It's a book! CONSEQUENCE coming in October - Goodreads Giveaway starts today.

Have I mentioned I've been writing a novel?

(Oh. I have. Forty-seven times in five and a half years of One Finger Typing, if the Unix utilities tr, grep, and wc are to be trusted.)

Well, then...

Ten weeks and counting 'til the official release date (29 September), I'm elated to announce that the finish line is visible at the end of the tunnel: my debut novel Consequence will be in readers' hands, Kindles, Nooks, iDevices, phones, and tablets by early October, in paperback and e-book editions.

If you read posts on One Finger Typing recently you may have already noticed the image of Consequence and link in the sidebar these past several weeks. But let's cut to the chase ... the capsule description from the book's back cover:

San Francisco activist Christopher Kalman has little to show for years spent organizing non-violent marches, speak-outs, blockades, and shutdowns for social and environmental justice. When a shadowy eco-saboteur proposes an attack on genetically engineered agriculture, Christopher is ripe to be drawn into a more dangerous game. His certainty that humankind stands on the brink of ecological ruin drives Christopher to reckless acts and rash alliances, pitting grave personal risk against conscientious passion.

Here's how early endorsers have responded to the novel (these also from the back-cover):

"I couldn’t put Consequence down! Masover ... asks thorny, essential questions about personal responsibility and the role of violence in movements for social change."

– Sam Green, Academy Award-nominated director of The Weather Underground

"Consequence is a great read, full of building tension and excitement ... Masover writes about conflicts central to the human situation."

– Starhawk, author of The Spiral Dance and The Fifth Sacred Thing

Over the coming weeks I'll occasionally post book news here, but a more complete announcement stream will be posted to my Author Page on Facebook, which I invite you to "Like" if you want to keep an eye on notifications about the book's launch party, readings, interviews, book fair appearances, panels, and so forth.

(You can also subscribe to my mailing list to receive a modest number of notifications via e-mail.)

One more thing, hot off the press this morning:

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Consequence

by Steve Masover

Giveaway ends August 11, 2015.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

If you have an itch to read Consequence early, there's a giveaway for that. Beginning today you can sign-up for a chance to win an advance-reader copy (ARC) on Goodreads. All you have to do to enter is be (or become) a Goodreads reader -- it's free -- and click the Enter Giveaway link above (or on Goodreads' Consequence page) before the giveaway ends.

Whenever you read Consequence, I hope that you'll leave reviews on both Amazon and Goodreads to let other readers know what you think.


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Pre-apocalyptic fiction: The Jaguar's Children by John Vaillant
Robert Redford, the Weather Underground, and why we read books
Dystopias in fiction
Allusion in fiction

Stepping back in time: resubscribing to a paper & ink newspaper

I subscribed to the SF Chronicle for years, maybe fifteen years at my current address alone. It's not the NY Times, but it's a paper that carries local Bay Area news and -- unlike the NYT -- you can read it over breakfast and stand a chance of making it to work on time. Compared to the SF Chron of my childhood, the paper is slimmed down so far you can practically read it over orange juice.

Anyway, price spikes, spotty delivery service, and a confluence of personal circumstances that left my partner and me ready to take a break from longstanding news-over-breakfast habits, led to cancellation of our subscription in late 2012. We ignored a number of 'please come back' offers since.

Then, earlier this month, the Chron sent an offer we couldn't refuse: seven-days-a-week delivery for a year for $99. Okay, not a year; fifty weeks. But still. We bit. Yesterday our delivery started.

First impressions: compared to the unbelievably slow-loading web site at SFGate.com, my ink and paper news is fantastically easy to skim! That's what I like most about news printed on paper, even compared to the fast, fat-pipe network connection I enjoy at work. Negligible 'load time'; for a fast reader and news-skimmer, the difference is huge.

I also took note of stories I would likely have missed over the last couple of days if I hadn't read the news in paper form -- things that wouldn't necessarily make the SFGate home page, assuming I had the patience to wait out the load time -- and I probably wouldn't have found by intertube-accident. Here are a few:

• Teju Cole's new novel, Every Day Is for the Thief, is out, reported and reviewed by Michael David Lukas on Friday and printed in Sunday's book review section. Okay, I'd have figured that out the next time I walked into a bookstore, which happens pretty regularly. But still: news to me, and now it's on my To Read list.
• I'm now aware that from 2011 to 2015 the number of railroad tanker cars filled with crude oil coming into the Bay Area is expected to rise from 9,000 to 200,000, thanks to regular columnists Phillip Matier & Andrew Ross, whose reporting usually makes my eyes roll. Favorite pullout: "It's not that crude oil is any more dangerous than ethanol or other products that we currently see on the rails," said Chief Jeff Carman of the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District. "It's just that with the sheer volume that will be coming in, we are going to see more accidents." Note the non-conditional assertion Chief Carman made: we are going to see more accidents. And I imagined those towns devastated by oil-tanker derailments and subsequent big, big 'splosions were something that only happened in places like Casselton, North Dakota -- far, far away from the Left Coast. No longer.
• Sony plans to make a movie about security blogger Brian Krebs, who broke the story about Target's data security breach last year. Really? A movie about a blogger? No production date has been set, according to the article, which is syndicated from the Minneapolis Star Tribune. STV is my guess, but surprise me. Somewhat to his credit, Mr. Krebs seems to be holding the project at moderately ironic distance on his blog: Judging from accounts of the screenwriter’s other movies, if this flick actually gets made someone vaguely resembling me probably will be kicking some badguy butt on the Silver Screen. And he names Edward Norton as one of his favorite actors, also to his credit. Still. STV, if that. You read it here first.

Will it be worth the $99 to get the SF Chronicle in print for the better part of a year? At that price, it'll pretty much be worth it if all I do with the delivered papers is train a puppy. (Note to landlord: not getting a puppy, stand down please.)

Will it be worth paying full price? ($99, said the mailer, is 84% off 'regular' price -- my calculator tells me that makes 'regular' price more than $600/year.) Nope. I kinda doubt I'll ever pay more than $50/month for the SF Chron.

But we'll cross that bridge when we get there in about a year.

Related posts on One Finger Typing:

Is data security worth it? Depends who's counting.

Teju Cole's Open City: protagonist as open book or guarded guide?

Bookstores

Thanks to Another Believer by way of Wikimedia Commons for the image of the SF Chronicle's building at 5th and Mission Streets in San Francisco.

Should technology shape art?

Is it coy to title a blog post with the wrong question? Mea culpa.

The question is not whether technology ought to shape art. The fact is that it does, and always has.

• We read books, not scrolls: the codex was a technological development, first described in writings still known to us about two thousand years ago ... and overcoming an older text-recording technology, the scroll, a few hundred years later.
• We generally read printed books, not hand-copied books; the printing press as we know the technology here in the west was invented in the fifteenth century.
• Musical arts? Beyond the human voice, music is produced with mouth harps, violins, oboes, zithers, trumpets, drum kits, synthesizers, and so on -- that is, with technologies at all levels of complexity.
• The art of cinema? A nineteenth-century technology.

