Charles Harris's Blog, page 4

The Role of the Political Novel in a Bitterly Divided American Election

American political fiction needs to be bold to overcome the raucous noise of partisanship, within both the electorate and the media.

The Message in Walmart’s Latest Gun Policy Changes Is the Real News for Businesses and Washington

Growing popular support for additional gun control will make businesses more willing to take a stand to show they are trying to do something

Breaking the Rules: Can Genre Blending Educate as Well as Entertain?

Authors are generally told to pick a popular genre for their fiction book and stay with it. Why is the genre so important? First and foremost, it’s a marketing and positioning tag. Different genres have different features and characteristics. The genre tells the reader (and the bookstore or online marketplace) what kind of book it is. This simple classification helps the reader decide whether she might be interested. It also helps the bookstore decide where the book should be displayed or shelved for sale. Selling books is hard. Genre categories simplify the process for everyone involved, from the literary agent to the publisher to the book seller to, oh yes, the author—especially a new author. Knowing who’s going to read your book and where it fits in the marketplace is important to getting it sold to your publisher and purchased by your readers. If you want to sell your book to readers who like genre A, you’d best cater to these readers by following the “rules” for genre A. But what if you don’t want to do that? What if you want to alter the rules or blend genres, even though it may make it harder to categorize your book and, accordingly, make it harder to market and sell? A decade or so ago, blended genres became more popular as authors experimented with more creative approaches to the single genre rule. This led to a raft of mixed genres that has continued to proliferate, such as action comedies, sci-fi detective mysteries, techno-thrillers, paranormal romances, historical romances and dark fantasies, among many others. Critics and publishing industry players argue over whether to call these combinations subgenres, mixed genres, hybrid genres or whatever. Terminology aside, they all include at least some dominant features of two or more established genres. Some have become so prevalent that they are essentially recognized as “new” genres. When I struck off to write Intentional Consequences, I wanted to use real-world politics and technology to fuel a classic thriller conspiracy story. I had two reasons for doing this. First, to give depth to the plot and the action, I wanted to show how our current bitter partisan political environment and new technologies were combining to pose threats to American democracy that could be exploited by the conspirators looking to dominate the 2020 presidential election. To make the entertainment value vivid, I needed to educate the reader about the real-world context—to make it believable. To do that, I had to slow down the typical breakneck speed of the first part of the book to let the characters show the political disagreements and demonstrate, or at least foreshadow, the technologies that could be exploited. To weave this background information into the story, I relied on my characters to explain key technical information or political disagreements—speaking not to the reader, but to each other. Valerie Williams, a respected political science professor, was invaluable in this regard, giving a keynote address and writing blog posts and Op/Eds that add real-world depth to the political commentary. Several of the other characters who were tech company execs played similar educational roles by conveying information in their conversations and actions. To make the story relevant, I set the novel in the early days of the democratic primary battles during the spring and early summer of 2019. Rather than use the typical historical fiction approach of having real people play the key characters with my own interpretation of their actions and statements—something that seemed very risky from both legal and ethical standpoints—I included real world presidential candidates in the backdrop, but created my own fully-fictitious characters to play out the thriller story. The result is an interesting blend of fiction and nonfiction that echoes but doesn’t emulate classic historical fiction or the nonfiction novel genre. My second reason for integrating the real-world politics and technology was to raise reader awareness about the threats to American democracy that are being posed by the political bitterness and the emerging technologies discussed in the book. As I said in my author’s notes, while the story is fiction, the issues are real. I wanted to encourage readers to join in the good faith debate we need to confront these issues and enhance democracy in America. The depth of the background information was a risk, both in delaying some of the early classic thriller action and in asking the reader to remain interested in the amount of information presented. But the education provided the context needed to help the reader enjoy the accelerating action in the final two parts of the book. Hopefully, it also achieved my goal of interesting readers in the issues and in the importance of working together to resolve them. So far, I’m encouraged by the number of readers who have said that they both enjoyed the book and learned a lot from it. Check it out on Amazon or at www.charlesharrisbooks.com and let me know what you think. So, what genre is Intentional Consequences? If you follow the suggestion that hybrid genres must still have a primary genre—a classic genre that can be modified by one or more adjectives (with perhaps a comma thrown in), then I’d say it’s still a thriller. If you start adding adjectives, it’s a political thriller. If you keep going, it’s a sophisticated fact-based political thriller. And if you allow a few more words, it’s a sophisticated political thriller for people who think (and enjoy nonfiction about politics and technology as well as fiction). Just don’t try explaining that to the publicists or the people mapping the keywords for online marketing. Genres aside, the key point is to have a great story people want to read. Which brings me to a final question. If the internet is reducing attention spans and making all of us expect quick, easy answers when we ask Siri or Alexa or whomever to help us find something, will readers gravitate to more granular sub- or hybrid genres, or will they stay with the traditional genre categories and keep scrolling through book after book presented to them by some AI-based marketing engine that thinks it knows what they want to read and buy? If AI holds the promise we expect, I believe granularity will carry the day. But we’re frankly not there yet. Too many of the AI-generated suggestions are still off-base or trite. Limitations on the number of categories authors can specify to Amazon/KDP and other online sellers, and AI algorithms that dislike marketing fiction books to readers of nonfiction (and vice versa), also have some way to go to provide the selection granularity and effective marketing readers and authors would like. Fortunately, that’s another topic.

