Sunday
Apr192009
Online Publishing
Sunday 19 April, 2009
I am after any and all thoughts about online publishing - form, methods of distribution, compatibility, responsibility, value, copyright etc. etc. Please post any thoughts you might have in the comments.
Reader Comments (9)
Tricky. I have a blog the purpose of which has changed over time. Initially it was meant to be a place I could publish stuff of my own that had either been rejected elsewhere - usually with good reason - or because I was too lazy to go through the whole process of editing and submitting work. I'm still too lazy to submit things on the whole.
On the way the purpose of the blog changed and it became more like a notepad for me. And that's more or less what it is now. There's more but at this stage it's probably worth saying that the story so far shows some of the problems of self-publishing. Without an effective editorial or at least selection process what you get is a mix of utter crap, stuff that has potential, and the odd piece that really should have a wider distribution. You have to read through a lot of junk to get the good stuff. But in some ways I find reading blogs more interesting than reading online magazines. I'm not sure why this is - perhaps it's that magazines despite the best efforts of editors seem somehow sterile and tame even if the content is really excellent.
For myself the story continues with the move into sound poetry. While I'm still too lazy to submit much online publication and distribution becomes by far the easiest and most effective route. Again the caveat is that anyone can spew anything out there - although I hope that especially recently I've been a little more cautious with my sound than with my text poetry.
I'm beginning to feel though that the end isn't especially to publish online but to help with networking - getting to know and stay in contact with other artists. Certainly where my sound poetry is concerned improvisation and performance are the important aspects. The idea that a piece is never complete but should always be in a state of becoming.
This probably doesn't tell us anything useful except that online publishing is an addition tool for anyone and at present for me one that encourages an ongoing dialogue with interested parties. Re-reading this it seems obvious that what I'm struggling towards is that conventional publication presents work as something accomplished, complete and remote. Online publication appears to open up the possibility of debate. It can have a much more human presence and consequently be less intimidating to readers.
networking & encouragement, as Matt says, are useful 'tools'. putting out crap in isolation is, as matt also points out, one of the pitfalls of online publishing. this too has happened to myself. overenthusiastically pumped out material can certainly be 'aesthetically challenging.' lots of excellent writers have more than one blog & many seem to enjoy the benefits of multiple journal or blog entries. it would be difficult to do this with books. it looks these days like a permafrost has settled on british book culture. the online DIY ethic appears to me to be in a much stronger position, which is a great shame cos i love books & i love appearing in them. the main thing is to get the writing to work within the medium, as with books. but publishers usually take a long time to produce books, whereas online publishing is as immediate or 'real time' as you want to make it. you can also edit your own live material as much as you want. i find myself re-editing almost every entry. i've also got to say that without online publishing, i personally would have been far less productive. i have always found the offline publishing world a bit turgid & offputting - as stiff as a new book. while i love the smell, feel & look of old books, online publishing seems to be serving the world of writing well enough & there's lots of good exciting writing going down online. we probably need a publishing house that doesn't involve cliques. i dunno if that's any more possible than, say, a meritocratic mode of existence ... but maybe it's worth thinking about.
I've a few thoughts and facts on this, through a couple of basic studies I did recently for a publishing course. Obvious challenges such as the appearance of digital e-books and e-reading devices (principally the Sony e-reader and Amazon’s Kindle), present problems relating to intellectual property rights, piracy, digital formatting, and pricing models. Added to this is the need for publishers and booksellers to adapt to changing customer behaviour as printed books are increasingly bought through online channels, and also to become competent at selling the abstract product of digital content, as contrasted with the physical, more overtly consumable object that is a printed book.
At the moment though, recent digital advancements have done a lot more for the printed book than any digital model, and print sales are rapidly growing in the UK. In the early nineties, there were between 60,000 and 100,000 new print titles in the UK each year. By 2007, that figure was approaching 200,000 – the biggest annual output of any country in the world, turning over some £4billion per year
But internet retailers and publishers will have to cope with lower profit margins from e-books. It's been estimated that Amazon makes “around 5% to 10% higher margins on print books than it does on digital downloads to the Kindle, which run around $9.99”. (The Bookseller, 10th February 2009). The difficulties of selling digital content via downloads is affecting all areas of the publishing industry, but in relation to books there are three main areas of challenge: publishers need to protect intellectual property rights relating to their own publications, safeguard against breaches of copyright and such on their own part, and face the problems of piracy caused by adopting mutually incompatible security technologies; they need to deal with the emerging problems of incompatible digital formats in e-bookselling and the negative impacts these may have on the consumer and subsequently e-book sales; and lastly, they need to adapt their sales and marketing to sell digital ‘content’ in addition to print, and convince consumers (who are accustomed to the free ethos of the internet) that certain digital information can be a valuable commodity.