Drawing on cave walls with charred sticks, painting in oils, cast bronze sculpture, splitting dead cows in half and mounting them in tanks of formaldehyde? Okay, maybe never mind that last, no need to get ridiculous. The point is, technology has had a major role in the ways art could be created and experienced for a long time ... arguably for as long as we've had art.

I remember hanging out with my BFF, a student at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early eighties, and rolling my eyes at the bazillions of 'pieces' being produced by John, by his teachers, and by fellow-students that consisted of videotaped 'scenes' in which pretty much nothing happened. I never figured out the attraction myself, but the availability of video cameras that art students could afford must have had something to do with the phenomenon.

Now, of course, we have YouTube. Heck, we have video on YouTube of dead cows split in half and mounted in tanks of formaldehyde:



Still.

I have to admit my jaw dropped last month when I read Betsy Morais reporting on last month's Digital Book World. Her 22 January piece on The New Yorker's web site -- The Book of the Future, Sliced and Diced -- was brought to my attention by a FB friend. Here's how it starts:

At the Digital Book World conference, held in New York last week, one could hardly pass muster by holding up a stack of pages bound together. The crowd's sensibility was more conceptual; the word that filled the air was "content." This was a fairground for companies like Innodata, DigiServ, Biztegra, and Datamatics, with booths snaking through the hallways of the Hilton Hotel. They passed out business cards and flowcharts, decked out with spritely taglines: "Unleash your inner book ~ just $99." In a conference room, Linda Holliday, the C.E.O. of a digital publishing company called Semi-Linear, leaned against a presenter’s table, having just wrapped up a panel discussion on "Making Content Searchable, Findable, and Shareable." She spoke in an excited stream. "A book is an amount of knowledge that I feel good about finishing," she told me. "A book is a clump of knowledge that goes together."

"Look at a book as a bag of words," suggested Matt MacInnis, another panelist, who had been working on education projects at Apple before forming an interactive-book company called Inkling. "Bag of words," he pointed out, is a computer-science term: a model by which a machine represents natural language. "Computers are terrible at natural language," he said. "Humans are shitty at multiplication and division." For a reader searching the Internet for information, he explained, "the word rank is going to be terrible for a bag of words of book length." But a book that is broken up into component parts would show up higher in an online search result, because each discrete section coheres around a single idea, which can be tagged, indexed, and referenced by other sites. This is known in the business as "link juice."

"A book is a clump of knowledge that goes together"? Really?

"Look at a book as a bag of words"?

Books as "link juice"?

Not what I signed up for, either as a reader or a writer. Not how I read books now, or write them, or want to read or write in the future. (Cf. Hamlet as a bag of words in the image at left, courtesy of Wordle. Can we agree that's not nearly as interesting as the play Shakespeare wrote and published as a sequential set of lines spoken by characters?)

Now, to be fair, these folks at DBW were focused on non-fiction, says Betty Morais, and I mostly read and write fiction. Different kettles of fish.

Sort of.

"Sort of" because, when you think about it for seven seconds or so, you realize that the depth and breadth of understanding one gains by reading book-length non-fiction -- say C.G. Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, to take a random example from my own bookshelves -- is of an entirely different order compared to the several factoids ingested by reading fifty or so words that make up the first paragraph of Wikipedia's article about "the Swiss psychotherapist and psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology." Even if you read those fifty or so words sequentially, I'm saying.

Is it hopelessly old-school to think this way?

Is current technology's influence on art a good thing? A bad thing? Indifferent?

Is its value irrelevant because its influence is inevitable?

Consider Mark Katz on the pervasive influence of recording technology on music, from classical to popular, from his book Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (2004):

Simply put, phonograph effects are the manifestations of sound recording's influence. Consider a straightforward example. When Igor Stravinsky composed his Serenade for Piano in 1925, he wrote the work so that each of the four movements would fit the roughly three-minute limit of a ten-inch, 78-rpm record side. "In America I had arranged with a gramophone firm to make records of some of my music," he explained in his autobiography. "This suggested the idea that I should compose something whose length should be determined by the capacity of the record. And that his how my Sérénade en A pour Piano came to be written." Stravinsky was not alone. Many composers of classical and especially popular music followed a similar compositional approach. (Today's three-minute pop song is a remnant of this practice.) Stravinsky's decision to tailor his Serenade to the length of the record side is a clear manifestation of recording's influence. It is just one of countless phonograph effects, ranging from the obvious -- jogging while listening to Wagner on  Walkman, a pop star harmonizing with herself on disc -- to the more subtle changes in the way we speak and think about music in an age of recording technology.

On the other hand, here's Camille Paglia in Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars, published in October of last year:

Looking at art requires stillness and receptivity, which realign our senses and produce a magical tranquility.

Me? I'd say Paglia is making an essential point. Here's more from her introduction to Glittering Images:

The creative energy of our era is flowing away from the fine arts and into new technology. Over the past century, industrial design, from streamlined automobiles and sleek home appliances to today's intricately customized personal gadgets, has supplied aesthetic satisfactions once mainly derived from painting and sculpture. In my experience as a teacher, industrial design students have acute powers of social observation and futuristic intuition, as well as independent and speculative minds, rarely found among today's overly ideological intellectuals. The industrial designer recognizes that commerce, for good or ill, has shaped modern culture, whose cardinal feature is not economic inequity but egalitarian mass communication. Indeed, American genius has always excelled in frankly commercial forms like advertising, modern architecture, Hollywood movies, jazz, and rock music.

But mass media are a bewitching wilderness in which it is easy to get lost. My postwar generation could play with pop because we had a solid primary-school education, geared to the fundamentals of history and humanities. The young now deftly negotiate a dense whirl of relativism and synchronicity: self-cannibalizaing pop, with its signature sampling and retro fads, has become a stupendous superabundance, impossible to absorb and often distanced through a protective pose of nervous irony. The rise of social media has blurred the borderline between private and public and filled the air with telegraphic trivialities, crowding out sequential discourse that invites rereading.

[...]

In an age of alluring, magical machines, a society that forgets art risks losing its soul.

No bag of words those. Thoughts worth mulling-over, I'd say.




Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Everything relates to everything else
Art as long as history, time beyond memory
N-gram fetishism


Thanks a third time to Evan Bench for the image of a stack of books at Shakespeare and Co. in Paris.

Early e-publishing: 30 Million Book Giveaway! (circa 1995)

Recently I was combing through back issues of a now-defunct New York literary magazine, the very one in which I first published short fiction. That story, "What was Slain in the Sun," appeared in the penultimate issue of Christopher Street, in November of 1995. I was looking for the magazine's circulation figures (this to do with eligibility criteria for a short story contest), but what I found was more interesting than that.

There was an advertisement in pretty much every issue of Christopher Street that I looked at in the library stacks at UC Berkeley, where I work. The advertisement was printed as a full page in many issues, and a half-page in the issue in which my story appeared. It promoted a book written by the woman with whom I'd corresponded when my story was accepted for publication, Neenyah Ostram. The book she was promoting in 1995 was: America's Biggest Cover-Up: 50 More Things Everyone Should Know About the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic And Its Link to AIDS.

