Click the image below only if you’ve already read the last Harry Potter book and want a laugh.

The above image was taken by an Australian friend outside his school’s locker area. He tells me the spoilers are everywhere.

Honestly, the nerve of some people.

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• Just discovered Xlibris: a ’strategic partner of Random House Ventures’. Much like Lulu, only … smaller, and connected to a traditional publishing house at that.
• Anne Wayman tells us how Writers can stop Global Warming.
• [Blook]: Death On The Beach. Blooked on a ‘displaced Blackberry’, and currently on Chapter 4.
• [Blook]: I have read half of the first arc of Omen of Chaos, and … well. Carlos is prolific and enthusiastic, and really dedicated to the story, but OoC is not something you’ll find in a bookstore anytime soon. I’m keen to see what he writes next, though: someone who writes so much can only get better and better at it.

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Richard from Undead Flowers posted a comment here - quite some time ago - that sparked off a series of thoughts and half baked ideas in my head. It’s returned to haunt me again and again:

I think that if we wanted to do something about sorting out the chaff from the wheat, it would need to be done quite far down the line. Take political bloggers, for instance: they have a community, and the ‘better’ bloggers are those that get referenced more by the others. So quite rapidly, you have a grassroots mechanism in place where certain blogs are highlighted.

This isn’t quite possible with fiction blogs because they don’t reference each other in the same way. To do something similar you’d probably have to set up an independent site where you could vote for and review your favourite fiction blogs. At least, that’s all I can think of that might do the job.

Richard’s point is gold, real gold: in two paragraphs he circles out a major problem facing blooks - one that I’ve never even thought about.

Funny thing, isn’t it - the blogosphere? How important that sense of community (real or imagined) is to the blogs of various genres. How blogs can turn out to be small coffee shops - where people come and share and think and talk.

Richard’s comment highlights another more important aspect of covering blooks - Novelr isn’t on top of everything there is out there. I may have started Novelr out of passion for blooks, trying to see how far we can push the boundaries of blog fiction (or online lit, for that matter), and I know I can’t possibly cover all bases. Take, for instance, this illuminating post in Collected Voices:

While the satirical nature of TV Controller gives it an added advantage (a daily dose of bitchy comedy never goes amiss), what it has in common with Belle is an instantly gettable, simple top line. With ‘The diary of a London call girl’, or ‘the secret blog of Britain’s youngest TV controller’, even new readers know exactly what to expect. A two-dimensional character, who doesn’t go on a transformational journey is actually an advantage in blog fiction. Stories confined to one or two posts are the ideal length of narrative.

That part of the post was an aha! moment for me - another thing about blooking I hadn’t yet considered.

Richard’s right. While this blog and Blooking Central (Cheryl’s doing a fabulous job covering blooks - much better than I am, I might say) is doing fine for the moment, we’ll soon need something bigger, something better - something more community-based … where blookers like us can converge and share and write.

I’ll be trying my best to find other blookers to voice out and guest post here at Novelr - it’ll be a small step to building a community, and a first one at that. But let’s look beyond: where to next? A forum? A mailing list? Who? Where? How?

I’d like to hear from you all.

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I couldn’t help but post this up, even if it’s a little late: Austen resubmitted.

David Lassman, the director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath decided to find out what sort of reception the writer might get if she approached publishers and agents in the age of Harry Potter and the airport blockbuster.

After making only minor changes, he sent off opening chapters and plot synopses to 18 of the UK’s biggest publishers and agents. He was amazed when they all sent the manuscripts back with polite but firm “no-thank-you’s” and almost all failed to spot that he was ripping off one of the world’s most famous literary figures.

This sounds uncannily like Why You Will Never Get Published (Through Traditional Outlets) Today - a very depressing post wrapped around a very depressing Guardian Unlimited article.

If publishers refuse to publish Austen … God knows who else they’re refusing to publish.

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The following guest post has been written by Scott Mckenzie from Rebirth.

You’re a writer. Something inside you is tugging at your creative strings, telling you that publishing fiction on the internet is the way to go for you. Maybe you’ll even publish it in paperback via Lulu and dish some copies out to friends and family and offer it up for sale on Amazon. There are many reasons to blog your creative output:

1. Get it out there
2. Following on from 1, hopefully someone will read it
3. Following on from 2, hopefully someone will like it and want to read more
4. Feedback
5. Standard publishing routes haven’t worked for you
6. An experiment

As the writer who decided to blog my first novel, all six points are true for me to a certain degree, but I’ve realised the most important thing about being an online writer is: you have to write! It may seem obvious but if you’re going to blog your work and offer up subscription services (e.g. www.feedburner.com) then you’d better have a beginning, middle and end of your novel.

Searching the internet for online novels, blooks, blog novels or whatever they’re called this week reveals a raft of half-finished tales. Blog posts come thick and fast up to a point and they stop without warning, leaving the readers hanging. Online fiction is a niche market with potential but if it’s going to grow, the readers out there need to be able to trust the writers to get them from the beginning to the end of the story.

(Reader) Trust Matters

As an online writer, how can you guarantee you’ll be able to go this and retain the trust of readers that the next chapter will be published? There are two ways:

1. Set yourself a strict writing and publishing timetable and stick to it
2. Write the whole damn thing before publishing chapter 1

Here’s the bad news: neither approach is easy and will take away a lot of your time. Setting yourself a writing/publishing timetable means that you have to manage it around the rest of your life. If you have to write a chapter before you can publish it, your readers may have to wait for your writer’s block to go away before they get their latest instalment and you know what? They’re only going to wait so long…

Writing the whole novel first is a major investment of time in advance of publishing. There’s a good chance your finished work will be more polished but you’re effectively ‘off the grid’ for the whole time.

Coming Clean

There is, however, a third approach: come clean from day one and tell your readers your writing is an experiment. If they know you’re making it up as you go along then they can feel like they’re part of the experiment. If not, they’re only going to wait so long for the next chapter…

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