Plagued by Small Demons: Art or Ad?

Plagued By Small Demons – Art or Ad
by Gregory Pellechi

Gregory Pellechi is a freelance writer who lives and works in Cambodia and writes fiction under the name Sven Nomadsson. He can be found online at http://worldwritsmall.wordpress.com and on twitter at @SvenNomadsson

Movies and television have become synonymous with product placement to the point where we rarely look aghast at such. In some cases the product is so well integrated into the story to become a key element – Coca Cola in Goodbye Lenin by Wolfgang Becker. Others like Blade Runner by Ridley Scott make use of the same product but make it part of the background and at the same time elevate it’s placement to an art form that hasn’t been replicated in real life.

Then there are those movies like Josie and the Pussycats by Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan that are so chock full of products that they’ve become nothing but a two hour advertisement, mainly for Target shopping centers in the case of Josie and the Pussycats. One can look at it in the post-ironic hipster way and say that it’s merely making a mockery out of product placement, but for that to be true it’d have to be a good movie. AMC’s Mad Men takes it the other direction with the entire premise of the show being about the inclusion of products within our lives and the people who make that happen – entire conversations happen around Lucky Strike cigarettes or 7UP and yet we aren’t caught out by the placement.

For literature, be it fiction or non-fiction, the inclusion of items has never been seen as product placement. More often than not it’s considered a critique on culture or a method by which the author has been able to help set a scene and place a character. The mention of a particular brand of cola, cigarettes, car or even book (most commonly Penguin) can help evoke an image within the mind of a reader. I did have one professor at university who ascribed to the practice of never including such details as it can easily date a work and keep it from becoming universally relevant.

Eclipse, the third book in the Twilight saga by Stephanie Meyer, proves that mentioning a particular product, in this case Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, can increase sales. Without a doubt Haruki Murakami’s mention of Cutty Sark whisky in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84 didn’t hurt sales – an odd choice considering that Murakami’s native Japan is the largest producer of whisky and Cutty Sark is from Scotland, but one that likely has thematic implications.

A Plague of Small Demons

For all the references in books one has until now most commonly had to refer to Wikipedia. But Small Demons has come along to “welcome [us] to the Storyverse™,” as it were and allow us to find “the people, places and things from books, and everywhere they can take you.”

In essence you can now search for all references to landmarks in Portland, Oregon in Devon Monk’s Allie Beckstrom series of urban fantasy or track any mentions of The Smiths who are most commonly discussed by Chuck Klosterman and Nick Hornby. For that matter you can find out that Frank Herbert’s Dune is mentioned in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon and U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton.

But it also means that there’s now a reason for mentioning particular people, places, groups and things. It certainly provides some cultural relevance and shows the amount of research that an author has done to set a story in a particular place and time. Yet what’s to prevent an author from monetizing on the choices of music, books, clothing or other items that a character prefers? It’s a form advertising that’s likely to last far longer than traditional advertisements – in effect helping the products enter the cultural milieu.

Young Adult and Urban Fantasy (at least as popular as it is at the moment) are likely to be the most applicable genres for such advertising as they’re geared towards readers who are looking for similarities between the characters and themselves. The fact that the stories are often set in this world, rather than an imaginary one like Middle Earth, also helps. Placing Coca Cola in Mordor would really have thrown off the whole quest to destroy the one ring, but would have offered Sam & Frodo a nice, refreshing respite from the grueling nature of their journey and quite possibly upped their blood sugar so they were in a little better mood.

Products, particularly those with a specific nature – clothes, cars, phones, computers, etc. help to define a culture and add a relevance to a story and a character, it’s undeniable. Their choice in music is likely to endear them to some readers and distance them with others. In a movie, and the same goes for television and other visual arts (think video games) any product placement is most often deliberate for two reasons: 1) It’s integral to the story 2) the item is offsetting the cost of the production.

In modern stories, regardless of medium, a character is likely to have a cell phone. An item that isn’t necessary to describe. To show it, a piece of black rectangular plastic is enough but if the producer wants to lower her costs then getting a cell phone maker to provide the phone along with a fee for the “advertisement” is the way to go. Authors on the other hand chose particular items such as Apple computers or Nokia phones to help illustrate a scene. Naming a particular items allows a reader imagine it easily. Just look at how often Stieg Larsson mentions Macbooks in The Millennium Trilogy (The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest).

