No, that isn’t a typo.  $2.99 per chapter.

Not per book.  Per chapter.  WTF?

For a model that requires almost zero distribution costs and no printing costs. That would be $60 for a twenty chapter novel.

So here’s what I’m thinking:

1. There’s going to be a different scale for longer works, because $2.99 per chapter would be stupid in most cases. The pilot book is only six chapters, so that’s $18. Set aside the fact that this price point is stupid and unreasonable for now and let’s just assume that RH didn’t get the memo from iTunes that download versions of complete works should be a snorch cheaper than the physical artifact.

That’s the optimistic me.

2. Random House doesn’t believe that the download model is viable, but they need to demonstrate it definitively so they can turn their nose up at it. By setting a ludicrous price point, they’re insuring that the pilot will fail, then they can point to it’s dismal sales and say, “See? Nobody wants downloadable books.”

I’m trying not to read too much into this, because the article is too short to really tell us anything definitive. Random House has some history behind them, and they’ve had a successful business model for a long time, so I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt (for now) that this little tidbit isn’t telling us the full story (i.e., the bit that makes sense).

The economic reality, at least according to one survey, is that ebook users expect to pay less for digital text.

One surprising conclusion you found is that over half of people surveyed expected e-book prices to be $5 or less and 1 out of every 5 expected the price to be $2.50 or less. But most publishers are used to setting sticker prices (and profit margins) that are double that. What will publishers today need to do to adapt to this business model?

We believe that the Publishing Industry will very quickly discover that they’re blessed with ELASTICITY. That is, the lower the prices of e-books up to a point, the more net revenue they drive (thus the cannibalization effect on traditional book sales will be overcome). E-books may start around $10.00 each, but come down in the 2008-09 timeframe and approach $5.00.

With great resources for free books like Wowio and manybooks.net really starting to hit their stride, Random House and other traditional publishers are going to have to do better than $2.99 per chapter.

If they need a better model, and want to use their chapters as teasers to tempt readers into buying a physical product, they could do worse than to look at Baen’s Webscriptions. I’m not a huge fan of subscription services for digital text, either, but it’s better than what Random House appears to be offering here.

Of course, I’m giving away shit for free, so maybe I’m just going to be too hard to please.

What I’m not always sure about is the execution.

I was digging around over at if:book (Institute for the Future of the Book) today, and started to notice a trend.

Scholar McKenzie Wark, working with the Institute (see the project here), recently used a comment system set up by if:book on initial drafts of his book GAM3R 7H30RY. (See this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education for details.) The idea behind the collaborative effort was, essentially, to improve the work as a whole by opening it up to review during the drafting process. Think of it as a massively expanded Wikipedia entry.

A couple of quotes I want to tease out from the Chronicle article:

One of Mr. Wark’s inspirations for the e-book form is Wikipedia.

“That is the literary work of our time,” he said. “It’s the Shakespeare of 2006. It took a traditional form, which is an encyclopedia, and completely rethought it. It rethought what authorship is. It rethought what collaboration is. It rethought textual form.”

And from Ben Vershbow, a researcher for the Institute:

“This is not a proposition that every book should be written in this way,” he said. But the networked e-book is ideal for scholarly books, or any work dealing with big ideas that might be difficult for a lone author to tackle, he argued.

In a way, he said, the institute seeks to apply the model of open-source software development to scholarship. Open-source software, in which a distributed group of volunteer programmers contribute to large software projects, was also the inspiration for Wikipedia.

I think this is a fine idea, provided that the person heading up the project has a firm grip on what he or she is trying to say in the first place. The bigger an idea, the more skittery it tends to become, but being able to beta test the presentation and logic against real-time users (i.e., readers) seems like a good idea to me. Hell, it’s worked pretty well for Wikipedia, which is, as the folks at if:book repeatedly state, the whole point.

And then I come to a post like this one where an Institute researcher starts deconstructing the entire concept of “authority” (which can be okay, but which can also be a pitfall of the sorts of hyper-individualistic fantasies to which Americans are all too prone), and my head starts to spin a bit.

[P]erhaps the future of the book is not a future of books. Or at least it’s not one of authorship, but of writing. … I feel deeply that the print industry is out of step with the contemporary cultural landscape, and will not produce the principal agents in the future of that landscape. And I’m not sure that ebooks will, either. My hunch is that things are going two ways: writers as orchestrators of mass creativity, or writers as wielders of a new rhetoric.

As a fiction writer, here’s my problem: I don’t think stories are designed to be “orchestrations of mass creativity”. Scholarship needs a ton of voices hashing out the logical bits. Narrative is one voice telling one story. Too many cooks spoil the broth and all that. Or when you try to please too many people, you end up pleasing no one. I’m sure I can come up with a dozen different cliches here if you give me time. The bottom line is that anyone who’s ever workshopped a short story knows what I’m talking about — when you let ten or fifteen other people get their grubby little hands all over your draft, frequently what comes out is a jumbled and unfocused mess that tries to do too many things and manages to fail at all of them.

