The Best Worst Thing: Orc City

I went viral…again.

If you’ve followed me for a short time or a long time on twitter, odds are you’ve seen my tweets pop off and make the rounds—usually something that pissed off an inordinate amount of people. This is largely because I hang around in and comment on topics that have a high number of easily enraged people.

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t actually intend to anger large numbers of twitter people. I snipe, I poke, but never do I sit down with the intent of trying to make the largest number of people imaginable angry with me. If I did, I’d be commenting on politics. Believe it or not, no one is more surprised at going viral than I am.

The TL;DR version of Orc City is that I tweeted a picture of Fat Man, a boss character from Metal Gear Solid 2, which angered fans of the game’s director Hideo Kojima. This led to a high follower acct putting the opening passages of The Black Crown on display. Que several massive shitposting accounts retweeting and after 24 hours, I looked to find my book’s opening had gone viral in the worst way possible and was not only being dragged online but had been turned into a legitimized meme now visible on a meme website: Know your Meme: Orc City

For about an hour, admittedly, I was mortified. No author wants their book to be twitter’s laughingstock. But after coming to terms with what was happening while it was going on, it hit me like a bolt of lightning: I’d inadvertently become the most notorious indie author on the site and my book was in front of everyone’s eyes.

You have to understand meme culture: it’s a crushing machine of derision and attempting to laugh your way through the pain. Memes are effective because they’re irreducible and you either “get” it or you don’t. Those who don’t are often the meme’d. But I’ve known a truth about memes for quite some time: You can’t fight them.

The internet always wins.

I could either hide and pretend it didn’t happen, which only spurs the memers to try harder. Or I could lean into it and own the damn thing. Which is what did and it worked phenomenally. Hundreds of new followers, new subs to the susbtack, and the best sales week I’ve ever had. Why? Because not every eye turned on me was a hostile one. And because memes are FUN. Even if its at my expense, joining in on the memes both dulled the fangs of the trolls and also helped kill the meme short.

You wanna know what the half-life of a hit tweet is? Roughly three days. Three days in which it feels like everyone hates you after which they move on and forget you exist. In the aftermath of that, you’re left with a surge of new followers, new supporters, and in my case, new readers. Some will say this isn’t the best way to become well known, but remember that most of the people mocking you flat out forget you even exist. Things move quick on twitter and people move on to other posts, other people.

This is notoriety and publicity that money can’t buy. When the mockery fades, people will remember your reaction to them. It’s like getting a pie thrown in your face: you can stomp off and get mad, but that only makes them laugh harder. Might as well laugh with them.

And now, in the aftermath of it, tens of millions of people know the opening lines of my debut book. If you’re an author or even remotely in the reader and writing spaces, you know how much people agonize over their opening line and passages in the hopes they will be what hooks readers. But seldom do those lines become memes, living on in meme history. Mine has. In a few weeks, the twitter payout for tens of millions of engagement views will hit and by then Orc City will be a distant memory in internet lore.

They have no idea what they did and that’s the funniest part of all.