By Mark Alpert

Mass-market success is a bewildering thing. There’s no doubt that a well-financed marketing effort can boost the popularity of a movie, book, or television show. Why else would Hollywood spend hundreds of millions of dollars to promote its latest offerings? And yet there are many examples of plucky films and books that unexpectedly gathered wide followings without the aid of any big marketing campaign.

I first analyzed this topic in the late 1980s when I wrote a story about fashion-industry marketing for Fortune magazine. Remember all those goofy 1980s fashion trends? The shoulder-pad craze, for instance? Marketing experts told me it was hard to identify the origins of that particular sartorial mania. Did people instinctively go wild for the linebacker look in a kind of mass hysteria, or were they pushed in that direction by canny advertisers trying to profit from excessively padded blouses? Or, to phrase the question more generally, how much leverage can corporations exert over consumer choice? One of the ways to study this question is to focus on fashions that are adopted more freely — that is, in situations where no one has a financial interest in influencing the public’s tastes.

A good example of this kind of fashion choice is the selection of baby names. No corporation is going to spend its ad dollars trying to convince you to name your kid John or Nancy or Preston. In this situation, the influences are personal and cultural, rather than economically driven. And as we all know, there have been huge changes in the popularity of certain baby names over the past several decades. Does anyone name their kids Seymour or Ida these days? So the marketing experts wanted to study the trends in baby-name popularity to get a better understanding of how consumer choices are made. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the results of those studies, and I can’t even locate the story I wrote on this topic. All this happened before the Internet.

And of course the Internet ushered in a whole new arena of consumer influence. I’m not an expert on viral marketing, but many of my friends are freelance journalists, and as a group they’ve become pretty obsessed with tracking the popularity of the Web articles they write. Some of them have a financial incentive to maximize the readership of their stories, because they’ll get paid more if their articles attract a greater number of clicks. I haven’t done a whole lot of journalism since I sold my first novel, but every once in a while I write stories about science or politics for various websites, and I’ve noticed a few characteristics that seem to enhance the readership of those articles. Those same characteristics, I believe, can also boost the popularity of novels, giving them a better shot at making the bestseller lists.

So what are the keys to viral success? Let me tell you a couple of stories about what’s worked for me.

Back in 2014 I heard something strange about NASA. The space agency was funding research on what was described as a warp-drive technology. Yes, warp-drive, like the engines on the Starship Enterprise. Just in case you’re a little rusty on your Star Trek trivia, I’ll provide a brief explanation of how the Enterprise and all those Klingon and Romulan starships are able to flit across the galaxy so easily. They’re not actually going faster than the speed of light, at least not locally; instead, their warp drives are compressing the spacetime in front of the starships. These drives bend spacetime into an asymmetric bubble around the spacecraft, distorting the fabric of the universe so violently that a trillion miles of interstellar vacuum (as seen from an outsider’s perspective) can shrink to a few inches (as seen from the bridge of the Enterprise). Within this distorted bubble, the spacecraft never exceeds the speed of light, but once it crosses the compressed spacetime and emerges from the bubble it could be hundreds of light-years from its starting point. Take us to Warp Nine, Mr. Sulu.

This technology works great on the television show, but in reality it’s a little more complicated. Bending the spacetime around a real starship would require enormous amounts of an exotic form of energy that may or may not exist in our universe. Nevertheless, a NASA researcher named Harold White thought he could test the principle behind the warp-drive technology in a tabletop experiment, and the space agency agreed to spend $50,000 on the project. (Which is a relatively small investment given the agency’s twenty-billion-dollar annual budget.) That was the gist of the story I wrote for Scientific American’s website, that NASA was willing to take a small gamble on an unlikely hypothesis that most scientists scoffed at. But this little news squib quickly attracted tens of thousands of readers, the great majority of whom were reeled in by the Star Trek references and the accompanying illustration of the Starship Enterprise in flight.

