1.    We can’t see the full ‘data’ picture

Data Data Data – if there’s one thing that has been drummed into us, it’s been to get a handle on what we can learn from sales and audience data. The problem is that retailers don’t really want us to see their data, and as publishers are cautious about sharing data it makes it almost impossible to see the full picture. Bigger publishers have built up data analysis teams, with Victoria Barnsley citing Eloy Sasot, a data analyst recruited from American Express, as her “secret weapon”.  Most have worked out that a Kindle Daily Deal is going to be worth the promotion, but for many smaller publishers getting beyond working out what obvious ebooks sales drivers are is not straight forward.  Shrewd publishers are undertaking spot-check qualitative and quantitative research projects to work out what is and isn’t working in the online environment.

2.    Digital = Publishing

Compartmentalising the digital department hasn’t been an option for some time. The gentle seeping of digital into every aspect of the book publishing business – even if that means a digital marketing strategy to support the launch of an artist bound edition of a print book – has been superseded by the opening of a floodgate. This has meant the re-evaluation of the marketing, communications and sales floors, and a clash – or worse – a convergence of job roles and a political land-grab at the top tier.  On a positive note, it’s meant an influx of fresh blood from other industries. Nick Perrett, who will open this year’s Innovation Workshop, is now group strategy and digital director at HarperCollins – and with a background in entrepreneurship, combined with gaming industry experience – his take on the impact of technology on publishing will be interesting to hear.

3.    Walled Gardens Make Readers Claustrophobic

Publishers are tired of the constraints of walled gardens. Actually to clarify this point – consumers are tired of walled gardens. If you buy a book product you want it to work on all your devices. With the rise of Samsung and other android devices, consumers are become increasingly demanding – it’s no longer an iOS vs. Kindle game. If readers upgrade their ‘phone or tablet then why should they have to buy the same book content again? The prospect of going DRM free still makes many publishers feel like lemmings dropping off the edge of a cliff – but Pottermore statistics are heartening – with piracy falling for Harry Potter e-books, indeed some of the most pirated e-books, by 20% to 25%, after it was taken live according to Charlie Redmayne, Pottermore CEO.

4.    We’re Not Sure How Much Is To Blame on Global Recession  

Double Dip, Triple Dip, what does the term ‘negative interest rates’ even mean? We can’t deny that we’re still in the midst of a massive global recession. This makes it hard to analyse what can be attributed to the impact of technology on book publishing and what should be attributed to the dearth of consumer spending.  We know that high street bookshops are suffering but it’s not clear how much is due to the impact of online retailing, and how much is due to recession. Earlier this month Google published a study revealing that 84% of mobile shoppers now use their phones to help with shopping in physical stores. Some governments are stepping in to support the industry – with France muting a levy on smartphones, tablets and all other internet-linked devices ‘to help fund the production of French art, films and music’ in order to protect culture in a digital age, and with Chinese cities such as Shanghai offering 5 million Yuan ($793,800) ‘to support book retailers who find themselves in harsh competition against their online counterparts’ – part of an annual allocation of 15 million Yuan ‘in support of the city’s publication and book marketing infrastructure’.

5.    We’re still in Love with Print

It’s a bit like going back to that unsuitable boyfriend even though your friends and family told you quite clearly that there was no future in it: but really we’re all still in love with print. We all laughed when everyone talked about the smell of books, and the feel of books – repeatedly – but actually we haven’t got over it yet and maybe we never will. Limited editions with extended texts, author forewords and special artwork are all coming into play for beautiful books being produced by publishers. The Folio Society is going strong – with a cheeky ad this year with the words ‘Rekindle Your Love of Beautiful Books’ – and with the announcement of a new £40k Folio Prize, quality publishing and a unique distribution methodology is working for some. In arranging our delegate goody bags for this year’s Workshop, the thing we’ve been most excited about is the set of lovely new, beautifully designed (print) Do Books for the bags. Nuff said.

6.    We Need To Understand Alternative Distribution Channels

One of the projects we’re most interested to hear about at this year’s Workshop is the 39 Steps project from The Story Mechanics and Faber. Carefully positioned not quite as an app, not quite as a game, not quite as an ebook its creators have been able to assure its distribution on a wide range of channels – not just iOS. This is a game changer when looking at the possibilities for digital ‘book’ distribution. If distributing on games channels most developers are aiming at over 100k +, while book app developers have on the whole accepted that over 10k is a good result. Understanding how to position book content for other channels is an important task.

