Archives for August 2009

Flash Fiction Defined

August 31, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

I spent some time today trying to bring my growing awareness of internet fiction into some kind of focus, and while doing so the phrase ‘flash fiction’ kept nagging at me like a forgotten errand. Later, in a moment of clarity I realized that I didn’t really have the slightest idea what flash fiction was, beyond being very short.

So I saddled up ol’ Metaphor (that’s the imaginary horse I just invented for this post) and rode over to the Wikipedia Saloon, (apparently this post is going to have a Western theme), and asked around. And here’s what I found:

Flash fiction is fiction of extreme brevity. There is no widely accepted definition of the length of the category.

So there you go: nobody knows what flash fiction is.

Yee hah!

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Authonomy

August 31, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

Imagine for a moment that you’re a publishing house. You’ve been putting book deals together for decades the old-fashioned way. You have agents you know and trust doing the heavy sifting for you, plowing through countless query letters from eager new authors. You have in-house editors working with a stable of developing and established authors, packaging titles for developing and established niches, and leveraging copyrighted content across developing and established mediums. You know, down to the last penny, what it costs to print a page, change a typo, or put a book on a shelf in any bookstore in the world.

And then the internet comes to town.

What do you do? Well, after a good bit of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, you would probably come up with something very much like Authonomy. (If you haven’t seen the site before, click over and take a look. You’ll ‘get it’ in about five seconds.) You might not do it as well as HarperCollins has done it, but you’d recognize the obviousness of the solution, and you would seize the opportunity.

By establishing an online community under the auspices of HarperCollins, and by promising members of that community a chance to get their work in front of editors at HarperCollins, Authonomy solves two persistent publishing problems in one fell swoop. First, it offloads part of the arduous and rarely-rewarding process of sifting through submissions — which is currently undertaken by agents around the world — onto an even less-demanding community. Second, it gives HarperCollins the appearance of being forward-looking, tech-savvy and internet-aware, when in fact they are simply replacing one system of mining writers with another system of mining writers. [ Read more ]

Why the Book Biz Should Be Scared

August 28, 2009 By Mark 10 Comments

Next time you’re about to school someone on how the music industry is or is not like the book business, stop what you’re doing and locate a copy of Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age, by Steven Knopper.

While you should ideally read the whole thing, at the very least you should flip to Chapter 7 and read it in full before you wax intellectual about all things digitally downloaded. Here’s a key graph:

“These days, [Aimee] Mann uses recording technology that is cheaper than ever and makes licensing deals with major distribution companies simply to put her records in stores and post them on iTunes. She gets to keep control of her master recordings and makes every creative decision about what does and doesn’t go on the record. ‘A lot of artists don’t realize how much money they could make by retaining ownership and licensing directly,’ her manager, Michael Hausman, told ex-Talking Head David Byrne in Wired.”

Why is that a big deal? Because it makes clear that recording artists no longer need partners in order to produce music or deliver it to an audience. Between advances on the recording side, which have made CD-quality audio cheap to produce, and developments on the digital/internet side, which have made CD-quality audio cheap to distribute, there is no longer any obstacle between Aimee Mann and her audience. [ Read more ]

Why Communities Matter: Filtering

August 28, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

In the great rollicking free-for-all known as the internet, there’s clearly no shortage of content. Everybody’s got a blog or a web site, or a Twitter account piped through a Facebook app which spits out 140-character poems that are converted into a real-time mash-up with whatever’s playing on your local radio station, all courtesy some kid’s home-grown basement server, which is running off juice he’s stealing from the neighbors.

If we had enough hours in the day we could look at it all and laugh. But we don’t have enough hours in the day. In fact, we don’t have enough time to read this blog post, let alone try to figure out what it means. So we rely on others to do the sifting and filtering for us. What’s the best movie this week? What’s the hot new band? Which video clip will make us laugh? Cry? Hurl? [ Read more ]

Why Communities Matter: Support

August 27, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

There are a lot of people writing online fiction these days. And why not? Until recently anyone with the desire to write fiction had to suffer with a drawer full of unread manuscripts or a social network dotted with unreliable (if not patronizing) readers. Today you can easily find a writing community that shares your specific interests, and if you’re not a total jerk you can usually find someone who will give you honest and useful feedback.

But online communities — at least some of them — also provide another important resource for fiction writers, and that’s emotional support. Whatever you want to say about any given writer’s skill level, or the average skill level of all fiction writing on the web, the fact is that putting your work out there for others to see is a risk — and it should be a risk.

Unless you’re a pure artist — meaning someone who is creating without concern for audience reaction (which is doubly hard to do when you’re using the written word, which was literally invented for communication) — you intend the people who read your fiction to have a particular experience. And at some point you want to know if you created that experience or not. So you need other people to validate your work when it’s finished, and that certainly involves risk. [ Read more ]

Why Communities Matter: Education

August 27, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

I almost pity people who are growing up now with no knowledge of what life was like before the internet came along. What still seems a miracle to me — on days when I’m not getting bombarded with spam, or some punk isn’t trying to destroy my computer with malware — is a boring norm to more people every year.

True story: a couple of decades ago I asked my grandmother, who was born in 1910, to pick the most amazing technological advance of her life. I figured maybe it was the airplane, or even the computer, although computers were just getting out of the gate at that time. She thought about it a while, then said, “Electricity.”

What she meant was that until sometime in the 1930’s, electricity was not a given in daily life for a lot of people (and for some it would take much longer). When electricity finally got wired up to your house, and you weren’t using lanterns to see after dark, it changed everything. [ Read more ]

Saturation Day

August 26, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

One minute you’re skulking around a forgotten alleyway, looking at sights (and sites) that only a few intrepid explorers have ever seen. The next minute someone runs up laughing, slaps a satellite photo in your hand, points to the teeny-tiny, itty-bitty you standing in an infinite grid of similar forgotten alleyways — all of which have already been clearly marked by and populated with people just like you.

