Scott Mackenzie is the author of online works Rebirth and The Rising. He’s currently looking for online writers to contribute short works of fiction to an anthology of blooks. I’ll let him speak in his own words:
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 30th 2008.
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.
In the last post by Gavin we talked about how and why a publishing industry slump will help online fiction. In the comment storm that followed James of JPS/fact presented a counter-argument as to why online fiction is not yet an alternative to the traditional publishing world. James and I were supposed to do a Q&A post on Novelr, but due to time constraints (mine, mostly) we have settled on me writing this post, with him editing it. The arguments and ideas forthwith are, at the core, his.
First, a recap. We know that the traditional publishing industry is upon dark times - an obvious parallel would be the music industry, which was grappling with piracy and the Internet before iTunes came along and blew everything up. In the previous post Gavin wrote that the time is ripe for a similar thing to happen in Book World - and I agree with him. But before we begin discussing how best to blow things up let us talk about the challenges that are unique to us - and online fiction - in particular.
Quality
The first point James brings up is that online fiction suffers from chronic quality drought. The problems we have with quality are two fold: first of all we do not have a legion of editors, proofreaders, people who are familiar with text and who constantly hound at authors (again and again and again) to polish up, jettison chapters, rewrite characters, rethink themes and the sort. Secondly, we have little (as yet) serious works in online fiction. Traditional print fiction does not suffer from these problems - their editorial processes are so tight we accuse them (rightly, it seems) of being patronizing to new authors, and I’ve personally lost count of the amount of Book Awards designed to promote an ever-escalating bar of quality for new novels. They also have an old, long-standing gauntlet of academics and critics through which new novels are thrown into … online, all we have is The Blooker Prize.
How are we faring on these points? Not very well, I’m afraid: we’re still figuring out an editing process for online fiction (in the comments section we’ve got a lot of talk about readers being editors - I do think, however, that there is a limit to the effectiveness of this method) - however, as for quality I am confident we will win out in the end. The quality of blooks now are a lot better than they were one year ago, when I first started Novelr - and as we continue to experiment with the form and the function of the screen we will only get better and better at presenting stories online.
Accessibility
Online fiction isn’t as portable as the dead-tree version. We need batteries, we need a screen; that screen isn’t easy on the eyes; we have yet to build a globally accepted standard for electronic books. I have dealt with this problem before on Novelr: like James, I believe it is impossible to port an offline work to the digital world without significant change. Rather, writing has to be tweaked to suit the way we read things on a screen. And that’s leaving out things like hypertext and images - which, used wisely, help boost the immersive power of a story.
We have another problem in this area, however: did you know that only 27% of Internet users read blogs? And if we look at reading in a broader sense we have to admit that we are losing our kids to video, music and games. How many Gen Ys know the pleasure of turning to the last page of a book? If they do read, it is in bites - on blogs and newspaper websites, never more than a few lines of information. We will have to fight to get them to realize stories are another form of entertainment - just because they don’t like the reading they do in school doesn’t mean that reading isn’t fun.
But back to the technology - despite what most critics say I believe we’re in a far better position than we care to admit. I am writing this on a beautiful glossy LCD screen, and Amazon’s Kindle makes some headway in solving the screen and battery problem, though it is too expensive and too rare at the moment for any real impact. But this is what I am excited about: I am following a little known technology called Seadragon very closely - below is a demo of the technology being put to its paces in front of a live audience. My breath caught as I watched it. Tell me if yours does as well.
I think most of us know the pretense under which we are having this conversation. The question is, do you? Increasingly irrelevant, you are - a dinosaur in the age of the Internet - and you just have to change. No, don’t worry, your counterparts in the music industry didn’t want to admit the truth too - for too long they handled the intrusion of the Internet in exactly the way a business shouldn’t: political lobbying and suing the socks off 80 year old grandmothers. Their lawyers must’ve been laughing all the way to the bank, no? And don’t look at me like that, you’ve made your lawyers very happy too - remember the J.K. Rowling case? That’s copyright, you say? Well, big news for you: you’ve got to rethink copyright - suing the socks of everyone who reproduces content isn’t going to do anything for your business. Not at all.
