/lit/ - Literature

>>13456385
He made youtube videos with his brother for a long time covering things he liked so when he wrote a book he had an audience of young people to sell it to?

He's popular because he's a hack, not in spite of it.

>>13456385
marketing

>>13456385

If you can make pre-teen girls fall in love with you through banal love stories, you too can be rich anon

>>13456385
Capitalism

>>13456484

God I want to fuck a slutty art hoe so fucking badly with a nose ring and choker and purposefully unfashionable glasses fuck

>>13456484
Based
>>13456493
Relax

>>13456385
Good/talented writers usually don't achieve much popularity. Popularity is for the mediocre.

Teenagers like books that relate to them. Who wouldda thunk?
>>13456484
>people like things because capitalism
lmao

>>13456955
Capitalism promotes top sellers over substance.

C’mon liberalfly

women get out reeeeee

>>13457105
How small is she where an iPhone is larger than her face?

He writes for a specific audience and knows how to do it, but he was lucky and/or knew where things were going.
He was a youtuber when youtube was turning into youtube and before the night hosts invasion, demonetization, etc. Then he wrote books for YA female readers during the boom (2000's).

>>13456493

Me too man, me too
Why even live

>>13457280
same here, hurts to breathe

>>13457105
i agree, but how would we develop a better system of public opinion?
only thing i can think of would be utilising review websites, but even then they fluctuate a lot

>>13457280
There is no point of living is you're a slave to the senses and passions.

>>13457105
These books are top sellers because people like them.

>>13456385
He knew some people sucked some people them people gave him a job

american high school teachers like him and show his videos

>>13456385
Some of his stuff is genuinely interesting if you're actually the target audience and age – I remember liking Looking for Alaska back in the day.

Much of it is garbage though, and all of it definitely DOES have a narrow age window.

>>13457488
Actually this, I had no clue who this guy was until high school and like half my teachers showed his videos

>>13456493
That shits a baseball dugout bro
Too many dicks and balls

>>13457394
These books are top sellers because of MARKETING BUDGETS

>>13458938
Holy fuck stop- can’t you PRESUME the most rational response? Fuck you are a dense cunt

what's the deal with that weird cereal analogy he made?
why was he trying to convince teenage girls to have casual sex?

>>13458938
Marketing budgets are allocated after a thorough analysis of WHAT PEOPLE LIKE

>>13456390
ding ding ding

>>13456385
One word: innocuousness

>>13457234
>brainlet unable to fathom basic kindergarden level concepts of perspective and mirror effects in optics

>>13459033

I don't know what that means.

is he a yootoober?

>>13459080
Harmless, inoffensive, basic.

>>13456390
So he was a youtube onions before he was an author? Huh, didn't know that.

>>13459178
Thanks.

>>13456385
well it all started with these /lit/ dogpile threads around the time I wrote The Fault In Our Stars and started producing Crash Course. I think the /lit/ dogpile threads really helped get my name out there. They were intended to tear me down but that's not how the attention economy works.

Thanks for doing your part.

Best wishes,

John Green

>>13456440
Yeah if you spend your whole life working on your opus you never become popular. If you release frequently, don't overdo it, and get a lot of help from marketing and PR, you're a hack.

Hacks are successful. You're either a hack or you're whack.

>>13458986
WHAT PEOPLE LIKE is predicated by ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS.

Yes there has to be an element of gullibility and stupidity already present in the population, but that also has to be maintained. You actually want audiences to have pedestrian tastes because it means they are easier to satisfy. Money goes towards keeping consumers dumb as shit

His main youtube channel used to be pretty good and very popular. John Green honestly seems like a cool guy who just happens to right novels for tweens. He also hosted crash course (videos lazy teachers put on for students to fill time)

>>13456385
by being really good looking for a start

>>13456484
Which is also responsible for the liberation of women btw

>>13459712
john please go to sleep

>>13459105
Yeah, but he's also the Jake Paul of literature.

>>13459181
How did you not know that, him and his brother are the creators of vidcon, you know that youtube convention that happens every year.

>>13459645
>people don't have pedestrian tastes on their own
we live in an age where people have access to all the information in the world and spend most of their time watching cat videos and hardcore pornography without any advertising for such things

people are just dumb, capitalism is a posteriori codification of this

>>13460042
>people are just dumb, capitalism is a posteriori codification of this

>>13456385
By writing stuff like this

Wonderful prose, meaningful stuff

>>13459610
I strongly doubt any /lit/ thread about John Green has ever convinced a single human being on the face of the earth to buy one of this sniveling, pedantic retard’s books. Maybe there’s ONE basement dweller who bought a copy of A Fault In My Wallet just to epic style stick it to those stuck-up pseudoaristocratics at /lit/. Congrats to that guy for spending $39 of his own money for one of the worst written works of the last two decades.

