Writing Web Fiction

Category Archives: Writing Web Fiction

How To Design For Readers

Light_5 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?

By Eli James | Also posted in Design | Comments (6)

Wednesday, 18 February, 2009

How To Prepare For A Digital Shift

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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?

By Eli James | Also posted in Publishing | Comments (33)

Thursday, 12 February, 2009

A Series Of Unflattering Questions

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.

By Eli James | Also posted in Publishing | Comments (14)

Thursday, 15 January, 2009

Digital Publishing’s Set To Explode. Will You Be Sidelined?

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?

By Eli James | Also posted in Publishing | Comments (9)

Monday, 12 January, 2009

Exploring Personality Bias

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.

By Eli James | Also posted in Writing | Comments (20)

Saturday, 6 September, 2008

The Story Behind Web Fiction Guide

This guest post is written by Chris Poirier, the founder of Web Fiction Guide. Here he talks about the origins of the site, the story so far, and his plans for the future.

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:

Most of the people who click through on banner ads leave again right away. 80+% of them, in fact.
Even on busy sites that are appropriately chosen, most readers don’t click on banner ads.
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.

By Eli James | Also posted in News | Comments (16)

Wednesday, 20 August, 2008

What Is The Classic .com Mistake?

Somebody Is Wrong On The Internet 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)

By Eli James | Also posted in Meta | Comments (23)

Sunday, 3 August, 2008

Pages Unbound Is Closing

Closed Door Alexandra Erin recently announced the closing of her filter site Pages Unbound. It must have been a very difficult decision for her to make, and I respect her move to do so – she’s got 4 other serials to maintain, after all, and that is no small feat.

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.

By Eli James | Also posted in News | Comments (20)

Sunday, 27 July, 2008

How To Build Community Around Your Fiction

A Community of Monopoly Houses The Internet is really only fulfilling when you’re a part of a community. Admit it: one of the main draws of the blogosphere is waiting for your readers to comment, to squeal at your hero’s bravado or to laugh at your jokes. The attraction is there for all of us, really – at Novelr I enjoy nothing more than going through a storm of particularly furious commenting, reading arguments and evaluating alternate viewpoints, sometimes even laughing at the occasional lolcat. There is joy in communication and love in community. We all crave it. Hell, we all want it in our blooks.

So how do you go about creating community? Much has been said in Novelr about the whys of community, but little has been said about the hows. This post is my attempt to rectify this lack: it contains all the observations I have made and some of the things I have done to create communities (at Novelr and elsewhere) over the past three years.

Finding A Suitable Metric

The metrics usually thrown about when we talk about blogs are comments, RSS subscribers and visitors. The truth is that community cannot be measured by any one of these metrics alone. Subscriber count and visitors may indicate the number of long term readers, but if they don’t speak up then they’re merely observers in the community of your blook. Comments, perhaps, are a better indicator of community, but we have to remember that 100 ‘tat was amzng lol!’ comments does not mean you’ve got a great crowd on your hands (maybe an unintelligent one, but that’s a different story).

I measure community with two interlinked gauges. The first is the interaction between readers. When your readers argue, joke (even flame) each other they ensure that your blook/blog isn’t about you anymore – it’s about them. But we have to remember that reader-reader interaction is an inconsistent metric – there will be months where the discussions and arguments will be plentiful, and there will be months when nobody’s posting. This is normal, though entirely unhelpful – if you think community equals activity then you’re going to get one hell of a headache trying to cultivate a constantly high level of it.

The second gauge is interlinked with the first, and can be summarized with a few simple questions: do your readers talk about your site and the community of people around it? If so, what do they say? And how often do they do it? These questions touch on the intangible quality of ‘we’ness – the integral core of any group.

One thing you’d notice is that this second gauge can be found in all strong communities. Matthew Haughey, creator of the Metafilter community blog, points out that people will start talking about the site and the community sooner or later if it’s good enough, so he provides a place to do so on his sites. Conversely, if they stop commenting on the state of the site (or if they stop cracking inside jokes) then your community has more or less disbanded. Not died, certainly, but it has lost its soul.

I consider a site successful in community the instant people start talking to each other, and about each other (us). Now I’m not going to mislead you: getting there is hard, but not impossible; maintaining it once you’ve got it is satisfying, but hard in a completely different way.

By Eli James | Comments (24)

Sunday, 13 July, 2008

Floods and Streams: Where Traffic Comes From

Traffic I logged in a few weeks back to find Novelr’s stats behaving strangely. Reinvigorate reported that my traffic had leapt from 20 a day to 300 – a stunning figure, considering I hadn’t updated in a few days. So I checked the referrals, and I found that an article was making the Stumbleupon rounds. I was nonchalant. That particular article wasn’t very good.

Things got worse. Less than a week later Novelr’s traffic spiked at 900. I checked my bandwidth and breathed a sigh of relief to find that I still had a gig or so left. The viral word-of-mouth hadn’t killed my hosting package. Oh, how wrong I was. Traffic spiked at 3000 per day shortly after and lasted four days. Novelr got killed in the process.

