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!

In this guest post Gavin Williams covers the basics of online fiction for beginners to the medium. Read on to find out more about him.

Hey, have you heard? Online fiction is the future!

Okay, maybe not. Online publishing is a non-traditional route for writers, and an emerging art form. Novelr’s creator, Eli, has asked me to share some of my experience as an online writer and reader with the Novelr community, in the interests of helping others who are hoping to start writing, and to facilitate the growth of the online book community.

Who am I? Glad you asked. My name is Gavin Williams, and I currently write “No Man an Island” and “The Surprising Life and Death of Diggory Franklin.” I read a lot of online fiction, and have a background in literature. A lifelong reader, I have a lot of interest in the future of the medium, and I think online writing will be a big part of that. It’s not the whole future, but it’s an intriguing facet.

Traditional publishing and online publishing are two very different mediums, even though their core material is the same: text. The written word. However, the way their text is presented, and the way their audiences interact with these two mediums, make them very different. We’re going to walk through those differences, in the interest of highlighting the strengths of online publishing, and educating writers in how to use these strengths to their benefit.

Part One: The Delivery

Traditional fiction comes to us in paperback and hardcover editions, on paper, usually in a bookstore. I love buying a new book (or getting an old favourite from a library) and then curling up in a chair and reading for hours. It’s a unique experience, as you get comfortable and let your imagination interact with the words on the page to create a world. It’s irreplaceable.

So, why should you read online then? Well, it’s got advantages too. A traditional writer might publish one or two books a year. You wait and wait for it to come, and that’s if you know about it ahead of time. Stephen King spent thirty years on the Dark Tower series, beginning it in college and ending it as a grandfather. J.K. Rowling started her seven book Harry Potter series in 1995, so it took about a decade to write seven novels.

But online fiction can be published every day, you don’t have to wait years or decades. It doles out its story one chapter at a time, but it’s immediate. This immediacy gives readers new material to look forward to, and can connect them deeply with a story while they wait for the next day’s instalment.

Charles Dickens wrote serial fiction, published in newspapers. It was greatly anticipated by the British audience, and connected people as they all eagerly awaited his continuing story. It gave them something to talk about and look forward to.

Online writers can create that same kind of excitement, by having a new chapter up for their waiting audience on a frequent basis. This suits online audiences quite well, as they will read episodes of their favourite stories during work breaks, or in-between checking their email. Short, intriguing chapters are ideal for the casual reader.

Part Two: Interaction

Traditional writers receive fan mail about their latest work. They might attend book signings or conferences. But the average reader never gets to speak to their favourite author.

With online fiction, interaction is built in. Chapters are usually set up to be commented on, and most writers answer their readers. An intimate communal experience develops, with audiences complimenting what they like, complaining about the things they hate, arguing over ideas, speculating on storylines, and then, actually hearing the writer’s two cents. Traditional publishing has nothing quite like it.

Some writers even set up forums for their audience, increasing their interaction and the development of community. Fan art, wikis and encyclopedias all become part of the experience.

Part Three: Structure

This might be the most important difference between online and traditional publishing, and one that writers might not be aware of right away. I certainly wasn’t, and learned it from experience. Now, hopefully that experience will benefit anyone thinking of starting a new story, and make your lives easier.

Originally, “No Man an Island” had a very busy opening scene, with eight separate characters competing for screen time. In a movie that almost wouldn’t matter, the camera would show them all and the story would move along. But for online readers, they couldn’t keep track of all the different names and find interest in the story. They weren’t sure who to care about, and where the story was going.

I had to sit down and analyze why this had happened. I knew plenty of traditional novels with big casts, and never had a problem. Indeed, they were often best-sellers, so audiences in general didn’t mind a big cast of characters. I listened to the comments (directly benefiting from Interaction) and tried again.

This time I wrote a chapter featuring only three characters, and highlighting one in particular. But again there were complaints. There was too much description and not enough action. I analyzed my writing again, and looked at other examples. The Lord of the Rings is one of the best-loved stories of all time, and is full of description. My chapter had less!

But LOTR is not online fiction. I learned something important about the difference between the two mediums. With a traditional book, I can sit for hours and finish it. Or, I can put it down and read more later. But, I know there is more, and that the story is complete. I can be patient with it.

But online writing is designed to be immediate. Audiences get frequent chapters, often weekly or daily. Those chapters need to capture their attention quickly, and give them a reason to come back tomorrow. Otherwise, the audience will go elsewhere. The story isn’t complete, and you can’t sit down with it for hours. Most online readers are taking a fifteen minute break from work, or are in-between checking emails. They need a reason NOW to enjoy your story, not in three pages or another chapter.

“The medium is the message.” With traditional, offline fiction, you know that in a few pages more will happen. So, the busy crowd scene is endurable (and possibly enjoyable) so long as it contributes to plot and the audience knows where it’s going. But online fiction happens one short chapter at a time, leaving people waiting. They want to know something important about your characters in chapter one, something that makes coming back tomorrow worthwhile. And a change in scene and time can look disruptive, because each day is formatted like the one before. In a chapter book, you have the transition of the blank page and a big bold caption: Chapter Two!

