Early in autumn, in the year 2000, members of the American Printing History Association gathered at the Rochester Institute of Technology to consider the precipice between centuries. The conference: “On the Digital Brink.” Among the figures invited to address the assembly, Robert Bringhurst stood apart. As a typographer and poet, Bringhurst was intimately acquainted with the forms words take, and the ache that accompanies shepherding one’s own work toward print. Asked to issue an epitaph for the twentieth-century book, Bringhurst approached its apparent demise with caution; sensible, for at the turn of the twenty-first century, the book in its familiar form retained a certain indeterminate allure.

On a Friday evening in October, Bringhurst issued a forecast. “The book,” he first said, “is poised to move, in the coming century, from its familiar paper house to a kind of handheld movie screen.” But, he continued, “I assure you that I see no reason to be worried by any of this. For while it does look to me like a part of our future, I expect that part to be short-lived. Wherever human beings live their own lives instead of somebody else’s, stories form in their hearts and in their heads.” Finally: “stories and people nourish each other. Where that occurs are the seeds of the book, some of which are certain to sprout.” Expressing sympathy for the impulse to publish while remaining vague about what form that impulse would come to inhabit in the future, Bringhurst drew his epitaph to a close. Stories, he suggested, were going nowhere. But nowhere did he promise that the houses they inhabit would not change.

Tradition

In 2005, a scandal broke. At issue was the definition of “tradition”; the controversy involved a print-on-demand publishing outfit called PublishAmerica, a mass of frustrated authors, and the troubled state of the novel in a digital age. PublishAmerica, The Washington Post reported, had lured authors to sign over rights to their manuscripts with the assurance that their work would be produced by a “traditional” publishing house. PublishAmerica identified itself as “traditional” to distinguish itself from vanity presses, which—historically—charged authors for the privilege of seeing their work in print, rather than paying authors for the privilege of publishing it.

PublishAmerica did not charge, but it barely paid, either; worst of all, authors who believed they were legitimizing their work quickly discovered that they had instead condemned their manuscripts to collective disdain. When one PublishAmerica author stopped by a local bookstore to schedule a book-signing, “an assistant manager checked her computer, ‘looked at [the author] and said, “That’s POD,”’” a compact and often derisive acronym for print-on-demand. The author was told that the bookstore did not do signings for POD authors. She was devastated.

Technology complicates tradition. The publishing industry as it existed in the twentieth century was a masterpiece of systematized inefficiency. Publishing houses routinely printed thousands of copies of a book so that enough people would see it that a few might choose to buy or read it. The enterprise was, of necessity, surrounded by an ecosystem of quality control and promotion devoted to recouping the massive cost of that inefficiency. This ecosystem included the apparatus of the book review, the role of the editor, and the specialty of creating cover art. Bookstores, given limited shelf real estate, carefully chose which books to stock; publishers, given the tremendous cost of publishing a volume in quantities that would enable certain economies of scale, took great care to bet only on books they thought bookstores might stock. The advent of online merchants such as Amazon.com altered the equation slightly, offering a new outlet for books unconstrained by the limitations of physical display space. The ease of desktop publishing, and the undeniable efficiency of print-on-demand technology at managing supply and demand, hold the potential to alter the equation further.

Yet norms of approbation and evaluation are stuck clinging to a bygone matrix of scarcity, in which only books mass produced on paper at the expense of a third party have a shot at fair consideration. For many, though, the paper book as a recognizable end-product of this process remains the tangible goal they strive toward. Persuaded by outfits such as PublishAmerica that their dreams are within reach—wanting to believe that norms can change, that the long tail exists, and that meritocratic success is possible—some sign away the rights to their work, convinced that they will be happy just to feel the heft of their words on paper. “People who just want a book to hold in their hands, who don’t care about having a career as an author, do okay with PublishAmerica,” commented A.C. Crispin, the chair of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Committee on Writing Scams. But “for many, ‘after a while, they realize that what they really wanted was to be read.’’

Approbation

Particularly for novelists and memoirists, who pour their imagined worlds and private memories into volumes that they then nervously expose to appraisal, just seeing their work “in print” falls short of the fantasy they held close: that people might enter those worlds by choice, and pay for the privilege, thereby validating the creative mind that constructed them.

For writers, technology-enabled shades of gray in the publishing industry have proven dangerous, seductive, destabilizing, because: for them, paper artifacts have long been the mark of success.

The dream of becoming a “published author” is haunting. Becoming one, for most of the twentieth century, was a worthy goal because it was incredibly difficult to achieve. To achieve it meant conquering all of the obstacles put in place by the publishing industry to keep unmarketable or uninspired texts from reaching bookstore shelves. In a sense, it meant winning—over other manuscripts and other authors, but also over one’s own self-doubt. It did not, of course, always or even often translate to riches. But to become a published author at least meant that someone else believed in a work enough to bet on its success.

As paper-based business models confront the digital age, the function of the physical book shifts and mutates. Meanwhile, the familiar bundling of validation, distribution, and promotion afforded by advance-paying mass-production publishers becomes even more of an elusive and alluring goal through its comprehensive authentication of the authorial voice. Self-publishing, by violating these standards through the vehicle of a potentially identical physical product, illuminates their presence and challenges their endurance.

Expectations

Self-publishing outfits transgress publishing industry norms on a number of fronts, complicating the assumptions of quantity as an assurance of quality, production values as a competitive necessity, and business models in which publishers assume the financial risk of printing a book. The disjunction between what self-publishing authors think they are accessing and what they are in fact accessing shows that the physical book carries with it certain powerful expectations that can be easily disappointed.

The significance of paper books is further complicated by the explosion in online publishing over the past ten years. In an age when anyone can, and most people do, instantly publish their thoughts in one form or another on a near-daily basis, the paper book has come to represent not only an antithesis to unpublished manuscripts lying in desk drawers, but an antidote to the flimsy ephemerality of thoughts beamed up into the digital ether, as well. Paper, in any form, is in fact an increasingly inefficient medium for the transmission of information, especially up-to-the-minute information. Books, then, must provide something better than up-to-the-minute information, or at least something different: cohesively imagined worlds, strong narrative, well-considered characters, immaculate copy-editing, readability, portability, and mastery of the long form.

Most of all, books offer the promise of durability; there remains something unsatisfying about purely weightless words. “Weren’t writers supposed to be bypassing publishing houses and dead-tree technology by now?” asked Paula Span in The Washington Post. “Shouldn’t the industry have evolved to something other than the book as Gutenberg knew it? Somehow, though,” she answered, “writers’ most potent fantasies still involve pages between covers, not e-books and blogs.”

When asked why this might be so, Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors’ Guild, suggested that “the immortality of the book, the permanence of the book draws people in.” Though the paper of books may be fragile, the objects themselves have a habit of sticking around—resurfacing at opportune times, persisting as reminders of the words within. For aspiring authors, the tenacity of that finished product is appealing and comforting: unlike screens, which start each day anew, paper cannot so easily forget the words it holds.

Ironically, appropriately, the same technology that enables words to be published weightlessly allows them to be published physically at will. Armed with print-on-demand technology, self-publishing outfits can flourish. All offer to transform digital files into bound volumes; they differ mainly on the degree to which they prey on aspiring authors’ dreams. Blurb, for instance, makes few promises; PublishAmerica implies many, without guaranteeing any. Yet each, operating on the premise of print-on-demand, manages the eternal problem of matching supply to demand by literally supplying only the books that are demanded, printing each volume only once it is ordered online. In so doing, the services violate another twentieth-century publishing norm: mass production as quality insurance.

Mass Production

Books constitute one of the few arenas of art where mass production enhances value rather than diluting it. The words within are uniquely affirmed by the magnitude of their reproduction. Recorded music provides perhaps the closest analogy; and yet songs, like paintings and unlike novels, can be fully enjoyed just by being in their presence. (Standing in front of a portrait at the museum; swaying to a rock song at a concert or in a dorm room.)

Henry Baum, editor of Selfpublishingreview.com, has written that “it takes all of two minutes to listen to a song, as opposed to investing real time in reading a book.” Furthermore, “writers can’t sell out a rock club the way an unsigned band can.” Because the worlds inside books are so interior, and require attention rather than simple ambient presence to access, the best guarantee a potential reader has of quality is the confidence with which a publisher invested in that interior world. For according to the business model of publishers such as Random House or Simon & Schuster, a book could never be published without being read by a number of discerning individuals. The risk would simply be too great. And so a book’s presence in bookstores assures potential readers (and purchasers) that they are about to invest in a collection of worthwhile words.

The problem with self-published books, for authors and for potential readers, is that the physical book no longer signifies that anyone has read it. In fact, the physical fact of a self-published book is far more likely to signify that astonishingly few people have read it.

This is not a tautology of the form. Rather, it is a pattern that affects the reputation of the entire enterprise. The very exclusivity of traditional publishing houses means that their approval retains substantial meaning; moreover, it commands at least some respect. Since the rubric for success as an author is part of popular culture, “published authors” do not have to advocate for themselves in social situations to the extent that “freelance writers” often do. Social status is so often simply a function of whether or not strangers are impressed.

Promotion

For authors, though, the true mark of success is whether or not strangers read their work. One of the major disappointments cited by authors who have self-published is the failure of their work to filter out beyond their personal social networks. In the self-publishing universe, according to Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio, “the overwhelming majority of sales are to the friends and family of the authors.”

