I’ve always struggled to put the (often dark) joy of reading your books into words. You aren’t as easy to describe as some of the other authors: “Do you read Diana Wynn Jones?” I’d ask my friends, in my childhood, and they’d shake their heads. “Well go read her. Go read the Chrestomanci series.” But they wouldn’t.

Your books, I realize, aren’t the teenage wildfires that the Hunger Games or the Twilight books are. They’re … different. Darker. Witty. More realistic, I feel. More difficult, too.

Tor.com had a call for letters late last year, when the editors found out that you stopped chemo. I considered sending a letter. I never did, and I regret that now.

I realize – in the wake of your passing – that I loved your books more fiercely than I did any other writer; if Stephanie Mayer or Rowling died I wouldn’t have felt as terrible as when Gaiman reported your death.

I found my first Chrestomanci book when I was 11; in the children’s section of the Sarawak Club library. It was on a bottom shelf by the large picture-windows facing the hallway, all of them HarperCollins reprints of your catalog. I didn’t borrow any other writer for quite a bit after my discovery. My sister and I fought over the only copy of Howl’s Moving Castle.

When the Sarawak Club burned down my mind leapt, almost immediately, to their collection of your books.

In my first semester in NUS, shortly after finishing Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, I took a chance and searched for your name in the NUS library’s cataloging system. There were only three books of yours in the catalog that I’d not read. I finished all three in three days, during the reading week, procrastinating when I should’ve been studying for my theatre exam.

I gave my youngest sister a copy of Wilkin’s Tooth as a 12th birthday present. It’s lost now, and I feel a little bad about that.

I don’t really know how to talk about your writing. I suppose I should, but I can’t. Too many layers. Cruel protagonists and unbelieving parents. Sulky dragons and self-absorbed enchanters. Broken marriages and young, vain lovers. I feel a bit better knowing that bits of you live on in writers like Neil Gaiman (whom you dedicated Hexwood to, how dare he!), John Scalzi, and Rowling (though she has not admitted it!).

I miss you already.

Rest in peace, Diana Wynn Jones. I promise you – when I have kids, your books will be amongst the first they read. Thank you for such a wonderful childhood.

PS: More tributes here, here and here. In particular, I loved this bit by Emma Bull:

She was passionate about what children want and deserve from their literature. Adults would approach her at signings, wanting to know why she wrote such difficult books. In one case, when a woman protested, the woman’s young son spoke up and assured Diana, “Don’t worry. I understood it.”

She had such faith in us.

Speaking for myself, my ‘one thing or another’ has been splitting my time between school work and programming for Pandamian. A funny thing I’ve found out about programming: when I write code, I can’t write English. And vice versa. And I’m rather amazed at all the programmer-writers out there. How do they context-switch so easily? I’ll have to wait some more to figure that out.

Thoughts on Pandamian

We’ve been at it for close to 6 months now, and I want to be honest about what we’re currently doing. And the truth is that we’re in pretty bad shape. We were adding features and removing bugs all the way right up to December, and then Christmas happened and we all stopped working. Not a good idea – it’s the new year now, and a new semester, and everyone’s work-loads are off the charts.

But here’s the tricky thing about building a consumer-facing product: build too little features and you risk fizzling out on launch-day; build too many features and you risk wasting time and energy on the wrong things. I sometimes wish I can tell where that thin line is, so we could stop programming and just launch.

As it stands, Pandamian has only got a small core of features worth talking about. We’ve got ebook conversion, though it’s about 80% done, and with the odd bug here and there. And we’ve got simple chapter posting, editing, deleting, comments, a built-for-readability front-end design, and some basic comment moderation.

That doesn’t sound exciting now, does it?

It doesn’t, and here’s another thing I’ve discovered about software development: each and every one of those features is a little Pandora’s box of Alice’s rabbit holes in and of itself (description courtesy of Jason Kottke). It is easy to do a basic version of editing, posting, deleting and comments, but if you don’t want things to break for an average user, then you’ve got to think about a whole bunch of other problems.

For example: your user has lost a password. You’ll have to regenerate a key and store it someplace so the user can get it once he’s verified. And you have to send an email to verify aforementioned user. And when you send out an email, you have to worry about being marked as spam. Which means that you have to set up Reverse PTR records for your server, and then you have to configure DomainKeys Identified Mail in your DNS, and then you have to verify it by sending test email to either a dummy GMail account, or to a Port25 email verifier. Every single step of which may take hours, each.

And remember: all this is to make sure your users don’t ever lose their passwords, something they probably never even think about. I’m not making this up, I tell you.

Thoughts on open source

Of course, we’re not over-engineering every feature right now. Just the ones that are most important. Some things we’re leaving for later, which is supposed to be the case when you’re building a web product today – the relevant mantra being ‘build fast, launch fast, fail fast. Rinse and repeat’.

But one thing that’s come up more often than not is this idea of going open source. Why not? people say, You’ll get a whole bunch of other developers ready to contribute to your project.

And they’re right, of course. I’m a big believer in open source, not the least because there are significant advantages to the model (plus it’s very often win-win-win). So when people first began asking me about it, I was taken off-guard. I hadn’t considered the possibility. No-one in Pandamian had. And now I’m wondering if it makes sense.

The problem with releasing Pandamian as open source is that it’s all written in Python. And that means you can’t just run the software on any old host. We chose Python because Yipeng, my co-founder, wanted to learn the language. And also because it’s beautiful. (Why or how a programming language can be beautiful … let’s not go there in this post, okay?)

I’d never considered this before, but I think that if you want a successful, widely-used installable web app, it has to be written in PHP. WordPress is written in PHP, as is Drupal, and bbPress. And this makes sense, because most hosts run PHP with a MySQL backend out of the box, and it isn’t too difficult for a non-technical person to install and use a PHP app.

But I don’t like PHP. Even when I’m hacking up a WordPress theme I write all these variable names with a dollar sign in front of them and $I $feel $like $curling $up $in $a $corner $to $cry.

The one good thing Python would give us, should we go open source, is that we’d probably get more interest from fellow programmers. But ask a normal user to install and run our software and he’d probably give up. Which isn’t what we intended, of course. The whole idea of building Pandamian in the first place was to allow writers the ability to do this digital publishing thing with as minimal fuss as possible. Ideally, without having to look at a single line of code.

Would we release an open source version of Pandamian in the future? Maybe. Would we recommend that someone else do so? Oh yes, indeed. I talked to Hugh McGuire of BookOven over the Christmas holidays, and am happy to report that he and his team are currently building an open source version of what we’re doing. That makes him a competitor, but it also makes him a enabler in this field. And God knows we need as many enablers in publishing right now.

On the Upcoming Launch

We’ve decided that we’re going to launch in February, whether we like or not. And that means polishing up every interface screen in our software, perfecting that ebook conversion feature, and squashing all our bugs. I’m not sure if what we’re building is the right thing, but I hope that releasing this early, first-iteration version of Pandamian would give us some idea of what to build next. As usual, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. So create.

Here’s a plan, and I’d love for you to hear me out: I want to get web fiction mentioned in the New York Times, in the space of a year.

No, scratch that. I will get web fiction mentioned in the New York Times, in the space of a year.