If your Company could Sponsor America, would it? Should it?

Author's Note: This post was initially published by me as an article in LinkedIn. This week’s statement by the Business Roundtable about of the "purpose of a corporation" shattered the idea—still prominent in most of our corporate laws—that corporations exist primarily to enrich their shareholders. Signed onto by over 180 CEOs of some of America’s most prominent companies, the statement “redefines the purpose of a corporation to promote ‘an economy that serves all Americans’,” making clear companies should be managed “for the benefit of all stakeholders – customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders.” If you haven’t read the actual statement, it’s worth doing, in part to see the actual words rather than read second-hand news summaries, and in part to see the signatures of 181 CEOs who put their personal and business commitments behind those words. Although much of the reaction to the statement has been positive, critics have already called it out as much overdue and a “too little, too late” effort at trying to defend corporate America from the aggressive anti-business attacks by many of the progressive Democrat presidential candidates, notably led by Elizabeth Warren. One of the interesting things about the statement is that so many leading CEOs signed it and spread their names across full page ads in The Wall Street Journal and other publications. The signers include J.P. Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Apple's Tim Cook, Bank of America's Brian Moynihan, Dennis A. Muilenburg of Boeing and GM's Mary Barra, among a raft of others. These are smart people, advised by other smart people, who must have understood the political implications of broadening the purpose of a corporation in today’s political environment, where capitalism is under attack and socialism is renewing its periodic appeal. They took the risk of wading into that fray because they believed doing so was in the best interests of their companies—and maybe even America. Which gives rise to the question of whether your business would Sponsor America. I explored that query in a novel I just released about a geopolitical cyber conspiracy aimed at the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The book’s called Intentional Consequences. In one of the subplots, a billionaire tech CEO named Rakesh Jain who’s concerned about the bitter divisiveness of American politics decides to put together a business consortium to reunite America. He asks his business colleagues to “sponsor America” by putting their weight and sponsorship dollars behind his project. His wife, a prominent political science professor named Valerie Williams, counsels him on how companies look at brand affinity sponsorship decisions that have political implications—something I wrote about back in the fall of 2017 in a Playoff Tech blog post on The Slippery Slope of Sporting Event Protests for Sports Sponsors. In the book, Jain says he wants to “build a national consensus that reinforces the things we believe in as Americans, the things that help us assimilate this boiling pot into one country. As Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, said the other day, we need to stop focusing on what divides us and start focusing on what brings us together. I’d like to create a coalition that can rekindle our spirits and reset our horizons, regardless of whether we’re Blue or Red. We need to repaint America.” When Jain complains about the challenges of lining up business support, Valerie explains, “For most companies, it’s just Marketing 101. Companies take positions they think will help their business, which means attracting the customers they want to attract. They avoid positions they think will harm their business. Target demographics matter here. For most companies, younger customers are more valuable than older ones because the younger ones spend more, both now and over their longer lives. These younger customers often have more progressive values, which can skew how a company thinks about its political persona. Some companies with aggressive marketing strategies, like Nike, may be willing to risk offending a less valuable customer segment if they can fire up their most important customers. It’s like a political party firing up its base. Risk avoidance works the same way in reverse. It’s not like an election where you win if you get 51%. Most businesses can’t risk losing the other 49% of their customers. Employee pressure in some companies can also keep them from supporting political and social programs. Google’s employee contributions were 95% Democratic in the 2018 mid-terms.” She also warns him about the risks of seeking business support for his program in the 2020 political environment: “The platform issues in 2020 are not going to help you attract business partners. With both parties attacking big tech, those companies will be especially cautious about offending either side. Some potential sponsors may not want to be associated with you because you made your money in tech. Health insurance companies are going to be worried about seeming to take sides on the fight over Medicare for All. The list goes on.” When Jain says he’s just trying to reunite America, not take positions on those platform issues, Valerie warns him, “That’s not the way your opponents will paint it. They’ll call you out for being against new ideas and progressive change. They’ll align you with the billionaires and big businesses they’re attacking as part of their basic thesis about America.” I don’t want to be a spoiler on how Jain makes out with his efforts to reunite America—you’ll have to read the book to see how his efforts go and how the main story comes out. But the issues Jain struggles with in the book are clearly relevant today as businesses decide how to act, what to say and what to sponsor in a world where virtually everything has become politicized and bitterness and even hate have replaced what we used to call rational political debate. Just check out the leading online advertisers who are increasing the words they are blacklisting from the obvious ones about violence, hate and racism to words about the 2020 election and the names of the candidates for president, including the incumbent. So, if your company were given an opportunity to Sponsor America, to help bring us together in a time of political bitterness and division, would you do it? How would you judge the affinity value? How would you judge the risk, especially in a world where social media can be mobilized against you in a few heart beats? Clearly it would depend on the specific messaging. Could you build a reunite America version of the long-famous Coke commercial I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing? Even if you could, would you take the risk, especially with the 2020 elections coming up? It’s a sobering thought.

