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The Website Platform Advantage

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While writing my Platform Evolution post I gave some thought to commenting on an excellent Infographic about content farms. No sooner did I decide against it than I ran across this excellent post on Publishing Trends about content farms. Then, a day later, a good friend sent me an unbidden and timely link to a post on Making Light, which, among other things, talks about — wait for it! — content farms.

If you’re not familiar with content farms you can get a quick overview here. As a writer, what concerns me most about content farms is that they are to writing and publishing what Ebola is to the human body. If I was an astrophysicist I would also add that content farms are to information and knowledge what solar storms are to communications. And if I was a logician I would say that content farms are to accuracy and reliability what tsunamis are to fishing villages.

Which is to say that everything about content farms is bad, but not equally bad. The worst aspect of content farms is not that they’re the new frontier for spammers and swindlers, it’s that producing so much crap at such an incredible rate renders every single aggregating and filtering mechanism useless.

Google as a search engine for retail products and reviews has been beyond broken for years. (Try searching for “best _____”, where the blank is any product you’re interested in.) Amazon is currently the default search for products, but it’s starting to fall apart as well. (Am I looking at the latest version of the CD/DVD/book I want to order? Is it new or used? Does it ship free or for a fee? Is it shipping from Amazon or some fly-by-night third-party reseller?) And of course the idea that all that ballyhooed user-generated social-media content is pretty much crap is also nothing new.

What content farms do that’s new is automate the production of internet crap by exploiting free labor and making liberal use of other people’s content in a plausibly deniable way. For independent writers trying to attract attention, fighting through the noise pollution generated by content farms may seem impossible, and all the more so as content farms begin to pollute e-book retailers like Amazon. The antidote to this virulent hemorrhage of obfuscating web text may seem to be a gated social networking community, but I think the opposite is true.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Rust Hills’ Introduction

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The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

Rust Hills comes at fiction-writing from a decidedly literary perspective. What does that mean? Well, this:

I’ve got a shelf of how-to-write books, and they all seem to me pretty much dreadful, especially the ones about the short story.

…

Then I’ve got another shelf of books, some of them seem to me great. These are college textbook anthologies of short stories, with analyses of the stories that sometimes get quite technical.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking what you really want is the how-to-write books, because you want to learn how to write, not how to read. Believe me, I understand: I’ve been there, and I”m no great fan of critical analysis. But Hills is going to throw you a curve in a minute and I don’t want you to miss it.  [ Read more ]

Ditchwalk Book Club: WIG&TSSIP Overview

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The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. If you’re interested in improving your storytelling craft I encourage you to follow along. Original announcement here. Tag here.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you’re not a short story writer so this book won’t help you with your flash fiction, novellas or novels. Wrong.

Short stories are the smallest form of fiction that can be fully realized. If you can write a short story you can write anything — either by subtracting elements or by adding complexity and scale to increase the length of the work. More importantly, understanding the mechanics of this tightly-knit form exposes the mechanics of all other forms as well, meaning you can directly apply any lessons learned to your storytelling life.

I won’t promise that you’ll click with this book the way I did. For me it was a confirmation of a hundred things I’d felt and come to believe about writing, all compiled in a simple accessible volume. What I can promise is that you’ll never think of fiction writing the same way again, and you’ll have at least one ah-ha moment along the way. Worst case scenario: it won’t make your writing worse, and will almost certainly make your writing — and your writing life — better.

To make sure we’re all on the same literal page I ordered the latest version of the book: First Mariner Books edition 2000. I will be commenting on each section of the book in a separate post, but quoting sparely in order to respect fair use and copyright. While you certainly don’t need my commentary to profit from Hills’ book, you’ll need a copy of the book to fully profit from my commentary. Or the book.

First up: Rust Hills’ introduction to Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, and why it shouldn’t scare you away.

— Mark Barrett

The Book as Burden

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Hilarious:

This is going to sound incredibly lazy, like someone who gets in their car to drive a few blocks rather than walk, but the physicality of the book, having to hold it open then lift and turn each page, was a lot more exhausting than I remembered. All of that holding and lifting and turning distracted me from the act of reading, took me out of the story if you will. A few pages into it I gave up, logged in to Amazon, and bought the Kindle book.