So what is the future? You can’t think beyond the box at the moment, oh no, you’re too busy worrying about the bottom line, complaining about the short (God forbid you use this term) shelf life of new books, pushing for fancier covers and louder headlines to splash over your releases. You want television appearances, author readings, bookstore appearances - the whole package … and then you stop and wonder why you seem to be losing. You’re doing the things that used to work, but they just doesn’t seem to be as effective as they once were! So you point fingers - you say that these are fallen times, that people don’t read as much as they use to, that books are relics of a forgotten age and there’s nothing you can do about that. But really, can you?
Printing On Demand
Well I’m sure you’ve heard of this. Vanity Press, you call it. Hahahaha. Lulu can never compete with us you say. Well shut up. Do you realize the opportunities PoD presents to your dying business? No? Let me give you an example. At Kinko’s they have this service where you upload a document (it can be as big as an entire book), customize the basic look (cover, fonts, etc) and have it printed and delivered in one business-day. To a location of your choice - say you’re doing a presentation at Hilton, you can have Kinko’s print it out in a store closest to your hotel and have it sent there minutes before you arrive. Amazing, no?
Now apply this to your business model. What if readers can choose to have their books printed in store? See the opportunities this presents to you? You no longer have limited shelf space - you can have a virtually limitless number of books available to customers in your computer system - and besides that you don’t have to - ick! - plastic wrap the books on show! Your store can now be customized to encourage browsing, reading, and imagine how much smaller it’ll be! Death to the big bookstore - overhead costs will kill you on one of those! And think beyond the retail front: your backend will be much more streamlined. No more freight costs, no more surplus stock (wasting paper!), no more burning petrol as you cart books from factory to shopping mall - whenever a new book comes out you just download a shell of it from your publisher’s network! Cheaper! More effective! Do you see it yet?
And all these cost savings can be passed on to the consumer: kill the thought, now, that books are luxury items. Dell builds its computers and ships them in a week; customers love them because they’re bloody cheap! Now you can do the same! And, yes, there may be a few kinks along the way - printing a book will take a few hours, particularly if a whole bunch of customers are buying at one time … but think of it as a temporary setback, while advances are made to our printing technology.
Choice
We all know that the 21st century consumer loves choice. M&Ms made a huge killing when they implemented a system for customers to choose the colour of their chocolates. Imagine paying extra for a packet of only pink and green M&Ms! Crazy, no? Now think about what this can do for you: why not let customers choose what short stories they want in an anthology? Why not let them read stuff online and, if they want a dead-tree version of their book, get to choose their own covers? Why not allow your customers to print a message on the cover, the same way iPods can be engraved as gifts?
And why not charge a premium for all those services?
The illustrious Alexandra Erin, one of the successful online novelists (and by “successful” I mean it’s her day job) recently wrote that the publishing industry is currently tightening its belt in the face of a possible recession. That means there will likely be less sales, less new books, and less new writers. Because in the face of falling sales, the big companies will be unwilling to take risks on new authors until the crisis is past. And, readers will have less money to spend on unknown writers. They’ll want something they’re sure to find entertaining and worth the money, since we’ll all have less of it.
Now, this is where some news anchor would say “This is a good time to PANIC!”
Now, it kind of is. If the rising price of oil destroys our economy and causes a depressed period, that will pretty much suck. I’m not going to sugarcoat that sad fact. So, what chance does the new art form of Online Novels have against a powerhouse industry like Traditional Publishing? Especially in the face of a crisis of global proportions?
Well, because we have an opportunity here. The Chinese symbol for crisis is the same as the one for opportunity: Crisertunity! (Thank you Homer Simpson) If the common reader is going to have trouble finding disposable income to spend on paper books, we can present a great alternative: free online text. It’s environmentally friendly, takes zero manufacturing time, saves trees, and entertains daily.
The Old Way: Traditional Publishing
You know how it goes. A plucky young writer goes into his or her private sanctuary with a typewriter/laptop and punches out the next great American Novel. (I’m Canadian, but we’re talking myths here) It’s a work of genius, with rich drama and realistic characters. The earnest would-be novelist sends it to agents and publishers, writing query letters, hoping for the best.
Form letters come back, saying the manuscript isn’t “right” for their publishing house or agency. Or that the writing is excellent, but that marketing it would be difficult. Perhaps a rewrite? The writer goes back into seclusion, writing like a madman, until it’s finished. Frank Herbert’s “Dune” was rejected 13 times by publishers. James Joyce’s “Dubliners” was rejected 22 times, and then the first run was bought by one person and burned. They had to try again.