7.    The Audience Wants to Interact – and what does this mean for IP?

A number of projects being showcased next week demonstrate a hunger from audiences to interact. Hot Key’s Story Adventure has had over 2,000 children answering questions and offering creativity to help shape a story created by Fleur Hitchcock. There are a number of projects where audiences are interacting with and contributing to stories – Neil Gaiman’s project with Blackberry is one example. Audience interaction is interesting, but what happens when a Hollywood film director wants to buy the story. Who owns crowd-sourced literary projects (not crowd-sourced funded) – but actually crowd-sourced content – and how will this audience interaction affect the art and craft of writing.

8.    We’re Increasingly Enticed and then Freaked Out by Technology

Julian McCrea from Portal Entertainment will be showcasing The Craftsman at our Workshop next week – a five-day thriller for iPad and smartphone, written by an international bestselling writer launching soon. He will also talk about ThrillMe, a content discovery service using Portal’s technology, that allows audiences to find horror, thriller, mystery and suspense films based on how thrilled they are, using their facial expressions. Currently in public beta, the thought of a machine being able to sense not just how we feel, but then concurrently use this sentiment to inform our decision making still scares the sh*t out of most of us. It’s at this point that a nice cup of tea leafing through a beautiful Folio edition (see Point 5) seems to make most sense.

9.    Brands See Value in Writers, While Publishers Can’t Always Monetize Content

This is a weird dichotomy. Brands such as Microsoft Internet Explorer are using great writers on projects such as Brandon Generator to promote brand extension – in the case being showcased next week: Edgar Wright and Tommy Lee Edwards (LBi). Another recent example is Blackberry working with Neil Gaiman for the Calendar of Tales to help launch its Blackberry Flow product (AMV BBDO). Yet – for publishers monetizing content from writers is still complex. What will be the impact of big name advertising brands seeing the value of bringing ‘traditional’ writers into the fold (that is to say, not traditional advertising copywriters), while traditional publishers grapple with online retailers and pricing?

10. We Like Post-Digital Projects – but are they commercially viable?

In our final session next week we have a trio of projects demonstrating just how interesting things get in the post-digital era. Digital writer Tim Wright will be showing us The Haunter – a haunted box and physical companion on West Country walks that recites Hardy poetry depending on where you are located; The Library of Lost Books, is a talking, gesture-responsive book, created by BAFTA winning Alyson Felding along with collaborators Dave Addey and Mo Ramezanpoor; and Turning the Page considers what would happen if your well-thumbed, outdated guidebook could talk – a project which looks at how books act as repositories of treasures and triggers of memories from Stand + Stare. This is awesome and imaginative stuff that we can’t wait to hear more about next week. Sometimes it’s hard to see how projects like this will transform into commercial products – but as the artist Ghislaine Boddington pointed out at a recent NESTA symposium, when the researcher Steve Mann was prototyping ‘wearable computing’ few believed it would make the mainstream – yet augmented reality headgear is now here with Google glasses. This is exactly what the Workshop is about – a bit of what is happening now, and a bit of crystal ball gazing. We hope to see you there.

Sophie Rochester is Founder of The Literary Platform and TLP Collective.

Join us – and others – for this year’s FutureBook Innovation Workshop 2013 in Association with The Literary Platform. You can still book for this year’s workshop here – www.eventsforce.net/FIW13  – (but last few tickets remaining!).

Event Date: 30^th May 2013, 1pm – 5:30pm

Venue: LBi, 146 Brick Lane, London E2

Tickets: £129 – booking essential: www.eventsforce.net/FIW13

#fiw2013

The Broadside of a Yarn is a multi-modal performative pervasive networked narrative attempt to chart fictional fragments of new and long-ago stories of near and far-away seas with nought but a QR reader and a hand-made map of dubious accuracy. Yes, but what is it? Well, it’s kind of hard to say.

The Broadside of a Yarn remediates the broadside, a form of networked narrative popular from 16th century onward. Broadsides were texts written on a wide range of subjects, cheaply printed on single sheets of paper (often with images), widely distributed, and posted and performed in public. During the Remediating the Social exhibition, The Broadside of a Yarn was posted as a discontinuous map printed on 15 A3-sized foam-core-mounted squares arranged in an asymmetrical grid in a 5m x 3m light-box situated in the main entrance of Inspace gallery.

The purpose of this map is not to guide but rather to propose imprecise and quite possibly impossible routes of navigation through the city of Edinburgh, along the Firth of Forth, into the North Sea, into the North Atlantic and beyond into territories purely imaginary. The map squares are composed from my own photographs, and scans of details of maps, charts, drawings, and diagrams found in books, pamphlets, prints and other ephemera gleaned from used and antiquarian bookshops during a research trip I took to Edinburgh in May 2012.