Which leads me to another if:books post pimping a project called Flight Paths. Flight Paths describes itself as a “networked novel” collaboration between authors Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph. It’s actually a pretty interesting idea at the core: the collision of two distinctly different lives told from different perspectives in one overarching narrative.

But the vision is larger than just two collaborating writers.

The first stage of the project will include a web iteration with, at its heart, this blog, opening up the research process to the outside world, inviting discussion of the large array of issues the project touches on. As well as this, Chris Joseph and Kate Pullinger will create a series of multimedia elements that will illuminate various aspects of the story. This will allow us to invite and encourage user-generated content on this website and any associated sites; we would like to open the project up to allow other writers and artists to contribute texts – both multimedia and more traditional – as well as images, sounds, memories, ideas.

Which gives us something like this, where serious debate goes into consider what the female protagonists name should be. I can only imagine how many more suggestions there would have been if Flight Paths had owned a larger audience at its inception.

What this means is that a ton of bits get spilled either making or defending a particular choice, when it would have been just as simple, direct and satisfying for the reader if the author had just made a choice and left it at that.

To me, that’s what narrative is. It’s the author making choices. As a reader, what I want to know is “What is the outcome of these choices?”, not “Why did you choose this story and not that one?”

(Which is not to say that I’m going all Murky Dismal on Flight Plans. The work is still early enough in its process that I’m not sure what final form it will take, and it’s only fair to reserve judgment until that happens. I wish Chris and Kate all the luck in the world.)

And lest you think they’re alone, note that Charles Leadbetter is doing the same sort of thing with We-Think and Daniel Oran, a former Microsoft programmer, has released a “beta” version of his newest novel to leverage Kindle’s technology for reader input. (Which may or may not be a pretty clever idea. Writers are used to making money on the final draft. Now there’s the possibility we can make coin on the penultimate and final drafts. Who knows?)

I see this type of reader/writer collaboration as fundamentally different than blogging fiction, or at least the way that I’ve chosen to blog it. The novels I’m giving you have already been written. I’ve told the story I wanted to tell, and I welcome your comments as you read to tell me what may or may not have worked for you (or even better, just to spout your undying devotion to my authorial awesomeness).

Maybe collaboration is the future of fiction. It could be that I’m just too Web 1.0 to see it. Is that what readers really want? Do they want to be part of the creative process, to help decide where the story is going, to render, in effect, every work a piece of “fan fiction” written by their favorite brand author?

As always, your thoughts are welcome.

D.

In the article linked above, Byrne does a nice job of breaking down the various models by which musicians have traditionally related to the “music industry” and created their revenue streams.

1. The Equity Deal — The record company foots the bill for everything and has ultimate creative control. The record company more or less owns the “act”.

2. Standard Distribution — The record company foots the bill for everything and owns the copyrights on the music. The artist gets royalties, but has a bit more creative control over the final product.

3. The License Deal — The artist owns the copyright and the master recordings, but leases them to a record company for a set period of time in exchange for production, distribution and advertising services. After that period, all rights revert back to the artist.

4. Profit Sharing — The artist owns the copyright and the masters. Costs and profits are split evenly with the record label.

5. Manufacturing and Distribution Deal — Just what it sounds like. The artist has complete creative control but subleases the business pieces to a label.

6. Self-Distribution Model — The artist owns everything and does everything.

Byrne makes the observation that artistic freedom increases as one makes his or her way down the list. The more work you’re willing to do yourself, the more rights you control and the more creative latitude you retain. Which makes perfect sense. People (i.e., record labels) demand more rights to the final product as their financial investment increases. Or, as Byrne writes early in the article, “What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over.”

(Which, oddly enough, is something that scans as vaguely familiar to me for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on.)

This is not to say that I’m predicting the end of paper publishing as we know it. God knows that I would be severely annoyed if printed books went away. The environmentalists would be annoyed because we’d quickly gorge out the landfills with empty print cartridges and reams of print-offs. On top of that, some poor soul would have to fund a charity or three to support all the out-of-work English majors displaced by the collapse of the print publishing industry. (And yes, I know that the poor slobs filling the trenches at most publishing houses do it for the love of literature. You can only stretch $25k in annual salary so far in New York.)

What I am saying here is that blook writers (or whatever the fuck you call us), bloggers and “new media” content producers would do well to pay attention to how the artists in the music industry are grappling with their revenue models. There are plenty of mistakes to be made, and the more we can spread them out across industries, the better it will be for all of us.  More importantly, in the New Media, there isn’t one way or even necessarily a “right” way for content creators to be successful.

As Byrne writes it:

 No single model will work for everyone.  There’s room for all of us.  Some artists are the Coke and Pepsi of music, while others are the fine wine — or the funky home-brewed moonshine.  And that’s fine.  I like Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Christina Aguilera’s “Ain’t No Other Man.”  Sometimes a corporate soft drink is what you want — just not at the expense of the other thing.  In the recent past, it often seemed like all or nothing, but maybe now we won’t be forced to choose.

