The Long Tail is a concept, first expressed in 2005, that talks about how the Internet is changing the way people consume content. It applies to books, music, movies and DVD rentals - pretty much every form of entertainment product there is out there, and more. I first read about the Long Tail in 2006, shortly after the book was released, and I marked it off as something ‘vaguely interesting’. ‘Vaguely interesting’ pretty much meant ‘this does not apply to what I do’. I thought I understood what it was. I was wrong.

I revisited the Long Tail idea today. And I realized much of what is talked about in Alexandra Erin’s guest post is Long Tail in action. This post explores the Long Tail idea and how it applies to Online Fiction today.

What Is The Long Tail?

Now this is a tricky one. The article that started all this (it expanded into the book and the blog) doesn’t actually give an outright definition. Chris Anderson’s opening paragraph is an illustration of the Long Tail in action, and it is only in paragraph 27 that he finally stops his stream of examples and goes ‘this is the Long Tail.’

So what is Long Tail? In short, the Long Tail is a concept that states:

In a market with near infinite supply (huge variety of products), a demand will exist for even the most obscure products.

Chris Anderson backs up this theory in the first part of his article with numerous examples. The one I like the best is Robbie Van-Adib’s question: ‘what percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online store (iTunes/Amazon) will rent or sell at least once a month?’ The answer? Not 80/20 like many people suppose - it is 99%. He then concludes that if an inventory is unhindered by space, profit margins (it is very cheap/free to make) and time (there is only 24 hours in a day - which means radio stations are limited in their product offering), user demand will continue to exist for very obscure products. These products then earn the company money, and totaled up may even surpass the sales of the hits.

Okay, yeah, fine. The Long Tail rocks for online merchandisers. What about blooks and online fiction?

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I’ve no idea how I missed this. Fray has been on the Internet since 1996, puts out a book four times a year (though they do not refer to their issues as blooks) and is one of the best examples of online storytelling I have ever seen. They even have a proper model to sell their independently published issues: subscriptions.

Fray began as a website. It was 1996, and the idea was simple: the web as the ultimate conduit for personal storytelling. A little later Fray started live story telling events called Fray Days ‘that took place all over the world, attended by thousands of people.’ Uhhuh uhhuh. I see parallels with flashmobs here, since both are powered by the Internet. Fray took an indefinite hiatus on 22 Oct 2005.

And … they’re back. Issue 1 (Busted) just came out, with almost everything available in the online issue. Notice the blook publisher Blurb at the bottom of the page: they’re one of Issue 1’s sponsors, and I wonder just how they tie in with the whole project. The stories are well written, well presented affairs. Elementary School Confessions, for instance, has a tag line you’ve got to love: ‘Joanne had only two strengths that I didn’t: social intelligence and breasts‘.

Classic.

I have to say Fray has a good chance of bringing Internet fiction to the mainstream - the people behind it are web heavyweights: Derek Powazek, the founder, was the guy who did Technorati’s original design, and Kevin Cornell, who did the bloody hand cover for Issue 1, is the guy behind the whimsical A List Apart illustrations. Fray is also a part of The Deck, an advertising network for elite blogs/websites … and damn, it looks good.

I am very pleased with the whole idea, and I’ve bookmarked and subscribed to site updates. Fray is high profile and it is web fiction. That, folks, equals one heck of a point of entry site.

[Update]: Just received answers to several questions regarding Fray:

Blurb is a sponsor of Issue 1, along with Media Temple and Wheadon Mahoney. Submissions are by email: Issue 1 was put together a few months before the actual release, and they’re going to release the theme for Issue 2 soon. Derek hints at something more than email submissions this time around - though he refuses to say exactly what. He also reminded me that Fray is not fiction: it’s all true stories, hence the term ‘personal storytelling’, as opposed to just ’storytelling’.

And guess what? He hates the term blook ‘though not as much as … mook‘. Fray calls each issues a ‘Quaterly.’

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You know that old suggestion that online fiction needs a famous author to kickstart the medium? This exact suggestion seems to have happened quite unintentionally: John Banville, writing under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, is posting up a serial entitled The Lemur over at the New York Times. They’ve put this up in their online version, naturally.