Like the printed broadsides of old, the public posting of The Broadside of a Yarn signifies that it is intended to be performed. Embedded within the cartographic space of the printed map are QR codes which link to smart-phone-optimised web pages containing computer-generated narrative dialogues. These were created through a dialogic process.

Over a 10-month period, Steve Booth, Amy McDeath, Braille Fem, Caden Lovelace and I engaged in an extended conversation toward the development of a text-generator engine. Booth et. al. wrote a code base in JavaScript using jQuery, which I then used, in combination with CSS, HTML and various other JavaScripts, to create thirteen computer-generated narrative dialogues. Most – though not all – of these are intended to serve as scripts for poly-vocal performances, replete with stage instructions suggesting how and where they may be read. One generator is composed entirely of dialogue from Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer. Another contains lines of dialogue from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The combinatorial powers of computer-generated narrative conflate and confabulate characters, facts, and forms of narrative accounts of fantastical islands, impossible pilots, and voyages into the unknown undertaken over the past 2340 years.

On one hand, a print map hung in a gallery exhibition for three weeks offers but a narrow window of access to such a vast and varied body of digital text. On the other hand, this discontinuous print map is infinitely expansible. Any number of new map squares may be added at any time.

In part to extend the life of The Broadside of a Yarn beyond the Remediating the Social exhibition, and in part to further the remediation of the broadside as a form, I also created an A3-sized subset of the gallery map, which was handed out freely during the exhibition and which continues to circulate through gift exchange economies and postal networks. This map collages together imagery and QR codes from some – but not all – of the gallery map squares. The folding of 500 A3 sheets into map form took rather longer than expected and became something of a performance in the gallery space in the lead-up to the opening of the exhibition, 1 November 2013. Immediately following the opening there was a performance event in the Sculpture Court of Edinburgh College of Art, in which, a number of the computer-generated narrative dialogues in The Broadside of a Yarn were performed by myself, Jerome Fletcher, Judd Morrissy, and Mark Jeffery before a live audience. Similar performances have been staged at the Arnolfini in Bristol, the Sorbonne in Paris, and The Banff Centre in Canada.

The performance of The Broadside of a Yarn continues off-stage as well. Each gifting of the broadside map, each unfolding, each demonstration, each QR code scanned, each URL located, each page loaded, each JavaScript file executed, each computer-generated narrative dialogue read (whether scanned by eye, absorbed by ear, or spoken by mouth), each gesture, each act, each utterance prompted by this print map constitutes an event.

Two of the mobile-phone-optimised computer-generated texts have been developed into stand-alone web-based pieces. There he was, gone. was published on Joyland Poetry: A Hub for Poetry in June 2012, and Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl was included in Avenues of Access: An Exhibit & Online Archive of New ‘Born Digital’ Literature presented at the Modern Languages Association convention held in Boston in January 2013.

The Broadside of a Yarn may perhaps be best described as an assemblage. It is an unbound atlas of impossible maps, an errata-base of historical, pictorial, diagrammatic and cartographic data, a collection of short stories, a selection of fragments of quotations from centuries of sailors’ yarns, spoken words from printed stories set on far-away long-ago seas pulled through networks into hand-held digital devices, past words put into present mouths and then shifted. As is the way with assemblages, this work remains fluid and is by no means finished.

For more information on The Broadside of a Yarn visit: http://luckysoap.com/broadside

Download a free e-book of the Remediating the Social exhibition catalogue here: http://elmcip.net/critical-writing/remediating-social-e-book

Follow @jr_carpenter on Twitter.

The speakers for this year’s workshop are:

• Nick Perrett, group strategy and digital director, HarperCollins
• Bobette Buster, story consultant for Pixar, 20th Century Fox and Disney
• Sara O’Connor, editorial director print and digital, Hot Key Books, Bonnier
• Dan Franklin, digital publisher, Random House
• Julian McCrea, managing director, Portal Entertainment
• Simon Gill, executive creative director, LBi
• Cate Cannon, head of marketing and digital content, Canongate
• Jodie Mullish, senior marketing manager, Pan Macmillan
• Simon Meek, creative director, The Story Mechanics
• Alyson Fielding, md of Pyuda
• Tim Wright, digital writer
• Lucy Heywood, co-artistic director, Stand + Stare

With chairs:

• Joanna Ellis, associate director, The Literary Platform
• Matt Locke, director, Storythings
• Mike Exon, lead content strategist, LBi

And hosts:

• Sophie Rochester, founder, The Literary Platform
• Philip Jones, editor, The Bookseller
• Gareth Jones, global brand and marketing director, LBi

The half-day seminar will look at how existing and new publishers can innovate and take charge of the digital disruption, showcasing recent innovations in storytelling and publishing.

