Deus Ex Machinatio

Death of the Novel... Sort Of

The book as we know it is probably doomed.

It might come as a surprise to hear me say that; after all, I posted on why we all need publishers just a couple of months ago. I stand by that post and everything I've said in it, but I've been doing a lot of thinking about the future of publishing, and I do believe I fell into a bit of a logical trap. I'd like to correct that here.

The Arguments

Bear with me as I rehash the conventional wisdom for one sec.

There are people arguing that the ebook will never achieve mainstream adoption. I think we can safely assume, for reasons logistical, economic and environmental, that this isn't the case. The Kindle has ushered in an age of increasingly cheap e-readers, and if you don't think people like to read on screens, I'm wondering what it is you're doing right now. Hell, that's what I do all day long; it might be blog posts, correspondence, and chat, but it's still reading words on a screen. That war is over already.

Prognosticators see two primary ways that this eBook revolution will go down. One of them is the open source model, in which writers, freed from the long oppression of the publishing gatekeepers, sell their books directly to readers, possibly obtaining a la carte editing and marketing services along the way. I've previously explained why, as a writer, I find this outcome both undesirable and unlikely. 

The other prediction is that publishers will adapt their existing mechanisms to function in a digital world. Books will still be printed as a specialty marke, but the bulk of fiction will be eBooks, sold online for a to-be-determined price point. 

There are a lot of unspoken assumptions in both of these scenarios on what reading habits and market pressures will do. Notably, all of this conversation about books -- or at least fiction books -- assumes that the item itself, a novel-length story, will remain exactly the thing that we know and love today. 

I'm pretty sure that's wrong. 

Once our books are consumed in significant proportion by people reading on the screen, people are going to want to interact with their books the way they do other content. And that pressure is going to fundamentally change what books are, and how they're written, sold, and read.

How Much Should A Book Cost?

One of the pressures acting upon writers as we transition to an eBook world is the price point. While $8 for a 600-page epic fantasy is a pretty great deal in terms of entertainment minutes-per-dollar, there is a certain resistance that comes into play when you translate that to a digital item. You can't feel the heft of it. You can't really measure how good a value it is. All you know is that you're spending $12. The value proposition is fundamentally the same, but the perception of it has shifted.

People don't want to pay $12 for something not measurably different from a very long web page or a PDF document. Among the die-hard Kindle community, you will notice that a significant fraction of people feel like they should be spending 99 cents for a book. Mayyyyybe $1.99. Certainly nothing higher than five dollars. That's because the price we're used to spending for a unit of entertainment online is about a buck (for music) or free (for, say, Flash games and blogs.)

The precise economics of book production have been covered extensively elsewhere, so I won't repeat it here. I will say that if the income earned from each book is likely to be lower, this puts pressure on the writer to sink less overhead into any one book. The biggest investment a writer makes is, of course, time. And what happens when a writer spends less time on a book? Either it's poorer quality, or else the book is much shorter. ...I'll get back to that in a minute.

Cost to the Reader

The writer isn't the only one who loses time in a book. Another reason that our imaginary reader is resistant to spending $8 on a paperback is because they are committing, not just money, but also hours of time into the author's care. This is what crowdsourced reviews are good for; you know what clips to watch, what blogs to read, which Twitter users to follow -- because the crowd has discovered them for you already. 

But the problem with crowdsourcing is that at some point, somebody has to be the first one. The numbers of reviews on a 3-minute YouTube clip are always going to be an order of magnitude greater than the numbers of reviews on a 30-minute one because of that time investment. 

Crowdsourcing reviews of book-length works is, for this reason, structurally nonfunctional.

But people still like reading book-length fiction... so how's that going to work?

The Future of Fiction

Welcome, one and all, to the rebirth of short and serialized fiction. Short fiction has been dead for a long time. And by "dead" I mean there's been very little market for it, which means there's been very little money for writing it. That's going to be changing. 

We have the pressure of writers not wanting to commit a year of their life to a single thing that may sell for 99 cents. We have the pressure of readers not wanting to commit hours to reading a book of uncertain quality. We have a shift to screen-reading, wherein the length of the work you're reading is of markedly decreased prominence.

But the most important reason short fiction is going to come back is because it's uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between a reader's desire for free entertainment, and a reader's desire for entertainment of guaranteed quality. You don't want to spend $12 on a novel of uncertain quality... but you might try the free first chapter, which, because it's both free and short, has a ton of crowdsourced reviews. And then when you like it, you'll spend 99 cents for the next chapter, and the next one, and then... screw it, let's just buy the whole thing. (Writers, this means keeping your pace snappy is going to be very, very important.)