I agree that the revolution has already taken place. But I still think books will always have their place.

— Mark Barrett

Alone in the Wild

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I happened on a documentary yesterday on the National Geographic channel that I feel compelled to recommend. Called Alone in the Wild, it documents Ed Wardle’s attempt to spend ninety solitary days in the Yukon wilderness. Putting the challenge in context, Wardle has twice summited Everest. (You can see a page about the show here. I haven’t been able to locate a DVD, and the documentary doesn’t seem to be available on Netflix.)

If the title or subject matter evokes anything for you it will probably be the similar story of Christopher McCandless, whose fatal journey Into the Wild was turned into a book and subsequent movie. By absurd chance I happened to read the original magazine article about McCandless when it first came out in 1993, and my reaction then is the same as my reaction now: I’m not surprised that someone who knew little or nothing about surviving in the wilderness died after only cursory study and inadequate planning.

I want to stress that I take no satisfaction in the fact that McCandless died. The arrogance and ignorance he displayed is the flip side of adventurism and daring, and had he lived he might have profited from the experience both personally and financially. I do think, though, that there is a human tendency to perceive conception as the greatest obstacle to attainment. It’s not the doing that’s the hard part, it’s thinking of something to do that takes real ingenuity.

Over the course of my life I’ve come to believe that this is exactly backwards. In the storytelling world it doesn’t take long to realize that great ideas really are a dime a dozen — or a gross. It’s execution over the long haul, draft after draft, and the realization of detail in the final polish that makes any idea shine. But that’s not fun to contemplate because it presupposes a life of hard work and apprenticeship, when what everybody wants to do is fall out of bed and land on fame and fortune.  [ Read more ]

Platform Evolution

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Here’s a graph from my Twitter Quitter post:

A basic premise of independent authorship is that authors should establish their own platform in order to reach out to readers and potential customers. I believe in that premise. What constitutes a platform, however, remains undefined.

Implicit in the idea of an author’s platform is the creation of an online presence. Because the internet has become commonplace it’s easy to forget that an independent platform for individual artists would be impossible without it. (Prior to the internet an artist’s platform was limited by geography. Bands were limited not by their music but by their touring range.) While the advantages and opportunities provided by the internet are astounding relative to the pre-internet age, the internet is still a communications medium devised by human beings, with inherent strengths and weaknesses.

Understanding how the internet works in a business context is an ongoing process. Two days ago the New York Times put up a paywall, attempting for the second time to derive revenue from its own online platform. (The first attempt failed.) That one of the most prominent newspapers in the world is still struggling to monetize content despite almost unparalleled visibility and economic muscle is a reminder to everyone that the platform question has not been answered.

Depending on your perspective, the tendency of the human mind to cherry pick information can be seen as either a bug or a feature. In the context of online platforms, it’s easy to see successes like iTunes as indicative of potential and promise when it’s actually the result of a unique set of circumstances. Finding gold in a stream may spark a gold rush, but only a few people will stake claims that literally pan out. The internet is no different. As I noted in a post about the future of publishing:

In return for making distribution almost effortless and almost free, the internet promises nothing. No revenue. No readers. Nothing.

Possibilities are not promises. Possibilities are chances, which is why I always say that writing for profit is gambling — and gambling against terrible odds. Determining what your online platform should be, and how much time you should devote to that platform, is an important part of nudging the odds in your favor.  [ Read more ]

The Ditchwalk Book Club: WIG&TSSIP

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For some time I’ve been wanting to talk about what I believe is the best book ever written on the subject of storytelling.* Rather than simply identify it and applaud, however, I’m going to walk through the entire book in a series of blog posts. If you’re interested in grounding your storytelling with a solid foundation of craft I encourage you to buy a copy of the book and follow along. I don’t promise it will change your life, but I’m confident you will profit from the discussion, and perhaps considerably so.

The author of the book is L. Rust Hills, the former long-time fiction editor at Esquire magazine. I was fortunate to meet Rust when I was a fiction writing student, and he had a profound effect on my understanding of storytelling as a craft. From him I learned more about how fiction is constructed than I did from any other source, and I remain indebted to him for that instruction. (Mr. Hills died in 2008.)