The annual event, programmed by The Literary Platform, will explore innovations in story interaction: gestural interactions, shared experiences and inter-authorship; innovations in business methodology and post-digital innovation.

As well as hearing about innovative projects from publishers, delegates will learn from other industries working with narrative and engage in bespoke workshops.

Screenwriter and Pixar story consultant Bobette Buster will lead a 45 minute workshop in building stories, while there will be analysis of how big brands such as Microsoft use compelling narrative to create communities and sell products.

BAFTA winner Alyson Fielding will show how her latest project combines print books and technology, while Portal Entertainment will demonstrate how crime stories might mutate and change depending on the reader’s gestural responses.

Founder of the Literary Platform Sophie Rochester said: “The line up for this year’s FutureBook Innovation Workshop demonstrates how publishers and others are thinking increasingly innovatively about audience interaction with stories, how digital can help publishers and writers find and better understand their readers, and look at experimentation in the post-digital era. These are exciting projects which to help inform delegates on innovative approaches and ways of thinking.”

Philip Jones editor of The Bookseller and founder of FutureBook added: “As we increasingly need to think beyond the e-book, it is essential that publishers equip themselves with the skills to innovate, and open themselves up to the way digital might change the way stories are sold and content is delivered. We’ve asked practitioners to give us their hands on advice, share their experiences, and workshop some new ideas.”

The event, which takes place on 30th May from 1pm, is being run as part of Digital Shoreditch, an annual celebration of the outstanding creative, technical and entrepreneurial talent of East London and Tech City.

The event will take place at Marketing magazine’s Digital Agency of the Year LBi in their offices on Brick Lane. For more information or to book your place, visit www.eventsforce.net/FIW13.

Event Date: 30^th May 2013, 1pm – 5:30pm

Venue: LBi, 146 Brick Lane, London E2

Tickets: £129 – booking essential: www.eventsforce.net/FIW13

#fiw2013

I love audiobooks. Something about listening to a story really appeals to me. Maybe it’s because it feels like a treat, being read to. Maybe it’s because it frees your hands to ride a bike or make a soufflé. Back in the days of the Sony Walkman (actually, mine was an Aiwa from Boots), my coat pockets rattled with cassettes of audiobooks, which would unspool and have to be meticulously re-twiddled with a pencil. I still have them all in a drawer, just in case (of what? I dunno).

Since the Aiwa days, I’ve been lucky enough to join Comma Press, an independent publisher specialising in short stories. We’ve published thousands of stories over the years, by multi-award winning authors and unknown authors alike. About half of our output is from overseas, translated into English; in many countries, short stories aren’t viewed as the poor cousin of the novel, but rightly valued as a potent and pointed form in their own right. Short stories translate well: the situations they depict are often more universal than the novel, and yet they cling to their original language less tenaciously than the poem. This makes them perfect vehicles for imaginary journeys into unfamiliar locations and cultures, and to date we’ve published ten ‘Reading the City’ anthologies (of stories from Europe, the Middle East and China), with more planned.A few years ago, we stuck some recordings of our authors reading their stories on our website, as free mp3s. It wasn’t something we gave much thought to at the time. But when we checked the analytics later, we were like fishermen hauling in a line left drifting for months and finding a whale attached. Or rather, a whole pod of whales. We were getting thousands of downloads from all over the world, often from places where you couldn’t even get our books on import. It was pretty clear there was an appetite for this stuff in audio form.

This month we launched the Gimbal iPhone app. It marries all these things together – short stories, translation, audiobooks, and the exploration of different cultures. The idea’s quite simple: short stories set in cities across the world, which you can listen to or read in eBook form. All the stories feature a journey across a city, and as you listen, the app charts the journey on a map (with additional information about key locations), so you can explore the context as the story unfolds. A gimbal, by the way, is a navigational device – a sort of gyroscopic mounting for a ship’s compass. The Gimbal app is primarily aimed at commuters who, like me, want to let the humdrum journey to work dissolve around them, and take an imaginary journey instead.

The response to the app so far has been amazing. We expected people to like the content, but we’ve been surprised by how much people love the discoverability of stories within the app, too. You can select a story by location, by genre, by mode of transport, or by length (to match that of your own journey). It solves the problem of ‘I’ve got 25 minutes to kill – what can I read?’ (or listen to).

