Fluffy_seme is totally right, a frying pan doesn’t make one a better chef, just like a BMW doesn’t make someone a good driver.

I think that her observation applies to web fiction writers unnervingly well. A lot of weblit authors feverishly discuss the latest blog platforms, or the newest site designs. But many web fiction writers are still making the same mistakes that writers were making when the cutting edge technology was a Smith-Corona.

They’re writing cliched, underdeveloped characters in cliched, underdeveloped stories. It is the exception rather than the norm that authors actually keep to their update schedules. And frighteningly too many writers are rude and condescending to those who don’t gush over their work.

There’ll NEVER be any technology that will change that. That’s the responsibility of writers.

It just so happens that I think Bill’s right. When discussions pop up about reader interaction in web fiction, the majority of the solutions being bandied about are technological. And of course some of the solutions are technological. No-one would argue against the utility (and comparative ease!) of the like button vs the comment box, for instance, and you’re more likely to get ‘liked’ than you are to get a good long comment. Certainly the method of response affects the kinds of responses you get, to a certain degree.

But there are other factors to consider as well. Are readers not commenting because:

• Your story sucks?
• You don’t have enough readers?
• Your story is good but it isn’t engaging.
• Or perhaps you’ve been rude in the past?
• Or you don’t respond to comments? (or you don’t have a mechanism that emails commenters when you’ve responded!)
• Or you’re writing the kind of story that doesn’t encourage comments? (For example: I find that I don’t comment when reading literary web fiction, I tend to think it over and then shoot the author a thoughtful email at the end of the entire book; whereas I comment like a fanboy when reading superheroes).

I suppose what I’m trying to say is this: getting better reader interaction is a function of several different variables. And certainly, tech-related mechanisms are about half the solution. The other half is caused by story/response-related variables, and as an author your job is to test these things, to figure out which of those variables are the ones that are giving you the reader:comment ratio that you currently have.

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.

Why Web Fiction?

There are two good reasons to write web fiction. The first is for the writing. You’re a writer, and it’s likely that you’re already scribbling in little notebooks on the side. Putting that on the web provides for you an external force to keep you writing.

The second reason is more visceral: write web fiction to find and talk to readers. The best online writing gets comments within the first few hours of a new chapter going live. It’s an amazing thing to have readers debating over characters – your characters – not too long after you’ve finished writing.

These are the two most important reasons to write web fiction. All the others will fade in comparison as time goes by. Getting noticed through web fiction is an untested model. Making money works for some people (who have to be just as good as building great web-reading experiences as they are at writing) and may not work for all.

These extras are nice bonuses to have, but will certainly not be true for everyone.

Writing Web Fiction

Stick to a regular posting schedule. Find a comfortable chapter length and use that. This isn’t too hard to do – you’ll figure this out, naturally, as you go along.

Some people recommend keeping a buffer of chapters so you have time to think ahead. This is fine, but there’s a better alternative: keep a loose plot skeleton in a separate document, and write once a week with the pressure of a waiting audience to keep you going. Things will be more fun that way.

Talking to Readers

Web fiction is only truly fulfilling when you have an audience to keep you going. Creating that audience is important if you truly want to enjoy all the medium has to offer.

The single most important principle to remember if you want to create a community around your work is to: respond to each and every single comment. I want to repeat that, because it’s so important: respond to each and every single comment.

The majority of your readers will never comment on your work. If and when they do, why not do the one thing that would keep them commenting? A quick response tells them that they’re valued. It keeps them coming back. Given enough time, they’ll begin debating with each other, and that’s the best metric possible for the quality of your community.

Keep a personal writing blog. Talk to readers on Twitter. Point to both on your web fiction site. The blog helps you talk to readers even when you’re not posting fiction. And blogs are much less work than a well curated forum, for the same benefits.

Don’t worry too much about finding readers (at least – not at the beginning). Keep writing good stories and the readers will find you.

Presenting web fiction

Good presentation in web fiction isn’t as important as the first three ideas. A beautifully designed site with bad writing habits and no audience is worth nothing to a web fiction author. And if you have unmanaged expectations for your online writing, you aren’t likely to have as much fun.

That said, if you’ve got the first three ideas down, you may find the general principles listed here useful.

Design matters. Designing for web fiction is simple: keep things readable. Stay away from electric-pink text.

Design affects how readers view your work. Colours set the mood and tone for your stories. It doesn’t hurt to hire a designer to do an identity for your site. But if you can’t afford to do that, read these Novelr articles here, here, and here.

I think this pretty much covers the core of what we’ve found out about web fiction, at Novelr. Probably these ideas work as a framework on which you may hang all the other ideas that you’ll find at this site. And that’s all there is to it – it’s that simple. Good luck.

A Recap

Novelr’s been around for some time now, and in that time we’ve learnt quite a few things together. Let’s start off with a couple of things that we do know about presenting online fiction. Peel off that scalp and think back: what have we learnt together, exactly?

One of the first things we’ve got to remember is that reading online is crucially divided into two distinct stages. These stages exist in the offline, paper-book world as well, but they’re not as critical for the writer as they are on the Internet. The first stage is called the browsing stage. During this stage a potential reader skims content to determine if the work is worth reading or no. It isn’t just the opening text that the reader takes into account – in the browsing stage, it is everything from the subject matter to the included pictures to the size of the font to the weight of the book in the hands that goes into a reader’s evaluation. If the reader thinks the text is promising, he or she then moves into the second stage, the reading stage. You and I should know this – if you are a book lover, like I am, then you will recognize this stage as the one where you forget about the sun and the ocean and so get sunburnt with a shadow-image of a book burnt into your chest. The reading stage calls for complete attention on the text. Everything else – links, ads, sidebar text – are superfluous to the reading experience, and they fall to the periphery of a reader’s vision.

The second thing on presenting online fiction that we must remember is what I call the Picture Book Effect: credibility and perception of online content is shaped by the design/format in which that content is presented. In simpler terms: your readers judge your work by the visual cues you have on your site. There are deliberate differences between the New York Times and a celebrity gossip blog. Both appeal to different demographics, and so both have different visual cues. One is designed to be credible, the other is designed to be kinky. One is black and white, the other shocking pink. How readers view your site depends as much on the design of said site as it does on the text you have provided them with.

The third thing that we must recall are the basic principles of readable design. Large fonts, good contrast, clear colours. An intuitive site structure. What exactly these elements are and how you apply them is beyond the scope of this article – go read some of the previous Novelr posts on the topic, or pay a visit to the pros.

So what have we learnt? We have learnt that an ideal fiction format is designed around a browsing stage and a reading stage. We have learnt that the site must have a coherent visual identity, one that should – ideally, at least – complement the fiction. And thirdly, lastly, we have learnt that the site must be readable.

The Online Fiction Format

So what should an online fiction format look like? What elements should we include with it? In this we are faced with a complex task, and so it would be helpful to begin first by talking about what we wouldn’t need to include with the online fiction format.

The first thing we have no need to include is forcefully-readable text. This is simply pragmatic: it makes no sense to limit authors to one font over another, or to ban them from using font sizes below a certain cutoff-point. Neither can we stop writers from using electric pink or neon green in their prose. Most of us already know how to display our fiction in a readable manner. The ones who don’t will quickly learn from the lack of happy readers.

We don’t have to create distinct visual identities for each work. We also don’t have to adjust for all possible forms of presentation. Some writers will want innovative, highly experimental forms in which to present their fiction; this format does not serve them. It simple cannot: no format will attract or hold the interest of such mavericks for very long. This particular format will be for the majority of authors out there: the ones who want to write and who do not wish to worry too much about the underlying mechanics of code and presentation.

And so what should this format be like? At its most basic level, it should have two things:

• It should be built to accommodate the two states: browsing and reading
• It should be easy to customize, both visually and practically

We shall deal with these two elements in order.

The Reader Conversion

We have learnt earlier that there are two states for the online reader: the browsing stage and the reading stage. How can a presentation style be built around these two reading patterns? The answer is simple, but consists of two parts: we would need, first of all, to build two distinct screens for the prospective reader, that is consistent throughout the entire work/format. Secondly, those two screens would need to fulfill all that the reader would want in both stages of the reading process. I’m not going to say that this is dead easy (the second part, in particular, isn’t), but the base idea isn’t particularly complicated: at the browsing stage, give the reader a splash page. At the reading stage, give the reader text. Got that? Good. Now a little more detail:

The Browsing Stage

At the browsing stage, give the reader enough scannable information to make the decision to leave or to read. This sounds simple, but it isn’t: what you’re really trying to do is to convince the reader to choose the latter and not the former. There is a limit to this, of course – if your fiction is about vampire rabbits, and I am not interested in vampire rabbits, then there is very little you can do to make me choose to read your work. The trick is to get the readers that are open to vampire rabbit stories to make the conversion from browse to read.