(And don’t even get me started on Andrew “Fucking” Keen and his obsession with the cult of the amateur. He’s a dick weed whose fifteen minutes has gone on about fourteen and a half minutes too long.)

I’m taking a momentary break from Sunday football (mainly because my beloved Colts are thrashing the Houston Texans 38-7 in the 3rd Quarter at last check) because I wanted to drop a line or two about some of the things I’ve been reading lately.

I followed a comment from Eli’s website (Novelr, as if you didn’t know by now) to Refresh Monkeys and the Usual Nuts – The Blog of Alexandra Erin.  Though it isn’t the primary focus of her blog, Alexandra has spilled a bit or two talking about ways to make money off of electronic fiction.  She’s got some good advice and smart tips for people who are thinking about going the e-publishing route (most of which amounts to: don’t.  You can make more money and do a better job yourself.  Which is, I think, solid advice if you’re someone who doesn’t need the validation of being accepted by a “publisher” and who isn’t afraid to get your hands dirty with marketing and/or reading communities.)

(And because I pimp, here’s a link to Alexandra’s current project: Tales of Mu.)

I’ve made my share of change with electronic fiction, mostly through Fictionwise editions of my small press novel From the Hands of Hostile Gods.  (Psst. Don’t purchase from that link.  My small publishers seems to have gone under, and while you’d get the copy you ordered because of their relationship with Lightning Source, I won’t see a dime.  And besides, I’m going to post the full text here in the next few months.  And that’ll be free.)  And when I say “my share”, what I mean is that I’ve made enough that I could take you and I out for dinner to a nice restaurant.

I haven’t really thought much about making money from electronic fiction.  See, I don’t buy electronic fiction.  I’ve never even been tempted.  I’ve spent a few hundred dollars on electronic non-fiction, but that was because I was paying for information I wanted or needed for projects.  This isn’t a moral judgment on selling e-fiction, just a personal ethic that I’m not going to ask anyone to give me money for something I wouldn’t pay for.

And that brings me to whuffie.  Whuffie is why I’ve decided to publish online.  I wrote it.  I’d like you to read it.  I think you’ll enjoy it.  I’m sharing my creative labors for free because I’ve bought into the concept that releasing creative content into the wild with no other expectation than to share, and maybe bring some interesting ideas to my readers while entertaining them, is worthwhile.  It makes me happy.

I saw a statistic recently (that I’m not going to look up for you because I’m lazy) that something like half of web users under the age of 21 have published free content on the web.  This is a massive paradigm shift from my generation.  I was raised in the writing school that said you write, you query, you get published, you wait for the money.  In between querying and publication, the manuscript sits in a drawer gathering dust so that no one can “steal your idea” or whatever.  The fact is that fewer than 10% of professional fiction writers make a living from writing.

I wrote my novels to be read, not to have them sit in a drawer.  I don’t see creative writing as qualitatively different than YouTube videos, Oblivion mods or open source software.  They’re all labors of love that their creators hope will make someone’s life better, more interesting or just a bit more fun.

Probably the turning point for me came with reading an essay by Cory Doctorow describing his rationale for free distribution of his novels.

Not (just) because I’m a swell guy, a big-hearted slob. Not because Tor is a run by addlepated dot-com refugees who have been sold some snake-oil about the e-book revolution. Because you — the readers, the slicers, dicers and copiers — hold in your collective action the secret of the future of publishing. Writers are a dime a dozen. Everybody’s got a novel in her or him. Readers are a precious commodity. You’ve got all the money and all the attention and you run the word-of-mouth network that marks the difference between a little book, soon forgotten, and a book that becomes a lasting piece of posterity for its author, changing the world in some meaningful way.

– Cory Doctorow

For me, it’s about writing stories that are intensely important to me.  It’s about having them read.  And maybe, just a little, it’s about having a bunch of strangers think well of me and appreciate what I do.

(Plus, I really ought to give something back to the creative community after all the software and music I’ve, um, “tried out” without actually buying it.)

D.

I want to state upfront that I have no issues with Lulu’s corporate services. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, they’re the premier Print-on-Demand printing service available. Their integration of web tools is seamless, straightforward and simple. Their production services are well worth taking a look at if you really want a bound hard copy of the manuscript living on your hard drive (or alternately, a hard copy of someone’s blog novel). On top of that, I have to admit that I’m mesmerized by some of the projects you can create with personal photos — think personal, annotated photo albums, family calendars, etc. Their product quality is exceptional and their per-unit cost is reasonable.

Plus, you know, the whole thing is free (FREE), until you decide to use some of their “promotion” tools or buy your labor of love, and if you do decide to purchase, the prices are in line with usual Print-on-Demand publications if you purchase through Lulu’s portal.

