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spoopy-sloth · 24 hours

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How to spot Liberal Zionist Propaganda 101

This post is by no means exhaustive at all. There are many Liberal Zionist talking points but these are just some of the most common ones. While on the surface they seem a little naive and hopeful at best, they are very much harmful. If you claim to be an ally to Palestinians, this post is primarily for you!

For starters, liberal Zionists will often try to both-sides the issue of Palestine, talk about how it's complicated, they'll claim that the conflict hurts both Israelis and Palestinians, how the only way forward is one where Jews and Arabs "just need to get along," amongst other things. They also often like to centre themselves, even when acknowledging Palestinians as the victims of Israel or this "conflict." From time to time, they also like to engage in tokenising certain Palestinians whose views tend to more or less align with theirs. Here are some common arguments you may hear from them:

1. Any form of justifying Israel's existence or claiming that the only solution is two states

It does not really need to be said why justifying Israel's existence is harmful but justifying its continued existence also means legitimising Israel's land theft, its expulsions of Palestinians, and its ongoing harm to Palestinians and other populations. Reducing any sorts of “solutions” into a binary is unhelpful. Needless to say, a 2ss would not even address any legitimate concerns Palestinian have, such as the right of return, and would only legitimise Israel’s colonialism. Talking about a two-state solution also implies that the root of the conflict lies in Palestinians not having their own state rather than being an occupied people. It is very much also possible to construct a paradigm where Jews and Palestinians both live together on the same land as equal citizens that doesn't involve two separate states, much less an ethnostate.

2. Security for Israel could only come through peace

This is a similar talking point to the one above. Not only does it centre Israeli safety and security above Palestinian liberation but it mistakenly assumes that once Israel makes peace with Palestinians, it'll achieve security. The reality, however, is that Israel's imagined security has quite often come at the expense of peace. In fact, "peace" has just acted as nothing more than a smoke-screen for Israel to carry out its expansionist policies, particularly in the West Bank. When liberal Zionists talk about peace juxtaposed with Israeli security, they're talking about attaining a negative peace rather than a positive one.

3. Israelis are not their government.

This point does nothing to actually help Palestinians. It is also an incredibly tone-deaf thing to say when Israel has targeted many Palestinian civilians by having alleged proximity to Hamas, such as being family members of militants or leaders (inc. children!), civil servants in a Hamas-led government, or even any male above the age of 15 they consider to be a potential combatant! It also deliberately erases Israeli civilians' support of and culpability in Israel's actions towards Palestinians.

4. Netanyahu and/or the Israeli right are the source of conflict.

While it is true that things have gotten inadvertently worse under Israel's various right-wing governments, they are not the source of conflict, but rather a product of extremist nationalism and Jewish supremacy perpetuated by the system. Both the 1967 occupations and settlements were undertaken under centre-left governments in Israel, and Israeli policy under non-right wing governments has been just as harmful towards Palestinians and has paved the way for where we are today. Blaming Netanyahu just also obscures the violent nature of Israel's military occupation over Palestinians which long precede him coming into power.

5. Netanyahu and Hamas are two sides of the same coin

I don't think I've seen any allies give validity to this claim but it's an extremely reductionist claim and is sort of similar to the one above. Groups like Hamas are merely a response to the Israeli occupation while Netanyahu is a byproduct of it. While some Israelis may see Hamas or their actions as an "obstacle to peace," Israel's actions and policies long pre-date Hamas and how Israel is currently responding to Hamas is no different to how Israel has engaged with Palestinian militant groups in the past, regardless of political affiliations or political goals. It is also important to note that Hamas has agreed to the establishment of a state along 1967 borders while Netanyahu aims to prolong the occupation and empower the settler movement (some of whom are part of his coalition government) as much as possible.

6. Israel is not a settler-colonial state.

While it is indisputable that Jews have historical connections to Palestine, that doesn’t automatically make you Indigenous or negate Israeli settler-colonialism. Colonialism in particular describes a relationship of exploitation. There are many cases of this, but we most clearly see this in the West Bank where Israel exploits natural resources on occupied Palestinian territory for its own political and economic gains. In terms of settler-colonialism, it is widely known that Israel expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to make way for Jewish refugees and migrants to the new state of Israel, and is still actively facilitating Jewish migration to Israel today while denying Palestinians their right of return.

7. (X) doesn't help Palestinians.

It is not up to anyone to determine whether certain tactics or strategies are helpful or not. This point only seeks to discredit pro-Palestine organising. Only Palestinians get to decide what is actually helpful for the cause or not.