Maybe, underneath their experiments with e-books, their haggling with Amazon, and their insistence on the persisting qualities of the printed books, publishers are worried about a more fundamental dilemma which although not immediately problematic, sits ominously on the horizon: if products such as the Kindle really do eliminate the business of packaging in paper, a lot of the value in being a book publisher vanishes. Writers and editors could re-group in other forms, and Amazon could be publisher itself. Evidence of such re-grouping opportunities, which could be disastrous for publishers and booksellers, are all over the internet. Alex Davies mentioned a few examples to me not long ago. Publishing set-ups such as literary magazine Triple Canopy (http://.canopycanopycanopy.com) are collaborations of digital publishers, writers, artists, and researchers that use a small editorial team to publish works (including serialised books) online and make them available for free. To operate, Triple Canopy relies on funds from benefactors – but it is not an insignificant venture. It's been lauded by Harper’s Magazine, Wired, and The New York Times as a well-written, innovative multimedia magazine with a high rate of ‘ideas-per-page’. Its content is sought out and signposted elsewhere on the web, for example, when The New Yorker news-stream reads, “Triple Canopy has posted the first complete English translation of the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño’s 1999 speech accepting the Rómulo Gallegos Prize.” (The New Yorker, 2008). With success stories such as this, it is unsurprising if publishers are unnerved. However, while Triple Canopy may give reason for publishers of literary and arts print magazines to worry, its contents are topical and creative works featured are short or published in sections, so there is more to suggest that it would compliment, and encourage sales of, actual books.
Set-ups such as ‘myebook’, which refers to itself as a product which harnesses internet technologies to help authors create, publish, and distribute ebook content online (with little or no actual ‘human’ input other than themselves), is another example of how publishers could eventually be bypassed. ‘Social publishing’ website Scribd claim to be ‘democratising’ publishing by making it possible for anyone to self-publish, but again here is a suggestion that online publishing and bookselling can work to the benefit of printed book sales: Random House has recently made C.C Finlay’s new novel, The Patriot Witch (as yet unreleased in print), available on Scribd. The preview is the first novel in Finlay’s “Traitor to the Crown” historical fantasy saga, and would presumably encourage readers to purchase the follow-up books.
What I'd really like to know is what this will all mean for poetry not just in terms of online publishing set-ups, but in terms of actual digital poetry. I'm not convinced of the value of the digital poetry I've seen so far. I'm not sure why I should care about the random lexical arrangements of a computer, for example. The 'random' element doesn't have its root in a conceptual (meaningful) source in the way that the works of people like Kenny Goldsmith and Steve McCaffrey do. Though that is not to say that 'digital poetry' is limited to things like that. Maybe I've missed the good stuff.
Amy's comments set me thinking about the actual price of books, and wondering what effects the collapse of the Net Book Agreement have had on sales of poetry. I suspect that a small number of guaranteed sellers and out of copyright works are available at low cost whereas less popular works find it harder to even get shelf space.
Anecdotally it's apparent in the wider publishing world that big selling books however elephantine are available at absurdly low prices whereas slim academic texts can be eye-wateringly expensive. It's the same with poetry. A collection of around 100 pages will set you back as much or less than a novel three or four times the length.
This is where online distribution scores over old school distribution every time. Works can be made available for free or at a lower cost than would be possible in a book shop and they don't have to fight for shelf space. Even in the better book shops the poetry section tends to be very small with what's normally a dispiritingly conservative selection.
[...] 2009 at 11:04 am · Filed under Alex Davies (Blog Posts) Thanks to those who commented on the online publishing post. Further to that, here’s the chief executive of HarperCollins talking about digital [...]
'myebook' setup last year has made fic-blogosphere component of Home'Baked "slow science fictions" redundant. Can mash entire multimedia work-in-progress on myEBook.
'myebook' pickles Dewey Decimal Classification scheme librarians grew up with. I classified 'Screen Reading' ebooks as category 'Arts and Literature' in myEBook' library - tagging 1 & 2 as 'poetry' and 'videography'. These tags are no longer visible without pushing 'myebook' search button - yet new shelf 'Poetry' has been built at 'myebook' library (print journal 'Stimulus Respond' separates 'Poetry' from 'Arts' so maybe this is general trend?). Personally I am not in hurry to locate own stuff on 'Poetry' shelf.