What I found interesting in this wasn’t the traffic spike (that happens pretty often, of varying magnitude, to any website) – it was what happened afterwards that mattered. Novelr’s daily traffic remained at a constant 150-170 per day, a huge difference from the 40 daily visitors from before. I was surprised at this – blooking and digital fiction is a highly niched field to be blogging about, and I hadn’t expected so many new visitors on a day-to-day basis.

Here’s what happened: Novelr had found itself a traffic Stream. The initial Stumbleupon outbreak was more like a Flood: it took my hosting package down by consuming 5 gigs of bandwidth. But let’s take a look at both kinds of traffic, separately.

Floods

Floods are short term bursts of traffic that usually come from a linkup in a) a major blog, or b) a social news site (Digg and Reddit). The traffic from these Floods leave behind a trail of particularly unintelligent comments, have a high bounce rate, and they trickle off fairly quickly. What you do get from Floods, however, is wider exposure – and you’ll find a corresponding upsurge in your RSS subscribers and daily visitors for a few days after. Novelr has experienced two Floods: once for Problogger’s writing project (with this article) and the second being the initial Stumbleupon spike.

Streams

Streams are long term sources of traffic. Good examples of these are blog networks like 9rules, advertisements (as long as you can keep a consistent number of them running) and bookmark sites like Del.icio.us and Stumbleupon. I’m actually quite surprised at Stumbleupon’s ability to constantly point new visitors your way – I’ve always thought of it as a copycat Digg – but then again I am not a regular user of either so I can’t say. What all these examples have in common is that they aren’t particularly influenced by time. Whereas traffic from Digg and a linkup in, say, Boing Boing, dries up after awhile, these sources consistently bring you new traffic, even if it’s for an article that’s one year old.

Which Is Better?

I’d like to suggest that Streams are the traffic sources that people should aim for, simply because they’re more consistent and are thus more reliable than Floods. You’d notice that amongst the really big blogs (I’m thinking of Kottke and Daring Fireball here), traffic gets redirected quite often. These linkups count as Streams, not as Floods, because to each other these blogs act as consistent sources of new traffic.

I also believe that a site (be it blook, blog or company splashpage) will do well if the owner takes steps to convert as many Floods to Streams as possible. If Blog A links up to one of my stories, for instance (sending 1000 visitors or so my way), it’ll make sense to put it up on Stumbleupon as well. And my experience with the service is that the traffic spike may come months later, but that good content on Stumbleupon attracts new visitors regardless of how long it’s been ‘out there’.

A closing thought: how successful your blook is depends on how many eyeballs you command. And while finding Streams and enjoying Floods as they come is fine and dandy, in the end your job is to make sure new visitors love your stories, and come back. Like fruitflies on a particularly sticky banana pie, your job is to make sure they become regulars – that they become glued right on and that they can’t escape.

I’m preparing glue as I write this. Are you?

By Eli James | Comments (6)

Monday, 23 June, 2008

How Online Fiction Is Still Losing

Man Pulling Building Blocks
In the last post by Gavin we talked about how and why a publishing industry slump will help online fiction. In the comment storm that followed James of JPS/fact presented a counter-argument as to why online fiction is not yet an alternative to the traditional publishing world. James and I were supposed to do a Q&A post on Novelr, but due to time constraints (mine, mostly) we have settled on me writing this post, with him editing it. The arguments and ideas forthwith are, at the core, his.

First, a recap. We know that the traditional publishing industry is upon dark times – an obvious parallel would be the music industry, which was grappling with piracy and the Internet before iTunes came along and blew everything up. In the previous post Gavin wrote that the time is ripe for a similar thing to happen in Book World – and I agree with him. But before we begin discussing how best to blow things up let us talk about the challenges that are unique to us – and online fiction – in particular.

Quality

The first point James brings up is that online fiction suffers from chronic quality drought. The problems we have with quality are two fold: first of all we do not have a legion of editors, proofreaders, people who are familiar with text and who constantly hound at authors (again and again and again) to polish up, jettison chapters, rewrite characters, rethink themes and the sort. Secondly, we have little (as yet) serious works in online fiction. Traditional print fiction does not suffer from these problems – their editorial processes are so tight we accuse them (rightly, it seems) of being patronizing to new authors, and I’ve personally lost count of the amount of Book Awards designed to promote an ever-escalating bar of quality for new novels. They also have an old, long-standing gauntlet of academics and critics through which new novels are thrown into … online, all we have is The Blooker Prize.

How are we faring on these points? Not very well, I’m afraid: we’re still figuring out an editing process for online fiction (in the comments section we’ve got a lot of talk about readers being editors – I do think, however, that there is a limit to the effectiveness of this method) – however, as for quality I am confident we will win out in the end. The quality of blooks now are a lot better than they were one year ago, when I first started Novelr – and as we continue to experiment with the form and the function of the screen we will only get better and better at presenting stories online.

