[Update]: I’ve just realized that it’s not very nice of me to take a leave of absence without leaving behind something for you read, do, or think about. Here are two things:

• Sharon (of Bibliobibuli) recently alerted me to a Guardian blog post about online fiction. It’s a rather comprehensive cover of works and web fiction history I had no idea about, and I’d like to highlight one line from the article:
  
  

  Meade (of if:book) himself confides that he is yet to be “seized by a digital fiction that is utterly compelling”. 

  I wanted to email both Chris Meade and Andrew Gallix (the writer behind the blog post) alerting them to our portion of the blogosphere, perhaps by pointing them to the concentration of online fiction at Web Fiction Guide. But I don’t at the moment have enough online time to do so. Here’s my proposal: will somebody from the blooking community please start an email correspondence with them? Just to tell them: hey! we exist! and we’ve got a couple of ‘utterly compelling’ works out there, you know?!

• Johnathan Harris recently did a controversial presentation at Flash On The Beach, a Flash developer conference. He says
  
  

  … our medium – the online medium – has the potential to become the next great way of processing and expressing our world. Some would say it has already reached this point, but I believe it still inhabits an awkward adolescence, with no real virtuosos and no real masterpieces, and that the only way for it to mature is for its leaders and practitioners to push themselves to make better work, which will, in turn, reach a larger and less insular audience. If the work is purely technological, it will be less likely to reach this larger audience, for it won’t resonate with as many people. If it connects on a more human level, on the level of ideas, it stands a better chance of touching people deeply and spreading widely, like a Toni Morrison novel or a Steven Spielberg movie. My reasons for wanting all this are partly selfish – it is my medium and I want it to flourish – but also inherently communal, as rising tides raise all ships.

  His presentation is worth a read. Also, go check out his portfolio, which has an unusually high spattering of online storytelling experiments. My favourite? The Whale Hunt.

[Note]: I’ve reenabled comments for this post, and I’ll pop by when I can to see what you think. Tell me if anything’s new.

Mock exams just ended this morning, so I’m popping by to throw some links your way.

• David Foster Wallace committed suicide a couple of days back, and it prompted an outcry of sadness from major swathes of the blogosphere. I spent much of my (already limited) online time reading articles dedicated to his memory, excerpts of his work, and pretty much catching up on his life and times. It felt strange, knowing I should be mourning the loss of a brilliant writer, but I had no idea who he was. McSweeney’s has a long thread of people penning their memories of him, amongst them Zadie Smith:
  

  He was my favourite. I didn’t feel he had an equal amongst living writers. We corresponded and met a few times but I stuttered and my hands shook. The books meant too much to me: I was just another howling fantod. In person, he had a great purity. I had a sense of shame in his presence, though he was meticulous about putting people at their ease. It was the exact same purity one finds in the books: If we must say something, let’s at least only say true things.

  Ah, the ignorance of youth. I am left with dipping my hands into a stagnant pool of work, never to know how it must have felt like to know Wallace in person.

• Muse’s Success is a new listing site, similar in concept to Pages Unbound (read: crowd powered, no editors). Programmer Chris Clarke says it’s running on Wordpress for the time being, but plans are underway to switch to a custom platform. Interested writers submit your work here.
• Lethe Bashar has completed the Las Vegas section of his The Novel Of Life. I’m still reading the first part, though, so I can’t really tell you how it is. Project page has a wonderful summary; check it out here.
• Sol Mann’s blook: Estimated Time of Arrival, is based on his true experiences with travel and drugs (amongst other things) in Costa Rica.
• I wrote about Urbis sometime ago, and it seems that they’ve gotten a literary agency to check out the writers on their site. Their PR blurb says they’ve ’started with the best’: one LJK Literary Management, under Time Warner Book CEO Larry Kaufman. Opportunity page over here.
• Why people pirate games. Some very interesting insights on why and how piracy works on the Internet.