The coming generation of books may even be structured in a completely modular fashion. The first chapter, especially, will have the strength to stand on its own feet as a work of short fiction. But later chapters will, too, and authors will release select chapters as short stories -- a marketing plot,  in order to lure readers into ponying up their 99 cents to get the other chapters, too. For prime marketing value, you'll see novels written in episodic format; each chapter functioning both on its own, and as a part of an overarching story.

Hey, it works for TV, why do books have to be so special?

I bet we'll also see endless serial novels; you arguably have this now from authors like Charlaine Harris, Sue Grafton, David Weber, and Laurell K. Hamilton, who have all written extensive series in the same world and featuring the same main character. 

The three-act novel as we know it will still exist, I'm sure, but mostly as the vehicle for artists with a significant and well-established fanbase, who have the liberty to experiment more.

The times, they are a-changing, and changing fast. Now excuse me, I've got to go dust off my short-fiction skills. I'll be needing them.

Creative Spotlight: Naomi Alderman

I have another beautiful thing to show you, and it is called The Winter House. This jewel of an interactive experience was written by Naomi Alderman. I won't spoil it for you, except to say that it's a short but simple interactive mystery, heavy on ambience and light on puzzle-solving. Go and gobble it up. It is delicious from start to finish.

Some of you may recall Naomi Alderman as the lead writer of Perplex City (and, not to sell him short, her collaborator Jey Biddulph as a key designer). If you do, it won't surprise you that the same pair were the ones to bring you the Library of Babel, which is similar in execution; this is the obvious next step in that style of storytelling, poised at the intersection of visual and literary arts.

This is poetry as the future will know it, you guys.

What you may not know is that Naomi is also an award-winning novelist. Her first book, Disobedience, came out to massive literary acclaim in 2007. Her second book, The Lessons, has just been released in the UK. I've had the pleasure of reading The Lessons, and it is likewise a beautiful work full of achingly real characters. If you can get your hands on it, absolutely read it at once.

I have an inkling what Naomi will be working on next, and trust me when I say it's going to be amazing. I can't wait to read it, and I can't wait to tell you about it.

Publishing, Self-Promotion, and Amazon v. Macmillan

It's been a fabulously interesting weekend in the publishing world. The Cliff's Notes version: Amazon pulled all print and digital editions of Macmillan's books from sale when the two reached a negotiating impasse regarding the pricing of Kindle editions of Macmillan titles. Macmillan is one of the six big publishing houses, so this was a big deal; basically Amazon removed about a sixth of their stock. If you're interested in the comprehensive details, check out these analyses written by John Scalzi, Scott Westerfeld, and Charlie Stross.

A fun time was had by all. Or actually, now that I think about it, by nobody.

There is, however, a tangential issue I would like to address. I've seen a common refrain bubble up over this hullabaloo: "Soon, the entire publishing chain will collapse, and an author will be able to sell to readers directly!" Or a variant: "When the iBookstore comes, authors will be able to publish their own work and set their own book prices!"

Oh god, I think. What a nightmarish future that would be, indeed, in which every author is reduced to self-publishing. Why would anybody think such a thing is desirable, much less inevitable? Even aside from the stigma of self-publishing, let me explain just why this is a dystopian endgame.

First, as a reader, I look to the publisher as providing a sort of affidavit of quality. If I weren't interested in quality, I could buy books indiscriminately on Lulu or iUniverse. I do not do this. And if you look at the numbers... nobody else does, either. This teaches us two important lessons: First, promoting a self-published book is really hard. Second: Nobody is going out on a limb to try out cheap but potentially lousy ebooks. There's a reason people get paid to read slush, and not the other way around.

It's also no big secret that I'm trying to claw my way up the ladder into the treehouse of traditional publishing. Hopefully it won't fall out of the tree first (or at all). As a writer, if the traditional publishing model ceased to exist, if your only choice as an author were to put your work out there and promote the hell out of it your own self, you know what I'd do? I'd probably stop writing novels. 

I have a trait that is not rare among writers: I loathe promoting myself and my own work. 

In the golden world that exists only in my head, I make stuff, and then somebody else hands me cash for it. I at no point need to hustle for clients, network, chase payments, or any other pesky administrative task. In reality, these are necessary evils to keep my freelance business running. But I only need to successfully market myself to a handful of people in order to be successful as an ARG writer. Those are the creative directors, project managers, team leads, etc. at the agencies I look to work with. 