My book gets more interesting to online readers as they go on, because I learned to create deliberate snapshots of action — interesting in themselves, complete enough in themselves, leading the reader on to the next day with small cliff-hangers or unanswered questions. I applied that theory to the beginning, making an active scene focus on one or two characters with the others relegated to the background. I brought them in bit by bit in the next few chapters, expanding their roles while keeping the story moving. I relegated slower chapters into Bonus Story territory, to keep the pacing faster but to also give readers more depth to investigate when they had time. And feedback tells me it’s working.

I think the way to sell online fiction is to work with its unique features. Interactivity and speed of Delivery. But it’s as an alternative experience to offline fiction, not a competition with it. Readers read. I’m not giving up print novels for the internet, but I’m also not going to stop enjoying reading a new chapter every day and then sharing comments with the author directly. Both are satisfying.

But hopefully my experience will make your online story that much better. All the best, and keep reading!

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.

When I first started writing on the Internet I owed a lot to Poynter Institutes’s 50 Tools That Can Improve Your Writing guide. The whole list was sadly taken down from the web to be sold as a book so I do supposed it’s lost forever, unless someone can figure out how to view the cached versions of the site. But back to the topic at hand: The Long Sentence. One of the first lessons I learnt from the Poynter guide was how to get long sentences right - how not to write one, how they work, and how to keep meaning clear even if your sentence is a paragraph long. Let’s start by comparing two long sentences:

A career that is spent primarily in the back office for troubleshooting for the benefit of the department can be detrimental to your advancement.

And this gem by Dave Eggers,

I fly past the smaller shops, past the men drinking wine on the benches, past the old men playing dominoes, past the restaurants and the Arabs selling clothes and rugs and shoes, past the twins my age, Ahok and Awach Ugieth, two very kind and hardworking girls carrying bundles of kindling on their heads, Hello, Hello, we say, and finally I step into the darkness of my father’s stores, completely out of breath.

Now the second example is a lot longer than the first, and yet it just seems to work. Why does it work? Why does it flow logically and not collapse inward?

Simple. It branches to the right. Branching to the right is a very important part of a good long sentence, and it is very easy to pull off - all you have to do is to put the subject and the verb as early on in the sentence as possible. It acts as an anchor and prevents the sentence from drifting out of control.

In the second sentence ‘I’ and ‘fly’ are placed at the start, and the rest of the sentence branches out from it. It prevents the sentence from spiraling out of control. In the first sentence, however, a whole chuck of text is placed between ‘career’ (the subject) and ‘can be’ (the verb). Result? An unreadable sentence.

Keeping a strong subject and verb together is a simple rule that should be applied to all forms of sentences when you’re writing to be clear. It helps give shape and direction to your text, particularly if it’s placed at the very front. But putting the verb at the end isn’t a completely evil thing to do - writers do it all the time when they’re trying to create suspense, or when they’re building tension for the reader. This works if it’s done well. Just use it carefully.

There’s one last aspect to the long sentence that I must include before I close: you might not need to write long. I believe that there are three possible remedies when a writer frequently loses you with the long sentence:

1. The writer needs to learn how to write good long sentences
2. The writer should stick to short and snappy
3. The writer should stop squeezing in every imaginable detail into his/her prose

And the third is more often than not the problem. Know when to stop with your details. And fear not the long sentence.

I don’t think there’s anyway I can approach this other than by talking straight: Novelr ran out of bandwidth yesterday. As of writing there are 55 active visitors on the site, with 162 visitors within the past hour. Most of them are from stumbleupon and they’re nice folk, for the most part. They are, however, bringing this site to its knees.

Why am I writing this post? Simply put: I might have to upgrade the hosting plan Novelr runs on. I’m aiming for a $5 a month package, which provides the site with 10 gigs of bandwidth. At the moment I have 3 gigs per month, not much certainly, but I wasn’t expecting 3k spikes of traffic back when I first started. Novelr does not make enough with advertising to cover the bandwidth it uses up at the moment. At midnight last night I rushed online to purchase extra from my host, and at 10 this morning I was told that the extra 2 gigs I had bought were running out as well.

Helping Novelr Out

Now, before I get into the nitty-gritty of how you can help I’d like to explain to you where I’m coming from. Some of you may ask why I’m asking for donations, instead of paying for this with my own credit card. The truth is that I don’t have one - I’m still studying, and I’m not ‘earning’ anything other than knowledge. Novelr is passion, a hobby, or perhaps a part-time job if you’d like to call it as such, and I can’t pay more from my own pocket than what I did at the start of the year. Most of my time is spent studying, writing, and reading; a significant portion of my week is used to sharpen the ideas that I post here.

There are two things you can do to keep Novelr running. The first is to donate to Novelr by clicking the shiny donate button below. The minimum for a donation is $3, and if you have a little time, plus if you enjoy the stuff I’m writing here then please consider helping Novelr out. The donate button uses Paypal, so I hope it won’t be too much of a hassle.

The second thing you can do is to purchase advertising on Novelr. Novelr offers both Text Link Ads and image ads, and both cost $15 a month. There’s a prime spot in the sidebar for both.