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’ll be taking a study break from Novelr until late December, which means my posts here will be fewer and further between. Yes, I know this sounds quite awful, but I’m currently studying about 4 hours a day and it’ll only get worse as my Finals approach. Guest posts and community alerts are welcomed - I can come online, but only in very short bursts - so please shoot me an email if you’d like to write something for the blooking community.

I’d like to do an open mike before I vanish. An open mike is a post where you take the center stage, be it in the commenting section below, or back in your own blog, about a topic I’ll be discussing today. Brains turned on, then? Alright.

Here’s what I’d like to know: would you rather censor foul language for the sake of your audience, or would you keep it in your story, because that is telling the truth? Where do you stand when it comes to vulgarity in fiction?

This is an argument I’m pretty unsure about, because there are very valid opinions on both sides. On one hand we have Stephen King, who defends his use of the f-word because he is writing about common, working-class people, and they say fuck more than they do foie gras. On the other hand (the cleaner one, you’d suppose) you have the argument that it is just impolite to litter your prose with, well, impolite language. The most creative treatment of vulgar language I have seen is by children’s writer Diana Wynn Jones. Yes, you got me right - a children’s author. In her book Wilkin’s Tooth the neighbourhood bully is a particularly rude child, and he frequently uses (in her words) ‘colourful language’. Jones treats this quite literally - her dialogue from the bullies is filled with “orange” and “black” and “you purple red green boy you!!” Witty stuff.

Where do you stand on this issue?

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)

This article orginally appeared in Palm Sunday (New York, Dial Press 1999) from pages 65 to 72, 9 years before Vonnegut’s death. I thought I’d share it here.

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.

These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful– ? And on and on.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

1. Find a subject you care about

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

2. Do not ramble, though

I won’t ramble on about that.

3. Keep it simple

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

4. Have guts to cut

It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

5. Sound like yourself

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.

6. Say what you mean

I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable — and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.

Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.

7. Pity the readers

They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school — twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify — whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.

8. For really detailed advice

For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I recommend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.

In Sum:

1. Find a subject you care about
2. Do not ramble, though
3. Keep it simple
4. Have guts to cut
5. Sound like yourself
6. Say what you mean
7. Pity the readers

But here’s the most surprising conclusion from “In Rainbows”; despite an explicit invitation by the band to legally download the album for free, huge numbers chose to do so illegally. Research by Will Page, chief economist of copyright organisation MCPS-PRS Alliance, and Eric Garland, c.e.o. of online media researcher Big Champagne, reported 400,000 such “torrents” in the first day, and 2.3 million over the first 25 days. Yet by any standards the album has been a huge commercial success. Page and Garland conclude that “torrents and legal downloads are complements, not competitors”.

He comes to an interesting close when he talks about the music industry’s attitude towards piracy in the 1980s:

.. the (then) record industry publicly argued that “home taping is killing music”, while recognising that hard-up students who had developed a love of music through illegally copying might become core buyers in later life.

It is worth pointing out here that piracy doesn’t affect the publishing industry as much as it does the music one. I’d be more worried about the lack of offline readers and the lower margins the publishing industry faces today than the possibility of copyright infringement. Though, on the other hand, I admit to downloading a copy of Breaking Dawn recently (ehheh!) after finding out that the Malaysian release was delayed for a week. The difference here being that I’d buy the book the instant it hit local bookstores - owning a paper copy is priceless and forever, and a lot more meaningful to me than a .lit file. (Special thanks to Sharon of Bibliobibuli for highlighting this article)

Other links worth checking out:

• Some of my predictions regarding Pages Unbound’s close have come true: discussions about a replacement/clone site have sprung up in the PU forums. Interested writers contact Rose here.
• The New York Times on why we capitalize our ‘I’s.
• A long transcript answering the question ‘How Is the Internet Changing Literary Style?‘
• Just found out about Yochai Benkler’s book The Wealth Of Networks. Benkler explores the reality of making money through user generated content, though Nicholas Carr has a wager going on that the only reason volunteers still exist is because there isn’t really any way to make money off them. The book is available for free here.
• Daniel Hall writes in The Economist about how technology is fragmenting the music industry, and - like many others - goes on to throw the gauntlet in the book industry’s direction.