A 2002 article in The New York Times noted that “unless authors make extraordinary promotional efforts on their own, most print-on-demand titles typically sell just a few hundred copies.” Most book-buyers do not walk into bookstores, or embark upon browsing through Amazon.com, thinking about metrics of approbation and the business models of various publishing houses. They are looking for something to read.

Without paper copies of a book inundating physical stores and crowding their shelves, countless opportunities for real-world serendipity are lost. It is almost impossible to accidentally collide with a print-on-demand book, because the book would first have to be demanded. For all its astounding resource inefficiency, the publishing industry’s system of mass production is quite expert at populating shelves in enticing ways. Without admission to that physical matrix, self-published books lose out on the production of consumer desire—a production process that is mimicked, not subverted, on sites such as Amazon.com.

The supreme downfall of self-publishing, though, might be its reliance on the self. Untested authors, when they are desperate for approval, long to be discovered—to be spontaneously recognized by a respected stranger as having talent, promise, value. They ache to be believed in. Friends and family, while supportive, lack the capacity for the kind of recognition that these authors desire, for they are already invested in the person behind the words. To be recognized for words alone is a pure, unimpeachable form of affirmation.

Marketing oneself can be painful and humiliating; marketing one’s words, exposed for all to see, can be even more difficult. Without external affirmation, all confidence feels like vanity. For most self-published books, The New York Times mentioned, “marketing…is up to the author, which is one reason why most do not sell.” Furthermore, “too often, writers who use print-on-demand services do not put enough energy or money into their efforts, expecting that somehow their work will become known.” People who gravitate toward print-on-demand, a self-published author added, “are very frequently planning to fail.”

A crisis of self-confidence can undercut a book’s success completely. Longing to be discovered, authors balk at producing serendipity for themselves. “With the availability of print-on-demand services,” the Times concluded, “the issue is no longer whether one can get a book in print but only whether anyone will notice.”

On the digital brink, would-be authors face the dissolution of publication as a unified goal, and thus a disruption of the meaning of paper books as unified products of that system. As familiar business models for selling fictional words fall apart, the book’s role as signifier alternately deteriorates and stiffens. Yet, in spite of everything, “people keep on hankering to write and publish books,” Bringhurst reflected. “It seems to be the way we are. People keep on wanting to make love in spite of overpopulation and wanting to write books in spite of overpublication.” The way we are, and what we long to become: one who leaves to the world something worth believing in.

Diana Kimball lives in San Francisco and works in technology. She writes at http://dianakimball.com and collects thoughts at @dianakimball. In general, she is an enthusiast. “Paper Houses” was first published as a blog post based on a research paper, in May 2009.

Two things inspired me to write my new novel, Ho Springs, online, day by day, instead of writing it for a conventional publisher the way I did my first five novels.  Well, two things that are easy to explain.

The first was my husband, after watching the DVD of American Gangster, telling me he found the movie good enough but ultimately unsatisfying.   “It was a movie,” he explained, “so you knew from the beginning that everything really interesting was going to happen to Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, and that it was going to build to this big climax at the end.”

That was the problem with conventional novels too, I thought.  They were predictable, limited and finite in form and scope.  Wouldn’t it be more interesting to write – and read – a novel that unfolded in a way that was both more leisurely and more compelling, the way TV shows like Mad Men and The Wire did?

The second influence was creating my blog How Not To Act Old after no one wanted to buy it as a magazine article, turning it into a book and making that book a New York Times bestseller.  That experience taught me that not only was it more fun and exciting to write without an editor between me and my readers, but my own creative instincts were often better than those of the traditional publishing world.

My experience writing five “real” novels and developing two big websites – I’m also a partner in the site nameberry.com, based on the ten baby name books I coauthored with Linda Rosenkrantz – put me in a unique position to create a piece of digital fiction that would combine the best of both worlds.  Rather than writing episodic pieces, I wanted to create a novel that included such conventional elements as a character-driven story, causally-related scenes, and an extended plot that would unspool in unexpected ways, but in a form that could exist only online.

My blueprint was a television series I’d created (but hadn’t sold) a few years ago, set in a fictionalized version of Hot Springs, Arkansas.   A place-based story was perfect for an online novel, I thought, offering a wide range of characters and settings and the potential for stories to expand in an unlimited number of directions.

The big problem was the name, Hot Springs.  The url hotsprings.com was obviously taken.  And then, driving one day, I had a eureka moment: hosprings.com, or Ho Springs.  I was so excited I did a u-turn and drove right back home to track down and reserve the name.

From that moment on, I knew the idea was right.  I wanted to create the site in wordpress, so it would be free and I’d have total creative control, but I couldn’t find a theme that included all the elements – videos, graphic windows that opened to places in the town and story, room for a big block of text.

I needed a designer – or, as it turned out, three designers.  I had a vision for a logo that would look like all the letters were in realistic flames, with the T up in smoke, which called for a photoshop expert.  My budget was zero, or as close to that as I could get.  I was lucky to find Katie Mancine who built me an amazing logo.

The only problem was, Katie said, she couldn’t design a good-looking site to go with that logo.  Rather, she sold me on the concept “Vintage Tourist Guide,” which was great, but in the end that didn’t work out either.  Katie finally ended up with the design you see now on the site, and my friend Dennis Tobenski, who’s really a composer, made the whole thing dance.  Combined cost: under $1500, and several hundred gray hairs.

Weeks and then months were passing, during which I found a musician, Matt Michael, to write and record two original songs for the site, and also drafted several writer friends to create independent blogs from the characters’ viewpoints.  But the only writing I was doing during this time was putting together the static content describing the characters and the settings.

A novelist creating a work for the web is not, then, just a writer, but a designer, a logician, a manager, a tech guy, a producer.

And then, once you do start writing – or at least, once I did – the process is different too.  I suppose you could write one long story and parcel it out day by day, but the whole point for me was to create it as I went along, publish it immediately, to swing by the crook of my knees with no net below.

That’s the only way to feel the wind on your face, which is something you rarely feel when you’re writing a conventional novel, one that won’t be published for two years or maybe five, that no other person may even see for all that time, or maybe ever.  Writing all my other novels, I’m a big planner, outlining the big story and even each individual scene, revising and reimagining, working on the same piece until I lose sight of where I started and when it will ever end.

With Ho Springs, I get up in the morning, having a vague sense of what I’m going to write about, from which character’s viewpoint, but letting myself be swayed by whatever I encounter between brushing my teeth and opening my computer.  A David Sedaris story in an old New Yorker got one of my characters beaten one morning; an email from a writer friend inspired me to make a video of myself talking about what had influenced me that day.

It wasn’t until after I launched the site that I looked at what anyone else was doing in this arena.  The only site I’ve found that’s similar is All’s Fair in Love and War, Texas, by the brilliant Amber Simmons, which makes me believe God saved me from that Vintage Tourist Guide idea.  Penguin’s We Tell Stories is brilliant, but much more expensively and expertly produced than I could hope for, and more limited in writerly ambition.  Visually-based web fictions that blow me away include Unknown Territories and The Flat on Dreaming Methods.  But they’re movies, really, not novels.

Where is this project going?  My ideal vision is that someone like HBO or a publisher with a production arm will buy it and produce it as a multimedia property, with a television and a web and a book element working together.  I believe that this is how fiction will be written and published in the future, that this will become the new standard long after anyone remembers that Ho Springs ever existed.

Or I may take it down tomorrow and build something else.  The excitement is in creating something.  Holding it in your hands, or staring at it on a screen, holds so much less satisfaction.

Pamela’s personal site may be found here; with Ho Springs just around the corner.

About four months ago I got an email from a writer asking if fluffy-seme would be interested in publishing her work. The timing couldn’t have been more wrong. Although fluffy-seme had been “publishing” for a few months, we’d only just decided to throw caution to the wind and just make it official and incorporate. We had started the pilot run of Hyperlocal (a scavenger hunt where players solve clues to collect pieces of an on-going story), and that program had just been featured in TimeOut New York under their 75 Things To Do Before Summer Ends cover story. The competitive environment of Hyperlocal turned out to be more competitive than I ever imagined it would be: clues were released at midnight and most of them were solved before 9am. On top of that, Split-Self had only just started publication and it needed a lot of tender love and care to help it find fans. On top of that I was also writing two other serials for a grand total of three serials at roughly 4,000 words each part … about 12,000 words a week.

Nevertheless, despite completely overcommitting myself … we were a publishing company and I was itching to start recruiting writers (mainly so that I did not have to write 12,000 words a week). So I said okay, send me something to look at.

What she sent me wasn’t going to win any Pulitzer’s, but it was serviceable and marketable. A little polishing and I could see it being a series that attracted an audience. There was just one problem…

“Unfortunately, we’re not in a position to pay writers right now.” I explained.

“Oh, that’s alright … you don’t have to pay me.”

At first I kind of assumed this was just naiveté, and so I explained to her that yes … in fact we do have to pay you. In order for us to publish you, you have to sign a contract giving us the right to reproduce your content and to profit from said content. You should never sign away those kind of rights without some compensation. So I suggested … “How about this? I can draw up a temporary three month contract at a low rate and then when it expires we’ll renegotiate.”

“Oh … no … really that’s okay, I really don’t feel comfortable getting paid for my work. It’s not that good.”

Negotiations actually stalled and inevitably fell apart over this unbelievable problem: she really didn’t want me to pay her for her writing.