I haven't read the book, so I won't speak to its subject matter. What called my attention to the ad was this bold callout, seemingly so naive from a distance of (only) 17 years:

How do you give 30 million copies of a book away? On the Internet.

It gets better:

For those of you who know your way around the Internet, access to the Electronic Newsstand is free and available through the Newsstand Home Page at URL http://www.enews.com:2102 and via gopher or telnet. Please gopher enews.com or telnet enews.com and login as enews.

For those of you who don't know the Internet from a hairnet, we suggest that you modem yourself to your nearest bookstore and buy and old-fashioned hard-cover copy of AMERICA'S BIGGEST COVER-UP. [...]

For those of you who don't know the Internet from a hairnet? Port numbers in a URL? Gopher? Telnet? It's like discovering evidence of a lost civilization!!

What's "gopher" -- both the noun and verb? Gopher was a widely used protocol for distributing documents over the early internet. It presented text menus for retrieving hierarchically organized documents, which made sense in a world in which many computer systems handled text display much better than graphics. Gopher lost out to the web, as we all know now. It was invented at U. Minnesota.

Telnet was (and is) a protocol for opening interactive, text-oriented communication sessions with remote computers. It was superseded by the still very broadly used SSH protocol, which handles the same sort of communication securely (so communications between computers can't be intercepted by tapping the 'wire' between the legitimate parties to data exchange).

I know, I know, it's like trying to explain rotary phones to today's elementary school kids. Or landlines. Grandpa, what's a modem?

Leaving aside the trip down Ancient Technology Lane, what really struck me about the ad for Ostrom's book was how clearly it anticipated the sea change in book distribution that electronic formats would make possible -- a dozen years before the explosion of e-books detonated by the Kindle in 2007, and fueled now by the likes of Smashwords and iTunes and Google Play in addition to Amazon and Barnes and Noble. These sea changes are roiling the publishing industry, hard, to this day. I don't suppose that Ostrom's work was read by all 30 million subscribers to 1995's Electronic Newsstand, but it could have been. For free.

Remarkable what you can find in the stacks of a library, at the border between the pre-digital world and the one in which we're immersed today.



Thanks to wackystuff for the rotary phone image, via Flickr.



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
My short story "Martin's Pond" published as an e-book
Are dust bunnies an argument for e-books?
Getting a grip on attention span
Rock, Paper, Digital Preservation

Sea changes in self-publishing at the 2012 SF Writers Conference

The most notable trend at this year's SF Writers Conference (SFWC) was the sea change in how industry professionals across the spectrum are talking about self-publishing.

Advice on self-publishing was fragmented and tentative at the past two SFWCs, in February 2010 and 2011, respectively. Some editors and agents suggested that a self-published book that sold 5000 copies might whet a publisher's appetite; others warned that less than 5000 copies sold would likely kill interest in a book; still others insisted that a book that has been self-published is a dead project as far as the New York houses are concerned ... but the track record of a self-published book might influence a decision to acquire a subsequent project -- for better or worse.

This past weekend, at the SFWC 2012 held at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill, the story was nearly uniform.

Michael Larson, who co-organizes the SFWC and co-leads Larson-Pomada Literary Agents with his wife Elizabeth Pomada, said in an opening address, that "self-publishing may be the best option for you, if only to test-market your book, to see if it works."

Jennifer Enderlin of St. Martin's Press was unequivocal: There's no publisher who would be turned off by a self-published book that sold well.

Agent Dan Lazar: "I look at them [self-published books] as a manuscript." In fact, when I pitched my own novel, Consequence, to Mr. Lazar on Sunday, he had beside him a self-published (print) book written by a young writer I'd met two days before.

The voices of those who have been helping authors self publish for years & years (Joel Friedlander) or run self-publishing companies (Mark Coker of Smashwords, Brian Felson of BookBaby, Jesse Potash of PubSlush) are sounding louder.

In responding to a question during a panel discussion yesterday about the "stigma" of self-publishing, Joel Friedlander responded, "Stigma? It exists primarily inside unpublished writers" ... and Friedlander went on to assert that it is diminishing even there. That assertion resonates with the tenor of conversations I had with nearly all the writers I spoke with over the weekend.

"The times have changed," Mark Coker said, agreeing with Friedlander. He credited successful independently-published authors such as Amanda Hocking and John Locke (no, not the 17th century philosopher), who have set an example of the reach successful indie-publishing can attain. The Smashwords founder went on to assert that becoming one's own publisher has moved "from the option of last resort to the option of first resort for some writers."

Informative guidance on the what and the how of self-publishing are all over the intertubes, but a place to start for interested authors might be the guides written by Coker:

• The Smashwords Style Guide is focused on formatting requirements for publishing on that platform, but also gives a writer a clear idea of the kinds of complexities in a digital manuscript that would likely stymie conversion to e-book formats on any platform or using any conversion software.
• The Smashwords Book Marketing Guide offers 30 DIY marketing suggestions that are applicable to any writer; some of them will strike writers as obvious, some are less so.

Smashwords is all about e-books; PubSlush and BookBaby bridge the print- / e-book divide. For a novelist (a subspecies of writers of some personal interest), printed books are a connundrum: it's nearly impossible for an individual to place her/his books widely in brick-and-mortar stores. PubSlush claims it has distribution into brick-and-mortar stores through Ingram, a major distributor to independent bookstores, but it's a very new venture, independent bookstores are widely perceived to be on the ropes, and there's still the matter of convincing widely distributed buyers to place orders and keep a debut title on store shelves.

Does all that imply debut novelists ought to be thinking only in terms of e-book publication, at least until a book is proven in the e-marketplace? Some think so. I'm not so sure, but I also know I don't have room for too many cases of printed books in my livingroom.

Questions about what it all means for this unpublished novelist were ricocheting around my head all weekend at SFWC 2012. I suppose time will tell ... but in a world of diminishing advances and marketing budgets, a world in which only 7% of "traditionally published" books sell more than 1000 copies, it's fair to say that writers are taking a close look at value that large New York houses offer to authors in exchange for contracts that limit both royalties for and ownership of our work.

I can still say this: I would much rather have an agent to steer me through the thicket than go it alone. So far as I can tell, it's pretty much all quicksand out there.



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Publishing ain't dead, but it's a deer in the headlights
What's that you say about self-publishing, sonny?

Thanks to Briar Press for the image of an iron Baby Reliance hand press.

Data mining the 2012 SF Writers Conference

Last February I posted on the topic of the annual San Francisco Writers Conference (SFWC). I'll be attending again this year, for the third time, and have begun to look over the (still-tentative) schedule of sessions posted last week.

The conference will be held on Presidents Day Weekend, 16-19 February, at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. There's an impressive array of speakers, and seventy-five currently scheduled sessions and keynotes. The conference has sold out, but there's a waiting list if you're inspired to make a last-minute attempt to attend. There are also SFWC Master Classes offered on Monday 20 February, for which enrollment is still open.

Like last year, after reading through the listed sessions I was curious about the big picture view of what's on offer at SFWC. Since I have last year's categorization readily at hand, from last year's blog post, I have compiled counts of sessions in the same categories (almost) that I used last year, for comparison.