If it seems that more and more people are seeing the parallels between both industries, then it is because they are. The Internet has disrupted many things for many people and the general situation we’re seeing on the ground now is mass confusion. Which equals opportunity. Exciting times, this.

PS: Alexandra Erin’s not gotten back to me on the future of Pages Unbound, so I’m in the dark as to what her descicions are. Somebody help, please?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For

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

Against

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

Open Mike

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

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

Calling all online fiction writers

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

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

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

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

Scott McKenzie

www.stardotfiction.com

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

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.

How

Let’s start with the basics. First, enable comments. (No I’m not kidding). I’ve met several people who believe comments to be a poor medium for opinion making - they’d rather have their articles and stories linked back with a comprehensive, well written article.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that having responsive articles may be the ideal - it means people are taking the time to write about your work, for one - but preventing your readers from interacting with you is a great disservice to your site. It also prevents community creation, because there is no such thing as a community through email or personal message - you must have some form of medium through which readers can communicate with you, and see that others are communicating as well.

Okay, I just had to get that out of the way. On to main meat of this article:

1. Talk to them. In your posts. This is a lot simpler for blogs than it is for blooks, because blooks are really all story installments. First off, they can be fit in: I like how Jim Zoetewey puts up italicized author’s notes before his chapters in The Legion Of Nothing, and how Alexandra Erin puts up occasional non-story posts, talking about specific themes and scenes in Tales Of MU. But the truth here is that short sections don’t work well in creating community. Readers learn about you when you talk to them, in much the same way that they learn about your characters as you write about them in your fiction. Talking to your readers is the single most important thing you can do in your blook, but how exactly you can do that I’ll return to in a short bit.

2. Be honest. This sounds weird, but I’m putting this fairly high up in the list because it’s that important. Honesty isn’t some vague concept preachers talk about in pulpits. On the Internet transparency is one of the key things you’ll need to create and maintain a community - it’s the glue that keeps things together. That you will face drama on the Internet is an ugly truth. Because community is about relationships, and relationships are built on trust, it helps when you’re transparent in all your dealings with your readers - treat them fairly, and treat them like you know them personally, even if they’re being an ass. Things will be a lot easier for you.

3. Reply to your comments. As in, almost all of them. I know that comments may be very flattering things (I’ve got 25 per post! I’m famous!), but the point of community is creating worthwhile relationships between reader and writer. And you can’t really do that if you collect comments as trophies. One of the first things I learnt when I started blogging was that readers value replies. They feel treasured if a blogger appears in their own commenting section, sleeves up, hands muddied and hair tousled, engaging in that droll task of Interacting with The Reader. They feel welcomed. Feeling welcome is a wonderful thing in my book.

4. Initiate conversation about the community. Don’t wait for people to start talking about each other - take the first step and refer to them as a group. At Novelr I frequently encourage discussion regarding the state of the blooking community, and I believe this to be one of the main reasons why Novelr has become an unintentional rally point for many blook writers. Start talking about you and your readers as a unit, and they’ll start to see it as one.

5. Moderate disputes. All good blogs need good enemies. The trick is to make sure people make up afterwards. You can’t avoid drama on the Internet, but you can create an ethos of civility: stop issues in your commenting section before they get out of hand, or at least maintain a heavy presence throughout the spat. Display maturity and good judgment, and your community will do the same - I’ve talked about how comments mimic the style and mood of the blog, and this applies here more than it does anywhere else.