After that, the marketing muscle and know-how of wiser heads than mine combined with the quality of the experience I am designing work together to build an active and engaged audience. The people hiring me have the dollars to put up commercials, billboards and posters; the designers to make them interesting; and the savvy to know where they should go. They attract attention. My job is to keep it and build on it.

If I were completely on the hook to build that audience all by my lonesome, I'm sure I'd do a pretty miserable job. I know this because I have done a miserable job many a time before! The participation and readership numbers I get for my personal projects - this here blog, My Super First Day, what have you -- they aren't in the same ballpark as my big games, not by multiple orders of magnitude. I frankly don't think I could build an audience of several thousand or more for a book without any marketing support. And it's not because I think my work isn't pretty great. It's because self-promoting is hard, it's expensive, it takes time away from creating, and just plain isn't the talent I've spent my life honing. 

I'm curious to know where other people see the future of publishing heading, though. Think I'm wrong-headed, misguided, pessimistic? Go ahead and comment. I'd love to hear what you think.

Heroes Week: Roger Zelazny

I missed yesterday's entry in my self-declared People I Admire Week (more deftly called Heroes Week by my pal Tom Bridge). Sorry about that, folks; much of my life was temporarily disrupted over an amusing vignette involving my husband, a side-impact airbag, and a little old lady in a Chrysler Sebring*.

There's also a Facebook group for like minds now; please play along!

But enough meta-level stuff, let's get to the point, shall we? My next personal creative hero is Roger Zelazny. This one requires a bit of exposition first, so please bear with me.

When I was growing up, everybody was always telling me how I should grow up to be a writer. Teachers, relatives, friends. Me? I never really thought about it one way or the other, to be honest. And sure, I knew how to string words together to make my point in an essay, and I spent more than one summer writing incredibly embarrassing adolescent ElfQuest fanfic with and for a close friend, but I never had that moment when lightning strikes and you think: "THAT. That is what I want to be doing." It was my path of least resistance, and like any good electron, I went along for the ride. There was no element of volition for me.

I did have a different sort of moment, though, one sultry Florida summer when I was dawdling in the bath and reading a book, as was my habit. My mom had an occasional subscription to the Science Fiction Book Club, and this time around I was reading a book of short stories I'd read a few years before -- probably closer to when it came out. At the time I'd been too young to get the most out of it, but old enough to know bits of it were passing me by.

So there I was, maybe 13 or 14 years old, bored, wet, re-reading a book of shorts by Roger Zelazny. Unicorn Variations, to be precise. There's a story in it called Recital. The first time I found it... kind of dull, really. Excessively sentimental, and rough-hewn, not like the stuff I was used to reading at all. Recital starts in present tense, describing an older woman singing at a microphone. Then came my lightning bolt, starting in the second paragraph:

Let's call her Mary. I don't know that much about her yet, and the name has just occurred to me. I'm Roger Z., and I'm doing all of this on the spot, rather than in the standard smooth and clean fashion. This is because I want to watch it happen and find things out along the way.

So Mary is a character and this is a story, and I know that she is over the hill and fairly sick. I try to look through her eyes now and discover that I cannot. It occurs to me that she is probably blind and that the great hall in which she is singing is empty.

Why? And what is the matter with her eyes?

Were you struck by the bolt, too? Do you understand what happened to me?

Probably no. There are as many paths to enlightenment as there are people, yes? But there, explicitly there in the story, I saw something I'd never noticed before, something crucial to anyone who wants to make stuff up for a living. I saw a creative process in action. My bolt wasn't so much "I want to do THAT." No, it was more like "Oh, THAT'S how you do it!"

I did a lot of writing in school. I even did a lot of creative writing, equal measures tepid stories and vapid poetry. But it had honestly never occurred to me that you could make it up as you go along, so to speak. I thought the way to write a story was:

1. Think up an idea
2. Write it down
3. Hand it in for your grade

This three-step process is sometimes still there in the back of my brain, and frankly, it's a terrible model. (Or for me it is, anyway.) I find some of my most magnificent ideas, some of my most subtle touches, they come when I work and let the ideas come from the mystic place where they spawn and swim down through my fingers without interference from that no-good meddlesome brain. And beyond that: "Think up an idea" is so huge, so intimidating, that if you wait on that step before starting to write, why, you might never write anything at all!