I know that the inherent quality of the story didn’t give it the big boost in readership, because I wrote a very similar article for the same website two years later, a story about a more reasonable, feasible plan for interstellar travel (it’s called the Breakthrough Starshot project), and this second story didn’t attract an extraordinary number of readers. The big difference in popularity was obviously due to the widespread appeal of Star Trek, which continues to be a powerful cultural force 50 years after the original television series went off the air. So the lesson here for fiction writers is that it’s commercially useful to write a novel that piggybacks on an enduringly popular theme, person, place, or period of history. For example, a novel set during the Civil War will likely attract more readers than a novel set during the War of 1812, even if the two books are identical in quality. It’s just a fact of life: there are a lot of Civil War buffs out there. (I happen to be one of them.)

My latest brush with viral fame occurred just a few weeks ago during the holiday break. My new novel SAINT JOAN OF NEW YORK has a nonfiction introduction entitled “Physics and the Search for Meaning,” and I thought it would be cool to put an excerpt from this essay on the Scientific American website. I gave the excerpt a somewhat provocative title — “Can Science Rule Out God?” — and it ran on the website a couple of days before Christmas. I promptly forgot about it because I had to drive the family up to Maine for the holiday, but when I got back to New York and looked at my emails I saw one of those ominous messages from Twitter: “You have 152 notifications” or something like that. My essay had definitely struck a chord. I’d put forth a middle-of-the-road position, arguing that we need to better understand the laws of physics before we could say anything useful about their origins, and I got dozens of impassioned responses from both believers and nonbelievers. Lots of people have strong opinions on the question of God’s existence, and they’re eager to share. These readers want to be part of the conversation. They want to be heard.

The typical experience of reading a novel is more of a one-way communication: the writer tells a story, and the reader listens. But some novels almost demand a response. This kind of book touches on something that the reader cares deeply about, something universal, and the reader wants to prolong that impassioned immersion in the story even after finishing the novel. So a common reaction is to encourage other people to read the book too. Or go online and discuss the plot and characters. These readers get feverish and excitable, and with every breath they spread the ideas that the novel has planted within them.

Just like a virus.

———

Speaking of God, I recently wrote another essay related to my new novel SAINT JOAN OF NEW YORK. The heroine of this book is a modern-day version of Joan of Arc, so I did a lot of reading about the original Joan and developed some fervent opinions about her legacy. My essay was published this week in America magazine; you can read it here.

Happy 2020! I ushered in the New Year by freefalling into a web research wormhole while educating myself on the subjects of archeology, astronomy, and physics. There are some startling and occasionally frightening discoveries being made in all three fields — particularly astronomy — but today we are going to discuss a recent announcement concerning the significant archeological discovery in Egypt of an illustrated book.

Some of you under the age of twenty may be saying, “Big deal! My grandfather has a first edition of The Watchmen!” I’m talking about something a bit older than that. The book which was discovered is The Book of Two Ways, a work that was well known to historians and archaeologists in its previous editions prior to this latest discovery. It was written as a guide for a deceased individual as they make their journey through the Underworld, with the “two ways” of the title being the options of making the journey by land or by water. The advice presented in the work included spells that could be cast in order that the deceased might ultimately achieve immortality.

What makes this discovery significant is that this edition of The Book of Two Ways, which is estimated to be approximately 4000 years old,  is considered to be the earliest known illustrated copy of the work to date. The location where the book was discovered is particularly interesting, given that it was inscribed on a coffin (rather than being bound or in scroll form) at an Egyptian burial site housing the remains of a woman named Ankh. 

Let’s think about this discovery in modern terms. We have 1)  a coffin dual-purposed as a Kindle 2) containing the first graphic novel 3) which is a distant ancestor of the AAA Travel Guide. With regard to #3, maybe considering The Book of Two Days to be the very first Lonely Planet guide would be more appropriate. Calling it a collection of life hacks due to the spells it contains, however, might be a bridge too far. Still, it makes one wonder whether time truly is a flat circle.