Maybe it’ll be on an NYT blog. Maybe not. I’ll leave this deliberately ambiguous because the goal in itself is big enough, and audacious enough to try to attempt – and when it’s done, I’ll write about it on Novelr. The results? We get publicity, we get attention, and – most importantly, we’d have proven to everyone in the Web Fiction community who wants to continue this effort – that anything, marketing wise – is possible, and that you should try. You should do it, you should talk to people, you should change things.

Right now.

What This Has To Do With The Web Fiction Community

I want to talk about a disease that has settled amongst us, as a community of writers. I don’t mean this as a bad thing. When I say that this is bad, I mean it in the same sort of way someone would say that being laid-back and relaxed (and maybe lazy) is okay, but being active is so, so much better.

And that disease begin with a question: what have we done in the past couple of months, in the past two years? What have we done that has fundamentally changed the way web fiction is read, the way it is written?

The answer: very little. And we have all had a part to play in this.

I believe that we have lost our culture of communal creation. We have stopped building things that make web fiction better for ourselves.

Things weren’t always this way. In the not-too-distant past we had some culture of creation. Quite a bit of it happened here at Novelr. And I know what you’re thinking – you’re probably saying that I’m biased this way, because I created Novelr. But I’m not. I’m not kidding when I say that the community – once clustered around this blog – got things done; I had to learn this the hard way.

The Nature of Getting Things Done

Ideas are a dime a dozen on Novelr. They always have been, and they always will be. There have been a crazy number of ideas that have graced the front page of this site for years now – many of them made as observations: ideas for publishing-related startups, ideas for community sites, ideas that writers can adopt in their writing, immediately. They come naturally from Novelr’s job of observing patterns in the digital publishing sphere, and then simplifying that for the use of any writer who so wishes to write and publish web fiction.

And yet – despite this free giving-away of ideas, much like a painter giving away his canvases on the street, screaming, ‘Paint! Paint!’ – nothing ever got done. Nothing sparked. I didn’t realize this, of course. I was too busy chattering away.

One day, I announced that I was going to build a ‘filter for online fiction’. I wrote this without realizing what this meant. Support poured into the comments section of the post. A few months after, we released the Web Fiction Guide. Chris Poirier did most of the work, a bunch of writers and designers and editors hopped on board to help, and we’re still plugging away at it. The point I’m trying to make here is that things only started moving when I announced my plans to do something.

Today, I’m going to do something similar. I want to get web fiction into the New York Times, in a year, by gum. And I’ll do it because getting mainstream press coverage will benefit everyone in this community, whether they had a hand in it or not.

Attitude

But … do you see what I just did? I announced that I was going to do something. I took ownership of a cause. And ownership is important if you want to get things done.

There are three things that I want to examine about community, today. The first is an attitude of ownership. This attitude of ‘I’m going to do this, it would be nice if you’d help me, but I’m going to do it anyway’ – this is a powerful idea, one that has been missing from ours for far too long.

Take a look at this WebLit.us thread, for instance. The central idea is great: get writers to pool their resources together, and then use those resources to market a central gateway for web fiction. It could’ve been great. It could’ve also been a flop. But we won’t know until we’ve tried, right? We can’t know until we’ve tried.

But then – people argued against Becka, the original poster. The debate went on for 22 posts and then … nothing happens. What went wrong?

What went wrong was that nobody took ownership of the idea. Nobody said: “I’m in charge of this, I’m going to do this now – because I think it’s going to help everyone. And if you want to help me, that’s cool. And if you don’t, well never mind then. I’m going to do it, let’s see if it works.”

People were waiting for permission. Things don’t get done when you wait for permission. Things get done when people step in and (to quote a wise man) ‘be the change they want to see in the world’. I know this, because I’ve started it before, by accident. And the result was the collective creation of the Web Fiction Guide.

In the past, Novelr has provided the impetus to do things, to build things. But the problem with a community blog is that if the blogger fails to update (like I so often do) then the momentum is lost, and the will to do things disintegrates. And so it has happened with Novelr. For a long time, I haven’t helped with communal momentum.

I suppose what we do need is a gathering point with this positive ethos, one where writers can get together, and have fun, and create things for the community. I want to build such a site, and I’ll launch it in a couple of months. I may succeed, and I may not, but it doesn’t matter – I think it’s for the good of all involved, and the only way to know for sure is to try.

Selflessness

Here we come to the second bit about community. You see, there’s a cool trick about communal creation that makes things easier on all of us. Say, for instance, some of our writers feel that I shouldn’t be going to the New York Times with the term ‘web fiction’. And that’s perfectly fair. But the cool thing is – things aren’t bad at all if these writers take things into their own hands and beat me to the Times with the term ‘weblit’.

Because then we’ve solved our problem, haven’t we? And therein lies a trick to communal creation: when you want to do something that’s good for everyone, and if you show that you own the execution, people would chip in to help.

And they may help in completely unexpected ways. When I announced that I would build a filter for online fiction, I gathered a group of people – writers, editors, programmers – to begin talking about the project. Chris Poirier reacted. He disagreed with some of the core ideas in the Shelves project (rightly, as it turned out), and so decided to build his own. He asked for help from the Shelves team. And here’s the cool bit: we piled in to help. This switch happened behind closed doors, and was how work began on what was to become Web Fiction Guide.

So an announcement that someones makes, who says that he’s changing something that he doesn’t like for the benefit of all involved would change things for the better, regardless of the way that happens. And that’s pretty cool, so long as people are selfless. My only concern, after all, is that these things do happen, because they make web fiction better for everyone. And I’ll support whoever it is who solves the problems I sat out to solve, because – hey! – everybody’s going to benefit, and that’s the core idea.

Being selfish, and thinking ‘how is this going to affect my lot in web fiction’ has no place in the communal model. It simply gets in the way.

Creation Is Inclusive

There is one last point I want to raise about the state of the current web fiction community. The quote at the beginning of this post is from a guy called _Why (yes, that’s his name, don’t ask me … why). In his time he created more than twenty software projects, released for free to the world to use.

I just so happen to believe that he’s right. Creating things bring out the best in people. They chip in to help, they lend skills, contacts, and information, and they get things done.

My assertion is that we’ve been missing out on this, in our community. Not all of it – there are glimmers of it, here and there. Ergofiction, for instance, has been one of the greatest things to have happened to web fiction in recent times – its creators, Jan and Anna, spend large amounts of their time creating a friendly, fun place to find and read good web fiction.

And then there’s MCM, who has never really stopped experimenting with the medium. And I find it funny that people criticize Ergofiction for being too MCM-centric – how can they not, when MCM is himself expanding the space of possibilities in web fiction?

I can think of a few others. Isa is currently building an upgrade to fluffy-seme software (I must admit that I’m looking forward to it). I’m launching Pandamian, which attempts to remove as many technical barriers as possible to writing web fiction. And Chris Poirier has continued to tweak the algorithm powering WFG – and has gotten it to a place where, if you type ‘fiction on the web’ in google, you get WFG amongst the top 5 spots.

My point is that creation is inclusive. Everybody can help out. And people who do tend to have loads of fun in the process.

