Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

in Books, e-books | June 9th, 2009

Ear­li­er today, Seth Har­wood wrote about a new chal­lenge for writ­ers — mak­ing sure books get dis­trib­uted through as many dig­i­tal read­ing plat­forms as pos­si­ble. His think­ing dove­tails nice­ly with Wired’s list of the “Eigh­teen Chal­lenges in Con­tem­po­rary Lit­er­a­ture.” Here are some of the Wired items that mesh or flirt with what Har­wood is talk­ing about…

2. Ver­nac­u­lar means of every­day com­mu­ni­ca­tion — cell­phones, social net­works, stream­ing video — are mov­ing into areas where print­ed text can­not fol­low.

4. Means of book pro­mo­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion and retail desta­bi­lized.

5. Ink-on-paper man­u­fac­tur­ing is an out­mod­ed, tox­ic indus­try with steeply ris­ing costs.

8. Long tail balka­nizes audi­ences, dis­rupts means of canon-build­ing and frag­ments lit­er­ary rep­u­ta­tion.

11. Bar­ri­ers to pub­li­ca­tion entry have crashed, enabling huge tor­rent of sub­lit­er­ary and/or non­lit­er­ary tex­tu­al expres­sion.

Get the full list here. Thanks to Ed Finn for giv­ing us a heads up on this list.

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Writing in the Digital Age: It’s All About the Platform

in Audio Books, Books, e-books | June 8th, 2009

A cou­ple of weeks ago, crime writer Seth Har­wood wrote a very pop­u­lar piece here — How I Sold My Book by Giv­ing It Away. Now he’s back and telling us about the new chal­lenge of writ­ing in the dig­i­tal age. Take it away Seth (and check out his new book JACK WAKES UP )…

The num­ber of ebook read­ers and read­ing devices is grow­ing rather than shrink­ing these days. We’re enter­ing a world where indi­vid­ual read­ers will decide not only what books they want to read, but how they want to read them. And here there’s some­thing to think about for authors: As read­ers choose the read­ing plat­form they like best, they’ll see a cer­tain set of books in that space. Dif­fer­ent books show up at Wal-Mart than at your local inde­pen­dent book­seller. On the Kin­dle there are dif­fer­ent books—with dif­fer­ent prices—than on the iTunes App store. And even with­in the iTunes store, you’ll find dif­fer­ent books in the Audio­books sec­tion (owned by Audible.com), the Podcasts»Arts»Literature sec­tion (where many of the titles are free), and in the App store.

As an author, I want to be wher­ev­er a read­er can look. On every plat­form and every new plat­form, I want my book to be avail­able. My nov­el JACK WAKES UP start­ed out as a pod­cast (via iTunes, RSS Feed, & MP3). Peo­ple liked it. It got to print on demand, and Ama­zon sold it in print and Kin­dle for­mats. Guess what? It did pret­ty well. Now, it’s out from Three Rivers Press, a divi­sion of Ran­dom House, and read­ers can find it at all the online out­lets, as well as brick and mor­tar book­stores nationwide—both big box and indy. But that’s still miss­ing part of the mar­ket: soon more and more peo­ple will be buy­ing their books on their iPhones as Apps—both audio and text—or on Kin­dle, Scribd, eRead­er and who knows where else. All I can do is work toward mak­ing JACK WAKES UP avail­able in as many places and ways as pos­si­ble.

At the Pub­lish­ing 3.0 pan­el ses­sion dur­ing April’s LA Times Fes­ti­val of Books, the experts spoke about the prob­lem of pub­lish­ing in the 20th cen­tu­ry being demand—how do you gen­er­ate the inter­est in your book and get peo­ple to buy it—and that the new prob­lem in the 21st cen­tu­ry is sup­ply. With so many books pub­lished, many will fail. There’s lit­er­al­ly just too much, a glut of books that no one has a good idea how to fix.

The oth­er sup­ply-side issue is plat­form. As the pub­lish­ing game steams quick­ly toward dif­fer­ent plat­forms, vir­tu­al­ly unlim­it­ed choic­es for read­ers, dif­fer­ent pric­ing mod­els, read­ing expe­ri­ences, and pref­er­ences, my duty as an author now involves mak­ing sure my work is offered on as many plat­forms as pos­si­ble to ensure my book is an option for the great­est num­ber of read­ers.

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The Infinite Jest Summer Challenge

in Books, Literature | May 27th, 2009

When I devel­op the cur­ricu­lum for Stan­ford’s Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies pro­gram, I often like to cre­ate cours­es around big, hard books that stu­dents have long intend­ed to read, but have nev­er quite pulled off: James Joyce’s Uly­sess, Pla­to’s Repub­lic, Tol­stoy’s Anna Karen­i­na, you get the pic­ture. For many stu­dents, it takes a course, or some­thing equiv­a­lent, to pro­vide the struc­ture and encour­age­ment to get through a tru­ly major work.  A more mod­ern exam­ple is Infi­nite Jest, David Fos­ter Wal­lace’s 1100 page sprawl­ing nov­el, which TIME Mag­a­zine includ­ed on its list of all-time 100 nov­els. To help you work through the nov­el, a web site called Infi­nite Sum­mer has invit­ed read­ers to tack­le the nov­el with oth­er read­ers start­ing on June 21. Here’s the basic invi­ta­tion:

You’ve been mean­ing to do it for over a decade. Now join endurance bib­lio­philes from around the web as we tack­le and com­ment upon David Fos­ter Wal­lace’s mas­ter­work, June 21st to Sep­tem­ber 22nd. A thou­sand pages1 ÷ 93 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat. 

Return to this site on June 1st for full details. In the mean­while, buy or bor­row a copy of the nov­el, fol­low us on Twit­ter (#inf­sum), join the Face­book group, and clear your lit­er­ary sched­ule for the fore­see­able future.

