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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This guest post is written by Bradley (or Sebastianky) of An Obtrusive Reader. He is one of those rare kinds: an actual blook reader. Here he talks about some of the things that irk him as he reads the web’s fiction.

If you keep up with web fiction blogs, I’m sure you’ve run across a little tidbit that’s fast becoming an adage: “Don’t write a traditional story with a beginning, middle, and end – write a blog for a fictional character.”

Pay this no heed.

I am not an author, so I won’t condescend to tell the writers how to write. However, I am an avid reader, especially of web fiction and blooks, and I can tell you what I want to read – and what I want is something engaging. Regardless of your chosen medium, you cannot be a successful writer unless your readers want to keep reading. To a certain extent, then, any author is trying to write a page-turner (page-scroller?).

Does that goal require you to write in any particular way? No. Nor are you limited by your medium; we can look at successful writers from the age of print to prove it. Hemmingway and Cummings, Joyce and Asimov, Poe and Shakespeare – they wrote on many subjects, in many ways, in many formats – short stories, poems, novels, crazy-stream-of-consciousness-novels, plays – but all in the same medium: slabs of dead tree bound together.

Should, then, digital media be somehow more limiting? Ought web writers have to react to traditional media by refusing to write anything resembling a novel? What about serials? They’re nothing new – Charles Dickens was famous for his serials.

What I’m getting at is that format is less important than it’s made out to be. Writing for the net opens up some possibilities that wouldn’t be very practical in print, but it doesn’t restrict you much as an author. Don’t believe me? Check out Dirty Red Kiss – an online novel with a beginning, middle, and end. And it’s excellent. I read the whole thing in one sitting. Better yet, check out Wowio – they’re publishing online serials and webcomics, but the majority of their offerings appear to be public domain and small press books – prose originally written for the print media. And they seem to be doing pretty well.

To sum up, write what you want, write what you like to read, but don’t write what other people tell you to. Go ahead, take advantage of the new things that the internet makes feasable: short fiction, microfiction, fictional blogs, etc.

Just don’t forget that lots of people want to read lots of different things – and there’s plenty of room for everybody on the internet.

Bradley reviews all kinds of online fiction at his blog, An Obtrusive Reader. He reads like a man starved (of books) and in the process has created a wonderful repository of the best fiction the web has to offer.

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Bob is a blook writer. He hosts his blook on Wordpress, buys his own hosting plan, and has completed a masterpiece: a beautifully written work entitled Bob’s Blook.

One day he steps out of his house to pick up a pound of beef. It is a wonderful day for a walk down the road: the sky is an azure blue, his garden is in full bloom; the smell like wine in the air. He hums as he steps out of his front yard - there are library books under his arm he wants to return - and as he turns to head down to the shops he is hit by a speeding car.

Let’s take our mind off Bob for a moment (he won’t survive, if you’re wondering) and give some thought to his blook. What will happen to it? Bob has not left the password to the Wordpress blog to any of his acquaintances, nor has he left instructions for the maintenance of his domain name or his hosting plan. Both will expire, and when they do, Bob’s blook will be no more. Since all copies of it exist solely in the digital domain it is highly likely no trace of Bob’s Blook will remain after a 5 year period. There is no chance of a grandson finding a dusty manuscript in a drawer, and there is certainly no chance of publication after death - a Children Of Hurin will certainly not happen here.

Poor Bob.

The above story brings us to the topic at hand today: we’re not going to live forever. When we’re gone, what’s going to happen to our online scribblings?

It’s a handy thing to note that the printed page will still be accessible 100 years from now. The digital page, however, may not. Times change, so do file formats. Who isn’t to say that HTML would be phased out a century from now, and that PDFs are to be laughed at?

Dave Winer gets down to the heart of the matter in his article Future-Safe Archives, which was sparked off by the death of blogger Marc Orchant.

People are humble, no one wants to come out and say their work has any value that’s worth preserving past their death, but come on, we know that’s not true. If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be writing on the web. As would Hemingway or Faulkner, Vonnegut or Mailer, John Lennon or Dylan Thomas, Carl Sandberg or Robert Frost. Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. You think there isn’t any great literature out there on the web? I wouldn’t be so sure about that. What if there is? And what if a baby born today becomes a great creative force? Or what if there’s a social disaster like the Holocaust? Did you know that there are preserved diaries from pre-revolutionary America? Writings of ordinary people can be of enormous help to historians. And if we believe in citizen journalism (I do) why not citizen historians? Shouldn’t we be thinking out into the future? We should!