Much of the success has been down to strong partnerships. The developers, Toru Interactive, really took the time to understand what we wanted. They learned what kind of reader this will appeal to, and how to make the app optimally intuitive and navigable for them. Likewise, we partnered with Literature Across Frontiers, a brilliant organisation which coordinates innovative literary exchanges between writers from around the world. They sent eight writers to visit each others’ cities, ride around on public transport, and write stories specially for the Gimbal app, to go along with stories by Comma Press authors. We’re also very grateful to Arts Council England. Their support of new digital projects like this helps to ensure that the independent sector is at the vanguard of innovation.

Future iterations will bring Gimbal to Android OS, and increase the functionality (including Google Street View capability). We’re also looking at replicating the success of Gimbal for some of our science-literature crossover projects: an app of ‘real science fiction’ stories written in consultation with scientists, with audio-visual explanations of the key scientific concepts involved; and an app of essays by contemporary authors on their favourite short story writers (including full text and audio versions of their out-of-copyright works). Again, it’s all about discoverability – inviting readers to take a journey, be it conceptual, imaginary, or literal.

Gimbal is available free on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. 

Watch a video demo of the Gimbal App here:

More at www.commapress.co.uk

Jim Hinks
Editor
Comma Press

25 May, 4pm: Tom Chatfield ‘On Technology‘: The author of ‘How To Thrive In A Digital Age’ explores how we use the internet, mobile technology, emailing, texting, tweeting and blogging and the effect these have on our minds. He offers original suggestions to ‘prosper in a digital century without losing our humanity’.

5 June, 8pm: ‘The Digital Alternative‘ will consider the digital alternative to poetry magazines, in discussion with website editors Helen Ivory from ‘Ink, Sweat & Tears’, Caleb Klaces from ‘Like Starlings’ and Claire Trévien from ‘Sabotage Reviews’.

The remaining events make up an eclectic and wide-ranging programme with appearances from musician Jarvis Cocker, artist Gavin Turk and actor Rupert Everett, as well as readings from celebrated authors and poets including Audrey Niffenegger, Claire Tomalin, China Mieville and Paul Theroux. Cerys Matthews will be hosting a mass sing along, there will be outside performance including live rooftop poetry events and fairy tale walks, and Ute Lemper will be singing the love poems of Pablo Neruda.

There will be events related to the following subjects:

WOMEN

FAMILY EVENTS

RELIGION

PHILOSOPHY / HOW TO LIVE

ENVIRONMENT / NATURE

FINANCE

TRAVEL / THE CITY OF LONDON

MUSIC

ART / DESIGN

POETRY

TECHNOLOGY / DIGITAL INNOVATION

Book here:

25 May, 4pm: Tom Chatfield ‘On Technology‘:

Level 5 Function Room at Royal Festival Hall

5 June, 8pm: ‘The Digital Alternative‘:

Saison Poetry Library at Royal Festival Hall.

Academic writing is painful. I discovered this the first time I had to face writing an essay as a 4^th year undergrad on exchange in London. Outside of the English speaking world, the academic essay is mostly an esoteric art form that is the domain of researchers and academic hipsters. I had never seen anything like it.

There was all this hassle of keeping your paragraphs as tight conceptual units within the greater scope of your argument, with their own internal structure, then having to back up anything you said with what other people had said before and this absolute obsession with not using someone else’s words without attribution. Pile up on top of this dealing with the formatting, keeping to the strict word length, and writing in “the language of science” and you can see it was not an easy year. But I learned the system, and became a better writer and a better communicator because of it.

Fast forward a couple of years. Now in academia, I was doing research and moving to Edinburgh to start a Master’s in Natural Language Processing, a mystical discipline born of the intersection of Linguistics and Computer Science. With a background in both, it was the obvious choice.

By this time I had written a number of papers and come to this realisation: no matter how many times you do it and how good you get at it, there are some tasks that never get any easier. You can only optimise your process so far. Searching for references is still hours of Google or JSTOR or PubMed or whatever your discipline requires. Useful references are still difficult to find using keyword search, come in awkward and bloated formats like PDF, and hide behind paywalls.

Structuring the document is often a slow iterative process. Thousands of words on a white canvas quickly become an indistinct waterfall of black characters, so proofreading is essential.

I started thinking that the things that never get any less painful are the mechanical jobs, those that require little to no creativity or critical thinking but a lot of hours of essentially hammering and shovelling text. There must be a better way.

In our collective history, we have gone from stone to papyrus, from printing press to typewriter and from there to computers, which now automatically check your spelling, punctuation, grammar, and to a certain degree, style. Why don’t they also check your structure? Why don’t they tell you: “It’s a very clever thing you’re saying there, but somebody said something similar before. Look, here’s a reference”, or “That paragraph has five different ideas in it – you might want to split it up, like this”? How about, “You need to get rid of 2000 words, so I suggest you cut this, this and this”?