Finally, the young writer (probably no longer young) gets an agent and gets published. And then waits for a year while the manuscript is edited and printed, cover art finalized, marketing planned… Until finally, one day there is their book, on a shelf in a store, for the world to find and love.
Readers will spend fifteen, twenty, twenty-five dollars for a paperback. And from there to the neighbourhood of fifty bucks for a hardcover. And that plucky young writer? Well, after the publisher pays the corporate owners, the editors, the publicists, the artists, the printer and the agent, not much is left.
And if a recession closes the publishing world’s doors to everyone but the big names, the bestsellers? You get zero.
The Alternative: Faster, Leaner, Cooler
A new economic model is emerging thanks to the Internet. The Music Industry has already proven it works, and that the culture needs to adapt. Downloads. Why buy a CD with two good songs and ten bad ones, when you can download the two songs you like? Ipods and MP3 players make digital music more convenient than CDs. Some bands are taking this to heart: Radiohead offered some of its music online for free, and fans could leave donations. The whole industry is trying to recreate itself.
Bands are getting fans to help them publish music, instead of turning to big studios. Fans get to feel like part of a community, vote on favourites, comment on albums, and decide who’s worthy of funding. These are exciting times.
I tried to get one of my little cousins to read Harry Potter last week. It was a great failure - he took The Philosopher’s Stone, flipped through it and handed it back to me.
“No pictures.” he said, “Not interesting.” And when I checked in on him later he was watching Spongebob on TV.
I had forgotten how kids are introduced to the world of reading - their first books are often filled with pictures, watercolour paintings and perhaps a few lines of text. Compare that to the stark novels of the adult world - words crammed into 500 or so thin pages, not a picture of the main character in sight. I remember reading my first ‘novel without pictures’ (gasp!): it was an Enid Blyton book, about a group of kid detectives. It left me feeling like a real grownup: goodbye to picture books now, the whole vista of bookland was open - finally - to me.
Pictureless Books vs The Internet
Here’s the truth, plain and simple: novels are remarkably unvisual things. Apart from the cover, the book itself is the pure domain of language. We don’t care if the page is white or yellow, crinkled or frayed: all that matters to us are the words written on it. And perhaps the font the novel is set in, though even that doesn’t matter much (my old copy of Pride and Prejudice is falling apart by the seams, and the typography is horrible - but I still enjoyed it).
When we come to the Internet, however, the rules of the game change. They shift so much that publishing a book and publishing online are two completely different things. No longer is reader perception of a story shaped by typography alone - we have many other factors that decide whether a reader is going to read and enjoy your work: navigation, graphics, overall ‘feel’ of the site. I have touched on readability when it comes to presenting your work online, and while that’s important there’s another major part of publishing on the web that I haven’t talked about yet - something I call The Picture Book Effect.
Put simply, The Picture Book Effect is this:
Credibility and perception of online content is shaped by the design/format in which that content is presented.
In simple English: your readers judge your work by the visual cues you have on your site.
The Internet Is A Picture Book
Oh yes, it is. Let me prove it to you. I am going to give you two opinion pieces to compare. The first one is Why There Aren’t More Googles, at paulgraham.com. The second one is entitled Terrorism and the Olympics by Nicholas Kristof, over at the New York Times. I want you to visit these two websites and read at least three paragraphs of both articles. Done? Done? Good.
Here’s my question: which one seems more credible?
Now many of you would probably say the New York Times, which doesn’t exactly prove my point, but we’ll come to that in a bit. The reasons for choosing the NYT is two-fold: first of all it is a major established newspaper, so it has to be more credible than a simple website run by some geezer you’ve probably never even heard of. The second reason is the one I’m getting at: the design of the NYT site oodles credibility, especially if you compare it to the paulgraham one.
Now I can’t really argue with the first reason, but I’ll give you something to consider. Imagine for a moment that the NYT site had Paul Graham’s site design, and paulgraham.com had the NYT layout. Which now would be more credible in your eyes, in the time that it takes you to read 3 paragraphs? It would be the one with the NYT site design, wouldn’t it?
Dear Mr Publisher.
Gavin Williams writes 
I tried to get one of my little cousins to read Harry Potter last week. It was a great failure - he took The Philosopher’s Stone, flipped through it and handed it back to me.
