Or is Scalzi the Jered Threatin of Science Fiction?
Talking up your own band a little bit to make it appear that you’re more popular than you are is a rite of passage for young acts. We’ve heard of plenty of bands that’ve exaggerated sales or live show numbers to land a gig or two, or talked themselves up to national media for some press attention. It comes with the territory, and it’s usually harmless.
But the Los Angeles band Threatin have taken that idea to a level previously thought unimaginable: the band was able to book an entire tour of Europe despite having no fanbase whatsoever, and it’s all in the process of crashing down around them.
To do it, the band’s frontman and leader, Jered Threatin, posed as a nonexistent booking agent / promoter to land the gigs, used faked live footage of allegedly packed shows in L.A., bought Facebook likes, event RSVPs and YouTube views and lied about ticket sales numbers to swindle venue owners and talent buyers into taking on the shows.
He of the “more than two million monthly page views” pulled off his con considerably more successfully than the musician, but then Threatin didn’t have a real record company helping him do it the way Scalzi had Tor Books.
There’s more to John Scalzi and his writing than meets the eye. For one thing, his blog gets an extraordinary amount of traffic for a writer’s website–Scalzi himself quotes it at over 45,000 unique visitors daily and more than two million page views monthly.
– The New York Times
It just never gets old, even as Scalzi’s blog fades into oblivion. Will 2018 be the year he finally stops reporting his blog statistics? Will he even reach two million pageviews for the entire year? By comparison, it looks like this year will be relatively flat at VP, with between 32-33 million pageviews.