(For the record, by "almost" I mean that this year I broke out poetry into its own category, rather than grouping it with "Miscellaneous" sessions; to keep the comparison honest, I broke out last year's poetry-oriented session count in the new category as well.)

Et voilà:

Category	2012 Sessions	2011 Sessions
The industry: how it works, how to work it	18	13
Promotion (platform building, etc.)	14	15
Fiction (adult or general)	8	15
Craft and practice of writing	7	9
Poetry	7	3
Self-publishing, E-books	6	4
Books for kids and young adults	6	7
Non-fiction	3	7
Miscellaneous	6	2
Total	75	73

Same disclaimer as last year: Others might count some of the sessions differently than I did, and some would come up with different categories. Since the 'raw data' is the publicly posted schedule, readers are free to come up with their own schemes ... I'd be interested to see other slices and dices in comments to this post.

Like last year, I've used Wordle to generate a word cloud (see image, click to enlarge) from the SFWC schedule. Input to this year's word cloud was limited to session names, so the cloud gives a sense of the content of the sessions without the clutter of the presenters' names (I included names in last year's Wordle). No offense intended to the presenters, natch.

The big trends I'm seeing this year include an increase by more than twofold in poetry-oriented sessions, significantly more about the rapidly-morphing publishing industry, and a better-than-last-year emphasis on the new and disruptive kidz in the class, self-publishing channels and e-books. Also, interestingly, a halving of sessions oriented specifically to fiction and specifically to non-fiction; and a slight decrease in sessions aimed at the craft and practice of writing.

Six of the eight members of my on-line writers' critique group are attending this year -- traveling from as far as the midwest and Europe -- and a seventh will be returning from overseas in time to meet us for a post-conference lunch. I'm really looking forward to spending time with my circle of working writers after a year of contact limited mostly to e-mail and Skype.

Like last year, my on-line critique group will be looking for new writers to join us -- and because we communicate via the intertubes it doesn't matter where in the world new members live. If you're attending and think you might be interested, please feel welcome to seek me out; or send an e-mail ahead of time (you can find contact info on my web site). Our group's activities and guidelines are pretty close to the same as those I summarized in my post last year, How to organize an on-line writers' group; please have a look if you'd like to know more.




Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Data-mining the SF Writers Conference schedule
How to organize an on-line writers' group
Drafting vs. editing
Music, memory, nostalgia ... and the novel

Adult fiction is hard to sell

In late January of this year, literary agent Stacy Kendall Glick at Dystel & Goderich wrote a blog post she titled What I'm Looking For. In agentspeak, that means the sort of work and authors from whom she especially welcomes queries. A post like this is fabulously valuable to an author ... especially, of course, if what the agent is looking for matches a project for which the author is seeking representation.

Alas, what Ms. Glick wrote about the type of book I write was not the stuff that dreams are made on.

"I'm signing up a lot less adult fiction," she wrote, "because it's so hard to sell but also because my time is limited and fiction can take a lot of work to develop."

Boy, do I get that. Fiction takes a heck of a lot of work for an author to develop, and (extrapolating here, because in actual fact I am not now nor have I ever been a literary agent) it's easy to imagine that an agent who takes on a fiction project, especially fiction written a debut author, is likely to have a lot of reading and suggesting and cajoling and re-reading and further suggesting to do before the manuscript is ready to see the light of an editor's desk lamp.

Interestingly, I wasn't discouraged by this frank acknowledgement by an experienced & reputable agent who works for a top-drawer New York agency. Not even a little.

Why not?

Well, the easy answer would be that there are a lot of agents (and editors) out there. What Ms. Glick is less eager to represent is another agent's bread and butter.

But ... glad as I would be to find an agent, to see the agent find an editor interested in pitching my manuscript to a publisher's acquisition board, to be courted by a publisher eager to put my manuscript between covers and into bookstores, and from there to find a vast (or even respectable!) community of readers ... the truer answer would be that I don't write adult fiction because I think it's the most likely path to that sort of success. Nope. I write adult fiction because adult fiction is what I love to read, adult fiction is what kindles my creative passion, writing adult fiction is what I really, really, really want to do.

A few weeks ago Nathan Bransford posted a video on his blog without much in the way of explanation. Nathan is a former literary agent whose first novel, Jacob Wonderbar and the Cosmic Space Kapow, is being released today, 12 May 2011 -- congrats Nathan!

Here's the video Nathan posted last month, Scott Weaver's Rolling through the Bay:



So ... what's the connection? How does Scott Weaver's elaborate construction have anything to do with adult fiction being hard to sell?

Here's how:

Mr. Weaver didn't take 35 years (yes, you read that right) to build his truly, geekily cool toothpick-sculpture-slash-ping-pong-ball-obstacle-course because he thought he could sell it, or because he figured it would bring him fame and immortality. I mean c'mon, does the guy sound crazy to you? Mr. Weaver built his sculpture because it's what he really, really, really wanted to do.

I get that too.

When the phone rings and the caller is that agent who does want to represent my finished adult fiction manuscript, Consequence, can you guess what I'll be doing? Yup. That's right. I'll be working on my next adult fiction project. It's what I really, really, really want to do.

What do you do just because you really, really, really want to?

News cycle, information glut

Japan made it back onto the front page of a lot of American newspapers this week. It's not as if the unraveling nuclear disaster ever got "better" in the month since the earthquake and tsunami of 11 March. It's just that this week the officials in charge of such things raised the 'ranking' of the nuclear power plant crisis to the highest level of an international scale, on a par with the worst such crisis ever, at Chernobyl in 1986.

Slow motion disaster is background news. Escalation puts a crisis above the fold (or, in this day and age, above the scroll horizon). Were you tracking the fact that there are, very unusually, street protests in Tokyo around the nuclear crisis and the risk that last month's earthquake and tsunami have surfaced? Not a lot of media focus on that...

Libya: we in the lower reaches of North America are paying plenty of attention to Libya because the U.S. has CIA boots on the ground and both U.S. and NATO planes are flying attack missions. It's a war, and each day it becomes more clear that the U.S. is backing revolt against a merciless tyrant (we knew that going in) by a weak and disorganized opposition (optimistic strategists hoped otherwise).

Syria's got a war on too, and there the balance is tilted even more heavily toward government "security" forces in tanks against protesters who do not seem to be armed at all ... and there's not much in the way of journalistic witness either.

Egypt? Tunesia? Yemen? Conflict, betrayal, dictatorial recidivism are all still in play. But there's only so much that fits above the fold.

I've been meaning to write about Bradley Manning, the Pfc. being held in the military brig at Quantico under conditions that, "according to 250 of America's most eminent legal scholars [...] are illegal, unconstitutional, and could even amount to torture," as the U.K.'s Guardian reported over the weekend. The U.S. government's torture of Pfc. Manning -- accused of passing classified material to Wikileaks -- has been the topic of protest and many newspaper editorials. But I haven't pushed his imprisonment and treatment to the front of my to-blog-about queue because ... well ... because ... it's overwhelming how much truly awful news there is to assimilate.

And the deficit hoax? The attempt by one major U.S. party to destroy the government and the failure of the other to defend it? Not going there. Not today.

