Digital Fiction 4.0: The bottom line
As a writing career began to coalesce around me, I learned that striving to expand the horizons of digital publishing proved far less successful than simply submitting stories for ordinary analogue publication. If I took on lesson from the experience of writing Hemmingway 0.5, it was to stick to paying markets. Unromantic? Sure, but necessary. Readers are not clamouring for cranky virtual writers to engage in realistic text-based banter with. Readers are looking for good stories well told. And what is a writer’s job if not to produce good stories well told? I placed Hemmingway in permanent stasis and focused on the craft.
With some success in publishing short stories though came a new problem: finding an audience or, more accurately, enabling an audience to find me. A common conversation at the time ran something like this:
‘I’ve had a new story published in Blah Magazine.’
‘Really? Where can I get it?’
‘Um…I think I saw it at the local independent bookshop, but my story is in the January edition and they’ve already come out with April, so I don’t know if you can still get it. You could have a look at their web site maybe.’
It does take the shine off one’s achievement.
Literary journals have small circulations and even smaller distribution networks and, increasingly, I found people interested in reading my stories were unable to. Not even my Mum had copies.
If ever there was an opportunity for digital publishing to step in, this was it.
In setting up an online shop for short story downloads, I took inspiration from two sources.
The iTunes Music Store had, by now, proved the viability of online music sales and, by extension, the viability of sales for any digital download content. If consumers were prepared to pay to download three-minute pop songs, then why not 3,000 word stories as well?
The second inspiration was a rejection slip, or, rather, a rejection email. The rejection itself was not unusual, they are a writer’s lot in life, but the logic behind the rejection.
Thank you for this enquiry, and I must say, you appear to be the most published of short story writers who ask if I am interested to publish their work. But no, sorry. I do not publish short stories.
It’s policy. I felt like I had been rejected by a bouncer because the colour of my jeans. Publishers, big and small, have very good reasons working within their chosen forms and genres and I do not begrudge this particular publisher for turning down my work. Rather, this rejection confirmed a suspicion I had harboured for some time. The publication of short story collections, once a right of passage for new writers into the literary world, was now the preserve of established authors and themed anthologies. Short stories published in a few literary journals would not translate to a book-length work, even with small independents (with one recent and notable exception).
If I were to reach an audience, I would have to find another way.
With Hemmingway duly elbowed to one side, my web site made way for a new experiment in digital publishing. The purpose of the download store is to create a space where short stories can reside in perpetuity, available for readers to purchase at a small price. As John Birmingham says: ‘Writing for love is nice, but getting paid is even sweeter.’
As well as previously published works, I also wrote stories specifically for publication on the site. Each story is laid out in columns with breakout boxes, mimicking the layout of magazines and literary journals. I then convert the files into portable document format (PDF), a file type that offers several advantages for both author and readers: the format is almost universally accessible on any computer or handheld device, the finished file maintains a consistent look regardless of the viewing software, and the text cannot be edited or overwritten. These are important considerations for the author to emphasise to readers that the purchased downloads are finished works of publishable standard.
The files contain no DRM, allowing readers the widest possible choice of ways to engage with the text. Many readers choose to print the files, rather than read on screen, a major advantage of the short story form in digital publishing. Not may readers would be dedicated enough to print a 300-page of novel onto A4 paper to read for leisure, regardless of how well the text is laid out.
Like any good e-commerce web site, the system essentially runs itself. Readers who make a purchase gain instant access to their chosen downloads via an automatically generated email link. The system requires no input from me unless a problem arises.
In 2006 simongroth.com opened its electronic shopfront and continues today to tick over sales. It hasn’t set the publishing world on fire, nor has it fired salvos at publishers, threatening their very existence. It’s not that kind of site.
The purpose of the site is to complement traditional publishing, not replace it. The most likely place readers will discover my writing is still in book form. For that reason, I continue to follow competitions, journals, agents, and publishers. The market for short fiction delivered digitally is not mature, but for those who engage with my stories and wish to seek out more—and are willing to take the digital plunge—the digital store is always here, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
There’s even more to come with Digital Fiction 5.0: A warehouse of unsold books. That’s the last of the series though.