The bottom line is that Lulu is an honest, reasonably priced printing service for niche and/or specialty publications.

What Lulu isn’t is a publishing company. They’re not Random House. They’re not Bantam. For even a vague approximation of the sorts of services that traditional print publishers provide (excluding critical bits like, um, editing, a professional sales force, a marketing team, a genuine interest in the success of your book, the ability to get your work reviewed in the “right” places, etc.), you’re going to end up paying out the ass. See a quick example here of cost for very basic marketing tools Lulu provides.

What they are, and honestly, all I think they’re claiming to be, is a low-cost printing service — low cost compared to traditional offset printing, which requires sizable print runs and get get into the thousands of dollars very quickly, all of which must be paid up front. What Lulu has done is harness Print-on-Demand technology and made it accessible to hobbyists and people interested in generating short run creative print products. I’m working really hard to avoid the term self-publishing here, because I think it carries a bunch of negative connotations that I don’t want to associate with Lulu’s mission. (But, you know, that’s really what they’re doing. Or at least what they’re facilitating.  And if self-publishing is your bag, Lulu is definitely one of the best options out there.)  What I don’t want to connect them to is operations like Vantage Press or PublishAmerica, who are (essentially) subsidy or vanity presses selling the illusion of traditional publishing. You can use Lulu as a vanity publisher, but so much of their model is more appropriate to calling them a printing service that I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

(N.B. — In the interest of full disclosure, since I’m using Lulu’s printing service: I don’t make any money on copies of A Vessel for Offering purchased through Lulu. Lulu only makes whatever percentage they’ve marked up beyond basic printing costs. One of Lulu’s niftier features is the ability for product creators to set their own royalty rate — which gets tacked on to the printing cost. Lulu takes a cut of the royalty rate the creator sets. Mine is set to zero. In keeping with the whole Creative Commons ideal, I’m giving this shit away for free. Or in the case of bound copies, as close to free as I can make it.)

There’s an old adage in writing, most recently taken up by Victoria Strauss and Anne Crispin through their scam exposure efforts at Writer Beware (under the auspices of SFWA): Money flows toward the author. If you’re paying money for anything, then you’re not working with a real publisher — you’re working with a printer or a subsidy/vanity operation. Vanity/subsidy operations are either getting their money directly from the author — in terms of “fees” or direct sales of crates of printed books — or indirectly through pimping sales to the author’s friends and family. Especially under the P.O.D. model, folks like PublishAmerica are bargaining that they’ll sell enough copies on overpriced books to people you know to make back their (minimal) setup investment. Plus, you know, they’ve got the whole Long Tail working for them. If you publish a million authors who each convince their friends and family to buy 20 total copies of their mind-bogglingly precious Work of Art, that’s 20 million sales for PublishAmerica. Given that your storage is digital and works are produced, well, on-demand, so you’ve cut out warehousing costs, that’s a great deal more cost-effective and risk-averse than hoping you’ve signed the next Neal Stephenson to sell 20 million copies of his latest book.

(Look, this has all been discussed to death on the internets. Look here for a much more lucid discussion of the topic than I’m giving you and a summary of the benefits/pitfalls of Print-on-Demand vs. traditional publishing, but remember that SFWA is an organization for professional writers and prospective professional writers, so they’re not going to be real big on evaluating folks like Lulu as purely a “printing” service. So insert your grains of salt here.)

That said, the problem I have with the Blooker Prize — other than the fact that it’s a not-very-clever attempt at generating controversy (read: free advertising/attention) by co-opting the name of an established award — is that it ultimately makes it look like Lulu look like just another vanity publishing shill. As a P.O.D. printer, Lulu is a legitimate operation. The Buy-These-Lulu-Books-Cuz-They’re-Good Prize makes believe that Lulu is a publisher with an established publishing “brand” (and trusted track record) that should be taken seriously as an arbiter of culture. Publishers are arbiters of culture because they’re taking a risk on stories that they hope are good enough that people will want to buy them. Their status as a Gatekeeper comes from correctly guessing what sorts of narratives people want to read. Guess often enough, and we begin to trust your taste. We consider you an expert.

Lulu isn’t doing any guessing. They’re not experts in narrative. Their business model isn’t selling stories, but selling bound paper. The Blooker Prize fosters the illusion that Lulu as a corporate entity performs some other valuable role in story production besides printing.

That makes the Blooker Prize an over-hyped marketing gimmick.

It’s an advertising misdirection that lends Lulu a guise of legitimacy as a “publisher”, when all they’re trying to do is sell paper. It’s the equivalent of slapping a sticker on the cover of the winner that says, “We Want to Sell More of This One”.

Of course, moving more product is the ultimate purpose behind all awards. I won’t dispute that.

