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The Attention Economy: Shorter

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Image – iStockphoto: Kristina Jovanovic

Hemming in the Tension

When I tweeted up the author Anne R. Allen for writing that “Word count guidelines have been trending down in the last decade,” I found our colleague Hugh Howey checking in from a galaxy far, far away to say, “Slaughterhouse Five, Frankenstein, and Fahrenheit 451 are three of my favorite sci-fi works of all-time, and each is around 50K. The problem part of most novels is the boring middle bit. Best to just leave that part out.”

He’s right, of course, as is Anne Allen, and we went on to discuss (briefly!) the problem some big-name authors run into in this regard, too. I call it the Clancy effect. Once they’re established as a publishing house’s majors, the editorial touch gets lighter, often more pixie dust than anything else. Typos are caught, we have to hope, but developmental work (“structural” edits to your British neighbors) goes out the window.

That can go to anybody’s head, and many of us can name an icon whose work got leggier and sadly shapeless as the big career flabbed on.

Too Much Entertainment

Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh

At London Book Fair last week, another element of this issue came into sharper focus as I moderated a panel for the Byte the Book organization, which looks at the industry from the digital vantage point.

While the session was titled “Publishers Go Prospecting: Finding Hidden Treasure in Your Content,” I’d worked out with our four fine panelists (from the BBC, Penguin Random House, Vodafone, and Hodder Education) an approach that would take us past the obvious issues of spelunking for good backlist titles. (Bring Up the Bodies, as Hilary Mantel might say.)

We looked at today’s mushrooming level of competition for reading time from really fine television and film. After all, you may have felt the first really deep tremor of storytelling’s new cinematic leadership in February when Amazon Publishing created its Topple Books imprint in direct collaboration with Amazon Studios and the activist-filmmaker Jill Soloway (Transparent, I Love Dick, Six Feet Under).

Tom Goodwin

As the futurist and corporate strategist Tom Goodwin told me, “Book publishing is not in the ‘text industry.’ It’s not in the ‘reading industry.’ It’s in the ‘what do people want to spend their time doing? industry.’”

And that’s where the rubber is going to increasingly meet the shortest road possible.

[Read more…]

In Our CyberVillage: So Much Anger

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Image - iStockphoto: MR1805
Image – iStockphoto: MR1805

Calling Them Out

Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh
Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh

IRL, in real life, if you were mad at someone for something, would you walk into the village square, face the buildings, and start yelling that person’s name and your complaints about them? You’d be calling them out, physically, demanding that they change their ways and accusing them of wrongdoing in front of passersby and traffic. Sound like a plan to you?

We’re going to come back to that nightmarish scenario. It has the feel of something from The Twilight Zone, doesn’t it? Hold onto that.

Today, as my Provocation in Publishing for you, I want to ask you to consider just that: our provocations in publishing, and the shared space in which we conduct them online, a pretty glassy house.

How do we disagree with each other? And why do we provoke each other in the ways we do?

In recent weeks, this topic has been gaining attention. The level of concern is rising. Three examples.

(1) Howling at Howey. As Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select put its new per-page payout scheme into place early this month, the author Hugh Howey completed a full year of weighing whether to participate fully and to accept the exclusivity required. While he originally was given a limited-time special arrangement to try Kindle Unlimited (KU) without the exclusivity requirement a year ago, he has made it clear that he enjoys no such exemption now. And Amazon’s change to the per-page payout structure — he calls this “KU 2.0” — has persuaded him to go in:

All of my novels and stories are now in Kindle Unlimited (KU).

[pullquote]When did ‘winning’ every argument become the goal? Why do so many seem to feel they need to (a) ‘succeed’ by changing minds and (b) put down all dissent?[/pullquote]

I wrote about this at The Bookseller’s The FutureBook, which I manage as its associate editor. (Our weekly live #FutureChat on Twitter is today at 11 a.m. New York / 4 p.m. London time, you’re always welcome to join us if you like.) And I noted then that Howey was taking some powerful flak from followers, some of them castigating him as a turncoat for making a decision they didn’t like. He suggested at one point that the new plan would base payments on reader satisfaction. “If your income goes down, someone more deserving is seeing their income go up.” As it turns out, one of his readers had no interest in hearing this:

Did you really just say that? I used to have respect for you… that’s gone now. How dare you say that authors who have been busting their balls to make a living at this career that they are not deserving! I write romance, have been making a decent income since 2014, not spectacular by any means but my readers love what I write and yet because my income is set to go down in KU 2.0 I am not worth shit?