Wonder what it feels like sitting in draughty coach station at midnight, stuck into new genre-busting novel on Sony e-reader, only to have it snatched out of hand mid-sentence ... ahhhhhhhhhh
i have been publishing online since 98 when i was 13 yrs.
i still take the same approach, which is to do it at my own pace and not worry too much about promotions.
i've t ried a lot of different methods. one of the most interesting being the floppy disk distribution thing, which 'im planning to do another run of shortly. machinebook was a great success for me, and continues to grow, although in less noticeable ways because it's deep growth in the crazy ass rhizome. so yeah i sent those disks to a bunch of zine people, and to everyone who bought stuff from me via amazon.
i think my main idea is to include promotions into my regular interactions, not with the intent of turning everyone into a consumer of my work and the work of my collaborators but with the idea that A) the reason i make art is because i have trouble expressing myself normally and B) since this is the case, people who want to know me better might benefit from reading my work. this excludes, of course, anything to do with how i make my living, because that would be disastrous. my mom reads my blogs, even when i'm talking about aliens raping my brain.
online publication has had a huge impact on how i do art. instead of being some far-off distant blah blah blah i wrote this book now giv eme money, it's instead something far more integrated into my life, and yes, like aboveposter, immediate. immediate to the point that it's a big part of how i communicate with people.
"the reason i make art is because i have trouble expressing myself normally"
this makes perfect sense. wish i'd said that. i'm sometimes 'tested' by people who think that because i write as i do & because, as you rightly say, the art is 'integrated into my life' that the art replaces the life of the individual. people can easily forget that art is an artificial lifeform that states its own existence AND is a means of communicating not as your rational, everyday, commonsensical self, but on your inexpressable everyday life's behalf.
There are some really interesting discussions going on here, and I don't think I'm really qualified to talk much about publishing so much, but I have a few ideas and responses...
The first is regarding publishing itself, which often can involve some form of compromise on the part of the artist. This is, as Jim has astutely pointed out recently on his blog, definitely true with online publishing. However, the scope to a) publish one's own work (self-publish) and b) publish that of others on one's own terms is much higher online at relatively low cost.
No-one really wants to publish my work :) but when they have I've been wary of the conditions under which I do so. Often one cannot be published (even self-published) if one wants a work in some journals. But Jim has already discussed this. I find this uncomfortable, not because I am overly protective of my work, but quite the opposite: I want my work to be remixable, spreadable, perhaps even viral, potentially. Ironically the ease of online proliferation is also a potential stumbling block for those wishing to be published or wishing to take advantage of the 'electronic multiple'.
And it's a difficult balance - journals need stability (my own experience with How2 has highlighted how important this is for long-term reliability and high regard in terms of resource-reputation) but can also be found making somewhat ludicrous demands of those they publish, when instability is such an artistically interesting trait of online media. There is such a grey area too regarding what might be considered the 'true work' (an outmoded concept in an online context IMO) so going off and producing remixes, versions of a work might not necessarily free you from your shackles.
The immediacy is something I completely agree with and I think that this too has and will continue to change the perspectives from which writers write. I am fascinated by the promotions idea - an idea which I am currently work on with a prototype journal launch. Simple consumerism it ain't. The internet has always been a delicate mix of freedoms and special offers. Sponsorship is rife and an accepted by-product of largely free services. To use this as a literary effect (subvert it?) has many interesting potentials. As media (a medium of media), the internet is a formally both utilitarian and gloss, socialism and capitalism. I'm surprised actually that more artists are not working with these ideas, even aesthetically, in more subversive ways. But I guess that's another discussion.
To touch briefly on Amy's comment re the random: there are more complex ways in which generative texts can be produced, which require non-ethical arbitrary choice procedures in order to be effective. On a simple level, word choices may simply produce word salads, which might not be so interesting. However, design the algorithm to produce interesting structures and your vocabulary potentials are much more important. Noah Wardrip Fruin refers to 'textual instruments' and this is perhaps the easiest way of looking at it. Mere randomness is not enough - but to design a generative text in a way where an audience and / or a performer are complicit in the the relationship between the random and the ethical judgement of interpreting it, I think, is potentially very interesting. Brian Kim Stefans has written about this in Fashionable Noise and it's a good read. To paraphrse, he highlights the importance of producing environments through which the computer-poem might produce grotesque explosions unhindered by ethical judgement.
In my PhD upgrade, I read from a piece I had designed to scan perfectly well but with a vast bank of vocabulary chosen at random. I knew full well that there were potentially problematic combinations there simply by virtue of heavily socially loaded nouns, but one of the sentences I read was "shred a pretty Catholic". This was, thankfully, not deemed offensive by the (mainly faculty) audience, but instead prompted the focal point for my QA afterwards. There is a strange absolution of responsibility when interacting with a randomising machine.
Also, there are other more subtle modes of randomness, such as spatial arrangement and movement, colour, size, timing, which may not affect the actual vocabulary at all.
I'm rambling. Bye bye!