I have no time to analyse the elements of a good, compelling splash page here in this article. I suspect that it would involve a fair deal of experimentation on my part, and a fair bit of patience on yours. But my case is that an online fiction format should provide writers with the tools to make a splashpage (and not just an about page) and that the splashpage should allow easy placement of a blurb, some links (latest chapter/first chapter etc), and some choice words from a selection of positive-ish reviews. For your perusal, some of the best I have seen so far:

Winter Rain, by Chris Poirier (yes, that same god behind Web Fiction Guide)

A Timely Raven by Amber Simmons

Beasts of New York by Jon Evans

Getting Real by 37signals

… and Speak Human by Eric Karjaluoto.

This last one isn’t actually a splashpage for an existing book, but a promo site for a pre-release non-fiction title. I’m including it to make a point that the online fiction format should be able to have writers adapt their splashpage from site-intro to preview, and that this may work, too, regardless of whether it is fiction or non-fiction the format needs to handle.

The Reading Stage

And so that covers the browse stage. For the read stage, however, the online fiction format should be crafted so as to limit distractions from the reading experience. This is a complete opposite to the browse stage’s objective of providing as much scannable information as possible. In the read stage, you want to remove as many scannable elements as you can, for this detracts from the readers’ concentration on the prose.  What this means, practically, is a limitation on the number of sidebars possible. No sidebar is good, one sidebar is the maximum allowed. (I’m tempted to make exceptions for thrillers and David Wellington, but then again this is a fiction format and it has to be general and simple all through. Sigh.) MCM’s novels have the read stage screens perfected (image below), and so have 37signals with their book Getting Real (here’s an example of a chapter).

The basic rules for a good read stage screen is this: navigation before the text, stuff after the text, no distractions in-between. Things like exhortations to donate or to buy the book may be included after the end of the chapter, at the bottom of the page, or you may choose to place those pages on a separate screen at the very end of the novel. That’s up to you. A basic fiction format should, at least – I believe, have this underlying structure.

Flexibility And The Fiction Format

Now that we’ve dealt with the browse/read design philosophy, let us turn to the idea that the online fiction format should be easy to customize, both visually and practically.

When I say visually, I mean that the design must be simple enough to allow all kinds of writers to use it and adapt it for their own, distinct, purposes. This is not easy to achieve, for it takes a certain amount of ability as a designer to create themes that are universally applicable. The only example I can think of, at the moment, is the Minima theme of the Blogger platform, originally designed by Douglas Bowman in 2004. It is used by hundreds of blogs worldwide: all similar, yet never the same.

When I say that the format should be easy to customize practically, I mean that whatever format it is should be easy for any writer to turn into their own. Minima’s beauty is that it can be completely changed by just adding an image header and a background image to whatever blog it is that you have. The online fiction format should have this ability, too. I am not yet a good programmer, but I believe that it is possible to integrate this functionality to the backend of the fiction format theme/system: optional fields to upload and modify the header/background image of the site you’re using it on.

Conclusion

If you’ve been following closely, you’ll realize that any and all of these elements can be applied to the existing content platforms of the web. It is true that the suggestions I have offered here can simply be implemented with a theme; in fact, if I felt like it I really could go out right now to whip one up for the Blogger platform. But this is merely one aspect of the online fiction format, and there have been countless other suggestions besides. MCM has already suggested e-commerce integration, Jim Zoetewey suggests built-in ebook conversion ability (such as a one-click conversion of chapters into PDFs or ePub files). There’s no reason all these and more can’t be integrated into the online fiction format; in fact, some of us have already taken the first few steps in these particular directions. These are my suggestions, I’m sure you have many more. Over to you.

I no longer believe this to be true. The quality of a medium has never been measured by the quality of its reviewers. As writers, this is intuitive: how often do you write to please your critics? I know I don’t. I write for myself, and I’m pretty sure that you too, write for reasons far more important than the next glowing review. Perhaps we’ve gotten the causal relationship wrong: the bar isn’t raised because of reviewers; instead, reviewers improve in scope and ability as the bar of quality in a medium rises. And the bar rises of its own accord, driven by writers who work to improve themselves, or by writers who attempt to experiment within (or even without) the boundaries of their chosen form.

When you think of it like this, WFG’s true value becomes clear: it isn’t valuable because of its reviewer integrity; it is valuable, rather, because it makes it very easy for one writer to look at another writer’s work, and to learn from that experience. I must admit that I used to believe in such an idea: that good reviewing would improve the quality of web fiction. But a year at WFG has proven me wrong: quality happens regardless of whether or not there are reviewers on hand to catalogue it. Writers are fantastic people, and they don’t need to be told to up their ante.

That is not to say that reviewers aren’t important. They’re just important for a different reason. In indie music, independent music blogs (usually curated by a team of music lovers) post tracks from their favourite artists on a weekly basis. This helps to spread word of mouth, from artist to blogger and finally to audiophile. Reviewers play the same role. They’re not important because they improve the quality of online fiction. They’re important because they attract attention, and attention in turn translates to more readers. The eFiction Book Club is one such ‘music blog’. We need more like them. But, more importantly, we need to be clear on the form and function of our reviewer class, and we shouldn’t get too presumptuous over what the reviewer can achieve. Reviewers don’t improve the quality of our medium. We do. Let’s not mix the two up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• you expect a cover
• you expect soft pages you can flip
• you expect binding of some sort
• you expect book-smell (and this is a personal favourite of mine – I really really like the smell of new books) –
• in short, you expect a standardised reading experience.

Compare this experience with that of online fiction. Granted, one of the main draws of the medium right now is that it is new, experimental, and that it doesn’t come with a set of preconceptions or constraints that may bind you if you so choose to write a dead-tree novel. But if you think about similar mediums that have matured, over the past few years, you’d realize that there exists a very particular growth pattern to which all these mediums follow before they became mainstream, one that we haven’t gotten to yet.

Clay Shirky best summed it up in his June 2009 TED talk:

What matters here isn’t technical capital. It’s social capital. These tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. It isn’t when the shiny new tools show up that their uses start permeating society. It’s when everybody is able to take them for granted.

And this is the truth. Nobody really paid attention to blogging until WordPress and Blogger came along and made the technology – or, more importantly, the concept – boring. But it’s interesting to note that while blogging is staple to us now, in 1997 it was chaotic, and less of a movement than a collection of fringe geeks. Early blogs were literally ‘web-logs’ – records of links found on a person’s travels throughout the world wide web (and, yes, I am aware of how old-fashioned that sentence just sounded) and there really was no defined idea of what – and how – a blog should look like.

This has, of course, changed, in so far that even fringe communities like ours now write our fiction in the blog format. We know what blogs look like. We know how they work, and we know how to read them. Somewhere in between 1997 and 2001 the blog morphed from a collection of links to a reverse-chronological order of posts, with comments, trackbacks, RSS feeds and what have you … and this change enabled the mass adoption and acceptance of blogs and blogging. The blog became standardized. When you go to a blog now, you expect a number of things that all blogs provide you with – things that are by now so rudimentary that nobody thinks about them anymore. And in this way blogs resemble books: they deliver content in exactly the way you expect them to.

The same cannot be said for the blook. Or blog fiction. Think about it: when we publish fiction on WordPress/Blogger/Drupal, we are taking a system that was designed for something else entirely, and adapting that for the delivery of fiction. There is a difference between text and prose, and I believe that WordPress, and Blogger, and Drupal fail to make this distinction. How the author displays the work is up to him or her. Sometimes this works. Most of the time it doesn’t.

And you don’t have to look very far for evidence of this! Take two random works, any of the 300+ you can find on Web Fiction Guide, and compare their presentation styles. Some will have their chapter listings on the right, some will have it in the footer. Some display a splash page, some just hit you with a reverse-chronological order of posts; still others give you a link to the first episode in the sidebar. Whenever you read web fiction you are literally taking a dive into the dark – you don’t know what you’ll find, and you don’t know the context you’ll find it presented in. Imagine going to a bookstore to see books of all possible formats – some read right to left, some packaged in scrolls, others propped up and sold in ring files. This is terrible. It is already a huge challenge to find good content within the confines of the book as we know it. Likewise for online fiction – the diversity of presentation styles is is a huge mental block, particularly for the reader, and it’s one that I think we should do away with.

So Who Should Do It?

Let’s go back to the story of the blog. I told you that somewhere along the way – around 1997 to 2001 – the blog was transformed from a ‘web-log’ to the written format we accept and know today. Now I believe that this change did not happen via collective community movement. Nobody decided anything together. And so I’m not going to suggest some cliched ‘let’s decide now, together, what we’re going to change about this’ as a solution to this problem. If we look at blogging, we see that the change happened not because of the old-timers, it happened in spite of them. A bunch of newcomers – programmers – came together and wrote b2, cafelog, and then later on Movable Type and WordPress. This changed the nature of the blog. WordPress and Movable Type were easy-to-install platforms that lowered the bar to entry for many. More importantly, however, it put blogging on the map. The more bloggers started using WordPress/Movable Type (and it didn’t matter which, for the format was essentially the same) the more people read them; the more people read them, the more they started clicking these interesting little ‘powered by blogging engine‘ links; the more they knew blogging, the more they were inclined to blog; the more bloggers there were using that particular blogging format … and on the cycle went.