I believe people reading this would be divided into three groups - the first wouldn’t mind tipping the site, the second would move on to other articles, and the third (which I believe is the majority) will think about it. And I’ve no problem with that, really. I thank all of you for reading what I’ve got to say, regardless of whether you comment, you donate, or you lurk around reading.

I’ve put a lot of energy into Novelr and I hope you enjoy it. Please help me keep it running.

I tried to get one of my little cousins to read Harry Potter last week. It was a great failure - he took The Philosopher’s Stone, flipped through it and handed it back to me.

“No pictures.” he said, “Not interesting.” And when I checked in on him later he was watching Spongebob on TV.

I had forgotten how kids are introduced to the world of reading - their first books are often filled with pictures, watercolour paintings and perhaps a few lines of text. Compare that to the stark novels of the adult world - words crammed into 500 or so thin pages, not a picture of the main character in sight. I remember reading my first ‘novel without pictures’ (gasp!): it was an Enid Blyton book, about a group of kid detectives. It left me feeling like a real grownup: goodbye to picture books now, the whole vista of bookland was open - finally - to me.

Pictureless Books vs The Internet

Here’s the truth, plain and simple: novels are remarkably unvisual things. Apart from the cover, the book itself is the pure domain of language. We don’t care if the page is white or yellow, crinkled or frayed: all that matters to us are the words written on it. And perhaps the font the novel is set in, though even that doesn’t matter much (my old copy of Pride and Prejudice is falling apart by the seams, and the typography is horrible - but I still enjoyed it).

When we come to the Internet, however, the rules of the game change. They shift so much that publishing a book and publishing online are two completely different things. No longer is reader perception of a story shaped by typography alone - we have many other factors that decide whether a reader is going to read and enjoy your work: navigation, graphics, overall ‘feel’ of the site. I have touched on readability when it comes to presenting your work online, and while that’s important there’s another major part of publishing on the web that I haven’t talked about yet - something I call The Picture Book Effect.

Put simply, The Picture Book Effect is this:

Credibility and perception of online content is shaped by the design/format in which that content is presented.

In simple English: your readers judge your work by the visual cues you have on your site.

The Internet Is A Picture Book

Oh yes, it is. Let me prove it to you. I am going to give you two opinion pieces to compare. The first one is Why There Aren’t More Googles, at paulgraham.com. The second one is entitled Terrorism and the Olympics by Nicholas Kristof, over at the New York Times. I want you to visit these two websites and read at least three paragraphs of both articles. Done? Done? Good.

Here’s my question: which one seems more credible?

Now many of you would probably say the New York Times, which doesn’t exactly prove my point, but we’ll come to that in a bit. The reasons for choosing the NYT is two-fold: first of all it is a major established newspaper, so it has to be more credible than a simple website run by some geezer you’ve probably never even heard of. The second reason is the one I’m getting at: the design of the NYT site oodles credibility, especially if you compare it to the paulgraham one.

Now I can’t really argue with the first reason, but I’ll give you something to consider. Imagine for a moment that the NYT site had Paul Graham’s site design, and paulgraham.com had the NYT layout. Which now would be more credible in your eyes, in the time that it takes you to read 3 paragraphs? It would be the one with the NYT site design, wouldn’t it?

Visual Cues Tell Readers A Story

When I trawl the web reading blog fiction I notice quite a few things about site presentation, and sometimes I wonder if this is what is preventing online fiction from gaining a larger following amongst the web’s users. Readability is just one thing - in fact it is one of the easiest to fix. Most people know that black on white is good, or white on black … and if they don’t their readers (or lack thereof) will alert them to changing the colour scheme of their blook. Most blog fiction I read also has good typography - big, visible fonts that encourage reading by being easy on the eye.

What I do have a problem with, however, is the lack of visual identity a majority of these blooks possess. A prime example is The Legion Of Nothing, a work I love and one that I’ve been following religiously over the past few weeks. It’s got great writing, brilliant characters and a superhero plot going for it … but I find the site design a bit jarring. In fact, I had no idea it was a superhero story when I first started reading. Here’s why: the visuals on the site are that of an old world map, something you’ll expect for a fantasy novel, perhaps. Certainly not a modern, high-school, contemporary one.(I was expecting something like this, actually.)

Jim Zoetewey, Legion’s writer, is a web developer by day (and a caped author by night), so I’m pretty confident that he’ll do a good redesign when he’s finally free. But let’s stop talking about jarring examples and take a look at some blooks who are doing it right.

Mortal Ghost and Scary Mary

Both aren’t standouts when it comes to design, but they do one thing right: they get the mood of the story across. Mortal Ghost has fire at the top of every page, and anybody who’s read it will know that a fire is a major plot point in the story. An ominous one, in fact - the synopsis of the blook warns you early on: “And then there are Jesse’s own memories of a fire … ”

Scary Mary, on the other hand, has one of the most memorable blook headers I’ve ever seen. The font used isn’t very nice, I’ll admit that, but the eyes stay with you long after you’ve left the site, and it is iconic. I associate those eyes with Mary whenever I see them (Mary, the main character, can hear ghosts) - and I can safely say Windvein has done a great job creating a strong visual identity for her blook.