The Blooking Context

Earlier I said that talking to your readers is the single most important thing you can do to create community in your blook. And I admit it’s a lot harder to create community on blooks, simply because most readers really have nothing to comment about other than the story (and the chapters in web fiction are often too short to be of any discussive value - Joe beats up the bad guy … so what?). But is it possible? Certainly. There’s a huge community around Tales of MU, for instance, and it’s sprung up around two cores.

The first core is Erin’s personal blog. This is where most of the community creation is done - readers pass from MU to her blog, read a few entries, and then subscribe to both. You’d realize that the community is more apparent in her personal blog than it is on the actual story pages - but also that they exist in both. The second core is her forum. It’s a lot harder to maintain a forum than it is to maintain a blog, but the returns (community wise) are far greater. Again, notice that the community creation is powered by a blog - her personal one - which then helps to funnel readers into the forum.

The lure of Alexandra Erin’s personal blog can be easily explained if we draw upon what we know of the living web. Mark Bernstein writes:

Undressing, literally, figuratively, or emotionally, has always been a powerful force in personal sites and web logs. Pictures don’t matter in the long run; what matters is the trajectory of your relationship with the reader, the gradual growth of intimacy and knowledge between you.

Community is about relationships. When readers care about what you’re creating (or about you) they hang around more often. Erin’s personal blog deals with the day-to-day struggles she faces writing MU - something her readers already love - and it is this that makes them hang around and interact with her as well as each other. She is but another character on the web, apart from the ones she creates in her fiction, and the readers care. They watch her grow. They stick around.

Conclusion

If you want community, write more than just fiction on your blook. Keep a behind-the-scenes blog, if you will, to document your process. It’ll be a lot easier to talk to your readers like that rather than to attempt community creation through the commenting section of your story.

Final thoughts? Let your readers in. Show them that you’re human, that you’re like any other character in your fiction, and that they should care. Talk them, argue with them, make them laugh. Show them the other side of your story - the side where it’s still malleable junk in your head. Tell them the story of how you cat peed on your last draft, or how you dog chewed your masterplan. Ask them questions and respond to their replies. But above all let them in. Community is never too far behind when you do.

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?

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.

Exposure

I’ll quote James on this one:

… But for 99% of the world who try and write nowadays it isn’t what they are reaching towards: it’s the fallback, when they discover that they cannot get traditionally printed. It is, for most writers, a way of vanity publishing.

I’m going to ignore the firestorm on whether or not we write blog fiction because we cannot get published (Novelr’s community is the 1% who doesn’t) and focus on the truth of the statement here: most new authors don’t even consider online fiction. They don’t even realize its existence - and even if they do, why should they aim for it? There is no minimum bar of entry, there are few readers as compared to the distribution might of the bookstore, and … wouldn’t it be nice to be able to pick up a copy of your own book in Borders? Online fiction is at the moment a fringe movement - associated primarily with fanfiction, perhaps, or amateur writing.

This is something we must change.

Credibility

In a comment James had talked about how a conventionally published book goes a long way when you’re a lecturer:

I’ve got a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing, and am currently looking for job posts teaching CW at University level, and they all require nowadays that you are a conventionally published author. Despite my thesis concerning online fiction, despite many of the jobs saying that an awareness of online fiction is a desired quality, they still want me to have a book in the shops that the students can buy. It’s a bizarre attitude, but that’s the way it is.

This attitude isn’t weird at all - it brings us to our next point- that online fiction simply isn’t seen as credible. There are a multitude of factors associated with this: I believe it is the compound result of little readers, low quality and lack of exposure all lumped together. Then there is the sad truth that Internet fiction currently isn’t built to last - if the creator of a blook dies, his work dies along with him because nobody is there to pay his hosting costs. It’s hard to be credible when works disappear along with their writers - what would’ve happened to literature if Anne Frank had blogged? Scary thought, that is.

Closing Thoughts

James is right in saying that online fiction isn’t a viable alternative to traditional fiction. Not yet. But with an ailing publishing industry on our hands I am convinced it will eventually become integral to reading and fiction as a whole. We can’t continue on like this for much longer … a whole industry waiting for the next Da Vinci Code? That isn’t rubbish - that’s just sad. Let’s start making things better.