If I can wrap up Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov (my cur­rent read) by then, I’ll give it a go. In the mean­time, you should def­i­nite­ly give this some thought. Also, as a quick aside, you may know that David Fos­ter Wal­lace trag­i­cal­ly com­mit­ted sui­cide last year. To learn more about DFW, his writ­ing career, and spi­ral into depres­sion, give this piece in The New York­er a read.

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The Art of Trashing the Classics

in Books, Film | May 27th, 2009

From the Freako­nom­ics blog:

We’ve writ­ten before about the occa­sion­al hyper-crit­i­cal com­ments on cer­tain blogs, but such com­ments are like valen­tines com­pared to what some Amazon.com cus­tomers heap upon The Rolling Stones, The God­fa­ther, The Diary of Anne Frank, and oth­er stan­dards. The Cynical‑C blog lists the most caus­tic of these every day.

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How I Sold My Book by Giving It Away

in Audio Books, Books, Most Popular | May 23rd, 2009

Today we’re fea­tur­ing a piece by Seth Har­wood, an inno­v­a­tive crime fic­tion writer who has used the tools of Web 2.0 to launch his writ­ing career. Below, he gives you an inside look at how he went from pod­cast­ing his books to land­ing a book deal with Ran­dom House. If you want to learn more about how writ­ers will increas­ing­ly build their careers, be sure to give this a read. Take it away Seth…

Before it ever hit print, my debut nov­el JACK WAKES UP was a free seri­al­ized audio­book.  And giv­ing my crime fic­tion away for free turned out to be the key to becom­ing a pub­lished author—that last piece of the puz­zle that eludes so many aspir­ing writ­ers. 

How did it work? Well, I got my MFA from a pres­ti­gious writ­ers’ work­shop.  I got a dozen sto­ries placed in lit­er­ary jour­nals.  In short, I was doing all the things “they” (the lit­er­ary estab­lish­ment) tell you you have to do in order to become a suc­cess­ful author.  And it wasn’t work­ing.  Agents were say­ing nice things about my crime fic­tion, but weren’t will­ing to take me on as a client.  Even­tu­al­ly I start­ed look­ing for anoth­er way to dri­ve my own career and put my work in front of peo­ple. Hav­ing had a lit­tle suc­cess with a pub­lished sto­ry online—my friends could read it and I was hear­ing from strangers who liked it, two things that had nev­er hap­pened with the dozen sto­ries I’d slaved to pub­lish in lit­er­ary journals—I could see that the web was the way to do this. But I couldn’t imag­ine any­one read­ing a nov­el online, or even on his or her com­put­er. I did have an iPod though, and didn’t I lis­ten to it all the time in the car and at the gym? Wasn’t I tak­ing out books on CD from my local library for my dri­ve to work? Sure I was. So when a friend showed me how he’d been using his iPod and a thing called pod­cast­ing to get free audio­books from an unknown author named Scott Sigler, I knew I had to fig­ure out how this was done.

Turns out that mak­ing MP3 files costs noth­ing. Dis­trib­ut­ing them costs me less than $10 a month, no mat­ter how many episodes go out. Each week, I release a free episode—usually a cou­ple of chapters—to thou­sands of sub­scribers. You can think of this as a throw­back to two old forms of crime dis­tri­b­u­tion: either the pulp mag­a­zines or the old-time radio plays that intro­duced detec­tive adven­tures to ear­ly lis­ten­ers on the radio. (more…)

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The New Digital Book Marketplace at Scribd

in Amazon Kindle, Books, e-books | May 19th, 2009

The ground under­neath tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ing has shift­ed once again. Scribd, the “YouTube of doc­u­ments,” has opened up a new store where authors can upload and sell their books. And here’s the clinch­er. You don’t need a cost­ly gad­get (like the Kin­dle) to read these dig­i­tal books. Any com­put­er with an inter­net con­nec­tion will do. And appar­ent­ly, you can use smart phones as well.

As not­ed in the LA Times, Kem­ble Scott, a best­selling author from San Fran­cis­co, has pub­lished his sec­ond book — The Sow­er — on Scribd, and it goes for $2 per copy. Of that, Scott will get to keep $1.60, which beats the cut he received for his first tra­di­tion­al­ly-pub­lished book. You can watch a video intro­duc­ing the new dig­i­tal book mar­ket­place above. You can also read more about it in The New York Times. If you have some thoughts about Scrib­d’s new move, let us know in the com­ments below.

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Jack Wakes Up: Get the First Three Chapters Here

in Books | May 5th, 2009

harwoodIt start­ed as an audio pod­cast (iTunes — RSS Feed — MP3) and now it’s being released in print by Ran­dom House today. Seth Har­wood’s Jack Wakes Up is out, and you can read the first three chap­ters as a free pdf here. A cou­ple of weeks back, we fea­tured a short video show­ing how Har­wood has used web 2.0 (pod­casts, videos, etc.) to get his crime fic­tion in front of new audi­ences. If you’re a writer, no mat­ter what your age, you’ll want to see what Seth is doing here. It’s smart and let’s you take charge of your lit­er­ary career. In the mean­time, you can fol­low his enthu­si­as­tic book launch over on Twit­ter: @sethharwood. And we’re at @openculture, bring­ing even more bits of open cul­ture to the world.

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Free PDF Download of The Alchemyst

in Books | May 2nd, 2009

A quick fyi: You can down­load a free PDF of Michael Scot­t’s Young Adult nov­el, The Alche­myst: The Secrets of the Immor­tal Nicholas Flamel. It runs about 375 pages and is avail­able for a lim­it­ed time thanks to Pow­ell’s web site. Get it free here. Or buy a copy (and read user reviews) here.

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