8. Any sort of Hamas-blaming.

On the surface it may seem like there’s nothing wrong with this, but this point is often harmful and usually lends itself to right-wing talking points because its objective is to deflect blame away from Israel. Certain arguments blaming Hamas also aim to minimise Palestinian suffering perpetuated by Israel. It also paints Israeli violence as retaliatory to Palestinian violence which only obfuscates Israel’s (and by extension, the US’) role in its state military apparatus and the differing power dynamics between Israelis and Palestinians. In other contexts, this point seeks to also legitimise certain opposition, such as the Palestinian Authority. Hamas-blaming also tends to sometimes lead to racist diatribes about Palestinians and their culture.

9. Al-Jazeera is not a credible news source.

Al Jazeera is a news source like any other. It has varying editorial policies and therefore will have equally good reporting on certain issues while having terrible reporting on others. The difference is that Al-Jazeera's news on Palestine is credible because it comes directly from their Palestinian reporters on the ground and first-hand eyewitness accounts. Western news sources are no more or less credible than al-Jazeera. Compare this to CNN, NYT, and any other Western news sources where Palestinian voices are often entirely missing from the narrative.

10. Overemphasis of antisemitism on the left

Antisemitism is a real issue and has the potential to fester in left circles if not directly addressed head on. Combatting antisemitism is extremely important, however, it is not an issue exclusive to the left. There is also a double standard in that no one expects Zionists to call out Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism. Certain accusations of "antisemitism" also seek to distract from what's going on in Palestine by making it about Jewish comfort and feelings. Combatting antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism etc is always important as the basis of good politics.

Last but not least, be wary of native collaborators or any sort of normalisers! They are Palestinians or Arabs who try very hard to appeal to Western liberal consensus and can end up perpetuating a lot of harm to the cause and/or other activists. You will know them when you see them.

#:X #zionism #good to know

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spoopy-sloth · 2 days

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So, You Want to Write Original Fiction and Post It Online? Here's What to Expect.

I finally saw a post that pushed me over the edge of talking about this subject, because a lot of people go into posting their original fiction online and they end up extremely burned out and disappointed because their ambitions did not line up with reality.

To be clear, posting original fiction can be one of the most fulfilling experiences that you can have as an internet denizen (it certainly has been for me!) and I absolutely encourage everyone who wants to to try it, but like, at the same time I think everyone should know what they are getting into. I’d like to cover here what your goals might be for getting into web serial writing, and what a realistic level to set those goals at is, as well as some tips on how to meet them. This isn’t so much as a how-to or concrete advice, it’s more like “lessons I’ve learned (or seen other people learn) the hard way but that I rarely see talked about frankly.”

Before we begin, just so you know where I’m coming from (and so you can decide if I’m worth listening to) here are my bona fides

I have been posting fiction online since 2018, nearly 2 million words total. It can be read on ao3/royalroad

About half of what i’ve written is original fiction and half is fanfic

I write things that you might generously call “extremely niche”

My total audience (which i’m broadly defining as “people who have read a significant part of either of my major series”) is probably on the order of 500 people. this is a difficult/impossible metric to really track, but you can make fairly accurate guesses from view counts

I am friends with some moderately successful web serial writers (moderately successful here defined as “makes enough money via patreon that it affects their taxes, but is not enough to live on”)

I have never attempted to traditionally or self publish my work, or monetize it in any way

I try to keep up with the broader web fiction zeitgeist

All that is to say, I have been there in the webfiction trenches.

Through this guide, I will be using numbers pulled from the statistics pages of my own stories (and those of friends) to back up some of the conclusions that I’m drawing. I do believe the statements i make are illustrative of broad trends, but do keep in mind that I am one person with one experience, and everyone’s experience will differ.

With that out of the way, I think the most important thing before you post your writing online is to understand what you’re trying to achieve. If you understand that, you can manage what you’re actually expecting much more closely. Here are some super common goals/desires that people posting web fiction can have.

I want to have as many people as possible just read my work (but I do not care about engagement or monetary gain)

I want to have an audience that I can talk to and who talks to me; writing is about sharing a part of myself and I would like to be friends with my audience/connect with them.

I want to improve my writing with reader feedback.

I want to improve my writing by figuring out what readers like and tailoring my writing to them.

I want to make money off of my writing via patreon.

I want to test the waters before I self-publish my book, and maybe gain an audience who will purchase my books.

I want to test to see if my writing is “publication worthy” by posting it online and seeing how it does.

I want to test myself and my ability to complete a long form story/project; having an audience will be motivation to keep at it.

I’m not doing anything else with this piece of writing that I have, so I might as well post it and see if people like it.

If any of this sounds like you, read on! I'm putting the rest of this below a cut b/c it's disgustingly long.