Dear Mr Publisher.

I think most of us know the pretense under which we are having this conversation. The question is, do you? Increasingly irrelevant, you are - a dinosaur in the age of the Internet - and you just have to change. No, don’t worry, your counterparts in the music industry didn’t want to admit the truth too - for too long they handled the intrusion of the Internet in exactly the way a business shouldn’t: political lobbying and suing the socks off 80 year old grandmothers. Their lawyers must’ve been laughing all the way to the bank, no? And don’t look at me like that, you’ve made your lawyers very happy too - remember the J.K. Rowling case? That’s copyright, you say? Well, big news for you: you’ve got to rethink copyright - suing the socks of everyone who reproduces content isn’t going to do anything for your business. Not at all.

So what is the future? You can’t think beyond the box at the moment, oh no, you’re too busy worrying about the bottom line, complaining about the short (God forbid you use this term) shelf life of new books, pushing for fancier covers and louder headlines to splash over your releases. You want television appearances, author readings, bookstore appearances - the whole package … and then you stop and wonder why you seem to be losing. You’re doing the things that used to work, but they just doesn’t seem to be as effective as they once were! So you point fingers - you say that these are fallen times, that people don’t read as much as they use to, that books are relics of a forgotten age and there’s nothing you can do about that. But really, can you?

Printing On Demand

Well I’m sure you’ve heard of this. Vanity Press, you call it. Hahahaha. Lulu can never compete with us you say. Well shut up. Do you realize the opportunities PoD presents to your dying business? No? Let me give you an example. At Kinko’s they have this service where you upload a document (it can be as big as an entire book), customize the basic look (cover, fonts, etc) and have it printed and delivered in one business-day. To a location of your choice - say you’re doing a presentation at Hilton, you can have Kinko’s print it out in a store closest to your hotel and have it sent there minutes before you arrive. Amazing, no?

Now apply this to your business model. What if readers can choose to have their books printed in store? See the opportunities this presents to you? You no longer have limited shelf space - you can have a virtually limitless number of books available to customers in your computer system - and besides that you don’t have to - ick! - plastic wrap the books on show! Your store can now be customized to encourage browsing, reading, and imagine how much smaller it’ll be! Death to the big bookstore - overhead costs will kill you on one of those! And think beyond the retail front: your backend will be much more streamlined. No more freight costs, no more surplus stock (wasting paper!), no more burning petrol as you cart books from factory to shopping mall - whenever a new book comes out you just download a shell of it from your publisher’s network! Cheaper! More effective! Do you see it yet?

And all these cost savings can be passed on to the consumer: kill the thought, now, that books are luxury items. Dell builds its computers and ships them in a week; customers love them because they’re bloody cheap! Now you can do the same! And, yes, there may be a few kinks along the way - printing a book will take a few hours, particularly if a whole bunch of customers are buying at one time … but think of it as a temporary setback, while advances are made to our printing technology.

Choice

We all know that the 21st century consumer loves choice. M&Ms made a huge killing when they implemented a system for customers to choose the colour of their chocolates. Imagine paying extra for a packet of only pink and green M&Ms! Crazy, no? Now think about what this can do for you: why not let customers choose what short stories they want in an anthology? Why not let them read stuff online and, if they want a dead-tree version of their book, get to choose their own covers? Why not allow your customers to print a message on the cover, the same way iPods can be engraved as gifts?

And why not charge a premium for all those services?

