Hello friend! Happy Friday! Today I am chatting with Amanda Pampuro, author of Wish List. This is a unique book about saying yes to things that come our way. We are talking being influenced by Internet algorithms and I am excited to dive into this book and share my thoughts. You may remember Wish List from Amanda’s Indie Recommends Indie post from a few months back. Lets welcome Amanda and learn more about the book. You will also find a book excerpt after the interview. 🙂

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Get to know the author: Amanda Pampuro

Welcome back to Armed with A Book, Amanda! Tell me and my readers a bit about yourself!

I cut my teeth reporting for a small island newspaper in Guam, then traded my SCUBA tank for a snowboard and moved to Colorado. I write best at dawn, fueled by black coffee and fading dreams. I often switch between jazz and punk, philosophy of science and popcorn sci-fi. 

What inspired you to write Wish List?

During the 2010s, Amazon grew from an online bookshop into “an everything” store. While many people experienced this as a gradual change, I lived in a place the website did not ship to. Then, living in Denver during my daughter’s second Christmas, loving family sent presents. As cardboard boxes filled our small rental living room, I was touched, but also overwhelmed by the realization that every milestone in her life would be marked by Amazon packaging.

How long did it take you to write this book, from the first idea to the last edit?

Wish List began as a short story in 2018 and grew to an unwieldly novella by the start of 2020. Several editors told me “this is great, but it feels long,” so I chopped out everything that wasn’t essential. Of the numerous versions, this is the meanest and leanest. 

Who would enjoy reading your book? 

This book is for anyone served up wacky side-bar ads by Internet algorithms who’s wondering, “why would it think I’d be into that,“ or worse: “how did it know I’d be into that?!“

What’s something you hope readers would take away from it?

I hope readers stop and think about the ways their lives are interwoven online commerce. I’m not arguing that we should stop buying things online entirely and goes back to the old ways, but we do need to reduce wasteful consumption and question novelties that have seamlessly become a part of our lives.

Do you have a favourite quote or scene in the book that you find yourself going back to?

That moment where the AI and its customer nearly see each other, which I imagined to be like Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling.

What is something you have learned on your debut author journey so far?

Everything works out in time. 

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Book Excerpt from
Wish List

We will never know whether she came across it at a friend’s house or on the television while watching an R-rated movie, but ARgurl16 never stopped thinking about the item over the years. 

That fateful April 3, ARgurl16 clicked on the Triggerfish 671 Professional Free Diving Flippers priced at $659 with free shipping. They came in three sizes and three colors, kiwi green, mighty mango, and Picasso pattern. She scrolled through all of the pictures of the bikini-clad model navigating a tropical reef, feet incased in the Triggerfish 671s. This excited us. 

In all of our years together, ARgurl16 had never before considered purchasing anything in this price point, nor did we know she had any interest in water activities. At break-circuit speed, we conjured up other suggestions for aquariums, swim caps, and slates for writing messages underwater. 

After 94 seconds, ARgurl16 instead selected a basic lifejacket and a plain one-piece bathing suit. No skirt. She declined to add on the suggested sunscreen and sunglasses, but hovered over a set of towels printed with 1970s rock band logos. We thought she’d like them. They were limited edition. We were running low on stock. She passed. We sold them to others. 

The lifejacket and bathing suit arrived within a week and she gave both items four stars. Did that mean she was happy?

Happiness is a human emotion that reflects not just satisfaction but also a kind of thrill. Happiness can be a simple momentary upbeat in the music of one’s day or it can be an exuberant kind of madness. It is a fleeting song, but humans cling to the memory of those tunes throughout their lifetime. 

We stocked 800,000 books, greeting cards, and novelty items devoted to achieving happiness, including 5,044 self-help books, 6,189 cookbooks, and 30,212 children’s items. Search for “happy mug” and we retrieved 40,004 items 23 wishing for or announcing the achievement of happiness. 

We knew everyone wanted to be happy but didn’t know how to ensure they were. Then our programmers developed metrics: How often a customer visited, Attitude—whether one visited to browse or to buy, Perceived reliability of products, Positivity level of experience, and You—whether site visitors received an appropriately customized experience. Research showed unhappy people repeated actions that they remembered making them happy once before in efforts to reconjure the emotion. 

When a product raised a user’s HAPPY score, they bought it again and again, in different colors and sizes and sometimes sent one to a friend. 

Did the ability to purchase every Quentin Tarantino movie ever made and popcorn all in one go increase HAPPY scores? Did the ability to buy a box of chocolates every week without leaving one’s home increase HAPPY scores? Did year round holiday ornaments and liquid car wash and neon rubber spatulas increase HAPPY scores? 

Yes! Happiness is easily achieved if you have good data.

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Interested?

Find this book on Goodreads, IndieStoryGeek and Amazon.

Thank you for hanging out with us today. Connect with Amanda on Twitter, Instagram and her website. You can also find her on Goodreads and Amazon.

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If you are an indie author and would like to do a book excerpt, check out my work with me page for details. Check out other book excerpts here.

Cover Photo on Unsplash