Guidelines To Follow

The problem with working The Picture Book Effect is that it isn’t as clear cut as improving readability. Creating and enforcing a strong visual identity for your blook depends on your story and on the way you write, and there are designers who spend a few years learning how to design good site identities.

Here are some general observations: white backgrounds are more credible than black, though Mortal Ghost makes good use of black to paint an ethos of coming danger. This atmosphere makes Lee’s writing that much stronger, and it also helps to accentuate the tension in her story.

A single image - often placed in a prominent place - that conveys what kind of story you’re doing helps a lot in creating the mood of the site. You can’t expect to engage a reader with a zombie story if your site has pink flowers all over it, in much the same way you can’t hope to scare a child when you’re dressed as the Easter Bunny.

Visual identities are needed to produce strong reader experiences on the Internet, and this applies not only to blog fiction - it applies to every type of website: blog or forum - this one included. So the next time you surf the web keep an eye out for how designers dress up a site to make it feel fun, to make it feel corporate, or perhaps to make it feel downright boring. And when you do, come back here and tell me about it. I’d love to see those sites too.

“Hello Marcus!”

“Madeleine, dahling!”

“Jack, this is Marcus Sphincter. He’s one of the writers short-listed for the prize this year.”

“Congratulations,” said Jack, extending a hand.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you - most kind.”

“So what’s the title of this book you’ve written?”

“The terms ‘title’, ‘book’ and ‘written’ are so passe and 2004,” announced Marcus airily, using his fingers in that annoying way that people do to signify quotation marks.

“It is 2004,” pointed out Jack.

“So early 2004,” said Marcus, hastily correcting himself. “Anyone can ‘write’ a ‘book.’ To raise my chosen art form to a higher plane, I prefer to use the terms ‘designation,’ ‘codex’ and ‘composed.’”

“Okay,” said Jack, “what’s the appellative of the tome you’ve created?”

“The what?”

“Hadn’t you heard?” asked Jack, hiding a smile and using that annoying finger-quotes thing back at Marcus, “‘Codex,’ ‘composed’ and ‘designation’ are out already; they were just too, too early evening.”

“They were?” asked Marcus, genuinely concerned.

“Your book, Marcus,” interrupted Madeleine as she playfully pinched Jack on the bum. “What’s it called?”

“I call it … The Realms of The Leviathan.”

“Ah,” murmured Jack, “what’s it about, a herd of elephants?”

Marcus laughed loudly, Jack joined him, and so did Madeleine, who wasn’t going to be a bad sport.

“Elephants? Good Lord, no!” replied Marcus, adjusting his glasses. “The leviathan in my novel is the colossal and destructive force of human ambition and its ability to destroy those it loves in its futile quest for fulfillment. Seen through the eyes of a woman in London in the mid-eighties as her husband loses control of himself to own and want more, it asks the fundamental question ‘to be or to want’ - something I consider to be the ‘materialistic’ Hamlet’s soliloquy. Ha-ha-ha.”

“Ha-ha-ha” said Jack, but thinking, Clot. “Is it selling?”

“Good Lord, no!” replied Marcus in a shocked tone. “Selling more than even a few copies would render it … popular. And that would by a death knell for any serious auteur, n’est-ce pas? Ha-ha-ha.”

“Ha-ha-ha,” said Jack, but thinking, Even bigger clot.

Jasper Fforde is pure genius. God I love him.

Not so long ago I wrote Blooking Needs A Community, which served as a clarion call to the blooking world to start getting our act together. Now, nearly one year down the road, I’m happy to say that we have.

I only realized this about two weeks ago, after escaping from total boredom studying to start browsing through the list of blooks I had earmarked as ‘must read’. I caught up with The Legion of Nothing and The Mutants, and then I returned to Pages Unbound for an inkling on how the blooking world was getting along.

You have to understand where I was coming from. I had spent the past 6 months or so scribbling articles on paper and then jumping online for 30 minute intervals to publish them. I hadn’t had much time to do much else, much to my chagrin, and this little trip around the blog fiction sphere was eye opening.

It was great. The commenting sections of both blooks had more or less the same people hanging around them, as did their profile pages on Pages Unbound. I saw an even better indicator of a community in PU: a living, breathing forum. It isn’t very user friendly (I have to try to get Lexy to change the software) but it is a start.

Where To From Here?

This spirit of commenting on the various blogs of the blooking world bodes well for us. It makes it easier for writers to learn from each other, plus it also gives readers ample opportunity to site hop. I’ve no doubt that this (along with Pages Unbound) will keep our community alive and kicking for a long time to come.

So where do we go from here? A community gives us several advantages and allows us to do a few things that we could not do before. Exciting stuff, isn’t it? Here’s a look at some areas I feel we still have much to do:

1. Presentation

I’ll be talking a lot about design soon, about how and why it is important on the Internet, particularly if we’re writing and we want to be read. Yes, I have mentioned this before - readibility and fonts and the like, but there are a few ideas I’ve been working on that I’d like to share. Chief amongst this is the concept of a visual identity and how it makes writing that much stronger.