Winer humbly admits his entire web presence will disappear within mere days of his death. He runs his own server; tweaks and maintains it on a weekly basis. And in days his site will be gone, and the thoughts that defined him will be lost forever.

I agree with Winer’s view that creating future-safe archives will require ‘foresight and planning’. I intend to leave some form of continuation for all my web projects should I - knock wood - get hit by a bus. But, should it prove to be too complicated to protect my digital content, I have this to say:

There will always be paper.

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I’ve just finished reading Andrew Keen’s The Cult Of The Amateur, a book I’ve referred to before in some of my arguments defending the Blooker prize, and in my commentary on the quality of blooks in general. In it he talks about how today’s Internet, with its focus on user/amateur generated content, is destroying our economy, demeaning our values, and degrading our culture.

It’s a big let down, overall: Keen starts with what looks to be a convincing argument against the amateur, but he shoots himself in the foot with the extreme stance he takes on the Internet. His arguments would be easier to take seriously if he didn’t go on and on and on about how the Internet is completely bad.

Keen says we will have to filter through the dross to get to the real gems as more substandard content is produced online. The irony here is that I’m filtering through the dross in his book, to get to the relevant points that I can talk about.

The Horror Of A Liquid Library

Alright - first off, Keen refers constantly to a New York Times “manifesto”, in which Kevin Kelly, one of the founding editors of Wired magazine, writes about his dream of a liquid library.

… once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or “playlists,” as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual “bookshelves” — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf’s worth of specialized information.

Kelly’s views are radical: in his vision of a liquid library all books will be digitized to make the World’s Only Book, and individual writing would be freely distributed online. Writers will no longer receive royalties from their creative work, and would earn from speeches and selling add-ons to make a living.

It’s beyond imagining, really.

Keen thinks Kelly’s vision would spell ‘the death of culture’. He then refers to John Updike’s reaction to the article, that famed:

So, booksellers, defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

Updike’s reaction is an interesting read, though some point out his arguments are the rantings of an old man resisting change. Personally I’m vouching for the ‘old man’, mostly because I can’t bear imagining a world without bookstores; without places to relax and mingle and read. And I also believe that royalties are one of the best ways to spur a writer to keep on writing, creating, and producing quality content.

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This post is part 2 of a two part series on improving blook readability.

In Part 1 we’ve taken a look at some designs that focus reader attention on the writing of a site, as opposed to designs distracting from it. Today we’re going to go through the common points these designs have: something that anyone with a little bit of time (free from writing, that is) can figure out on their own.

When we look at good, content-focused sites we notice that a lot is done to make it easier for the reader to read. It thus goes without saying that the fonts in which content is written in play a big role in determining site readability. Our hope, of course, is that when a site is easy to read more readers will give the writing a fighting chance - to prevent them from clicking the back button or - worse - flying off to some distant corner of the web, never to return.

Typography - the messy business of fonts

If you don’t already know, typography on the web is an embarrassment. There are only about 6 fonts in use, and at least one of them should be buried at the bottom of the ocean. These fonts are Georgia, Verdana, Arial Times New Roman, Trebuchet and Comic Sans.

Let’s go over them quickly:

• Novelr uses Georgia. I like Georgia. It is the font of choice for many design blogs, and it still holds a certain visual appeal for some people (eg: me). It reads wonderfully in larger sizes, though legibility takes a beating when it is scaled down to smaller ones.
• Verdana was created for on-screen reading, and it does that job very well. It is a big font by nature but remains clear even when brought down to very small sizes. It is the font most used by blogs.
• Arial is like that old Ford your grandfather used to drive around in. It isn’t glamorous but it gets the job done. Arial is designed for on-screen reading, and is used almost everywhere on the web - Wikipedia, for instance, and any Google search results page. It is a very reliable, readable font, but it slightly uninspired.
• Times New Roman was overused on the Internet way back 1990s. It can still be used, but only after some major CSS tweaking, and even then as post headers. Otherwise stay far, far away from it.
• Trebuchet is described by Microsoft as ‘good for web design’, and I’m inclined to agree. It may not be as widely used, and it might not turn up in some non-Windows computers, but it is a curvier alternative to Verdana or Arial. In Windows it is the default font for title bars.
• Comics Sans should be burned in hell. Do not touch.

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