I believe that the easiest way to have a standardized online fiction format is for somebody to actually sit down and develop the system himself. And yes, that does sound rather difficult (!) but note that blogs are actually rather simple applications to write – ask any programmer if this is so and he’s likely to go d’oh at you. So while WordPress and Drupal are too bloated for our purposes, the former – being open source – is actually a good starting point on which to built a system on. The crux of the change is this: this app – whatever it is, or how it looks like (and I’ve got quite a few ideas on how it should look like), it should be good enough, and simple enough, and intuitive enough to meet all possible online fiction needs. And if it is all these things, mass adoption should follow, sooner or later, allowing writers to do what they do best in an environment that currently throws so many obstacles in the good writer’s way.

I’d like to close now, but in case this sounds like a lot of charity work, here’s something to think about: there is now a large publishing industry shift across the digital divide, particularly where authors and novels are concerned. Consider how beneficial – and how desirable – designing a system for writers to tell their stories would be … not only for the community, but for whoever so decides to be a developer of just such an app. WordPress, is, after all, making more than enough money to survive.

I believe the main reason for this to be that people now attribute ownership to a creator’s online channel. They don’t criticize you on your blog the same way they won’t comment on your (bad) taste when they’re visiting you at your home. Two photographers I follow – Olivia Bee and lightsongs receive  praise – and only praise – every time they release a photo on their Flickr photostream, and I must say that it gets pretty annoying after two or three months, to scroll down and see a whole heap of amazing! piled upon them – upload after upload after upload.

There’s also the possibility that these people filter out their comments, and only approve the positive ones – but I don’t believe that to be the case. I wonder, though – how likely is a reader to post a negative review in an overwhelmingly positive comment thread? A creator’s loyal community is the best defense against trolls, but it also a deterrent from negative commentary on the creator’s work. And – if this is true, and it’s true for all creators – then wouldn’t the Internet be the ideal home for the narcissistic writer?

Note that this trend doesn’t seem to apply to Novelr, nor to any of the non-fiction idea blogs you have out there. People have no problems with arguing against ideas they don’t agree with. It’s the fiction – the creative work – that suffers from this dearth of online critique, and this means that the writers who blog for improvement aren’t likely to find it … not unless they ask for it, and ask for it regularly. There is one exception, however, on the Internet: writing forums and communities not clustered around the writer are good places to ask for writing feedback. Which means, then, that the trick to getting C&C isn’t to ask for opinions from the community clustered around your blook, but to ask for it at other places – neutral ones – where people do not feel that they’re intruding on your digital turf.

The ebook format fiasco is sometimes called ‘the tower of eBabel’, and for good reason: there are too many of them. But because we deal in digital fiction, and because ebooks are fast becoming viable models of distribution, we need to consider the sticky question of which ebook format, and why. This post attempts to answer that question. (Note that this is quite difficult to answer without looking into the future, simply because it is unclear if there’s ever going to be a victor in the ebook format wars. But I’ll get back to that in a bit.)

Context

E-book formats are no longer created from scratch. In most cases, the ebook maker – regardless of whether it’s a vendor or an open-source project – will decide to adapt and use an existing format, or to have some underlying programming language to make coding the format easier. Today, that language is often XML, or eXtensible Markup Language. Before we talk about the various ebook formats in proper, it’ll be good to talk a little about XML, and why it’s so popular as an underlying language.

The answer to that lies in XML’s name. ‘Markup’ and ‘Language’ are pretty self-explanatory; it tells us that XML is a programming language that consists primarily of markup tags, much like HTML.^[1] In fact, an XML document looks pretty much like any HTML page, the only difference being that XML is powerful enough to define and shape other languages ^[2]. But unlike HTML, XML is extensible. This means that XML allows you to define and create your own tags. For example, if I were an e-book-format creator, I can easily create and define <title> as a tag describing the title of an e-book. <title> doesn’t actually exist in XML. However, because XML is extensible, I can create what is effectively a whole new platform for my e-book format, and it’ll contain <title>, and whatever other tags I see fit to use. All I have to do is to define them, so that my ebook reader will understand which bits are which, and treat those sections accordingly.

You can tell that XML is useful precisely for this flexibility of form and function. The language is now used for many, many things – sometimes even as the foundation for web services to send requests and responses, behind the scenes, server-to-server. And if you take a look now at even the simplest of RSS feeds, you’ll find a language that is defined – and made possible – through XML.

Most of the major ebook formats today are all built upon some foundation of XML. The ePub format, widely tipped to become wide-spread, is built on a strong XML base. The Amazon Kindle format is built on a modified version of the Mobipocket ebook platform, which is in turn built on XHTML (with a dash of javascript/frame support). So is the format used by the new Sony Reader, though that’s known as the Sony BBeB. The conclusion you can take away from this is that sooner or later, XML will become a major part of your workflow regardless of which ebook format ends up as the eventual winner of eBabel. There’s no running away from it. The good news is, however, that XML is a remarkably convertible format. It’s going to be easier and easier to work with as most major software vendors make the jump to XML-based files; case in point: Microsoft Word’s new docx format is built on XML, and it’s not very hard to convert XML to other formats – say, PDFs, or HTML, or an XML-based ebook format of your choice.

The e-book Formats

So let’s get started. The following are the e-book formats in use today, ones that I believe still have a fighting chance of becoming the format of the known universe.

1. Amazon Kindle’s AZW. The Kindle uses Amazon’s proprietary AZW format, but can read unprotected Mobipocket e-books, HTML, Word documents and plain text (.txt) files. You convert to AZW using Amazon’s online Digital Text Platform, and you format your e-book using rudimentary HTML. AZW supports DRM (unfortunately) and is built around the Mobipocket format – though, confusingly, DRM-protected Mobipocket files cannot be read on the Kindle, because they’re not exactly one and the same. Is it worth it? Publishing your work in the AZW format grants you immediate access to the Amazon online store, where a number of online writers have been making a decent sum selling their work … some of which have been regularly hitting the top 10 bestseller lists for Kindle e-books. So … yes, it’s worth it.

2. Sony Reader’s BBeB, which stands for Broadband eBooks, is perplexing: Sony does not offer any tools to convert to the format, making the Sony Reader a closed medium to all but the biggest of publishers. In fact, the only way to publish for the Reader is via RTF or PDF … but XML to PDF conversions aren’t solid, not at the moment, and RTF limits your formatting options (it’s hardly better than a .txt file, to be honest). And there is at least one unofficial converter to BBeB, but Sony’s lack of support for writer releases is discouraging at best. Is it worth it? No.

3. Mobipocket (also known as mobi). The Mobipocket format was originally created by Mobipocket SA, a French company, in 2000, which was then bought over by Amazon in 2005. It’s been around for quite a bit, and it’s probably the only ebook-ish format at the moment that can claim full multi-platform compatibility. It runs on just about everything: the Kindle, the Palm OS, Symbian, Windows, Mac, and on the iPhone (the Stanza reader allows you to read Mobi books, though it was recently bought over by Amazon and is now in a vague sort of flux). It is, however, not very popular, and there doesn’t seem to be a captive audience or a community built around the format. A quick snoop around the official Mobipocket site confirms this. Why? I’m not sure, not at the moment (and I’m still looking for proper mobi-related numbers) – but a surprising amount of traditional publishers offer their ebooks in a mobi format. Is it worth it? This is hard to say. On one hand, the Mobipocket software suite is completely free, and it’s old enough to make conversion and formatting very easy on the writer. But the truth is that it’s not an exciting format to talk about, and this lack of excitement can probably be attributed to a lack of Mobipocket users … even with free software for just about every platform. And if you’re not likely to get serious ebook readers on Mobipocket (and you can’t sell mobi ebooks on Amazon for Kindle, anyway), then I guess it’s not worth it to spend so much time and energy on a format not many people would use in the first place.

4. ePub originally started off as the OEB (Open eBook) initiative. ePub is currently tipped to be the next big ebook format, if only because it’s backed by a loose consortium of publishers, writers, and programmers, who are tied together in the IDPF, or what is known as a ‘stardards and trade organization for the digital publishing industry’. As mentioned earlier in this article, ePub is built on XML, and so the IDPF leaders are currently trying to push it as a distribution standard for e-books. This means a couple of very interesting things. If the ePub people have their way, publishers will no longer have to produce e-books in different formats for different e-book vendors; they publish in just ePub, and demand that everyone else (say, Amazon) convert ePub to their own proprietary format. And it’s really simple to do that, primarily because ePub’s built on a nearly 100% XML base – itself a highly convertible format. Is it worth it? As of late 2008 Sony announced that their reader would now support the ePub format, and publishers (or at least, the ones who have vested interest in a digital book future) have been relatively supportive of ePub over others. If the IDPF people get their way and ePub becomes the industry standard (or even if it becomes just a distribution standard), ePub would well be worth it. I’m fairly optimistic that ePub will win – at the very least, I want it to win – but the road to that future is far from clear-cut: Amazon has yet to announce any plans about ePub compatibility. They’re the one major player who’s yet to come around to ePub, and for what it’s worth – I think that it’s going to take a bit of time, some elbow grease, and a lot of arm wrestling to get them to see things from the publisher’s point of view. But give it time. It should happen … eventually.