>>13460185
>implying 90% of the human race isn’t scraping by on the bare minimum

>>13459721
It’s actually responsible for expanding wage slavery to women (and children, for a time) so no, liberation to exploit is a lie of freedom

>>13456493
have sex

>>13460223
This has to be an edit.

>>13460484
If you'd like you could just go back to the kitchen
that would be very liberating

>>13459645
This is conspiracy theory tier bullshit.

>>13462201
>>13462223
Weak defense, liberalfly

>>13462248
Nope, those jew-, i mean, capitalists just made you think its that way
lmao

>>13456385
He tapped into an untapped market of retarded tweens.

>>13462223
You seriously mean to tell me that advertisers aren't interested in manipulating the collective consciousness of their target demographics?

>>13462436
Yes, they can 'manipulate' people to buy their products. But people have to be willing to buy them in the first place, which is contingent on the people seeing value in the product. Advertisers can't just input signals to your brain which makes you like something.

John Green, like him. Relatable characters, realistic scenes that give you hope about humanity but are yet still out of sight in everyday life. Some scenes are just shocking enough to get my teenage self accustomed to the potentialities of my YA life. Not too intellectual, yet moves you. God, I wish I was loved unconditionally. Quite a talented e-teacher as well. Entertaining AND informative. Anway, I know, this world is f***d up, yet I still have hope. Thank you, John Green.

Stole DFW's style but appealed more to teenagers and the harry potter audience

>>13462607
As I near 200,000 followers here at fishingboatproceeds, I just wanted to to say Cock is one of my favorite tastes. Not only that, but balls smell amazing. It makes me go a little crazy on it to be honest. Like, I cannot get it far enough down my throat to be satisfied. I’m only satisfied when I feel those intense, powerful, salty hot pumps of cum down my throat. When I sit back on my heels, look up at you with cum all over my mouth and slobber running down my neck, hair all fucked up and wipe my mouth with the back of my arm and ask you if I did a good job and you cannot even speak because I’ve drained all of your energy out the tip of your dick..... that’s when I’m satisfied.

>>13456484
She hardly has pupils. How does she see?

>>13460223
>I wouldaaant want to sleeeeep with her like all the other guys
>I'm diffaraaant
>I'm miserable
literal incel whiteknight mindset in horrible prose (and analogies which is the absolute mark of a mechanically thinking mind)

>>13462559
>Advertisers can't just input signals to your brain which makes you like something.
Not directly. But the whole point is to make you want something you previously did not know about or need; if you buy this or that product, you will take one step closer to becoming like this or that famous, desirable individual. It's modern, commercialized mythology.

>>13462559
if advertising didn't work there would be hundreds of billion spent on it a year you absolute mongoloid

>>13463475
Advertisers advertise, they don't brainwash dumb faggot

>>13463459
The can influence you to buy a product, sure, but the decision is ultimately made by the consumer. People like John Green's shitty books because they relate to those people, not because they saw a commercial and suddenly fell in love.

He got in early on youtube youth culture, Wizard Rock and the like

>>13456385
made videos and wrote some books that tell teenage girls what they want to hear

>>13463475
Why not? The idea that big money people only act rationally is a meme. If everyone in town is buying ads like it's the most efficient strategy ever, you can bet your ass you're going to start buying ads even if there is no proof it actually helps your bottom line.

>>13456385
Most people like to have their ideas validated through perceived authority and popular acclaim.

>why is popular fiction a thing?

This'll rustle everyone's jimmies, but the truth is so few people read at all anymore that John Green churning out lame novels for teenage girls is actually a good thing
He's on our side. He's just not very good at it

>>13464813
but what if I don't care if people read

>>13464824
Then why would you care if people read John Green?

>>13464830
because I want them NOT to read anything
normies get video games and movies and porn and all kinds of other fun things, they need to stay away from books

>>13463573
>dude free will exists

stop posting retard

>>13456493
C-Cumbrain!

>>13460223
>a thot being "endlessly fascinating"

What did they mean by this?

>>13465540
The narrator in question hasn't gotten rejected enough times to have entered his shitpost on 4chan about how all women are whores and niggers are the reason he lives with his parents phase of life yet

>>13465560

>>13465565

Because of (((market forces)))

>>13462559
>But people have to be willing to buy them in the first place, which is contingent on the people seeing value in the product.

You're basically feeding directly back into the original point I made to you:

>Yes there has to be an element of gullibility and stupidity already present in the population, but that also has to be maintained. You actually want audiences to have pedestrian tastes because it means they are easier to satisfy. Money goes towards keeping consumers dumb as shit

>>13463573
They don't need to see a commercial for the specific product they're going to buy when they've already cultivated an identity around certain kinds of consumer products. That identity is cultivated through consumption of media from a young age. Sit a kid down in front of enough Barbie commercials and she might ask for a similar product, but not Barbie specifically. If a child cultivates an identity that John Green's publishing agent tells him to target, then it is entirely likely that child will ask his or her parents to buy a John Green book at some point. I mean for fuck's sake my dad bought ME a john green book despite having no indication that I would want or like such a thing.