2. Reaching Out

I did a post not too long ago about how important it is to reach beyond our target audience - to convert non blook readers, if you will. I realized I may sound a little like an evangelist (oh hear The Lord now, ye flock of unfaithful sheep) but it’s something that must be done if blooking’s going to advance. Advertising is one option we have, but there are many more that we can explore.

3. Expansion

Of the community. We’ve got a whole bunch of writers working together now, making friends, interacting and talking with each other. This can be strengthened, grown and expanded upon. It’ll be interesting to include readers into the mix - what writer doesn’t like a legion of adoring fans after them?

Initiatives

I have a few projects I’ll be bringing out in the future with Novelr’s help. The advertising from Novelr isn’t much; it’s actually just enough to cover site costs at the moment. Soon, however, it will be sufficient to fund these projects. Closest to release is an experiment on story presentation I’ve been working on for two years now. I finished the first draft of the manuscript two days ago, and it’ll take about four to six more months for editing and design to be completed. Then the feedback process begins, and the elements that work will be isolated and analyzed.

The second initiative I would like to start next year is an editorial-based quality filter. In simple English: a site that highlights and helps build up the best blooks. The eventual aim is of course to create a solid alternative to the traditional publishing world - ambitious, no doubt, and liable to fail. But let me worry about that. At the moment I’m trying to find designers, programmers and writers interested enough to help out. There’s not going to be any monetary reimbursement in the beginning, so I’m relying on friends, mostly. Worst case scenario? I learn the skills I need to launch the site and do it myself.

(The worst case scenario’s actually the most likely thing that’s going to happen. Oh well. Fun times ahead.)

Wrapping Up …

We’ve got a great start already, thanks to Alexandra Erin’s vision and Pages Unbound. Yes, we’ve got a lot more to do, and there’s plenty of people who don’t know anything about blooks. But a community is a brilliant first step, and it’s also a very fulfilling one - friendship and interaction in the end make writing a lot more worthwhile than if we were sitting at home, alone.

PS: I’ve still got a lot more blooks in my Must Read list to catch up with, No Man An Island, Mirrorfall and Scary Mary chief among them. Fun, fun times ahead.

Note: Picture from Deviantart.

In early 2007 I closed down the last blook I was working on. Deleted it, made it private, archived the posts. Ironically enough it was the same blook that had driven me to start writing Novelr, but it was a failure. I never had enough time to update it consistently, and I lost readers as easily as I gained them. When I closed Janus I had zero. They had all lost faith in me.

Reader Expectations

We all know that posting consistency is the hallmark of a good blog. Blogs that update sporadically are bad ones, and they can never fulfill their potential as far as this trend continues. Novelr is a bad blog. I’m not saying this in jest - it’s the truth and there’s not much I can do about it as long as the academic year continues. I decided long ago that it was better to publish erratic but quality content rather than yell at my schedule and let Novelr die. It’s a horrible choice to make, and Novelr is not growing as fast as it used to. But life’s like that.

Novelr is, however, a blog, not a blook. Reader expectations of blogs are nothing compared to the expectation generated from a blog novel. I followed a few blooks before my academic year started, and I’m familiar with the strong feeling of murder whenever an author misses a scheduled episode (and doesn’t explain). Blook writers know it too - a lot of them apologize when reality pushes back an update, and readers are usually forgiving enough to tolerate that. But two or three times - a month - and the readership dips for the said writer. And once you prove you’re consistently inconsistent? Well. You’ve got suicide on your hands.

So the question you should ask yourself before you start writing a blook is this: do I have the time to handle my obligation to my readers? Blooks are divided many ways: some are split into arcs, others into volumes. The trick is to consistently plow through one arc - where the story’s somewhat completed - and then you can allow yourself a rest. If you can do that, carry on. If you can’t, don’t bother. It’ll save you and your fans a lot of heartache in the process.

But I Still Want To Blook!

Yeah, well, so do I. And there is a way around time constraints, though it’ll be a little tricky.

Your first option is to complete the story, edit it, and type it out in Wordpress. Then what you’ve got to do is to future post them one by one - set it so that it automatically publishes at consistent time intervals - every Thursday, for instance. Wordpress allows this through a feature called timestamps, which basically allows you to set the date and time you want a post to be published. Nifty feature, but it’s a lot of work.

The second option you do have is to post up a complete story in its entirety. I have opted for this route, and there are several things it allows you to do. The first is that you can edit your manuscript until you’re sick of the whole thing. The second is that you have plenty of time to tweak it presentation-wise, and the feedback process before you publish is tremendous - you can watch other people using the site and make note of what works and what doesn’t. I am in fact using this method as an experiment on blook design, but I’ll talk about that on a later date.

There are a few drawbacks of opting for the completed story route: the first of which it’s not as fun. Writing a story organically - sometimes with reader feedback and always with support - is a wonderful experience. It’s also quite attractive to the reader - the tension as you wait for the next update and the interaction with the author as the story folds out is incomparable to any other medium, save probably the Dickens newspaper serials.

