Entries Tagged 'Digital Publishing' ↓

Anthony Mullins of Hoodlum has finished his article for the 11th edition of The Australian Writer’s Marketplace due out later this year, and it’s fantastic! You’ll be amazed and inspired by his take on the possibilities for writers in multi-platform storytelling. So today we’ll look at a few projects, just to just give you a taste of the huge depth and breadth out there.

Hoodlum’s award-winning narrative online accompaniment to British drama Spooks allowed viewers to log on after the show and participate in a range of activites that enhanced and extended their engagement with the program. The online narrative also fed back into the television show, creating an exciting interactive platform for viewers, and a fantastic opportunity for multi-platform storytellers to develop new creative techniques.

To advance your understanding of the technical and creative elements of interactive fiction, read this interview with Nick Montfort, author of Twisty Little Passages. As Bob Stein, founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book says, if you want to see the future of creative writing, look to the computer game creators of today.

For a beautiful example of the digital enhancement of print media, have a look at this mind-blowing Augmented Reality book – make sure you watch the video of Le Monde des Montagnes (World of Mountains) in action before you read the whole article, or it will spoil the magic.

From television shows and computer games with mass appeal, to eclectic high art projects … there are so many worlds to explore as a creative writer, if you keep an open mind to emerging technologies.

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Reminder: Writing Race tonight, 8-9pm AEST for AWMonline subscribers. Come along and get your Write ON!

Writing Racers Kim Wilkins and Bec Sparrow

Picture a warehouse room full of laptops and expectant faces, imaginations primed and ready to write. Then picture those same faces, an hour and a half later,  glowing with achievement: combined, the QWC Writing Racers produced 48,498 words, just a squeak away from a complete naNoWriMo novel. 20 or so writers all boosted their own projects by thousands of words in one writing session of social writing – and what with all the pizza and lollies, it didn’t feel like work at all!

Meanwhile, the AWMonline Racing crew are also smoking hot this November. Some are working on NaNo books, and others are just using the month of focus to work on their ongoing projects. Last Sunday we were joined by Special Guest Peter M. Ball, author of Horn, and he blew us away with these fantastic tips:

Staying on the Ball:

1) You only have to write the next 250 words (Picked up from the blog of Dean Wesley Smith originally).

I like breaking goals down into something small and achievable, so I try not to think in terms of "I need 1000 words today" or "a ninety thousand word manuscript." All I need to do, in order to get things done, is write the next 250 words of the manuscript. If I do that every day, at a minimum, I’ll have a short story within the space of a week or a novel in the space of a year.

The other way to think about it is "how much can you write in twenty minutes." For me it largely equates to the aforementioned 250 words. If I find myself not wanting to write, I tell myself I’ll sit in front of the computer and do twenty minutes of work before heading off to my procrastinatory activity.

2) Get things done in the morning

I’m one of those folks who feels the guilt of not-writing really heavily, so I make sure it’s the first thing I do when I get up in the morning. Even if it’s just for an hour, or a half hour, or twenty minutes, I get the writing out of the way so I’m no longer thinking ‘oh, god, I have to write something."

Usually this makes it easier to sit down and keep working, because the angst of not-writting usually gets worse the longer I leave it and I have a somewhat counter-intuitive response (basically, "oh god, I’m not writing, lets go watch TV")

3) Have space that’s committed to being a writer.

While this is my first writing race, I have a regular write-club with my friend Angela Slatter where we meet once a week and basically be writers. We trade news about our successes and failings, eat a nice meal, then sit down and bang out words with someone else in the room. Frequently the three or four hours we meet will be more productive than the rest of the week combined.

On the weeks where we don’t meet, for whatever reason, it’s usually much harder to focus on getting work done. Largely this is a mindset thing – spending time talking about writing, giving it a weekly space regardless of what’s going on, makes it easier to remember that I’m a writer when the day-to-day problems of the week start distracting me from the idea that I should be writing.

Giving yourself the space *to be a writer* with other people who acknowledge that is enourmously powerful when you’re starting out, especially when other people look to things like novels and JK Rowlings sized paycheques to justify the activity.

4) Turn off the internet

It took me years to learn this one, but it finally sunk in. The internet is based on creating links and diverting your attention, always sending new information your way and demanding that it be processed. It’s the most distracting thing I’ve ever come accross and I noticed the difference immediately the day I decided to turn it off during my regular writing time.

And once again, it’s a reinforcement thing – the three hours every morning I devote to writing are *purely for writing*. By taking the internet away I’m telling myself that I’m not doing anything but writing.

These days I tend to get up and write for three hours every morning before I take my computer into the study and plug it into the modem. Creating that space, away from the distraction, made a huge difference in my daily wordcounts.

