A bit more on Walt Disney. In the early days, Walt had a small staff and almost no money, but he always believed that he could rise to the top of the animation field through his obsessive focus on quality. One time, he screened one of his cartoons for an executive, and the exec passed on it. Walt, stung, was kind of like, “But the cartoon is great!” In response, the exec picked up a roll of Life Savers and said gruffly, “See these? These are Life Savers. People pay money for Life Savers. You know why? Because they know Life Savers. They don’t know you or your mouse.” That made a big impression on Walt. He was already resolved that people were damn well going to know his mouse, but now he resolved further that they were going to know him too, and he started putting his name prominently on everything that he did.
That seemed sensible, and looking over my website I realized that I didn’t even have my name on it, except in my bio and in tiny letters way up in the title bar, so I did a quick redesign in hopes that now people who stumble across the site and don’t have any idea who I am might have a chance of noticing my name and remembering it.
So, the old:
And the new:
If you’re a professional writer, it’s vital that people notice your name and remember it, but that’s hard, particularly for short story writers. I was recently at a social event for people who write for or listen to the Escape Pod podcast. One of the young women there told (Escape Pod host) Steve Eley that my story “Save Me Plz” was her favorite recent story from the show, so he called me over to introduce me to her. During the conversation, I mentioned that I’d recently had a story on Pseudopod as well, and she said, “Really? Which one?” I said, “‘The Disciple’ … it’s at a college, and there’s this evil professor … ” and she exclaimed, “Oh, I really liked that one too!” But despite the fact that she’d obviously enjoyed both stories, she’d had no idea that the same person had written them, let alone what that person’s name was. (Parenthetically, my impression from talking to some of the Escape Pod listeners was that they conceptualize the show differently than I do. For them, it seems, the stories aren’t so much “A Tim Pratt story,” or “A Greg Van Eekhout story,” or “A David Barr Kirtley story,” but “An Escape Pod story,” in much the same way that you might watch The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits each week and not particularly pay attention to who wrote the individual episodes.) Of course, I wish people would pay close attention to the names of short story writers, but I understand that people are busy and have other things to think about, and I can remember before I started writing professionally that I didn’t pay that much attention to authors’ names either, and how eye-opening it was when I started putting together a more comprehensive mental picture of who had written what and realized how many of my favorite stories that I remembered vividly were written by the same people.
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