I wasn’t going to blog on Novelr until the redesign was complete, but recent unhappy events in the publishing industry turned out to be too big for even this non-conventional litblog to ignore.

The outpouring of negativity and anger, of grief and beard-pulling the past two weeks, and over ‘Black Wednesday’, have been pretty depressing to read at best. Bookstore chains suffered: Borders, for instance, posted losses of $175.4 million, or $2.90 per share, compared with $161.1 million, or $2.74 per share in the same quarter of last year. There have been too many reports of the various layoffs and troubles plaguing agencies and publishers; one Salon.com article has a byline that reads, almost gleefully, “The economic news couldn’t be worse for the book industry. Now insiders are asking how literature will survive.”

I’m not going to comment on ‘Black Wednesday’ itself, because writers greater than me have blogged and dissected and given us their collective takes on what this means for culture, for writers, and for the reading public in general (in a nutshell: culture will survive, writers will write, and the reading public will be able to find whatever book they want in bookstores because nothing has been sold out). I prefer to talk about the changes the publishing industry are taking to deal with their problems. The good news? They’re turning to the Internet.

There seems to be growing evidence that publishers are moving, and moving with focused intent, onto the web. There are no guarantees, and there certainly aren’t any solid business models for them to latch onto, but God they’re trying. Let me toss you a personal example: sometime in the middle of this year Tor launched a supersite. I was studying for exams at the moment, and I had a short break. So I checked it out.

I absolutely loved it. I spent about 3 hours on the site, reading all the fantastic short stories and checking out the related ‘how we wrote and produced the original art that went along with that’ blog articles and the forum posts and the author-reader interaction. You see, Tor got a whole bunch of heavyweight writers in their stable and somehow got them active in the community section of the site, along with the short stories and the original art. My favourite is Steven Gould’s Shade, a short story set in the Jumper universe he created.

There are many more examples: Harper Collins recently announced that they’d be putting ebooks into the Nintendo DS; Penguin USA have released Penguin 2.0 (which are a collection of book-related apps to computers and (get this) mobile phones), plus Macmillian (click that link, it leads to Macmillian’s digital lit branch; totally cool) are pushing for their Stanza reader for the iPhone. And on an off-note: an independent designer has packaged The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the (copyright-free) short story behind the upcoming movie, as an iPhone app, for $0.99.

I’m pretty certain that all this movement is good news for the Blooking community. There might be overcrowding, and jostling, where before we had the whole net to ourselves, but I suppose that comes with the turf. A rising tide raises all ships, independent producers included. And while the recession may suck for the time being, I’d like to point out, with cautious optimism, that sometimes the worst of times provide the most unbelievable of opportunities.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

So far I’ve been very, very impressed with the way Penguin has been doing We Tell Stories. I thought week one was a nifty idea, presenting a narrative on Google Maps, but it wasn’t something mind-blowing because I’d seen it done on a blog before. My lack of faith was exposed two weeks later, with week 2 and week 3’s stories. Both blew me away. Here’s a look at the various forms We Tell Stories has been done in the past few weeks.

Week One’s story is a thriller built around Google Maps. This presentation style allows Charles Cumming the freedom to dispense with lengthy setting description and focus on the action. It works. I found myself impatiently watching the main character moving from point to point on the map, and the snappy, sparse narrative kept me glued to my seat. There’s a plus side to all of this: Google Maps has provided Cumming with a visual element and an easy level of realism not available to normal books. I could see how the main character escapes from the police in a dinghy, I could tell how far away the locations were from each other, I could even follow the character on a (very lengthy) train ride around London. Promising stuff, this. Technology used: Ajax, the Google Maps API, lots and lots of javascript.Week Two is done in a medium familiar to Novelr: blogs and twitter. Nothing particularly revolutionary going on here - both the blogs had cookie cutter templates and weren’t very enjoyable to read, and the story wasn’t good. But the interesting thing about these two blogs were the way the characters interacted with the readers. Some twitter posts were made in response to reader questions, and comments were answered in the blogs, in character. Since Lisa (the daughter) went missing in the middle of the story we had a few readers helpfully pointing out her blog and giving suggestions as to where to look for her … which they responded to. Technology used: Twitter, Wordpress and Livejournal.

It appears so. The only blook publisher to have regularly put out blooks of quality seems to liquidating. The Telegraph reports HarperCollins to be the frontrunner in the bid for The Friday Project’s assets, while a Guardian article entitled ‘Industry majors seek option on ailing ‘blook’ publisher list‘ reports Random House has joined HarperCollins in talks regarding TFP.

“The group now has insufficient funds to continue to trade and the directors have a responsibility not to allow the group to incur further liabilities where there is significant uncertainty about the group’s ability to meet their liabilities as they fall due,” said Friday Project Media plc.

I’ve blogged about my experience with TFP, and I must say the feeling towards the company on the ground has been largely positive. Its model of publishing has been largely traditional, the only difference being its source material - which is from the Internet. Whatever happens, whoever succeeds in buying TFP’s list … one thing is clear: there will be no more new media publishers of TFP’s pedigree.

It is believed that HarperCollins intends to buy publishing rights to The Friday Project’s book titles. It also plans to use the company’s expertise in new media publishing to bolster its existing new media operations.

Which is a pity.

It’s funny what you can find in your local papers if you look hard enough. I flipped through the Technology section of The Star yesterday and was surprised to find a Reuters piece on how social networks are helping publishers sell books.

Oh no … more Web 2.0 hype.

Faced with the challenge of marketing a book with a vulgarity in the title, publisher Rick Wolff turned to Internet blogs and social networking sites to spread the word about his latest business book.

Bookstores were scared of The No A**hole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, so Rick Wolff sent emails by the bulkload to bloggers and readers.

There apparently is some serious regard for the power of the Internet: Wolff was invited to talk at a panel discussion on ‘the Internet in publishing’ at the BookExpo America trade fair. I’m regarding this as an early toe-dip into the uncharted waters of marketing books on the Internet … what I’m afraid of is that the market would be so saturated with bloggers screaming “read this book, read this book!”

But there are some interesting concepts mentioned by the article: for instance - Harper Collins Children’s Books used Myspace to promote a competition for teenagers to write successive chapters of a novella, which was then voted on by site visitors as the book progressed.

Oh, and apparently Harper Collins is a 26 year old male in Myspace.

I’m not entirely comfortable with publishers making headway into the online review sphere (remember that article about book reviewers being out of print?) - but then again there raises the question of just how influential are bloggers in selling books? I’m reminded uncomfortably of an annonymous comment in Critical Mass:

I find it interesting that a review of a book in the Sunday NY Times is often much more positive than a review of the same book in the Times week day arts section. Many reviews today sound like marketing instruments and you get the feeling, at least with respect to books from well-known authors, with well-connected publicists, that the reviewers are “bought off” or at least have bought into the hype. As a result, I am more likely to pay attention to a review of a book by an obscure author than of a Cormac McCarthy, a Jonathan Safran Forer etc.

One possible problem? Publishers using PayPerPost to get you to review their books. I shudder at the thought of that.

PS: the article mentions Shelfari, and states that 76% of users there would but their next book from site recommendations. Really now? We’ll see.

Google organized Unbound sometime ago (the video is dated 8th March), and I thought I should share it over here - some of the snippets of speeches, especially Cory Doctorow’s and Seth Godin’s were particularly interesting. Oh, and watch for this line:

… where we discovered that the more content we put up on our own website; the more content we gave away the more books we sold.