Dead Tree Paradigm vs Web Paradigm

The first thing that came to mind for me was pure work ethic. If you're going to make it in DTP, you need discipline to meet your deadlines and to keep producing. Not so much with weblit.

At the same time, it's something to leave behind. Weblit gives people the freedom to write simply for the joy of doing it, and to still get a little bit of that thrill that comes from having readers. You still need some of the good ol' work ethic to really wrangle it into something payable, but you don't *have* to.

There's more, but I need to go grocery shopping. Breain ded of hungor.

> The first thing that came to mind for me was pure work ethic. If you're going to make it in DTP, you need discipline to meet your deadlines and to keep producing. Not so much with weblit.

As a former dead-tree author, I disagree totally.

One of the models of online success that I personally try to emulate is the progressive political blogosphere, and I learned early on that the most successful sites are those which post reliably, at least once a day, more often several times a day, seven days a week. Atrios does that, with guest bloggers if not himself; ditto Aravosis, Digby, Josh Marshall and all the others from which people are making their livings. Daily Kos is a virtual big city, the Blog That Never Sleeps. You can absolutely count on them always to have something new. Even in the small town in which I live, there's a news/opinions blog that has achieved serious popularity in a few months, and one of its features is the commitment to posting *something* seven days a week.

I submit also the example of Alexandra Erin. When she was building her readership, she was posting every day.

Because I'm all on my lonesome I take weekends and statutory holidays off, though just by writing this I've almost sold myself on the idea of posting *something*, albeit it small, on the off-days. But otherwise, I have two midnight deadlines every weeknight. If they come before the print deadlines (I'm also a freelance journalist) they take precedence.

It helps that I already had at least half of the posts rough drafted in one form or another, but still, I'm often frantically writing at 11:30 p.m. But you know what? I don't think I've done anything before that was as good for me in terms of improving my writing. You'll hear over and over from really good writers that the way to become one is, like any other skill, daily practice -- and the daily deadline forces that. The discipline you learn and the sense of accomplishment you feel is really fantastic. Insofar as the main thing that stops or slows people down in writing is performance anxiety, committing yourself totally to a daily deadline offsets that. Your concern with meeting the deadline overshadows the anxiety.

More thoughts on what to bring, what to leave behind and what to acquire (a third category we also need to look at):

Bring:

- professionalism, i.e. a commitment to quality
- financial ambition
- skill at meta-plotting (by which I mean, you have to avoid the danger of not seeing the forest of your whole plot for the trees of your individual posts.)
- professional networking

Leave behind:

- instinctive habits of self-censorship due to standard English-language DTPI constraints. (Bwaaaaaa ha ha ha ha ha! I'm free I'm free!)
- lengthy chapters (I think... someone might find a way to prove me wrong on this one tomorrow.)
- distance from readers (these days they expect to be able to sound off either in comments or forums). Hence, sensitivity to criticism.

Acquire:

- willingness to promote our own work, since it's now our responsibility; skill at promoting our own work
- a commitment to quality in *packaging* as well as writing, since that's now our responsibility too; skill in same
- skill at tracking readership
- innovative approach and flexibility in format, packaging, promotion, etc. (The Internet moves at the speed of thought.)

Those are the ones I can think of at the moment...

@Karen My point was more that you can be a weblit writer and enjoy some sort of fan base without having to put much effort into it, but I don't hear any stores about writers who have been DTP that managed to do so with a "eeeeeh, I'm just doing this for the lulz" attitude. It just makes sense that the magnitude of your success is tied to how much effort you're willing to put into your writing (and publicizing that writing), but the bar is set quite a bit lower with digital publishing. Hell, fanfiction writers don't really publicize at all; they just have so many people reading that word-of-mouth can make a big name out of someone just by the power of sheer numbers!

Yeah, I BNFed (Big Name Fan) with pretty much no effort years ago when I was writing Slayers fanfiction. I just kept writing and the readers lined up for it. I still have Slayers fans who hit my gallery regularly and check out Peacock King in the process because "oh, you're IRK!"