Jump Online

Generation Y is reading more and more stuff on the Internet. I won’t be so stupid as to suggest you port books whole into the online world - that’d be daft because the screen is so different from the page. But pause for awhile and think about how a jump might be made possible - writers can perhaps keep extended stories online, stories that build upon and use characters from the book. We’re all familiar with the novel you just don’t want to end … why not port that element over to the digital world, where stories can go on forever? And the best part about making readers do the jump from offline to online (or vice versa) is that you’re opening up yourself to countless other business opportunities. You can sell advertising, or you can build your brand amongst a new generation of readers, or perhaps you’d like to drive readers to a social networking part of your bookstore site - build a community that’s loyal to you, your books and your authors.

And the best thing about the Internet? Marketing. Yes, you heard me right. Stop sniggering away. Weezer recently did a music video featuring a host of web celebs - Chris Crocker and a dancing banana amongst them. This was a very, very smart move - by tapping into the Internet’s ability to spread word-of-mouth their video got over 3 million views in 5 days, catapulting their band to web fame and, if not fortune, at least many more album sales than before. Do you see what the Internet can do for your business? Stop thinking in terms of old boy networks and jettison the fat (your marketing departments). There’s a whole world of readers you can reach with very little expenditure - all you have to do is to think outside the box a little - see beyond the printed page. The world is waiting for you … just reach out and pluck it.

Conclusion

So, Mr Publisher. Do you see the future? Or do you still want to carry on pretending something will change someday and that everyone will return to books? Stop that! Forget it. The music industry went into cardiac arrest when an outsider came in and redid the rules of the game … I believe this will happen to you too if you’re not careful enough. Still old and fat and slow? So be it. Somebody (web writers, perhaps, or maybe Amazon - remember the Kindle?) is going to make some very big changes in the coming years, whether or not you like it. Hell to old boy networks - we don’t play by your rules and frankly we don’t care. We just know that books can be so much better, and we’re going to do something about it.

So join us, or die.

Yours Truly,

I. M. Dafuture

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.

Online novelists can benefit from these experiences. Web design gets easier all the time, especially with free alternatives like Wordpress and Blogger. Instead of getting an agent and a publisher, writers can publish their stories themselves, electronically. Instead of waiting a year to see it in print, it can go up right after you finish typing it. Instead of waiting a year for a whole book, readers can have a new chapter every day. They also help edit the book and improve the writing, through comments.

Online novels can go beyond the confines of regular print. Interesting layouts, uploads for artwork, videos and music, links to past chapters or related stories, character profiles, the websites can be designed for interactivity and creativity. Online stories can be a wholly different and engaging experience from the paperback you’re used to.

We don’t have to chop down trees to make paper: we’re environmentally friendly. We don’t have to pay a printer, a publicist, an editor or an agent. We certainly don’t have to pay a fancy publisher in a suit, who makes money for putting their name on the cover and little else. Through reader donations and web advertisements, the only person being paid is the writer themselves.

And fans don’t have to drive to the mall to find a bookstore. They get new chapters in the comfort of their own home. We’re cheap on gas, too!

While the Publishing Industry is busy twiddling its thumbs waiting for Dan Brown to write a lame sequel, or for someone to create the next Harry Potter, we can get out there and experiment. Try new styles, thrill readers, shock audiences, fly without a net. Most online writers do it as a hobby, a sideline. There’s little financial risk. We enjoy writing, it’s an inexpensive hobby. All it takes is pen, paper, and imagination. And, if we’re online, it takes the computer and keyboard we already own. We don’t need employees, manufacturers, stores, overhead, publicists. We just need to type.

For Alexandra Erin, there’s a little more risk involved. It’s her full-time job. But, think of the alternative. You (as a reader) can wait a year for your favourite novelist to publish a book, and then read it in a day, and spend twenty to fifty dollars on it. Or, you could send your favourite online writer a dollar a month. Or five. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but the Internet is huge. If we get lots of online fiction out there, cast a big net, we’ll draw in more audience, and slowly but surely that dollar from one person is one thousand people, or ten thousand… It’s not impossible.

It just takes trying.

