I belong to an internet forum populated by a right bunch of weirdos some lovely people, and in the course of discussions about my survey, the one in which I’m trying to figure out how people discover new books and authors (it’s still open, please answer it!), the question was asked:

So what the hell is Literary Fiction? Is everything else is non-literary fiction?

The answers were far too insightful to just leave them hidden away in our little corner of the web, so I’m happy to say that I have permission to share them with you. Names have been redacted to protect the innocent.

Serious books that aspire to be literature. Full of high falutin ideas and not many knob gags.

You mean books that the reviewer and/or marketer didn’t understand (or finish?) and couldn’t place elsewhere?

And a lack of death-rays, super-villains etc

What’s the difference between “classics” and “literary?”

Classics is old. Literary is new stuff pretending to be good.

I reckon literary fiction is where the prose is so good the plot can afford to be poo. They make great reads but lesser films.

So can I assume “literary” is “everything left over without a genre”? You know, books about people and their problems who aren’t aliens/knights/spies/criminals/women?

Some are good, but some are a navel-gazing wankathons. Try The Finkler Question. Great prose, but sod all happens.

The stuff that wins awards, but nobody actually reads?

I think some of those definitions are pretty much spot on.

I’m interested in finding out more from readers about what they like and how they find out about new books and authors. I’m starting off with a very simple two-question survey. Please do take a moment to fill it out! When I’ve got a significant number of responses, I’ll publish the results.

UPDATE: Right, well that all went unexpectedly wrong! SurveyMonkey, it turns out, charges £24 per month to access your data as soon as you go over 100 responses, and I was rapidly heading towards 300. That £24 only pays for the first 1000 responses per month which, given the rate at which they were coming in, didn’t seem like it would last long. If you go over 1000, then you have to pay 10p per response, so if it really took off and I got 2000 responses, that would be £124.

Now, I don’t mind paying for stuff online. I buy a lot of independent software and pay for a number of key web services which I think are good value for money. But SurveyMonkey is taking the piss, frankly. I’d happily pay, say, a fiver per month or a few quid per survey if it came with unlimited responses, but I’m not going to pay £24 per month for such a horribly hobbled service.

So, I have been trying Obsurvey which has far fewer options that SurveyMonkey, but so far getting mixed responses from users as to whether that site is usable. If it turns out to be unusable is another option I can try yet, but I know that the more I change things, the less likely people will be to bother to fill things out. All I can say is sorry!

Today I passed the first milestone in my ebook pricing experiment: I have sold as many copies of Argleton in the first 11 days of January as I sold in the four months it was available last year. However, and it’s a big however, I’ve made less than a quarter of the money in royalties than I would have if I’d kept the price the same. A further big however, however, is that the absolute numbers I’m talking about are tiny: 49 copies sold in the last four months of 2011, and 50 sold in the last 11 days.

Nonetheless it’s a milestone and I’ve passed it. The question remains now is how long it will take to pass the next one: to equal the amount of money in royalties that I made last year, estimated at £54.79. I know that’s a trifling amount but we all have to start somewhere.

Of course, these are actually unfair comparisons for two main reasons:

• Argleton now has seven 5-star reviews in the UK store; one 5-star and one 4-star review in the US store. It should therefore perform better now than when it didn’t have those reviews.
• Lots of people got Kindles for Christmas that they want to fill with free/cheap content, so one would expect a sales spike in early January, which seems to be what I’ve seen. Sales have certainly decreased in the last few days.

Once I get to the end of January I’ll publish all my stats for comparison. I have to increase sales by an orders of magnitude or three before I really see a return, but I hope that one day these numbers will be the beginning of a rather attractive graph!

Today I stumbled across a blog post by KB/KT Grant about how authors who can’t handle negative reviews should really stay away from reading them, and certainly shouldn’t throw a hissy fit about any criticism they get. I hadn’t previously seen any of the examples of authorial meltdown that Grant refers to, but she is absolutely correct to say that writers should never, ever respond badly to reviews. Not in public. Not in private. Not ever.

Negative reviews are part and parcel of putting stuff out there, and if you can’t handle reading them you should ignore all reviews all the time. It’s really that simple.

But whilst Grant says that sites like Goodreads are for readers, not for authors…

At no time in Goodreads’ mission statement does it state that their site is for authors to promote their books

…and whilst that might be true of their mission statement, when signed in to the site as an author it is very, very clear that Goodreads does indeed think that the site is for authors to promote their books. On my author dashboard it says:

Check the stats for your books and giveaways, and learn more about how to promote your books on Goodreads.

That’s right up at the top of the page. In the sidebar, it says:

Learn more about how to promote your books with special tools on Goodreads.

Clearly, Goodreads does want bring authors and readers together. And there’s a risk in that, for both parties: Readers risk learning that a particular author is a moron and authors risk being harangued by moronic readers, for it is an undeniable truth that both moronic authors and moronic readers exist.

But you just have to get over it and move on.

I also think that reviews, even negative ones, can be really useful for authors, if they have the maturity to read them with both an open mind and a pinch of salt. A review is one person’s opinion and it may well be that that person is a douche. It may also be that your book really does suck, or that you really did mess up the ending, or that your characterisation isn’t as crisp as it should be. The truth to be found in negative reviews varies from ‘all of it’ to ‘none of it’, and only if you are honest with yourself as to the potential for flaws in your work will you be able learn something from them.

It’s also important to know when to ignore criticism. I have had one person criticise (not in a review, but in a comment on G+) Argleton, but they also told me that they had read only half the book. I had hoped that they would finish it and then either stand by their point or let me know that actually they now thought their initial assessment to be incorrect. They didn’t, which rather robbed their criticism of validity.

But these days, authors cannot completely escape contact with readers, particularly as authors both new and mid-list have to do a lot of their own promotion and a lot of that work is done online and in social media.

I personally believe that we should not even try to avoid contact (although if you’re wildly successful you will have to limit it simply because of scale: you simply cannot spend the time that would be required to reply to everyone). Even I, as an almost entirely unknown author, get people saying hello on Twitter because they have read or are about to read Argleton. I always try to reply politely, although as with all things digital sometimes I miss messages. But if someone were to say something negative, I would either respond gracefully, ignore it, or block them, depending on the nature of the message.