Because to me when you’re selling something: $$ > $ and $ > free I assumed that this encounter was merely an anomaly … instead it foreshadowed the hair pulling frustration that was to come in October when fluffy-seme opened up for submissions and went about trying to recruit writers. Nearly every single time I started negotiations with a writer discussions would come to a dead stop as soon as the fact that I actually intended to pay them became clear. Once I spelled that out one of two things would happen: either the writer would suddenly have a crisis of confidence like the encounter described above, or the exact opposite, the writer would turn around and declare (some more subtly than others) that since I was willing to pay, then maybe a BETTER publishing company would also be willing to pay. Or better yet, maybe the author could go out on their own and get to keep 100% of the profits.

Writers Need Publishers

Writing is a scary thing. Not only are you putting yourself out there emotionally, but you have to deal with all manner of scams and publishing predators looking to sell your dream back to you at a hefty profit. One of the reasons why I started fluffy-seme’s corporate site was to show prospective writers the way we do business and make them more comfortable. You can read all about our advertising strategies, our values, our business plan, the contracts we put writers on, even look at traffic and growth reports. When I started fluffy-seme I expected writers to be skeptical, I was prepared for that. I never expected to be caught up in a cultural rebellion against the concept of a publishing house. And by in large that is the problem: everyone wants to go it alone. There was one writer I spoke to who sincerely thought he had a shot with a major traditional publisher (and who knows, maybe he still does) but everyone else wanted to go it alone. They were convinced that despite the thousands of self-publishers and web literati that have come before them, they will succeed and get their story out there to hundreds/thousands of readers without a publisher watching their back. fluffy-seme, as a digital publishing company, was not seen as a legitimate publishing option not because writers thought we were an elaborate scam but because they believed that everything a digital publisher can provide, they can get just as easily on their own.

Quality Does Not Matter

I had a very (thankfully) short career in the traditional book industry when I got out of college and one of the things I learned before I ran screaming from that world was: quality does not matter. Every writer on the face of the Earth seems to believe that their work will become popular because it is well written. Every writer also seems to wander through writing groups, scribbling corrections and edits so that they can ‘make the reader want to read more’ as if readers who have no interest in Civil War epics are suddenly going to want to read your Civil War epic because the writing is pretty.

It’s nice to think that people are really that open minded, but sadly that is not how books get bought or sold. The vast majority of people look to buy books that reflect their existing interests and world views. The only thing that you as a writer can do to convince someone to read something they’re not usually interested in is reframe the blurb so that appears to be something they ARE interested in. This is why the publishing industry gives us totally absurd cover quotes like: “It’s The Hunt for Red October meets Free Willy!”

The reason why writers cannot rely on the strength of their writing is simple: unlike music or TV or movies, reading is not a passive activity. You cannot just zone out, listen/watch and find yourself enjoying it. Reading is actually quite a lot of work neurologically. Even books on tape require focus and attention to “read”. All that work requires a commitment of time and effort from the reader and even if your writing is beautiful and your characters fascinating … if the story isn’t about something that interests the reader already they’re not going to keep reading.

Strength in Numbers

There is one exception to this and that is having established a familiarity and rapport with an existing audience. One of Haruki Murakami’s more recent works involves a guy who murdered cats … I can’t imagine the market for that is very large, yet it was a run away bestseller because it was Haruki Murakami. (It was also good, but again that’s irrelevant. If Kafka on the Shore was written by Harry Kim– first time writer– doubtful it would have had the same success)

It takes a long time to build that kind of trust with a large reader base and that’s the real strength of the publishing company and what an author really gives up by going alone. Publishing companies are businesses designed to make connections with readers both directly and with intermediaries (book reviewers, bookstores, etc) for the purpose of selling stories. Publishers keep the connection open with the reader even when the writer is on a break from writing. By going alone you only maintain that connection with your readers for as long as you are producing content.

More importantly, publishers pull resources that individuals do not have access to on their own.

Today’s writers, particularly the ones who are internet savvy seem to resent that fact, as if the publishers have access to these resources because the industry is snobby, elitist and unfair. Well, the industry is snobby, elitist, and unfair, but that’s not why publishing companies have better access to resources. It’s a basic economics principle at play: economies of scale. Economies of scale means that in an industrialized modern economy things are cheaper in bulk. In other words a company that manufactures frying pans will pay more per frying pan if they produce 20 than they would if they produced 20,000. How does this apply to publishing? Even with online publishing, POD, eBooks and a number of other services that have made getting the story out there dirt cheap, writers still require a variety of services to make their book a success: editing, design, promotion, more promotion, still MORE promotion. A publisher with a whole stable of writers can buy these services in bulk for dirt cheap. Editors can be paid a salary instead of by word, and just about every advertising department major or minor offers deep discounts the more you buy.

As an individual writer you pay out the nose because all you have is YOUR BOOK. You may write another book … or you may have only one in you. You’re in no position to offer service providers even the promise of more orders that might encourage a discount. All you have is yourself.

Give Up Some of Your Rights

By now you may be thinking ‘okay but I can get a few other writers together to pool resources and still be independent’ and yes, absolutely, you can do this. And probably some writers will find a modest amount of success in doing just that, but there are also pitfalls to consider. An informal arrangement like that often offers neither the group nor the individual writers any legal protections. I’m not just talking intellectual property here either. Imagine this situation: three writers throw in $100 dollars each for an advertising campaign and because it’s hard to advertise three books at once they pull together a little site for their group, give it a name and a brand identity and start promoting. Two of these writers see sales and make money as a result of the advertising, one does not. Does the unfortunate writer have claim to the profits of the other two?

Another wonderful advantage to publishing companies is that the roles, responsibilities, and obligations of everyone are clearly defined and spelled out in contracts. You give the publisher the right to distribute your content in exchange for an agreed upon sum. Both your claim on the profits and the publisher’s claim on your work are clearly spelled out. The above situation is not so clear and unless there was a partnership agreement drawn up before the adventure began saying otherwise, the writer without sales could argue that the profits from the other two should be split evenly as return on their joint business venture.

And this is where webfiction has come to: no one can reach a large enough audience alone. Cross promotion is an obvious and necessary next step that will benefit everyone, but it can’t be done without capital (read: $$$) and that can’t be done without agreements that make it clear who’s putting up the capital and what they’re getting in return, that requires publishing houses. Webfiction writers have understood this need for a while, but they implicitly hand off this responsibility to sites like WFG and weblit.us, and they offer the owners of these sites nothing in return. As amazing as both are, without a commitment of serious capital to promoting the webfiction brand, their effectiveness at opening up the wide wonderful world of webfiction to new readers is limited. And why should anyone be expected to pony up large sums of cash without any claim to the profits from that result from those actions?

As fun as it is for everyone to set up their own private sites to distribute their work, if webfiction is going to thrive as a storytelling medium it cannot remain a self-publishing model where everyone goes alone. And while other models could be developed the one that handles the challenge most efficiently is the one we already have where the writer signs over some rights in exchange for services and $$ … a publishing company.

Isa tweets at IsaKft, and maintains a business blog chronicling her adventures as a digital publisher on Campaign for fluffy-seme. Her super-power is her business sense, and she plans to some day rule the world.

I’ve been using Twitter for a bit now, and while I’m by no means an expert, Eli has asked me to write an article on the usefulness of the network for web fiction writers, and so here I am.

A rough idea of what I use Twitter for: in the past couple of days I’ve discovered a great poem, found out about a Webfiction Podcast, voted for my favorite contestant in a literary reality show and almost became MCM’s marketing agent for The Vector.

On a more personal note I learned that one of the authors of the Peacock King just found her first grey hair at the age of 28, that Lord Likely is getting married (no matter how much I protest) and I’ve organized a sleepover party, pillow-fight included, with The Dispatch crew. And these things are only the tip of the iceberg.

For me Twitter has been a revelation. I have made contacts with web-fiction authors I would never have found otherwise, I have discovered great short-stories, poems and other digital art, and I got to take part in #3D1D, which really deserves it’s own article on the technologies MCM used.

These are my personal benefits, but I believe Twitter could be a real asset to all web-fiction authors, and I’ll try to explain how and why in this post. There really is no limit to the possibilities of the use of the medium, but I’ll try to cover the basics at least. If you don’t know what Twitter is and how it works, I’d suggest reading the TwiTip Starters Guide and Inkygirl’s Writer’s Guide to Twitter.

How it Works

Twitter defines itself as a microblogging system in which people can post short updates (there is a max. of 140 characters per update), and other people can subscribe to their feeds. 140 characters sounds very limiting, but you can say more than you think you can, and there is a subtle art in being brief and to the point. As far as I can see it there are 3 kinds of authors on Twitter.

1. The Personal Account
2. The RSS Author
3. The Balanced One

Until recently Eli himself was a good example of the first type. He didn’t use Twitter frequently, but when he did he tweeted personal thoughts. There weren’t any references to Novelr, and not many references to anything web-fiction related in general. He also didn’t really connect with people (because he didn’t know how to reply to them), so his Twitter feed resembled a stream of consciousness. Other variants of this are authors using Twitter as a chatbox with their personal friends, taking the “What Are You Doing Question?” to an extreme and posting everything they eat and do. There is nothing wrong with that, but in my opinion this isn’t using Twitter to its full potential.

The RSS Author is on the other extreme of the spectrum; there is nothing personal in these accounts. RSS Authors simply attach their RSS feeds to their Twitter account, and let it run on auto-pilot from there on. No interaction whatsoever. A variant of this, and probably more annoying, are the marketeering authors, who only use Twitter to promote themselves and their books. Both types aren’t using Twitter to connect, which is a big loss, because, since their streams aren’t very interesting, they probably won’t gain many followers.