Takeaways

I hope you’ll understand that this isn’t just another complaint. I’ve spent a good part of the last three months building software to make web fiction easier for writers. And when you think about this problem space for that long a time, when you program these little usable bits for web fiction writers, you’ll begin to home in on certain conclusions. This post is not a complaint; it is a call to action. A call to build things, to talk to people; a call to change the way we read.

I promise to do two things:

1. I will get web fiction into the New York Times within a year, for better or worse.
2. I will build a better communal gathering point, focused on fun, creation, and writerly love in the coming months.

There are other projects, by other writers, of course – some of which I cannot yet mention in this blog. But if you want to do something, start it now. Ask for feedback, perhaps (I welcome guest posts from any writer who wishes to do something for the community) but don’t ask for permission. And if there’s any help you need – contacts, for instance – email me and I’ll see what I can do to help.

We’re in the middle of an exciting digital shift, folks. I intend to give us a part in it. And I hope – well I really hope – that you’ll lend a hand, too.

In the past six months a couple of things have changed at this site. Some of you – the older readers, I’m sure – may have noticed these changes. Novelr has begun to move away from helping writers write for the web, and has lately been posting links to, well, new-sy stuff. Things like the recent iPad launch, for instance, or articles on Margaret Atwood’s Twitter account.

This isn’t a good thing. I suspect one reason for this change has to do with the fact that there isn’t much left to explore about online writing. Novelr has done a fairly good job of connecting one good idea to another: there was information out there on how best to write for the web, how best to design for readability, and so it didn’t take much for me to constantly keep a lookout for the best ideas and to link those to the particular challenges of online writing.

Writers now know, more or less, how to write their fiction for the web. And if they don’t – well, they’ve got a decent chance at figuring it out. I daresay that Novelr has done a good job of teaching people these things. Writers ask each other for advice now, something that started here, and spread later on to other places. And many of the ideas that are in circulation in the community today were originally developed on this very site.

But Novelr is no longer needed today.

Or – if it is, it isn’t needed in its current form.

The easy topics have been written to death. For the past couple of months I’ve begun to feel increasingly uncomfortable as I’ve updated Novelr – I thought, rather, that I was starting to sound like a pundit. I don’t like pundits. I’m terrified of becoming one. Pundits tend to be more interested in complaining about things than in doing anything useful for the community. And for the large part – this is true. You don’t have to be a special someone to write about the state of the publishing industry today – indeed there are many people who’re already doing this, on their publisher blogs and the like.

I don’t want to sound derisive, but there are only so many articles on the future of publishing before you feel like tossing your laptop out the window.

What I want to do now, however, is to work on doing. On making things better for writers. Novelr’s had four years worth of good ideas all stored up in its archives – and it’s about time someone put them to good, coherent use. I want to do just that. We still have problems, after all:  problems that I believe – with experimentation – we should be able to overcome.

In the coming months I’ll be working on a startup called Pandamian. The site’s not up yet (it’s just a fancy splash page, at the moment), but we’ve started work on several interesting ideas, behind the scenes. Most of these ideas were taken from Novelr’s archives. Some of them will be released in the next two to three months. Others would take longer. The core philosophy, however, is that Pandamian will do everything in its power to make writers – particularly online writers – as awesome as they possibly can be.

But What About Novelr?

I’m far-sighted enough to know that Novelr will no longer be as central to the web fiction community as it has been, in the past. This may be a good thing, particularly so for web fiction. When it was first created, Novelr’s sole purpose was to figure out how best to present fiction on the web. I’m happy to say that we have figured it out, more or less, rendering Novelr’s original purpose – well, moot.

So two things will happen at Novelr. The first thing I plan to do is to compile everything we’ve learnt – and that means everything, or four years worth of ideas – into an ebook. In true Novelr fashion, the ebook will be available on the web, as well as as a pdf file. And the best thing about that is that I plan to make it free (unless, of course you read it and you feel like donating) – but I’ll be happy so long as you point new writers to the Novelr book, and tell them to ask good questions about the information presented within.

The second thing I hope to do is to write about what we’ve learnt, doing Pandamian. I’ll be honest here – I’m not sure how that would play out. Pandamian’s problems are large problems – problems like promotion and reader acquisition (ooh yes, I did just say reader acquisition) and big, thorny things like elitists filtering and community building and the like. I want to document the process – I’m not sure if it’d be helpful to the individual writer – but I think it’ll be an interesting topic nevertheless.

I’ve got a lot of work to do, soon. Till then, drop me a comment, or subscribe to Novelr for Pandamian updates. More stuff (on various other things) coming soon.

Note: this post has been edited after publication, for sentence structure and clarity.

I think there are two things that we need to talk about. First, the Kindle is screwed. There has been some debate on Twitter as to why and how Apple compares with Ye Olde Amazon, and the biggest argument against the iPad is that it has a backlit screen, and backlit screens suck for reading.

Now this is true. Backlit screens do suck for reading, and I know this because I own a aluminium Macbook, and the screen is terrible when I’m doing work under sunlight. But I don’t think it matters. Isa asks: Why would anyone want to read on an iPad? and that is, I think, a rather valid question.

It is also the wrong kind of question to ask. The correct question people should be asking isn’t “why would anyone want to read on an iPad?” but rather “why wouldn’t they?” Isa’s question assumes that the majority of buyers would be logical book-nerds – comparing e-readers on metrics such as heft, size, and screen quality, but that’s the wrong way of looking at things.

The right way of framing the question is to begin asking: who’s likely to buy the Kindle? Who’s likely to buy the iPad? What kind of people are they, and how are they different?

The Kindle is for readers – book nerds, but of a particular, non-technophobic kind. People like you and I. The iPad, on the other hand, appeals to just about anyone: rich geeks, early-adopters, technophobic aunts, families who’d like a secondary computer, kids who want a gaming device, your uncle Harry who loves reading in the toilet … the list goes on and on.

The iPad is a computer. The Kindle is an ebook reader. In this aspect, at least, the Kindle is outclassed. There are more people interested in buying the iPad than there are people interested in buying a Kindle.

And so the question isn’t – who wants to read on an iPad? – because that’s the wrong question to ask. The question you should be asking is rather – what, exactly, is going to prevent all these people from buying books and reading them? What’s going to prevent Johnny, say, whose parents buy him an iPad for Christmas to play games and surf the web on – and one day the new Harry Potter equivalent comes out – what’s going to prevent him from thinking: hey, the book’s cheaper on the iBook store, and I don’t have to go all the way downtown to buy it from a shop. What’s going to prevent Johnny from buying the book – literally flicking his thumb over a sheet of glass – and reading it on his iPad?

The answer? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And the truth of the matter is that Johnny’s probably going to buy other books for his iPad, and spend ridiculous amounts of time arranging them on his virtual bookshelf, simply because it’s a) cheaper, b) quicker, and c) it’s all just a thumb flick away.

And so now here’s a related question: given the audience of these two devices, who do you think the content producers – the publishers – are more interested in going to? The Kindle? Or the platform that is the iPad? The answer to that, of course, lies in the number of potential readers, which is related to the number of current users, and I’m willing to bet that there are far more potential readers on the iPad than the Kindle ever would have, given a year or so.