How Amazon’s Disruption of Book Publishing Is Changing the Books We Read

For decades, authors self-published books when they couldn’t convince a “real publisher” to do it. Like so many other areas disrupted by technology, today self-publishing is not only changing how we buy and sell our books, it’s changing the diversity and timeliness of the books we read. Three factors are at work here. First, the internet has trained us to expect content that’s timely, diverse and immediately accessible. Books are no exception. Amazon’s initial business model was based on selling books online. Today, they dominate that market, and a lot more. But selling books is only one step in the process. Those books have to be published before they can be sold. For decades, the route to publishing through a traditional publisher has been anything but quick and easy—especially for new authors. The typical route includes finding an agent and convincing her to take you on as a client. Then the agent works to find a publisher who will consider your book. Assuming that works, you then enter the publisher’s multi-level editorial process which eventually results in printing and release of your work some months later. Many larger publishers only release books on established release schedules across the year, which further stretches out your time to market. How long does all that take once you have your manuscript? If you’re starting without an agent, easily a year or more. Even with an agent, the answer could be the same. Exceptions do exist, primarily for highly topical nonfiction books by the best authors, but it’s hard to beat six months of editorial and production time alone. Second, traditional publishing companies are getting hammered by the internet. They can’t afford to market like they used to do. They also can’t afford to spend time and money (including advances on royalties) with authors who are anything other than guaranteed to sell books at the volume levels these publishers need to be profitable. As a result, the larger publishers are increasingly focusing on big name authors, politicians and celebrities, preferably with books that are sequels or part of a series. They’re doing this to reduce marketing costs and risk, both of which have become even more important in a world that expects content to be free or at least a bargain. These economic realities have reduced the diversity of published voices available in the marketplace. They’ve also made it even more impractical for the big publishers to produce timely, topical books that have a short shelf life. Third, advances in book publishing have made it possible for authors to use disruptive online “ePublishing” tools to create, publish and distribute their books quickly and (relatively) easily. Many of these tools enable an author to take a book from manuscript to online distribution of both eBooks and printed books in a matter of weeks. With or without help from third party service providers, authors can use these tools to format a manuscript and book cover into production ready pages, set prices, approve distribution and sale and deploy digital ads for the finished product. These tools disrupt economics as well as production and disruption. There are no royalty advances. Authors do most of the promotion. Some tools offer only eBooks. Others offer paperback books as well, or even hardcovers. Print books can be published and shipped on demand, even one order at a time for online orders, without an option for retailers to return unsold copies. Yet, they’re still price competitive. Because of Amazon’s power in online book sales and the success of its Kindle eBook readers and apps, its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) service is one of the best known ePublishing tools. But other tools are also out there (check out Lulu.com, AuthorHouse and Xlibris among others), some even offered by established publishers. Authors can use one distribution partner (such as KDP) for eBooks and another (such as IngramSpark) for primary or secondary distribution of print books. How does all this affect the books we read? A lot depends on where we get the book. The heavily promoted books we see at large bookstores and major retailers are increasingly coming from a narrow range of well-known authors, politicians, sports figures and media celebrities who are published by major publishers. Author name recognition and salability are overtaking quality and diversity of content. Just as we’re seeing in our major motion pictures, sequels and series are becoming the game to play. (Just check the number of prominent fiction authors who keep reprising the same hero or heroine or make each new book part of some series.) The question is when we’ll tire of too much of the same thing from the same people. Much as I enjoy some of these authors, I’m already tired of it. At the same time, ePublishing is enabling a far more diverse set of voices to publish and sell their books online. Faster times to market are also enabling more contemporary content and timely books that can be profitable with shorter life cycles and lower long-term production runs. Current topics that used to be relegated to articles can now be built into full-blown novels that carry much higher interest and impact. Fiction and nonfiction books about politics and technology are among the beneficiaries here. The question is whether these interesting and important books can find their way into our remaining book shops and retail stores. When the time came to publish Intentional Consequences, the choice was clear. Only ePublishing could get this provocative contemporary novel about political cyber conspiracy out in time for the 2020 election. The book is set in the early days of the 2020 presidential election cycle, in a world of fake news, geopolitical hacking, privacy issues, social media manipulation and a loss of trust in our traditional socio-political institutions. Beyond politics, the book involves real-world technologies like artificial intelligence, facial recognition, drones, deepfakes and other altered images and cyber security. The time frame for the plot begins on March 9, 2019 and runs through most of June 2019. Produced via KDP, the book was released for eBook and paperback sales on Amazon this month (August 2019). ePublishing allowed it to happen.