The Balanced One is the ideal Twitter-using author. He varies personal updates with updates on his writing, publishing and other professional updates, promotes (through the art of retweeting) interesting content of fellow authors and contacts and interacts with his followers. The really cool authors take this interaction to a new level and come up with stuff like #3D1D. Off course there isn’t such a thing as a perfect twitterer, but aiming for a mix between personal, professional and peers should get you close.

Useful Features

Twitter has implemented a couple of nice features to make connecting with interesting people and content easier. The most important one is probably the hashtag. Each term that starts with a # is converted into a hashtag. These hashtags are searchable, which means you can easily find all tweets mentioning the topic. A lot of web-fiction authors are adding #weblit to their tweets concerning their web-fiction, or web-fiction in general. Some of them also use a hashtag for their stories, so people can easily find updates. MCM even named his project after the hashtag he used for it, #3D1D.

Some people organize chats around these hashtags, using a twitterclient like tweetchat, or the Twitter search function (search.twitter.com) on a set day of the week. The most interesting ones for web-fiction authors are #writechat, #dnchat and #wnchat, but there are a lot of others as well.

Another great side effect of the hashtags are the hashtags projects. A prime example of this is #fridayflash, where every Friday authors publish a Flash Fiction Piece, and tweet about it using the #fridayflash hashtag. J.M. Strother posts a weekly roundup on his blog of all stories published each week, and an Anthology is in the making.

On your profile you can easily save searches, so you can check your favorite topics with one easy click. My personal saved searches include ‘Online Novel’, ‘Online Fiction’, Web-Fiction and others, and by checking them daily I found authors publishing online that weren’t on the WFG, Muse’s Success or other Web-Fiction Directories.

Some authors have been creating characters accounts, and are tweeting in character. I find this a great way of connecting with fans and readers, and that it greatly adds to the web-fiction experience. Reading the adventures of Lord Likely is twice as fun since I’ve been following his twitter account and I’m sure other readers feel the same.

A final great feature are Twitter Lists. These lists are used to organize the people you follow into categories, so people can easily find people with similar interests. I have made one for web-fiction authors, which currently lists 124 tweeting authors of web-fiction. Once you’ve subscribed to a list, it only takes one click to subscribe, and the tweets of all those listed are within reach from your Twitter sidebar. Nancy Brauer of Strange Little Band has also made a Twitter list of fictional characters tweeting.

Last but not least I’d like to mention @onlinefiction, a Twitter account created by Naomi of Nomesque Fiction, which tweets and promotes various web-fiction on hourly intervals.

I have by no means mentioned everything there is to do on and with Twitter, so please do comment with your favorite accounts, hashtags or anecdotes.

Jan Oda tweets at @janoda, and presents her followers with a LOT of good links. (Image at top sourced from Flickr)

The Internet provides a great opportunity for writers to meet up, and start working together. And the collective format offers some great economies of scale to writers – especially when it comes to marketing, where each person’s efforts benefit everyone (if you focus, as we think of it at Year Zero Writers, on replicable not duplicable activity). But it’s easy to think of collectives as a short cut. Aside from the whole question of how you get large numbers of independent-minded people who’ve never met to pull together, you need to make sure you have a niche.

One of the main points of having a collective is to create a single identity for you all. Rather, to allow you all to be who you are, but to let readers know that if they like one of your books, they will probably like the others as well. Your books need to appeal to the same market. And readers need to know that.

That’s easy when you’re writing non-fiction. If your books are “Orchid-growing in Queensland”, “Orchid Houses of new Zealand”, “1001 Orchids”, readers will soon get the hang of what you’re about.

With fiction it’s harder. You effectively have to create an imprint – something like Mills and Boon or Black Lace.

For the writers of Year Zero this was a real problem. The point about imprints like this is they come with strict rules of style, content, and format. And the thing that had driven us together in the forums of Authonomy and The Book Shed was our frustration at the editorial strictures the publishing industry put on writers. We wanted a place where we could be free of all that.

It was also clear, looking at our books, that there WAS a common thread. Whatever we wrote, we wrote it for an audience that didn’t want to be told what to think, that wasn’t frightened of a challenge, that wanted to look at the world in new ways. If we have a demographic it’s what we’d call “urban indie”.

So we had this anti-establishment readership, and we had a bunch of books we refused to edit to “be commercial” (a very different thing from refusing to edit them – some of our books have been edited to death: the point is we did it the way WE wanted to). And we had an angry, group mentality, and an almost political approach to the publishing industry.

So the answer was obvious. We needed a manifesto. THAT is our “imprint”, our rallying call, and the thing that draws our readers in. And it’s a very simple one – restoring the direct conversation between reader and writer. “Uncut prose” unsullied by arbiters of taste. It’s about a reader-writer relationship that’s mature enough to do without a chaperone.

So for us the manifesto has tied everything together. It’s given us focus; it differentiates our work from the mainstream and lets readers know what to expect; it makes a virtue of what some would see as a defect; and it’s the building block of a very simple strategy.

1. Attract readers to us with our manifesto
2. Make our work free in e-format so people can get to know us once we have their attention – from Brief Objects of Beauty and Despair, the sampler featuring original prose from 13 of us to the full versions of our novels
3. Deliver the best books we possibly can to keep readers once they’re interested

So my advice if you’re looking at starting a collective and you can’t think what your niche is. Ask yourself what it is you all have in common – no matter how obscure or angry or negative that might seem to be. And make it your unifying strength, your rallying call.

Dan Holloway is co-founder of Year Zero Writers, a regular blogger on independent culture, and organiser of the Free-e-day festival. The first three novels form Year Zero Writers are: Benny Platonov by Oli Johns, Glimpses of a Floating World by Larry Harrison, and Songs from the Other Side of the Wall by Dan Holloway.

In my previous post over at Alan Baxter’s site, I talked about why a reviewer class is vital to the overall health of the weblit community. But creating that class shouldn’t just be about copying what the Old Publishing industry does. We’ve got more potential, so we should use it.

This is all going to be based on the Long Tail:

In a nutshell, the head (left) is where the hits are, and the tail (everything else) consists of niches of various shapes and sizes. Mainstream publishing tends to focus on the head, leaving the rest of the graph totally undiscovered. It’s done this way out of necessity: churning the tail would take more resources and split more attentions than anyone can afford. Or, at least in the old system it would.

On the web, we are a massive collection of niches… far more niches than you can possibly put tags to. From a distance, it looks too busy to comprehend, let alone assign a reviewer to. The problem many weblit authors have is that their work doesn’t fit into a genre very cleanly. If you write erotic werewolf scifi mysteries, you probably get ignored by most reviewers, because they have no idea what to do with you. But that’s the old paradigm… on the internet there are as many experts as there are niches. What we need to do is find these connoisseurs and give them the tools they need to be heard and taken seriously, and encourage their authority over their niche.

For this example, we’ll make up a reviewer named Bob. Bob specializes in erotic werewolf scifi mysteries. Don’t judge him. Bob is the one who separates the wheat from the chaff without punishing you for your genre. To the readers and writers in that niche, Bob is the one that you trust for the truth. He becomes a Super User, if only on a limited scale.

Above him, we have an umbrella niche for werewolf stories, with Jen as one of the top reviewers. Dealing with a larger pool of books than Bob, Jen can’t possibly read everything. Instead, she saves herself time by reading the best-ranked books coming from her sub-niches. Bob loved “The Werewolf’s Wife”, so Jen can safely pick it up, knowing the baseline quality is there. If she thinks it will be a good fit for her larger, more diverse niche, she can review it too.

Repeat the process up and up the chain, and at each level, we’re treading closer to the head of the tail. If “The Werewolf’s Wife” is a work of true genius, it will float into the realm of the higher-level reviewers… these aren’t reviewers who are BETTER than their lower niche counterparts, they’re just appealing to a broader base, giving them a bigger readership pool and more influence. Not every book will make it up the structure, but there will be more mobility than ever before.

Now let’s say “The Werewolf’s Wife” made it to the upper levels of the “mystery” niche, and had magnificent reviews. The next book by the same author should (theoretically) not need to start from the bottom anymore. It can premiere near the top, thus removing a lot of the clutter waiting to be discovered by the micro-niche reviewers.

So how do we create this system? It’s pretty simple: first, we need to have a set of standards for reviewers. It needs to include an attribution clause, so as books travel upwards, the reviewers who discovered them are given credit. The reviewers need to establish themselves in their niches, rather than aspiring to be generic. Sites like the Web Fiction Guide could promote this notion of rockstar reviewers.

Authors need to play a part as well: link back to your reviews, send your readers to check them out. Trust isn’t a finite resource, so don’t be stingy with it. The more you teach your audience to trust your reviewers, the more the more powerful those reviewers will become. By helping Bob become well-respected in his niche, you’re giving yourself a head start with all subsequent books. It’s a symbiotic relationship, and the more work you put into it, the healthier the whole system will be.

Making an efficient and dependable reviewer class in the weblit world will help give everyone more credibility, so that when the rest of the world notices what we’re doing here, they’ll feel like it’s fully developed and ready for use. Otherwise, we’re just a wild west of half-wit writers waiting for the established players to arrive and bring us civilization.

MCM is still heavily invested in the future of online fiction. Read one of his books here, or spar with him in the comments below. (Oh and, I read The Vector. It rocks.)

Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. Also, some are mentally unstable, and actively seek out disaster. That, in a nutshell, is me and publishing.

I’ve been writing fiction online for over three years now, and I’ve tried countless publishing business models, with some great successes and horrible failures. I endeavour to be the guinea pig for authors everywhere, testing the theories others are too scared to try. It takes a lot of patience, but it’s very rewarding. Here’s a bit of what I’ve learned…

Find Your Niche

This is fairly obvious, but I think it’s greatly overlooked. Possibly the most important thing you can do when starting a project is to know who your audience is, and what they’re looking for. Taken to an extreme, this could be called pandering, but that’s not what you’re trying to do. You know that expression that goes “you can’t break the rules until you know what they are”? Same idea. You can’t push the boundaries of a sub-genre unless you know which sub-genre you’re writing.

But it’s more than substance. Certain niches don’t work in certain media, and can spell disaster for your release plans. One of my series, The SteamDuck Chronicles, sold in amazing volume in e-book format, but bombed badly in print. If I’d taken the time to really understand how my niche audience worked, I would have known they weren’t interested in paper, and saved myself some money. Ignoring that tiny bit of research meant my first 30 sales went to offsetting the Print on Demand set-up costs. You don’t want to do that to yourself.

Free Works

One of my most popular titles is “TorrentBoy: Zombie World!”. It’s available in print and e-book, and just like all my other projects, it’s completely free. You can read from start to finish on my website without any obstacles, and over 250,000 people have already done so. Obviously, I’m losing lots of money on it, right? Wrong.

In the three months since it was released, TorrentBoy has earned over $9,700 in profit, almost entirely from donations. In fact, even though 99.8% of my readers don’t pay a thing for the experience, the ones that do are spending more than I would have earned from royalties under any conventional model. And the only reason they donate is because they can see the whole picture. You can’t count the non-payers as lost income, because in all likelihood, they wouldn’t pay anyway. Worse yet, if you obsess on them too much, you’re going to scare away your true customers. They’re an endangered species, and you can’t afford to mess around with their generosity.

Focus Efforts

When you’re building your website, it’s easy succumb to what developers call “feature creep.” Every new widget or feature or side-issue that you come across gets squeezed into your page design, often at the expense of the content itself. You have to make sure nothing is distracting from the text. Hosting may be expensive, and ads may pave the way to stability, but if you overload the reader’s senses when they’re trying to browse, you’re losing business.

To help test these theories, I created a special Reader site, which lets you read any of my books in whatever languages they’re available in. The design removes everything but the content from immediate view, with chapter navigation and title information one click away. Since the switch, my “rate of completion” (how many people actually finish the book) has jumped from around 40% to 98%, and both donations and sales are up (230% and 180% respectively). As a trial, I create a parallel version of the site, adding a right-hand column with navigation and tombstone information, and made it display for a random subset of visitors. The result? Smaller gains over the traditional model: 10% for donations and 0.3% for sales. The fewer distractions, the better off you’ll be.

Streamline Donations

I’ve tried PayPal buttons in various places around my sites, and this is what I know: a link in the right sidebar gets clicked 0.21% of the time. The same button in the left sidebar gets clicked 0.01% of the time. The link can be “below the fold” (not visible when the page first loads), but too far down and your click rate drops to zero. Putting the link inline almost never works (0.002%), and at the start of the text, it’s utterly useless (0%). Placing a link at the bottom of a chapter or page often works, but you need to be careful that the reader feels a sense of closure when they see that link. Cliffhangers and wrap-ups work nicely (1.1%), but if you’re just arbitrarily cutting the text mid-stream, those links never get clicked. And sometimes you get hate mail.

Another thing to consider is not using the PayPal icons at all. If you create your own button, or apply the “email link” code to plain text, those tend to outperform the branded icons 2:1. Again, don’t overwhelm readers with too many options in too many places. My Reader site places a “thanks!” page at the end of each book, with several donation options to choose from. Since it went live, donations have increased to almost 3% across the board. It’s simple, inoffensive, but blunt, and it does far better business than overcrowding ever did.

Consider a Serial, or Serial+

Serializing a novel is a great way to build brand loyalty (where the brand is you). It’s largely psychological, but I’ve found that readers who come back to you regularly for two or three months will tend to convert from “casual observer” to something approaching “fan”. But the interesting thing is, they don’t need to be coming back for new stuff, just more of the same. Serializing creates an artificial need to return to your site, thereby boosting your fan levels. For my serialized novel Fission Chips, I’ve seen a great shift in the profile of my readership over the last month and a half. Of my 10,000+ readers, 814 are now in the category I’d call “dedicated fans”, visiting not just that site, but reading my other titles as well. After the first two weeks, that number was only 12.

Another variation on this theme is what I call Serial+. In it, you release your book on a schedule (new chapters every Monday and Wednesday, for example), but put a footnote after the latest chapter informing the readers that at this rate, it will take them until some distant date to finish the story. If they want to skip ahead, they can donate a reasonable sum, and get the full story unlocked right away. In early testing, this model has an astounding conversion rate of 72%. If your writing is compelling, people will probably “upgrade” when they can’t take waiting anymore.

Be Nimble

The biggest handicap for major publishing companies is their inability to react to subtle shifts in the marketplace. Strangely, most indie authors actively emulate this mindset, even when they have no reason to. Never get stuck in one mode for too long. If you’re seeing resistance to a certain approach, look at ways to change. You’re writing fiction online here: tradition already says you’re the scum of the Earth. Don’t feel beholden to it for any reason. Do what needs to be done, and be prepared to shift your weight when the time comes.

MCM writes at 1889.ca, and he’s also heavily invested in the future of online fiction. See a full collection of his works here.

Gavin Williams writes No Man An Island and The Surprising Life and Death of Diggory Franklin. In this guest post he talks about how a traditional publishing industry slump presents a unique opportunity for the growth of online fiction.

The illustrious Alexandra Erin, one of the successful online novelists (and by “successful” I mean it’s her day job) recently wrote that the publishing industry is currently tightening its belt in the face of a possible recession. That means there will likely be less sales, less new books, and less new writers. Because in the face of falling sales, the big companies will be unwilling to take risks on new authors until the crisis is past. And, readers will have less money to spend on unknown writers. They’ll want something they’re sure to find entertaining and worth the money, since we’ll all have less of it.

Now, this is where some news anchor would say “This is a good time to PANIC!”

Now, it kind of is. If the rising price of oil destroys our economy and causes a depressed period, that will pretty much suck. I’m not going to sugarcoat that sad fact. So, what chance does the new art form of Online Novels have against a powerhouse industry like Traditional Publishing? Especially in the face of a crisis of global proportions?

Well, because we have an opportunity here. The Chinese symbol for crisis is the same as the one for opportunity: Crisertunity! (Thank you Homer Simpson) If the common reader is going to have trouble finding disposable income to spend on paper books, we can present a great alternative: free online text. It’s environmentally friendly, takes zero manufacturing time, saves trees, and entertains daily.

The Old Way: Traditional Publishing

You know how it goes. A plucky young writer goes into his or her private sanctuary with a typewriter/laptop and punches out the next great American Novel. (I’m Canadian, but we’re talking myths here) It’s a work of genius, with rich drama and realistic characters. The earnest would-be novelist sends it to agents and publishers, writing query letters, hoping for the best.

Form letters come back, saying the manuscript isn’t “right” for their publishing house or agency. Or that the writing is excellent, but that marketing it would be difficult. Perhaps a rewrite? The writer goes back into seclusion, writing like a madman, until it’s finished. Frank Herbert’s “Dune” was rejected 13 times by publishers. James Joyce’s “Dubliners” was rejected 22 times, and then the first run was bought by one person and burned. They had to try again.

Finally, the young writer (probably no longer young) gets an agent and gets published. And then waits for a year while the manuscript is edited and printed, cover art finalized, marketing planned… Until finally, one day there is their book, on a shelf in a store, for the world to find and love.

Readers will spend fifteen, twenty, twenty-five dollars for a paperback. And from there to the neighbourhood of fifty bucks for a hardcover. And that plucky young writer? Well, after the publisher pays the corporate owners, the editors, the publicists, the artists, the printer and the agent, not much is left.

And if a recession closes the publishing world’s doors to everyone but the big names, the bestsellers? You get zero.

The Alternative: Faster, Leaner, Cooler

A new economic model is emerging thanks to the Internet. The Music Industry has already proven it works, and that the culture needs to adapt. Downloads. Why buy a CD with two good songs and ten bad ones, when you can download the two songs you like? Ipods and MP3 players make digital music more convenient than CDs. Some bands are taking this to heart: Radiohead offered some of its music online for free, and fans could leave donations. The whole industry is trying to recreate itself.

Bands are getting fans to help them publish music, instead of turning to big studios. Fans get to feel like part of a community, vote on favourites, comment on albums, and decide who’s worthy of funding. These are exciting times.

Online novelists can benefit from these experiences. Web design gets easier all the time, especially with free alternatives like Wordpress and Blogger. Instead of getting an agent and a publisher, writers can publish their stories themselves, electronically. Instead of waiting a year to see it in print, it can go up right after you finish typing it. Instead of waiting a year for a whole book, readers can have a new chapter every day. They also help edit the book and improve the writing, through comments.

Online novels can go beyond the confines of regular print. Interesting layouts, uploads for artwork, videos and music, links to past chapters or related stories, character profiles, the websites can be designed for interactivity and creativity. Online stories can be a wholly different and engaging experience from the paperback you’re used to.