5. Adobe’s PDF format is probably the most known amongst the e-book formats I’ve discussed so far^[3]. There’s not much to talk about: PDFs are simple, familiar, and easy to use regardless of medium, plus they’ve been around long enough for everyone to know, more or less, what a pdf file looks like. And because the PDF format is so old, it’s not likely that you’ll ever meet anyone with a computer that can’t read the PDF file format. Is it worth it? Hell, yes.

The Format That Wins

I want to make a case here that the primary ebook format we’re going to work with is probably going to be whichever ebook format wins on the iPhone. The Apple developer conference, WWDC, happened not very long ago, and several very interesting things became clear during that conference, most of it worrying news to the rest of the mobile phone industry, but good news for the rest of us. Here’s what Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has to say:

On the whole, there was a palpable sense that the iPhone is a peer to the Mac in Apple’s eyes. This isn’t about counting how many sessions were devoted to each. Nor is it an indication that the Mac as a platform is slowing. Quite the opposite in fact — Apple is selling more Macs than ever, and, knock on wood, there’s a strong consensus amongst developers that Snow Leopard is going to be the best release of Mac OS X yet. It’s simply that for however fast the Mac is growing, the iPhone is growing far faster.

But the two platforms are symbiotically intertwined. The Monday schedule at WWDC is static. In the morning comes the keynote, which the press attends and where all public announcements are made. After lunch, though, there comes what is effectively a second keynote, this time with material aimed squarely at developers. A technical keynote, as compared to the morning’s marketing keynote, if you will. This technical keynote has for as long as I can remember been titled “Mac OS X State of the Union”. This year the title changed to “Core OS State of the Union”.

Hence the symbiosis: Apple now has two full-fledged developer platforms, Mac OS X and iPhone OS, derived from one core system. Neither felt more important than the other this year at WWDC, which is remarkable considering that one of them hadn’t even shipped two years ago.

But look at their vectors — their relative rates of growth — and ponder how much longer until WWDC begins to feel like an iPhone developer conference with a Mac developer track. My answer: next year. In other words, I think it will have taken just three years for the iPhone to supplant the Mac as Apple’s primary platform. By 2011 it will be obvious.

It’s simply a matter of users. During Phil Schiller’s keynote, he showed a graph of the “OS X” user base over time, with steady growth over the first part of this decade followed by a sharp jump from 25 to 75 million over the past two years. This figure was widely mis-cited, however, as showing growth in “Mac OS X” users. It did not. The graph said “OS X”, not “Mac OS X”, and what Apple meant to show were the combined number of users of Mac OS X and iPhone OS. It was a very misleading and poorly-designed chart.

This doesn’t prove anything on its own, but stick with me for a bit. I’ve been seeing several articles arguing the point that AT&T isn’t providing immediate MMS and tethering support due to fear that their network would crash the very instant a million or so iPhone users decide to connect their devices. And I’ve noticed that the iPhone is itself a remarkably tactile platform, one perfect for reading books, and that we’ve already seen a number of apps showing us just that: that reading, and reading on your iPhone, is one hell of a revelatory experience. We’ve also been hearing rumours of an Apple tablet, with all the touchy goodness associated with their current multi-touch technology, and having that released in the not-too-distant-future would mean bringing the tactile interface to a fully-fledged operating system. And that, lastly, all those people connecting to an online network on such a small device will be a community of captive, fanatical users limited by the processing capabilities of their phones, but not by their phone’s features … making the iPhone all at once better than any ebook reader out there (cough the Kindle cough) but also perfect for reading text on the go.

But all of the above are small, fragmented pieces of information, hardly worth talking about, individually. It’s when you look at them from a broader perspective that things begin to become a lot more exciting, particularly from a digital-fiction point-of-view. Allow me to pull it all together for you: Apple sees the iPhone as a peer to their traditional Mac platform; the iPhone is a superior tactile device perfect for on-screen reading; the iPhone has a fanatical userbase that is connected to the Internet, one that downloads and consumes content through the iPhone itself; and Apple is a master at enabling 3rd-party (software) innovation. Put two and two together and you’d realize that this platform is ready for just the right ebook app^[4] to come along, and whichever one it is – be it Amazon’s Kindle app, or an Eucalyptus-type reader, or even one that we’ve never heard about – whichever one that is, that app will be the turning point that defines our industry. Want to know which format you should end up supporting? Watch the iPhone, and watch it closely.

____________________________________________________
^1. HTML isn’t really a programming language, but XML resembles it in the sense that both have very simple opening and closing tags as a foundation, like, say: <head></head> or <blockquote></blockquote> ↩

^2. Don’t worry too much about how XML works with other languages – that bit’s not relevent to this article ↩

^3. Though I must note here that the PDF is really more of a document format, not an ebook one. ↩

^4. This is dependent on one more factor: the app must have seamless integration with an online store, which in turn must be stocked with a good collection of ebook titles. In this aspect, at least, Amazon seems to have a clear lead, but no more so than if Apple decides to enter the ebook market themselves. If they do, or if some publishers decide to take things into their own hands and cobble together an online store/app combination, then I’m willing to bet that things will get very interesting, very fast. ↩

And I hate this. I think it’s stupid, and it’s ignorant, and that it does little for both the writer’s reputation and the good reader’s trust. The truth is that the Internet simply cannot tolerate pay-by-installment methods … and the one or two writers who think otherwise better get used to that, and quick. It’s been 9 years since Stephen King failed to get his readers to pay for The Plant. It’s about time people stop thinking they can sell their work like this.

But what are the problems with this format, and why? Apart from the obvious arrogance (how good do you think you are, to deserve my money?) I’m beginning to think that this model is but a mistaken carry-over from the software world – you know, the one where you download a trial edition and you pay to unlock the full version. But let’s be honest, shall we? Nobody – and I really mean nobody – previews a novel for a 30 day period. The parallels between software and writing vanish when we’re talking about business model, because they simply don’t share the same preconceptions. We don’t bat an eyelid when we’re asked to fork out for an unlock key, especially when we’ve tried out our preview version and we like what we see. But ask the same question after a first chapter? Forget about it, pal – I’m more likely to close the window and roll my eyes than I am to pay you. The only thing such a request accomplishes is that it tells me just how web-savvy you are … and I’m not likely to respect you for it.

The strange thing about the Internet, however, is that the preview idea works when you release the whole book – for free – online. You can then ask for financial contributions, or sell them paper/pdf versions of your book, and you’ll find that people will pay up when you do. There’s a principle at work here, one that works only on the Internet: the more you’re willing to give things out for free, the more likely people are to reward you.

I am now sick of online writers emailing and offering me previews of their work … but only after a small payment. The last one who did had a Flash website - a Flash website! – and a badly designed one at that. It was bad enough to demand $1 payments for chapters 2 onwards … but to sell his work in Flash? That meant he didn’t trust me – or any of his potential readers – with copyable, piratable html. I closed his site within 30 seconds and deleted the email soon after.

The Internet’s an exciting place to write, really. You’ll meet amazing people, you’ll find new things to do, and there’s a boatload more new business models just waiting to be discovered. Just – please, you know? Don’t be selfish.

Note: if you want payment models that work, try reading up on MCM’s Novel+ format or John August’s Variant model.

Late last year, however, some nine months after I first wrote that 1000 True Fans post, Alexandra Erin posted in her blog to say that she was in danger of shutting down. At that moment in time Erin had been making a living from her online fiction for about a year, living off donations and ad revenue from the four serials under her name and having a rather good time of it (for the most part). Her situation was dire. The purpose of that blogpost was to request contributions from her readership, and if you’d go take a look you’d realize that her fanbase responded – and responded beautifully. Together, they donated $5000 or so within the first 24 hours (Erin only required $3000 to get out of trouble); a few days later, she announced that the eventual amount was somewhere in the range of $6000-$7000. 

In one way, at least, this particular episode tells us that the 1000 True Fans hypothesis is correct: make an outright request to your fanbase, and if the fanbase is large enough they’re likely to fulfill that request for you. But look slightly beyond that and we’ll find that there’s a problem with the way the 1000 True Fans theory is applied to blooking. Put simply, there are less established ways to make money from online fiction as compared to blogging, or webcomics, or music.

The Problem With Fiction

The most obvious problem you’ll face as a blooker when you attempt to make money from your fiction writing is that of product. It takes far longer to write a novel than it does to produce a song, or to write a blog post, or even to publish a collection of webcomics. And even if you do, say, write two novels per year, and by some chance you manage to publish them on your website after an impeccable editing process, you still have to live with the fact that books – and in this context self-published books – do not command the same money-to-effort ratio that other types of web-powered media (e.g.: music, for instance) commands. Consider: a self-published book costs about $16.00. An mp3 from Coulton costs $1. At his prime Coulton churned out a song a week, so let’s say for the sake of argument that an mp3 takes him a week to finish. What have we, money-to-effort wise? If we take the number of hours needed to create that book/song, and we divide it by the price of purchase, we’ll find that a self-published book makes you $0.0037 per hour, while a song makes you $0.0060 per hour. Not a big difference, but remember that a song a week results in a lot more product than two books a year. Writing books and banking on book sales surely isn’t the way forward, not unless you’ve got an audience numbering in the thousands.