I seriously doubt that the author(s) of the recently discovered edition of The Book of Two Ways considered for even a moment that a few thousand years down the road the discovery of their work would be considered a major archeological event. It goes to show you never can tell. It might be unlikely but the story that you are working on, as humble as it may seem to you now, might get similar treatment. Keep that in mind. As our mothers used to tell us, you only get one chance — if you get a chance at all — to make a first impression. 

The in-depth discussions of this discovery are for the most part buried behind paywalls, but I have ever so thoughtfully provided you with a link to a fairly interesting article here if you should care to read more about this. I also offer a tip of the fedora to Egyptologist Harco Willems, who directed the expedition which led to this discovery. If I had been at the helm I would have discovered nothing but camel spiders and left immediately. 

So…what is the oldest book that you own? Mine is a copy of The Eclectic First Reader by W.H. McGuffey. What is yours? Thanks for stopping by. 

By Elaine Viets
The cat needs to go to the vet, the repairman is coming at three to fix the light switch, and the dryer is making a shrill squeak. When am I going to find time to write with all these household demands?
This is the writer’s dilemma, and after 35 novels, I’m still coming to terms with it.
Here are some suggestions:
(1) Have a dedicated space to work.
I’m lucky to have an office in our condo, with a view of the Intracoastal Waterway. My husband, bless him, prefers a room with no windows. Don says windows are a distraction. I’d get claustrophobic in his office. The landfill pictured below is my desk.

If you’re serious about writing, you need a place to work. A writer friend with a small apartment uses her daughter’s bedroom while the girl’s away at college – my friend loses her space at Christmas and spring break, but otherwise she has a good writing space. Another has a small desk tucked in a nook in the hallway. A third writes at a kitchen desk. No matter how small it is, stake a claim to some space in your home. And when the going gets tough and you’re overwhelmed by noisy spouses and children, head for the coffee shop or local library.

(2) Know your most creative time.
I get most of my writing done between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. After that, I’ll still write, but my work often feels flat. My brain really sparks during those four peak hours. After that, it’s better for editing.
(3) Seize the time you have.
If your husband takes the kids to McDonald’s, don’t use that time to sort socks. Write!
Romance writer Joan Johnston wrote her way to the New York Times bestseller list by writing her novels between 4 and 6 a.m. – while the kids were asleep. Now, that’s dedication.
What if you have a sick spouse or ailing children – or you don’t feel so well yourself?
That’s where your own determination comes in. I’ve written novels by my husband’s bedside when he was in the hospital, and edited proofs for the next book while waiting to hear from the doctor when he was in surgery.
Am I Super Woman? Heck, no! But I can concentrate for short periods. Writing is a way to escape a painful or scary situation. It can be solace.

(4) Make time
Remember the words of that rabble-rousing journalist, Mary Heaton Vorse: “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” You need seat time.
Try to schedule time-sucking activities after your peak writing time. If the cat isn’t deathly ill, make her vet appointment at 4:30 p.m. The repairman – if he deigns to show up – will start the repairs after your peak writing time. And for now, I’m ignoring the squeaky dryer.
Be ruthless when you write. Turn off your cell phone. Ignore the siren call of the internet, tempting you with cat videos, unanswered emails and Kim Kardashian’s latest lingerie photo. Use that time to write.

(5) A writer writes.
Make that your mantra.
I love being a writer. I enjoy talking to other writers at the Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime meetings, and hanging out with other writers in the bar at conventions.
But writing is a lonely business. Eventually, I’m going to have to go to my office, all by myself, and write. You will, too. Good luck.

Pre-order A STAR IS DEAD, Elaine Viets’ newest Angela Richman, Death Investigator mystery, here.https://www.amazon.com/Angela-Richman-Death-Investigator-mystery/dp/0727890166/ref=sr_1_1?crid=GSRN4WJRG8EV&keywords=a+star+is+dead+elaine+viets&qid=1578517051&s=books&sprefix=a+star+is+dead%2Caps%2C176&sr=1-1