The Internet is lying to you. The rise of clickbait headlines.

James Bond: Superman Henry Cavill on replacing Daniel Craig as 007 “Very, very exciting”

Phil: This headline popped up on my tablet a couple of days ago. From it, you might conclude that Henry Cavill has bagged the job as the next 007. You might be surprised, having read that Tom Hardy was already lined up for the role a couple of days earlier.

What has happened?

Basically, the newspaper who “wrote” the Cavill story has turned an old quote saying he would like the role, and was the second choice to Daniel Craig*, into some words online. What they want is for you to click through and read.

The title is “clickbait”.

Clickbait: content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page.

OK, so you might not think this matters. It’s only an entertainment story, and since you know it’s going to take you to the Daily Express, not likely to be something of great importance.

Why do they want your visit?

Advertising. Land on their page and you’ll find loads of ads as well as more clickbait headlines to try to keep you on the site. Your visit will also raise their traffic levels, making the page more appealing to advertisers.

In publishing, this is called “reach” and it’s valuable. Very valuable indeed. Greater reach means you can charge more for adverts. It creates greater demand for your ad space. Sometimes it’s as valuable as actual sales.

Which is why media outlets look for people with headline writing skills. Yes, there will be a story of sorts behind the headline, but it’s all about the clicks, Don’t get me wrong, writing lots of clickbait headlines is a serious skill. Short, snappy and containing what the marketing world terms “a call to action”. If you can churn out a few dozen of these a day, stick it on your CV, it’s a saleable skill.

Does this matter? I think it does. At the moment, every news outlet is vying for your eyeballs and the best way to do that is shout the scariest news imaginable. Bad news sells, it always has done, and the worse it is, the better the “sales”.

In the middle of a pandemic, you’d like to think accurate information would be easy to find, but what we are served with are ever more apocalyptic headlines. Whichever numbers look worst, those are the ones we are told are most important and the figures are then twisted to suit the narrative. And those headlines keep coming. Endlessly.

As I write, more people die each day in the UK from suicide than Covid. Does this get reported? Of course not, because then someone might suggest that the endless stream of bad news is killing people.

Clickbait is deadly.

*Humourous book note: In our first novel, Dave is compared favourably to Daniel Craig emerging from the sea in a Bond film. I did not write that bit. I might have suggested we didn’t need quite so much detail in the description.

Looking for the happy ending

Phil: Does anyone else feel like they are being blown along by events at the moment?

We seem to be inching along to some sort of normality, but with very little idea what the new version of “normal” is, or whether it will be as nice as the old version. Everything is up in the air, except those hoping to go on holiday, who suddenly find themselves grounded.

Maybe this is why books are such a comfort. Even in the grimmest of “misery memoirs”, the ones that start with rape and get progressively worse, you have the expectation that by the end, everyone will be happy again with the worst of the problems behind them.

In our genre of humourous chick-lit, the girl will get her boy and be heading off to happily ever after land. I don’t think that I’m giving away a massive spoiler if I say that we expect Kate and Dave together by the end of our series. Anything else would upset the readers.

For most of us, Covid is the first time we have been in the middle of a massive event over which we have little control. We don’t generally, live in a war zone or a famine thank goodness. Now though, we look at the news and wonder what new plot twist is about to come our way. I’m hoping that whoever is writing this story and think that they have thrown quite enough at us. It’s making me have sympathy for our fictional characters and the wringer we have to put them through!

Let’s just hope that we’re a long way through the story and can soon close the cover with the satisfaction of a happy ending.

Reality too close to home

Candice:  I like reading ‘police procedurals’ – I love the mystery and trying to work out who done it, often with some downtrodden main character leading the charge.  The gore, the horror, what happens next, the twists; they are all part of a good story.

However, the other week my local area became part of its own police drama which made me think about things a bit differently.

Monday morning I’m getting text messages from friends, ‘hope you are ok’.  Ok, ok in relation to what?  We are out with the in-laws in a park an hour away from home.

I reply – what do you mean?  They respond to say that there has been a double murder not far from our house!  Shocked to say the least. I log on to the web and discover that the night before, while we’d been tucked up in bed, a young man had decided to stab his ex-girlfriend and her mother.  It comes out later that he has a history of violence and she’d been calling the police earlier in the evening because of problems but one thing led to another and he decided to step over the line and viciously murder these people.

Reading this story in a book it would have been a great opener; screams heard in the street, two people lying dead outside their house and a van seen driving off at speed.  But this isn’t a book, its real.