And here Zelazny published a rough-hewn bit of work -- he even says it's not "the standard smooth and clean fashion" -- and puts it out there where readers like me could see the raw process and have a revelation. So I admire Roger Zelazny, not just for being an amazing wordsmith and reputedly a magnificent human being, but for taking creative risks and pushing the envelope even after achieving recognition as a celebrated author.

Thanks, Roger, wherever you are now. I wish I could have met you.

Making Book: A Few Scattered Thoughts

I met Teresa Nielsen Hayden once. It was an unexpected privilege for me; I'd been accepted in a writer's workshop at a con and she was acting as a last-minute substitute for one of the original panelists. My story was shredded in the workshop (and rightly so).

Being soundly critiqued by Teresa Nielsen Hayden (and, don't get me wrong, other notable and worthy professionals as well) was both dismaying and comforting. The comfort was that the meat of it was stuff I already knew, though I hadn't quite shifted it into the bits of my brain where you know how to fix it: Mainly, the piece in question was based on a fairly tired bit of folklore and didn't do anything particularly original with it, nor even anything interesting. It was dismaying because I've long held TNH in high esteem, and I was crushed to think that she would hereafter believe that was a sample of my best work¹, should she be moved to remember it at all².

I've long been a fan, you see. Part of this grows out of my teenage years, and a certain wide-eyed naivete toward publishing and the mysterious springs and gears that make it go. I knew she was One of the Editors at Tor, and I knew I loved books from Tor, and so she was part of a canon of semi-mythical creatures to me: the people who made the culture that I consumed.

In more recent years, I've been a fan because of Making Light. Making Light is an exceptional online community, populated with wonderful and erudite persons of all manner. Although I read it without fail, I comment but rarely. It has the distinction of being one of the few places on the internet where I feel thoroughly outclassed in every respect, so I rarely feel I have much to add to the conversation.

This is all by way of context so you can understand what I'm really here to say. I have finished reading Making Book, a collection of assorted writings by TNH. It's been out for years and years, and I'm not sure why I never bought it earlier. And once I had, I wasn't sure exactly what I expected from it. Probably something like a series of Making Light posts? Slushkiller writ large? But the book was not what I expected.

It's easy to think that you know people on the internet when you just don't. And I admire TNH and her work, but I really don't know her, not in any meaningful sense, and probably don't know most of the important things about her. All I really have is the public persona she presents to the internet, which is charming, intimidatingly competent and educated, and all-around the sort of person I'd love to grow up to be.

So Making Book was a fascinating read because it gave me a glimpse of Teresa Nielsen Hayden as she was before she was... well... Teresa Nielsen Hayden. A history, if not an actual blueprint. You see that time in her life when she and her husband were a couple of broke kids trying to build culture while being dealt a number of bad hands. She lays out bare her narcolepsy and the insidious, pervasive influence it had on her life. She's a person in there, and not a fabulous creature borne of the internet and exacting prose.

Is it arrogant to say I saw myself in her words? I did, I really did. I don't mean this in an hubristic sense. I mean: I read a letter that TNH wrote to Ted White, and in dizzying echoes through time I see that she is addressing the fannish culture of the late 60s with the same sense of signification that I might address the fanzine culture of the early 80s. (Though it does bear saying that she actually knew Ted White at the time, whereas I do not actually know Teresa, as discussed above.)

And this in turn makes me wonder at the children who are in grammar school today. Will they one day look back at the internet culture of the mid-oughts and see in our blogs and tweets the determination and luck that will create the next generation of demigod culture-makers³? Will they blink and think to themselves, "Wow, once such-and-such was trying to find their place in the world, just like me"?

I hope so, I really do. It makes the goal seem attainable, to know that your heroes were not born heroes, but had to grow to become them.

---

¹ And here I make my excuses, feeble as they may be: Applying for the workshop was a last-minute thing. The piece in question was ripped from a novel I'd written because it was the only thing I had lying around at the time that could stand on its own feet as a short story, and I badly wanted to meet Jim MacDonald (another panelist and Making Light contributor) and shake his hand over his selfless service to aspiring novelists at Absolute Write. I'd written the chapter/story/work in question years before, and my craft had leveled up significantly in the years intervening. I really should have known better, etc.

² I expect she does not. Or at least, I'd hope the piece wasn't so bad as to be memorably bad, given the vastness of her experience with bad writing.

³ This is not to assume I'll be a part of that canon, mind.