Hacker News Reader

Comment by arbitrage | Hacker News Reader

I find it particularly scene breaking as well. Stephen King does this a great deal -- he seems inordinately fond of name-dropping electronics.

I don't think authors get paid to include name brands as adverts. I think what you and I are seeing is men of a certain age thinking things are "cool" and then using the name of a product or service to themselves appear "cool" or in-touch.

I personally always feel it has the exact opposite effect for the reason you already said: authors who do this do it so often that it becomes extremely noticeable and scene-breaking.

View on HN

They call this "KMart Realism" sometimes, KMart being a chain of discount stores that was prominent way back when, comparable to Walmart. The idea is to enhance versimilitude by dropping in signifiers from contemporary consumer culture.

King, as you note, does this a lot and his name often comes up when people are talking about it: he was in fact one of the first well known authors to use this device regularly. I agree that he's definitely overdoing it these days.

When authors go out of their way to avoid using a brand name, it can be equally distracting though. I'd prefer that a character simply visit YouTube rather than visiting 'an online video site' or some fictional site with a made-up name like Chumhum. I think a distaste for product placement has sensitized us to seeing brand names in fiction, but some brands are a part of our daily lives in a way that is difficult to avoid.

That's mostly when people use bad brand names, mostly in foreign media. I say foreign because I imagine that it's a case for say, a Japanese author trying to imitate an English brand name without knowing enough English to make it sound even slightly sensible. That's how you get stuff like WcDonalds and "Bobson Dugnutt".

Done well though it works perfectly fine. It's not like everything is huge brands out there, so there's plenty room for random branding.

And once in a while somebody comes up with something neat. I think "Pesterchum" is a great name for a messenger app.

When you use alternative brand names, you are cementing your story as taking place in an alternate universe of sorts. That works for some readers and for some stories, but for others it can be even more distracting than regular brand references.

To use your example, if I am reading a book set in mid-2010s Seattle and a character is wandering down Pike Street after a bad date, it would be jarring to see them using an app called “Pesterchum”

There's plenty odd brands for everything in the real world too. There's Ubuntu Cola, Migo phones, and AbiWord, to name a few examples.

But having a character in novel use such a brand has to be a conscious choice and say something about that character. Why are they drinking an odd brand of cola, or using an unusual sort of phone?

Why? Tying brands to identity is a weird thing. Companies aren't static anyway. I switch brands depending on how the wind blows at the time of purchase.

yes but that itself tells something about who you are, and precludes stories about certain kinds of people. not that I really want to read about them

A cousin of mine is in film production (think EU teen movies) and one of his movies had a full two minutes product placement segment. I made fun of this (not the kindest move in retrospect) and he explained that this segment pretty much cemented the feasibility of the whole movie. It was a known in advance fixed fee source of income. I have no clue about writers and books but perhaps the publishers (they give advances to well-known authors?) repackage some of the risk via endorsements? That would be finance where you wouldn’t expect it.

An elegant world-building technique that King uses is to invent a brand and use it across novels; but an existing brand will always communicate much more effectively, as you already know the brand and its positioning! It’s a lazy way of implementing “show, don’t tell”. Instead of “she was expensively dressed”, “she wore Prada”, etc.

Also comes to mind a meta-use of this in American Psycho (not from King!), were the psychopathic narrator only uses external appearance and brands to describe people.

It also is a great way to ensure your writing is guaranteed to never be timeless.

Writing doesn’t have to be timeless! Almost all books, even successful ones, are forgotten quickly. Writing isn’t a competition to see who can write the most immortal book.

I personally don’t care for books that conspicuously take place in the present day and feature fairly regular people. I’m reading to have some time away from screens—I don’t want to read about people staring at screens! But I know lots of people who find books like these more relatable and interesting.

"timelessness" is overrated. War and Peace has a particular time, Slaughterhouse 5, pretty much anything that's on a great books list is there because its the product of a particular time and place.

Why is the other reply to this comment dead?

It looks like the comment's author may be shadowbanned but has had many of their posts vouched for. Could be a good candidate for review.

Be the change you want to see and vouch for it! (I did)

Almost all of FFP999’s comments are dead but all the ones I skimmed seemed constructive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com