Internet marketing gives you a completely different set of priorities, though. Most of the pressure is getting listed at certain places, rated well there, getting linked to by someone with a wide readership... that sort of thing. It's still work, but of a different kind. Also, I think you can be more laid-back about building a fandom, whereas if you're signed up with a dead-tree publisher you are expected to do certain things to market your work and be CONSTANTLY doing the PR thing. Especially now when trad publishers are putting in a lot less money to marketing and such, and expecting even more of authors. Being indie on the internet gives me a certain amount of um... spare time. Which helps, because I've got to make a living on the side and I've got to have time for it.

I think you've hit on a lot of important points. I know several of the "Acquires" are on my list of this _to_ acquire (i.e., skill in packaging, promotion).

I'm not sure about lengthy chapters. Shadow Unit (http://www.shadowunit.org/) publishes once-monthly "episodes" that are hella long, but it seems to have a big readership (could just be my impression, but the forums are hopping), and I know that it sucks me in. To do it right, I think you need to have a very intense style of writing that will, indeed, hold people's interest to the bitter end.

~Lyn

I posted a poll on PK's first site re: chapter length, and while some people said the length was "a good size", nobody ever said they should be shorter. Most votes were for longer. Since I update twice a week, people have to wait a few days for more story. I think the thought there is that more always = better, because it means less to wait for.

Maybe if I were writing a different story I could manage 500 word chapters, but too much happens in Peacock King's scenes for me to manage that sort of wordcount for its current chapters. It'd chop up the flow that's going on. Sometimes I've posted updates that were over 3,000 words in length because the scene was just that long. The chapters tend to average out to 2,000 words. It's just, well, I don't write in chapters, I just write in scenes and then divvy up the material as seems appropriate to pacing whenever it's posted. PK's definitely written as a complete novel, it's just being posted to the internet.

I think there's some division in WebLit between work that's written specifically for the internet and work that's being contoured to the internet after writing. I wouldn't say either is better or worse in general - it depends on the specific WebLit as to what works or not. Work that's not for any specific format can take some time to adapt for what you want it to be used for, but work that's format-specific might have trouble being applied to any other purpose than its first one. Each has its strengths and weaknesses.

One thing I did with PK in the beginning was post 10 chapters of it up on its original Blogger account when it first went up. This was so people could get an idea of what teh story was like and wouldn't just turn away because there was barely any content up there yet and no proof that I'd follow through on posting more. If I had that to do over again I think I would have just limited it to five chapters, but I still like having something up there at first that people can "leaf through". If someone picks up a book in a store, they can thumb through it, check if the writing's consistent, get a feel for how long it is, see if it's something they want to invest their time in. With digital stories you don't have that physical version to thumb through, so I'm more concerned with making sure a reader understands that with a serial, a whole book WILL be there, in time.

I'll just leave this here. (To promote some discussion until I can think about it myself because I haven't had tea yet.)

http://ebooktest.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/the-eleven-axioms-of-21st-cent...

Ouch. A lot of validity that the dead-tree-book-lover in me really hates.

Certainly -

10 – Readers sell more books than any publisher

is true within my own life. The books I actively buy are ones where the author was recommended to me by a friend (except the one author who I first bought because I found her on LJ via a quote in a friend's LJ; and that's something else entirely.)

I think this one

8 – A book’s function dictates its file container

Is a little more non-fiction oriented, but if you change the angle from which you look at it, it works for fiction (Does the mood of your page for your e-book match the mood of the story, etc.)

~Lyn, clearly not completely ready to divorce from dead-T-shirt books

I certainly see no reason for dead-tree to die, and I doubt it ever will. (I've been proven wrong before, but hey.) It definitely hits the issues pretty hard, since it's by an e-book anti-print militant.

I had to look up what metadata was, and felt bad because I immediately stopped caring about it - search data garnered from digital books, word clouds, stuff like that. I think that's also more valuable with nonfiction work. In the comments there's some discussion/debate on the relevance of this list, and also some debate on how much it even applies to authors since it's aimed at publishers.