I will be brutally honest here: some of these goals and desires are much easier to achieve than others. I’m going to break these motivations down into a couple broader categories: popularity, reader engagement, publishing, financial, and intrinsic.

Popularity

On some levels, this is the simplest metric. It’s pretty easy to count things— views, followers, comments, reviews, etc— and all of this is so good for the “number goes up” reward button in our monkey-brains.

If you do not care about engagement, and only care about view counts, it’s actually pretty easy to rack up views. But that is only the case if you really, honestly, truly do not care about comments. Here are some statistics from my own work

On royalroad, my story ItSoH has ~160,000 pageviews and 711 comments (a 225:1 hit:comment ratio). Keep in mind that many of those comments are also my own replies or copy/paste “thanks for the chapter” messages— I reply to every substantive comment)

On scribblehub, the same story has ~10,000 pageviews and 6 comments (a 1666:1 hit:comment ratio!). Granted, i’ve never been truly active on SH and only crosspost there for kicks, but still!

Views are very very cheap as a metric, and it can feel really dispiriting to have a big viewcount and a much smaller amount of audience engagement.

The things to understand if you are writing to be popular

You need to know what metrics mean (how they are tracked by the website you’re posting on, how they are used by your audience, how much they actually tell you) and how they relate to each other (what are the typical ratios between hits/comments/follows/likes/financial support)

If you are hooked on watching the numbers go up, there is not going to be a time when you feel satiated by the metrics. It’s always going to be a jolt of good feeling when they go up, and when they stagnate it feels bad. This is unavoidable and just how brains work.

If popularity is your only goal, you can tailor your work specifically to gain an audience

Luck has a lot to do with it, unfortunately.

Here are some tips about popularity.

Location, location, location. If you are posting on the wrong website, you are shooting yourself in the foot.

Every website has a niche, but not every niche has a website. If you want to write BL, you need to be somewhere like Tapas. If you want to write progression fantasy: royalroad. Fantasy erotica for men: literotica. TeenLit: probably wattpad. Hard sf: spacebattles or sufficientvelocity. Asian light novel inspired stuff: webnovel. Etc etc etc. there are many many many websites, and each of them has managed to snag a different audience who go there looking for the type of content on that website.

You should be reading the content that you want to write, and you should be posting in the place where you are reading.

Not All Websites Are Created Equal, and there may be reasons to choose one over another, or to crosspost in only a few places. i will ditch a website if their UI/UX frustrates me (and many of them do). The statistics and metrics that different websites offer vary greatly, as do the ways in which site users interact with your content. Some websites will have active author communities, others won’t. The ways readers discover your content can vary greatly between platforms as well. Some websites have built in monetization systems that affect the way stories are read (thinking of webnovel and tapas specifically here). It’s all over the place. Once you find a home, you can dig deep into what works there.

A note on hosting your own website: you make the major tradeoff of control to discoverability. (+ you have to put time and effort into creating and maintaining a website.) if you are willing to make that tradeoff, godspeed, but it is not going to do anything for increasing your readership, especially at the beginning before word of mouth can carry you

You should be reading the popular stories on the website that you are posting on, and figuring out what the common denominator is that makes them popular (usually this will be pretty easy to figure out)

Some readers will go to a story that is just parroting out the same thing as everyone else, but it can really help to have some sort of unique twist

Tailor your writing to match site expectations. If the average chapter length of popular novels is 1.5k words, do not post 10k word chapters.

Consistent uploads are great; rapid uploads are better (usually). If you can post three times a week, you will have a /massive/ edge over someone who posts once a month

Every website will have its own scheme for ranking stories: figure out what it is and what the best way is to game it.

Some websites have too many authors and not enough readers, and/or no easy way for readers to find your work. Wattpad is especially heinous in terms of discoverability. Avoid these places, or at least don’t make them your primary platform.

Being affable and friendly and participating in a community can help you get your foot in the door, but it probably will not be the thing that skyrockets you to fame. But it’s also just good to be part of a community so i do recommend doing this anyway.

Explicit self promotion almost never gets you anywhere. Paying for in-house advertisements, if you’re willing to pay for it, might.

An audience for something else (social media following, writing fanfiction, etc) WILL NOT translate into an audience for your writing. Maybe 1-2% of your social media or other thing followers will click on your writing, though it doesn’t hurt to post the link to it.

This should go without saying, but having a well written summary, a nice cover image, and an interesting title are like. Crucial. These are the only things that a prospective reader will see, so you need to use them to their full ability.