Novelr is trying to forge links in the online community to make finding online fiction easier. Alexandra Erin is doing the same with Pages Unbound. Writers like me usually have links on our sites to our friends and favourite stories, so audiences can find new material and expand their horizon.

As I pointed out in my previous article, you get back a lot in return. A new chapter every day or every week, or somewhere in between. The chance to communicate with other fans and the writers themselves. The chance to build communities, and explore new worlds of imagination. There’s a lot to be excited about in online fiction.

The traditional model can sit there, waiting for trouble to pass it by. Meanwhile, we can take the art of writing to a new audience and a whole new level, by being faster, leaner, more creative, and interactive.

Now is not the time to panic. Now is the time to jump in and make the future.

Here’s a list of why Online Novels have an advantage over Traditional Publishing in these leaner, meaner times:

1. The publishing world is making it harder to get published.
2. The online world is constantly growing in audience, and is easy to use.
3. The publishing world compensates agents, editors, publicists, typists, printers and owners, and then the author. It costs a lot of money to prepare and print a book, and it costs readers a fair amount to buy one.
4. The online world compensates the author. And, it’s inexpensive for readers.
5. Traditional publishing is slow. It might be a year after a contract before a book is in print.
6. Online publishing is instantaneous. I wrote this article today.
7. Traditional publishers and agents send you form letters if they don’t like you.
8. Online readers comment directly on your chapters, telling you what they love and hate in equal measure, teaching you to take criticism and how to improve.
9. The publishing world is shrinking down to its favourite best-selling authors and genres. Which means, not you.
   The online world is craving innovation, experimentation, entertainment and fun. Which could be you.

Need I say more?

Gavin Williams writes No Man An Island and The Surprising Life and Death of Diggory Franklin. If you like his work feel free to drop by Pages Unbound and leave a review for him there.

This post talks about how small crowds aren’t wise, how this affects voting-based filters such as Pages Unbound and what can be done about it.

Democracy is a strange thing. It powers much of the Internet we see today: Google uses it to decide link relevancy, Digg uses it to decide article placement and Pages Unbound uses it to determine the quality of a work. This model assumes that the crowd is wise: if a vast majority gives an article the thumbs up then surely it must be a good article, and surely it must deserve a spot at the top/in the front page/where most people can see it.

I have talked about the fallacies of this model before, so I’m not going into detail about the strengths and weaknesses of harnessing the crowd as a filter. What I am going to talk about, however, is an underlying assumption that must be fulfilled before the crowd’s wisdom can be harnessed properly. This assumption is deceptively simple:

The crowd must be large.

I kid you not. (Alright, alright, stop giving me that stare). Pause for a moment and think about what this assumption implies.

The larger the crowd, the wiser it is. Here’s an example: let’s say there are 10 people voting in Digg. I have a story I want on Digg’s front page, so I post it up, vote for it and then look for ways to get other people to vote it up as well. The good news is that I am friends with 6 of the other 9 voters. They vote for my story because we’re chums and - hey presto! - instant fame.

Alternatively, I am not friends with the other 9 voters, and my story sucks. Fret not - I’ve got another solution. I call up 20 of my friends and ask them to register and vote for my story. Once that’s done there’s nothing anybody else can do - even if the original 9 try to vote me down I have enough friends to overcome them.

In a sentence: I’ve gamed the system. The crowd is stupid.

Not so for big crowds. We know now that it’s pretty difficult to trick your way into Digg’s front page. They have thousands of users - trying to trick them by befriending a significant proportion of that voter base is plain impossible, as is bringing in thousands more of your friends. Tricking Digg has been done before (by Wired magazine, no less), but it was done with another concept, one we call ‘herd mentality’. Yes, Diggers can be cows too. (Note: in this particular case the crowd corrected itself at the end. Big crowds really are hard to beat).

Pages Unbound Is - Oh Dear - A Small Crowd

The truth about small crowds is that it isn’t really a problem - communities around crowd-based filters tend to grow over time, and even ‘bring-in-my-friend’ behaviour isn’t bad, because it encourages other slighted people to bring in their friends, and so on so forth, until the user base is large enough to be wise. But small, unwise crowds can be a problem when the voter base doesn’t grow.