The good news is that most of what I learned from Rust Hills comes from a small book he wrote that is still in print. Titled Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular (WIG&TSSIP), Hills’ book treats every aspect of fiction writing as a craft technique, and shows how specific narrative choices create specific effects. Rather than resort to formulas, Hills focuses always on the author’s intended effect, and whether or not the author accomplished that objective. The goal is never replicating a form, but rather accomplishing the storytelling goal you intend to accomplish for your intended readers.

It’s true that Hills was a dedicated proponent of literature, so you might be worried that his book is a ponderous tome. Nothing could be further from the truth. WIG&TSSIP is plain spoken and accessible to everyone. Too, the points and observations he makes about writing literature apply to every kind of storytelling. If you’re a genre writer or tend to favor a particular formula, reading Hills’ book will improve your writing without asking you to abandon your beliefs because it will make you aware of the interconnectedness of your words on a deeper level.

If you’re interested in the craft of fiction — either as a writer or a reader — I encourage you to get a copy of Hills’ book and follow along. In order to give everyone time to find a copy or have one delivered I’ll be starting the discussion in about a week.

* Yes, that’s a bold claim. Regular readers know I don’t hype recommendations, but in this case I think the praise is warranted. I’ve read a lot of how-to books on fiction writing and nothing else has ever come close.

— Mark Barrett

Google Books Settlement Rejected

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This is extremely good news:

A New York federal judge has overturned a Nov. 2009 agreement on whether or not Google can digitize millions of books as part of its Google Books initiative.

My position has always been that the Google Books Settlement was a direct violation of copyright law and of the rights of copyright holders. Judge Denny Chin clearly agreed:

Indeed, the ASA would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case.”

I’ll have more to say about this after I digest the ruling. Previous commentary on the issue here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Update: It’s reassuring to see that Google’s blatant larceny is being exposed and denied in this case (p. 35).

Second, it is incongruous with the purpose of the copyright laws to place the onus on copyright owners to come forward to protect their rights when Google copied their works without first seeking their permission.

If Google and the Author’s Guild could conspire to circumvent third-party copyrights, and copyright law itself, there would be no end to the abuses unleashed on authors — all at a time when authors of all stripes need copyright protection more than ever.

Independent authorship is premised on inviolate copyright law. This ruling and rebuke could not be more welcome.

— Mark Barrett

Twitter Quitter

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A couple of weeks ago I deactivated my Ditchwalk Twitter account. All I have felt in the aftermath is relief.

A basic premise of independent authorship is that authors should establish their own platform in order to reach out to readers and potential customers. I believe in that premise. What constitutes a platform, however, remains undefined.

Currently many people believe that Facebook and Twitter are central to an author’s platform because of the size of those online communities. But joining Facebook or Twitter merely allows the opportunity to start building, managing and marketing to the communities segregated on those sites. All of the work still needs to be done by you, often under terms and conditions no one in their right mind would otherwise submit to.

Facebook constantly made me feel like a sucker so I dropped it — and have never regretted doing so. Twitter, with its more fluid and simple conversational focus, never felt like a con game, but over time the potential and benefit of the site narrowed and faded. In the end I felt the time I allocated to using and managing Twitter could be more profitably spent in other ways. As I hope the remainder of this post attests, this was not a conclusion I came to rashly.  [ Read more ]

A Writer Muses on Marketing and Sales: Finis

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From the moment of conception until you present your work to the market, every decision you make — whether conscious or not, whether active or passive — is a marketing decision. This relationship is inherent in the process, not an affectation. People who study marketing with seriousness are not attempting to impose a theory on the process of production and sales, they are attempting to reveal how each decision at each step in the production process relates to sales.

The biggest problem with marketing theory and practice is in proving the causality of a particular choice or decision. As with stock prices it’s always easier to draw compelling conclusions from results than it is to make profitable predictions. In publishing such past-performance generalizations are useful to the marketing department and critic, but to the creator they have limited utility.

Why? Because at the molecular level every key press is a marketing decision. Every verb you use (or don’t), every comma you use (or don’t), every paragraph you write (or don’t), has a theoretical impact on the market’s acceptance of your work. At the same time it should be obvious that trying to understand and control these causal relationships can lead only to madness. As a practicing writer you must accept that there’s only so far marketing can take you, even if you devote yourself to it completely.  [ Read more ]