It isn’t clear, however, how Amazon would react to this news. John Gruber predicts that Amazon would jettison its Kindle arm to sell content through the iPad, because Amazon is a content company first and a product company second (and Apple the reverse). I’m not sure if this would happen, because I can imagine Amazon’s fears of being locked into a single store, but regardless of how you look at it, the Kindle’s days are numbered.

There is one last thing we should know, and this affects us more directly than any of the above predictions. It is this: the iPad uses the ePub format. The ebook format wars are effectively over. We’ve got a winner, folks, and that winner is ePub. Plan for that, because things might get pretty heated, pretty fast.

[Update2]: Day 3, the final day, is finally over. So I’m now back to blogging at Novelr. Will be posting a summary of the whole even on The Dispatch later.

Just a shoutout to everyone who’s into online fiction: this Tuesday (the 6th of October) fellow writer and webfiction-lover MCM will be attempting to write an entire novel in 3 days, in front of a live, online audience. Some of you may already know this, and are looking forward to watching him work his magic. For those of you who don’t, I’ll be working a Novelr special throughout that 3 day event – a one-time only liveblogging gig, over at The Dispatch. Hop over for behind-the-scenes commentary, novel-as-its-being-written analysis, and Twitter summaries throughout the 72 hours of live writing. This is a really cool way to be writing a book, made possible only by the Internet, and I can’t wait to get started.

(Edit: the image above is, by the way, MCM’s laptop, which will be his writing workspace for the next three days. He uses Pages, and then uploads his materials online.)

It appears that in the time I’ve been offline I have missed out on several big developments in the online fiction sphere. The Golden Notebook project is one of them.

Notebook isn’t really a blook – it is a novel by Nobel Lit-Prize winner Doris Lessing, and many consider it to be her most ambitious, and probably her greatest, work. The Notebook project is an ingenious one: it places the entire book online and it asks 7 readers, all women, to read the novel in real time and give their comments in the margins of the webpages that make up the novel. 

Part of me is awestruck: whoever came up with that idea must’ve been a friggin genius. But the other part of me – the writer part – is combing this project for ideas, is reading the book for the first time, and has come to the conclusion that whatever I have previously thought possible of this medium is but a pale caricature of what’s coming, of what can come.

Notebook as a novel is most famous for its structure: the work is divided into the four ‘notebooks’ of the writer Anna Wulf, each categorized by colour and each containing different aspects of her life. The story is concerned with Anna’s efforts to fuse all these disparate books together into one final, golden notebook, and the novel is set up in such a way that the four notebooks are referred to in non-chronological, overlapping manner, all excepts from the novel Anna is currently working on. The structure comments on the story, and the story comments on the structure, and it is precisely this that makes Notebook the kind of novel that takes weeks to read, and weeks more to figure out (another that springs to mind is Infinite Jest, which is structured in a circle, and where the beginning is the ending is the beginning is the ending).

What strikes me the most about the entire Notebook project is that it takes reading – an experience strictly individual – and it combines it with the living web: something inherently social and conversational, something that you really don’t expect reading to be. Now anybody going through The Golden Notebook can do so with the benefit of a host of people who are arguing, talking and who are above all, like you, trying to make sense of said and unsaid things within the novel. You no longer have to spend weeks of your life immersed in an epic, structurally intricate work of art, only to emerge from that experience going … huh. Or perhaps – and this is more likely – you no longer have to worry about leaving stones unturned while you’re reading the novel, as is often the case with such post-modernist works. 

Another thing that jumped out at me, right from the get go, was the very contemporary nature of the comments. On page 5 of the online novel (and, by the way, this is online pagination that actually makes sense) a paragraph in the margins pointed out that The Golden Notebook was one of the books listed as important to president-elect Barrack Obama. And the rest of the comment went on to say that certain books shape certain leaders in certain ways, which was all very interesting to think about and very helpful to me as a first time reader and certainly gave some idea of the context this novel occupies in modern day society, considering that it was originally written as a feminist text.

Commentary and pagination notwithstanding, I think the limitations of such a project are clear for all of us to see: The Golden Notebook works well in this format because it is written in such a way as to benefit from critique and discussion. There is, in fact, a podcast that talks about the many possible ways you might read the novel, and … yeah. That pretty much speaks for itself, doesn’t it? I’d definitely be better off with the opinion and insight of more established, familiar readers of Lessing and postmodern literature than if I’d read the book alone, and even Lessing says in her preface: “Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.”

There is one other problem with this format that I am slightly uncomfortable with: and this problem is that of trust. My reading of The Golden Notebook will be greatly influenced by what these 7 chosen readers say in the margins, and I believe that the quality of that commentary, and perhaps the quality of my experience, would be strongly dependent on the quality of those readers. If these readers are competent, and are within the intended audience by which Lessing writes the book for, then I suppose I am in safe hands. Though, thinking about it, I’d expect that my experience should benefit from a clash of opinion in the margins, where perhaps I can choose from views the same way a shopper might pick merchandise off a shelf; but what does that say about this form of reading, and does that mean that I am entrusting these readers to do my thinking for me?

I don’t have clear answers for that, and at any rate attempting to answer them might derail this article and push us into the territory of pedantic, stuffy, reasoning. But one thing’s for sure: the days where people can say: “No great writer exists on the web” are gone for good.

[Update]: Turns out The Golden Notebook is done by none other than the guys at if:book, who’ve been behind quite a number of digital fiction experiments to date.

[Update 2]: On a slightly unrelated note: Christine Rosen over at The New Atlantis talks about the serious implications of shifting from book reading to digital reading. Much of her concerns are similar to what the New York Times have had to say on the issue. (via Sharon Bakar)

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.

Back when we opened, Eli asked me to write an article for Novelr on the Web Fiction Guide. To be honest with you, when he asked, I wanted to run screaming for the hills. I just couldn’t imagine what I’d write about. And yet, the calmer, more business-like part of me knew it was a good idea—for publicity for the site, if nothing else.

So, last night, I figured something out: I’ll just tell you a story. That’s something I know how to do.

Where it all began

A few months ago, I started writing a serialized novel, called Winter Rain. I didn’t set out to write it. In fact, I set out to write a vignette—a one scene “moment in time”—for a net friend. But I’d had an idea bouncing around in my head for a story, for a while, and once the vignette was written, it just felt like I could go somewhere with it. So I did. And it’s been a lot of fun, so far.

But, of course, there’s no point writing something for an online audience if that audience never shows up to read it. And, frankly, I’m a bit of an attention hound. So, after the first week, I decided it was time to publicize the story.

And that’s where the trouble began.

Starting from nothing

I’d been hosting Sarah Suleski’s website since she started publishing Alisiyad online, and she and I have been friends for a long time, so I’d heard from her about wonderful publicity tools like Pages Unbound and Project Wonderful. So, that first week, I went and submitted a listing to Pages Unbound, and bought advertising space through Project Wonderful on a number of popular web fiction sites. And waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

Here are the things I found out:

1. Most of the people who click through on banner ads leave again right away. 80+% of them, in fact.
2. Even on busy sites that are appropriately chosen, most readers don’t click on banner ads.
3. Pages Unbound is only a useful source of traffic if you have a ton of good user reviews, or if you buy a banner ad on it (and not really even then).