We don’t have to chop down trees to make paper: we’re environmentally friendly. We don’t have to pay a printer, a publicist, an editor or an agent. We certainly don’t have to pay a fancy publisher in a suit, who makes money for putting their name on the cover and little else. Through reader donations and web advertisements, the only person being paid is the writer themselves.

And fans don’t have to drive to the mall to find a bookstore. They get new chapters in the comfort of their own home. We’re cheap on gas, too!

While the Publishing Industry is busy twiddling its thumbs waiting for Dan Brown to write a lame sequel, or for someone to create the next Harry Potter, we can get out there and experiment. Try new styles, thrill readers, shock audiences, fly without a net. Most online writers do it as a hobby, a sideline. There’s little financial risk. We enjoy writing, it’s an inexpensive hobby. All it takes is pen, paper, and imagination. And, if we’re online, it takes the computer and keyboard we already own. We don’t need employees, manufacturers, stores, overhead, publicists. We just need to type.

For Alexandra Erin, there’s a little more risk involved. It’s her full-time job. But, think of the alternative. You (as a reader) can wait a year for your favourite novelist to publish a book, and then read it in a day, and spend twenty to fifty dollars on it. Or, you could send your favourite online writer a dollar a month. Or five. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but the Internet is huge. If we get lots of online fiction out there, cast a big net, we’ll draw in more audience, and slowly but surely that dollar from one person is one thousand people, or ten thousand… It’s not impossible.

It just takes trying.

Novelr is trying to forge links in the online community to make finding online fiction easier. Alexandra Erin is doing the same with Pages Unbound. Writers like me usually have links on our sites to our friends and favourite stories, so audiences can find new material and expand their horizon.

As I pointed out in my previous article, you get back a lot in return. A new chapter every day or every week, or somewhere in between. The chance to communicate with other fans and the writers themselves. The chance to build communities, and explore new worlds of imagination. There’s a lot to be excited about in online fiction.

The traditional model can sit there, waiting for trouble to pass it by. Meanwhile, we can take the art of writing to a new audience and a whole new level, by being faster, leaner, more creative, and interactive.

Now is not the time to panic. Now is the time to jump in and make the future.

Here’s a list of why Online Novels have an advantage over Traditional Publishing in these leaner, meaner times:

1. The publishing world is making it harder to get published.
2. The online world is constantly growing in audience, and is easy to use.
3. The publishing world compensates agents, editors, publicists, typists, printers and owners, and then the author. It costs a lot of money to prepare and print a book, and it costs readers a fair amount to buy one.
4. The online world compensates the author. And, it’s inexpensive for readers.
5. Traditional publishing is slow. It might be a year after a contract before a book is in print.
6. Online publishing is instantaneous. I wrote this article today.
7. Traditional publishers and agents send you form letters if they don’t like you.
8. Online readers comment directly on your chapters, telling you what they love and hate in equal measure, teaching you to take criticism and how to improve.
9. The publishing world is shrinking down to its favourite best-selling authors and genres. Which means, not you.
   The online world is craving innovation, experimentation, entertainment and fun. Which could be you.

Need I say more?

Gavin Williams writes No Man An Island and The Surprising Life and Death of Diggory Franklin. If you like his work feel free to drop by Pages Unbound and leave a review for him there.

In this guest post Gavin Williams covers the basics of online fiction for beginners to the medium. Read on to find out more about him.

Hey, have you heard? Online fiction is the future!

Okay, maybe not. Online publishing is a non-traditional route for writers, and an emerging art form. Novelr’s creator, Eli, has asked me to share some of my experience as an online writer and reader with the Novelr community, in the interests of helping others who are hoping to start writing, and to facilitate the growth of the online book community.

Who am I? Glad you asked. My name is Gavin Williams, and I currently write “No Man an Island” and “The Surprising Life and Death of Diggory Franklin.” I read a lot of online fiction, and have a background in literature. A lifelong reader, I have a lot of interest in the future of the medium, and I think online writing will be a big part of that. It’s not the whole future, but it’s an intriguing facet.

Traditional publishing and online publishing are two very different mediums, even though their core material is the same: text. The written word. However, the way their text is presented, and the way their audiences interact with these two mediums, make them very different. We’re going to walk through those differences, in the interest of highlighting the strengths of online publishing, and educating writers in how to use these strengths to their benefit.

Part One: The Delivery

Traditional fiction comes to us in paperback and hardcover editions, on paper, usually in a bookstore. I love buying a new book (or getting an old favourite from a library) and then curling up in a chair and reading for hours. It’s a unique experience, as you get comfortable and let your imagination interact with the words on the page to create a world. It’s irreplaceable.

So, why should you read online then? Well, it’s got advantages too. A traditional writer might publish one or two books a year. You wait and wait for it to come, and that’s if you know about it ahead of time. Stephen King spent thirty years on the Dark Tower series, beginning it in college and ending it as a grandfather. J.K. Rowling started her seven book Harry Potter series in 1995, so it took about a decade to write seven novels.

But online fiction can be published every day, you don’t have to wait years or decades. It doles out its story one chapter at a time, but it’s immediate. This immediacy gives readers new material to look forward to, and can connect them deeply with a story while they wait for the next day’s instalment.

Charles Dickens wrote serial fiction, published in newspapers. It was greatly anticipated by the British audience, and connected people as they all eagerly awaited his continuing story. It gave them something to talk about and look forward to.

Online writers can create that same kind of excitement, by having a new chapter up for their waiting audience on a frequent basis. This suits online audiences quite well, as they will read episodes of their favourite stories during work breaks, or in-between checking their email. Short, intriguing chapters are ideal for the casual reader.

Part Two: Interaction

Traditional writers receive fan mail about their latest work. They might attend book signings or conferences. But the average reader never gets to speak to their favourite author.

With online fiction, interaction is built in. Chapters are usually set up to be commented on, and most writers answer their readers. An intimate communal experience develops, with audiences complimenting what they like, complaining about the things they hate, arguing over ideas, speculating on storylines, and then, actually hearing the writer’s two cents. Traditional publishing has nothing quite like it.

Some writers even set up forums for their audience, increasing their interaction and the development of community. Fan art, wikis and encyclopedias all become part of the experience.

Part Three: Structure

This might be the most important difference between online and traditional publishing, and one that writers might not be aware of right away. I certainly wasn’t, and learned it from experience. Now, hopefully that experience will benefit anyone thinking of starting a new story, and make your lives easier.

Originally, “No Man an Island” had a very busy opening scene, with eight separate characters competing for screen time. In a movie that almost wouldn’t matter, the camera would show them all and the story would move along. But for online readers, they couldn’t keep track of all the different names and find interest in the story. They weren’t sure who to care about, and where the story was going.

I had to sit down and analyze why this had happened. I knew plenty of traditional novels with big casts, and never had a problem. Indeed, they were often best-sellers, so audiences in general didn’t mind a big cast of characters. I listened to the comments (directly benefiting from Interaction) and tried again.

This time I wrote a chapter featuring only three characters, and highlighting one in particular. But again there were complaints. There was too much description and not enough action. I analyzed my writing again, and looked at other examples. The Lord of the Rings is one of the best-loved stories of all time, and is full of description. My chapter had less!

But LOTR is not online fiction. I learned something important about the difference between the two mediums. With a traditional book, I can sit for hours and finish it. Or, I can put it down and read more later. But, I know there is more, and that the story is complete. I can be patient with it.

But online writing is designed to be immediate. Audiences get frequent chapters, often weekly or daily. Those chapters need to capture their attention quickly, and give them a reason to come back tomorrow. Otherwise, the audience will go elsewhere. The story isn’t complete, and you can’t sit down with it for hours. Most online readers are taking a fifteen minute break from work, or are in-between checking emails. They need a reason NOW to enjoy your story, not in three pages or another chapter.

“The medium is the message.” With traditional, offline fiction, you know that in a few pages more will happen. So, the busy crowd scene is endurable (and possibly enjoyable) so long as it contributes to plot and the audience knows where it’s going. But online fiction happens one short chapter at a time, leaving people waiting. They want to know something important about your characters in chapter one, something that makes coming back tomorrow worthwhile. And a change in scene and time can look disruptive, because each day is formatted like the one before. In a chapter book, you have the transition of the blank page and a big bold caption: Chapter Two!

My book gets more interesting to online readers as they go on, because I learned to create deliberate snapshots of action — interesting in themselves, complete enough in themselves, leading the reader on to the next day with small cliff-hangers or unanswered questions. I applied that theory to the beginning, making an active scene focus on one or two characters with the others relegated to the background. I brought them in bit by bit in the next few chapters, expanding their roles while keeping the story moving. I relegated slower chapters into Bonus Story territory, to keep the pacing faster but to also give readers more depth to investigate when they had time. And feedback tells me it’s working.

I think the way to sell online fiction is to work with its unique features. Interactivity and speed of Delivery. But it’s as an alternative experience to offline fiction, not a competition with it. Readers read. I’m not giving up print novels for the internet, but I’m also not going to stop enjoying reading a new chapter every day and then sharing comments with the author directly. Both are satisfying.

But hopefully my experience will make your online story that much better. All the best, and keep reading!

Gavin Williams writes No Man An Island and The Surprising Life and Death of Diggory Franklin. If you like his work feel free to drop by Pages Unbound and leave a review for him there.