The technology to do this is here already, but nobody has bothered to make it available. This knowledge happily sits on the PDFs of hundreds of research papers published in the last decade. They explain in detail how each of these problems has been solved in different scenarios; what was lacking was something that can turn this intelligence into a useful product.

This is precisely the task my co-founder Brian and myself have set ourselves with Scholarly. We want to use the technological know-how and wealth of knowledge resources of an increasingly interconnected world to augment the human capacity for written communication. We are starting with academic texts because this is what we know best, but all writing is communication, and all communication has structure. The same tools we are developing can be applied to crafting press releases and newspaper articles, reports and business plans, writing speeches and cover letters.

While no machine can substitute human creativity and the very act of communication as yet, both of these can be augmented and served by technology. We want to take this service further.

We have recently joined the ranks of the dotforge accelerator, a 13-week long programme of workshops and intense mentoring. The next step in the evolution of writing is here, and we want to be at the forefront of it. You can walk with us on our journey at www.scholarlyessay.com.

22nd May: deadline for delegates wishing to submit to the Pen Factor writing competition or the Audience Story-time.

4th June: for those not submitting to Pen Factor or Audience Storytime, 4th June is the last day TLC will be accepting bookings for the Conference, unless tickets sell out before. They are currently at 70% capacity so don’t miss out.

Click here for the full conference programme, competition details, speaker line-up and booking.

PEN FACTOR: Those shortlisted for the Pen Factor writing competition, run in association with the new ebook conversion platform BookFlower, will be judged by a heavyweight line-up of agents, publishers and other industry professionals from traditional and digi worlds, including Dan Franklin (Random House), Larry Finlay (Transworld), Gordon Wise (Curtis Brown), Jonathan Conway (The Agency Group) and Jennifer Custer (A.M.Heath). This is a great chance for your work to be taken seriously by top people working within the publishing industry. In addition, the Pen Factor shortlisted titles will be involved in a unique collaboration with Media Futures and Perera to produce a “Book Hackday” at the Free Word Centre in November. It will bring together content creators, technologists and designers interested in innovation in publishing to rapidly develop concepts and prototypes.

AUDIENCE STORYTIME: In this session TLC will hear back from a selection of last year’s Audience Story-time presenters, and will be inviting 2013 delegates to send in a brief summary about their experiments with non-traditional routes to publication: TLC want to hear success stories, or otherwise. This session will be moderated by Jon Slack and Rebecca Swift, and there will be the chance to ask questions in an open forum.

THE FULL LINE-UP:

AUTHORS AND EDITORS: AUDREY NIFFENEGGER, DR. ALISON BAVERSTOCK,
DAVID GAUGHRAN, KATE PULLINGER, MOLLY FLATT, ORNA ROSS, ROBERT
MCCRUM THE OBSERVER, SALLY O-J, TOBY LICHTIG TLS, TOM CHIVERS,
WENDY TOOLE SfEP, PUBLISHERS AND AGENTS: ANDREW FRANKLIN PROFILE
BOOKS, DAN FRANKLIN RANDOM HOUSE, GORDON WISE CURTIS BROWN,
JENNIFER CUSTER A M HEATH, JOHN MITCHINSON UNBOUND, JONATHAN
CONWAY THE AGENCY GROUP, SCOTT PACK THE FRIDAY PROJECT, STEFAN
TOBLER AND OTHER STORIES, STEVE BOHME BOWKER PLUS ALISON FLOOD
THE GUARDIAN, BARBARA THIELE EPUBLI, BILL THOMPSON BBC, CHRIS
McVEIGH, CHRIS MEADE IF:BOOKUK, CLARE REDDINGTON iSHED, JOANNA
ELLIS THE LITERARY PLATFORM, JON SLACK AMPHORA ARTS, KRISTEN
HARRISON THE CURVED HOUSE, MICHAEL KOWALSKI BOOKFLOWER, PREENA
GADHER RIOT COMMUNICATIONS, REBECCA SWIFT TLC, SAM MISSINGHAM
THE BOOKSELLER, SANDEEP MAHAL READING AGENCY

Reporting to: Associate Director

Hours: 4 days per week, 10am – 6pm

Salary: £23,000 – £25,000 pro rata

Purpose
To increase media coverage of RSL programme and activities, traffic to the website and
membership take-up through the development and implementation of a comprehensive
print and digital publicity and marketing strategy.