“The quickest way to get a thread blocked at KBoards these days,” Howey wrote to fellow author Alan Tucker, “seems to be to mention me, have me start a thread, or have me butt into a thread.” Howey wrote that he was leaving the Kindle Boards forums. He’d had enough. And Howey hardly needs those forums as much as they’ve needed him, of course. Not only is Wool  being re-scripted by Nicole Perlman for 20th Century Fox, but his novel Sand has been optioned for development as a TV series by Imperative Entertainment.

(2) Reforming Reddit. Just this week, following Ellen Pao’s departure, the newly returned co-founding CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, is proposing a slate of reforms meant to change the hate-ridden reputation of the long-running platform and its “subreddit” communities. This is from Matt Weinberger’s report at Business Insider, quoting Huffman:

“There is…a dark side, communities whose purpose is reprehensible, and we don’t have any obligation to support them. And we also believe that some communities currently on the platform should not be here at all.”

As Mike Isaac writes in The New York Times, no one can tell if a new content policy for Reddit can change its perception with a plan to “effectively ban spam, illegal activity and harassment, as well as the posting of ‘private or confidential information’ and sexual content involving minors,” nor make it a platform that can attract needed advertising.

(3) #AskELJames How It Went. One of the most-read articles I’ve published at Thought Catalog has turned out to be my June 30 piece Is Online Life Real Life? Ask E.L. James. No, ask Chuck Wendig. In it, I went over the firestorm of criticism that the Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L. James took when Twitter’s London offices hosted a live chat with her for the release of Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian. As I wrote there:

Misgivings about the material [in James’ books] — in terms of misogyny, BDSM, abusive relationships, and James’ woefully bad writing (seemingly the one thing no one disagrees about) — rose quickly to the moment. A storm of invective overwhelmed the event.

[pullquote]If you don’t offer someone the chance to respond first, how seriously can anyone take your complaints?[/pullquote]

But what made the event even more compelling happened when the author Chuck Wendig, widely known for his supportive stance on women’s rights, tried to counsel civil discussion. “One tweet called James the lady-c-word,” he wrote, “while chastising the abuse found in the book — which sounds like abuse about abuse.”

Wendig? Ended up beating a hasty retreat of his own. He was waved off by people who clearly felt that their right to speak was more equal than others’. Someone, as I wrote, seems to have seen him as “a hegemonic male stepping, unwanted, into a women’s debate.” Wendig, who is rarely a man to withdraw easily, wrote, “I think of myself as feminist, but maybe I’m not a particularly good one.”

And what I found myself writing was this:

The question our sociologists need to study is not why people feel free to be so boorish online but why they’re so angry in the first place. There’s so much negative energy “out there” in our cyberspace — which is really “in here,” the small space of our hearts. And that means, finally, that there is precisely such pain, such anguish, such seething disregard, right here IRL. In real life.

Let’s get back to our village square.

[Read more…]

The Dreaded Training Debate: What If It Can’t Be Taught?

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Image - iStockphoto: User2547783c_812
Image – iStockphoto: User2547783c_812

No, this is not about talent vs. skill.

Let’s just set that aside for today, shall we? There’s no need to engage the ineffable this time.

“Like toadstools,” one seasoned observer called it in a note to me recently — this sudden proliferation of “author services,” especially the ones there to teach you, instruct you, train you. They’re everywhere, these kitchen-sink companies, and many of them seem to be peddling (or claiming they do) parts of the job we’re not even sure can be taught.

Provocations image by Liam Walsh
Provocations image by Liam Walsh

Today’s provocation is about this booming industry on all sides of us. And about expectations in a tight market. Expectations that it can all be learned.