This guest post is written by M. Alan Thomas II (call him Alan) a.k.a CrazyDreamer of Critical Mass. Critical Mass is a blog that focuses on the advancement of quality in webfiction. It rocks. Alan also has a public first draft of fantasy webfiction called Wet Hero. In this guest post he outlines and details four principles of community.

Rule #1: Acknowledge your membership.

If you are reading this, then you are probably part of the blooking community or a closely-related one. A community is made up of a lot of things, but one of the most important is simply a recognition by its membership they belong to it. If enough people say “I am part of the X community,” then the X community exists. What’s more, not only is there strength in numbers, but the more people who acknowledge their membership in the community, the more visibility the community has and the more likely it is that someone who is involved around the edges will realize that the community is one of their interests and will want to become more involved.

Rule #1 is fairly simple, but it enhances everything that follows.

Rule #2: Be involved.

Membership in a community is more than filling out a form; it means paying your dues. Not monetary dues, but involvement. It’s like being in a social relationship: According to some sociologists, a relationship begins when there is an awareness of being observed. In other words, it begins when you and the other person are both able to be affected by the other (because you both observe the other) and acknowledge that fact (Rule #1). In the case of an online community, this requires that you do something for another member of the community to notice.

Eli will have stuck some sort of answer to the question “Who is this strange person writing on Novelr?” at the top of this post. I presume that it mentions my own blog on the subject of webfiction[1], Critical Mass. Hopefully other members of the webfiction community notice my contributions there, particularly after reading this post. (Hey, guest posts are good, free advertising. I never said that being part of a community had to be altruistic!) If you don’t want to run your own blog—and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t—a guest post can add a new topic to the core conversation or develop an argument at length with far more prominence and ease of commenting than a comment to someone else’s post can. Whether or not you have the time or desire to write a guest post, you can and should write public comments, e-mail other members of the community, and/or otherwise make a nuisance of yourself add your thoughts to the mix.

Also, act on what you read. It doesn’t matter how good an idea is if nobody acts on it. Help out with community projects. (For example, the Electronic Literature Organization’s.) Even if it doesn’t apply to you, tell other people about it. Write a quick synopsis of it on your own site or e-mail it to your friends. Spread the word. By doing so, you will not only help advance the state of the art, you might even convince some others that they should get involved.

Rule #2 is really what makes a community a community; everything else is just a recommendation.

Rule #3: Find an unoccupied niche and stick to it.

Collorary to Rule #3: When something fits another site’s niche better than your own site’s, take it there.

You may be wondering why I am writing this as a guest post rather than putting it on my own site. Besides the free advertising, I am publishing this post here because it doesn’t fit either the theme or the mission of my own site; my site is designed to promote critical thought about, enable scholarly acceptance of, and enhance the state of the art in webfiction, not to write up rules for creating communities online. Nobody else appeared to be attempting those goals in that manner, so I decided to. Similarly, because nobody else had a reviews site that worked as well as Pages Unbound does, Alexandra Erin started one. And so on. We each fill our niche, and each niche is an unfulfilled want or need of the community. This post, a post talking about community, did not fit my site’s niche, but it does fit Novelr’s. Novelr is, among other things, where I come to talk about community.[2] Division of content is necessary firstly because people subscribe to a site to read one kind of content and may be turned off by another (or at least not want to dig through it) and secondly because sites are like words: when two of them become indistinguishable, one of them eventually dies.

Rule #3 helps you take advantage of the long tail, among other things.

Rule #4: Create sorted, trimmed, and prioritized links.

Of course, guest posts and niches are not the only things necessary for a community. A community requires people. People require filters, even if they’re just other people. Online, these filters often take the form of links. The problem here is that links are sometimes badly sorted or prioritized. For example, I have seen blogs where the blogroll exceeds the length of most of the posts. This is unlikely to make anyone want to browse it. The links may be categorized, but the categories each include so many sites that one suspects that they cannot all be of the highest quality. For my part, I have two link categories with five links: two to other relevant sites of mine and three to sites that I think are important parts of the community or discussion. I would hope that stories make an effort to separate their links into the community, other stories, personal interests, and so on and to appropriately emphasize quality sites. Certainly I would expect someone to direct others to key sites in a community if they consider themselves a member of it.

Rule #4 really applies to anyone with a website, but it’s extra-important for communities.

Footnotes

[1]“Webfiction” is the term that I prefer for serialized fiction that is adapted to its online medium.

[2]Perhaps more importantly, it is also an excellent source for information on sites, articles, and other things that I wouldn’t have heard of otherwise, and its synopses and analyses are first-rate, telling me everything that I need to know about and suggesting everything that I should think about a variety of posts and articles elsewhere that I don’t have the time or inclination to find and read for myself.

Alan’s blog, Critical Mass, has three aims. These are: firstly, to promote webfiction; secondly, to improve the state of the art by holding webfiction to a high critical standard; and, thirdly, to provide a filtering resource. He has reviews, editorials, and articles up for offer, so pop by for a fix, won’t you?

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.

Simply put, I believe the problem is badly overstated and that we would be better served by simply trying to attract more readers to the medium in the first place.

No, I don’t dispute the basic premise that there’s more bad stuff than there is good stuff, but as in most cases, I believe we can learn a lot from looking at webcomics … a medium which, when it was new, was predicted to fail for a lot of the same reasons we’re supposedly also doomed: “Who’s going to want to read comics off a screen?”, “There’s no standards, no central authority, and no barriers to entry.”, and the all-important “Who has time to sort through the dross?”

And yet here we are, years down the road and … despite the barriers to entry actually managing to sink lower and lower through wide availability of off-the-shelf content management software, free comic-centric hosts, widely available tools for screen capture and clip art comics… high-quality webcomics have actually managed to become big business, and good webcomics manage to attract large followings and make their creators some money.

How have they managed this, when it seems as though there’s more and more unquestionably crappy comics on the net every day?

Very simply, what we might call the “bottom-rung” comics don’t have any hope of competing with the quality ones, so what actually happens is that only crap gets lost among the crap… gems shine through.

This happens because by and large, people are not only capable of “filtering” for themselves, but they do so gladly… both as individuals and as an ad hoc community, as they exchange links with each other on forums, through e-mails, etc.

Look at these words: “surf”, “browse”… the adoption of those words to describe internet use wasn’t accidental. They’re descriptive. People surf through sites like they channel surf on TV. They browse through collections of links, or sites like YouTube, Digg, and even Wikipedia, the same way one might browse the stacks at the local library.

Now, I fully admit that if you put the question to any of these people as, “Hey! How’d you like to spend an hour looking at stuff thrown up by random people with no qualifications in the hopes that you’d find one thing that wasn’t total crap and which would make the whole thing worthwhile?” the answer you’d get would probably be something like “Um… no.”

That’s just common sense, right?

Yeah, well, they’d say “Um… no.”… and then… they’d go right back to their web surfing, an activity that consists mostly of doing just that.

The simple truth behind this all is that if you’re making a webcomic or writing something a long-form piece of web literature, the answer to the seemingly all-important “Who has time…?” question is surprisingly simple: your target audience does.

After all, who even has time to sit in front of a computer screen and read stuff in the first place?

Users With Too Much Time

Here’s a little example: when I first launched my current flagship story, Tales of MU, I posted it on Livejournal… mostly as an experiment in the marketing advantages of doing so. One such advantage is that people would subscribe to the story by “friending” me, and this allowed me to view the profile and interests of a large segment of my readers. Even now, I can still track back hits from Livejournal users who are following my RSS feed.

Do you know what I have learned from this impromptu bit of market research?

A surprisingly large number of my readers like to knit… or crochet… or do needlepoint. Now, if you’ve never read my stories, I will tell you right off the bat: they are not heavy on the yarncore.

So, what exactly is up with this odd statistical anomaly?

To paraphrase one reader on why she prefers online serials, “You ever try to read a book and crochet at the same time?” These are people with time on their hands and hobbies that keep them sitting in one place for long periods of time. Forget all the rhetoric about how much reading on a screen sucks: a story which appears “heads up and hands free”, scrollable at the touch of a finger, is perfect for a reader who’s involved in this kind of handicraft.

This isn’t to suggest that the future of online literature is entirely in the hands of the arts-and-crafts set… rather, it’s in the hands of people with time on their hands and access to the internet.

How about bored office workers in a business place with lax computer use policies (or lax enforcement?)

How about students who always finish their assigned work fifteen minutes into the class period and then have forty-five minutes of free internet use to fill?

How about insomniacs?

Now, I can already hear rebuttals forming about other, better ways to spend that time… because I’ve had this conversation before… and tellingly, always with other writers. This leads me to what is the central point which I think we as a community need to grasp if we want to succeed in reaching a wider audience, as individuals and as a community: call it the WANT principle.

We Are Not Typical.

Do you feel lonely when you have nobody to talk to? Do you feel at a loose end when you’re left to your own devices? Do you feel neglected when you’re all alone at a table in a lunch room? Do you feel bored when there’s no work to be done?

If you’re a writer, the answer is probably “no”… or at least, not to the same extent as somebody who isn’t a writer. Writers as a group are imaginative, driven to create, and capable of entertaining themselves.

Writers also likely work a full-time job on top of writing, which leads us to set a higher premium than most people on our free time and the attention we’ll give to some new entertainment.

For these reasons and more, we are exactly the last group whose habits and proclivities should be considered when we’re trying to figure out how to connect with a larger readership.

The “filter” provided by something like a review site would provide a valuable service for people who are discriminating in how they spend their free time, but nobody is ever going to achieve an appreciable level of success by catering exclusively to the narrow pool of people who feel their time is well-spent reading a story off a screen but aren’t willing to spend it idly browsing and randomly surfing… people who, in short, are already passionate about web literature.