And that’s the key thing to remember. As authors, we do have some agency here. We choose who to follow on Twitter and who to block. We choose whose comments to allow on our blog, and whose to block. And if someone posts an abusive review on Amazon (as opposed to one that is simply negative), we can choose to report it and let Amazon deal with it. And the rest we can choose to ignore.

There’s something always Darwinian about the kind of stupidity Grant describes. If an author is going to wig out at their readers, then it is going to come back to bite them on the arse in the form of “Do Not Read” notices, more negative reviews, and the rapid creation of very bad reputations. Authors at any stage of their career except ‘already wildly successful’ will do themselves irreparable harm by such ill-considered actions because, by all accounts, publishers and agents do have a tendency to notice these sorts of things. Freaking out over a bad review isn’t just bad for one’s blood pressure, it’s also bad for one’s career.

As they say, Karma’s a bitch.

It was with great sadness that I read today of Anne McCaffrey’s death.

I remember the very moment that I discovered Anne McCaffrey’s work. I was standing in my aunt and uncle’s dining room after some family gathering, almost on the way out of the door, when my uncle picked a book off his shelf and offered it to me, suggesting that it might be something I’d enjoy. It was Anne McCaffrey’s The White Dragon. I can’t remember the year, but it would have had to be after 1979, when I was 8, and given the already well-thumbed nature of the book, I suspect it might have been a couple of years later.

I was hooked. McCaffrey’s writing was amazing. The story flowed so beautifully, I really couldn’t put it down. I’d always been one for reading books under the bedcovers with a torch and with McCaffrey’s books I had found a writer whose work spoke to me in a way that other writers didn’t and kept me reading long into the night (and much to the consternation of my mother).

I often joke that I moved straight from Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys to Asimov and EE Doc Smith and Heinlein, but that’s not far off reality. I never throw books away and have very, very few from that age that are traditional children’s or YA books. In fact, most of the YA books in my collection are ones I’ve bought as an adult (e.g. Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series). I didn’t get pocket money to speak of, so my reading was pretty much constrained by whatever my Dad had about. So, Night of the Trilobites it was, then.

But, as good as all that was, I can’t really say that I identified with many of the characters I found in those books. In fact, these days, I’m hard pushed to remember any female characters that I could genuinely admire at all. I mean, Friday is a great book, but it’s hard to identify with an artificial, genetically engineered woman who works as a combat courier.

McCaffrey, on the other hand, had strong female characters at the centre of many of her books that were believable, admirable, and the kind of people that I could aspire to be. They weren’t Mary Sues either. Lessa, one of McCaffrey’s key female protagonists from the Pern series, is smart, sassy, brave, but also arrogant, stubborn and grumpy.

Many of McCaffrey’s female characters came from positions of disadvantage: The Rowan was an orphan; Helva, the Ship who Sang, was severely disabled; Menolly was socially outcast from her community; Killashandra was a singer with a flawed voice. As a bit of a loner myself, these were characters whose troubles I could identify with, yet their successes were hard won and their struggles never trite or contrived. These were women I could look up to, who were successful on their own terms and who saw men as equals. These were women I wanted to be.

I remember several years ago reading somewhere, in some sort of ‘dictionary of science fiction’, that some critics looked down on McCaffrey’s work, seeing it as some kind of sop to girlie teenage romanticism, and feeling angry without really realising why (other than that they had slated one of my favourite authors). Now, running Ada Lovelace Day, I know exactly why McCaffrey’s work was sometimes belittled and why it made me so angry: McCaffrey wrote strong, smart women in a genre that was horrendously male-dominated and, sadly, some men find the only way to cope with strong women is to undermine them and, in this case, that meant derogating McCaffrey and her characters.

McCaffrey’s contribution to science fiction and literature was tremendous. As Tor said, she was “the first woman to win a Hugo Award for fiction, the first woman to win a Nebula Award, and the first author to hit the New York Times bestseller list with an SF title (The White Dragon).”

But for me, and I suspect for many others, she was also the first author to speak so directly to my experiences growing up as a girl on the edges of community. She was the first science fiction author I read who I truly believed would have understood, completely and implicitly, what it was like to be me. It was her writing, more than anyone’s, that shaped my view of what the world could be and, more importantly, what I could be. It was Anne McCaffrey who told me that I could be myself, could be outcast and still be successful.

I’m much less of the social outcast now than I was growing up, but I wouldn’t have grown up to be the woman I am without Anne McCaffrey’s fictional role models to light my way. All those long nights, reading her books under the covers, gave me strength and inspiration that no one else at the time seemed able to provide.

I have decided to give away one paperback copy of Argleton to a random person on my Writing & Bookbinding mailing list, just as soon as it hits 100 subscribers! Yay! Note that this doesn’t automatically go to the 100th person, because that wouldn’t be fair to everyone who signed up in the beginning. Rather, once it reaches 100 subscribers, I’ll draw a name from Kevin’s top hat.

To join up, just fill in the form on the right there. Easy!

If you know of anyone who might be interested in reading Argleton or in my bookbinding projects, do feel free to pop them an email along with the subtle suggestion that they might, for example, wish to toddle off to http://eepurl.com/K1kR to join up forthwith. And, of course, feel free to do any other pimpage, such as a Tweet or Facebook update.

Right, I think that’s a pretty good way to round off a Friday!

The whole discussion about what the British Fantasy Society could morph into after its recent crisis set me to thinking about what, as an emerging author, I need and where I get those needs met (if I do at all). I’m a bit of an edge case, because right now I’m more interested in getting my stuff read by giving it away and binding my own books than sending manuscripts off to agents and publishers. (Not that I wouldn’t welcome that conversation should it occur, but I’m not actively seeking it at this point.) So that possibly makes my list rather different to that of other writes, but I thought i’d share it anyway.

1. Readers
The thing that I need the most – and I think this is quite a common need amongst writers of every genre and at every stage of their career – is readers. Most of my readers so far have come via my Kickstarter project and Twitter. It’s tough getting your stuff in front of enough people to build a significant readership, and anything that helps with that is useful. Of course, I can pimp Argleton to as many people as follow me on Twitter, read my blog, or whathaveyou, but a recommendation by someone else is worth so much more. (Which is why, if you’ve read Argleton and liked it, you should feel free to review it on Amazon. )There’s a lot still to do in terms of reaching more people, but finding readers will always be my biggest challenge.