Pages Unbound is at the moment harnessing the collective intelligence of a small crowd, and it suffers for it. In the discussions in NovLounge I frequently hear of how new stories leap to the very top of the ratings list because fans jump in, create an account and vote the socks of the particular story, even if it doesn’t deserve it. Normally this kind of behavior won’t make a dent in a bigger, more established filter, because the rest of the crowd would then step in and correct whatever rabid fanboyism there exists in PU. But that doesn’t happen here.

Another point to think about is that rating online fiction (be it serials or blooks or one-off stories) is a very subjective matter. Adam of Penfencer has pointed out that PU is dominated primarily by sci-fi or fantasy titles, so it won’t come as a surprise that blooks of other genres won’t be as well received. This isn’t PU’s fault - the demographics of the web show that people who come online are primarily Generation Yers - teenagers and adults below 30. These people grew up with Harry Potter and computer games so it natural for them to gravitate towards stories with an added wow factor. And it does mean that the crowd in PU isn’t as fair to blooks of other genres, apart from the two Adam has pointed out above.

What Can We Do?

The problem is simple - we have small crowds. The long term solution? Get bigger ones! This sounds easy enough to do, but it ties in with our overall aim to push online fiction to the fore and that isn’t easy in reality. Not many people have heard of blooks/blog novels; even fewer have heard of Pages Unbound. And the biggest risk we face concerning PU is that the fanboyism will continue to persist, thus deadening the potential and relevancy of one of the best filters in our medium.

As a short term measure I suggest implementing moderators - people who have the ability to remove reviews that appear to be too fanboyish. The most ideal format for ‘populist’ filters such as this would be of course for the crowd to correct itself, but this isn’t happening anytime soon, not unless we can get a big enough crowd to PU. And that is one of the things we must work towards.

Till then, we must innovate. All big crowds start off tiny, as ours is at the moment. Let’s make the best of what we have and continue to grow.

Right. Just a short shoutout here - Novelr’s forums, aptly titled NovLounge (yeah it was a hot afternoon and I wasn’t very feeling creative, so don’t clobber me) is up and running. There’s a handy button on the sidebar that I put together on the run - it’s made out of various image scraps I’m got lying about the computer and you can use that to visit the forum too.
I know I should give a long and inspiring speech about how I hope everyone will get together and build community and write well but I’ve been doing that for some time now and I think I shouldn’t push it too hard. Well, not in this post, at least. But I started NovLounge to gather a small team of people for a site launch we’re going to do next year, and since I’m going to be offline soon the team and I have decided to open it up to Novelr’s community.

Now I’d like to admit here that I’ve no particular vision for NovLounge - I’d like you all to do whatever you want with it, so if you want to compare notes on the best ice cream flavour, go ahead; if you’d like to talk writing, do that as well. We’ve got plenty of places doing intellectual, so it’ll be nice if NovLounge is a little different: a kind of a laid-back bar for Internet writers. Whatever it is, though, it’s up to you. No, really.

That being said, here’s a brief introduction to the forum: there are four categories: Voxpop (for random stuff), Commentary (for discussion of the medium and the craft), Off Tangent (for forum games) and Lounge News (covers forum news and issues). Interaction guidelines can be found here, and the administrators are, in alphabetical order:

• Gavin Williams (writes No Man an Island)
• Grace McDermott (otherwise known as Stormy, from Mirrorfall)
• Jim Zoetewey (writes The Legion Of Nothing)
• Sarah Suleski (writes Alisiyad)
• Sonja Nitschke (writes The Mutants)
• Stephanie (otherwise known as Windvein, from Scary Mary)

If you know them then you’re probably in for a bang of a time. Head over there now, have a cup of coffee, and enjoy!