Background
Founded by George IV in 1820, the RSL nurtures, celebrates and defends all that is best
in British literature, past and present. We organize talks, discussions and
readings; make awards to established and emerging writers; run a series of creative
writing masterclasses in collaboration with the Booker Prize Foundation; and campaign
in the interest of writers.
At the heart of the Society is its Fellowship, which has always encompassed the most
distinguished writers in the English language.
Although Fellows are elected to the Society, anyone can become a Member. Our events
are open to all, and recordings of them are available as audio files on this website.

Main Activities; Responsibilities

Publicity and Marketing – print:
· Maintain and develop media contact list
· Collate press clippings
· Manage press seats for events
· Produce press packs for RSL Fellows
· Respond to all media enquiries and log in media logs
· Write and circulate press materials
· Develop media relationships
· Input into overarching PR strategy
· Liaise with ad agency to place print ads
· Develop reciprocal cross-marketing links with other cultural organizations and
partners
· Design and distribute event and membership promotion material
· Oversee distribution of event programmes and membership brochures
· Develop new member recruitment strategy
· Manage RSL comments to the press on relevant issues such as libraries closures

Publicity and Marketing – digital:
· Develop digital strategy and upate social media networks
· Increase online presence of RSL and traffic to site
· Monitor and evaluate digital strategy via google analytics and other online tools
· Manage the RSL website
· Contribute to content strategy of the website
· Soliciting adverts for the magazine and website
· Carry out any other reasonable duties in line with the post which may be required

Person Specification

Essential:
· An arts degree or equivalent
· Basic web editing skills/knowledge of content management systems
· At least one year’s publicity or marketing experience in an arts related environment
· Ability to work independently and as a member of a team
· Excellent written and verbal communication skills
· Strong organizational skills and attention to detail
· Ability to prioritize tasks
· A keen interest in literature

Desirable:
· Experience of working with Indesign
· Experience of managing databases

Application process
Closing date for applications: Tuesday 4th June, 12pm
Date of 1st interview: Thursday 13th June

To apply, please send a CV and covering letter to Rachel Page, rachel@rslit.org

When YouTube launched their “embedding” feature in 2006, it changed the way we consume videos online. Simply put, it means that anyone can embed a YouTube video on their blog or personal website, even if they have next to no computer skills. Every YouTube video has a unique “embed code,” and when you copy and paste that code into your blog post, a YouTube video magically pops up at the other end. Now that the YouTube video has literally become embedded in internet culture, and similar embedding technologies or “widgets” have become the norm for the music and social media industries as well.

So why hasn’t the same happened in literature? Why is it that we aren’t seeing stories and novels embedded everywhere online?

We’ll come back to this question in a second.

When we founded ReadWave last year, our aim was simple: to give all writers the tools they need to build up a readership online. Last week, we launched a beta version of the ReadWave Widget, which we hope will one day become the literary equivalent of the YouTube video. Check out the beta version here.

So what are the advantages of using a widget? What’s wrong with just posting up the story directly on your website? The main advantage is that widgets create an open sharing system for your writing. Every day, millions of independent writers give away their creative writing for free on their personal websites with the aim of attracting as many readers as possible. Currently their fans can’t re-post those stories on their own blogs due to copyright law. Using a widget eliminates this copyright problem, enables anyone to post your story anywhere online without limits, and does so in a way that ensures the original writer is reaping the rewards.

Building a following

Widgets are also a great way to get followers. The ReadWave Widget is the first reading widget to allow readers to “follow” the writer directly from the widget. If a reader comes across your story online and enjoys it they can immediately connect with you and stay updated whenever you post a new story. This means that over time you’re building up a fanbase of loyal supporters. Social media integration is also an important part of developing your following. The ReadWave Widget is directly integrated with Facebook, so that your story can be automatically shared to the Facebook timelines of your fans.

The next generation of reading widgets

A few companies have already launched reading widgets, but so far none of them have had mainstream success. Part of the reason for this is that they rely on a traditional “book model”. In other words, the layout of the page is predetermined, so it feels like you’re flicking through a book online. The ReadWave Widget doesn’t have set pages in this way. It’s designed so that you can change the height or width of the widget and the text will automatically fit the space available. In short, pages are a legacy of traditional publishing and in the future we’re going to have to forget all about them.

The main reason why reading widgets haven’t had much success, however, is simply that they are not optimized for mobile. This is an area that we are hoping to look at in the near future, but as of yet there still isn’t a reading widget that works seamlessly on mobile like a YouTube video would.

Reading widgets still have a long way to go before they catch up with the film and music industries, but this doesn’t mean that they will never take off. As reading on tablets and mobile phones becomes increasingly popular, eventually reading widgets will emulate the slick user experience that video and music players currently offer.