But here’s the difference: Science Fiction’s Hugo Award is voted on by everyone who attends the World Science Fiction Convention. The Oscar is awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. See where I’m going here? These are third party awards. Third party awards (and the product sales that go along with them) are legitimate because the relationship between sales and recognition is organic. Yes, the Blooker is awarded under the auspices of an independent judging panel. It’s still Lulu’s award and they’re the company that stands to benefit the most from the existence of this award. That’s just seems like too much of a hinky conflict of interest for me to really take this award seriously.

This should not be misconstrued as any sort of negative comment on the worthiness of the Blooker winners. These books may very well be worthy of your time and attention. I haven’t read them. Probably am not going to, either. (Which brings to mind a great James Smythe rant about how successful blooks have this dirty tendency to vanish from blogs once the print contract is signed, which seems counter-intuitive considering that blogging the novel for FREE is what led to the blook’s success in the first place).

I think the Blooker Prize is a great idea, honestly. I think online long form fiction needs an award like the Blooker Prize if it’s ever going to get people’s attention as a worthwhile and legitimate communication medium.

But I also think that Lulu isn’t the one who should be giving it.

In the Locus article linked above, Doctorow argues fairly effectively that this is both a problem of medium and attention span — or more accurately, it’s a reflection of the way we’ve become socialized to use our Internet tools.  Reading long form fiction is a focused activity.  It’s something we do in solid chunks of time and with active attention.  The internet is about short bursts of time and multi-tasking.  The internet has also taught us to do more scanning than reading and to dig out the kernals of information we’re seeking rather than digesting large tracts of text or applying those nifty critical reading skills we paid so much to learn in college.

(In case you were curious, I printed out both Eli’s blog post and Doctorow’s article to scribble notes in the margins as I prepared to write this piece.  I did the same thing yesterday with Kembrew McLeod’s essay.  So yeah, they’re preaching to the choir.)

There are adherents to the digital form (else, Fictionwise would have gone under a long time ago), but as I read around the net, observe my own habits and talk to other readers, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that digital fiction, at least at this point in its evolution, is a long tail phenomenon.  In other words, we’re likely to see lots of people reading terabytes of online narrative, but the distribution is going to be so spread out that we’re not likely to see the sort of cohesion that would routinely produce “bestseller” numbers any time soon.  (Though, as Tess Gerritsen has famously pointed out, producing bestseller numbers from week to week may not be as impressive a feat as you have assumed.  We’re not talking about Platinum album sales here.)

And given that our primary metric for determining a “bestseller” in online fiction would be an amalgamation of downloads and page hits, would we really know what those numbers mean in terms of cultural impact?  I mean, we tend to understand a print novel’s cultural impact in terms of sales, book club discussions, articles written, screenplays written, etc.  None of those mechanisms really exist for purely digital fiction.  If I can claim, for instance, that my blog gets 2,000 hits a week (which it doesn’t) what does that even mean?

Maybe it means that 2,000 people really dig my novels.   Maybe it means that 100 people read all twenty chapters.  Maybe it means that 100 people just clicked on all twenty chapters.  Maybe it means that four people reloaded my front page 500 times.  Maybe it means that 1,999 people read the first chapter, said Urk! and moved on to something more appealing (with the 2,000th person being my mom, and she would read all twenty chapters straight through because she loves me.  I’m firmly convinced that more metrics should take my mom’s opinion into account.).

To some extent, these are all tangential questions, and they’re not limited solely to digital books.  Hell, I’ve got something like seven million paperbacks littering my bookshelves and I haven’t read a tenth of them.  But I did buy them — through the agency of my wife having possession of my debit card, at least — and those beans count on somebody’s accounting sheet.  I’m pretty sure that most of those writers would be just as happy to have my admiration and deep love for their story as they are with my money.

What I’m trying to get at is that we’re not really going to know what works for blogged fiction until we start seeing come cohesion (or some “buzz”) on what some writers are doing that is actually working, and this buzz can’t come from other writers of online fiction.  We’ve all got an investment in the medium outside of the I like this; I think I’ll read it impetus that drives most consumer entertainment phenomena, so we can theorize and rhapsodize all we want, but we’re really just experimenting (okay, guessing) until we get a concrete trend that we can analyze in retrospect.

(Alternatively, we can also jerk each other off and say we’re not going to compromise our artistic vision to the technological banalities of a plebian medium.  Which is the sort of excuse writers come up with when no one is reading and we want to pretend like we don’t give a shit.)

To get that sort of cohesion, we’re going to need a mechanism (and no, I’m not looking at you, Blooker Prize, and your slutty pimping for Lulu’s corporate coffers) that critically examines blooks, blog novels and digital fiction and that carries sufficient respectability and audience to engender authentic word of mouth buzz.  At the very least, we’re going to need what we haven’t seen yet, which is a breakout title that operates completely independently of the traditional publishing track.  (Don’t expect me to be a firebrand on the topic of digital exclusivity, though.  I would seriously doubt the veracity and/or sanity of any writer who said he’d rather publish on a blog than sign a print publishing contract.  None of us woke up one morning and said to ourselves, “You know what?  I really want to become a rock star of blog fiction.  That’s what I’ve always wanted.  Why did I never see this before?”  We would all kill to have Stephen King’s writing and publishing life.  Some of us already have.)

