I am the last person to know what the future of publishing is going to be. I say this in my interview in the current issue of LOCUS (this has been a promotional plug). So I'm always eager to listen to other people tell me what future publishing holds. A few days ago I got to do this at Leslie Howle's house, where she held a "networking event."
It was an evening both enlightening and bewildering. Greg Bear discussed his and Neal Stephenson's Mongoliad project (www.mongoliad.com). This is a "collaborative book" with serial chapters by Bear and Stephenson, which will take into consideration comments and feedback from readers. There is also artwork, maps, and some gorgeous period sets. A reader can subscribe for six months or a year. The story is an epic fantasy that will change and grow with feedback.
Bob Krueger discussed his website, electricstory.com. At the moment Electric Story is a subscription site offering reprint and new fiction, but Bob has in beta testing a more ambitious idea. One problem with reader reviews on a site like amazon.com is that one disgruntled reader can write, say, ten bad reviews under different screen names and bring a book's ratings way down -- or way up. (There are rumors that some authors and/or publishers do just this). Bob's system would assign "weights" to different people's reviews of self-published stories posted on the site. A review by Gardner Dozois might, for example, be worth ten points. If a story gets enough favorable reaction, Bob will offer a contract to the author for publication on the main Electric Story site. Again, this is in testing.
Several game-company people discussed what they are doing now, and in their comments I heard even more blurring of the line between traditional fiction and other media forms.
Especially revealing was Leslie's question as to how many people present own an e-reading device -- Kindle, i-Pad, other. Every single household had one. Granted, we are hardly a representative group of Americans. Still...
After listening to everyone, I still don't know what the future of publishing is -- are these just interesting experiments that will stay on the fringe, or are they harbingers of genuine change? I'm waiting to find out.
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They're harbingers of genuine change. We just don't know which ones will work out yet. Or which ones may fail for now, and come back in a few years when someone has a better idea how to make them work, or when a new technological fix makes them practical.
I know I'm in the (slow) process of working through Smashwords to get all my previously published stories online, to try to take advantage of having professional material available, as opposed to all the slushpile material that's flooding the web. I think without such a presence, none of us has a future in publishing.
Not that print is going away. But it's going to be one choice among many.
Your Locus interview was the second thing I read when my copy came. (You can figure what the first was.) You're not the only person who likes Beggars Ride--I thought it was a splendid finish for the trilogy and absolutely the right resolution for the whole story arc and the moral problems presented. And despite your statement that (if I'm reading you correctly) the problems with genetic engineering were there to enable the story, it seems to me that an inescapable theme of the series is that there is no gift so wonderful that we can't use it to poke ourselves in the eye. That "yes, but" response to utopian possibilities is one of the parts of being a grownup that I have reluctantly come to see as not just inevitable but necessary and useful--"no joy but lacks salt/That is not dashed with pain/And weariness and fault," not because hope is wrong but because experience is as important as innocence.
Russell- Thank you. That is exactly what I was trying to do with the BEGGARS series -- and in fact with most of my fiction. Nothing in life is unambiguous, and that includes "progress." But I'd still rather have it than not have it.
Argh. I let my Locus subscription lapse and the last issue was last month's. Off to the newsstand I go.
Hi Nancy. I think writers will, more and more, find collaborators from other mediums to enhance and imbue their work with extra levels of experience. I think the days of what are now called "enhanced ebooks" being simply just known as "ebooks" are well on their way, and that consumers will soon expect what are currently known as extras (soundtracks, video clips, interviews, artwork) to come as standard with the purchase of an electronic version of a book.
New ideas and stories have less time than ever now to make an impact on mass culture before they're forgotten or pushed aside by the next thing, so I foresee increasing levels of cross-fertilisation with other art forms as artists work together to create something that is at once a real event and more than the sum of its parts, and yet can be boiled down and still enjoyed as its separate elements, eg novel, soundtrack, comic book, image gallery etc.
It's an exciting time to be a writer and creative artist, and also, I reckon, an exciting time to be a consumer of creative content.
Sorry, Neil, but I disagree entirely. Writing fiction is not a collaborative enterprise. Adding a sound track and video clips and all that simply undercuts the reader's experience by diffusing it across unrelated media. You can't make a book more appealing by turning it into a carnival. Good books don't need to be made more appealing. In the earlier days of motion pictures, directors often tried to incorporate narrative voices and even shots of book pages slowly turning, in an attempt, I guess, to make readers more comfortable with a non-literary medium. My point is, that was dumb -- and so is tarting up novels to look and act like something they are not. Writing is a solitary activity. So is reading. If you are a certain type of person, the peculiar joys derived from that situation are more than sufficient. As a segment of the population, book readers have always hovered around a very low number, maybe as low as one percent. Adding video clips and sound tracks won't increase that number, it will simply create a broken thing that is halfway between a novel and a music video.
I think Neil and Jack are both right. I think some readers would be excited to have video/audio extras in a book. Others, maybe not so much. As I said above, we don't know what changes in the book industry will "take" and which ones won't.
I'm having a hard enough time coming up with covers for my e-books that I'm doubtful about some people being able to produce multi-media productions -- a lack of familiarity with producing such content could be one drawback, just finding time to do it if you're not a full-time writer is another.
That said, it could be pretty cool to attempt such a production sometime. It would be pretty challenging, but that would be the fun.
One thing I'm certain of: The "speedup" caused by digital publishing will make the sluggishness of the traditional publishing process increasingly intolerable to readers, writers and publishers alike.
Especially in SF, which thrives on being current and "with it"...
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