The truth of the matter is that most of my readers did not come from banner ads placed on other sites. Even fewer of them came from Pages Unbound. The majority of my readers found my serial (perhaps not surprisingly) from personal recommendations made by other web authors, in the form of links from their sites.

So what’s this all got to do with WFG?

This whole experience got me thinking: shouldn’t there be a better way to do things? Winter Rain isn’t brilliant, by any means, but neither is it chopped liver. Surely there should be a way to help people writing quality online fiction to connect with people who want to find good stuff to read. A way to combine the power of personal recommendation with a constant stream of new stories—where authors don’t have to wait for someone “influential” to discover them.

As it turns out, I wasn’t the only person wondering this.

Around about the time this all started, Eli posted here about why the review system at Pages Unbound wasn’t very effective. He argued, approximately, that Pages Unbound suffered from a “mom” problem: because Pages Unbound uses a straight average of ratings, one great rating on an otherwise-unrated story counts for more than 40 good ratings on an another. And that one great rating could very easily have been written the author’s mom.

In other words, Pages Unbound’s rating report is easily hijacked by people who have a few friends willing to help them out. It makes no distinction about the quality of reviews, and only recently has made any distinction about the quantity. Eli argued that what the online world needed was an editorial filter—someone readers could trust to provide an “objective” rating, so that the good stuff would get some publicity, and so that readers didn’t have to wade through great piles of stodge to find something good. That idea attracted a number of people, and gave rise to the Shelves project—a website that would spotlight the cream of online fiction.

Reviews as subjective truth

Of course, being the ornery, disagreeable fellow that I am, I didn’t care much more for the idea of Shelves than I did for the Pages Unbound’s free-for-all.

My point of view is that there is no such thing as “objective” truth when it comes to fiction. Well, very little of it, anyway. The truth is that what I love, you may hate, and vice versa. The benefit of an editorial filter is not the filter—it’s the editor. Because, if you can get to know that editor as a person—their likes and dislikes—you can start to make reasonable predictions about how much of what they say will apply to you.

To me, the problem with reviews at Pages Unbound is simply one of trust: you can’t know whether or not to trust those reviews because you know little or nothing about the person who wrote them. And the Pages Unbound software makes no distinction, either, which means you still have to do all of the work when you go looking for something to read.

And on the other end of the spectrum, the problem with Eli’s Shelves project is that it seeks to list only stories its editorial board deems of sufficient quality, which means people who disagree with their editorial viewpoint will find no use in their listings, whatsoever.

Back to the story

In any event, as it turned out, Eli wasn’t going to be ready to start on Shelves until 2009, due to real life time constraints—which is an eternity in Internet time—and, after waiting two weeks for my listing to show up on Pages Unbound (with no listing in sight), I decided I wasn’t going to wait any longer. I pinged Sarah on YIM, and by the end of the night, we had registered a domain name (she came up with it), sent out emails to hija—cough—borrow most of the Shelves editorial staff, and started on a site design.

What can I say: I’m an impatient fellow, too.

Of course, all did not go as initially planned. In my usual totally-out-of-touch-with-reality way, I figured I could customize WordPress in about a week, to do everything we needed.

As usual, my estimate was off by a factor of four. One of these days, I’m going to remember to apply that factor *before* getting started, instead of after.

In any event, after four weeks, I decided it was good enough, even if it wasn’t quite finished, and we opened for business at the end of July, 2008.

Editorial staff

Thanks to Sarah’s efforts, our editorial staff includes a number of well-known authors, bloggers, and reviewers from the web fiction community. Rather than be redundant here, I will simply refer you to our Editors page, where you will find a complete list, and links to our self-penned introductions.

As a group, we represent a range of opinions and viewpoints, as well as tastes in fiction, and while we may not always agree about the merits of a particular piece of web fiction, we have agreed on common definitions for our rating scale. As a result, when we average the editorial ratings on a piece, we think we provide a fairly representative estimate of the quality of a piece of work, with our individual reviews filling in the details of our disparate viewpoints. To use a metaphor, we don’t all sing the same parts, but we do all strive to sing as one choir.

Design elements

The primary goal of WFG is to help you find stuff you actually want to read. Every design element has been chosen with that in mind.

First and foremost, we provide a browsable “card catalogue” of online fiction, which you can browse in its entirety, or filtered on a particular subject. Subject can be just about anything—a genre, an age group, a setting, a story type; we add new tags as they become relevant. A subject catalogue is important because, as our listings grow, you don’t want to have to page through hundreds of fantasy listings if you are looking for historical fiction, or hundreds of novels if you are looking for short stories.

To the basic card catalogue, we add a number of features. Of course, we host reviews, so every listing displays our editorial reviews and the most helpful member reviews (determined by member votes). And the average editorial rating appears with every listing, even the thumbnails, giving everything a consistent at-a-glance estimate of the quality of what you will find.

Each listing is also cross-linked in two dimensions: similar listings, and reader recommendations. This cross-linking provides two important benefits. First, it acts as a visual landmark—if you like the stuff you see in these cross-links, chances are higher that you will like the listing you are looking at. And, second, if you decide the current listing isn’t for you, it provides you with up to twelve other possibly-relevant listings for you to check out. Again, we’re trying to help you find things you will want to read.

Our site is fully searchable. At the top of every page there is a search box that will search the text of our listings, our reviews, our articles, and even our catalogue subjects for whatever you want. Personally, I use the feature all of the time, for finding specific listings.

As of this second release of our software, we provide four sort orders for the catalogue: editorial preference, member preference, name, and listing date, and you can easily switch from one ordering to another with a single click, from any point within our listings, without losing your place.

Of particular note, our member preference listings cannot be hijacked by a single glowing review from the author’s mom. Without going into technical details, we consider the weight of member ratings, reviews, and recommendations, not the average. We have also taken measures to limit the effect of spam ratings.

For the benefit of our authors, our home page now shows thumbnails of up to nine of the most recent additions to our catalogue (as of our most recent software update). We try to give new listings a full week on the home page, but, as we never post more than three new listings a day, we can guarantee at least three full days of free publicity. And a link from the home page allows readers to continue browsing by listing date.

Our home page also displays three random Editors’ Picks. These are listings at least one of our editors has Recommended. There are 10 of us, in all—and if even one of us likes a story enough to recommend it, it has a free pass to our home page on a fairly regular basis.

We also display the most recent editorial reviews. These generally don’t get written on the same day as the listing, so new listings get additional publicity when their listing is reviewed, through additional time on our home page.

Also appearing on our home page, we provide a weekly column called “What’s Happening”, that is open to any of our listings. Here, we display blurbs about current events at up to six listings, each week. The listing thumbnails appear with each blurb, and the column holds the home page for a full week. We presently give out the slots on a first-come-first-serve basis, but we are prepared to apply additional editorial standards, should demand begin to outstrip our available slots.

Finally, all of our listings, articles, and reviews are available in one or more RSS feeds, so you can have your computer monitor our site for stuff you’ll want to read.