A colleague brought a Gartner article to my attention the other day: 'Big Data' Is Only the Beginning of Extreme Information Management. Here are a couple of sentences that caught my eye:

Big data has such a vast size that it exceeds the capacity of traditional data management technologies; it requires the use of new or exotic technologies simply to manage the volume alone. But processing matters, too.

The article topic is not what the context of this post might lead you to think. The Gartner authors are discussing how businesses and other organizations ought to approach management and analysis of very large data sets -- from consumer spending and web-surfing patterns, to massive sets of scientific data -- the sort of big data that is more and more regularly the basis of big business decisions.

But ... yeah.

The vast size of big data about what's happening across the globe is blowing my wetware's data management fuses, right and left. And it ain't all about taking in data. It's about processing too.

The Global Information Industry Center at UC San Diego explained in a research report:

In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). Information at work is not included.

Um. Go back and read that last sentence. That one really makes my head spin. I work in information technology. Tracking and organizing information at work is pretty much what I do. And keep in mind: the GIIC report analyzed information consumption two years ago. Nobody imagines those numbers are going down, right?

Given the 21st century information glut, how is a citizen to participate responsibly in democratic governance? Reader suggestions welcome......




Thanks to Kitamura Yayoi for bringing the Tokyo anti-nuclear street-protest to my attention; and to the Argonne National Laboratory for sharing the included photo of its IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer on Flickr.

Six things about e-books

E-books are really really hot in the news (again), in significant part because of through-the-roof sales of Amanda Hocking's self-published novels ... which I am not going to write about because Kristin Nelson, Nathan Bransford, Lauren Abramo, and the author herself have already thoroughly deconstructed the hype.

Nope. I'm going to list five other things about e-books that have been news in the last several weeks, and that I think are worth a second thought. Here we go...


HarperCollins policy punishes libraries



As Publisher's Weekly explained last week, "HarperCollins -- citing the explosive growth of e-book sales --announced a new e-book lending policy beginning March 7 that will limit the length of its library licenses to a maximum of 26 loans per e-title." Librarians are furious, and Pimp My Novel blogger Eric explains how and why the publisher's policy is "completely nuts" in his post Panic! at the Library. (In a parenthetically related note, a former director of four public libraries who posts as "inHI" shared Thoughts on Public Library Funding this past Sunday on Daily Kos.)


Jon Carroll on what's dysfunctional about e-readers

Jon Carroll is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. On 2 March 2011 Carroll wrote about his experience using a Kindle. I like his columns in general, and this particular perspective was a good example of why that's so. In Mr. Carroll's own words:

"I've been using my Kindle for two months now. [...] I quite like it - it's light, it's readable, and the tabs and buttons are intuitive and easy to use. Still, it's really, in my view anyway, only good for fiction. I like the random facts and discursive paragraphs in nonfiction, in part because I can use them for my column. I did not realize until I started using the Kindle that the advantage of a real book is that I can find specific sentences and paragraphs quickly using only my brain. I remember where in the book the page is, and where on the page the quote is. This is not a matter of turning down pages or inserting ripped-up bits of paper; it's just remembering. Using that technique on a Kindle is essentially impossible. There are no page numbers, and no good way to mark passages. There's a certain sameness to the typography, a digital-versus-analog thing, that is wearying after a while. I do like how portable it is, how good it is for lines and waiting rooms, but it ain't a book. So, you know, now what?"


Are e-book sales going up? You betcha.

Here's a summary from the AAP (Association of American Publishers) report on ebook sales, from Publisher's Weekly on Feb 21: "The Association of American Publishers' domestic sales report for 2010 showed e-book sales jumping significantly from last year, rising 164.4%, with e-books bringing in $441 million at the 14 companies that reported sales, compared to $166.9 million in 2009. While all print categories were down slightly in 2010, children's/YA hardcover dropped the most, at 9.5%. The good news for reporting companies is that the significant growth in e-book sales was able to make up for the drops in print revenue, resulting in a 0.2% increase in combined print and e-book sales in 2010. E-book sales represented 8.3% of combined trade sales in 2010, up from 3.2% in 2009. E-book sales have jumped 623% since 2008, when sales from reporting companies were $61.3 million, a figure that represented about 1% of trade sales."


Random House comes around to the "agency model" for e-books

This one's a bit arcane for those who don't follow the minutae of how publishing works. The "agency model" means that a bookseller (like Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com) receives a commission on books sold at the price a publisher sets; this differs from the usual model for printed books, in which a vendor buys some quantity from a publisher and sets the price itself. Why is this important to e-book authors and buyers? Because it is a direct challenge to Amazon's lock on the market (including price-setting) for e-books, and aligns well with Apple's iBookstore business model. With his usual clarity, and the advantage of his insider perspective, Eric's The Agency Six provides a more complete explanation on his blog, Pimp My Novel. [UPDATE: About 20 min. after this post hit the intertubes, Nathan Bransford posted Why Some E-Books Cost More Than The Hardcover, which goes a long way toward explaining why bookselling looks so bloody confusing to book buyers in these perilous times.]


The iPad 2

The iPad 2 is more, thinner, lighter, faster, and -- we're told -- better that tatty old original iPad; it is an Apple device; and it may well push the boundaries of what people do with e-books. I don't plan to buy one, but Steve Jobs doesn't care because millions of others will -- starting tomorrow. Along with changes to the way books are sold (cf. the "agency model" note, above), the iPad 2 may prove a key element of Apple's strategy to challenge Amazon's dominance of e-book readers (i.e., the Kindle) and e-book sales.


Is the e-book revolution really revolutionary???

When curious about reality in all things bookish, it's generally a good bet to check on what Nathan Bransford has to say. Here's Nathan's 22 February take on reality in Do Record Stores Point the Way of the Future for Bookstores: "When you consider that the digital revolution happened in music a little over a decade ago, it's interesting to see what has happened to record stores since the rise of the mp3. Basically: carnage on a massive scale. A huge number of stores closed, especially national chains. [...] And an interesting fact to bear in mind is that digital revenue still has not surpassed physical."

Nathan cited a NY Times article of 20 Jan 2011, Digital Music Sales are Starting to Slow, Report Says: "Sales of digital music now account for 29 percent of record companies’ global revenue [...]"

He also cited a Dayton Daily News (Ohio) article of 20 Jan that asserted "Vinyl was the fastest-growing music format in an otherwise distressed year, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. The throwback format increased 14 percent, selling more copies in 2010 than any other year since SoundScan started tracking sales in 1991." The more things change...



Looking for a bottom line here? You probably can't find a straight one, but I'll propose this:

The book's not dead. Long live the book!


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Speed dating for the bookish
Losing libraries (guest post)
Book clubs in a box from the public library

Social media as author platform

In Data-mining the SF Writers Conference schedule I wrote, a week before the conference began, that I was "a bit disappointed" to see only a few scheduled sessions that touched directly on the topics of "e-books, the changing landscape of self-publishing options, and What That All Means to writers."

In the actual event, I was glad to partake of an abundance of sessions focused on giving authors and prospective authors guidance on What Is To Be Done to put any book in the hands of readers, whether the book is brought out by a New York publisher or self-published, whether it is distributed in paper or digital form.