For the next week, if I drove around the area I’d find my route blocked by TV crew vans and police tape. It was most surreal, like being in a show.  There were times when it felt like you do on the motorway when there is a crash,  you can’t help but look.  But I also thought of the people involved and the horrible impact on their lives in having someone taken away.  It made me hug my daughter a bit tighter at bedtime.

The experience won’t stop me liking my reading material but it will make me think about how fiction can become fact and how different that is for those involved.

Character flip sides

Phil: From last weeks news:

Person A – A man who he couldn’t adapt to working life. He just couldn’t comprehend everybody moving on and he was struggling to leave behind his school days. He has a vague hatred of  society and a general social inadequacy with his place in it. If he ever managed to find a women who would have him, his anger with the world may eventually go away.

Person B – A committed, passionate extremist with a real intention to kill and maim as many people as he possibly can.

I picked all this up from the BBCs report on a group of Birmingham men plotting terrorist activities. Both phrases refer to the convicted men. They are in effect, the same person.

This is cause and effect. If you treat the perpetrator as a character in a story, much like those in the film “Four Lions” then you see that an inadequate individual who feels that he is backed into a corner can come out fighting, grabbing hold of the most preposterous cause to channel his anger. They can pervert a belief system that many millions of people follow peacefully every day to help justify their cause. It’s one of the great joys of writing that you can provide an internal dialogue for your character as well as showing the face they present to the outside world.

All this allows you to tell the story. Interestingly (in my opinion)  this is what is happening in the media generally. Scary stories sell the news so they collude with the terrorist by taking them desperately seriously. This isn’t to say that the planned acts weren’t serious but imagine how much harder it would be to recruit converts if they realised the root of your anger wasn’t a logical disagreement on the policies of a government but simply that you couldn’t grow up and find a girlfriend.

If you want to use this as a starting point for a story, imagine if in the 1920s, people had looked at a failed Austrian artist with slightly mad eyes and laughed at him instead of listening to what he said…

The death of print?

Phil: There’s a bit of buzz around the story that the magazine Newsweek is going to give up its print edition. Rumours abound that the Guardian will ditch the print edition soon and go on-line only.

Many commentators suggest that days of big news corporations are over because we can all get our updates free of charge from bloggers and “citizen journalists” rather than well paid hacks.

They then look beyond expensive news production and into the magazine world confident that you’ll soon abandon buying anything printed on a dead tree in favour of downloading it onto your iKindleslab.

Sadly (for the commentators) this proves why they are wrong. Magazine sales may be slipping but e-publication isn’t making much of a dent. With only 1.7% of sales being electronic any loss in circulation is down to other factors.

The point is that just because you say something doesn’t make it true. Even if lots of people are saying it, that doesn’t make it true. Proper journalism, the stuff people don’t want to pay for, involves going back to original sources, fact checking and other boring stuff that takes time. If you want the news according to an Idaho basement living nerd, well you can have it for free but in truth that’s all it’s worth. Just because something is loaded on to YouTube doesn’t mean it’s accurate either. Chances are that when you are seeing is only one side. Balanced reporting takes time and money too.

Of course, “big media” doesn’t do itself any favours sometimes. When you report stories happening outside your door by watching Youtube and Twitter rather than dispatching someone with a camera to go and have a look then those paying for it will begin to wonder. Likewise, some of us don’t think that the opinions of people you find wandering around the streets during the day are a substitute for cold hard facts, even if they are cheaper and more colourful.

“What has this go to do with writing a book?”, I hear you ask.

Well, the same commentators predicting the death of newsprint also tell me that e-books are the future. I’ve played with a Kindle and it’s very nice. You don’t want to kill flies with it or use it prop up a wobbly table leg but for reading it’s lovely.

The thing is that I can write a book to appear on it easily. Possibly too easily. No need to get involved with “big publishing”, they are as much of a dinasour as the big news corporations. Ignore the basic tenets of plots, character development, grammar and spelling – just write and be free!

Is this too easy though? Some numpty keeps e-mailing me something about how quickly you can write for Kindle etc. without bothering to do research. The messages clutter up my Spam folder daily. I think the idea is to churn out unreadable book after unreadable book, sell them for a tiny price and hope that all the sales will bring in a substantial income. (Feel free to correct me as I never read them properly never mind waste my broadband allocation watching the embedded video).

We have looked at e-publishing and technically, it’s not that difficult.

Is it the right way to go?

Is it the future?

Should we just assume that “big publishing” chooses its authors based on the number of weeks they stay in Strictly Come Dancing rather than how much they have to say?

There is a Self Publishing Conference in Leicester in 6 months time. Should we go?