Range of content

We will list just about any type of original, written online fiction: novels, episodic serials, short story collections, anthologies, story magazines, and scripts. Twice now, people have come to us with new types of things they wanted to list, and we’ve extended our mandate. About the only things we won’t list are pure erotica (because its primary goal is not to tell a good story) and fanfic.

How it worked out

At present, we get (on average) ten new listings each week. Our “What’s Happening” column is filled almost every week, too. We have approximately 400 unique visitors each week (we’ve had about 1500 unique visitors since opening) and they draw down around 1000 pages each and every day, amongst them. Every editorial review (even low-rated ones) gets several dozen click-throughs to the listing within the first day.

All that may not sound like an awful lot, but according to the stats Project Wonderful publishes about the ad spots on Pages Unbound, we’re well within the same ballpark, and after only six weeks in operation.

We’ve already upgraded our software once, and a second upgrade is in the works. The last upgrade simplified navigation and brought browsing by subject inline with the look and feel of browsing the whole collection. Additionally, we’ve added discussion forums for our members, and some of our authors have already gained tangible benefits from them.

All in all, I’m very happy with the progress we’ve made, and I feel strongly that we’ll continue to grow and improve in the coming months.

Plans for the future

For the next release of the software, we will be making the average member rating more visible. Presently, member ratings are used to calculate the “member preference” ordering, but next release, they’ll be shown right on the listing. We’ll also be making it easier to track events on a listing, so authors can do some cross-marketing and even provide rewards to their readers who participate.

Longer term, we might want to look into recognizing members who consistently provide quality reviews, with additional weight or presence given to their work. And, as our listings get even bigger, I’d like to work out a way to browse by multiple subjects at once.

Some middle ground

The Web Fiction Guide is an attempt to walk the line: to provide a consistent, reliable, known editorial viewpoint on everything in our collection; and to additionally provide comprehensive listings and member reviews, so you can ignore our opinion—or find others—when ours doesn’t apply to you. We do our very best to be useful to our listed authors, while, at the same time, being useful to our readers. Because, without our readers, we can be of no use to our authors, and vice versa.

Of course, trying to be all things to all people is the only guaranteed recipe for failure, so we make choices—often hard choices—to ensure we stay relevant. We can’t please every author with our reviews, and we can’t please every reader, either. What we can do is be consistent, so both authors and readers can treat us as a known quantity, and make allowances for our biases and blind spots.

Thanks for reading.

Chris’s blook, Winter Rain, can be found here. And if you’re feeling really nice, and you’ve enjoyed this post, then please go leave him a review over at WFG. He’ll appreciate it!

Disclaimer: Eli James, the guy behind Novelr, is one of the editors with WFG. This blog, however, remains an impartial party.

Personal feelings aside I would like now to point out a few important implications this move would have on the blooking community at large. The first and most obvious is the sudden vacuum created by its loss. At the moment many blooks derive their traffic from PU, and we have to remember that there is an ecosystem of readers and writers clustered around it. People come in from other blooks, check out what PU has to offer, and then jump off to another one. Rinse, lather and repeat. PU’s loss means this ecosystem will have to shift to another site, and it will take time to do so.

The good news is that we do have another site – and a good one at that. Chris Poirier and Sarah Suleski have together created a brilliant filter at Web Fiction Guide, a site that will certainly serve as another platform to promote good fiction in PU’s wake. The bad news is that WFG works on a different model from PU, and that presents several challenges to the community as a whole.

WFG is editor-powered. I have talked about editorial based filters vs wisdom-of-the-crowd filters before, and we know that both have different but complimentary sets of strengths and weaknesses. I have also pointed out some of PU’s teething problems in the past, problems that any crowd-powered filter would face.

So here’s the thing: PU’s loss means that we’ll lose a major crowd-based filter, and we’ll have to rely solely on an editorial based one. This is not good for a few reasons: a major limitation of the editorial model is the amount of digital fiction it can process. There will come a time when there would be too much good fiction and too little editors to review and rank them. Volume is the one major advantage that sites like PU have – it is democratic and it’s been proven to work in a vast majority of Internet scenarios (think Google search and Digg). We’ll need one sooner or later, regardless of how successful WFG is. Both types of site complements each other; it’s not WFG or PU, it’s WFG and PU.

So why not keep PU going? I suggest we take over the management of the site, if Lexy agrees. I know she’s pointed out that she doesn’t think that it’s worth it, but I don’t think so. Even though PU runs on off-the-shelf components, I believe it’ll be a lot easier to capitalize on both the site’s credibility, community and brand at a later stage, if we want to do a revamp (and we probably will want to recode major parts of it). At any rate, it would make no sense to restart a PU clone later on from scratch – why reinvent the wheel when the wheel’s already running? And there is of course the teething problems that we’ve learnt from in PU’s implementation – something that all new wisdom-of-the-crowd sites would face sooner or later.

I propose keeping PU. I’m having exams at the moment, so I won’t be much help in the sense that I can’t do anything remotely server related. I am however willing to underwrite the costs of moving PU. I’ve already got a bunch of people on NovLounge and elsewhere in favour of this idea, and they’re willing to contribute their time and energy to the continued effort of running PU. I’d like now to ask the majority of blookers, readers and writers out there: what do you think of this? Please tell me your comments.

Update: I’m mistaken in thinking WFG to be completely editor powered. There is a significant crowd aspect to it which has not been utilized because it is a relatively new site. That being said, here’s a-for and-against analysis for keeping Pages Unbound.

For

There are a lot of reviews and a pretty strong community around Pages Unbound. It also has a relatively high profile within our community, meaning new people discover it and benefit from the information there despite slow progress from the owner. Deleting PU off the bat would mean losing a whole bunch of reader recommendations, reviews, forum discussions and also the appearance of dead links on the various blogs and blooks linking to it. Not particularly appealing.

Against

Much of PU’s success has been because of Alexandra Erin’s status in the blooking community. Keeping PU without her personality on board would be a loss to the filter. On top of that Erin is right in pointing out that modifications to the site will be difficult – Joomla is not known as one of the simplest CMSes around. If code modifications are hard then it will be difficult to correct the problems that PU faces – gaming of the system, spite rankings, etc. It would be far better to destroy everything anyway and custom code a solution.

Open Mike

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this. Should we take over PU from Alexandra, or should we close down and redirect to WFG? I am in favour of keeping PU in stasis for a period of time while we determine the feasibility of a) continuing b) moving over to Web Fiction Guide. That way the reviews will at least be preserved for a longer period, and there would some form of community transfer through this pause. Either way the community would benefit more than an instant shutdown of the site. Which side do you stand on?

Disclaimer: I am an editor on WFG’s board. Also, I have emailed Lexy and I’m currently waiting for a reply. As founder her opinion is paramount in this undertaking – if she refuses we must respect her decision.

Calling all online fiction writers

I am looking for contributors for the *.fiction anthology volume 1. The anthology will provide a printed showcase for the emerging community of online fiction writers who publish their work on the internet for free. The plan is for the anthology to contain samples from 10-15 writers to allow them to promote their work in an accessible and cost-effective format.