Read MoreInterview with Jeff Lindsay
A quick update. An interview I did recently with Dexter author Jeff Lindsay. I’ll post a bit more about it later, but here’s the official article up and published at Tom Magazine.
Read MoreDigital Fiction 3.0: Everybody panic! NOW!
Now I think about it, her statement was rich with a delicious deadpan humour. Propped up in bed, reading by the glow of a twelve-inch PowerBook, my wife gave the idea all the gravitas of a shopping list.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘apparently book publishing has died.’
‘Really?’ I said, looking up from my crisp new paperback edition of Catch-22. ‘Again?’
What else could I say? What could be more appropriate? By the time my first short story appeared in a small-circulation literary journal, the publishing industry was already locked into a histrionic lurch from crisis to crisis, fuelled by corporate money and Luddite dread of what ‘killer application’ will finally lay the book, and industry’s existing edifice, to eternal rest.
Bob Miller, of boutique digital publisher HarperStudio, claimed in 2008, ‘We’re going to fix publishing’. This, of course, implies that publishing, in its traditional guise, is broken.
The image of a beleaguered industry staggering into oblivion is one perpetuated by its media coverage. From corporate and mid-level publishers to large bookshop chains such as Borders, the consistent message is one of crisis. Only Amazon.com, buoyant and energetic, bucks the trend, arousing only suspicion and fear among its rivals, both current and potential. Many in the rest of the industry seem to regard Amazon.com as something like the Blob, an entity that will continue mindlessly consuming publishing unless it can be stopped.
Authors are frequently paid obscene advances for works that all too often prove of questionable quality. The industry that cut its teeth on the philosophy of taking many small gambles, after a long period of consolidation and corporatisation, has found itself constantly chasing the next blockbuster, taking larger and larger gambles with fewer available resources.
Authors have described a pervasive low morale pervasive among editing staff in publishers throughout the United States. Writers seeking entry into book publishing feel the brunt of this morale via apologetic, and sometimes candid, rejection notes from editors.
The pervasive fear extends all the way to Oprah. Serious column inches have been devoted to the fear that Oprah will ‘soon’ go off air, cutting publishing houses loose into a red wilderness.
Much of this handwringing seems to emerge from publishers, critics, and other self-appointed keepers-of-the-flame, especially those from the large, corporate end of town. Rarely does anyone hear from the two parties at the centre of book and reading culture: authors and readers.
Fear of electronic publishing replacing printed paper as the preferred option to read, for example, Moby Dick is merely another panic point for a hungry media circling what they believe to be a dying industry.
Proulx’s observation of e-book readers, though astute and wonderfully pithy, is couched within an impassioned defence of the book, as if the printed word were under attack.
Really? Consider the following headlines for stories on digital publishing and their published dates in relation to Proulx’s 1994 defence:
- E-Books: An idea whose time hasn’t come (Kirkpatrick, 2002)
- An idea whose time has come back (Glazer, 2004)
- An e-book reader that may just catch on (Pogue, 2007)
Doom mongers seem to crave a ‘killer device’ that upends the traditional publishing model and decimates the book market, possibly in the same way that a bored emergency doctor might crave a high-speed collision. But does anyone seriously believe that one single whizz bang digital gadget will one day consign paper to the past? Is the book nothing more than an old-fashioned ‘format’ like the compact disc or the jpeg file?
People really do like paper. We’ve had paper a long time, far longer than we’ve had either recorded music or photography (both still and motion). Printed text on paper is an ingenious and remarkably hardy means of preserving ideas and stories.
The critical word here is ‘preserving’.
In entertainment, the media that have most willingly gone digital are relatively recent creations. Newspapers, soon to become the latest casualty to the digital world, are a creation of the Nineteenth Century. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, acknowledges his own company’s device is no book killer: ‘Anything that lasts 500 years is not easily improved upon.’ In fact, the modern book dates much further to Roman times, when the codex superceded the scroll in what may have been the first format war. This may provide part of the reason why books have proved the form of entertainment most resistant to digitisation. The problem lies not because a lack of technology (books were in fact the first technology declared doomed by the digital revolution, as Proulx’s 1994 defence shows), but rather because of a lack of uptake or even interest in readers. Books are ingrained in our culture in a way celluloid or vinyl could never hope to match.
