Writing Fiction

Better business through sci-fi

Can't think of any SF authors who've anticipated this development. Via The New Yorker: Better Business Through Sci-Fi. Excerpt:

About five years ago, Ari Popper enrolled in a course on science-fiction writing at the University of California, Los Angeles, hoping to distract himself from the boredom of his day job as the president of a market-research company. 

“It was, like, the best ten weeks of my life,” Popper told me recently. “But I knew I wasn’t going to pay the bills as a science-fiction writer.” Still, the course gave him an idea: since businesses often spend money trying to predict how the world will change, and since speculative fiction already traffics in such predictions, perhaps one could be put in service of the other—corporate consulting through sci-fi narratives. 

Soon, Popper quit his job, sold his house, and launched his own firm, SciFutures. Today, his network of a hundred or so authors writes customized stories for the likes of Visa, Ford, Pepsi, Samsung, and nato. Popper calls their work “corporate visioning.” A company that monetizes literary imagination might itself seem like a dystopian scenario worthy of Philip K. Dick. “There can be a little tension,” Trina Phillips, a full-time writer and editor at SciFutures, acknowledged. The authors’ stories, she added, which range in length from a few hundred to several thousand words, are “not just marketing pieces, but sometimes we have to pull back or adjust to accommodate a brand.” 

She and Popper have found that clients generally prefer happy endings, though unhappy ones are permissible if the author also proposes a clear business strategy for avoiding them. Rarely is there room for off-topic subplots or tangential characters. Phillips mentioned one story that initially featured a kangaroo running amok in a major North American city. The client, a carmaker, asked that the marsupial be removed. 

One spectre that appears often in the stories is the “dematerialization” of shopping. “The prospect of removing all friction from shopping is very frightening for companies that rely on consumers coming into the store and being swayed by packaging and pricing,” Popper said. 

He expects that, in the next decade, artificial-intelligence programs will do an increasing share of home shopping, often without any direct human supervision. They will keep track of inventories; negotiate prices for goods such as garbage bags, dog food, and groceries; and order new products on behalf of consumers. Companies that market directly to A.I. software, rather than to humans, might gain a competitive advantage.

What if someone wants to steal my novel idea?

Today I got a note from an aspiring author, worried about someone stealing a good story idea. I've heard the question many times, and here's what I generally answer:

Your stuff probably isn’t worth stealing.

 

Not that it’s a bad idea—but it’s an idea that’s probably been explored many times before. Even if you’ve got a good angle on it, how would anyone “steal” it? They’d have to find a known writer with a good sales track record, who would be willing to crank out a novel based on your idea, and then spend thousands to edit, print, distribute, and publicize it. Chances are that, like most novels, it would die within six weeks.

 

Note that I'm talking about novels. Stealing a good idea for a movie makes sense, because millions are involved, but novels are strictly small change. A good thief never steals anything small.

 

Publishing is all about making money, not throwing it away. A successful writer wouldn’t go along with the steal, partly out of sheer ego—“My own ideas are better than this one.” And the time it would take to write a rip-off novel would be time taken away from their own projects. On top of that, being exposed as a story thief would ruin the writer’s reputation, and the publisher’s. (Every contract has a clause about legal battles that might result from publication, and the author has to take responsibility with the publisher.)

 

So honesty is more or less forced on publishers. So send them your pitch, with a good sample of your novel in progress. And if they like the idea, and the writing is competent, and you can tell a good story, they will gamble with an unknown writer. Even if they lose, it's just small change. And if they win, they'll gladly publish every book you write, with lots of publicity.

 

Just as long as you keep making money for them.