Incidentally, these are also the only people likely to be reading the review site in the first place. Such a site would only really be useful to people who’ve already got a foot in the door… it would be a very rare reader who simply up and chose to start reading web lit, sought out a review site, and then proceeded to make an informed decision about which story to begin with.

As the community of web lit readers grows, trusted reviewers will take their place within it as they have done for webcomics, as will such things as topsites and various other forms of link networks… but it is possible and even easy to overestimate the necessity of such things. The community will grow on the strength of its ability to attract new readers, and this will be accomplished not by convincing discerning skeptics that yes, we do have a way of separating the wheat from the chaff for them!, but by getting the internet-surfing public at large to read our stories in the first place.

The best way to accomplish this is for each of us to put ourselves in the path of “casual clicks” of people who do have time to burn… I could (and probably will) write a whole separate post on just how that is best accomplished, but for now I will just say that this – and not any idea of “filtering” – is the true key to success, for any of us as individuals and for all of us as a medium.

Look at webcomics. Look at^[1] fan fiction and erotic fiction, which are probably the two biggest categories of prose stories on the web both in terms of amount of content and number of readers… the vast majority of examples of these that you can find are pretty abysmal, but people keep reading them anyway, because they know there’s some good ones… and when they find them, they are so overjoyed that they plug, they praise, they post links… and in short order, an internet star is born.

It’s not an immediate process… it’s not even an automatic one… but if your masterpiece hasn’t found an audience yet, I can promise you that it isn’t because a bunch of lesser works are somehow getting in the
way. The internet doesn’t work like that. That besides, the public awareness of what we are doing is so low that even the crappiest of crappy stories effectively raises our profile as a whole and will likely succeed in making people hungry for something better. If we for some reason did try to systematically exclude the most amateurish offerings, we would only succeed in making it harder for readers to graduate from such works to more professional ones.

In the end, the vast majority of people will judge your work for themselves… so you can best serve yourself and the medium by giving the vast majority of people a chance to do so. Put yourself out there, in other words. Advertise. Exchange links. Form an alliance, or collective, or whatever, with other like-minded, talented authors. Encourage your readers to share the link… people can be surprisingly shy about this, if you don’t give them explicit permission and an occasional prod.

Above all, don’t break a sweat over how much “dross” there is out there… don’t worry that there’s nobody “trusted” or “notable” around to recommend you (though by all means, welcome all the plugs you can honestly come by)… in short, don’t worry that nobody is filtering. Our critics within the traditional media and assorted erudite twits will be decrying the rise of “amateurism” on the net for decades to come, but it will not hurt us any.

^1.(The phrase “look at” is used here in a purely rhetorical fashion. I don’t recommend anybody actually “looks at” these categories of fiction on the internet, and I furthermore disclaim all responsibility for the health and sanity of anybody who does.)

Alexandra Erin’s flagship story, Tales Of MU, can be found here. There’s a review of it on Novelr, but this isn’t expected to draw in many new readers to her already fanatical fanbase. Just click the link and read, won’t you?

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.

The usual rationale for professional editing is to make your work into ‘the best book possible’. This reminds me of taste tests to find the best chocolate ice cream: some like it sweet, some creamy, some filled with rough chunks of chocolate, some with a hint of bitter mocha. And what about the chef who decides to add a dash of hot pepper? Every editor will find something to ‘fix’ in your work, but I prefer to do the fixing myself. And no work is ever finished, just set aside. If I weren’t involved in a new novel, I’d be very tempted to tear Mortal Ghost apart and rewrite it from the foundations up.

I suppose you could say I’m not interested in producing a book, but in writing one: learning all that I can learn of technique – how the very best writers use the fundamentals – in order simultaneously to exploit and break free of their mastery. The questions which interest me are all about exploration. In effect, the only authentic editing is self-editing. I don’t care to be bound by the expectations of the marketplace, nor the conventions of a particular readership. How can I doubt that my work is flawed? It will always be flawed, for the job of the artist is to set themself ever newer, harder, more complex challenges.

Does this mean that I pay no attention to criticism? Not at all. I listen very carefully, even obsess about suggestions, and welcome incisive analysis. In the end, though, there is only learning by doing: in fact, learning by failing. And publishing online affords me that wonderful and absolutely essential freedom to fail.

L. Lee Lowe’s YA Fantasy Novel Mortal Ghost can be found here. She also blogs about writing at lowebrow.

My Work Over Yours

It’s a labyrinth out there, and you have to be diligent about searching out e-fiction. I’m grateful to the fiction bloggers who have blogrolls listing other sites of note. I realize that I should add one to my blog. I have lots to learn about this new medium. An active community of e-fiction writers could offer dialogue, information sharing, learning and the promotion of our own work.

I think that last point is key.

Here’s one problem: I am more interested in my work than I am in yours. So I’m not too keen on reading your fiction. It might be bad or boring and a chore. It could be better than my writing, which could be hugely depressing. I want ME to become rich and famous or at least published by a traditional publisher so my father can finally see a book of mine in a bookstore and feel that what I’ve been spending my life at is finally showing results he can be proud of.

Not that I care what my father thinks.

I can also sense people agreeing with me that the time I spend on your work is time I’m not spending on my work.

Another problem is that writing is an introverted activity. Fiction writers probably tend to be more introverted than non-fiction writers. Supporting a community is an extroverted activity.

We have to get over this. We have to make the time and effort or we’re writing, posting blogs and publishing our work in isolation.

Last year, when I began my experiment of posting Stonyfields in blog form, I knew that I couldn’t simply post it and you would come. I knew I would have to find others’ work, comment on it, add to blog conversations, get involved. It was hard to find appropriate sites. Only with persistence and by trial and error did I discover some of the “bright lights” of e-fiction.

Corporate copywriters and freelance writers have more active and visible blog communities. I follow their blogs as well because I earn my living doing their kind of writing. My lifetime fiction income has covered perhaps one mortgage payment. But non-fiction writers – and even some hard-copy fiction writers are chattier, referring to each others’ blogs and works and promoting themselves.

The Question:

If WE don’t support and promote online fiction, who will? Are we waiting and hoping for traditional publishers to discover us and for academics to analyse our work as pioneering efforts on the Internet? Well, perhaps we are, but we can increase the chances by being the first to recognize what we’re doing.

We’re making literary history. Novel means new, after all, and after a few hundred years of the development of the novel, there seems to be very little that’s really new about novels. Online publishing, self publishing with the option of public comments on small sections of our work, is really novel, innovative, progressive, unknown territory. And that’s just for starters. There are eye-popping possibilities with online fiction that need to be explored.

We’re at a new frontier and we can explore and develop it endlessly. I believe we’ll push the boundaries further if we have an energetic community supporting, sharing, teaching and appreciating our efforts.

What’s your vision of community?

Read more of Gloria Hildebrandt’s work at Orchard House Communications.

You’re a writer. Something inside you is tugging at your creative strings, telling you that publishing fiction on the internet is the way to go for you. Maybe you’ll even publish it in paperback via Lulu and dish some copies out to friends and family and offer it up for sale on Amazon. There are many reasons to blog your creative output:

1. Get it out there
2. Following on from 1, hopefully someone will read it
3. Following on from 2, hopefully someone will like it and want to read more
4. Feedback
5. Standard publishing routes haven’t worked for you
6. An experiment

As the writer who decided to blog my first novel, all six points are true for me to a certain degree, but I’ve realised the most important thing about being an online writer is: you have to write! It may seem obvious but if you’re going to blog your work and offer up subscription services (e.g. www.feedburner.com) then you’d better have a beginning, middle and end of your novel.

Searching the internet for online novels, blooks, blog novels or whatever they’re called this week reveals a raft of half-finished tales. Blog posts come thick and fast up to a point and they stop without warning, leaving the readers hanging. Online fiction is a niche market with potential but if it’s going to grow, the readers out there need to be able to trust the writers to get them from the beginning to the end of the story.

(Reader) Trust Matters

As an online writer, how can you guarantee you’ll be able to go this and retain the trust of readers that the next chapter will be published? There are two ways:

1. Set yourself a strict writing and publishing timetable and stick to it
2. Write the whole damn thing before publishing chapter 1

Here’s the bad news: neither approach is easy and will take away a lot of your time. Setting yourself a writing/publishing timetable means that you have to manage it around the rest of your life. If you have to write a chapter before you can publish it, your readers may have to wait for your writer’s block to go away before they get their latest instalment and you know what? They’re only going to wait so long…

Writing the whole novel first is a major investment of time in advance of publishing. There’s a good chance your finished work will be more polished but you’re effectively ‘off the grid’ for the whole time.

Coming Clean

There is, however, a third approach: come clean from day one and tell your readers your writing is an experiment. If they know you’re making it up as you go along then they can feel like they’re part of the experiment. If not, they’re only going to wait so long for the next chapter…

So what’s my conclusion? You have to find a way to guarantee the next chapter will be published. You can do this whichever way works best for you but even if you’ve only got one reader, make sure you give them their next instalment. Word of mouth is likely to be the most effective part of your marketing campaign. After all, you wouldn’t like to start reading a book, find out you like it then turn the page to find it blank, would you?

Scott McKenzie is the author of Rebirth, which is being published online at http://rebirthnovel.blogspot.com. He wrote the whole damn thing first and is currently working on the sequel.