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Archives for September 2009

You Get What You (Don’t) Pay For

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In the publishing business writers get paid to write. In Hollywood, writers get paid to write. In the copywriting business, writers get paid. In the theater, playwrights get paid.

In the interactive industry, however, it’s been a very slow process getting the people who make games to see writers as an inherent part of the industry. In fact, ten years ago one of the docs I just added to this site — Storytellers: A Hiring Guide for the Interactive Industry — originally had this title: “Storytellers: Part of the team?”

Well, the good news is that writers are now much more a part of the development process than they were even five years ago. In fact, that’s one of the things that’s changed for the better in the interactive industry: writers are now being thought of as part of the team.  [ Read more ]

The Maltese Falcon, by Robert Polito

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True story.

Maybe a decade ago now I was browsing Amazon.com when I came across a book written by Dashiell Hammett and Somebody Else. Having studied detective fiction in college I knew that the actual credit was Dashiell Hammett and Nobody Else, so I sent a note to the Amazon elves asking for a correction. A day or two later the elves wrote back to say that the other person was actually the editor of the book, but because the work was not an anthology this other person should not have been included as an author. Shortly thereafter the listing was changed, and Hammett was again given sole credit for writing a book that he had written all by himself.

Which brings me to this:

And farther down the page:

Now, I don’t now who Robert Polito is, and I’m sure he is or was a wonderful person. But he didn’t co-write The Maltese Falcon. I’m not even sure what he actually did do to warrant mention (his contribution isn’t specified), but I am confident that none of the books in the title are books that he wrote or co-wrote.  [ Read more ]

Writing in Library Books

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I checked a book out of my local library the other day, and when I went to read it I discovered that someone had been there before me, littering the words and sentences with sharp lines and emphatic scrawls. Not a rare occurrence in my life, to be sure, but one that always makes me think the vandal (or vandals in this case, if the three different colors of emboldened ink are indeed evidence of serial abuse) is revealing something deeply disturbing about themselves in this simple, narcissistic, and completely self-absorbed anti-social act.  [ Read more ]

Site Seeing: Novelr

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When I was first making my rounds on the web to get up to speed on the state of online storytelling, it took me very little time to come across Novelr.com. Busy as I was, however, I filed the URL away in my ever-growing list of sites-to-visit, and promptly got lost in other things.

A few days ago Janoda kindly thought to suggest the site to me on Twitter, whereupon I immediately vowed to visit the site before promptly getting lost in other things.

Which brings me to yesterday, when Eli (the person behind Novelr) stopped by and added a comment to one of my posts, innocently punishing me for being such a slacker. Of such self-induced slights are my better motivations born.

The post Eli commented on was called Taking Stock, in which I updated myself and you about my current level of interest in all things digital and storytelling. One of the things I said I’m less interested in now is the broader question of online fiction, in part because it’s just so damn broad. If not unending.

Happily, as my dedicated visit to Novelr revealed, Eli and the Novelr community are very much on top of the subject, and very much probing the further reaches. Which means Eli and Novelr can do the heavy lifting on this subject for all of us. Wink!

Stop by, take a look around, and if you’re new to subject, say hello before Eli finds you first. You’ll be glad you did.

— Mark Barrett

Crisscrossing Chris Crawford

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A couple of days ago I was working my way through a slate of storytelling and publishing links when I found myself on the O’Reilly site. It’s one of those sites chock full of interesting links and notes, so I spent a few minutes just clicking around until I ended up looking at splash screen for Safari Books Online, which included works from Peachpit.

In that instant my current interest in digital and online storytelling suddenly merged with my ongoing interest in interactive storytelling, and I felt as if those divergent worlds had become a single focused image in mind. The cause for this convergence was my work as technical editor on Chris Crawford On Interactive Storytelling, a book written by Chris about his pioneering work in that fascinating and maddening field.  [ Read more ]

Publishing is for Professionals

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Full disclosure: I am by definition not qualified to have the opinions I am about to express. The book in question, Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, is a national bestseller. It says so right on the front cover. I don’t have any bestsellers to my name. The book was also published by Harvard Business Press. I didn’t go to Harvard.