It’s prompted by a recent column at The Bookseller in London from the literary agent who writes for us there from time to time as “Agent Orange.” As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m not fond of this use of a pseudonym. But I have verified that this is a prominent, working agent on the UK scene. We’ve spoken about this. And he or she writes (very well) under that pen name because she or he fears retaliation. The industry might strike back.

In Vanity fair?, Agent Orange is, as usual, supportive of writers. (After all, the job is to advocate, negotiate, and agitate for them, he or she is a literary agent.) But those many, damp-eyed, Kleenex-clutching “never been a better time to be a writer!” people among us — and they do love that exclamation point — might be heard gasping with alarm at Agent Orange’s opener:

On the face of it, it is paradoxical that while it’s never been easier for authors to get their books into print, there has never been a worse time to be an author.

The explanation for what she or he means:

Author earnings are down and the number of writers able to make a living out of their work is at an all-time low. But perhaps that is because there have never been so many people making money off writers.

[pullquote]There has never been a worse time to be an author. — Agent Orange[/pullquote]

Granted, there are opposing viewpoints we respect here. Hugh Howey and “Data Guy,” for example, have issued their sixth quarterly Author Earnings report. They’re focused on proving that a career in self-published ebooks is viable, remember. And they again see what they interpret as ample evidence to support their promotion of this route as a worthwhile alternative to traditional publishing, writing:

What does this report show? Higher ebook prices from publishers continue to erode their market share of ebook sales. Drastically. When you read industry reports on the health of ebook sales, keep in mind that these reports are discussing a mere 14% of the ebooks that show up on Amazon’s bestseller lists. That’s it. Indie ebooks account for 26%. Daily unit sales of self-published titles are now greater than the Big 5 publishers, combined. And indie authors are taking home more earnings from readers every day than those same authors, combined.

Some of us, however, are detecting a tonal shift in the independent sector’s palaver overall. [Read more…]

“Visionaries on the Decks”: Storytelling

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iStock_000003642265_Medium Bondarchiuk

“To Declare Your Story’s Intent”

There are things important to you. You hurt. You know stuff. I don’t. You see things that I cannot…You have everything you need, including the courage to declare your story’s intent.

— Donald Maass, Writing 21st Century Fiction

Not for nothing am I looking forward to the November 3-7 Writer Unboxed “Un-Conference” in bewitching Salem, Massachusetts. The final day, a Friday, as you might know, is given over to our good WU colleague Don Maass, who’s going to stand his 21st Century Fiction concepts on their feet and explicate them in a daylong seminar.

Don Maass
Don Maass

This material, which appears in Chapter 8, is some of the best of the entire book. For me, it’s the heart of what his subtitle describes as “High Impact Techniques for Exceptional Storytelling.”

Your novel definitely is about something, and that something is sharply defined, it’s just that you’re not letting yourself see and commit to it…Take a stand. Decide what’s important, what hurts, what you know that your readers don’t, what it is that people (including your characters) urgently need to see. That’s your missing focus, the refining fire that will turn the ore into steel.

It’s a careful line Maass walks here. Partly an answer to the question of what has become of literary fiction today, 21st Century Fiction insists on, maybe demands, an author’s awareness of what he or she is doing in a book. But it never urges preaching, lecturing, haranguing, or — forgive me — “man-splaining” the work or its mission to the reader.

And this is not only difficult for even the most skilled and exacting of novelists, it turns out. It’s also fiendishly tricky for many publishing-community wonks whose pleasure it is to guess and predict and define and decry where the industry! the industry! is going in its sometimes unseemly stagger through the digital determination of its future.

This, too, is storytelling.

Debates in this community of pundits tend to break out, rash and rash-like. What seemed a productive day spirals down into a sighing scrimmage of comments on a blog post. Here come the opinion-slingers again — God forbid they sit one out — rather sadly advancing a tiny turf warfare that can keep them from seeing new techno land-grabs much like the ones they missed years ago.