I have no idea how to build this mechanism or even what it should look like, but what I do know is that it’s going to have to work pretty damned hard to overcome the elephant in the room that I haven’t talked much about, which is that by and large, most of us harbor the secret belief (me included) that the bulk of free digital online fiction sucks.  That, however, is a discussion that we’ll save for a later date.

In the meantime, all we can do is write the stories we want to write, write them well and let the cards fall where they may.

D.

It would be a safe bet that we’re going to be chatting about some of Eli’s content and ideas over the next few days.

And yes, I feel like a complete idiot that it took me this long to discover Novelr.  Thanks for asking.

D.

Do things get missed? Sure.
Are mistakes made? Sure.
Do market forces play a role in the decisions Gatekeepers make? Sure.

I’ve never been particularly suspicious of this dynamic. As a writer, I want to get my texts out to the widest possible audience. The editors and publishers want to make money (sometimes for the sole purpose of making money, and sometimes because making money allows them to take chances on excellent literary works for which there’s no pre-defined market niche). To the extent that my goals (broad distribution) and theirs (more readers = more money) coincide, this is a straightforward and honest relationship. Deep down, I tend to believe that people who work with texts and narrative for a living do so because they love good stories.

Market realities mean that sometimes an editor or a publishers takes a pass on an absolutely brilliant, earth-shaking and revolutionary 400,000 word supernovel because they’re suspicious of how the public will receive it and, even if it’s full brilliance is completely realized by adoring critics and it’s ultimately destined to be studied in university literature classes for the next 500 years, whether or not they can make any money off of it. Gatekeepers who take too many chances that don’t work out financially tend to end up losing their Gatekeeper credentials.

I think this way because I’m not an academic with Marxist leanings, and because I choose to believe that most people and/or corporations aren’t secretly nefarious (unless you consider capitalist pigs to be nefarious in principle). I don’t like phrases like chilling effect because on some level, I suspect that the people most worried about having their effects chilled are really raging pussies who just need an excuse for being a pussy. But that’s just me.

(And yes, I promise I’ll give you a more nuanced view than dismissing anti-Gatekeepers as pussies in a bit. I just like calling people pussies.)

Now, the point I’ve been meandering towards is that I’ve just finished reading the interesting essay “Intellectual Property Law, Freedom of Expression and the Web” by University of Iowa professor Kembrew McLeod from the collection The Politics of Information from Alt-X Books. You can download this collection of academic essays (for FREE, damn it) here. I’m not a quasi-Marxist academic (as previously indicated) and I can honestly say that I’d never heard of Kembrew McLeod prior to reading this essay (though I probably will make an effort to remember his name now, because this dude had the temerity to trademark the phrase “freedom of expression” and convince a lawyer to send out injunctions to folks who dared to use it without his consent. Under normal circumstances, I’d call that behavior obnoxious, absurd and a clear case of outrageous asshattery, but since McLeod did this for the sole purpose of fucking with people under the guise of legitimate social commentary about the privatization of cultural artifacts, I’m just going to sit here and chuckle appreciatively.)

In brief, McLeod’s essay concerns the cultural impact of corporations ass-fucking the fundamental nature of intellectual property, copyright and creative expression to protect their financial interest in creative commodities in cyberspace. At the core, this is about reconstituting intellectual property rights as “Good for the Owner” rather than “Good for Society”. Personally, I think that this is a false dichotomy, but it leads to plenty of fascinating discourse in a hinky academic who-really-gives-a-shit-about-this-minutiae sort of way.

The only thing about the commodification of culture or the fact that corporations are abusing trademark and/or copyright law to squelch criticism of their inferior entertainment products that really concerns me is the extent to which it means more crappy movies, television and books served up on a poo poo platter for us as entertainment consumers to suck up because we don’t know any better. I leave the nefarious angle arguments that these corporations and entertainment consortiums are doing so for the sole purpose of keeping the necks of regular joe’s under their economic bootheels to folks who can get more hysterical about it. I personally tend to find entertainment tagged as Culturally Significant or as Capital-L Literature to be generally pretty snooze-worthy, so if we’re missing more of it because super-powerful media congloms are unfairly controlling the mechanisms of production, I haven’t missed it.

But let’s get back to Mr. McLeod.

I’m going to stipulate right out front that yes, abusing trademarks to squelch whiners and critics is stupid. I’ll also toss in the concession that the courts of late have given waaaaaay too much territory back to people like Disney in terms of providing legal tools to crap on people who stick Little Mermaid pictures on their websites (though I’m also prepared to argue that people who stick Little Mermaid pictures on their websites probably deserve to be crapped on, but you’ve caught me on a good day).