All online fiction writers are invited to submit their work for inclusion in the first volume of the *.fiction anthology. This will be a community-focused publication and should be considered as a starting point in building awareness of online fiction. It will be made available for purchase at cost price and all contributors are encouraged to promote this work along with their own.

If there are more submissions than the number required for the first volume, additional work will be carried over to subsequent volumes. Please contact me at s.a.mckenzie@gmail.com for more information and submission guidelines.

The closing date for submissions for volume 1 is September 30^th 2008.

Scott McKenzie

www.stardotfiction.com

On a personal note I think this is a brilliant idea. Scott’s doing this for the community – I repeat: cost price – and the publicity in a dead-tree book will in turn drive attention to both blooks and their Lulu merchandise. If you have questions, feel free to ask in the commenting section of this post. I’ll update this announcement with new details as I get them – I have exams on at the moment so forgive me if updates come slow.

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.Week Three is where I started really taking notice. I was confused when prompted by the story to input a name for the Princess, so I entered the first name that came to mind (Samantha). Then I realized the story was interactive. It reminded me of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels I read as a kid – though it’s weird that they wanted to do one here in the project. The story was lightweight, fluffy (none of the choices you make have much effect on the way things play out), but it was all very enjoyable. I had a smile on my face as I reached the options for the ending – all of them unhappy ones. Technology used: CSS for the styling, javascript, some backend code which I suspect to be CGI.Week Four is the latest story so far, and its presentation isn’t as interesting as to how it’s being written. Live, for the next four days, Nicci French will be writing the story 6:30 pm London time (1:30 am for me, or so the site says) and you’ll get to follow them as they work their craft. It’s too early in the morning for me to tune in and see how it’s being implemented (does the page update itself Ajax-style when the authors post?) so I can’t really comment on the technology behind it. And it’s a love story. Don’t we all just worship love stories?

Last week James Smythe wrote a hilarious post retelling how one of the readers of We Tell Stories contacted him, thinking he was a fictional character connected to the secret, 7th story. It’s worth noting that the ARG (Alternative Reality Game) part of We Tell Stories is alive and kicking behind the scenes – I’ve found a forum full of dedicated people hunting down Alice (yes, that Alice of Looking Glass and Wonderland fame) on the Internet. They’ve progressed quite a bit – so far the clues have led them to a statue, a blog and a list of train station names. I’m very happy following their hunt from the comforts of my armchair.

PS: on the We Tell Stories front page, click the rabbit for a little trip down the rabbit hole.

Penguin has been doing the ‘let’s try something weird’ thing again, and they’ve created this little project called We Tell Stories. 6 authors, 6 stories, and 6 non-linear presentation styles. There’s a competition involved (presumably to up interest in the experiment), and each of the stories takes its inspiration from a classic. The first week’s story is inspired by The 39 Steps.

I am most interested in Penguin’s take on non-linearity: Penguin’s Digital Editor Jeremy Ettinghausen has in this post talked about how non-linearity just might be the presentation method of the future. And while his point about non-linear information-seeking in this age is valid, I don’t think it will translate to how stories play out – a beginning, a middle, and an end simply do not conform with a random bounce-bounce presentation of information. Stories are linear. We live our lives in a linear fashion. So, the presentation of a story has to be – more or less – linear.

However, I do believe a random bounce-bounce presentation of the events happening within a chapter (or, say, an hour in a 24 hour period) would work, though in the bigger picture the chapters (or hours) would be linear in nature.

On other sites: James Smythe has a wonderful post about the possible implications this move would have if it succeeds (or fails), and Lee is not impressed with the writing. I, on the other hand, think it to be a really good experiment to the presentation of fiction. There’s a lot more story here in than there ever was in Dreaming Methods (which read more like poetry than anything else), and the use of Google Maps as a visual aid to move the story along is just brilliant. Another plus point: We Write Stories does not use Flash.

Keep an eye on this. Week Two’s coming out, and I’d like to see how this particular presentation plays out.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Of course, they’re not new words exactly; rather, they’re words that have been flung at the proverbial brick wall so often over the last 10 years or so that they’ve stuck …

Because the vlog (an internet video journal), the blook (a blog that becomes a book, or vice versa) and the mobcast (an unholy aliance of podcast and mobile phone) are mounting such a determined challenge on the lamestream (traditional media), advances in IT provide a good chunk of the list.

Oh, and while you’re there check out whataboutery, camel toe, and waterboarding! One of which, by the way, is a form of torture.

Overall Winner (and Non-Fiction winner) – My War: Killing Time In Iraq by Colby Buzzell
Fiction Winner – The Doorbells of Florence by Andrew Losowsky
Comics Winner - Mom’s Cancer by Brian Fies

I can see why My War won, judging from the way the Iraq war is presented in the mainstream media these days – the whole idea of a US soldier running away to cyber cafes between shifts and blogging about such an experience is highly magnetic … indeed, almost guaranteed bestselling material.

Colby walks away with $10,000 in cash, and while he may be smiling away Paul Jones is quick to point out that his may be the last ‘open and frank military blog blook.’

I’ve talked about how Blooker prize winners are, in the end, amateurs, but while this year’s selection may not have improved from a literary point of view (don’t expect The God Of Small Things anytime soon) it has certainly presented an … alternative to what we usually get from the mainstream. The Doorbells of Florence are random pictures of doorbells accompanied by fictional stories of the people living behind them, and came about from a Flickr photo set, of all things.

Mom’s Cancer is not unique, certainly (there are loads of worthy web comics out there), but it is the backstory that counts: the author’s mother contracts cancer … and he draws the comic throughout the period. I liked it, and it was a pity it was taken down from the web, due to copyright issues.

But in the end it’ll be Colby’s book that generates the most buzz.

“Buzzell never takes the easy route of painting Iraq in black and white tones. His account gives flesh-and-blood — and anger, scorn, bile, and unexpected humor — to the Iraq debacle. His delightfully profane account loses nothing in the transformation from blog to blook.’ – Arianna Huffington

Oh, and Nick Cohen’s remarks:

“Of all the books in the competition, ‘My War’ is the one most likely to last. If, in 20 years time, people want to know what it was like to fight in Iraq, they can pick up ‘My War’ and find out. It tells what it’s like to be a grunt fighting in the Sunni Triangle – with more power and authority than the best ‘embedded reporter’ could manage. It is something of a triumph for blogs over traditional media.”

Funny, he’s just talked about Colby Buzzell a few days ago.

Last, but not least, Colby’s words on getting published:

“After I tell them, “I don’t know”, I usually tell them to go start a blog. It’s what I did, and if you think about it a blog is the best and most affordable way for an absolute nobody with no formal journalism or writing education to be a published.”

How … simple. I can’t help but smile.

The NHS blog doctor asks: ‘Why is the main-stream media so sniffy about Lulu?’, and then gives an answer:

Because they are frightened. They are in the same position as the typewriter industry a generation ago, or as the Roman Catholic Church was when, for a few moments, it took its mind off protecting paedophiles to resist the move to the vernacular. Heaven forbid that the general public should be allowed to make up their own mind about novels and the Bible.

How long will it be before a successful established author decides to cut out the middlemen and takes the next manuscript directly to Lulu? Watch the agents and publishers sweat when that happens.