So the second source of income in your online operation that we have to talk about is that of site revenue – and that includes ads and themed t-shirts and other cutesy stuff like pillows and mugs that people sell through 3rd party websites. And there we have another problem – ads aren’t particularly effective, not in a fiction-based project, and even the small gains you make from selling ad space through programs like Project Wonderful would arguably be offset by the sheer uglyness those ads would bring to your blook (more on this later). Merchandise, on the other hand, does make sense, but I’ve yet to see any web writer take advantage of this by first creating a visual identity for his or her work, and then extending that established visual identity to pillows, mugs, t-shirts, and so on.

The Real Currency Of The Web

But perhaps we’ve been approaching the 1000 True Fans hypothesis all wrong. Perhaps it isn’t so much of getting those 1000 fans for money as it is getting those 1000 true fans in the first place. For the truth here is that the real currency of the Internet is human attention. No matter who you are, or what you do – if you’re on the Internet your first job would be to earn in the one currency that matters, before even thinking about converting that into real-world money. And the paradox is that you often don’t know how these conversions would take place. As Coulton says it:

But somewhere along the way the bottom line started improving, and I became less obsessed with tracking every little thing. Now I sort of think of the whole engine as a special genetically engineered cow who eats music and poops money – I have no idea what’s going on in its gut, and I have the luxury of not really caring that much about the particulars.

The real reason the cash-making cows (for want of a better name for this kind of business model) work is that you don’t really know how you’re going to earn your money in the near future. Productivity guru Merlin Mann remembers releasing a video on a presentation he made in Google called Inbox Zero, and he remembers releasing the whole thing for free instead of charging for it. The video got watched a gazillion times on Youtube, and not long after corporations began contacting him to do the same thing in their in-house workshops, with pay, of course. That simple act of releasing the video for free earned Mann human attention, which in turn converted to lots of real world money over the next few years, but in a way he didn’t expect. Coulton sums it up like this:

… extrapolate (…) across my entire catalog, across all the things sold that make up my income, across the past and present and future, across all the internet radio stations and file sharing networks and Facebook pages and Twitter posts and the whole wild and wooly internet – you will never know HOW it works, but I can tell you that for me it does. The state of the industry makes a lot more sense when you think of it this way, all these new business models rising and falling, internet radio choking on insanely high performance royalties, Radiohead and NIN giving stuff away and making a killing. This is the thing about the new landscape that drives everyone crazy: you can’t see inside the cow; you can only build one, feed it music, and wait for it to poop.

The real lesson you need to take away from the 1000 True Fans hypothesis isn’t that finding 1000 True Fans would guarantee you the ability to quit your day jobs and make a living writing online fiction. The real lesson in it is that human attention is the only measurement of wealth that matters on the Internet, and once you have it – once you’ve got a significant amount of it and you don’t do things to compromise it (like, say, ugly ads) – you’ve got to keep your mind open about how you’re going to convert that currency into real-world dollars and cents. And that open mindedness is the scary bit about the cash-cow business model – for how do you prepare for something that you don’t know? The answer is – you don’t. You find your fans, you write hard, and then you hope for the best.

Before the Internet, software companies plied their wares through brick-and-mortar stores, in handy little diskette drives the size of folded pocket-handkerchiefs. It was a smaller industry, back then - Microsoft was still getting a start in IBM’s god-forsaken armpit, Apple had yet to discover the GUI, and almost everyone was working with a command line interface. It was also a simpler time. It wasn’t too hard for a well-placed, lone programmer to whip up some fancy app and pass it on – via diskettes, perhaps, with a healthy dose of door-to-door spit – and land himself a nice contract at some new-fangled, pre-bubble Valley startup. And that was, for a few years, enough to live by.

But then time passed. The little software companies consolidated, grew bigger, and swallowed up all the lone hobby programmers. It was harder to find individuals writing software and passing around diskette drives – it was much easier, in fact, to buy software from the big companies, with their cubicles and identical workstations and well-oiled distribution channels. So when the Internet came along, and the individual hobby programmers came out of the woodwork to begin selling their software, just like old times, they found themselves going up against huge, established companies – giants like Microsoft and Adobe and Macromedia, with their advertising budgets and their PR people and their customer support floors, all of which – if the prospective hobby programmer stopped long enough to swallow – amounted to overwhelming, mind-boggling competition. You wouldn’t have liked the odds if you were an outside spectator when that happened, and I know that had I been a hobbyist, I would have thought twice before leaving my desk job to write code for myself.

But then something interesting happened. The hobby programmers didn’t die out. The small software companies – startups in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble – took to the Internet like so many ducks to water. They launched little websites, bought modest amounts of office space, and began competing with the corporations. And they did well.

Software and Books

It doesn’t take a genius, really, to see the parallels between the scenario I just described and what we’re trying to do here, with publishing our stories independently, and on the Interent. The small-time software writer had to compete against well-established,  financially richer competitors, in a market that didn’t make any disctinctions between geographical boundaries. Also, software and books are similar products, particularly in the context of the Internet – both are propietary, both suffer from piracy, both come from companies with a long history in marketing and distribution know-how. And so, assuming that the giants of both fields are going to start-off with an advantage, how do small content producers compete, survive, and eventually get ahead?

Before we go into specifics, let’s talk about the current bevy of independent software developers. I’m not sure what you call them – but for some time now I’ve been noticing these little sites, some of them powered by a 1 man team – selling software, primarily for the Mac. I suppose you can consider them boutique shops. Tuck away into little corners, with a bonsai next to the cash register and the velvet curtains; with only one or two kinds of product sitting on the shelves. They’re small, very focused, and they usually have cool, clever names like Panic or 2d boy or Potion Factory.

They’re also usually well designed. I don’t know if there’s a correlation between their aesthetics and their popularity, but most of the small software companies I’ve seen sell their software in very well-packaged, beautifully constructed sites. In a way, it makes sense – their main (and possibly only) selling point is the web, and it’s within their best interests to make sure you come away with a favourable first impression. 

The second thing you’ll notice about these little software producers is the kind of products they sell. They’re useful, and they come with snazzy icons, but you’ll realize that not many challenge the bigwigs in their own fields. Nobody has challenged Word, the same way nobody has really challenged Photoshop. They’re smart, in this aspect – beat the big companies in the little niche areas they don’t care about … business isn’t a zero sum game, after all. Ironically enough, there are app makers out there who are putting out e-books in the iPhone and the iPod Touch – for instance, see: Benjamin Button and the Classics App.

But I think the most surprising thing about these little software producers are that some of them are really, really successful. I think the one thing we can all take away from this is the inherent flexibility of the Internet’s marketplace. As long as your distribution channel is online, and you’re putting out reasonably good stuff, then you’re certain to enjoy the benefits of the Long Tail – people will find you, people will pay you attention, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll make enough to buy a whole new HQ of your own.

The Ecologist Model Of Seeing The Future

To answer the question of why these little software companies matter to us, I turn to notable writer and speaker Steven Berlin Johnson, who gave a talk recently about the future of news (and newspapers) at South By Southwest. In it, he presented an idea that I now find myself constantly going to bed with. He says, and I quote:

… I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism. When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago.

That’s why the ecosystem of technology news is so crucial. It is the old-growth forest of the web. It is the sub-genre of news that has had the longest time to evolve. The Web doesn’t have some kind intrinsic aptitude for covering technology better than other fields. It just has an intrinsic tendency to cover technology first, because the first people that used the web were far more interested in technology than they were in, say, school board meetings or the NFL. But that has changed, and is continuing to change.

Now let’s be clear on the distinctions, shall we? Johnson was talking about journalism – something completely different from book publishing – and he was looking through a prism of the current Tech sector. But if we append that idea, and we bend it to fit the current shift in book publishing, I think we’ll find it to be a first indicator of how a mature digital publishing industry would look like. On one hand you can have beautiful, standalone sites by independent writers, and on the other you have collective, publisher-managed projects, like the Tor supersite and Authonomy. 

In the end what I’m trying to say is that it’ll do for us to sometimes think like a small software producer. Face it: they’re making a name for themselves, by leveraging the Internet’s (small) economies of scale, by targeting areas the bigwigs don’t care for, and by presenting themselves in very careful, very beautiful packages. If they can establish themselves in an industry that is mostly known for their behemoths, and if we take this to be an indicator of how a mature digital book-future would look like, then I suppose that we can, too.

Mandy Brown (she of A Working Library) has written this fantastic piece in A List Apart Issue 278 that explains how people read on the Internet, and how designers should cater for these reading patterns. In it, she makes a very interesting distinction between browsing and reading, one that I think explains many of the design decisions I’d observed or made in the past. Some of these design decisions can be seen here on Novelr, but I’ll come back to that in a bit.