2. Design and editorial
One thing I learnt doing Argleton is that I’m rubbish as design. The cover for Argleton looked awfully amateur, but I didn’t have the budget to hire someone to do a better job. My next book project will correct that error. I’d also love to hire a professional editor at some point, but I think that might have to wait.

But there’s a big trust issue, because you could easily spend a lot of time and even money working with someone only to discover that they really aren’t right for the project. I will likely start trying to find a cover artist via my existing contacts, but if that doesn’t work out I’ll have to investigate other options.

3. Peer review
If there’s one thing that’s incredibly valuable for any writer, it’s having a handful of people willing to read your first draft and tell you when you’re doing something wrong. There’s quite a lot of websites, like Zoetrope, that allow you to exchange your reviews of other people’s work for getting reviews of your own. It can be a bit hit-and-miss, however, as not everyone has a good feel for stories and ill-considered reviews can led you on wild goose chases. I’m lucky that Kevin has a really good head for story – it was he that pointed out that my original ending of Argleton sucked, and it was through discussing it with him that I figured out what needed to happen.

4. Technical expertise
If you have ever done battle with the epub format, you’ll know what I mean about sometimes needing a bit of technical expertise to drawn on. I’m quite a geek, but even so it takes a bit of a while to get your head round the tools you need to whip an ebook into shape. When you know what you’re doing, reformatting into mobi etc., is easy, but when you don’t it can be a bit of a pain. I’ve happily accepted help from a friend on this.

5. Typesetting oversight 
If you want your book to look good, you need to properly typeset it. Sticking it in Word and picking a pretty font isn’t good enough – it needs to look professional. I’m lucky in that I know the basics of typesetting and again, I have a friend with mad ninja skills whose experience I can draw upon.

I’m not sure this list is complete, but it’ll do for now. If you have suggestions for how I can meet some of these needs, or if yours are different, do feel free to let me know in the comments.

I don’t know much about the British Fantasy Society, other than what I’ve gleaned from their website or at FantasyCon last year. In many ways, I’m in a poor position to pass any comment whatsoever on what they should or shouldn’t do after the recent controversy around the British Fantasy Awards. I’m not even in a good position to pass comment on said controversy. I’ve no inside knowledge, nor any great desire to fully read round accusation, counter-accusation, or response in order to form a considered opinion.

But what I can and want to do is think a little about about what the BFS might want to become. It’s clear that it’s at what could become an important inflection point, now that its Chairman has resigned over the awards. And it’s also clear that a number of people have questions about what the BFS is, or should be, or could be. And the only way we’re going to work out some answers is to have a public discussion about the issue, so here goes.

I’m not a member of the BFS. I hadn’t even heard of it until last year when Vince asked me if I was going to FantasyCon. I decided that, now I was taking writing more seriously, it would be a good investment and bought tickets. I knew that a few of my writerly friends would be there, so it seemed like a pretty good idea. And it was a lot of fun.

What it wasn’t was useful. At times, it struggled to be even interesting. It seemed to me that is was an event that didn’t really know what it was supposed to be.

The BFS is in the same predicament. It doesn’t know what it is or who it’s supposed to be serving. FantasyCon, I have heard, is theoretically a fan convention, but most of the people I met there were authors of varying degrees of professional. Who is the BFS for? Fans, or authors?

There’s a part of me that thinks, “Well, there’s no reason it can’t be for both fans and authors”. And it’s true that there is a valuable matchmaking role to be played between fans and authors, but can a single organisation fully provide for both sides of the coin?

What might fans want from an organisation?

• Readings and signings
• News about new book releases
• Freebies and discounts
• Content such as interviews, reviews and features in text, video, and audio, online and offline
• Exclusives
• Yearly booze-up where they can meet each other and authors
• An online space to talk about the stuff they like
• Probably some other stuff I can’t think of right now.

What might authors, at whatever stage in their careers, want from an organisation?

• Access to fans via readings, signings, other events
• Promotion of their latest works
• Advice from experts
• Content such as interviews, reviews and features in text, video, and audio, online and offline
• A community of peers to discuss the industry/their work with
• Access publishers, agents and other industry professionals
• Yearly booze-up where they can meet each other and fans
• Probably some other stuff I can’t think of right now.

There’s clearly some overlap. But any organisation wanting to serve both communities is going to be walking a fine line. The kind of content that authors want on a website, for example, is very different to that preferred by fans. But worse than that, serving both communities can create a conflict of interest.

Let’s take the idea of a convention. If your are a society of fans and you organise a convention, then you need to get in the biggest and best speakers to provide a compelling reason for the fans to buy tickets. If you are a society for authors, then your aim is to serve those authors by putting them in front of as many people as possible. An organisation trying to please both groups is likely to end up putting its own members in front of its own members, resulting in a small, cliquey event that doesn’t bring in or attract outsiders and thus doesn’t serve anyone properly.

This is a form of the Agency Dilemma and it is very hard to solve. Indeed, even with a single constituency, the Agency Dilemma persists, as can be seen by the current predicament that the BFS finds itself in: The goals of the organisation are at odds with the goals of its members, causing an inherent conflict of interest.

Indeed, this was at the heart of the issue with the BFS Awards. Having a publisher organise the awards was a serious mistake and would have been even if that publisher’s authors, publications and partner had not been involved as nominees. Any awards ceremony must be administered by people who are independent and unbiased, which means no publishers, publicists, authors, etc. Clearly, that’s going to be a real challenge.

It seems fairly clear to me that the BFS cannot be both a Fan organisation and an Author organisation without compromising its integrity. Which way it jumps is almost unimportant, as either decision would basically require the organisation to fork so that both constituencies can be served. I think it would make sense for there to be a British Fantasy Society which is focused on the needs of the fans and aims to be run by a majority of non-industry people, with the awards run exclusively by a non-industry committee.

I would then have a British Fantasy Author Society, run primarily by authors, publishers, publicists, agents and other industry people, and any dedicated fans who want to get involved. The two organisations could collaborate when it is appropriate, but would retain a sturdy dividing firewall whenever a conflict of interest might arise.

As for FantasyCon, well, that needs to decide what it is before it can decide who should organise it and how.

If I was the BFS right now, I’d be looking at a radical overhaul along these lines to not only regain credibility but also to retain some sense of relevance in this newly interconnected world. When I looked at the BFS site last year, I felt that it didn’t offer me anything that I couldn’t already get on Twitter. It would be a shame if I looked at the site again next year and felt the same way. This furore is an opportunity to examine what the BFS could and should be. We should all seize it.