John Banville wrote The Sea, winner of the Man Booker Prize 2005. That should be enough to satisfy the literary snobs out there, though I’m not sure how the story is done (weekly? all completed and submitted, or created on the go?). I do think this will prove to be an interesting experiment - readers have The Lemur in their paper, which is physical, and there’s the online version on a popular site. It’s a lucky combination of elements, one that we don’t usually see for online fiction.

PS: As an aside I’d like to point out the elegant use of fonts and white space over at The Lemur, as well as the strategic pagination of the story. It’s not too long, not too short. Wonderful.

PPS: I’m buried under academic work at the moment, so updates in Novelr will come slow. Real life is a harsh mistress to serve. Forgive me.

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Dreaming Methods is ambitious. It’s digital fiction, but not in a way you’d expect: instead of blogs or static text pages the stories in Methods are presented in Flash.

This choice in medium in intentional: the stories Methods produce are rich in sound and movement and colour. In Last Dream, a grandson narrates (in words) his blind grandfather’s final dream. The camera shakes as it introduces you to the story, and the first frame you pause on is that of an old house. The screen is black and white, with dashes of green from the shrubbery in the foreground.

The door is locked. Clicking it produces a thudding sound, barring you from entry. And your throat catches as you realize something about these stories.

They are interactive. You click on a rock and drag it around the screen, throwing it here, throwing it there. And soon you find the key to the door, and it grants you entry.

Rich in visual delights (the walls of the house are translucent, showing stalks of tall corn as you pan over them), the words and story in Last Dream are more of poetry than prose. They appear, you read, and then they fade away. And they don’t come back. If you missed a word it’s back to the start you go, for these things play like life, rather than literature. No rewind. No turn the page back.

Alan Campbell is the guy behind Methods, and he’s has been experimenting with writing fiction for the computer screen since the 1990’s. Many of his projects are collaborations with artists from other mediums - if he took those photos of the house used in Last Dream I’d consider worshiping him.

Parts of Methods’s stories are in video, like in Clearance, where he worked with filmmaker Judi Alston to tell an apocalyptic story in digital form (so says this post). This form of online fiction cannot be done by a one man crew, unless that one man is willing to learn photography and writing and film-making and flash programming all at the same time.

Methods’s fiction can’t be categorized. It’s film, but with gameplay. Prose, but with sound. Animation, but with photographs. A highly experimental medium with feedback forms at the end of every story.

What is it, exactly? I can’t say. But I’d like to think it’s a taste of the future.

PS: Special thanks to Lee of Lowebrow for the links.

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Alexandra Erin is a full time blooker who makes her living off the medium. She’s been doing it for 7 years. She blogs at Refresh Monkeys and Usual Nuts, and her main works can be found here, here and here.

“Look, I’m a busy person. I don’t have time to read through a chapter of every story on the net just on the off-chance that it might be good. I need some kind of filter. If it’s not a publisher and a team of editors who screen out the worst of the worst, then at least I need a review site that will give me an overview of multiple stories so I can have some idea if they’ll be worth my time.

Who has time to sort through the dross?“

That’s a very good question. I’ve heard it posed by people who are within the traditional publishing industry, as a reason why internet self-publishing is a bad idea that will never work. I’ve heard it posed by people who are within the self-publishing community as an expression of a serious problem which must be addressed if our good idea will ever work.

I’ve had it put to me in particular a great many times since I became a vocal proponent of self-publishing both for people who have the talent, dedication, and all-around “chops” that another path might be available to them… and for people who are simply writing for fun, people for whom it might not be a worthwhile goal to pursue a traditional publishing career.

The argument goes that the vast majority of everything is likely to be “crap”, so with no filter - no central reviewers and no barriers to entry - the amount of crap available vastly outnumbers the number of gems. The fact that the creators of the gems may have other options available to them while the crap has no other natural home only exacerbates this disparity.

The result - supposedly - is that anybody with a “gem” to offer the public who goes the self-publishing route is more or less doomed to see their work lost in the shuffle.

So… what do we do about this horrible, inescapable, and seemingly insurmountable problem which besets the world of internet self-publishing?

A Solution

Some have suggested that, in the absence of any kind of central authority, what we need is authoritative reviewers… trusted sites which can highlight the best of the best, point people towards stuff that’s worth reading, and generally serve as the much-needed filter.

Well, I admit that such sites have their uses… and would like to see more of them… but I don’t think they’re really the best solution to this particular problem. No, I have a different solution in mind. Would you like to know what it is?

Well, in a word…

Nothing.

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