But really now, Nick Cohen wasn’t all out against Lulu! He merely admits that blooking is, at this moment, a strictly amateur medium. I’ve written about this before, and talked about how we have yet to see any work of significant literary merit make it to the web. Yes, there is hope yet for the medium, but by saying we are teeming with quality right now is a tad ridiculous.

One comment did strike me while I was reading the Guardian Unlimted article:

MichaelBulley writes: Google works, after a fashion, for info: if I want to find info about sackbuts I type “sackbut” and sift through the results to get what I want and it usually works OK, but how am I going to use Google to find a good novel or a good poem that I’m as yet unaware of? The current conventions of established publishing houses may have faults that prevent some good works from seeing the light, but if I type “a good poem” in Google and hit the Enter key, is that going to do me much good?

It hits the nail right on the head: how are new readers going to find new blooks? It is a phenomenon in the publishing industry, yet nobody knows where to find one. I may be highlighting blooks in my Bookmarked! posts, and the Lulu Blooker Prize may be generating buzz, but think about it: none of these blooks are likely to be seen or bought in a bricks and mortar bookstore.

Hush about online shopping and The Long Tail: the majority of books are bought in real world bookstores (and usually on a whim, I must add), not online.

Well, if ‘a successful established author decides to cut out the middlemen and takes the next manuscript directly to Lulu’, we’d see a lot of revolution indeed.

Let’s hope that happens.

Update: I can’t not link to this article. It is brilliant!

But on to the issue on hand: I’ve just come across Betsy Friedrich’s thesis on blog fiction … and I’m very impressed with it. So maybe as a reader I could’ve done without the first chapter (Definition of Terms), but it was a thesis, so it had to explain blogs to internet virgins academicians.

Highlights from each chapter:

Chapter 1 – Definition of Terms

Here Friedrich introduces blogs and the various forms of fictional blogging – according to her there is a distinct difference between serialized fiction and ‘blog fiction’. The first may use blogs as a medium through which fiction is written, the second utilizes all aspects of blogging – ‘feeds, comment forms and hyperlinks’.

Chapter 2 – Blog Fiction as Digital Media

Much of this chapter is used to point out how comments from readers and the interactivity of the blogging medium has helped shape blog fiction. An example of this:

At its peak Simon of Space received upwards of 75 comments on each post. Some were from new readers, but there was also a group of regular readers and posters … Their comments were often in response to one another, and many readers linked one another as a result of their meeting on the fictional blog comments section … readers were able to form a real community around a fictional text without ever interacting with one another in person.

(page 17, paragraph 2)

Another interesting point she brings up is the strange isolation of fictional blogs – almost all authors of blog fiction she interviewed did not read other fictional blogs, and in many cases were not aware of others. In an interview she conducted:

I’ve been writing a fictional blog since May ’06 and I’ve been struggling to find out if there’s a community or some sort of ‘hub’ for fiction bloggers out there. Unlike other areas (e.g. technology or politics), the whole fiction blogging world seems very small and very fractured. Sure, I’ve seen quite a few other fiction blogs in my travels but there’s no real conversation’ between them. In this respect they’re quite unlike the other blogs I’ve read. Unlike, say, a political blog where you’ll get a lot of instant feed back and links to and from your blog, fiction blogging seems to be quite an isolated and, at times, disheartening experience.

(page 19, blockquote 2)

In this view the Simon in Space‘s community was a rarity.

Chapter 3 – Novels and Blogs: A Historical and Structural Analysis

Then Friedrich takes us on a trek down history – comparing blog fiction to the 18th century novel. She shows us that the 19th century novel was epistolary – or delivered in the form of letter/diary entries, a echo of blog fiction today. The rest of the chapter is spent exploring the social impact blogging has on society, interspersed with social developments and changes in the 18th century.

Chapter 4: Conversation and Dialogue

What is the difference between conversation and dialogue? Conversation is spoken, heard in everyday life – when brought into a narrative it is modified, simplified … turned into dialogue.

Friedrich shows that while fictional blogs have dialogue in their narratives, their inherent nature makes them also part of a conversation. The conversation here is through comments and trackback and the relationship between reader and writer.

Dialogue in a novel may be between several characters, but each point of view comes from one author. This is not the case on a blog. When a reader posts a comment, that comment is a genuine response to the author’s original post. There is a back-and-forth volley of thought happening where one person speaks” and another responds, just as there is in a spoken conversation.

Chapter 5: Trusting a Text: Hoaxes, False Documents, and Pseudonyms

On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.

This poses quite a few problems for fictional blogs – Friedrich gives examples such as Belle de Jour (Diary of a London Call Girl) and the controversy surrounding it:

Through all this, her identity has remained a mystery. Most critics are inclined to believe she is fictional and the list of attributed authors is extensive, including journalists, novelists, and the editor of an erotic magazine. All have denied involvement. In reply to an email from the British Sunday Times asking whether she plans to reveal herself, Belle simply said, “Darling —- no thank you” (Walsh).

(page 58, paragraph 1)

There are other examples presented here – Friedrich writes that fictional blogging, if and when revealed to be a fabrication, has led to a multitude of reactions – such as the furore after Lonelgirl15 was revealed to be fiction, played by actress Jessica Rose.

Viewer sentiments seemed split between three camps: those who still enjoyed the videos and suggested viewers forgive and forget, those who felt the videos were now devalued and not worth watching, and those who didn’t mind that the videos were fictional, but felt cheated out of the mystery.

(page 59, paragraph 2)

Chapter 6: Copyrights and Ownership

This chapter starts with a question first posed by Jason Kottke: who owns the conversation on your blog? You? Your readers? I love the way Friedrich poses these questions – can your readers, who affect the storyline of your blook, be considered co-authors? She gives us a case in Hilly and Fred:

… one commenter created and developed his own character by posting comments. He was able to insinuate himself into the blog’s story, thereby becoming a co-author. In this situation, the commenter could easily claim that he had helped to produce the text, and was thereby entitled to hold copyright just as much as the blog’s administrator.

Which makes you wonder what creating a community around your blook entails.

Chapter 7: Printed Pages and Flickering Screens

Ahh, the age old argument. I was particularly taken in by a point she expressed – that of trust. Text presented on the screen does not generate as much trust as a physical copy of the article:

I have experienced this distrust of on-screen text myself during research … I found an interview … in the online archives of Newsweek. I wanted to read it, so I printed it off and did so. I could hypothetically have never printed the article; I could have read it online, quoted it, and cited it, without ever printing it off. Yet I felt far more comfortable reading and using the text when I could hold it in my hands, jot notes in the margins, and flip from one page to another.

What this means for blooks may be quite worrisome … nevertheless she goes on to say that blogs are extremely useful to chart the evolution of thoughts and ideas, giving her own blog (which she used to record her progress while researching this thesis) as an example.

Her Conclusion

Betsy Friedrich sums it up with her belief that ‘fictional blogging will grow increasingly important to the publishing industry, but will remain marginal and relatively unknown to most readers.’ She goes on to say that ‘for a fictional blog to capture an audience it must be marketed professionally or be authored by an already well-known name.’

Well. Looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me.