http://gavinwilliams.digitalnovelists.com/node/280

I recommend you don’t (DO!) read my Animal Krackerz strips. If I’m this funny here, that might be dangerous too.

uh oh, will that joke get you killed?

(Nice to see that Eli is alive — you disappeared for over a month, dude! Everything ok?)

That being said, I’m quite pleased with the level of dissenting comments in Novelr, really. It’s fantastic when someone disagrees with you. =)

So what you’re saying is that writers should never write for money alone … and as an outward indicator of that, they should never consider their writing to be just ‘content’?

In that case, Lee, I quite agree with you. Any writer who exists as a pencil pusher should be shot … or at least given many bottles of whiskey until he’s got a permasmile on his face, and a stupid one at that …

On the comment about reader-author interaction: noted. Thanks for explaining your stand on the issue. I’ll keep that in mind the next time I design a feedback function for a blook.

BTW, I’ve linked to a very useful piece on publishing at Lowebrow today. Here’s a small excerpt:

‘The future of much of the industry will be dominated by electronic distribution, internet marketing to niche audiences, and reading by print-on-demand or hand-held electronic devices. There is opportunity as well as challenge in this model. The roles of editor and publicist, people who can guide the potential reader through the cacophony of background noise to words they’ll want to read, will become ever more important.’

To follow the link, since the whole piece is worth reading:

http://lowebrow.blogspot.com/2009/02/being-read-rather-than-reading.html

But I won’t allow myself to take a romantic view of the burgeoning digital industry. I love the writers, but I’m trying hard to not let that love blind me to the reality of the market. Novelr won’t be useful, otherwise.

As for readability: my problems are with the amount of information thrown at the reader, when what you really want to do is to provide just enough information for them to know what your blook is about, and then leave the reader alone for the main body of the text (no sidebars, no unnecessary links, etc). I’m sorry Gavin, I can’t give you a critique now because I’m really tired at the moment – but my next post should cover the the basic principles involved. If you really want to talk to me about your site design, email me and I’ll respond at a later date.

@Lee: Interesting note about comments. You could include a link to your email at the bottom of every post, though … that should up reader-author interaction somewhat (I know you like them, who doesn’t?). Oh, and thanks for the link to Triple Canopy. Good stuff.

@Irk: I think there’s a misunderstanding here with regards to the ‘end of the world’ message. I’m not suggesting we should worry about the end of the world – all I’m saying is that we’re going to have a large amount of digital fiction readers accepting the idea of reading a book off a screen very soon, and it would do well to figure out how to get a large portion of these readers to read independent content – blooks like the ones Novelr caters for – instead of just consuming publishing industry content.

In simple terms – are we going to prepare ourselves – with cups and basins – for the coming flood, when it’s still easy to do so, or are we going to wait it out and only jostle for water when the publishers have already staked their claim to the riverbanks?

@Lee: I read and write literary fiction too, Lee. =) I call content ‘content’ because … well, I have to recognize that on the Internet, fiction and prose and video and music are all the same – content. Any way you look at it, content is still content, and slow reading or no, they’re all consumed one way or the other. Digitally. The madding crowd makes no distinctions, so I guess neither should I.

There’s a lot of advantages to Drupal – it’ll sync up with Twitter and RSS and I do like comments every which way I can get em, if they’re separated enough from the posts that they don’t confuse the reader. Since my cowriter and I are both artists and illustrate PK quite a bit, the gallery options were also very interesting to me. That and userpoints, advertising, integrated subscriptions…these are all things I was already looking for, that I’ve seen work for other sites that thrive on their community. Drupal had them all in a very convenient package that is picky enough to deal with that I ram my head against the wall each day setting it up, but hey. I’m learning!

I don’t really think of my potential audience in the same way Novelr seems to. There are a lot of people on the internet who regularly consume digital content, be it directly from the computer or on a handheld such as an iPhone. The problem is not so much attracting the traditional book-reading populace as attracting the populace who is already on the internet and is always avid for more content. Basically, the webcomics readers, the fanfiction readers, gamers, and general nerdish sphere is pretty dang hip to what we’re offering already. They’re a big enough core to already keep several industries going, they tend to be loyal to and interactive with online communities, and they spread memes like they were the common cold. (I keep saying they, but the proper word ought to be we, since I’m in this target demographic as well.)

In any case, yes, blogs are not immediately suited for sequential work, but webcomics are built in similar ways and they have gigantic followings and catch really quickly between people. After tweaking your interface for readability and content flow, what authors should really think about is advertising and interacting outside of the insular core of WFG and finding a few new internet audiences.

I find buying Project Wonderful ads on digital novel sites gets me a nice new crop of readers for a weekend or so, but it’s less effective the next weekend, and the next. I’m reaching the same audience over and over again. So I switch it up to a webcomic or a forum that’s unrelated to digital novels as we know them but still a crowd that’s likely to be regular readers – such as roleplaying nerds. People who are interested in worldbuilding and such, since I’ve got a fantasy novel here.

Let the publishing biz worry about the end of the world coming. All my buddies are already on the internet. We’re not suits, we don’t have to think like suits, and we sure as heck don’t have to wet our pants like the suits do. This market is perfect for me.

http://canopycanopycanopy.com/