But time constraints are time constraints, and I have to make do with what I have. My manuscript’s nearly finished now - it’s only a matter of time for editing and design to be over and done with, before I can release it to the wild. Am I envious of other blook authors who can create ongoing works? Yes, definitely. But till I have enough time I can only watch from the sidelines, read ongoing masterpieces, and maybe, just maybe, murder an author who’s forgotten to update.

Note: illustration taken from Vladstudios.

I have suggested before that the best way to improve blooking (or blog fiction) would be to implement some form of editorial process on the web. This is a problem for a few reasons: 1, some people come online to escape the constraining editorial process in the traditional print world; 2, an editorial process (or a way to separate the chaff from the wheat) sounds just like something a traditional printing house would do. It is, however, an easy way of introducing first time readers to good online fiction. Editors who know what they’re doing and a website that highlights the best blog fiction out there can go a long way in solving the drought of quality blooks we have at the moment.

Now the main accusation thrown at me when I suggest this form of filtering is that of elitism. Editors?! You kidding me? And on and on. And I’m sick of this, really. Elitism on the Internet as applied to content is quite different from elitism as a political concept - it is, in fact the thing that has kept culture growing for a very long time.

Elitism As A Form Of Quality Control

Before the Internet the only way to get publish was through a traditional publishing house. These houses were very serious about editing (and they still are, thank God), and the books they published met certain minimum standards of quality we have come to be used to - proper vocab, proper spelling, (mostly) polished stories. At this point some of my friends have argued that there are crappy books published by traditional publishing houses as well, but I have to point out here that these crappy books are far less than if Penguin published every Tom, Dick and Harry without going over their books with an editor and a smoking gun.

There is a problem with this model, of course. Traditional publishing houses run very tight businesses, and they often do not publish good books that they think are not financially viable. I wonder how many publishing houses would publish Das Kapital for the first time in the 21st century - I don’t think any would considering how nonfiction today is published based on the initial proposition of an idea to a publisher before the book is written.

But that is an extreme. For the most part the publishing industry and its minimum level of entry has pushed writers and poets all over the world to constantly evolve and bring something good, or new, to the table. The editorial process may be elitist, true, but when applied to culture it is a very effective tool for solving the signal to noise ratio.

Populism As A Form Of Quality Control

When we look at the Internet we will find another effective tool I will call - for the sake of argument - populist. Google makes use of links as ‘votes’ to see if a topic is relevant to your keywords, and Digg makes use of public voting to decide if a story is appealing or not. This model works because it harnesses collective intelligence to make sense of a sea of information - and it does this quickly and easily. Editors don’t have to spend entire lifetimes sifting through the millions of news stories that break every day on the Internet - they just have to throw this decision to the readers. And the readers will choose what they want to read.

But populism fails when it comes to choosing important stories. The crowd often cannot tell if an article is groundbreaking new thought - simply because it is powered by the lowest common denominator. We don’t have to look far for such an example. Digg’s and Reddit’s stories are almost entirely selected based on broad appeal - and we all know that broad appeal alone does not determine a good article. There is an example in The Cult Of The Amateur where Andrew Keen points out the following:

As I write, there is a brutal war going on in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah. But the Reddit user wouldn’t know this because there is nothing about Israel, Lebanon or Hezbollah on the site’s top twenty ‘hot’ stories. Instead, subscribers can read about a flat-chested English actress, the walking habits of elephants, a spoof of the latest Mac commercial and underground tunnels in Japan. Reddit is a mirror of our most banal interests.

Filters May Be Elitist … But They Work

The two models I have outlined above already exist on the Internet. 9rules, the blogging network, uses the elitism model (3 ‘editors’, to be exact) to select good, quality blogs. And it got famous quickly because it provided readers with a one-stop location to find good content to read.^[1]

Now, I’m not saying one model is better than the other. I have already shown you the failings of both, and how they can miserably backfire as a way to filter content. But when it comes to online fiction I believe there is a distinct need to create a place where editors have a final say in what is good and what is bad. Broad appeal matters, sure, but to eventually get to a place where we can challenge offline, real page fiction we have to set an ever escalating bar of quality for ourselves. This is one idea I’ll be frequently coming back to, but actual implementation will have to be put on backburner for a bit.

Before I close I’d like to point out that ‘elitist’ is often used as a generic insult, not because of its meaning but out of general animosity towards a subject. People call the editorial process elitist out of spite, because many can’t get in. But what author hasn’t secretly dreamed of landing a book deal? I certainly have, despite being a proponent of the Internet as a publishing medium. We shouldn’t let all we hate about traditional publishing houses mar what could be a good alternative to the broad appeal camp.

Because, I don’t know, the Internet might end up nicer for it.

Update: I realize just how vague my proposition is, so here’s my explanation from the comments below, copied and pasted for clarity:

Let’s say we have a website that accepts the ‘very best of blooks’. These blooks are picked by a bunch of editors, who not only do the preliminary selection but also follow up with quality control. Then we built this website to such a stage where people respect and value the short stories and the blooks which are showcased there. People want to get in. In order to get in, they have to meet a minimum standard of quality.