That’s Saturation Day. The day the exploring catches up with reality. The day the ground drops out from beneath your feet. The day you realize that the thing you’re trying to take in is bigger than you thought it could be. The day you begin to sense the forest for the trees.

(It’s also the day you’re really glad you didn’t do any exploring before you put up your site, or you just might have decided to go with Plan B: The Ditch in American Cinema — 1930 to 1975.)

Internet fiction is happening. I’m still trying to find a fiction site that really connects with me, but the long tail of independent effort is already established. People are writing fiction on the internet and other people are trying to figure out how to make a buck off those people. Which is pretty much how the internet ballgame works.

Tomorrow, I’m going to speed up the tempo and try to catch up with the things I’ve seen and thought about so far. Because I’m already getting a good idea about what I want to try, and I’m not seeing any reason to think about it a whole lot more before I take the leap.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: e-Fiction Book Club

August 26, 2009 By Mark 2 Comments

The e-Fiction Book Club is a small site that’s only been up for a couple of months, but I found it quite useful. Its mission is much like the WFG: trying to help find and filter examples of e-Fiction on the web:

We review novels, novellas, blog-fics, series and short story collections in all genres except erotica. Our definition of e-fiction is fiction published in its entirety on the internet, whether by a registered e-publisher or by an individual.

Beyond the offerings on the site itself, check out the links page, which includes sites grouped by interest for both readers and writers.

(As if social networking needs any sanctioning by me, I found the e-Fiction Book Club because someone at the site linked to me via Twitter. The interconnectedness of the web still impresses me, but the speed at which useful connections can be and are being made seems to only be accelerating. Good news for a nascent movement like internet fiction.)

Update: e-Fiction Book Club closed in mid-January of 2010. The farewell note read, in part:

The e-Fiction Book Club has closed. Sadly my technical skills are not up to the task of running the site, and I don’t have the time or the cash to resurrect it.

I would like to thank you for your support in the past. I still believe there is a niche out there for a community site dedicated to promoting e-fiction works and authors, to encourage small publishers who are branching out into the medium of the electronic book and the many variations.

Even the right idea at the right time is no guarantee of success. The transition from analog to digital publishing is going to be long and difficult, and I can only hope others will fill this void.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Mobile Read

August 25, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

While I’m on the subject of e-readers, you might want to take a look at MobileRead.com, including discussions in the forum. (It’s a site I stumbled across while reading in the WebFictionGuide.com forums, and if you follow that link you’ll see that several people almost immediately turn to the question of whether online fiction and e-readers are different animals. Such is life at the dawn of a new era.)

As you might expect, there are currently posts on the home page about Sony’s newly announced reader, but they also have a note up about nominations for the next Mobile Read Book Club selection, slated for September. Right now Agatha Christie and Charlie Chan are battling it out, but this is the kind of community-based activity that could also work for online fiction writers, unknown writers, etc. (At least until an astroturfing PR firm or publishing company starts gaming the system, which probably won’t take too long.)

The titanic two-front war currently being waged to control (read: own) electronic text and the devices that convey electronic text to users means that dedicated communities like Mobile Read will probably grow in importance as time goes on — at least until the battles are resolved. For individuals looking to write online or electronic fiction as a means of finding an audience, keeping abreast of the current (and coming) technology is an obligation made a little easier by sites and communities like Mobile Read.

— Mark Barrett

The Second Front

August 25, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Sony unveiled a new e-reader this morning. Here’s the lede from the L.A. Times:

Sony this morning unveiled its answer to the Kindle 2 — a wireless electronic book reader with a 7-inch touch screen that’s 17% larger than Amazon’s device.

The fact that basic specs of the new reader are defined not in terms of utility but rather competitive advantage tells you everything you need to know about what’s going on in the e-reader arms race. A serious fight is on to see who produce the dominant reader, just as the fight is on to see who will become the dominant content provider for those devices.

Note also, however, that the two fronts in this global war to control the portable text industry are already deeply enmeshed:

Sony’s Readers have another feature that’s not present in the Kindle: All of the devices are capable of displaying digital books that have been borrowed from thousands of public libraries that lend electronic books. The Daily Edition goes one step further by finding local libraries with a digital-books collection and letting users wirelessly download the book for 21 days (provided they have a library card for that particular branch).

The machines enable delivery of more content: demand for more content drives sales of the machines. At some point in the not-to-distant future, this simmering symbiosis — backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing campaigns — is going to explode onto popular culture.

Which explains why Google is not simply trying to become the dominant content provider, but why they’ve also allied themselves with Sony, against the Amazon/Microsoft cabal. From Bloomberg:

In March, Sony gained access to more than 500,000 e-book titles for its readers through an agreement with Google Inc. The deal expanded Sony’s e-book store to about 1 million titles at the end of last month, compared with the more than 320,000 Amazon.com offers.

Sony gets content for its e-reader: Google gets a friendly device manufacturer for its content delivery system.

It’s going to be very hard to bet against a Google/Sony alliance, even against the combined might of Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo and others. More on this here. (That link is to a Macworld.com article, because “the new Daily Edition comes bundled with Sony’s eBook Library software 3.0, which is newly Mac-compatible” [emphasis mine]. Whether Apple is thinking about getting into the device business as well — iBook II anyone? — or whether they’re simply throwing their lot in against Microsoft is anyone’s guess. But that Apple seems to be on the sidelines should not be taken to mean that Apple is on the sidelines.)

— Mark Barrett