Provocations image by Liam Walsh
Provocations image by Liam Walsh

But once in a great while, the debate turns on itself. The discussion is about the discussion. It can be in such moments that we learn the most.

When it happens, it’s a public edition of the private challenge Maass hands to the author who’s lost his way.

As we stumble into one of these moments in the community’s circular conversation, the digital diaspora of book publishing’s energies is clearer. It’s more worrisome, too, maybe. Clarity does that. In a world of arts gone to mobile devices and a tradition of letters gone to Reply All, obfuscation can be a comfort.

Nevertheless, yesterday, Thursday, just such a moment arrived. While many in the Writer Unboxed community dislike paying attention to the “high-impact storytelling” that goes on as their industry tries to redefine itself, I believe wearing those blinkers is a terrible mistake. I think you need to monitor and engage in the dialog of a field that now expects you to know what’s going on. If you want to be an author regarded as a business-savvy professional,  you can do no less. That’s my provocation for you this time.

[Read more…]

Hugh Howey: “When the People of Publishing Are Set Free”

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Hugh Howey, “waiting to be interviewed,” earlier this month while in Taiwan at TIBE, the Taipei International Book Fair.
“Waiting to be interviewed.” Hugh Howey earlier this month in Taiwan at TIBE, the Taipei International Book Fair.

Porter here, to introduce a special post written for us by Hugh Howey in our “Inside Publishing” series. In my Friday piece, Sir Hugh and the Snail, I wrote about how Howey’s career has surprised some observers because he embraces not only self-publishing but also traditional publishing contracts.

[pullquote]I believe there are those in my own country who want to blaze new trails and forge new partnerships, and I welcome that. — Hugh Howey[/pullquote]

Howey has just re-signed with Random House UK’s Century imprint, to publish his new novel, Sand — the same folks led by Jack Fogg who published his Wool trilogy in London. These contracts are for print and digital, even as he self-publishes those works in the States. And with more than 30 such foreign publishers, Howey has said that overseas houses are “nimble and creative…They get putting the reader first.”

On Friday, Writer Unboxed’s rich comment-conversation produced some excellent questions along the lines of, “Wonder what Hugh would say a publishing deal looks like when it’s right?” What makes the driving force behind the new AuthorEarnings.com initiative so outspoken in his enthusiasm for these partnerships with publishers?

So I asked Howey at 10:20 p.m. if he’d consider giving us a few thoughts on it. He sent the piece to me at 7:43 the next morning. (When we say the outliers work hard for their success…right?) The text is his. I added visuals. Thanks, Hugh.

“Whatever It Takes To Reach Readers”

When my editor rolled over in his bed, I could feel the entire caravan sway on its axles. A tiny gas heater sputtered and tried to keep the cold at bay, but it was March in Wales and the ground was covered in frost.

We were at The Weekender, a science fiction convention held every year on those caravan-studded fairgrounds three hours by train north of London. Random House UK had sprung for a deluxe caravan, which came with two bedrooms. But I didn’t doubt that my editor would’ve bunked up with me if the accommodations required it. That’s Jack Fogg for you.

I first heard about Jack from Jenny Meyer, my overseas literary agent. She said one editor in particular was pestering her about Wool at the London Book Fair. He kept cornering her to ask about the book. I liked him already.

But it was in the gator-infested and broiling Florida backcountry that I knew we were meant to partner up. My wife had just taken a new job in Palm Beach County. We were down looking at houses in May of 2012, and the UK auction for Wool was in full swing.

To pitch their proposal to me, Random House UK had created a custom website for me to log into. With turtles and peacocks outside, my wife and I sat in a rental car with the AC blasting and shared my laptop. Up came a montage of employees at Random House UK who had read Wool and loved it.

At the end, Jack Fogg came on and shared accounts of people who weren’t even supposed to be reading the work snagging copies from his office. He said people were losing sleep. While my wife and I waited to hear if we got the house we wanted, I waited and hoped that another auction would go my way.

It did. And the same enthusiasm and creativity I saw in that pitch was displayed throughout the release of Wool in the UK. [Read more…]

 

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