A good bunch of published authors today (in the traditional book world) learned their craft in little magazines, where an editorial process (and a ton of rejection letters) spurred them to continually improve. We don’t have this on the web - anyone can put up stuff, and since we don’t have to be good to be published there isn’t as much motivation to get better as before.

^1.Disclaimer: Novelr is a member of the 9rules blogging network.

9rules is a blogging network that aggregates the best content from the blogosphere. It is many things to many people, but at its core 9rules has always been about quality. Finally seeing the 9rules badge on this site is - I must admit - a very fulfilling experience.

What Does This Mean For The Readers?

Becoming a part of 9rules is a milestone for any blog, and I promise you that Novelr will maintain the same level of quality that got it into the network in the first place. Updates will be slow in coming for the next few months, but whatever posts that make it through will be well thought-out, highly polished affairs. Novelr is and always will be for the promotion of Internet fiction. We’ve still got a long way to go on that one.

Being part of 9rules will not affect the way you interact with me or the site. The blog functions as before, only now Novelr’s content is aggregated on the 9rules homepage and writing community, and you get to see that cute little badge in the header of this blog. Writing, reading and commenting is business as usual.

If you’re new to Novelr: welcome. I hope you enjoy the thoughts I’ve collected over the past year, and I look forward to meeting you in the comments section of this site. Feel free to argue, to question, or to hit me over the head with an umbrella - you’ll find me mostly a reasonable person to clash with.

Special Thanks …

To the triad - the people behind 9rules: thank you for accepting Novelr. It’s been great knowing you, laughing with you, arguing with you.

To my friends in Chawlk: thanks for all the encouragement you’ve given me over the past year. I am particularly in debt to Norbert ‘Gnorb’ Cartagena - not too long ago he took the time to go over one of my short stories, and edited the whole thing almost word for word. That herculean effort is still fresh in my mind, and it’s a sterling example of the kind of passion and the kind of people you find in 9rules.

Most importantly, however - to the readers who have followed Novelr: thank you. You’re the guys who matter the most in the end - the blookers, the writers, the thinkers. We have much Internet storytelling to do, and only so much time to do it.

Onward.

I was reminded today that good writing isn’t everything. It was four in the afternoon and I was stuck at a turning point in one of my manuscripts, and it hit me that everything I’d done to improve my writing did not matter then and there. I could have just as easily messed up the entire project by tackling the scene the wrong way, even if I did write it beautifully. This wasn’t a matter of description or style or clarity of thought - it was something more. It was story.

Story is that extra something we writers don’t really understand. Take a stroll through any bookstore today and you’ll find writing titles jumping out at you: The Elements of Style, for instance. Or On Writing, that highly popular craft manual by Mr King. But pause for awhile and note that Mr King didn’t write a book called On Storytelling. Nobody has, in fact - I’m still looking for solid works on storytelling alone.

What I’ve realized is that writing is actually the easy part of the craft. The other part - the harder one - is the ability to create a mind-blowing good tale. And that isn’t something that can be captured in a book - I’ve yet to see manuals entitled How To Write Like Steinbeck, or Where To Find Story Ideas. Things like that fall from the sky, or they don’t fall at all.

I read an article last year by a writer turned editor complaining about how hard it was to filter short stories for a collection. She quickly identified two kinds of submissions - the first was by a good storyteller with bad writing (which she could work on), and the other was by the writer who could write beautifully but had nothing to say. The first needed a lot of polishing; the second, however, was impossible to work with. These 2nd category stories were beautiful on the outside, but in the end the aforementioned editor found them to be empty. Rotten apples. Hollow cores.

So I took a break from my manuscript today. I didn’t know how to go on from that turning point - the possibilities were just endless. But that’s not the point here. The point here is that I’m thankful for the storytelling department. For my storytelling department. There are people out there who can’t pull a good yarn even if it was staring them in the face, good writing or not. And I know my writing’s not perfect, but I’m working on it.

I’m just thankful I’ve got something to say.

So far I’ve been very, very impressed with the way Penguin has been doing We Tell Stories. I thought week one was a nifty idea, presenting a narrative on Google Maps, but it wasn’t something mind-blowing because I’d seen it done on a blog before. My lack of faith was exposed two weeks later, with week 2 and week 3’s stories. Both blew me away. Here’s a look at the various forms We Tell Stories has been done in the past few weeks.