The underlying shtick in Mandy’s article is how readers evaluate before reading. She calls the first stage the browsing stage, where a reader looks for context-sensitive clues about the book/article/post at hand, to determine if it’s worth committing time and energy to. If it is, and the clues are favourable ones, then the reader moves on to the second stage – reading. The designer’s job is then to ensure the reader has enough contextual clues at the top of the page; remove all distractions at the middle, and provide further links at the end when the reader has come out of the (ooh I like this word!) reading trance and is looking for further content to consume.

Mandy also provides some suggestions on how to ‘lure’ the reader in – some of them things that I hadn’t considered within a browsing/reading dichotomy. She suggests pictures to establish context, pullquotes, or typographic tricks: the whole paragraph set to a larger font, for instance. I personally lean towards visual lures – many of my posts in Novelr used to have picture leaders, although the new redesign (the current one) has now enough visual power to draw a reader into the text, and I’ve largely dispensed with that.

There are also lures that she haven’t discussed; ones that I’d like to point out here: site identity, for instance, and strong writing. Site identity (and how to create it; a.k.a the Picture Book Effect) I’ve talked about before, and I think remains the major subconscious element in the browsing stage. People who visit well-designed websites know that the owner has taken care to present his or her work, and with such care comes the assumption that the content on such a site must be good, so buckle up and prime eyeballs for reading quick! As for the second lure: the benefit of a strong first line/paragraph should be familiar to all writers who’re reading this, so I guess I’ll spare you the monotony of listening to me drone on about something you already know well.

As an aside: I found myself identifying with these design decisions mainly because I’d included almost all of them in Novelr’s redesign – without consciously thinking about them (imagine my surprise!). Novelr’s sidebar is purposely set to grey, with text smaller than the site norm (and in sans-serif, for legibility), to ensure that reader attention remains on post content. The post content is itself presented in large Georgia. And the sidebar is purposely kept short, so that for a majority of the article length the reader is left alone with just prose. There are problems with this design, I’ll admit, and I now wonder how much more to tweak … first paragraph in caps, anyone?

I’ve spent the last couple of posts at Novelr speculating on the future of web fiction – which as an activity, I must admit, was very fun to do. But it wasn’t a very useful one for the writers who read this blog. The essential questions remain unanswered: what do you do when the publishers finally wake up to the Internet? What can you do to prepare for a digital book future? 

Before I go into specifics, understand that you should take this article with a pinch of salt. These are steps that I believe aren’t too far off, and ones that I think can go a long way in preparing your writing for a more vigorous, more competitive online fiction sphere. On the flip side, however, I may also be completely wrong, and I’m obliged to warn you now that while this is a post that deals with practical steps, it’s also a post that deals with uncertainties. It is a first attempt in telling you what to do to get ahead in a place that doesn’t exist yet. If I’m wrong – and there’s a good chance that I am – then I suppose we can meet up 10 years from now and laugh at my stupidity. 

A Summary

Before we begin it’ll do to recap what exactly it is we’re preparing for. I’ve talked about this in the past, but for those of you who don’t have the time to dig into Novelr’s archives:

1. Publishers are exploring digital alternatives to books, and are currently figuring out how to distribute, market, and deliver them to the consumer. They’re forced to do so by the current recession, which is hitting the people in the publishing industry harder than most.
2. Printed books will not go away, but they’ll be staying on as ‘bespoke, art-directed paper packages’ – the top of a piramid of consumed fiction.
3. Self publishing, and by extension self-funded writing efforts like blooks and web fiction are going to become ‘tryouts’ for publishing houses. Publishers will look closely at the comments surrounding a self-published piece, and if it’s mostly good, and they think they can sell it, they then pick it up and sign-on the author for a traditional book deal. Haper Collins’s has tried to centralize these efforts – they’ve started a website called Authonomy and are hoping unpublished writers come to them with their manuscripts.
4. Writers will flock to the Internet in the sudden realization that there’re more ways to get published than just the agency/slush pile. We will be swamped with online manuscripts. Readers will go to certain filter sites, or perhaps stores, to find good things to read online.
5. Or not. They may want to put these stories in iPhones, Kindles, or one of the many portable device options poppig up today. They will want to read, and they will want to read away from the computer.

I’m not sure of the degree to which these predictions will come true, but for the sake of this article we’ll pretend that it’s a future we’ll have to prepare for. Which leads us to the focus of this piece: what can we do, now, to prepare for it?

Blogs Are Dead

I will be approaching this article with one assumption in mind: that blogs, as a form of presenting fiction, have failed. Which is rather ironic, considering the amount of fiction blogs I’m reading today, both for pleasure and for work (I have an obligation to review for WFG); and also ironic because my usage of the term ‘blook’ may have to be revised, and for good. But I believe we’re looking at a future where blogs aren’t going to be the main form of Internet fiction consumption, and here’s why.

The first thing we have to think about is the nature of the blog. Blogs are time-intensive things, and they require constant and consistent updating to be of any attraction to the reader. I once spoke of this as a good thing: that blogs force writers to perform on-the-fly writing, and I still do believe that the form has some unparelled attractions, attractions that cannot be found in books or even in writing magazines. But let’s ask ourselves a question: if we accept that publishers are moving onto the Internet, and we accept that they’re going to be finding the best ways to present fiction online, then what are the odds that blogs will be their medium of choice? What are the odds that of the majority of novels put on the Internet would be in blog form, and that the readers will be most used to consuming their online fiction via blogs? Not much, I’d expect – publishers aren’t going to invest so much of their time and energy into a medium that requires just that – lots of time and energy. And to back that up – take a look at the experiments we’ve seen conducted by the big wigs – how many of them are in blog form? We Tell Stories and The Golden Notebook and Tor.com are all beautifully designed websites; websites designed with only one purpose in mind: to be read.^[1]

That is not to say that blogs are not designed to be read. But we have to admit that we’re facing a structural problem when we try to tell stories with blogs – there is a wealth of information we have to design around, and most writers don’t bother to design at all. Many of a blog’s original features were not built with storytelling in mind. When I see things like reverse-chronological archives and trackbacks and comments I think of diary writing and community, not books and paper. And while some of these blog features can be adapted to storytelling, most of them remain deadweight; obstacles that get in the way of the actual jumping into the story that we want readers to experience.

On a side note, I wonder if this is one of the reasons why online fiction has taken so long to get off the ground. A reader comes to a blog with a set of expectations in mind, expectations that they have to overcome when they’re dealing with a serialized fiction blog (not so with short stories, or flash fiction – for these, blogs are extremely well suited as a presentation form). Note that online comics are not posted in the blog format, they’re presented in specially designed websites that are built around the expected interaction between reader and comic. There are no deadweights; no obstacles. No unnecessary fluff.

The bottom line here is that readers will eventually get used to a form of digital prose presentation, and that form will probably not be blogs. And that leads us to the next question – what to change into?

Novel Plus, not Blog Plus

Here we enter rather sketchy territory. The idea of Novel Plus (or Novel+, if you prefer) was first mentioned to me in conversation by James Smythe, who completed a PhD thesis on online fiction two years ago. I think James makes a point when he says publishers will eventually have to move into cross-platform publishing, and Novel+ is his name for it. What it is, really, is this: imagine buying a book, and then finding inside a little card granting you access to free digital downloads – ebooks, podcasts, inside areas of the writer’s site, perhaps. Now I’m not sure how much of this will come true, and the specifics are all still up in the air, but these are ideas that I believe are really cool and (I hope) will be inevitable. 

So what can you do? Quite a lot, actually.

A Suggestion List (Don’t We All Just Love ‘Em?)

1. Don’t kill your blog; split it up. Chris Al-Aswad (a.k.a. Lethe Bashar) wrote sometime ago that you should keep two blogs for your web novel: one to contain the work in progress, and another to present the completed work. It’s a fantastic article, and I think you should  check it out because Chris provides several examples of his own fiction where he has applied this split. But I’d like to make an adjustment to that suggestion: keep your ongoing blook the same way a writer would keep a manusript (or a moleskin notebook, for that matter), but present the completed portions of your story in a strong, beautifully-designed, visually-oriented ‘front-end’. A good example of this ‘front-end’ idea is The Golden Notebook project – it’s not a blog, for starters, so I suggest you take a look at the home page to see how the designers have incorporated book, forum and blog into an easily understandable package. 

2. Go cross platform. The future of the novel won’t be about the computer screen. It’ll be about the mobile phone, the Kindle, the Sony Reader, as well as a few other formats that I’m sure will pop up sooner or later. Your job as an independent writer will be to provide readers with a multi-platform selection of your works: pdf files, paper book, websites, yes; but also Kindle format, .mobi and phone-optimized sites. I’ll be keeping tabs on up and coming formats here on Novelr, and I’ll recommend them if I think they’re worth your time. But by and large you’ll be the ones putting the platforms together – get my self-published book on Lulu, email me the invoice and I’ll send you something cool? The applications are endless. I’m expecting a future where publishers will provide multiple formats for purchase – maybe the full text will be available online and for free, but other take-away-to-read formats will need to be paid for. And this is a business model you can emulate as well.

