Now? Hah. Books vs Internet vs games vs TV vs God-knows-what. Writing has changed to reflect that.

PS: Your Darwin remark, Windvein, also reminds me of this book about The Properties of Moss being a bestseller in 1800s England. Crazy, no?

Talking about dull books becoming famous, only three poeple read Origin of the Species, but everyone and their mom was like, “Ooh, Darwin.” ;-)

I think it’s almost a flip of the coin how much readers will take. Do you leave them wanting more or satisfy them? I deliberately made the chapters to my work Unicorn Bait short. I got complaints about that, but then some people said it was perfect. I know when I finally reach the end of UB and edit it, I’ll be going back and combining chapters because it will over seventy chapters as is. That’s a daunting number of chapters.

Balancing how much clicking people are willing to do, and how long they’re willing to stay on one screen is a tough call.

I agree that the whole attention thing is probably a smaller issue in the print media, I’m just pointing out that it’s a decently large issue too.

And I used to read alot but that seems to have dropped off to almost none in recent years, sadly…

@srsuleski:

There are always raving masochists running around.

Dickens and others were paid by the word,

Ha! That explains so much. ;)

Very nice article, Gavin, I think you expressed the advantages of web fiction very spot on.

I have heard many things though, about today’s publishing world that say how you have to catch the reader right away, keep them hooked, etc. and that’s referring to print media. I think that everything these days, is geared more toward immediate satisfaction. Or, at least, readers or yesteryear got more satisfaction out of a leisurely pace and today’s consumer wants bangs and booms to keep their interest.

Then again, books like “The Historian” come along and bash that notion. A more boring book I’ve never read (and I’ve read many classics) but it still becomes a bestseller with raving fans.

(I’m not bringing up the age thing to brag, but to illustrate a point about reading – everyone has different levels of tolerance, patience and enjoyment. I read the Hobbit so early because it had pictures from the movie, I thought it was a big kid’s book. I followed it up with LOTR because it was a sequel and I wanted to know what happened. After that, no book was intimidating.)

But a lot of books, like LOTR, I only read because I knew I could take my time with them. It didn’t matter if I could only read for ten minutes or three hours, the story itself wasn’t going anywhere, so I could come back. With online fiction, the audience itself is not likely to sit there for three hours. The online attention span is faster paced, and has different values than the readers of fiction through history before now. Literature was leisurely, and our current culture (largely internet and television driven) is not.

Traditional literature was written so readers and authors would take their time with it. Dickens and others were paid by the word, so it paid to have lots of description that modern novels don’t include, because their audience is different.

@Spotty: I dare say that offline prose doesn’t need to be as attention grabbing as online prose, for a myriad of reasons: the screen is hard to read off from, the Internet is a distracting medium, etc etc.

Yes, books still need to be attention grabbing. But I can get through some that start off very boring and still finish them. It’s just that online a boring start is going to kill the whole thing right off for me.

On the delivery side of things, I’ve commited to 1-2 updates a week, and usually manage to pull off two updates totaling 1100+ words a week, so I’m happy with myself on that front, even if it doesn’t size up to my idol other authors.

On the topic of cliffhangers (should read: interest), this is a very important part… As you noted above, readers need a reason to come back. Where I’m going to strike off from what you said though is you’re analysis of paper books. I, respectfully, disagree.

I know, personally, a book needs to hold my attention just as much, otherwise when I do put it down for an hour or two… I might just forget to come back to it again. Which tends to happen alot with both my online and offline reading. I know for a fact I used to keep track of a whole heap more webcomics than I do now, and that I have alot of half read books in my cupboard.

See you on the flipside (;