Last night there was an interesting discussion on Twitter between Cory Doctorow, David Hewson, Nick Harkaway, Baldur Bjarnason and, towards the end, me, about whether or not it’s reasonable to expect fiction writers to have to do something else as well as writing in order to keep the lights on. (The as-full-as-I-can-manage collection of Tweets is after the break.)

The discussion was prompted by a blog post of David Hewson’s, Why I don’t take career advice from Cory Doctorow, in which he basically says “A publishing model that works for Cory Doctorow will never work for me”. This was in response to comments on a previous post of Hewson’s in which he got understandably cross about people digitising is work and then selling it despite not being licensed to. Some commenters pointed at Cory’s model as one to adopt as it is predicated on sharing (although not the unlicensed sale of Cory’s work, I’d add).

I understand why David, and other authors, get angry about people taking their work without permission, and especially when those people then profit from it. Such behaviour pushes some fundamental buttons concerned with fairness that are rooted deep in our monkeybrain. Many animals, like monkeys and dogs, have a built-in sense of fairness which kicks in when they see a peer getting more than they do. So it’s entirely rational for humans to get cross when they see others acting unfairly.

The problem is that stopping people from acting unfairly on the internet is incredibly hard. Yes, you can notice-and-takedown, but in all honesty, you’re playing an infinite game of whack-a-mole which may well end up costing you more in time and effort than you’re actually losing in sales. And there’s no guarantee that you actually are losing sales at all; the evidence is not at all conclusive.

So let’s put that bit to bed and focus on the discussion that sprang from those beginnings: Should an author expect to require more than one income stream?

The nub of David’s argument appeared to be that the majority of professional authors are not able to do anything but write in order to earn a living, and that Cory is an exception. But in pretty much every conversation I have ever had with publishing professionals, they tell me that it is incredibly difficult to earn all of your income just from writing, even if you are a professional with a publishing deal. It’s the same across all creative endeavours. Graphs of income show a small spike of very successful people, and then a very, very long tail of people who get a bit of money, but have to supplement it with income from somewhere else.

This is not new. I doubt it has ever not been the case. When I worked in the music industry, I saw plenty of musicians who had the goal of living solely off their music, but I met very, very few who actually did. Lots of them had a day job and the majority would never be able to afford to drop that day job. For the small number that did, their income from music was not enough to see them financially secure for the rest of their lives, so they were destined to return to a day job as soon as their music career ended.

It’s the same in writing. In photography. In art. In all the creative fields: Most people simply will not earn enough from their creativity to live.

But things have changed, and changed dramatically. For a long time, creative types would have to work outside of their field to make ends meet, as waitresses or brickies or office workers. The internet brings with it an opportunity to make money from things that are related to your writing. Instead of holding down a 9 to 5 job whilst working on your latest project, you can get a bit of money in from talks, a bit from journalism, maybe even a bit from merchandise. You can boost your income whilst at the same time also building your brand and increasing people’s awareness of your work.

Yet both David and Nick made the point that Cory, who really is the poster boy for new and innovative publishing strategies, is in some way different. Not everyone, they say, can do what he does.

This rather reminds me of when I went to Australia as an 18 year old. “Aren’t you lucky?” everyone would say, much to my annoyance. I was not lucky. I worked hard for a couple of summers to save up enough to pay for my flights, got a work permit, and then got jobs in Australia to bankroll my trip. You could argue that I had indeed been lucky to have family in Australia, but although my trip would have been different in nature and possibly shorter, I would have found a way to go even without family to stay with. I made a decision about what I wanted and I worked until I got it.

Cory is not lucky. He has not just suddenly materialised out of the ether with a bunch of books and some weirdo business model. He has worked hard for his success, developing his writing, speaking and fanbase over many years.

This casting of Cory as somehow different, weird or lucky is fundamentally the same as people telling me I was lucky to go to Australia. By casting me as “other” in some way, people could abdicate responsibility for their own experiences. Because I was “lucky” and they were not, they could not be responsible for the fact that they hadn’t gone to Australia, because it was out of their hands, down to fate or karma or an accident of birth.

By casting Cory as “other” we can absolve ourselves of the responsibility to examine his business model in detail and learn new things that we could do to add to our own income. By saying that it’s about personality and secondary skills, we can avoid having to learn how to do things that perhaps we feel a bit iffy about.

The truth is that anyone can learn to speak in public. It might help if you’re naturally outgoing, but it’s not impossible for shier people to learn how to conquer their nerves, how to structure a talk, how to read an audience. I am certainly not the world’s most gregarious person, but I have learnt over the last six years or so how to stand up and speak in front of large crowds and not completely suck at it. We can all develop the skills we need to explore additional income streams. (And for some things, like the design skills that I wish I had but don’t, we can hire them in.)

Now, I know that it’s not just the author that has an impact on how successful these additional income streams are, but also their audience. I’ve heard over and again that SF is different, that Cory’s tactics wouldn’t work in Crime, for example, or Romance. Certainly some crime writers I know say that crime readers are a lot less focused on the author and a lot less interested in hearing the author speak or in signings etc. I think what that indicates to me is that there’s a need for market development – a whole post in and of itself – rather than that it’s fundamentally impossible for Crime or Romance readers to respond to a strategy like Cory’s.

If you are in the position to be creative and earn enough to live purely from your own creativity, you are in a privileged position. But it can only be a good thing that there are now alternatives to working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, alternatives that also serve to actually boost your creative career’s chances by bolstering your profile.

I sometimes think people confuse what is possible with what they want, or don’t want. One may not wish to become a public speaker, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to do so. One may not wish to have to supplement one’s income by writing columns or giving talks, but that does not mean that it’s impossible to do so. And equally, one may not wish to do some hardcore market dev work in order to make your secondary incomes viable, but that does not mean that it’s impossible to do so. Equally, just because something is possible does not mean it is also easy. But then, nothing worthwhile is easy.

UPDATE: John Scalzi has written a great blog post, Multiple Revenue Streams, Revisited, where he discusses the wisdom of not relying on just one source of income. Well worth a read!

UPDATE 2: David Hewson has written another blog post to more fully explore his thoughts on the matter: Don’t give up the day job (until the time is right).