When we want to relax with a novel, as a rule, we prefer a book. Recreational reading is a tactile and physical act. The display of colourful spines on a bookshelf is a trophy cabinet, designed to parade its owner’s intellect and taste.
We tend to fetish books, and for good reason. The book is an incredibly efficient and inexpensive way to educate and amuse and for storytellers to reach an audience untroubled by time or place.
But that’s not the whole story.
Many people read text every day, both on screen and on paper. But not all text holds the same inherent value. While readers may wish to keep some texts, maybe for future reference, maybe to display as a trophy, or maybe for purely emotional reasons. Much more text, though, is disposable: reference texts, web sites, news articles, menus, and, yes, even fiction.
Self-appointed defenders of the book tend to overlook that much of what is published every day is not Moby Dick, or even Oscar And Lucinda. A publisher’s current list looks more like: The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the Business of Life or Dewey: A Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched The World. Though such books are big business, commanding seven-figure advances, they are unlikely to become the culture-defining tomes that demand preservation for generations to come.
At least I hope they won’t.
Most books published today are consumables, much like newspapers: we read them once (if they’re good) and toss them aside. And such disposable text is ideally suited to digital reading, as the average newspaper, now caught in a terminal torpor, will readily testify.
A commercial advantage of the electronic book over the electronic newspaper is that readers appear far more open to the idea of paying for an e-book download than subscribing to news ‘content’ online.
Books can be one-off references in much the same way academic publishing relies on electronic texts to reach libraries and scholars. Digital consumption has begun swallowing the education and scholarly publishing industry in much the same way newspapers are fast becoming the slow moving print versions of their web sites.
The Kindle and other e-book readers acknowledge that, for all the talk of the book’s eternal preservation of vital texts, most of the books produced today are disposable products to be consumed and forgotten.
The other reality book defenders tend to gloss over is that computers and digital technology have already transformed book publishing. The same technology behind e-readers has already revolutionised the process of creating books, from the word processor to digital printing methods. I am always amused when book and journal publishers insist that all unsolicited submissions arrive on paper in an envelope only to request, on acceptance of a piece, the same story emailed as a word processor document.
Recognising this, some journals and independent publishers are increasingly eschewing paper-based submissions, whether to save time, money, or the planet. Even some large publishers are moving away from distributing printed manuscripts in favour of (egad!) e-book readers. Novels are now assessed, edited, designed, and laid out on a computer and returned to the author as a proof via email.
Only at the final stage, delivery to readers, does the story return to ink on paper via a digital printing press.
And all this technology is corralled into the creation of 200-odd bound sheaves of new-fashioned ink-on-paper.
And that’s just the beginning of the strange journey. As much as twenty-five per cent of those bound sheaves are headed only for the pulping machine. At a recent discussion between writers and publishers, participants estimated that as much as seventy per cent of all books published in Australia fail to earn back the advance paid to the author.
Publishers use digital technology to improve efficiency and save money in the production of books, and yet seem to undo that hard work in the product itself.
The discrepancy has not gone unnoticed. Independent publishers in the United States are experimenting with cheaper mass print runs as either print-on-demand softcovers or electronic texts, while simultaneously creating smaller runs of lavishly designed hardcovers for the smaller, cashed-up market of collectors and book lovers.
This is a significant development, taking its cue from developments in the music industry. After years of resistance, the music industry has finally realised that formats such as digital download, compact disc, and vinyl can not only coexist, but thrive.
The lesson for publishers large and small is to seek opportunities and provide texts in whatever format readers desire, whether analogue or digital. Some relaxation exercises may come in handy too. Reducing any new reading technology as a book-killer to be feared and derided does a disservice to the industry and insults the intelligence of both writers and readers. It’s also bad for business. Canny publishers and authors may begin to take a leading role in creating the future of reading technology. Why should we—the people intimately involved in publishing—allow technology and web companies like Sony and Amazon dictate the terms of how we read in the future?