Small Demons is tracking, through crowd sourcing, all of the people, places and things within literature and offers you a chance to purchase associated items. That means other books that mention the same thing, or music found in a book and presumably the list will expand to include other elements. So what’s to keep an author from filling a scene with inane commentary describing to the reader every piece of clothing or all the items scattered about a room in order to make money?

The addition of extraneous elements in literature could have two effects on Small Demons. The first: a book would have an increased number of connections on the website and thus a greater chance of being discovered which would result in more sales – a good thing for the author undoubtedly. The second: the amount of items for sale would increase – a fine thing for Small Demons as that’s likely to be their source of income. But it could turn books into nothing more than the spam that arrives with the weekend edition of the newspaper.

That’s a bit extreme and those connections wouldn’t be entirely bad – there is the chance to increase tourism if a book or series of books were set in a particular place. Edinburgh, Scotland and Stockholm, Sweden already offer literary tours that take tourists around to the various locales that have occurred in a number of books. Presumably an author could gain the sponsorship of a local tourism board which could be seen as a mutually beneficial relationship. Others might call that author a hack as a result because their patron is not a person but an organization.

The big difference between books and movies or TV or other mediums in which we find product placement is that books take place entirely in the theater of the mind. And while it does help to illustrate a scene by mentioning a character writing on a Moleskin notebook in Café Hawelka in Vienna, Austria the perception of those two unique aspects will still vary from reader to reader. What I know of Café Hawelka will be different from other readers due to personal experience and a knowledge of Vienna’s streets where as others may simply imagine a European Denny’s.

We, as consumers of entertainment, accept that there are going to be advertisements on TV & radio and in video games & movies because they clearly stand out from the program. It’s implicit every time we use them. Even if advertisements are integral to a story, the placing of an advertisement for the sake of advertising within a book has in a way violated the contract of intimacy between the author and reader.

When you pick up a book it’s with the understanding that there are only two parties involved. To find references to people, places or things that don’t directly meld with the other elements of the story is the same has having invited a third party to participate in this intimate moment. Yes it can certainly be a sign of poor writing but it could also be advertising run rampant, which is a possibility Small Demons is presenting.

What a contract between an author and a company or other organization is likely to look like I don’t know. The number of mentions and positioning of items within a book are likely to be difficult aspects to control. Inevitably restrictions on the other products in a book are to be part and parcel of any contract, potentially leading book covers to resemble the paint jobs of stock cars and the jerseys of European hockey players. If that’s the case will we see authors is fireproof jumpsuits sitting at convention bedecked in the logos of their sponsors, ultimately plaguing us with their products when all we’re interested in is their book.

A Catalog of Cool

People already sell the names of characters, albeit most often for charity, and people also write about things they think are cool or interesting – that’s not going to stop. More often than not those interests are shared by others and Small Demons offers a way to find those shared interests. It’s cataloging the cool in this world and the worlds we find in books, allowing us to find more of the same.

The introductory video itself appeals to the hipster in all of us with its bearded and spectacles sporting narrator who insists on showcasing Small Demons abilities at tracking finer points of cultural references to be found in books. It urges us on to putting that collection of knowledge regarding the minutiae of various literary works into its encyclopedia in an effort to trap those small demons that persistently nag us as we read. They’re not the same as the imp of the perverse but the name does provide a very apt description of the website; for it’s those little details that help add to a book to round it out and give it substance.

Where Goodreads helps you find similar books based on reviews and literary elements, Small Demons will do the same but based on references and other connections. While you won’t find the fruit Paolo Bacigalupi referred to in The Windup Girl as ngaw on Small Demons, it’s known as rambutan in English, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other exciting things to find and other ways to make connections to other books.

Small Demons is what it is and has the potential to have a bigger impact on literature than is likely expected in today’s consumer culture. Authors are going to mention brands unabated for the foreseeable future so shouldn’t they get paid for doing so? Writing is a costly and time consuming process and like the other arts doesn’t guarantee financial success – advertising allows an author to offset those costs. But is it a path that in following authors are simply introducing to the cultural fabric new things and references while allowing them to continue to produce work? Or is it shilling?

Small Demons is still in its beta stage and as such a lot of books haven’t had their references marked or even been included. As of the writing of this article, Devon Monk’s Allie Beckstrom series hadn’t been included nor had Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl. I should note that while Mad Men may continually references Lucky Strike cigarettes the last time I was in the USA they weren’t available but 7UP, Coca Cola and the myriad of other products as well as movies, TV shows and books I named are.