UPDATE3: James Marckaw joins in and imagines a few revenue streams for romance and crime writers. As he says, “Just because someone hasn’t done it yet [in romance or crime], and I don’t stipulate that they haven’t, doesn’t mean that they couldn’t.”

(After the jump: lots of Tweets! There are more on Keepstream, so for the full picture, do click through.)

We live in a world of abundance, a fact which scares silly anyone whose business relies on scarcity. Predictably, we now frequently see attempts to recreate scarcity, many of which are absurd (cf. most newspaper efforts) and some of which are smart.

The use of limited editions to create a desirable object available for only a short period is, in my opinion, a smart move. When it comes to content, we are swamped by choice. Something needs to make objects like books, CDs and movies special enough for us to take a punt and buy them. It ceases to be simply about the story or the music or the film, but also about its form. So I’m totally up for limited editions. It is, in effect, what I’m doing with Argleton.

But limiting editions does not mean you have to limit access to the source material. Indeed, limiting access to the content, rather than just the object, is counterproductive as it prevents new fans from experiencing your work and reduces the number of people who eagerly await your next release.

UPDATE: What was going to be my case in point, Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software, has now instead become proof that if your shop design sucks, people will think things are sold out when they aren’t. The limited edition is sold out, the trade edition isn’t. *headdesk* So, er, slightly truncated blog post due to inability to comprehend Subterranean Press’s UX. Sorry about that.

Sean Cregan (aka John Rickards, Mr Nameless Horror) and I had a chat on Friday afternoon on Skype about his book, The Levels, which came out yesterday in paperback.

Sean describes The Levels as ”Cyberpunk without the cyber”, and it’s somewhere roughly in the thriller genre. It’s not the sort of book I think I would have picked up by myself but Sean sent me a copy, so I read it and I loved it. (Particularly a bit at the end which I shan’t go into detail about because I don’t want to ruin it for you!)

In our chat, we talked about the world of The Levels, underground tunnel networks, over-researched books, Dan Simmon’s The Terror, the film Split Second, how important it is to give a shit about characters, the sequel to The Levels which is called The Razor Gate, the final scene in The Levels (a masterstroke, I must say), Sean/John’s earlier books written for Penguin, how The Levels is more the sort of thing that Sean wants to read himself, Sean’s last ‘real’ job, Creative Commons, comparisons to the [free] music industry, VAST,  Nine Inch Nails, Kickstarter, micropatronage, distribution, economies and diseconomies of scale, status of The Razor Gate, side projects, where the name Sean Cregan came from (great story!), serial bigamists and ‘marriers’ and Larry King.

Please excuse the slightly squiffy audio quality, the rattle of typing and what sounds like seagulls (but which could, I suppose, simply be very loud kittens) in the background. I’ve tried to cut out the worst of the Skype-induced silences, but there are still times Sean sounds like a Dalek broadcasting over AM. Sorry!

Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book won the Newbery Medal today. It was kinda sweet watching him go through the winning process on Twitter:

neilhimself: woken up by assistant at 5.30 in the morning. Not quite sure why. All rather bleary, to do with someone trying to call. argh. — 13:47:53

neilhimself: oh. forget about it. — 13:50:32

neilhimself: About to drink second cup of tea without Marmalade this morning. Also, I just won the Newbury Medal for THE GRAVEYARD BOOK. — 15:45:44

neilhimself: Newbery, not Newbury. Also FUCK!!!! I won the FUCKING NEWBERY THIS IS SO FUCKING AWESOME. I thank you. — 15:46:42

I thought I’d have a look and see if there was anything fun on Google News about it, and I stumbled across an article by the Associated Press, (I’ve linked to it even though I’m sure it will at some point be corrected), which appeared to be about an entirely different book.

I do wonder what an interesting book that would be, though: a story about a family so hard, so callous that they indoctrinate their children by making them participate in the slaughter of an assassin. No wonder Bod ran away to the graveyard. Being brought up by a vampire would be a life of sweet innocence compared to the horror of parent-child bonding over a still-warm corpse.

Interested in paper books, and how to turn the into social objects. They are very social things all ready – people pass them on, each one is the same, they last a long time. But what would you do if you designed a book to be a social object.

Designing a book to read includes format, sturdiness, how easy it is to pass on, reuse of pages. One problem with passing books on is that some people underline things. Would have liked to undo that. Kind of binding – how well does it last.

Designing books for groups is interesting. How do you design books you can point at, lowest level is an ISBN, standard reference. Pages don’t have permalinks, but books do. Harder then to delve further inside, makes annotation hard. Would like to link to a page an permalink it. Want to share pages with people who don’t have the book, have a universal reference to a page that shows it but without the rest of the book (say).

Thinking of books as an instance. In object oriented programming, objects have classes. So where do you draw the line between a book and my book, or my book and the book (the canonical book).

What about a connected book, e.g. tracking reading progress, Bkkpr, (“book keeper”) which keeps track of what page you’re on, and compares it to other people.

Books designed to be torn apart have perforations, so what are the digital perforation?

History? Who bought it and when? Who bought it for me and when? When did the front cover fall off? How can you embed that history in? What can RFID do? Could have history of all owners, readers could embed their history into the book, so that poeple can see what happened to the book, what are the stories of the book?

BookCrossing is a bit like that, but much more lo-fi. Dating site for the books themselves, book asa travelling artefact that exists between owners. If you wanted to design a book that would be easy to transmit around, or easy to site, or easy to disassemble and give to people.

What happens if you look the book up? The book owner? Annotations?

Books are more social now than music, can’t “rip” them like you can with CDs, can only give away and buy a new copy.

Golden Notebook. Collective reading, and collective annotation. Page numbers different in British, American, online, but has been paginated to understand all of them. Oneline is only one edition, have to take into account the previous editions, previous introductions.

All that a book can do is capture knowledge or ideas at one time. How does a book keep on living, how do books update with new information. Could you create a bottomless digital post-it note.

Interesting to contextualise a book within a publisher’s entire list, or library presence.

Tech is an easy way to do it on the site, don’t want to focus on it solely, as have to connect digital to the physical. Book is more portable and distributable so offering similar level of interactivity to digital.

Tear-off pages with unique URLs that allow you to pass it on to another person.

David Grey design book, you can download it in beta, and can see what he’s doing and contribute.

Like the idea of slower things. Dawdler instead of Twitter.

