Finally back, with a rant and an idea! by Neil McGowan

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to post, or even dedicate much time to writing. IT issues, both parents ending up in hospital at different times and needing help, coupled with increased work pressures mean I’ve barely written anything for the last six months.

Things are settling, though, finally. Parents on the mend, work settled, and have a new laptop all configured with backups restored at last; I got the last few pieces sorted out over the Easter weekend and can now return to scratching that itch I get when I don’t write for a while.

On the plus side, I’ve got a notebook full of random jottings I’ve managed to get on paper, and feel sure there’ll be something in there I can use in future work.

I’ve not been completely dormant, though. I’m around 10k words from revising the third draft of my Young Adult adventure set in the Middle East.

(As a wee side note, my wife has pointed out that my timing is impeccable – I was gearing up to launch a dystopian YA adventure set a few years after the planet had been decimated by a plague, in March 2020, just a week before the Covid lock downs kicked in; this time, I’m writing about the Middle East when it seems like it’s about to erupt in full-on war. Maybe I should pick something less risky to write about…)

I’ll almost certainly use a pseudonym of some sort, mainly to keep my YA stuff separate from my adult books. This means starting from scratch with marketing and building an audience.

And sigh, I’m not very good (or very interested in) marketing. However, I’ve gritted my teeth and waded into the murky swamps of advertising to see what I could use and...I don’t really like any of it. I mean, I have a basic outline of a marketing plan that I intend to flesh out over the next few moths with a view to launching the book in mid to late summer.

No, what surprised me was how bad the internet has become without using layers of protection. Reinstalling all my software made me realise just how much needless traffic I’m routinely blocking. Tracking scripts, so-called targetted advertising, browser fingerprinting, dodgy JavaScript running in the background – the list goes on.

Targetted advertising deserves a special place in hell, for me. It doesn’t work, to start with – the algorithms all seem to work on hoovering up past purchases and re-advertising them to you. I recall when we bought a new dishwasher a few years ago, for the next six months all we got were ads for new dishwasher. And don’t get me started on all those irritating YouTube ads they insist on slinging at people every few minutes. Okay if it’s a short video (well, it’s not really, as they’re all rubbish, and some are borderline illegal in the UK) but I like classical music – the last thing I want is for a complex and emotional piece of music to be stuffed full of inane ads for stuff I don’t want and will never buy. Tip: if you want to avoid the ads – use FireFox (or Waterfox, if you want a browser free of AI), with uBlock Origin and NoScript installed – stops the ads dead. The downside is you have to keep tweaking settings as you come across new sites, but it works on PCs, phones, and tablets.

My all-time favourite, though, was from Amazon, emailing me to tell me they’d found a book they thought I’d like. Well, yes, Amazon, I’d hope so – I wrote it!

As my day job involves working in IT, I tend to keep up with the tech news, so I often read about the latest breach that leaks private data across the web, and that’s when the problems really start – lots of the ad groups package people’s data up and cross-reference it to allegedly target ads better, and once they’re breached, then the criminals responsible have enough info to commit identity fraud.

It’s not that I’m against advertising I done right, but it seems to take over at the expense of everything these days.

Having said all that, I’m now wondering if there’s a story there, about advertising taken to extremes. Hmm, brain is now ticking over and doing that ‘What if?’ thing. It’s good to be back!