Thing is, I'm my own publisher now. I'm looking at #1 in this list as a reader, and thinking "objects sell better than information engines". I'm not really set up to sell my metadata. I can't even think of how you'd monetize that. If the information engine is a service, then you're selling a service instead of an object, and that makes more sense. Subscriber models fit into 'service'. I am trying to wrap my puny ape brain around this whole thing and translate it into concepts I know.

The skeptic in me wonders if the 11th part is the truest of all, though - to see only today is to forfeit tomorrow. It's good to look ahead, but compartmentalizing the future into elitist terms and making it a rabid cause to flock under is pretty similar to only seeing today - it's seeing only what you want to see. Heck, that's even worse. I don't really like the minimizing of authors to just content producers - all we have to do is sit there and look pretty when the publisher pays us to? Since when are publishers paying for book signings? Elizabeth Bear can't get to Portland on her publisher's bill, why is the author of the future going to go anywhere other than the internet?

...Yeah, I need more tea.

and I doubt it ever will. "Ever" is a big word. Especially in times that have seen so many standards, such as vinyl records, disappear.

I hear this a lot and is seems short-sighted. Oddly, the staunchest statements that books will always be the thing seem to come from SF writers.

I would say it's kind of like horses or archery. Yes, people still ride horses, and people still use bows. But that's really just a sort of curiosity from the viewpoint of the transportation and military profession.

I doubt seriously that people will be reading books in space, for instance.

The problem is, just because books have disadvantages (and they are many), it's not a shift that will happen fast (thought it's accellerating). The real question is, will that bandwagon get big enough to support those jumping on it today.
And I'd say, Yeah, if you're young enough.
Meanwhile, the advantages of creating electonic literature are there for the writer, regardless of the survival of print books.

As a side note on that, I've had thoughts concerning the role of writers in this paraqdigm shift.

Such as, you look at a book and how much of the wholesale price went for printing and transporting it. That's the big factor. It's always been the big edge of the big houses... a production cost that requires big investment and rewards economy of scale.

Now, look at what the nut is on a download. Virtually no production cost, virtually no delivery cost. And frequently no retail mark-up.

So what's the biggest expense in a book like that? The writer's points.

So, in my future fantasy world, if the money paid to the writer is the biggest expense and investment in producting a book for sale, doesn't that start making the writer more important to publishers?

Perhaps I'm pessimistic, but publishers will always find ways to shortchange writers.

Money to the writer, the retailer, the coders, the proofer, the editor, the graphics person, sales staff, the cut for the publishers... not to mention the marketing if that's being done by the publisher. The publishing world's set up an illusion that books cost a certain amount because of their print prices - what really costs the most money is the industry itself. That only makes sense - it's a big industry with a lot of reach. They're just not reaching in the directions they should/could at the distance they could try for with the flexibility they ought to be able to muster. That's how self-pub sustains itself, by eliminating a lot of the people you have to pay... it's just you end up doing all the work they would have, and without all their training and extra hands and time.

And like I said, I doubt dead-tree books will ever die. I never said they'll keep the lead, though, which isn't necessarily something I'd want anyway. I think most problems with communication right now between the ebook/new media proponents and the peeps holding on to the tried, trusted, OLD technologies, is that a lot of people seem to think one must win out over the other, and thus crush it. That's silly. Paper and electronic can get along just fine. Sometimes these days it's like watching a console war. (If you've never seen one, try to stay out of video game forums. PS3 vs XBOX 360 debates are BRUTAL.) People are fighting over whether the 360 or PS3 will take the lead, then the Wii comes along and scoops up a whole new field of consumers because of its interactivity, user-friendliness, broad appeal, and new way of thinking. The other two consoles get left in the dust fighting for SECOND place and in the end, who cares? I just want to play video games. It's not like the PS3 and 360 disappeared when the Wii took the lead, or people stopped buying them, or games stopped being made for them. All three are thriving. What's funny is that the real killing's being made in hand-helds, anyway.