Do you want something to be updated or do you want it to be marked in time. People will cross things out in a book if it’s out of date or inaccurate. People should be empowered to make these change and feed them back.

But equally, don’t want someone else’s marginalia. Has a dogear system, so turned corners at the top are for notes, at the bottom of the page are for quotes.

Book as part of an ecosystem of information. Place the book in a context. Even as simple as URLs for. That’s relatively easy to do – create a wiki and let people add information.

Need chapter points and scene points to help split the book into bits, which would hang on to a canonical version. But a book doesn’t have page numbers until it’s printed.

Translations, books exist in different languages.

Same in films or music. When does a song track become a new song?

Books are republished so often but with few changes.

Different reason to socialise a club. Book clubs, or family, books move between members of small groups. Also stuff that is of broader interest.

Sharing “my” book to create “our” book. The canonical version is kinda missing from the industry – there is no “the” book. Or is this systamatising a bit unfriendly?

People don’t always read as much as us book geek. Would want to build up an ecosystem around the one book that one person read that year.

Biographies, for example, some people like biographies and will read every biography about one person and then start comparing and contrasting. How do you facilitate that sort of behaviour.

How do you introduce books to people, e.g. if someone watches a programme about the Tudors and then wants to find out how much of that is true. Would be nice to be able to take all the research that went into that programme and make it available – that research has a purpose beyond the simple making of the show.

Social web and sociable web are different things. Placing a book as a high level object…

The missing link bewtween being told about a book, and actually remembering it and buying (or being given) it, and then passing it on to someone else.

Book groups, be nice to get the group’s annotations appended to the book. Process of reading isn’t just about reading, but about discussing and learning and understanding. Be nice to have that as an appendix you could attach to the back. A book that you could attach things to, expandable book that’s designed to have stuff added to it.

Best books to study are the ones with the biggest margins and biggest spaces to write in. Different book designs work differently, editions designed to be drawn on, or written on, rather than just read.

Not just sharing the book, sharing the reading experience. What’s a book that’s designed to be shared, that encourages discussion, and then gives you the way to have that discussion.

To see contentious issues marked in the book, a socialised filter you can switch on.

Best things to do with a book is to lend them.

People like the serendipity. Has to be casual, don’t want to make it difficult. Non-invasive, things that won’t stop people buying it.

Amazon have made it easier to buy, to wish for, to give, to refer to books. Bring value to the physical book.

Competing things to be the MusicBrainz for books.

Libraries. People’s experience of books is sometimes transitory, so it’s be nice to be able to leave notes without defacing the book.

Harper Collins – Kate Hyde, Mark Johnson.

Authonomy, book with rating new books. Getting agents on board. Going to be using Blurb to move manuscripts into PoD. Big learning curve. Tension about being a large company wanting to find the best books, with the needs of the community. People quesitoning why they’re doing it and why the outcome. What are they going to do with the community, but they see it as much more open ended.

Another project, Book Army, running in tandem, similar to LibraryThing etc. In beta, a database, 6m books/authors in print in the UK and US. Community tools to interact with the books, contact authors, open chat rooms and debates, recommendation systems, based on reviews of other users. if you want to catalogue your library you can do that and get better recommendations, be plugged into the stuff that’s interesting to you.

Already crowded marketplace, but Book Army related to major publisher, also talking to other publishers about how they can pull in their media and info and do it as an open thing. Book Army being run as separate limited company from HC.

Want to know how can they be used in a wider setting, what would you want from it, as it develops.

How do you create unique identifier (URL?) for each book when you don’t control the industry. Will have listings everywhere, but they will treat their Book Army listing as the key one that they fill with consumer content.

Would like to encourage other publishers and authors to contribute, and to encourage authors without a website to fill in their profile.

What tools do they offer to existing communities? Very little.

If you want to avoid solving a problem that no one has, look at other communities and look at what they’ve got and provide what they lack. Every publisher should have a directory of cover images in jpeg and png and provide a standard cover image that people could use in reviews, etc. Publishers are really bad at this, especially DC Comics who sell high-quality graphic novels but never provide cover art, even to Amazon.

In some fan sites, authors are not necessary and may even not be welcome. One author got thrown out of a community about her because they didn’t want to talk to her, but talk about her.

Fan activity is separated by time, in that discussions are left behind in time, but when found by someone who’s new to it, what happens?

Although long discussions threads can be oppressive.

How do you take it to people? Can’t expect everyone to come to the site, so roadmap is to hit the social networks with a proposal that’s engaging to them. Digital Bookshelf, WeRead, looking at what they are doing and how can add to those conversations.

The catalogue listings are all taken from Neilsen, and it’s been hardwork because the original data has errors, duplicate errors and superfluous data. No code to link author to book in original data. Have had to filter all that data out and are increaseingly getting there. Beta has 4000 people on there now, and their activity is cleaning up the data because they know whose book is whose. When you get identifying codes it’ll be much easier for all the sites that do with this.

What about if authors get precious and don’t want their reviews there.

Critical comments about talent is a very difficult area to mediate.

Publicists also worried about this. What to do if talent are worried about bad publicity. Issue about community management. Also, who’s this for – authors or readers?

Revenue through book sales, advertising, commercial relationships, etc. Want small publishers upwards and authors to be able to put their information up.

Issue with social networks is that you sign up and go on, and none of your friends are there, but you’re not getting the value of the network. How are you going to get my friends on there, and how is it valuable if they’re not.

Mapping social graph – want to be able to get friends on e.g. Facebook Friend Connect or copy over info from other similar sites.

In theory, agents might be interested in such a network, but right now are not starved for submissions. One agent is getting about 5000 a year, maybe accept 2 of those, not because they don’t want more, but because there are only two that are any good. Do all slush pile processing in house.

BBC has same thing, sorting through lots and lots of submissions to find the one or two that will be used.

What’s the value in the things in between?

Traditionally publishers were only interested in the books that would sell widely, but now there’s a bit more interest in books that sell a bit less but is there a business model there?

Notion of disposable books and permanent magazines. What is our concept of what to keep or throw away?

Is an expectation in Authonomy that HC are the ultimate arbiters of taste, although that’s not what HC envisioned. Writers are going so far with their project but then end up waiting for something to happen. [Waiting for validation from HC?]

Have to help people a lot with the upload of manuscripts, so older people, typical aspiring author, need help. Not a huge crossover with Facebook.

