Amazing what writing a series can do to you. The last few days I’ve been completely out of tune with the world at large, and I even lost track of most of the blooks I read.
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.
Remember Sophie? That project under the Institute for the Future of the Book that was designed to replace PDFs once and for all? I wrote about it in February, and at long last there’s some news about the software.
The Institute’s blog states that an alpha version of Sophie will be released this week, which I can’t wait to get my grubby paws on. It should be very interesting to see how they’ve implemented the features they mentioned in their last press release.
A very rough roadmap for Sophie:
June — a more robust version of the current feature set
August — a special version of Sophie optimized for the OLPC (aka $100 laptop or XO) in time for the launch of the first six million machines
September — a beta version of Sophie 1.0 which will include the first pass at a Sophie (sic) reader
December — release of Sophie 1.0
I can’t wait for December. Find out more about Sophie here and here.
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.
Just a short post - the new covers for Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows has been released:
The children’s edition:
The adult edition (this sounds wrong):
As usual, the Bloomsbury cover trumps the Scholastic cover (this is me being biased - all my copies are from Bloomsbury) and I must say the web should be in a flurry of excitement soon, as the hype leading up to the very last book usually starts building up after the release of the covers.
I haven’t got the time to zoom in on each of the covers to see the summaries written, but here’s the source if you want to be embroiled in more Pottermania.
[Update on coverage]: BBC apparently asked members of the public about their opinion on the book 7 cover, and a lot of them complained about how ugly it is. Read it here.
“Rich people may have finally found the way to heaven: a genetically engineered camel that would fit into the eye of a needle.”
To writers still aspiring to be taken up by one of the traditional publishing houses: our eye to writing heaven has just gotten smaller.
Let’s look at the odds working against authors wanting to publish a first novel:
There are hundreds of competent writing courses out there, which in turn raises the quality for submissions to publishers. Your writing, if beautiful, has to compete with hundreds of others who are more or less as good as, if not better than, yours.
So let’s look at the other factor in getting published: content. Or topic. Or what you write about. If you’re a novelist, the story you present in your first novel must be distinctive, fresh, and easily marketable. It is perhaps this last point that provides us with some worry - more and more marketing campaigns in the publishing industry have huge pictures of good looking authors to use while promoting their fiction - authors are sold next to their books.
Let’s talk about reading habits:
In a survey of 2,000 adults, a third had not bought a new book in the previous 12 months. 34% said they did not read books. (Expanding the Market, Book Marketing Ltd, 2004)
Whether they use the internet or not wasn’t asked, though I believe it should - the internet is primarily a text based medium where reading reigns supreme. Back to the topic at hand: less and less people are reading books, buying books, enjoying literature. There are a myriad of reasons, but let’s just step back and conclude that while book nuts are not shrinking dramatically, they’re not growing exponentially either.
But the number of books, content and writing out there are growing exponentially.
A lot of the above points are discussed and presented poignantly in a Guardian Unlimited article I’ve just finished consuming. The future looks bleak.
Before I became a journalist, I worked as a reader for Jonathan Cape and Chatto & Windus. I learnt that if it is true that everyone has a novel in them, most people would be best advised to keep it there.
Let’s look at the odds working against authors wanting to publish a first novel:
