We’re not going to compete with Amazon or Smashwords individually, it takes communal effort. Look at Wikipedia, it’s probably used more than Encyclopedia Brittanica now, but it grew up grassroots.

But sometimes, yes, there is a lot of wheel-spinning and crap which makes me occasionally frustrated — people seem to worry about not being huge and successful, and freak out at the big picture. I think concentrating on the small picture and incremental steps will get us there, because what we offer is something special. Dream big, YES, but also make sure you remember the little nuts and bolts that make the rest possible. The kingdom was lost for the sake of a nail, after all.

One can dream up a fantasy world as complex as Tolkien’s, but you need to write the sentences and paragraphs that make it come alive — a book comes with effort and time.

I love the first bit in your comment, though – you cut through all the crap (mine, as well) and got to the heart of the matter. Thanks. :)

Millions of people go to Amazon for getting normal books conveniently, and because it already had traffic and a reputation, they’re getting into the ebooks for even more convenience. Web Lit authors are all lone wolves, making their own sites and then struggling to find readers on limited budgets. The sheer scale of it all makes it difficult to build an audience.

The only person I know living off their writing is AE, and she struggles to maintain her audience because she struggles with her health and falls behind on updates — no one else I know of relies solely on their online writing. But she built that audience over time — Live Journal, her own site, twitter, facebook, etc.

Writers would need to collaborate more than they do, congregate more in one place, and try to snowball the audience together. It’s not the same as a web comic (which I think is the closet parallel model) because that visual medium can easily grab an audience (it takes 5 minutes to read like 10 installments, whereas it takes 10-20 minutes to read one chapter of a book). And then most webcomics make money off of tshirts and such, which is easier to do in a visual medium.

But the experience of web lit is different than ebooks and traditional books — it can be more interactive and engaging, and it can still produce an ebook for more mass consumption for those who don’t care about the social aspect. Web fic just needs to diversify and collaborate — I really don’t think it can be compared to anything else right now. There’s nothing like it and that means there’s going to be upheaval until we figure out what works.

a) Ebooks have more buzz. Apple, Amazon are doing ebooks. The Wall Street Journal talks about ebooks. The NYT talks about ebooks. Therefore writers think in terms of ebooks.

b) Ebooks are supported by the publishing industry. They believe it isn’t much different a model from selling paper books (which means less work, less change for them). And where the publishing industry goes, writers and their agents follow.

c) Ebooks, as a model, are simpler to understand. They map to the world of books that we already know (as I argued in my post above).

I was not trying to set the bar so high that it diminishes the achievements of notable community members. What I was trying to do was explain that writers flock to ebooks because there are cases of writers converting ebooks to fame and fortune: like Boyd Morrison who got a two book deal from Simon & Schuster from his Kindle sales of The Ark or even like MaryJanice Davidson who is little known but has gone from publishing ebooks to spots on NYT Bestsellers and USA Today Bestsellers list. I used the word “glamorous” in my original comment for the good reason.

My comment was not meant to be taken as an assessment of the significance or success of webfiction as a format, just the factors that attract writer to publish in one format over another.

Still, you really don’t think that bar is a little … high?

This kind of pie-in-the-sky thinking sounds awfully Hollywood to me. It’s along the lines of saying a TV show isn’t significant unless its ratings are in the top 10 — or that an indie movie’s opening may earn 30 million at a significant profit with critical/audience acclaim, but that still sucks because Spiderman opened at 116M.

I’m just saying, I think it’s crazy to set the standards for success of this genre up in the stratosphere. It’s setting us up for failure and dismissal. Can’t we start a little lower, please?

We’re also presuming that the de facto goal of webfiction authors is to secure a traditional publisher. I’m sure many do, but some of us crafted our webserials to be just that — a story based on the web, utilizing the many features unique to an interactive environment. I’m sure I’m part of a vanishingly small minority, but while I would consider publishing a bound version of my own serial, that’s not how or why it was created, and I think it would lose something in the translation.

Anyway, I just get frustrated when I see someone dismissing a Hugo-nominated success story like Scalzi’s “Old Man’s War” as “nice and all” but not good enough because it hasn’t been turned into a Keanu Reeves vehicle.

But I’m not here to opine, since others have much more informed opinions than my own. As ever, like a hovering and annoying hawk waiting to strike, when I spot some apparent ignorance of history I must swoop down and add a teensy bit of perspective.

Isa wrote: “Nobody has secured a book deal with a traditional publisher yet [...]”

David Wong and John Scalzi beg to differ! They’re the respective authors of “John Dies in the End” and “Old Man’s War” — both of which began as webserials in the early 2000s and were later published to acclaim and much success. “Old Man’s War” was nominated for a Hugo award, and “John…” is supposedly being turned into a film.

Obviously two examples don’t a trend make, but in such a young industry the numbers of successful ventures are bound to be small.

That’s all I have, really. Just felt compelled to offer some nuggets of webfiction history/trivia. And to thank you for making that little text tweak! (Also: thanks so much for adding the link to WeSeWriMo up there!)

Although my reasons for doing this are a little selfish (I wouldn’t need to make ebooks for use in Stanza manually if more offered them), I am working on making it easier for web fiction authors to create e-Book versions of their books. Development is slow and far between at the moment, but I am working on it (http://github.com/chrisclarke/eBook-Export-Plugin-for-WordPress).