McLeod’s primary concern seems to follow these lines:

As more and more of our interactions are mediated electronically and cultural texts are routinely distributed online, we are increasingly exposed to the policing powers of intellectual property owners. That is, when we often reference existing cultural texts (and engage in everyday interpersonal discussions), we often reference existing cultural texts to convey certain meanings. In doing so, we cannot help but use privately owned signifiers when engaging in cultural production — signifiers that are copyrighted and trademarked by very protective corporate entities who care little for protecting freedom of expression. (Politics of Information, p. 183)

What this inevitably leads to is a collision between how people might want to use “protected” cultural signifiers and how the owners of the rights to those signifiers would ideally like them to be used. With specific reference to trademarks (for which there is no “fair use” provision, like there is with copyright — which, in case you don’t understand “fair use”, is what allows me to quote Mr. McLeod’s work in this context), McLeod raises the point that “Many times corporations that want to eliminate unauthorized uses of their intellectual properties want to control the context in which their copyrights and trademarks are exhibited, particularly when shown in an unfavorable context” (Politics, 187). The reason they do this is because corporations — or, Gatekeepers — are used to relating to their consumers as, well, consumers. They’re not trying to make culture. They’re just trying to sell us something. As court rulings increasingly side with content owners, the result is that in legal terms, the conception of trademarks purely as property should win out over the idea that they are important texts that can be used to engage in discourse about contemporary life”.

Here is where I think McLeod really starts to make some valid points about Gatekeeping functions. At some point, when we start aggressively defending copyright and trademark to the extent that we’re letting the content owners attempt to control the context of discussion, they’ve stopped merely performing merely as arbiters of taste (i.e., dreck filters), and become delimiters of how “acceptable culture” should be defined. The danger of privatizing culture — of placing too much faith in the Gatekeepers solely because we respect their investment in a commodity as a valid indicator of that commodity’s worth — is that eventually we lose touch with what we’re missing. Which is not to say that we should get rid of the Gatekeepers. Only that we should be aware that the Gatekeepers are less interested in showing us what is best and most brilliant about our current cultural production than they are about making money.

Let me put it this way: You can’t read a book you’ve never heard of. And that has the potential to be significant, because that book that you’re not aware of might be the one that could change your life or your way of thinking about life, the universe and everything.

Most compelling to McLeod’s argument, in my opinion, is his conclusion about the perils of increasingly powerful corporate interests acquiring more and more cultural artifacts into fewer hands and doling out the rights to those artifacts at their own discretion. Essentially, he’s making the point that absolute private control of cultural artifacts (texts, movies, symbols, etc.) ultimately influences the form that culture takes. It becomes a question of access. You can’t be influenced by the ideas to which you aren’t exposed. Limited access propagated over a society eventually translates to loss in cultural production. That is, it leads to increasing cultural homogenization, which serves the interest of corporate distributors rather than the recipients of that culture. (What do I mean by that? Let me ask you this: How many Da Vinci Code spin off novels, PBS/Discovery Channel specials, Nicholas Cage movie clones, etc. have you seen in the last year? If you like this, then we’ll give you more of it (and we won’t stop until you puke) is the most obvious form of cultural homogenization.

When the production of cultural artifacts, texts and signifiers becomes all about making money, that which is fringe, different or experimental tends to get squeezed out of the public consciousness, regardless of merit. Small content producers lose market, along with the writers and artists they support. Ultimately, homogenization impedes the sort of stories and narratives that can be told because the non-commercial gets squeezed out of the cultural landscape.

If culture is dialectical in nature, the Hegelian tripod collapses in some cases because the thesis and/or antithesis texts vanish because they didn’t fit an appropriate marketing niche.

These are legitimate concerns, and a reason to be wary of Gatekeepers. (That reason? No matter what they might say to the contrary, they’re trying to sell you something.)

Having said all of that, maybe I’m a bit naive, but I truly believe that at ground level, most Gatekeepers are just saying, “I liked this book. I think you’ll like it, too.” Which is what we want them to do. We want them to start the buzz of word-of-mouth advertising. It’s likely that I feel this way because I’ve worked with small presses, who are taking a considerable personal financial risk to publish any novel. Small presses don’t exist to make money. They exist because the folks running them love books and want to share atypical narratives with people of a like mind.

I’d like to think that this is the way all entertainment gatekeeping is done, but I’ve gotten my share of rejection letters that said simply We loved this book. It’s awesome. But it’s way too long for us to take a chance on it. At some point, there has to be a business model. Better, there has to be a financially responsible business model. And I’m okay with that.

At some point, I’d rather have someone love my work enough to take a risk on it, even if that risk fails, than have a corporate Gatekeeper conclude they can make money on it, even if isn’t particularly good.

D.

Dave’s assorted sites and sub-sites are very professionally designed and the writing is top notch, but this isn’t actually a post about his work (which, because I’m a shameless pimper, is also available in print from the normal on-line sellers or from his publisher, Thunder’s Mouth Press.)