Our own widget still has a long way to go and we hope to keep iterating on it over the next few months, but if you have any feedback, we would love to hear it. You can get in touch with me at:

rob [at] readwave.com.

www.readwave.com

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About ReadWave

ReadWave is a community of readers and writers who love to discover and share new stories from contemporary writers. Readers can access thousands of stories and read them for free on mobile or desktop. ReadWave’s free Story of the Week gives you a great short story from a new writer every week, delivered straight to your inbox. Writers can use ReadWave to build up a fan-base and market their stories online. ReadWave puts writers in touch with the readers who are right for them.

I grew up reading comics. For a period, when I was a child in the 80s, my family lived on a campsite. I got 20p a week pocket money. This was enough for a Beano or Dandy, which is fine if you understood the class references in Lord Snooty and the 1930s gangster jokes behind Babyface Finlayson, but the best strips – the most daring and relevant for the youth of the late 80s – were in the more expensive, ‘glossy’ publications: Whizzer and Chips, Buster, Nipper, Whoopee and of course Big Comic Monthly. Luckily I had access to a games room on the campsite which was stacked with wonderful (and mostly quite out-of-date) comics. They were my chief source of entertainment, and I eventually devoured them all. You are what you eat – and for me, reading fun, slightly subversive publications lead to making fun, slightly subversive publications. And here we are.

Back in November 2012, Matt Sheret wrote up his thoughts about digital comics for this site. ‘E-ink and comics don’t make particularly good bedfellows,’ he said, noting that the only two titles on the Costa shortlist that can’t be downloaded were the graphical ones. Sheret is concerned about the longevity of webcomics, and values the physicality of graphical publications: “At the moment, I couldn’t say with confidence that I’ll be able to reach for this year’s webcomics when I think of them in a few years’ time. Platform, resolution and URLs are still like so much dust in the wind.”

In a way, those stacks of comics in the games room encapsulated the time of their creation partly because they were destined to decay. They were part of the physical world: each one its own little ‘platform’, serving up dozens of triumphant worlds of kids with strange and amusing powers. Digital locations shift and change and might tear stories from their moorings in the process, but they contain at least the hope of longevity in abstraction, and the sense of displacement, and the reduction of comics to the content of their strips is the price we pay for that.

Comics are interesting because their cheapness and frequency suggests they are throwaway, but in reality they are always part of something much bigger. For example, the fact that physical comics are numbered reminds us that each instalment is just one of many – each one part of something that had a beginning, now has multiple units, and may one day have an end. So however bad they are, they are collectable, and always have within them the potential value of a collection.

The internet can’t quite parse the peculiar value of a physical collection. It understands what goes in – it gets ‘content’. But when it comes to gradual accumulations: the pursuit of parts of a world, the investment of time, the chase, digital can only offer shortcuts. Reading comics isn’t just about funny little vignettes and characters, it’s a sort of world-building game. It’s much more difficult to find things in the real world than on Google, and there is a value in difficulty. Perhaps the internet removes a large part of what it means – or meant – to enjoy comics.

Paper will always melancholically fade, simply because the actual world contains a sun. One can almost age an old comic by its colour. And like rings in a tree trunk, the lifespan of the comics in the games room was marked out by the handling of a sequence of children. The history of an old comic is the history of its readers, told in smudgy fingerprints that you could add your own contribution to when one found its way into your hands. By contrast, when comics are experienced on a device, perfectly and through glass, you can always feel like the first and last reader (though of course online communities mean sharing and swapping is still possible, in at least a virtual way.)

It’s easy to become misty eyed at this point, but let’s assume things are shifting and changing rather than declining. The internet comic world is a different beast to the paper stack. It’s not just a digitised version of the same thing, it’s something completely separate that demands different behaviour from its readers; different impulses, a different kind of world-making. You can’t buy tumblr webcomics with your pocket money and there’s no point trying to collect virtual things when the collecting has already been done for you by an algorithm somewhere. You can Google your favourite characters, but scans split them from their friends, leaving each strip decontextualised, totally alone. But there are other valuable and fun things that can happen with the collision of digital and graphical. As one thing passes, other things rise up in their place. We are currently witnessing a struggle, but there will be victors, just as there always are at the end of all the great comic strip battles.

I’m sure those old campsite comics have since been thrown away, but I hope that as we move away from the physical someone, somewhere has saved a few of those influential publications. In fact, despite everything, I hope they have been scanned and archived on a blog somewhere – at least giving hope of permanence. Because the sci-fi storylines of Faceache and X-Ray Specs, the infinitely creative world of Chalky, and the glamorously spiteful School Belle all contributed to what I am, and what I do, today – and I’m sure I’m not the only one.