Accessibility

Online fiction isn’t as portable as the dead-tree version. We need batteries, we need a screen; that screen isn’t easy on the eyes; we have yet to build a globally accepted standard for electronic books. I have dealt with this problem before on Novelr: like James, I believe it is impossible to port an offline work to the digital world without significant change. Rather, writing has to be tweaked to suit the way we read things on a screen. And that’s leaving out things like hypertext and images – which, used wisely, help boost the immersive power of a story.

We have another problem in this area, however: did you know that only 27% of Internet users read blogs? And if we look at reading in a broader sense we have to admit that we are losing our kids to video, music and games. How many Gen Ys know the pleasure of turning to the last page of a book? If they do read, it is in bites – on blogs and newspaper websites, never more than a few lines of information. We will have to fight to get them to realize stories are another form of entertainment – just because they don’t like the reading they do in school doesn’t mean that reading isn’t fun.

But back to the technology – despite what most critics say I believe we’re in a far better position than we care to admit. I am writing this on a beautiful glossy LCD screen, and Amazon’s Kindle makes some headway in solving the screen and battery problem, though it is too expensive and too rare at the moment for any real impact. But this is what I am excited about: I am following a little known technology called Seadragon very closely – below is a demo of the technology being put to its paces in front of a live audience. My breath caught as I watched it. Tell me if yours does as well.

By Eli James | Also posted in Publishing | Comments (15)

Wednesday, 11 June, 2008

Why A Publishing Industry Slump Is Good For Us

Money In The Eye Gavin Williams writes No Man An Island and The Surprising Life and Death of Diggory Franklin. In this guest post he talks about how a traditional publishing industry slump presents a unique opportunity for the growth of online fiction.

The illustrious Alexandra Erin, one of the successful online novelists (and by “successful” I mean it’s her day job) recently wrote that the publishing industry is currently tightening its belt in the face of a possible recession. That means there will likely be less sales, less new books, and less new writers. Because in the face of falling sales, the big companies will be unwilling to take risks on new authors until the crisis is past. And, readers will have less money to spend on unknown writers. They’ll want something they’re sure to find entertaining and worth the money, since we’ll all have less of it.

Now, this is where some news anchor would say “This is a good time to PANIC!”

Now, it kind of is. If the rising price of oil destroys our economy and causes a depressed period, that will pretty much suck. I’m not going to sugarcoat that sad fact. So, what chance does the new art form of Online Novels have against a powerhouse industry like Traditional Publishing? Especially in the face of a crisis of global proportions?

Well, because we have an opportunity here. The Chinese symbol for crisis is the same as the one for opportunity: Crisertunity! (Thank you Homer Simpson) If the common reader is going to have trouble finding disposable income to spend on paper books, we can present a great alternative: free online text. It’s environmentally friendly, takes zero manufacturing time, saves trees, and entertains daily.

The Old Way: Traditional Publishing

You know how it goes. A plucky young writer goes into his or her private sanctuary with a typewriter/laptop and punches out the next great American Novel. (I’m Canadian, but we’re talking myths here) It’s a work of genius, with rich drama and realistic characters. The earnest would-be novelist sends it to agents and publishers, writing query letters, hoping for the best.

Form letters come back, saying the manuscript isn’t “right” for their publishing house or agency. Or that the writing is excellent, but that marketing it would be difficult. Perhaps a rewrite? The writer goes back into seclusion, writing like a madman, until it’s finished. Frank Herbert’s “Dune” was rejected 13 times by publishers. James Joyce’s “Dubliners” was rejected 22 times, and then the first run was bought by one person and burned. They had to try again.

Finally, the young writer (probably no longer young) gets an agent and gets published. And then waits for a year while the manuscript is edited and printed, cover art finalized, marketing planned… Until finally, one day there is their book, on a shelf in a store, for the world to find and love.

Readers will spend fifteen, twenty, twenty-five dollars for a paperback. And from there to the neighbourhood of fifty bucks for a hardcover. And that plucky young writer? Well, after the publisher pays the corporate owners, the editors, the publicists, the artists, the printer and the agent, not much is left.

And if a recession closes the publishing world’s doors to everyone but the big names, the bestsellers? You get zero.

The Alternative: Faster, Leaner, Cooler

A new economic model is emerging thanks to the Internet. The Music Industry has already proven it works, and that the culture needs to adapt. Downloads. Why buy a CD with two good songs and ten bad ones, when you can download the two songs you like? Ipods and MP3 players make digital music more convenient than CDs. Some bands are taking this to heart: Radiohead offered some of its music online for free, and fans could leave donations. The whole industry is trying to recreate itself.

Bands are getting fans to help them publish music, instead of turning to big studios. Fans get to feel like part of a community, vote on favourites, comment on albums, and decide who’s worthy of funding. These are exciting times.

By Eli James | Also posted in Guest Bloggers, Publishing | Comments (27)