Digital Fiction 4.0: The bottom line to come…
Digital Fiction 2.0: No iPod of books is here.
Proof that I like books as much as digital fiction.
Read MoreDigital Fiction 2.0: No iPod of books
While digital technology has indeed revolutionised other entertainment industries even at the consumer level—from photography, to music, to film and television—book publishing in 2009 has remained steadfastly analogue.
Authors have described a ‘rhetoric of resistance’ to the idea of electronic books, perhaps fuelled by the slow take up of the technology to read and dsitribute fiction and entertainment texts.
Where authors have waded into the debate around electronic books, the focus has been on dismissals of the technology from established authors, such as E. Annie Proulx’s sneer at the ‘twitchy little screen’. Fifteen years on, her statement retains currency in the popular imagination. Although the screens are nowhere near as ‘twitchy’ today, most people assume that reading text on an e-reader could never live up to the experience of a book.
But, despite the rhetoric of resistance, manusfacturers continue to develop e-readers under the belief that the technology will eventually gain wider, if not universal, acceptance.
Several dedicated e-book readers are still available, with more models to arriving on the market. Other portable handheld devices are also capable of displaying e-book files. Reading applications and books are already available for the iPhone. With its 3.5-inch backlit display, the device itself hardly makes for great reading, but its popularity and flexibility make it a good platform for e-books to gain wider appeal. The iPhone app store in Australia had more than 1,200 books earlier this year (and far more now) in a variety of formats ready to purchase. Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro is available as a package of audio book, e-book, and other multimedia.
But the most significant recent development in e-readers has come not from the features of the device itself, but rather from the identity and intentions of its manufacturer. In November 2007, Amazon.com launched its Kindle e-reader, sparking a deluge of breathless ‘news’ stories: approximately six hundred in a matter of hours and, by July 2008, Kindle e-books accounted for six per cent of Amazon’s electronic sales. The Kindle 2, this year, repeated the success and has established the device as the frontrunner of the e-book market, in visibility if nothing else.
Even in its new incarnation, the Kindle is a rather clunky-looking device that offers little more than any contemporary electronic reader: an easy-on-the-eye ‘e-paper’ screen, a high-resolution black and white display, large portable storage for texts, and wireless connectivity to online content. What really sets the Kindle apart is Amazon’s adoption of a so-called ‘vertical business’: a model where a single company controls the production and means of access; from the acquisition from authors to the delivery of text to readers.
At the moment, the readers can purchase texts for a Kindle via a standard web browser or wirelessly directly onto the device. Content for the Kindle can be purchased only through Amazon itself. Wireless content leans heavily toward regularly-updated news and magazine content rather than fiction or other book-length works. Publishers have made Kindle versions available of both fiction and non-fiction titles, some launched on the Kindle platform print. There were some suspicious reports that the Kindle version of Dan Brown’s new thriller-by-numbers was outselling its paper counterpart. By all accounts, the Kindle has been a quietly successful venture in a difficult marketplace. But Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos has indicated his company’s desire to use the Kindle as a means of changing the way people buy and consume texts.
Their inspiration, in part, is Apple Inc’s iTunes Music Store, which now dominates music sales throughout the world in partnership with the iPod. But Amazon also intends to seek and publish authors directly to the Kindle, bypassing the need to negotiate with publishers at all.
Who needs publishers? Or booksellers for that matter?
The implication for writers seeking publication would probably be minimal. Should Amazon forge headlong into publishing, it would likely adopt the same guarded curiosity towards new writers familiar to anyone who has submitted a manuscript. But how a writer, once accepted by Amazon-the-publisher, could confidently negotiate with a single publisher/marketer/seller would depend entirely on how open and transparent Amazon decides to implement its ‘vertical business’.
So far, Amazon has been about as transparent as a freak Australian dust storm.
But, while the impact of such a business model on writers is unclear at this stage, the implication for readers is potentially profound.