3. Polish, polish, polish. An as-yet-unmentioned condition about presenting your work on a ‘front-end’ site is the amount of polish you’ll have to put into it before launching anything. No grammatical errors; no revisions. You are presenting your work on multiple platforms, after all – if you make a change you’re going to have to answer to the readers who’ve already downloaded your ebooks and paid for your self-published paper versions. It’s a stage not everyone has reached, but one that you’ll eventually get to. Prepare for that eventuality.

Looking Forward

Now you’re probably asking why should you do this, and what’s in it for you. And that answer, I believe, hinges on why you’re writing online fiction in the first place. If you see this as your ticket to the publishing industry, then you should change – and change soon - because all indicators point to publishers sourcing material from the self-published pool. This is your chance to stand-out, at a time when nobody else is doing anything about the digital shift. But on the other hand: if you’re writing online fiction for fun, or if you’re writing to escape the editorial confinements of the traditional book-world, then you’re not likely to want to change so fast. And that’s fine too, as long as you realize when and what new formats are available to you in the future.

^1.N.B. I’m talking about the blog format here – the one where posts are presented in reverse chronological order, with sidebar, widgets, etc. I still believe that the blogging engine is the only viable publishing tool available for writers at the moment, though however they present their fiction, it better not look like a traditional blog.↩

[Update]: I’ve edited the sections where it seems that I’m linking the current lack of online fiction interest to the blog format. Chris Poirier is right – the sections exploring the causal relationship between the two were too strongly worded.

I’ve spent the last couple of days working on Novelr’s first collaraborative project. What this project does is it attempts to answer the question: ‘why do you read online fiction?’ and most of it is still, I must admit, in bits and pieces. But let’s examine the answers to that question, and ask ourselves some other related, and difficult, questions about this field we’re in.

For instance, let us consider that a large amount of people reading online fiction are writers themselves. One of the main community efforts in Novelr has been about how we can get more readers (ie: non-writing, non-creating people) to the medium, to consume what we writers are publishing. We want consumers of online fiction, and we must admit that ideally, we want an audience who are not participants – who do not produce works of fiction themselves. So what does that mean? It means that we’re currently writing for other writers. What is troubling with that assumption? Does it tick you off that the only reason other writers are reading your work is because they, too, want to be read by you? I’m now talking about an I’ll read your work if you read mine policy, and indeed that very topic has been explored on Novelr before in a guest post. But what’s wrong with it? Are you, like some of us, happy that you’re been read, to hell with the writer/reader dichotomy? What does an acceptance of this situation mean?

The first thing that springs to mind when we talk about an audience of equal creators is the blogosphere. People write blogs for a small audience, and it’s highly likely that a portion of that audience are bloggers themselves, and that you read and comment on their blogs to reward them for coming to visit your blog. The more successful blogs (say, Techcrunch) have a larger reader to blogger ratio, and they return a smaller amount of comments than a less successful blog (say, your Mum’s) would. Another example of a community of equal creators is the photo sharing site Flickr. Your contacts post photos and you post photos and everyone looks and comments at each other’s photos because, like us, I’ll read yours if you read mine.

The upshot of my above paragraph is that an audience of equal creators is the accepted norm in many areas of the online world. It is Internet culture. And even if this were not true, and that your blog commands a small readership of non-bloggers, consider: what is to prevent any or all of them from starting up their own blogs? Nothing? Nothing. In a medium where the barriers to entry (or creation) are almost nil, a community of creators are quite inevitable. Taking all of the above into consideration, and also taking into consideration that by the very act of writing your blook you are inspiring your readers to start their own blooks, are we likely, as a bunch of writers, to ever find an audience of ‘just’ readers? Is it alright if we don’t? What differences are there if we compare this model to the model of the book, the publisher, and the bookstore? 

You’ll find the answers unflattering, I believe, and I’d rather not answer them for you. You can tell me your thoughts in the comments area of this post. But here’s something to chew on before I step back: there may well come a day where the amount of people who want to write books outnumber the amount of people who want to read them. Indulge me and close your eyes: imagine this book future for a little while. Now wouldn’t that be strange? Yes, I can hear your voices now: that would be strange indeed.

It is tempting to assume that what we’re doing here, at Novelr, is going to be the centre of the new digital publishing revolution. We probably feel like we’ve been doing a lot, haven’t we? We think that we’re going to render publishers and their ilk useless. We think that getting published on the Internet is as good as getting published on paper. And, yes, I’ll admit there has been a constant increase of writers who start blogs and write fiction, and who gather here at Novelr to talk shop and to discuss new ways of writing, of publishing, and of circumventing the old agent-publicist-publisher network. We have become closer, as a community. We’ve started a quality filter, a Web Fiction Guide (recognition to Chris Poirier here), to help new readers sort through the dross and find good things to read. And we’ve done quite a bit in the past two years or so.

But guess what? I’m starting to believe that what we’ve done is not enough. I’d been out of the loop for four months, and I hadn’t been keeping track of all the new developments in the online book world. But this afternoon I sat down and made my first real sweep of the lit blogosphere – my first in half a year. And God, let me tell you: it was different. Scary different. Former boundaries I’d taken for granted were no longer there. People I never expected to talk about digital fiction were now talking about nothing else. Publishers had started blogs, opened up experimental digital teams. Regular people had created commentary blogs similar to this one, in an attempt to make sense of this shift from page to screen. And what was scary about this whole thing was that the biggest efforts everywhere were by the publishers.

Now I’m not really surprised, but my initial enthusiasm during Christmas has by now worn off. It may well be true that a rising tide raises all ships, independent producers like the blooking community included, but I’m inclined to think that it’s not going to be clear cut. And why should it? Look at the facts: the publishers that are jumping into the digital medium are making big waves, and they’re the ones with the money. Independent content producers – we the writers, the blog fiction people – we’re disjointed. We don’t have the resources nor the manpower to do anything matching the kinds of sites and software that these companies are now throwing up (you mark my words,  Authonomy won’t be the last site we’ll see from Harper Collins). Can we create an iPhone ebook reader? Can we push out a platform for publishing novels, and pipe them straight to the bookstore? The truth is that we can’t, and that once the big wigs step in, we’ll be revealed for what we truly are: big fish in a small pond. To me, it now seems that the book future before us will be startlingly similar to the book world we thought we left behind.

A Glimpse Ahead

But what book future are we talking about? I don’t pretend to have a crystal ball, but a few things seem certain in the near future, given recent developments.

Firstly: more and more people would begin reading books in the digital format. Sharon Bakar points out that an increasing number of people in the US and the UK received Kindles for Christmas last year; Gregory Cowles said in a recent blog post: Kindles are a regular sight on my train these days, and seem poised to become as ubiquitous as iPods …

Secondly: There will arise a new kind of publishing industry, a major portion of which will be heavily invested in digital and Internet-related technology. How they make their money isn’t clear, but I believe (though don’t hold me to this) that they’ll adopt a scalable, free model – most books available for on-screen reading; payment for book/mobile download. This model meshes with what we know of commerce on the Internet thus far, and it would make sense, considering the success of iTunes for the music industry. But let’s pause here, and think about what this means for us. If thousands of quality, paper-published writers are shifted online, for free, how will the independent writers be heard? What will happen if the major agencies and publishers begin their search for the next hot writer on the Internet? We will be swamped and oversaturated, won’t we? And here’s the question that matters most to us: what will the relevance of WFG be, in light of these huge online repositories of free, quality fiction?

The answer? In the dark. We will be driven into the shadow of these central big wigs, or at least we’ll learn to coexist uncomfortably side-by-side, never experiencing the same levels of attention that they enjoy. There will be a much larger percentage of quality stuff where the big publishers set up their shops, and it’ll only be safe to assume that the majority of readers, the Internet mainstream – they’ll be more attracted to those sites, as opposed to places like WFG. 

But … Where’s The Silver Lining?

Well it’s not complete good news, I’m afraid. We can do nothing about the big publishers coming in, nor can we prevent the fact that most Internet readers are probably going to be clustered around their efforts, not ours. This isn’t necessarily bad, though it’s a change that we’re probably going to have to get our heads around. But remember: nothing’s happened yet. If we can pre-empt and carve out a sizable niche for the indie producers, than why not? The publishing industry’s currently doing nothing more than dipping their toes in the water, checking for temperature and climate. And I’d say we’ve got a year or so to do something significant, before they all dive in and claim the land for themselves. And this is where the assumption that a ‘rising tide raises all ships’ becomes dangerous. If we agree with it, then we’ll just sit back as the opportunities are all gobbled up by the big fish. And being a small content producer myself, I’d say that no, we can’t let that happen.

When Novelr first started, the dream we had, the one that I shared here, was of a way to sidestep the publishers, the agencies, the rejection letters. We saw an Internet that would allow us access to our readers, to hell with typical publishing conventions. And it was all ours, for awhile – it was a small pond and we were the big fish, and we grabbed a respectable amount of readers from the influx of Internet users who came in via the blogging craze. They were there for the taking. Shed that assumption. The sharks are coming, and, for better or for worse, this is no longer the same sea. 