I would like to say that ads are the solution but I think it lies more in collective networks of authors similar to Digital Novelist but closer to say Weblogs Inc and Gawker Media. The most successful blogs I can think of are apart of some kind of selective network. The same appears to be true of podcasts (TWiT, ThisWeekIn) and online video (Revision3). I think web comics have something similar going as well. These networks are akin to publishers in the physical world.

I also don’t think those who start a generic livejournal.com or wordpress.com blog will be as successful as those who have their own site with a good and relevant to the story being published design to compliment it. This design should also be usable with a clear table of contents and navigation links between chapters.

I think the e-Book component is somewhat more important as well as being solely on the web makes bed time reading difficult (and I would argue even with full featured browsers coming to the smallest devices). My solution has been to make e-Books manually, but not many people are probably willing to do that. I am a person who likes to read for 10 minutes in the car or in bed late at night in the dark. I don’t really want to carry a web connected device or turn the computer on in the middle of the night.

I like the idea of a packaged deal – if I could subscribe to a appealing collection of on-going web fiction like I can with Crunchyroll (as much as I dislike the subs) and anime for a few dollars a month I would. I need to clarify though – I do not want to see web fiction go behind pay-walls. I would not however mind a timed exclusivity of about a week for subscribers. For this to be appealing though, I would expect the web fiction to have been gone over by an editor before publication.

Just some thoughts. :)

a) The web fiction that’s sold right now are in ebook form. And that happens in the same way serialized comics are sold – when volume 1 is completed, that’s sold; when volume 2 is completed, sell that. The unfinished version doesn’t really make that much money (beyond ads and the sometime donation). So you’re probably right on the point that weblit (where you mean *just* the online version) won’t make much money.

b) A clarification: when I say the web fiction/weblit model, I mean having a web-based version of the book and selling ebooks through the site (and elsewhere). The ebook model, on the other hand, is this idea of a writer just uploading (‘publishing’) their book on a store, and maybe keeping a blog on the side, but nothing more.

I’m not arguing that web fiction authors have to leave their ebooks to stay true to the model – I’m saying that there should, at least, be a web fiction component to selling ebooks as well. And that there are ways to make money from this setup – outside the Kindle store – that we haven’t discovered yet.

I understand what you’re saying, but I can’t help feeling that “cracking the code” is akin to “finding the missing link”.

I see an inherent difference between, say, a weblit narrative, and Madame Bovary, The Stand, or Barry Eisler’s The Last Assassin. The difference lies in both execution (the skill with which the narrative is handled) and how the narrative is presented to an audience–namely, finished vs. unfinished. Weblit revels in its unfinished state, asking for comments on drafts or chapters. But why would the majority of people (who read for leisure) pay for a product that is unfinished? I wouldn’t buy a car that lacked an engine; nor do I think most people are interested in putting the engine inside the car themselves–they’d rather assume ownership of the car in a functional state. At least I would, because I’m not a car guy; I get no thrills from repairing vehicles; I just want to drive. The few people who buy a car without an engine (most likely) intend on installing one themselves. In all probability, they’re car buffs, the same way (I postulate) weblit readers are weblit writers themselves.

I think, as some weblit and ebook authors have been mentioning recently, the weblit/ebook audiences aren’t overlapping or that more success (at least financial) is coming from ebook sales. I tend to ask why rather than to try to find a way to convince people to do something outside of their nature. No matter how veiled something appears at first, the answer is there in human nature, one way or another, already discovered and spoken about in our past and the technologies that changed us yesteryear.

Something just doesn’t add up. I’m not sure what it is, if weblit is destined to be a niche interest, or what. Like you said, we’ll really know sometime in the future.

There is no guaranteed model for making money with web fiction. Part of it is because it’s a new medium, and part of it is because content industries (of all kinds – music, movies, you name it) have been struggling since the advent of the Internet. It is erroneous to assume that just because we haven’t cracked the code for making money off ‘weblit’ that it is not possible. Precious few have cracked the code for making money off of content (fiction or otherwise) in the digital world.

Wait a couple of years and we’ll see then, won’t we?

I have the intuition that Interactivity is a red herring in this argument. Interactivity is great for informal storytelling, facebooking, or networking; but Interactivity is not great when it comes to formalized storytelling. WebLit, in some round about way, equates with informal storytelling, while books and eBooks equate with formalized storytelling. I’m being brief here because it’s my bedtime.

I just doubt anyone is ever going to make much of a living as a WebLit author.

Chris.

I’ve been designing websites for myself since ’99, but admittedly my knowledge hasn’t fully gone past HTML/CSS. This has allowed me to do cosmetic modifications to WordPress and Joomla! themes, but it’s still not enough. WordPress has inspired me to learn how to build my own themes (still in the infancy of learning) because there isn’t anything I can find that really works for how I want to present my work.

An issue I’ve read is quite common for many webfiction artists.

I’m glad to read you’re working on something to help change that. I’m following Pandamian’s and your tweets now so I look forward to news & updates.

Thanks again for opening up the dialog on this topic. :)

I’m not sure why or how to change this, but I gave him some of my ideas to experiment with.

I’m currently building writing software for web fiction and so I hope to solve this, myself. There has to be an elegant solution for this – surely ebooks alone cannot be good for readers? But we at Pandamian aren’t quite there yet.

Feel free to email me (use Novelr’s contact form) if you have any other questions. I wish you only the best in your future web fiction experiments.

@Isa: Astute, as always. (I can’t wait for that post, by the way!)

I think, though, that at this stage more writers = more readers. The current buzz is shifting towards ebooks and Amazon and the iBookstore, and so both writers and readers are moving towards that model.

It’s a chicken and an egg argument, really. Who comes first?