The bottom line across all of these means of book packaging and distribution was this message: it doesn't much matter who publishes your book or how. In an age of savaged marketing budgets even for books brought out by the Six Sisters, promoting a book is largely an author's responsibility. Even a novelist needs a platform to succeed.

What does that mean?

As Christina Katz explains in her book Get Known Before the Book Deal, excerpted from Chuck Sambuchino's blog, "The wo[rd] platform simply describes all the ways you are visible and appealing to your future, potential or actual readership. Platform development is important not only for authors; it's also crucial for aspiring and soon-to-be authors. Your platform includes your Web presence, any public speaking you do, the classes you teach, the media contacts you've established, the articles you've published, and any other means you currently have for making your name and your future books known to a viable readership."

The first session I attended at SFWC, titled "Get a grip: be your own best promoter," was given by Teresa LeYung Ryan and Elisa Southard. I wasn't crazy about the style of this session, but I did find value in the core exercise.

Teresa and Elisa led the room through initial development of a "talking tagline": a way of stating concisely what an author claims s/he delivers to a reader. For a non-fiction author peddling an area of her/his expertise, the focus of such a statement is relatively easy to find: it's all about rock climbing, or building birdhouses, or paying lower taxes, or making a relationship work. For novelists, a "talking tagline" might be more elusive. The YA author sitting next to me agreed that it was easier for a novelist to describe what s/he is delivering in a particular book than over the course of many fiction projects. Nonetheless, the attempt to frame what a reader of Consequence would get out of my current novel kept running through my head as I attended other sessions and readied myself to pitch to agents on Sunday morning.

If LeYung Ryan and Southard focused on the message -- what that "viable readership" needs to hear -- sessions I attended that were led by Tee Morris, Rusty Shelton, and Stephanie Chandler focused on the means of getting that message out into the world. In a self-actuated, digitally linked 21st century, they all insisted that the means is social media.

Tee Morris and Rusty Shelton talked up Twitter in a session called "Finding Your Tweet Spot." I know, I know. I went anyway.

I've never quite gotten Twitter. I've also heard about a zillion others say the same thing -- though it's worth a nod to yesterday's blog post from literary agent and "query shark" Janet Reid, who tore into authors who make excuses for avoiding social media. At the conference, Tee and Rusty made a credible case that the ability to rapidly connect with others through a medium that encourages linking out to other social media (videos, blogs, music, any content you can imagine) provides a powerful platform for networking with potential readers and fellow-writers. Rusty offered an interesting pair of similes: if Twitter is a cocktail party, Facebook is a family reunion. If you're aim is to connect with people you know, Facebook's the place. If you're aiming to extend your circle, try Twitter.

I'm giving it a try. Tee Morris's book Teach Yourself Twitter in 10 Minutes is one way to get savvy about the platform; or check out the platform's on-line support and Emlyn's 10-tip guide to Twitter posted last week on Novel Publicity's blog (also follow the links she provides to past posts) ... thanks again to Janet Reid for pointing me to Emlyn.

(It was interesting to read a few days after hearing Rusty and Tee speak that Nearly Half of Americans use Facebook; Only 7% Use Twitter. The article, on Mashable.com, noted that "Twitter [...] is driven largely by so-called power users, and only 21% of registered users are actually active on the site. Another interesting and related Twitter usage stat: 22.5% of users are responsible for 90% of all tweets." This is not necessarily inconsistent with the message I heard at SFWC. If authors, agents, editors, book bloggers, and especially people others trust & like to hear from are the people tweeting, those are the people with whom an author looking for readers wants to connect.)

Stephanie Chandler gave a presentation at SFWC titled "Storming Cyberspace" ... and a lot of what she had to say is outlined in her 22 February Authority Publishing post, Elements of an Online Marketing Plan for Authors -- a great 'consolation prize' for those who didn't have the chance to hear her speak. She echoed something Rusty said in the "Tweet Spot" session and emphasized again in another, titled "Digital Publicity": professional journalists and editors comb the web for stories & topical expertise, and you'll be glad if what they find is you ... because taking a ride in an established media vehicle, whether it's a popular blog or a well-circulated magazine or newspaper is another excellent way to get on readers' radar.

It was interesting to recognize something that happened to me late last year as proof of the fact that established, mainstream media editors are keeping a close eye on the intertubes. In November an old friend who works as an editor for a top-shelf magazine based in New York serendipitously found one of my blogs cross-posted on Daily Kos. He liked what I'd written, and jotted a quick e-mail to tell me so. This was during the middle of a weekday, East Coast time: he was working, not idly surfing. I didn't know you blogged, he wrote. I sent him a link to One Finger Typing. If my editor friend is combing the blogosphere in search of the zeitgeist, so are his peers.

[Of course -- keeping atop latest breaking trends -- the (somewhat silly) question whether blogging is over is in the air. Nathan Bransford asked it the week before last, in his post "You Tell Me: Have Blogs Peaked?" A few days later the NY Times was chewing over the same topic -- Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter -- which may or may not prove that the Grey Lady is following Nathan's blog. But take the NYT's conclusions with a grain of that Mashable.com article I linked to a few paragraphs back: "only 7% use Twitter." And then there's the damper thrown on rushes to judgment by Mathew Ingram, in his post "Blogging Is Dead Just Like the Web is Dead" (thanks to Nathan for that link).]


The self-promotion, the tracking of which channels are viable in a quickly evolving mediascape, the networking as if your literary future depends on it -- none of this is the sort of stuff I thought I was signing up for when I decided to write long-form fiction. But in a world of socially networked content, people turn more and more regularly (and exclusively!) to the internet for things to read, learn, and do. An author trying to attract a readership would be missing the boat if s/he failed to build an on-line presence.

As Janet Reid wrote yesterday, "There isn't any other option."







Thanks to GustavoG for the image of Flickr represented as a network of people sharing photos, circa 2005.

CORRECTION: This post originally misattributed Christina Katz's definition of platform to Chuck Sambuchino (who excerpted from Ms. Katz's book on his blog). Apologies for the error, which has been corrected as of 9 Mar 2011.

Publishing ain't dead, but it's a deer in the headlights

I attended the San Francisco Writer's Conference this weekend, met a lot of people, and learned plenty. I also had the unexpected pleasure and honor of falling into a hotel lobby conversation with keynote speaker Dorothy Allison, an author who I have admired since I read Bastard Out of Carolina soon after it was published in the '90s.

There was more at the conference to blog about than I'll ever get to, but I have to remark on an odd session on Saturday afternoon, when eight fiction editors from a mix of large New York houses and small presses introduced themselves to a crowd of some hundred or so writers and then fielded questions. There's a lot of anxious Kremlin-watching among authors and would-be authors in this era of e-books, major publisher consolidations, and mammoth bookstore chains going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Everybody wants to know what's next. Nobody has a clear view of the future.

The editors on the panel had a lot to say about what kinds of fiction they wanted to buy, whether authors should consider hiring a freelance editor, how self-publishing affects a book's prospects for New York publication (poorly) or a second book's prospects (a better story, depending). Good stuff, worth hearing.