Early last year, 2005 Man-Booker prize winner John Banville did a fiction serial called The Lemur over at the New York Times website. When I covered the attempt here at Novelr I immediately received a comment by reader Bill Hilton, who groaned about the choice of author. Why him?! Hilton asked. It turned out that Banville had made a couple of obnoxious comments upon winning the Booker prize some time back: he implied that a lot of middle-brow novels were winning awards lately, and it was good to see a book of real merit – his – fiinally win. Hilton then went on to say:

I wouldn’t mind, but (the Booker-prize winning) The Sea is the most pretentious load of old tosh that I’ve read in years.

I didn’t bother to follow The Lemur after that.

I think most of us now recognize the Internet’s potential for social communication and information dispersal. The tidbit about Banville wouldn’t have reached me if I hadn’t been writing a lit blog, and it also wouldn’t have reached me if Bill Hilton hadn’t passed by and commented on the piece. But consider the other things that made the exchange of bias possible: Mr Hilton had probably picked up the news from a newspaper or such during the 2005 Booker Prize news coverage – something that I couldn’t possibly have done given the limited nature of book news in Malaysia – and he’d probably remembered that tidbit when he read Banville’s The Sea. Also, NYT online had published the Lemur on the Internet, had released the item in their news feed (which I had subscribed to), and had taken the time to mark it as web fiction. There was a whole lot of variables that made this exchange of views possible, and the most astounding thing was probably the fact that I lived in Malaysia, an inherently non-reading nation. I wouldn’t have contracted a bias against John Banville had it not been for the opinion of a British reader who had more information about Banville than I did, and who lived in a nation where getting this information and finding his book was easier. Once upon a time a friend’s recommendation may have been limited by social and geographical boundaries. That time no longer exists.

The above example, however, is just one of many illustrating the social side of the Internet, and I’m sure you can all come up with more. Let me throw you another. It is now possible for you to read a poem in a book, enjoy said poem, and then go online, head to the publisher’s website, and email the poet your thanks. I remember a writer (can’t remember his name, for the life of me) who did just that, and who later commented on how the Internet’s connectivity added another dimension to his reading experience. I’m sure this was possible before, with post, but the Internet has now made it global, and painless, and very, very cheap.

The point I’m getting at here is that it’s becoming increasingly hard to enjoy books without some knowledge of the writer that wrote it. And, in web fiction, it is becoming near impossible to enjoy a work without interacting, and perhaps judging, the online writer behind it.

Let’s start with books. I’m pretty sure that certain writers are difficult people to get along with – H.P. Lovecraft, for example, springs to my mind immediately.  But that fact wouldn’t under normal circumstances affect our reading of their work. I wouldn’t mind reading Lovecraft, simply because I’ve never met him, and I’ll never know what a jerk he is. (Lovecraft was a recluse and was socially inept. He is also dead, but you get my point).

This barrier does not exist on the Internet. Much of web fiction exists on blogs, and reader-writer interaction is part of the whole blooking experience. I’ve talked about creating a reader community in your web fiction before, but an implication of doing so is that your readers are probably going to let their impression of you colour their judgement of your work. And there’s no way around it.

Allow me to give you a personal example. In my web browser I keep two reading lists – one of the works I’ll have to review as an editor for Web Fiction Guide, and one for personal enjoyment. When it comes to an editorial evaluation for a listing, or when I first begin to read a work, I never take writer personality into account. I read, I review, and if I like it I move the blook over to my personal enjoyment list (and subscribe to the feed, etc). But every so often I remove a site from that list. This usually happens after I form an opinion of the writer concerned, and when I find that I don’t like him or her. The first incident was because said writer lashed out at a reader who was commenting on her personal blog. I thought that was mean and rude and unnecessary, and after that I couldn’t bring myself to read her writing. I really tried. I liked the story, and I liked her style, but at some deep, subconscious level I couldn’t read anymore. I felt repulsed. And that was the end of that.

But of course that’s just me. I’m fairly certain other readers would just ignore the personal sections of a writer’s site, and ignore the commenting forms beneath each episode. This likely happens when the work is just too fantastic to ignore, and when said reader has made a huge emotional investment in the story. Personality bias doesn’t happen when you refuse to think about the writer.

There are two corollaries to this. The first is if you don’t let the reader in, and if you don’t interact with your audience, then you’ll have nothing to worry about. But why write online if you aren’t prepared to receive feedback or adulation from your crowd? The Internet is inherently social, after all, and you’ll be making a mistake if you don’t make full use of it.

The second corollary is: in the same way that you can turn a reader away with your personality, you can keep him reading when he likes you: even if your quality dips later on in your blook or if you take a break. And then it’ll be like reading a friend’s work – you may not like what he’s done to the story at a later stage, but you’ll still read him because he is your friend. And it may well be that the most successful blooks are those with strong writing and nice writers, and a good rapport with its audience.

I cannot help you with personality bias. When you really think about it, there’s not much you can do. You’ll get along with some people, and you’ll clash with others. And if the published writers of the world have to face it, in their correspondence, and in the falling barriers between reader and writer, then I suppose we online writers will have to as well, more than anyone else. And that is a frightening thought.

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.

I recently came across a critical piece on two Novelr articles (this one and this one), published in Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large, Volume 8, Number 9 (a journal of libraries, policy, technology and media). Overall, I thought the entire thing to be well written, witty at parts, snarky at others, with a respectable open-ended conclusion about the state of e-book readers at the end. There is just one part that is bothering me, though: in his analysis of my post on the Long Tail he alleges that I make something he calls ‘the classic .com mistake.’

Ah, but the blogger makes the classic .com mistake, one Jensen doesn’t make:

Our target audience shouldn’t have to be just people who are willing to sort through the dross: if that’s the case online writing will forever be in the dark, pushed into the corners of the web by other bigger, better, more instantly gratifying web distractions. If, say 1% of web surfers are actively finding/reading online fiction, the ideal solution shouldn’t be just to find that 1%, but to expand upon it. In other words, we should not find a target audience—we have to create one, so the 1% becomes 5%, or more.

“If we can only get 5%…” That’s propounded by another problem—one that’s characteristic in this blog. Namely, the writer assumes traditional media are dying. “Newspapers are dying out, losing to online news sources…”—and in an unrelated post, “We know that the traditional publishing industry is upon dark times.” Ah, but never mind. We learn that “collaborative filters” are what we need to make online fiction more accessible for others—but, and it’s a big but, you have to get people to look at those filters before they’re of any use. The writer mentions a website, Pages Unbound, that can provide the collaborative filtering. I visited briefly. Wow. Ugly white sans text on a dark-gray background, making it hard to read. A front page that seems more manifesto than invitation—and the claim that readers may need mental adjustment to read web novels. Let’s just say that, as one who might be willing to read online fiction, I’m decidedly not bookmarking this site.

Here’s my question: what is the classic .com mistake? I have absolutely no idea – and his article doesn’t really explain – but let’s hold that off for awhile because I’d like to dissect his analysis to see if I’ve missed out anything.

He opens with a rhetorical question: “if we can only get 5% …”. He then follows this up with an attack on credibility (that I’m assuming traditional media is dying, when he thinks it’s actually not) but reminds his readers that this is a minor digression – the true problem is that our current collaborative filters are too ugly to be of any use.

There are three reasons why his analysis is flawed.

Firstly, the amount of people writing and reading blooks has grown two-fold over the past year or so. When I started covering blooking on Novelr the majority of blook writers were the blook readers (prompting, incidentally, this guest post by Gloria Hildebrandt). This has changed in recent times – the number of writers have grown, certainly, but the number of readers have grown even more. Two works, An Intimate History of the Greater Kingdom and Tales Of MU have significant communities built around them, mostly drawn from LiveJournal, web comics and strategic advertising. The writer of said commentary has overlooked the simple fact that our 1% has grown into a 2%, and is set to hit 3 and more over the next few months.

Secondly, while the writer is correct in saying that Pages Unbound is ugly and non-functional this comment no longer applies for two reasons. Firstly, PU has closed, and a better filter (or filters, if plans for another one takes off) have replaced it. Secondly, much of the growth has been because of PU, and its close integration with the community could be felt in the outcry that followed its closing. Many readers and writers got their first start through PU’s review system – which despite its flaws managed to spark off a number of new, high quality blooks.

Thirdly, and lastly, my belief that traditional media is dying out has no logical connection to the ‘classic .com problem’. Why the writer included it there is beyond me. Whether they really are dying is open to heated debate – the said writer points out that local newspapers, for instance, are thriving because they provide local content, whereas only the large dailies are suffering. I do believe, however, that a good example does not a good argument make – while we can say that radio has not died with the emergence of television I’d like to point out that its significance has been greatly reduced. We no longer hear of people being glued to their radio sets for football commentary or nightly entertainment. The same will probably happen for traditional media – they won’t die completely, for sure, but they’ll certainly exist in a semi-significant state, less relevant than they were before.

PS: On the writer’s comment that 1000 True Fans is a gimmick – I point to Tales Of MU, amongst other works. Alexandra Erin’s full time job is writing it.

(Image from XKCD)

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.