Aside from locking readers into a single point of purchase, Amazon has also adopted a proprietary format for Kindle texts using digital rights management (DRM) to lock the files to a single authorised device. Many worry that, by adopting DRM, Amazon wishes to reduce reading to an atomised, private activity, without the messiness and unprofitability of readers sharing with friends, borrowing from a library, or selling their books to the second-hand market.
Is that a legitimate concern or just a guess at what might be Amazon’s fantasy world?
The real danger of DRM is that, by attempting to address a real or perceived threat of piracy, publishers will place needlessly punitive and restrictive measures on the very readers they need to remain in business. This is the lesson of the disastrous impact of DRM on the music industry.
In waging a war against piracy, record companies entered into a debate over the ownership of recorded music. With ownership comes implied control over when, where, how, and even with whom the product will be ‘consumed’. At its lowest point, the Recording Industry Association of America found itself in a blizzard of crushing lawsuits against individuals throughout the United States while every attempt at DRM succeeded only in annoying legitimate listeners. And all the while sales continued to fall in every territory: 14.3 per cent in 2006 and 10.8 per cent in 2007.
In the music industry today, the long discussion over DRM seems to have reached its end with the recent announcement that the RIAA has agreed to drop DRM from all digital music sales through iTunes.
Perhaps there will be no ‘iPod of books’. Perhaps the future of digital publishing resides not so much in any single device, but in the format used to download, share, borrow, or otherwise use texts. Entirely open and universal formats for reading texts and illustrations already exist such as the PDF or portable document format (don’t let Adobe fool you into thinking they own PDF—they don’t) and HTML or hypertext markup language. Both formats are created and almost universally accessible on any device. PDF has the edge on consistent layout and maintains the look of text on paper, while HTML, the language of the World Wide Web, has both ubiquity and the extensibility to incorporate multimedia, potentially opening new avenues for storytelling.
Digital Fiction 3.0: Everybody panic! NOW! to come…
Digital Fiction 1.0: Hardly prophetic is back here.
My own shop for digital fiction is over here. Artist owned and operated since 2006.
Read MoreTwelves Part Eight – Concerts
I don’t go to that many concerts, especially these days, but I try to make it when an essential artist (especially one from another twelve) rolls into town. There’s a few international behemoths in the list along with the usual obscurities.
Random memories from The Arena: I joined a conga line that wound its way through the Arena for They Might Be Giants, also the band playing ‘spin the dial’ where they improvise to whatever they find playing on local radio. Watching Regurgitator play one of their first gigs with their new drummer while sipping beers behind the sound desk next to their old drummer.
We were literally at the stage for Peter Gabriel’s concert, with our arms resting on the stage itself. I shook the man’s hand and my eyes almost popped out of my head. The 1995 REM show was better musically (they still had Bill Berry and they weren’t flogging a shithouse record), but we had the most horrendous seats. Word of warning: never let someone else organise tickets for you.
Radiohead created more goosebumps than any other show I’ve ever seen. I thought I was going to cry at one point. In fact, I may have.
I’ve seen the Augies more than a few times, but Eumundi was a special show. They played fan favourites to a tiny room where we practically eyeballed the band.
Oh, and I deliberately injured a crowd surfer at Festival Hall in 1997. Advice to future crowd surfers: avoid six-foot-plus-blokes with a crazy look in their eyes.
- Peter Gabriel (Brisbane EC, 1994)
- REM (Brisbane EC, 1995, 2005)
- Radiohead (Sydney EC, 2005)
- Regurgitator (The Arena, 1999)
- Ratcat/The Clouds (Brisbane, 1991)
- Augie March (Eumundi, 2009)
- Eels (with Strings, Tivoli, 2005)
- Ben Folds Five (Festival Hall, 1997)
- U2 (Brisbane, 2004)
- Custard, The Sharp (RNA Showgrounds, 1993)
- They Might Be Giants (The Arena, 1995, 2001)
- Powderfinger (The Arena, 2004)
You’ll notice there are no festival gigs here and for good reason. Going into debt to pay for overpriced tickets for the privilege of standing in either scorching heat or pissing rain to see one or two bands you like amid thirty-eight warty rejects doesn’t sound like a great way to spend my time. But I guess that could be just me.
Read More
The Books