Do aspiring authors spend a lot of time hanging round and commenting? Yes, and a lot of people just reading. Average visit to Authonomy is over 20 minutes.

Authonomy helps writers, but doesn’t answer the agents’ problems.

Have removed a lot of the barriers, such as the “review before upload” method that a lot of sites use, and find a lot of activity afterwards, that the users engage a lot.

How many people are writing because it’s an agreeable pastime, rather than because they really want or expect to be successful. People often find themselves happy in their own niche and community, they are not always aspiring to fame or fortune.

Why did HC start Authonomy? Felt they needed to get a more direct conversation about books and with book fans. Can do the harder thing, which is deal with the fans, or the slightly easier thing of dealing with the upcoming authors who are banging on their door every day.
Is there a way to create satisfying communities around fan fic. But fan fic are active communities because they’re born on the internet. A recent attempt to build a site for fan fic, but the communities already are sorting themselves out. Fan communities know which authors will be ok with it, and which will not. Is there a need there?

Authors won’t always feel comfortable engaging with people online. A bit like some journalists like audience plural, but loathe audience singular.

Have a moderation company they’ve hired, although it’s not a huge amount of work.

Wiki novel at Penguin, but a surprising little vandalism, and there was no barrier to entry there. Vandalism is probably less of an issue than people imagine.

There are catalysing subjects that attract vandalism.

Have to consider censorship laws, mainly governed by telecommunications law about the ability to speak freely, but there are anti-censorship laws. Bet they haven’t been tested on wikis.

In a community, who exercises power and control?

I’m here at Bookcamp today, a day of talking about publishing, books, paper and all sorts of related things. Notes are a bit all over the place, but hopefully they’ll be interesting.

Comic Life, kit who put together a comic for show and tell at school, ended up selling copies to his friends.

What if that came out of a game, where your journey through the game is different to someone else’s? Recording the experience and posting up online. What if it went into a different format? What about negotiating with kids to balance gaming and reading.

RPGs, Sherlock Holmes, where you chatted to people and some people wouldn’t talk to you unless you beat them at darts. Mini-games, dialogues. As you went along it was writing Dr Watson’s notebook, who you’d met, who you’d talked to, what you’d picked up. You in it where you’re controlling the story, but you in it when you’re in the story, named, or your photo etc. You then embellish it with your own details.

Big Planet is a bit like that. Requires quite a bit of digital literacy to make someone make the effort.

Simple way to do it would be a Facebook app, a “physical backup” of your year on Facebook.

Some chap who didn’t see the point of writing a blog when you could write a programme that just takes the feeds of stuff that you’ve done online and turns that into a blog. But you don’t want to included everything, so if you didn’t discriminate then you’d end up with the very boring bits included, three days trying to figure out how to open the door.

Watching Grand Prix and simulating the race on the computer. Computer game simulated TV coverage, but you need to disassociate between what the game thinks might be significant, and what is actually happening because you don’t want to see *only* crashes. You don’t want to get to the point instantly, you want some suspense.

Writing games is just writing a cheat manual, so it records what you’re doing rather than the interesting bits, the story, the reasoning.

Novelisations of story worlds in games help the gamer become better. Gamers progressing from just playing to reading the novelisation. Engagement – start with the idea that you’re trying to be a better player, but leads you to a different place as you get fully immersed.

Not just about a game, but also the stuff around it. Interactive fiction, people sitting round making up stories. Taking the idea of role playing games and turn it into group story-telling. Wrote notes throughout the session, but notes didn’t resemble the told story. Moving that to computer games, depends on the game. Something like WoW, there’s a huge backstory, and people in the game it’s all a story. Users add to the story.

UGC literature to come out of that? Collaboration online, it’s not completely personalised, but the group.

Any such book would have to have a human editor, because otherwise it would be a rambling mess.

Generating the content is more interesting than reading it afterwards.

Putting people’s name into a standard book. Kids names in the book.

Location data in the book too, so that it becomes based in your local neighbourhood.

Locative books that put you into a game or book whilst you’re out and about, via your mobile phone. Could do that with audio book so that it would key to GPS and get sections of the story related to your location and journey.

Are there two audiences? Stuff that is of interest to me, or my family, but which might not be of interest to the rest of the world. And stuff that’s of interest to the rest of the world.

Collaborative story-telling cards with text and images on from a blog. map on the back, to help you explore it, and each card has s small story on the other side. Everyone who contributed bought a pack of cards.

A Message to Obama – collaborative book making through Flickr.

Wedding book – story of a wedding, pulling together the photos, comments from guest book, etc. Creating the project makes it important, having it as an artefact is important.

In other contexts, there’s more collaboration, flatter social structure, it’s easier to pull people in.

Taking in content from Flickr, Twitter, blog, need a human editor, but can modularise it – you know that Twitters are less than 140 characters, pictures comes in standard orientations but can need cropping, blogs are more freeform. So would need to be easy to make something attractive.

Constraints as guidance rather than control. Much of that is about language, how ou communicate. But also about physical limits, such as you can only fit so much text on a card.

Whereas some sites that at totally freeform end up very ugly.

Wordle – lots of choice but hard to make an ugly one.

Design of books, not a popular hobby. Average person can recognise a nice looking book but don’t understand book design. Materials choice, layout, typography.

PoD is getting much better in terms of quality, better colour, better bindings. Technology is allowing higher quality.

Tactile qualities are important, they make a difference.