Reader Engagement

Ok. Here’s the tough pill to swallow: reader engagement, be it in the form of comments or reviews, for original web fiction is difficult to get. It’s also, unfortunately, probably the most satisfying thing to have. You will likely have to have a couple hundred clicks for every one comment you get. See the popularity section for some tips on how to get those clicks in the first place.

Some websites are better at being a comment environment than others— an especially noticeable difference is in sites where anonymous commenting is allowed vs needing an account to post— but it also depends heavily on the community culture, which is something that you will just have to feel out.

As always, I suggest being an active reader on the site where you are an active poster, and checking out the ratio on stories you read between hit counts (this info is often public) and comments on new chapters. You may be surprised at what you find.

You can improve reader interaction somewhat— be chatty in your author’s notes, always reply to comments to foster discussion, ask question prompts for readers to answer, solicit suggestions for upcoming plot points, etc. None of these are guarantees, but they are things that you can do that encourage people to talk to you.

I will also be completely honest here: it is way, way, way easier to get reader engagement if you are writing fanfiction (especially on AO3). For one thing, the community culture is vastly different, and the way that readers find your work lends itself to being more active commenting. This is not to dissuade anyone from writing original fiction, but it is a fact of life that I would be remiss if I didn’t mention.

If you are looking for constructive reader feedback (along the lines of actual “here’s how to improve your story” and not “here’s the typos I found in this chapter”), stop, do not pass go, do not collect $200. You are never going to get what you want out of it. If you are looking for constructive criticism, the best thing that you can do is find a trusted friend to beta read for you— ideally someone who you exchange works with. Reader criticism, when you get it, is often not given with your best interests at heart, and a fellow writer will usually understand/express what is working and not working in your story in ways that you can interpret and put into action better than a reader can.

Community and friendships =/= reader engagement, but they are good to have. I have writer friends from my time on royalroad who do not read my work, and whose work I do not read, but are nevertheless very good friends of mine, who have helped me improve as a writer, and have also been invaluable at helping me navigate the web fiction community space. Making connections with other people in a community can help make writing fiction online more satisfying feeling, even if they do not directly read your work. I promise!

[sidenote: ime, the webfiction writing community is a much better place to find writing friends than groups focused on tradpub or selfpub. I think the nature of how public everything is with webfiction helps remove some of the weird… idk… not knowing where you stand wrt everyone else around you. That’s not to say it’s a perfect community (lol) but it meshes with my brain a whole lot better than most other writing communities i’ve participated in. ymmv on that though, especially if you are coming from more traditional writers groups]

Publishing

Big caveat lector: I have never self or traditionally published anything, and I don’t have any particular intention to try. But here are some things I’ve noticed.

Novels =/= web serials. The things that make a web serial good and popular do not always translate into a good novel, and the reverse is also true. Web serials do better when they’re longer; novels typically have a set length (what that length is varys by genre, but you’re rarely going to find a 500k word novel, while web serials of that length are dime a dozen). Of course, you can break your long serial up into shorter light-novel esque volumes, but this comes with its own pain. And you /can/ post a traditional length novel on the web, but with fewer opportunities to post chapters (since there are a limited number of them) that leads to a smaller window to gather and keep an audience.

Also, I think it’s important to be aware that the audience of web fiction readers as a whole and the audience of novel readers are two completely different beasts. (There is also a difference between people who read mainly self published novels and those who read mainly trad pub novels, but that is Beyond The Scope Of This Post.) Web fiction readers will be lenient about things that would never fly in a trad pub book, and sometimes the other way around! The expectations of genre and professionalism are different. So using web serial popularity as a metric for “should I publish” can only get you so far.

Your free web serial audience =/= a paying audience for a self published novel. It can /help/, and sometimes readers will want to support you by buying your book, but there is no guarantee of either of those things. There’s no great way to do it: if you have your entire serial published free online and have a “buy my book to support me”, that’s a voluntary donation your readers are making, so is pretty equivalent to patreon. If you gate off chapters (like have the first half of a serial up and then say “buy my book to read the rest”) be prepared for people to be Pissed at you. Also, if you’re publishing via Amazon, there are rules about how much free content of your book you are allowed to post. Self publishing is an arcane and complicated system, and there are many more people who know much more about it than I do. If you’re serious about self publishing, there are lots of resources out there for you, and it’s just a totally different ball game than web fiction writing, though the two are often connected.

If you intend to traditionally publish your book: maybe don’t post it online. Every piece of advice I’ve read on this subject says that posting your full novel text online makes it extremely hard to get it published. The only exception is if you become massively popular (think andy weir’s the martian. I read that story while it was being serialized way back in like 2011 😅 this is a very ‘i liked it before it was cool’ moment of me :p ). But people who become massively popular in webfic are extremely rare, and also tend to monetize their content in other ways that are not being picked up by traditional publishing (patreon, mostly).