>>13465565
>ribbit versus reddit
wow you've indoctrinated yourself against being sensible by associating any normal behavior with somehow being from reddit. You're so brainwashed that your cultivated identity as a 4chan consumer and your imagined rivalry with reddit consumers makes you lash out

>>13456493
cringe and virginpilled

>>13463442
>>13465540
ITT: People making fun of Looking for Alaska because they fall for it's apparent use of clichés it's all about mockingly subverting.

The main character is deliberately and scornfully written as a coping horny idiot. Him stupidly MPDG-ing the love interest is part of it.

>>13456385
lol how do you think popularity works?

>>13466969
>if you dont like reddit then you are all these random psychological things Im pulling out my ass
Reddit is insufferable, there is no rivalry, they're just a bunch of faggots, surely you can see this

>>13467291
I wanna elaborate here, because this is a point people keep missing. Even those who have read Alaska like, I think, the idiot who posted the quote.

It was a while ago I read any Green, and I never read all of his shit (some of which is terrible), but iirc at least two books had basically identical themes and structure: Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns. Spoilers I guess?

So in Paper Towns the pathetic main guy develops some manic pixie dream girl crush on the girl next door after she took him on some "adventure" breaking into Sea world as kids. When she suddenly goes missing, he starts interpreting stuff in her room as clues left for him specifically, as if leading him into another "adventure".

Cue basic YA road trip story. Then when he finally finds her, it turns out that no, you idiot, the girl is just a normal person with problems of her own. The main character and you, the reader, are both self-centered idiots for imagining this girl as some weird avatar. She won't save you from your patheticness. She's just a person.

Looking for Alaska does a similar thing, though the MC being pathetic is built up the whole book. This MPDG girl at his boarding school ends up symbolising this, "drizzle vs hurricane". "Getting the girl" and "finally becoming cool" gets inexorably linked as concepts.

The books chapter titles act as a countdown, and the reader is led to believe it's counting towards the main character getting the girl, becoming cool, and so on. In chapter 0, he does make out with her or whatever (I don't recall exactly), but in his horny dumbass stupor he lets her drive away, drunk. Turns out, the countdown was to the girls death.

Worse than Paper Towns, there's reason to believe the crash was deliberate, but it's impossible to know. As the novel ends, the main character is anguished by not knowing. He was too horny to stop her from dying, and he was too self-centered to even have noticed if she was troubled enough to have done it herself.

I used to watch Greens videos around when I read these books, and they heavily support these readings. Partially because "imagine each other complexly" was (is?) a recurring lesson, and partially because of events in Green's own youth that he alludes to sometimes. The Alaska guy especially seems like a particularly hateful self-insert.

>>13463442
So yeah, no, this is pretty exactly how the idiot character is supposed to be read, and
>>13465540
thinking the pretentious thot is "endlessly fascinating" is part of his idiot problem.

>>13460223
Tl;dr the whole book is basically Green pissing people who genuinely fall for this passage in the face.

>>13456493
>Hate them as people, their general taste/opinions/etc
>Overall fashion style and general bitchy attitude of the kind of girl who ends up being an arthoe are entirely to my taste
Were I not a perpetual virgin I'd hatefuck whatever arthoe I could get.

>>13467558
Hatefuck one then; stop being a virgin.

>>13467574
If only it were that easy

>>13459645
Forcing a particular taste on masses doesn't make sense because doing so in of itself is a massive business risk because investments of all sorts is being made into something that hasn't necessarily been tested.

Comparatively, pushing what is popular because people like it makes far more sense where it's guaranteed return on investment because many people liking it would mean they would consume it.

Sounds like you're still in grade school. Not sure how much money you have, but try to think of it from a risk/gamble perspective. Also if what you said was true, then picture books would be pushed to be the most popular and something as unwieldy as the Bible wouldn't be the #1 book in the world popularity-wise.

>>13467463
that sounds great and all, but i'm still uninterested. his prose is totally lifeless

>>13467671
That's fair. Too long since I read him to comment on the prose, and YA will just be YA regardless of interesting themes.

>>13467671
You mean you can distinguish between "I don't like something" and "Something is objectively terrible and everyone who likes it is a faggot/cuck/buzzword of the week"?
Jesus that's a rare level of maturity for this board

tl;dr if you want to be successful in current year you need to buy a gopro and film yourself 24/7 kk

>>13464260
If advertisements didn't work companies would have stopped spending money on them decades ago.