Keyword Soup for the Soulless: A Recipe for Irrelevance
I’ve been preparing to publish my novel and it occurred to me that somewhere along the way, we stopped writing for humans and started writing for crawlers.
Not the cool kind from dystopian sci-fi. Just the dull, crawling-over-your-metadata kind. The kind that drools over phrases like “introspective dystopian novel” and “AI ethics fiction”, while completely ignoring whether any of it actually means something.
Everything is keyword soup now. Blog posts. Book blurbs. Dating profiles. Heck, I’ve even noticed people sending messages that were clearly “refined by AI”. It’s just a text, chill. And I’d rather have a mistake ridden text sincerely written than a polished one with no thought put into it.
Anyway, I digress.
We’ve become SEO chefs. Sprinkle in some “philosophical fiction.” Add a dash of “literary speculative sci-fi.” Stir until any actual flavor is completely obliterated. Serve lukewarm, with a side of vague words that sound deep, but rings hollow.
I get it. If you don’t play the game, you don’t get shelved, clicked, indexed, or found. And if you don’t get found, you don’t exist.
But sometimes I wonder… what exactly are we optimizing for? Attention spans shorter than a TikTok? The approval of an algorithm that can’t feel a thing? A spot on a bestseller list no one remembers a week later?
I wrote a book. I agonized over every line. I removed the passive voice. Turned myself inside out. And then came the part where I was supposed to reduce all that into seven search-friendly phrases like “visionary time travel” and “quiet dystopia.” I nearly choked on it.
Maybe this is just what publishing is now. One part manuscript, three parts marketing spreadsheet, garnish with existential dread.
But I still believe in writing that moves. That defies categorization. That means something. Even if the bots can’t find it.
Especially if they can’t.
But if you’re one of the few still reading things written for humans and not just optimized for visibility, Echoes in the Current releases July 7 on Amazon.
No algorithmic bait. Just 39,397 words and a faint sense of unease stitched together by hand, heart, and a few existential crises.
You’ll know if it’s for you.
Consume responsibly.
Love, Vx
