing happens. So you're constantly revising your expectations for timelines, for pacing, for what a piece of foreshadowing means. The emperor is done for a mere quarter of the way into the book, if that; the empire itself is fallen halfway through. And then, and then, what happens after?

This isn't a book about the fall of an empire at all, it turns out. It's about a tumbling cascade of inevitable consequences. It's about the web of chance encounters, of friendships and rivalries that seem slight in the moment they form, but that ultimately guide the fate of nations.

More than anything, The Grace of Kings is an incredibly interesting book, and one I can't stop talking about or thinking about, and I keep lobbying people to buy it and read it just so we can dissect it together. In terms of structure, in particular, this is a work doing things you just don't see, and doing them very, very well. I'm looking forward to the sequel, even though I'm sure it will break my heart.

Get Thee to HR, to Be Hanged

So the now-infamous McKinney pool party happened, and it was terrible and continues to be terrible. I am amazed that incident concluded with nobody dead or in a hospital. And now we're in the everyone-is-upset-and-angry period, soooo of course I've seen some calls to try get a woman fired. Maybe a bystander, maybe even the woman who started the whole thing by saying racist crap and then slapping a black teenager. This makes me deeply, deeply, deeply uncomfortable.

Let's look at a counterpoint. This weekend, Tor creative director Irene Gallo got some heat for expressing some opinions on Facebook about the Sad Puppies, and was thrown under the bus by her employer. And a lot of people are calling for her to be fired, too.

This is our nuclear option on the internet, and we go straight there whenever our dander is up. Someone should get fired over this. Salt the earth. Wreck their Google results. Make it so they never work in this town again, or any other town for that matter. Sometimes it works. Mostly against women. But... not exclusively.

Every time I see this, I grow more and more upset. This is not the tool of a just and reasoned discourse. And this is a real slippery slope kind of issue. Look, I don't want to live in a world where "you made some people on the internet angry" is a firing offense. 

If the McKinney woman that people are trying to get fired is the right person who assaulted a child, then you know how justice should be done? By taking her the hell to court for criminal assault and battery charges. Or make it a civil case. The avenue for justice is not emailing her employer. Likewise, if Irene Gallo done wrong, the place for that is in court, too, for slander or libel, not emailing her employer to take her job away. And then if there are clauses in an HR manual or employment contract about criminal behavior (or opening the employer to lawsuit liability) then take it to HR for review, fine.

But that's not the very first step in the process. Unless you're happy operating as an angry mob like GamerGate, and I am very much not happy with that. I want to be better than that. If you believe in social justice, you damn well should be better than that. Due process. It's a beautiful thing. I believe in it, because I'd rather justice be slow than that innocent people have their lives ruined.

I'm starting to think we need some kind of Geneva Convention for public online discourse. Social media is not the arbiter of justice, and we should not be serving as judge, jury, and executioner. Because that sword doesn't just cut the people you think are racist, sexist, homophobic assholes. It cuts the people you like, too, the people who have opinions exactly like yours. And sometimes they bleed out right before your eyes.

Never An Other

At Phoenix Comicon last weekend, a gentleman came to me after one of my panels and asked if I had any advice for him on writing women. I had a lot of things to say: fill your story with tons of other incidental women, so no one character bears the burden of demonstrating what it's like to be female in your story world; make sure she has agency in the story; please don't have her thinking hard about her relationship with her own breasts. 

But the first thing that popped out of my mouth was: write her just like you'd write a man. Because she's not really any different from you at all.

I've read lots of advice about writing the other. Much of it is sensible advice for achieving a new point of view -- research cultures and subcultures, make sure you read and talk to people in a culture and not just people who know it from the outside. But I was always a little unsatisfied with how the topic is addressed. I didn't understand why until that lovely young man asked me 'how should I write women.' And the problem I have is: talking about writing the other assumes otherness. It assumes a fundamental difference, even an alienness in priorities and perceptions. And I simply don't think there is such a thing as a human being who is other to me.

I admittedly have the privilege of possessing a remarkably broad swath of lived experience. I've been a minority in several senses, and just like everyone else around me; rich enough to have live-in servants and poor enough to have food stamps; I've been shy and unpopular, I've been the life of the party; I've made my home in a dozen places cutting across nations and regions, and spent time in a dozen more. And the thing that always strikes me isn't difference. It's how all the same everything is.

Wherever you go, people are fundamentally the same. Do parents want their children to succeed any less in China than in Chicago? Does an Iranian doctor feel any different about losing a patient than a Philadelphian? There are differences between cultures, to be sure, but the variation between individuals even in the same culture dwarfs it in scope. Who's more different from a gregarious restaurant owner and father of three in Atlanta -- the gregarious restaurant owner and father of three in Mumbai, or one of Atlanta's own homeless with crippling social anxiety and PTSD? 

So when I'm writing, yes, I do try to be cognizant of how the weight of etiquette and culture color a person's opinions and interactions. Maybe don't have the devout Orthodox Jew order the BLT, right? But also don't assume that no Jew would ever order the BLT -- not everyone practices their faith impeccably. Be sure you're operating from a credible perspective on what a culture's norms and standards actually are, and not groundless assumptions. Maybe don't have your Ugandan character behave as though they have never even heard of a mobile phone before, much less seen one. 

