A few months back I wrote a post about social media as an unintentional hypersigil generator, presenting a vision of your life that’s reinforced and magnified by ongoing intention. It was a bit of a light-hearted idea, It was a bit of a lighthearted poke at a thought that’s been bubbling away for a while, searching for a kernel of something useful in the heart of comic’s writer Grant Morrison’s most barking mad concepts.
More recently, I’ve been doing a bunch of reading that had me looping back to the concept and thinking about it in a more rigorous way, largely inspired by some recent reading on marketing and publishing. There’s an idea in Russell Nohelty and Monica Leonelle’s Get Your Books Selling With Facebook that eschews the standard indie author approach of talking about ads and hones in the potential uses for personal feeds as important tools for networking and writing.
One concept they bring up — an extension of an idea first teased in Nohelty’s How To Build Your Creative Career — is the value of the lore that builds up around an artist.
Your work is extremely important, and it needs to be amazing, of course, but people don’t spend nearly enough time building up their lore.
What is the lore of you? The lore parts of your brand are the mythological things that people talk about when you are not around, like how you:
— Built a 50,000-person mailing list
— Went to a hundred shows
— Wrote twelve books a year
— Made $100,000.00 on Kickstarter
— Became a USA Today bestselling author
These are stories people can tell about you when you are not around. They are the stories that precede you in people’s minds, so that when you arrive, they already know you are awesome without you saying a word. Building up your lore is as important as anything else, because those are the things people talk about, and those are the things that speak for you when you aren’t around.
There’s probably a small-but-subtle distinction being made between lore and brand here, although the two will no doubt influence one another, and it stumbles onto a thing I’ve been circling about in relation to blogging, teasing out why Neil Gaiman and Chuck Wendig seem to be framed as very different kinds of writers predicated on the content of their social media. Wendig spent years blogging about craft, and gets framed as a craftsman. Gaiman spent years showcasing the weirder parts of publishing, introducing people to art and writing they hadn’t encountered, and obfuscating process, and he gets framed as a magical phenomenon despite every sign that his craft is as meticulous and well-considered as Wendig.
Nohelty and Leonelle are two authors who came to writing via content marketing gigs, although thy’ve pushed themselves to offer some interesting insights that extend beyond the kinds of books and courses offered by folks with their background (because, trust me, there’s a lot. Content marketers with authorial aspirations make up a huge chunk of the first and second wave of indie success stories, and their tactics have shaped the industry over the last decade).
But the thing that intrigues me about this piece of advice is the focus on the personal feed as a tool for lore-making, which is equal parts vaguely odd and a callback to the way I remember authors using Livejournal in the early 2000s.
And, like many authors who used Livejournal in that era, it’s a usage that I’ve really missed as we migrated to blogs (which weren’t quite as networked) and social media (which discouraged long-form thinking). The same vibe and community didn’t carry over to other forms of engagement when we migrated platforms, and I’ve missed it.
At the same time, I’ve not been making heavy use of my personal Facebook account in recent y1ears. I don’t often friend people, post in order to have conversations with the same group of thirty or so friends, and treat it as a necessary evil for maintaining the Brain Jar Press page.
The idea of treating Facebook as a LiveJournal-esque journal, complete with conversations about writing and craft, hadn’t ever occurred to me, but after trying it for the last few days the results are…pleasant. Perhaps not a fully-fledged hypersigil, nor a lore-generating stream of content, but definitely something that’s got me interested in engaging with folks there again.