Then talk turned to e-books. And here's where it got strange.

Most editors on the panel represented large New York houses. They were mostly thirty-somethings, I guessed, employed by the likes of Macmillan, Bertelsman AG, Simon & Schuster, et al. And when they answered questions about the shift in book format from paper to digital, they weren't copping to the fundamental upheaval in the industry. You can't actually blame them. They're only the tip of a huge, sinking iceberg, and they're not making decisions in the executive suites of the Six Sisters. They can't speak publicly in contradiction to their employers' Official Line. Not if they want to keep their jobs. I'm guessing they're all polishing CVs & working out back-up plans for when the next round of pink slips are handed out. I think I would be.

So the answers to writers' questions tended toward tweaking placement of deck chairs on the Titanic.

Piracy was a big issue for these editors. One trotted out the fascinating confession that publishers are worried Amazon might underreport the number of electronic books sold, since there's no physical check or balance on the retailer's unverified assertion. What we need, the editor mused, is some kind of 'phone home' record of a digital book being unlocked by an end-user. You know, like Microsoft has been printing on their software distribution media for fifteen years.

A couple of brave writers posed more pointed questions to break open the subject behind the subject. After one editor insisted that publishers were existentially bound to Amazon, however devious and untrustworthy Jeff Bezos might be, a writer asked "Why do you need Amazon? Couldn't publishers get out from under Amazon's thumb by setting up a distribution arm that the major New York houses can promote as a go-to destination for buying books without a middleman?"

The answers were breathtaking in their lack of inspiration. There was truth in each. But ... the pedantry!

"The beauty of Amazon," one editor said, "is that everything is there."

"Can you name ten books published by [insert name of any particular publisher here]?" asked another.

"Amazon handles the piracy issue," yet another explained.

And another was quick to imply that the Six Sisters would be busted for monopoly practices if they tried to move in lockstep.

Does any of this sound familiar? Wasn't there another media industry (hint: used to sell vinyl, then CDs) that has more or less crucified itself on the same sort of recalcitrance over new content formats and business models? I'm not claiming to have a prêt-à-porter solution to hand to NY publishers (if I did, maybe I could convince one to publish my own book and quit all the shilly-shallying around with agents and queries and whatnot).

But did anyone on the panel name alternate means to the NY Times bestseller lists or Amazon's recommender features to refer readers to books they might like? Goodreads? Library Thing? Facebook? Book bloggers? Book tweeters? No, no one did. Of course, none of these are an instant panacea. But nurturing and promoting a diverse ecosystem of distribution and recommendation channels has to be in publishers' best interest, right? To counter the weight of big, bad Jeff Bezos?

Why not invest in doing so?

Sure, any attempt to shift the status quo will be riddled with risk, though perhaps no more risk than sinking slowly (or not) into the tar pit of literary history. No, I don't understand the publishing business one one-thousanth as well as the least knowledgeable editor on that panel. I'm not a good businessperson in the first place. Yes, I get that Bezos has a lot of publishers by the short hairs because Amazon is a distribution channel that must be reckoned with. Yet it doesn't take Warren Buffett to see that publishers are taking refuge in sand castles as a tidal wave approaches.

Here's what editor Jennifer Joseph of of Manic D Press, also included in the panel, said of the publishing industry on Saturday: "This is the most revolutionary time since Gutenberg invented the printing press." Here's something else she said: "We're trying to fit great literature into a different way of living" [i.e., into a way of living that increasingly fails to make time or attention for books].

And what did Dorothy Allison say in her keynote the day before? In her slow Southern drawl she told the room that "publishing ain't dead." Allison was looking at the big picture, considering the simple truth that everything changes. She spoke of attending an historians' conference decades ago, before all the intertubes were fully screwed together, and hearing the academics describe changes coming down the pike exactly like the ones we're experiencing now. As she put it, "historians think long." But just because publishing is changing doesn't mean it's finished. At least not for those who adapt to its evolution.

Jennifer Joseph and Dorothy Allison -- seasoned women who have been around the block more than a time or seven -- sounded like they were grappling with things that are actually happening. Certainly more so than most of the editors representing their very large, very slow-to-respond publishing houses. Or so it seems from the oblique angle this writer has on the industry.

I have nothing against very large publishing houses. I don't think paper books are going away. I would like to see my work published by one of the New York houses sooner than later. But it's not confidence-inspiring when editors from the Six Sisters pretend they're dealing with a little brush fire burning in the far corner of Podunk ... when everybody can see that the brush fire is an inferno and it's burning in the heart of literary New York.





Thanks to wwphotos for the image of Jeff Bezos from the photographer's flickr stream.

How to organize an on-line writers' group

Yesterday I wrote about the question "Does a writer need a writers' group?" Bottom line: nothing beats a group of committed writers if the object is effective feedback on your pages. And you can do it on-line.

When I joined my on-line writer's group the old-timers had an established way of working, and it seemed pretty sound to me.

The process was informally understood. We did find that sometimes the informality left room for divergent expectations about what active membership required. So a few months after I joined we decided to write down what we were up to, to make sure everybody was on the same page. As a relatively new and entirely enthusiastic member of the group, I volunteered for this duty.

It turned out to be useful to have guidelines. One of their purposes is to keep us focused. Another is to orient new members and prospective new members to how the group operates.

Our guidelines currently weigh in at around 1200 words, and we revisit them from time to time. I've included a lightly-edited version below for those looking for a place to start drafting guidelines for their own groups.

But first things first ...


Questions to answer while forming a writers' group

The first thing to do if you're organizing a writer's group -- on-line or face-to-face -- is to ask and answer some questions. A bunch of questions, actually. Here's my proposed set:

1. Will our group be about supporting each other? Helping each other improve as writers? Figuring out how to approach agents and editors? Vetting work for self-publication? If more than one of the foregoing, in what proportions, and how rigidly do we adhere to these purposes?
2. Will we limit our members to fiction writers or to those who write non-fiction? Any particular genres, styles, or period focus? Memoirists? Short story writers? A mix of these? Is the mix well-suited to each of us getting the feedback we seek?
3. Are we sharing first drafts, more polished work, or does anything go depending where a member is in her/his writing process?
   
4. How often will we cycle through reading/critiquing sessions -- a week, two weeks, a month, something else?
5. How much time can each member devote to reading and critiquing others' work each cycle? What does that time commitment translate to in word-count?
   
6. How frequently do each of us want to have our own work critiqued? Each cycle? Every other cycle? Every three?
   
7. Given that some people will need to step back from full participation every so often -- that's the way life happens -- what's a good group size to ensure we're getting a variety of perspectives each time a member's work is critiqued?
8. Taking account of all the cycle and quantity questions so far, how many people per cycle should share how many words for how many others to review and critique?
9. What ground rules or expectations should we establish about about how members ought to participate? What if some members fail to give as much attention to others' work as they receive on their own work?
10. How do we recruit new members? How do we respond if some think that a member isn't working out?
11. Who will facilitate the group's logistics -- scheduling and so on? One person or more? Is this a "permanent" position or a responsibility we share in turn?
    