Financial

So, on the topic of monetizing your work. The most common thing that people do is gate off new chapters on patreon for a couple weeks before posting them publicly, but many people also just use their patreon/ko-fi/whatever as a tip jar without offering bonus rewards. There’s benefits and disadvantages to both approaches, but I don’t have the experience to get into it (i have never personally tried to monetize my writing).

But for a second, let me talk numbers. These are examples pulled from my friend unice, who is a pretty popular writer on royalroad. Across her stories, she has ~7000 followers (though probably ~1000 of those are duplicate follows on both stories). Those 7000ish followers translate into ~30 patreon supporters with an income of ~$200/chapter (her patreon info is public, you can check it out here). Her actual readership is likely much higher, since the majority of people who only read stories on royalroad never make an account, and so can’t press the follow button. You can expect a ratio of >100 readers:1 paying customer.

And Unice is a success story!

My friend Nil, who also writes on royalroad, has on the order of ~1500 followers across his two active stories. He has 4 patreon supporters, from whom he makes $8/mo. Also i think one of those is Unice giving him seed money so his patreon is less dire looking. (that’s a protip— people are less likely to pledge to an empty patreon. Always have some seed pledges in there given by a friend.) But his ratio is not actually that different from Unice’s— you need hundreds of readers to get even one paying customer.

This is why i’ve never tried to monetize my anything haha. It would not actually be worth the sadness of trying. And I think that you should be aware of that before you set up any kind of patreon or other monetization scheme. Temper your expectations. If you have a dream of making enough money to live on, you are going to need at bare minimum in the high tens of thousands of readers (not an easy feat by any means).

Intrinsic Motivation & What Posting Your Writing Can Actually Do For You

Look, at the end of the day, you have to be writing for yourself. Writing is a solitary task that takes massive amounts of time and effort, and it is often difficult to get the kind of extrinsic motivators that you’re looking for.

It’s important to keep in mind that a reader’s time and attention are valuable things to them, and although you may be providing them with entertainment, they are also giving you the gift of listening to what you have to say. Attention is not a thing that anyone owes you by virtue of you putting your work out into the world, and feeling like it is will only hurt you in the long run.

It’s a reciprocal relationship. For me, it’s occasionally important to step back and remind myself of that— there are people out there beyond just the numbers who have let me into their lives, even in a small way. If I take into account my total pageviews across ao3 and royalroad, to date about 200,000 hits, and I assume each one of those hits is someone spending 10 minutes reading a chapter— that’s 32 THOUSAND hours that people have collectively spent reading my work, or about 3 ¾ years. Like that’s an almost unimaginable amount of time that people have given to me as a gift, and I’m so ;0; every time I think about it.

Aside from that, if you do write things to consistently publish online, you are going to improve. Even just brute force typing out words into sentences into stories, that WILL make you get better at writing. And web serials are a great place to learn, because the only things at stake are your ego and your time (and while both of those are valuable, hey, they don’t cost anything!). When I first started writing seriously in 2018, I made pretty much every mistake it was at all possible to make, and four years later, I am an unimaginably stronger writer, because of dedicated practice and keeping at it.

I know that I’m kinda a rare breed when it comes to perseverance (admittedly, this is one of those things that will come a lot lot easier to you if you have my flavor of autism lmao), but if you can find whatever the spark is within yourself to keep going, the rewards of writing web fiction are like. Immeasurable.

I feel like I can attribute 95% of the good things in my life right now to writing web serials. It has made me dear friends who i know i will cherish for the rest of my life. It has improved my writing skills beyond what i ever thought possible. It has opened professional doors for me. It has made some of the darkest hours of my life a lot easier to bear, because of having a project that I can cling to and dump nearly endless amounts of time into. It has improved everything about the way I see myself as a person and as an artist. And I’m not even a web serial success story! I’m kinda a flop, except for the fact that I keep on going :p

I know that a lot of things that I’ve said here about audience and money and whatever are pretty dire (they are) but I think it’s important to say those things at the beginning, because going into this without realistic expectations is a way to get burned the fuck out from an artistic project that can be extremely rewarding. I honestly think that if you have a story you want to tell, you should consider writing it as a web serial! I want there to be more of us! Please join me!

Thank you so much for reading my screed; I hope it was helpful. If you think it sounds like I know what I’m talking about, consider reading either of my web serials: A Wheel Inside a Wheel and In the Shadow of Heaven. Also, if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment and I will do my best to answer.

#writing #save for later #references

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