At the library the other day I snagged a copy of a book called Groundswell. I think I grabbed it because of the zany hypo-glasses-like book cover, but I was grabbing a lot of books from the newly-acquired shelf that day, so I can’t be sure.

The authors of Groundswell are both employees of Forrester Research, about which I know almost nothing. I figured maybe it meant something useful in a data-driven way, so a couple of days ago I started reading. Turns out the ‘groundswell’ in the title is the internet + social networking + tech + the inability of the corporations to control their messaging + the author’s desire to identify, brand, trademark and exploit a cultural phenomenon. Not particularly earth-shattering stuff, but okay.  [ Read more ]

Quartet Press Follow-Up

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Kassia Krozser, one of the principals of now-defunct Quartet Press, has a post up about how she spent her summer:

Here are some pain points to consider as you try to build a digital publishing business — this is an incomplete list, of course: ISBN madness (really, one ISBN for every format? the mind continues to boggle) and alternate product identifiers; formats, formats everywhere and not a hint of resolution; third party distributors, or, how do you get your books to retailers in the most efficient manner?; customer service (see: formats, devices, and all-around confusion); the challenges of getting your book to show up in retail outlets before release, particularly when you don’t have a corresponding print product; the imposition of DRM despite your stated preferences (really, who are the retailers protecting when they force DRM on the publisher?); pricing and consumer savvy.

As I said in my earlier note, I think being a third-party player (publisher) in the content-delivery business these days must be a nightmare. I also think this is exactly right:

So it’s easier to start from the bottom, figure out what it’s going to cost, and then build the model.

If the new publishing relationship is a direct connection from content creator to content consumer — and it is — then every additional layer added to that process is going to have to pay for itself. And the only way you can figure out how to do that profitably is to start with the absolute minimum cost to do X at quality Y and go from there.

Nothing else makes sense. Nothing else will work.

Read the whole post.

— Mark Barrett

All Things ISBN

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[Since this post was originally published Bowker has changed their website, their marketing approach, and some of the business practices I objected to. Links which could not be updated have been removed and the text revised where necessary. — MB.]

I don’t know much about ISBN numbers (which is redundant, because the ‘N’ in ISBN stands for ‘number’), but I thought I knew their basic function, and I had some vague sense that I knew how they were doled out. Having hopped from link to link to here to here, however, I realized I was wrong about everything.

I don’t use ISBN’s* much at all, if ever. I’ve had a few friends request one from me regarding a book I mentioned, and I now know that’s the best way to make sure you end up with the same version of a book that someone else is talking about. It might not be the most recent version, but it will be the same, because ISBN’s are only given out once and never reissued.

But that little tidbit was only the first domino to fall in my head. I used to think that ISBN’s were given out in some way that was vaguely associated with the copyright process. Or maybe I thought it was in some way vaguely associated with getting a bar code. (Because it’s all so vague, I can’t remember.)  [ Read more ]

Caught in the Middle

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I don’t know anything about Quartet Press other than the fact that they announced today that they’re closing. And I mean nothing.

Reading the post about their closure, however, made me think of a similar note I’d read only a few days ago. This one was about Manifesto Games, a site/biz run by a friend in the interactive industry. The owner, Greg Costikyan, closed up shop in June, saying:

We did not achieve the critical mass of support by independent developers that we had initially envisioned (some of whom, bizarrely, viewed us as a competitor), though we appreciate the strong and enduring support we received from some. We always knew that the essential problem we were trying to solve was a marketing one, but we never figured out how to crack the marketing nut, at least with the minimal financial resources we had available.

Now, Greg knows more about the business side of the games business than I ever will, but I’m not sure that what hurt Manifesto was a marketing problem. And while I know nothing about Quartet Press or the reason for its demise, I’m struck by one way in which the two companies are similar. They were both third parties to the relationship that exists between content provider and content consumer.  [ Read more ]