12. If we're an on-line group, will we just exchange e-mail or will we use some kind of discussion forum or website? Which? Who will maintain it?
    

The mechanics of forming an on-line writers' group

Having thought through the questions listed above, let's say you're interested in forming an on-line writer's group, or overhauling one you're in. There are mechanical issues to resolve ... including choices about technology you'll use to support your group. A full comparison of lots of options is more than I'll tackle in this post, so here's a concise description of the "infrastructure" my group uses.

Because the group began by using Google Groups for pretty much all its needs, we're pretty solidly embedded in Google's many offerings:

1. We now use Google Calendar to manage our posting schedule
2. Google Groups supports our communication (discussion threads), as it has from the start
   
3. A Google Site is how we bring it all together
4. Our guidelines (below) are maintained as a Google Doc

With links to "how do you do that?" pages, the calendar and the Google Groups discussion forum are embedded in pages on our Google Site. Our guidelines, as I mentioned, are a Google Doc, and we embed that too.

Other flavors of on-line tools are possible, of course, from Wordpress to Drupal to Joomla and beyond. If there's interest, maybe I'll circle around and review some alternate choices in a future post. Google's offerings work for us because the Googleplex worries about the infrastructure, all we have to do is respond to the sometimes-unpredictable changes in what's on-offer.

But the most important mechanics have to do with how the group functions, not the technology it uses to implement its processes. To that end, I've included my group's guidelines below, in the hope they might help shape other groups' operation. We started out with lots of bullets, but that looked too daunting ... so our guidelines are written in a less formal tone than, say, a national constitution (!) ... but at the same time we tried to be reasonably clear and concrete.

You're welcome to adopt or adapt our guidelines if they fit your needs. Please take note of the Creative Commons licensing terms under which the guidelines are shared.


Guidelines for an on-line writers group

[If you republish or repurpose these guidelines, please cite the author -- that would be Steve Masover -- and provide a link to this blog post. Permission to use these guidelines is granted under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.]


We are a group of writers committed to improving our work through engagement and mutual critique.

The main activity and primary responsibility of members is posting and reviewing pages of original writing, on a regular schedule. Our cardinal rule is: What happens in the group stays in the group. No member may publish, post, blog, distribute, or make public in any way the original writing of any other member unless s/he asks for and receives explicit permission. Violation of this rule is grounds for immediate ejection from the group.

Our culture assumes that members are in the group because they are willing to give and respond to honest critique. No one's work is unanimously praised. All of us learn to swallow our defensive instincts in order to understand and consider feedback our fellow-members have taken time to offer. We rarely get a chance to post a whole work; we give and receive feedback on work that is often read out of the context or flow of its place in a larger work. This takes getting used to. We either incorporate & apply lessons learned from members' feedback, or are able to articulate how our different choices strengthen the piece(s) on which we're working. The give-and-take is not always easy, but it makes us stronger as writers. Those who stick with it find in the group a source of support and strength for our writing, and are "toughened up" for the kind of reading and critique to which we each hope to be subjected by agents, editors, and reviewers.

Core Activities

Members post pages on which they are actively working and which are intended for publication. Pages on which members are "actively working" are usually fiction (a chapter, scenes, a short story); but might also be an outline or precis for work in development, a query letter, a synopsis for an agent or editor, etc. Questions about craft or the publishing business that are relevant to the member's work and direction are also fair game. Fiction is our usual focus, but non-fiction can be part of the mix; non-fiction with a narrative arc is preferred.

Each week, those members whose turn has come up on the group's Posting Schedule make their work available in a new discussion thread in our Forum (or, commonly, as a file in a commonly-readable word processing format); deadline to post is Saturday at 11:59 pm, poster's local time. However the material is made available, the poster initiates a new discussion thread to notify the group that material is ready for review and to serve as the thread in which feedback is given. Other members respond to posted pages by the following Wednesday, at 11:59 pm, respondent's local time.

These regularly scheduled postings are coordinated by a designated member of the group. Weekly pages to be reviewed are limited to under ~5000 words total, from all members scheduled to post -- e.g., 2500 words each from two posting members. If a member posts a larger quantity of work than is appropriate for that week's review & feedback, s/he is expected to indicate which within-size-limits portion is to be reviewed. Posted pages may be included in a discussion thread, or uploaded as files in a format accessible to all members.

Members posting pages are encouraged to ask for the type of feedback they want or need. Members offering feedback are encouraged to tailor feedback to what the poster has asked for; to honestly praise what's praiseworthy; and to couch criticism constructively. When a member enters or re-engages with the group, s/he is expected to "dive in" to the middle of other members' works-in-progress, responding to the currently-posted pages with whatever understanding s/he has of the larger context; the group will not 'rewind' to the beginning of their projects. The new or re-engaging member is welcome to catch up by reading previously posted chapters, but need not do so. Posting members are encouraged to provide an overview or synopsis to help new or re-engaging members get their bearings.

Members who are posting are expected to offer feedback on other members' posts. This is core to the 'economic proposition' of the group: the time a member commits to offering feedback is the 'dues' for receiving feedback on her/his own work. Members who have recused themselves from the posting schedule because they are unable to consistently offer feedback are welcome to participate in those discussion threads for which they have time and interest, including "other discussions" described below.

Members are encouraged to ask the scheduler for more or less frequent 'assignments' if they wish; accommodation depends on the group's aggregate needs. Members maintain a rough 'declaration' of the lengths and types of posts they expect to submit over the coming months on a simple table at the bottom of the group's Posting Schedule page. The posting schedule will be set 2-6 weeks in advance, give or take.

Optional Activities
Other discussion threads are initiated on an ad hoc basis, as individual members wish. For example:

• Thematic scene threads: members might be invited to post a sex scene or an action scene from work-in-progress or older work for general discussion/comparison/critique/fun
• Threads that treat an aspect of craft (voice, show-vs-tell, grammar, point-of-view, dialog, etc.)
• Threads that summarize and/or discuss points from a How-To-Write book or article (or contrast advice from multiple sources)
• Longer or 'extra' materials can be uploaded for optional reading and review. These might be full manuscripts, re-worked material, draft queries, older work, and other pages for optional, 'out of band' review. (Recognizing that time necessary to review additional material is non-trivial, prospective posters are advised to canvas members to see whether there's interest and ability to provide additional review.)

The group recognizes that material of this "optional" sort may or may not get reviewed, due to time constraints and/or member interest; and that no member is obligated to read or review 'extra' pages or posts.

Membership

Any member can propose new candidates for group membership. Proposals from members who have been with the group long enough to have a solid feel for its processes and dynamics are strongly preferred. New members are screened. The screening process seeks to assure that a candidate is an active writer; is willing and able to regularly and constructively participate in the group's core activities; and agrees to abide by these guidelines.

It's expected that members will need to take a break from the group from time to time, whether for personal reasons or because their writing process requires it. As a courtesy to other members, and because unexplained disappearances may weaken the group, notice of intent to take a break should be posted in a Discussion thread.





Thanks to AE, LG, SL, and SW for taking in this stray novelist. Thanks to DB, MM, and KR for joining us a few months later. Thanks to WallyG for the image of Jack Kerouac's manuscript of On The Road.