Dw i newydd darganfod bod ‘na fersiwns Asterix The Gaul yn y Gymraeg. Mae ‘na wyth o deitlau:

• Asterix y Galiad (1976)
• Asterix ym Mhrydain (1976)
• Asterix a Cleopatra (1976)
• Asterix Gladiator (1977)
• Asterix ym myddin Cesar (1978)
• Asterix yn y gemau Olympaidd (1979)
• Asterix a’r ornest fawr (1980)
• Asterix ac anrheg Cesar (1981)

Dyma’r blurb:

Y flwyddyn yw 50 cyn Crist. Mae Gâl i gyd yn nwylo’r Rhufeiniaid… I gyd? Nage! Erys o hyd un pentref o Galiaid anorchfygol sy’n llwyddo i ddal eu tir yn erbyn yr imperialwyr. Ac nid yw bywyd yn hawdd i’r llengfilwyr Rhufeinig sy’n gorfod gwarchod gwersylloedd milwrol Bagiatrum, Ariola, Cloclarum a Bolatenae…

A, hefyd:

In the BBC archives we found the following explanations: “The Druid is Crycymalix a reference to ‘Cryman’/'Sickle’ which of course he carries with him at all times. The Bard (or should I say ‘Bardd’!) is called Odlgymix a reference to ‘Odl Gymysg’/'Mixed Rhyme’ – a very appropriate name! The chief is Einharweinix – ‘Our Leader’. With no book to hand I’m not exactly sure of the spellings they chose, or of the other character’s names. Oddly, though, I can remember the Roman camps around the village – Bolatenae/Thinbelly, Cloclarwm/Alarm Clock, Bagiautrwm/Heavy bags and Ariole/After Him. “

Well, dw i ddim yn siwr am yr esboniad yngly^n â “Crycymalix” (Getafix yn y Saesneg). Dw i’n meddwl fod o’n dod o “cruc cymalau” (neu “cricamala” according to Anweledig!) sy’n meddwl “arthritis” – bardd oedrannus yw Crycymalix.

Eniwe, dw i eisiau! Ond dw i ddim yn gwybod os maen nhw’n ar gael y ddyddiau ‘ma. Dw i wedi methu ffeindio nhw arlein. Piti.

OK, we all know I’m a devoted fan of Neil Gaiman. Devoted, if possibly a bit rubbish at actually doing fan-like things, such as standing in line for signings, making it to any of his recent appearances in London, or buying everything he’s ever released. I hang my head in shame for that and hope that he’ll forgive me.

To make up for such shoddy behaviour, I hereby implore you all to go and vote for Neil in the 2007 Weblog Awards Best Literature Blog category. He’s doing pretty well so far, but Pepys’ Diary is creeping up behind, so he still needs your votes. It’ll take just a second of your time, I promise you, so go vote!

Vince and some of his pals at Crimespace have set up a poll to find the World's Sexiest Writer 2007. The nice thing about it is that you can add people to the list, not just be forced to vote for one of the existing entrants.
Of course, I entirely deny that I added any names to that list at all, and I most strenuously repudiate the implication that I voted for person whose name I most definitely didn't add. Equally, I would never, upon my life, ever suggest that you pop over there and vote for the person whose name I am completely innocent of typing into the little box that says “Add another option”.
I'm not sure when the poll ends, but I would hazard to propose that authors who wear a lot of black and are patrons of digital rights organisations are really rather dashing and lovely, although, of course, I would never attempt to influence anyone when they were just about to do something as serious as vote in something as important as the World's Sexiest Writer 2007 poll.
UPDATE: Recent developments in the poll require that I add a clarification to this post, lest anyone misunderstand. I might have possibly have added someone's name, but it wasn't mine! I'm quite embarrassed now, specially as if you look at Vince's post, I don't even qualify! *scurries away, blushing*
UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: My name has now been removed from the poll. Mind you, I was doing quite well at one point, in the lead with 8 votes.

Good to see that Neil's Official Web Elf has our best interests at heart, rather than his.

In that sad and slightly pathetic way that self-employed people deal with such things, I'm attempting to have a few days off this week. It's not a holiday as such – I'm not going anywhere, I'm not escaping my laptop, and I'm not slumped on the sofa watching the TV. (Mainly because our sofa is not good for slumping on, having been made by someone who believed that people should Sit Up Straight at all times, but also because our TV is a small box that one plugs into the computer in order to provide us with endless hours of joy adjusting the exact positioning of our small internal aerial which – as with all small internal aerials – is never quite in exactly the right place.)
My friend Steve has kindly offered to break all my fingers if I do any work this week, but I have a day of proper work on Friday, and in the meantime I have odds and sods that I need to do or else people will be unhappy with me. I'd like to ignore email if I could, although some might argue that my new method for dealing with it (put all mail in a folder marked 'Pending' until I have time to look at it) is exactly the same as ignoring it, but I am scanning the inbox for urgent missives that demand my attention or, at least, make me feel guilty for not replying sooner to some previous plea for assistance.
In lieu of actually having a proper holiday that involves beaches, warm sun and mojitos served to me by a nicely tanned cabana boy, I am doing the next best thing. I'm sitting slightly stiffly on my landlady's choice of slightly-too-short couch and watching Neil Gaiman do a reading and answer questions at Cody's last year.
I embed the player here for your delectation. If you have a couple of hours to spare, watch it. Neil is really very, very good at doing readings and answering questions. In fact, I wonder sometimes why he doesn't do stand-up comedy, because he's very funny.

Primarily, though, I embed the video here so that I can come back to it tomorrow and try to finish it off. It conks out for me at around the 01:19:10 mark, and even if I can manually move the playback head forward a minute or two, it just conks out again after playing me a tantalising snippet. I'm not sure whether it's just that Neil's east coast fans have all woken up and, seeing the post he posted at 9.33pm last night have decided to join me in attempting to watch Neil at Cody's, thus causing Fora.tv to conk out. Or maybe it's just that it conks out at 01:19:10, or thereabouts, for some unexplained technical reason. I guess I'll have to wait til I wake tomorrow morning, when our friends across the water are asleep, to find out.
UPDATE: Still can't get the last section to play smoothly, so have instead downloaded it. If you want to do the same, go to the Fora.tv site, launch the player, and look for the 'download' link in the top right-hand corner.
And whilst I'm doing the fan thing, I bought Fragile Things yesterday, finally. Feh, some fan I am… Anyway, I'm going to read it to Kevin just as soon as we finish Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising pentology, which I have loved for the best part of my adult life, and which Kevin now also adores. I don't think Kev's ever read any of Neil's work, though, so it'll be fun to start off with a book neither of us are familiar with. Don't tell him, but I'm hoping to convert Kev into a fan, so that maybe he'll stop rolling his eyes every time I mention Neil.
Which reminds me, I have Neil's keyboard, signed and dated (1986 – 1989) and complete with coffee stains and other markings of dubious provenance sitting just in front of me. I must a) take lots of photographs of it and b) arrange a time to give it to the most fabulous Mr Ben Goldacre, who won it in the ORG raffle, so he can finish his own book off on it.

Technorati Tags: ben goldacre, Hobnobbing with the rich and fabulous, neil gaiman, trying to remember to use tags more often