This is actually a post stemming from one of Dave’s links to Nate Piekos’s Dead Ends.  Dead Ends is an interesting on-line zombie themed adventure story in the mold of the Choose Your Own Adventure books.  The site features some impressive collaborative artwork, a stylish layout and a really well executed site design.

(N.B. — Dead Ends appears to be on a creative hiatus at the moment, but what’s there is definitely worth looking at.) 

Of course, I’ve got my quibbles.  I don’t like the pop up window for navigating the text.  I don’t like pop up windows at all.  Ever.  Unless they’re for pr0n, then maybe.

What I do like is that Nate has designed his site to fit the milieu of his story.  The weathered book navigation theme fits organically into the setting and mood of the work itself, reinforcing the creep factor of the experience rather than merely acting as an interface to get to the text.

This is not to say that I’m always going to side with organically ambient interface.  If I can’t figure out at first glance what’s going on with a site’s design and how to navigate to the text, I’m just going to get annoyed, no matter how slick the production values.  In other words, just because you can design a fully functional web reproduction of a starship’s navigation console with lots of blinking lights and buttons to push doesn’t mean that you should.  I don’t want to have to get a degree in engineering to find Chapter 1.

Bottom line is that I think Dead Ends has stuck a nice balance between theme, content and user-friendliness.  It probably isn’t what the future of web narrative is going to look like, but it’s a fun sort of hybrid.

I’ve long maintained that the most brilliant decision Bill Gates ever made was to give computers away to schools through his charitable foundation. Why? Not merely because it makes him look like a good guy who cares about education (which I happen to believe is true), but because he’s essentially ensured the continued domination of Microsoft in the OS and applications sector for another forty years. Look, no school system is going to turn down this offer because they would have preferred to fork over the cash for Macs. They’ll take the gift and be grateful. In return, they’ll education an entire generation in how to use Microsoft Office. When those students eventually become employees, smart business managers are going to say to themselves, “Hmm. I like the Mac, but most of our employee pool already has Windows skills. Becoming (or remaining) a Windows shop means that we don’t have to pay to have them trained or lose productivity as they overcome the learning curve.”

That’s what mindshare is about. People who already have one skill set are less likely to want to learn a parallel or rival set to get the same job done, especially if it’s going to take lots of intensive time and effort. There’s no point in picking up the second set if the first set is adequate, even if the second set is ultimately superior. People can complain about this all they want, but as Stephenson points out with regards to Microsoft, “But they can’t really do anything about a mindshare monopoly, short of taking every man, woman, and child in the developed world and subjecting them to a lengthy brainwashing procedure.”

Now, my point here doesn’t really have anything to do with Microsoft, operating systems or consumer software. The topic of this blog is (usually) blogged and electronic narrative. The traditional paradigm of printed books (along with the colinear assumptions of legitimacy, gatekeeping, value, etc., that we’ve discussed previously) can be viewed through this lens of mindshare somewhat productively, I think. Communal mindshare says that print, mass produced and marketed books are “real”. They’re valuable because someone WHO KNOWS ABOUT BOOKS says they’re worth reading. The entire mechanism of critics, reviews, advertising, bookstores supports the argument of this mindshare, and I wonder how much my personal annoyance with reading long narratives off a screen is informed by my own subconscious buy-in to this mindshare.

I mean, really, aren’t we all a little suspicious of what we read on the internet unless it comes from one the “approved” outlets? Don’t we tend to evaluate creative content that comes from The Great Unknown somewhat more critically than we would exactly the same material from CNN, ESPN, ABC, Bantam, Tor, etc.? If it was that good, we reason, someone would have paid money for it by now.

Do you remember the days when people used to look askance at Wikipedia? When you could be laughed off of a discussion board for using a Wikipedia link as proof of your argument?

Mindshare.

While I’m not specifically talking about some sort of aggregation service or internet publishing cognate (ala Printpusher, which I mentioned recently), those mechanisms do have their benefit. What I’m really referencing is our underlying mindshare-based assumptions that narratives posted to a web page are necessarily inferior. Yes, we’ve all watched, read, perused more crap on the internet than we ever cared to. We know the tubes are full of dreck. We also know that it isn’t all dreck, but that doesn’t stop us from having to overcome the Dreck Radar when first encountering something that seems attention-worthy.

And that’s what puts the wiggle in my waffle on this subject. Part of me wants to look at presentation of long form narrative on the web as an essential component in converting to a new mindshare where electronic fiction is taken as seriously as its print counterpart. Part of me wants to think that it’s the nature of narrative that has to change to get readers’ attention in this new medium. But the writer in me hears Stephenson argue that “a writer is literally talking to his or her readers, not just creating an ambiance or presenting them with something to look at; and just as the command-line interface opens a much more direct and explicit channel from user to machine than the GUI, so it is with words, writer, and reader.”

A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people’s minds.

– Neal Stephenson