The Politics and Technology Behind Intentional Consequences

I set out to make Intentional Consequences fun, pointed and provocative, regardless of your political point of view. Overall, this is a “purple” book that’s intended to offend and invigorate both sides of the American political spectrum—and especially each party’s so-called base. If you don’t like one character’s politics, stand by for the next one. If a character’s comments make you smile or frown, that’s good. You’ve taken the bait and you’re engaged. This story is fiction, but the underlying issues are real. Many of them are affecting and endangering the future of American democracy. Beyond entertaining you with an interesting, timely and fast-paced story, I hope this book will encourage you to join in the good faith debate we need to confront these issues and enhance democracy in America. The book is set in the early days of the 2020 presidential election cycle, in a world of fake news, geopolitical hacking, privacy issues, social media manipulation and a loss of trust in our traditional socio-political institutions. The time frame begins on March 9, 2019 and runs through most of June. During that time period, you'll recognize a number of the politicians who provide the contemporary backdrop for the book's characters and actions. Many are Democratic presidential candidates for the 2020 election--people like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, among a host of others. President Trump is also around. Unlike traditional historical fiction, which tries to imagine what these people might have said, Intentional Consequences uses these real-world people to frame the background where the events take place and the characters play out their lives. It suggests how these real people and their campaign teams might have reacted to events in the book, and how the characters in the book might have reacted to these real people, but it leaves the major roles to the characters. For a thriller genre novel, Intentional Consequences includes a lot of political debate and commentary. The political arguments and comments have several purposes. They help frame the characters' beliefs. They frame the pros and cons of different points of view, some very partisan and some more objective. They also highlight the political bitterness that is encompassing virtually every aspect of our current American society--a challenge that drives the characters and permeates much of the book. In capturing the political backdrop to the story, I have relied on news reports, articles, editorials, blog posts, tweets and other materials from both traditional media and social media through early August 2019, when this book was first released for publication. The technology in this book is important because of its current and future impact on our democracy, and on each of us as voters and keepers of the flame. Like the politics in the book, the technology paints a picture of the world where the book's characters live. All the technology in the book exists in one form or another, and the few applications that have been embellished are in research and development or trials somewhere. You'll find artificial intelligence, facial recognition, drones, deepfakes and other altered images and cyber security. I’ve tried to provide enough detail to be interesting to readers who are familiar with these technologies while still being informative to those who are parsing them for the first time. At the same time, I've tried to explain why these technologies pose the challenges they pose to our society and democratic government. In a few situations, I have intentionally withheld details that might be helpful or encouraging to bad actors, domestic or foreign. Few issues are more important than determining how we are governed and by whom. We can debate the platform planks and nuances of specific legislation. We can argue about the character and demeanor of our candidates and elected officials. But if the pace and misuse of technological change outstrips the capability of our constitutional structure and socio-political stereotypes to protect us against mob rule from the left or the right, none of those things will matter. Whatever the answer, the first step is agreeing that American democracy deserves preserving. The second is admitting and understanding the challenges. Only then, can we move past denial and work together on the solutions.