But at the end of the day, I think the key to writing the other is to discard the idea of otherness completely. Writing any character is an act of extreme empathy. You have to find the spark in you that understands what it would be like to be someone else -- how the world might treat you in different circumstances, how those different layers of reward and resentment would influence your reactions and change you into something different. All of us know what it is to be virtuous and terrible, petty and generous, brilliant and stupid, selfish and brave and worn down. Find the person-like-you first. Once you have that, the rest is just color.

Reviewing for Robots

This weekend, I happened to visit with quite a lot of good friends and family, and conversation turned (as it does) to Andrea's New Book, and how closely I'm watching my reviews. Why, they wondered, did I care about it so much? And lo I discovered that there is a common misapprehension about the nature and purpose of reviews on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Goodreads.

It's intuitively obvious that leaving a good review is helpful to a book and its author. If someone should find the book, the logic goes, all of those reviews will give a reader confidence and incentive to buy, right?

And that's true, to some extent... but that's not actually the big, valuable service you're performing for an author when you leave a review for their book. You're not reviewing for the benefit of other readers. The pivotal core audience for your review is computer algorithms.

Bookstore Time Machine

Back in the old-fashioned days, when you wanted to read a book, you'd hit a bookstore. You'd be tempted by various methods a book might have for spreading its fancy tail feathers and strutting its stuff: end caps filled with the new hotness, displays curated by the store's employees (if you like this, you'll also like...), standing displays and window displays and table displays. The books with the most prominent placement tended to sell the best. That's because visibility is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You buy the books you see and know about. ...We'll get back to that.

And then the shelving system itself would also guide you toward books you'd probably like. You'd make your way to the section of books similar to the books you already tended to enjoy reading, and make choices (consciously or not) based on the cover's color scheme, art style, and font choices. These all signal even today what to expect from a book, to help you decide if you'd be a happy reader or not. When you found some likely contenders, you'd pick up the book, read the back or inside flap copy, and decide whether it might be worth your time and money.

I daresay most book-buying doesn't happen like that anymore. I rely almost entirely on word of mouth from my internets. And I sell books that way, too -- not mine! But I've nudged many a friend into taking a close look at Naomi Alderman's Liar's Gospel, or Max Gladstone's Craft books, or Chuck Wendig's Atlanta Burns, or NK Jemisin's Inheritance series. I'm talking about The Grace of Kings so much I'll probably have sold a dozen copies for Ken Liu before I even finish it myself.

But that's not the only way books are sold. Not by a long shot.

Amazon's Algorithms

Today, the biggest obstacle any author has is obscurity. I can't sell you my book if you never, never see it or hear of it. And who decides whether a reader sees a book? Amazon, mostly. More specifically, the mysterious computer mind that is Amazon's recommendations engine. Goodreads, too; people do go there to find recommendations. But it's my understanding that there is some synchronization of reviews, since Goodreads was purchased by Amazon a few years back. And Barnes & Noble surely uses many of the same tricks.

But for an indie book or a small press, Amazon is the name of the game. That's 80% of your sales. So if nobody sees you on Amazon... basically nobody sees you.

I'm going to speculate here about the nature of Amazon's secret sauce. I don't know, of course; only people who work at Amazon specifically on the recommendation engine can know this, and they're at pains not to talk about it or lose their jobs and quite possibly be sued into oblivion for revealing trade secrets. But given what I know about information systems, metadata, and about how books sell and behave online, I think I can make a few really solid guesses.

So readers, think of it this way: when you leave a review, you are training Amazon as to what kind of book it is. And my guess is that it takes into consideration not just the stars you award, but your own buying and reviewing history, and keywords left in the review itself. Even a bad review is, I suspect, helpful to the book overall, because it means it's more likely to be shown to would-be readers who might enjoy it going forward, and less likely to be shown to readers with a history very much like the unhappy reviewer's.

I further speculate that none of this does much until the book reaches a critical mass of reviews -- there have to be enough data points for the algorithm to reach a solid conclusion. The system couldn't have much confidence in two five-star reviews from people with a history of only buying books from the one author, right? Even beyond that, there's a good shot that it's got some secret metric of reviewer credibility. We know Amazon prunes reviews left by authors writing in the same genre to prevent gaming for good or evil; so reviewer credibility is definitely on the Amazon radar. 

We also know for a fact that it tracks other books bought by the same readers. Right now, Revision has been bought by readers also interested in Myke Cole books, Jews vs. Zombies, and Vermilion. That's great news for those books, but the flip side is crucial, here -- it doesn't mean my book is being shown on those pages as an also-liked. And that is why books like mine need reviews: so they show up on the shelves next to the books kinda like it, so to speak, so that readers who enjoy that kind of thing know it even exists. It works. It really, really works. When my book A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling was paired with Spreadable Media, sales skyrocketed back to launch week levels for a while! 

That's because visibility is a self-fulfilling prophecy. So if you've read a book in the last couple of years that left you with a strong impression, tell people -- and leave reviews about it on the retailer of your choice. (But let's be honest, mostly Amazon). It's not just a nice thing that makes a writer feel good (or terrible).

A book lives or dies by the algorithm. And the algorithm can only know what it's been told.