Week One’s story is a thriller built around Google Maps. This presentation style allows Charles Cumming the freedom to dispense with lengthy setting description and focus on the action. It works. I found myself impatiently watching the main character moving from point to point on the map, and the snappy, sparse narrative kept me glued to my seat. There’s a plus side to all of this: Google Maps has provided Cumming with a visual element and an easy level of realism not available to normal books. I could see how the main character escapes from the police in a dinghy, I could tell how far away the locations were from each other, I could even follow the character on a (very lengthy) train ride around London. Promising stuff, this. Technology used: Ajax, the Google Maps API, lots and lots of javascript.Week Two is done in a medium familiar to Novelr: blogs and twitter. Nothing particularly revolutionary going on here - both the blogs had cookie cutter templates and weren’t very enjoyable to read, and the story wasn’t good. But the interesting thing about these two blogs were the way the characters interacted with the readers. Some twitter posts were made in response to reader questions, and comments were answered in the blogs, in character. Since Lisa (the daughter) went missing in the middle of the story we had a few readers helpfully pointing out her blog and giving suggestions as to where to look for her … which they responded to. Technology used: Twitter, Wordpress and Livejournal.Week Three is where I started really taking notice. I was confused when prompted by the story to input a name for the Princess, so I entered the first name that came to mind (Samantha). Then I realized the story was interactive. It reminded me of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels I read as a kid - though it’s weird that they wanted to do one here in the project. The story was lightweight, fluffy (none of the choices you make have much effect on the way things play out), but it was all very enjoyable. I had a smile on my face as I reached the options for the ending - all of them unhappy ones. Technology used: CSS for the styling, javascript, some backend code which I suspect to be CGI.Week Four is the latest story so far, and its presentation isn’t as interesting as to how it’s being written. Live, for the next four days, Nicci French will be writing the story 6:30 pm London time (1:30 am for me, or so the site says) and you’ll get to follow them as they work their craft. It’s too early in the morning for me to tune in and see how it’s being implemented (does the page update itself Ajax-style when the authors post?) so I can’t really comment on the technology behind it. And it’s a love story. Don’t we all just worship love stories?

Last week James Smythe wrote a hilarious post retelling how one of the readers of We Tell Stories contacted him, thinking he was a fictional character connected to the secret, 7th story. It’s worth noting that the ARG (Alternative Reality Game) part of We Tell Stories is alive and kicking behind the scenes - I’ve found a forum full of dedicated people hunting down Alice (yes, that Alice of Looking Glass and Wonderland fame) on the Internet. They’ve progressed quite a bit - so far the clues have led them to a statue, a blog and a list of train station names. I’m very happy following their hunt from the comforts of my armchair.

PS: on the We Tell Stories front page, click the rabbit for a little trip down the rabbit hole.

Today I woke up to yet another article demonizing a blog turned blook. And the problems mentioned were exactly the same as a hundred other similar reviews I had read in the past: it was sloppy, it was put together slap dash without a thought on how it would read on the page, blog popularity did not translate to book sales. Etcetera etcetera etcetera.

And it’s funny, you know, how blog popularity and stunning wit in a blog just doesn’t seem to jump onto the printed page. Because it should. Because writing a post is as linear as writing a chapter in a book, and there shouldn’t be any problem in converting the things you love in the blog from one form to another. And it’s just frustrating for me to see such great writing, such amazing blogs at the forefront of blooking, stumble the leap to the static page. And get a bad review in the process.

The two links I posted above refers to The Order Of The Phoenix Park and Petite Anglaise (though the 2nd link also talks a little about Julie And Julia) respectively. The first had newspapers calling it “resolutely clunky and self-indulgent’ and having ’sloppy’ structure. The 2nd had this particular comment going for it (I’ve read similar ones on Julie and Juila the year before, so this review is by no means alone):

I remember being disappointed with Julia Powell’s Julie and Julia that the book wasn’t a series of her best blog posts. I didn’t ever follow her experiment (to cook her way through Julia Child’s massive tome Mastering the Art of French Cooking) online, and I expected the book to be a series of vignettes charting her progress. Instead, it was fluffed out with less fascinating personal detail. The same is true with Petite Anglaise: the blog itself was gripping in a reality TV, slice-of-life, car crash kind of way, and the book itself isn’t. It’s fluffy, and like candy floss, doesn’t satisfy.

My theory for this is that personal bloggers don’t approach writing the same way writers do. Writers set out on a project to tell a story; personal bloggers just want to let steam off after their boss yells at them or their cat pees on the couch. And the good ones do it so well, so brilliantly, so witty, so true, that we readers can’t help but fall in love with them.

But the problem with all this is that when Penguin comes knocking on their doorsteps any thought to the formula that has so far worked for them goes flying out the window. They start to approach the project like a writer writing an actual manuscript, but not exactly, because they’re sourcing material from their online rantings. So what you get a mix of both: blog writing and book writing, and it doesn’t appeal to either groups that will buy these blooks: the blog readers (who follow these bloggers) and the book readers (who browse a bookstore and don’t care if it’s a blook; they just want something good to read).

In the end readers aren’t going to read you because you’re hip and in the news all the time. They’re going to read your book if your writing is good and your story is solid, regardless of where the source material is from. So please, blook writers - you Petite Anglaises and Julias out there. Write your book as a writer would (from scratch) or capture your blog posts without tinkering around with the format that has worked for you so well.

Just don’t mash the two approaches together. Put out a book that’s worth reading, that’s worth falling in love with - because it’s the ideas and stories in between the covers that matter the most, not the fancy technological shwag that got it there in the first place.

And that’ll do all of us in the blook medium a big favour. We won’t have to deal with any more negative preconceptions about jumping to the static page. And that - if it happens - can only be a good thing.