A reader sent me a link to a Reddit thread which reveals that the image used in a popular meme online, Sheltering Suburban Mom, is the author photo of Carly Phillips, bestselling romance author.
Cue long discussion of how romance is porn.
This is a whole new kettle of WTF for an individual like Ms. Phillips, who probably never suspected that her image was being used to portray a meme character. Her identity has been listed at Know Your Meme for awhile, and their article traces the first known usage of Philips' author photo as 5 May 2011.
I don't know if I can successfully explain a meme, but usually it's an image representing a character with various captions attached. For example: judgmental bookseller ostrich, who is that horrible bookseller we've often met who judges our reading choices.
The problem for Phillips: some of the captions are funny, some are sort of meh, and some are painfully racist and homophobic, not to mention the overarching problem of having one's image used as a symbol for hypocritical self-importance.
Not the author brand anyone is looking for.
The Reddit folks have begun posting messages on Phillips' Facebook page, and the thread at Reddit may have crashed the Smexybooks giveaway featuring Phillips' trading cards.
This is a brand identity problem that most social media experts probably haven't faced before. I don't know if serving takedown notices, if they'd even be effective, would work, since it would be impossible to catch all the captions, and since it would only encourage communities like ReddIt who would mock the takedown notices with yet more captions.
I would hazard a guess that one solution might be for Phillips to publicly state that it's her image, it's being used without her permission, and she'd never say those things – and if you'd like to see a really funny meme, have a look at that ostrich. But I confess, I am flummoxed by this problem for an author and her brand on the internet, and I imagine many a social media expert would be confused, too. And I have a lot of empathy for her, too.
So do you think is the best solution? How would you handle it?
Gah! Read the reddit thread. Kudos to all those who stuck up for romance!
I just looked at Reddit for the first time. Is it a junior high school site?
I asked a friend who’s a professional internet dude what he would suggest. He says:
She should do an AMA on Reddit and engage with the community. They’ll leave her alone. They’re just amused at getting to interact with a real-life meme. (AMA = Ask me anything, or basically a Q&A thread.) She’s dealing with a male crowd that slants to the young-ish end of the scale, I’d think she’d know how to address that as a romance author and a mom, lol.
And…
But the thing about Reddit, if she engages, is that she’s gotta stay cool, even if one or two people start needling her. It’s juvenile, to say the least, but stuff like that is definitely basically a hazing/rite-of-initiation kind of thing.
Wow, that’s got to be the most confusing thing I have ever read. And, not at all what I understood a meme to be. So, someone took this authors pic and started tagging it with stupid slogans. Well that kind of sucks. But it took me three websites to understand the SBTB post. Doh!
@Sleuth I really think you’re underestimating the breadth and depth of audience for both internet memes and romance fiction. I know I’m not alone in that I find a large portion of my reading material through websites. IE, I might see a comment or a review somewhere about an author or book, then I’ll go check out that author’s website to learn more, then… you get where I’m heading?
Because reading material isn’t the only thing I use the internet for. I know what memes are, thanks. I also know that they’re not always based in complete fiction. That would be like saying, “Woke up today, Googled self…” was just some made-up phrase that had zero reference to anyone at all.
Like I said, I agree that this is probably just a “laugh it off” scenario. However, I don’t agree that it’s 100% impervious to negative consequences for the author.
The Santorum “thing” started in 2003 – here’s a little history from Dan Savage, whose readers came up with the new definition at http://www.thestranger.com/sea…
It’s probably confusing, it’s probably disorienting, but I think that any notion that this matter would have lasting or negative consequences is perhaps beanplating.
I was going to say that people who don’t know what a meme is must be few and far between but apparently I was wrong. I agree that it’s largely harmless and that the best thing Ms. Philips can do is clarify and laugh it off since the alternative is the aforementioned Streisand Effect, but also cause… well it’s just a meme.
The unfortunate thing about the Internet is that it often behaves like a mob, running from one spectacle to another. The fortunate thing is that it has a short attention span, and the mob quickly moves off to the next conflagration…provided it isn’t given any more fuel.
It appears that Ms. Phillips has acknowledged the matter appropriately and now, the wise course is to move on and ignore it. Given the rate at which conversations can dissolved into sh*t flinging fests at Reddit, I wouldn’t recommend any more engagement. My guess is that the audience for that meme, isn’t the audience for her books. The odds of one of her readers stumbling on a meme image and deciding immediately, “I’ll never buy her books again,” based solely on that image, are rather low.
I have never paid any attention to memes. I could be a potential reader who could be easily turned off by thinking that Ms. Phillips had intentionally lent her image to a meme and was fine with the awful comments and yes, that would affect my buying decisions.
I also wonder why it’s perfectly okay to steal photos when it’s not okay to do things like plagiarize. A photo is a COPYRIGHTED work. Its copyright is held by the original photographer. Stealing of copyrighted material is a crime.
I never get the jokes that seek to make other people feel smaller or more stupid. I tend to call that cruelty, not humor. It seems that most people doing memes think that cruelty is humorous. Alrightey then. I’m glad I’m not part of that culture. I feel really sorry for Ms. Phillips and would feel attacked in her position. Telling her to just laugh it off because it should be humorous? How patronizing.
If it ever happens to me (and I happen to be a well-known novelist) I would do the interview, along with a picture of me…and the ostrich. But then, I’m weird.
Gah. I meant if I HAPPENED to be a well-known novelist. Oops.
(hangs head in shame, I need to drink more before I post, I guess)