This is a luxury that a lot of people don’t have, and I appreciate it as such, but even if you’re only going to be writing for twenty minutes on your lunch break it’s worth seeing what happens when you take the modem away

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Last bits…

Feeling scared about changes to the publishing industry? Take heart from this post at Storytellers Unplugged. And then be gobsmacked by the innovations at the new monthly magazine, Electric Literature.

Write on, people!

I have made a commitment to balanced blogging, since I Could Have Cats took me to task for my recent rant on the PIR debate. But then something like this comes along: Kindle hits Australia this month.

Regular Speakeasy readers will remember that one of the key issues preventing the sale of Kindle outside the US was the complexity of Amazon’s negotiations with local telecommunications providers, whose 3G networks are required for distribution of Kindle books. According to cnet:

A spokesperson for VHA said it hadn’t signed a deal with the bookseller. Telstra has yet to respond to queries. Optus said it "had nothing to confirm". On the site, however, it is possible to check wireless coverage that the device will access, which seems to be quite extensive.

So everyone’s being very coy, but if you compare coverage maps (and thanks to the very clever Mark Bahnisch for this tip), it looks like a pretty good pattern match for Optus. Don’t take my word for it.

Now, let us all take a brief moment to grok out on the fact that the gadget uses real ink. Mmmm, lo-fi…

I alluded to a little rant about this issue, and here’s the thing. Well, there are many things, as non-Optus (I’m postulating) customers will soon realise, but here’s my thing: Prices are all in USD! For some, this would be no biggie – your actual price information is just a conversion rate away. But it represents a barrier to the seamless integration of e-books into users’ experiences, one of the strongest benefits of digital publishing. It also makes me feel totally coca-colonised.

Still, if you look at this comprehensive list of kindle services, Australia is better off than most countries, especially Islamic countries, and even poor old Canada, still out in the Kindle wilderness…

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From Publishers’ Lunch:

Simon & Schuster is taking their successful Simon Spotlight Entertainment line and merging it with Pocket Books’ hardcovers and trade paperbacks to create a new imprint, Gallery Books. Pocket itself will return to focusing entirely on mass market publishing, as partner for all of the S&S imprints and continuing with paperback originals for "rising authors" such as Kresley Cole and Thomas Greanias.

The new line is expected to launch in spring 2010. CEO Carolyn Reidy writes to employees that "as a company we need to insure that each of our imprints has sufficient strength and support, especially in this difficult environment." Reidy notes that Gallery will have immediate strength in areas where Pocket and SSE "have already forged well-earned reputations, such as women’s fiction, pop culture and entertainment," while it "will also operate with a mandate to acquire top authors and hot prospects in a broad range of publishing categories, both fiction and nonfiction."

Large publishers often lack agility in the marketplace, constraining their ability to respond to economic and cultural trends. It will be so interesting to see how Gallery Books performs.

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Budding scriptwriters pease note, next week is your last chance this year to throw your hat into the Neighbours pool:

The Australian Writers Guild has once again joined forces with FremantleMedia Australia to present the Neighbours Scriptwriter Training Initiative. The initiative provides the opportunity for two writers to join the Neighbours writing team for six weeks as trainee storyliners and learn what it takes to write for Australia’s favourite serial.

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FYI, Speakeasy will now be posting once weekly, as we move into the production schedule for the next AWM print edtion.

Write on, everybody!

A writer has brought this to my attention: a recruitment notice on the job site Seek for writers of children’s books. While it certainly seems to be an exciting opportunity, this approach raises a few questions: how does a publisher responsibly handle the potentially high number of submissions resulting from such a wide call out? How does a writer investigate the suitablity and credibility of the publisher involved, when so little information is supplied? And note, the burden of proof here is on the aspiring author, who must provide a CV and a sample, while the publisher provides only an email address. I’m interested to know, would you respond to this type of call out for manuscripts?

Over at Publishers Weekly there’s an amazing example of how digital publishing is both challenging and complementing traditional publishing: Kemble Scott released an e-reader edition of his second The Sower through scridbd.com, and quickly gained interest from a range of publishers. Since it was available as print-on-demand, The Sower did not have to wait the standard year or more to work it’s way through the traditional publishing process, which kept its contemporary cultural references fresh. Scott clearly understands marketing very well, and has great relationships with independent booksellers in the Bay Area. Now published in a limited hardcover edition, The Sower has reached the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller list. Says Scott, "This book was completely done outside all of the traditional gatekeepers of publishing… [P]eople can read the book for its merits and its content and not for the way it was published.”

Lastly folks, TINA is nearly upon us! This Is Not Art: Independent, Emerging and Experimental Arts Festival includes the National Young Writers Festival, as well as the Crack Theatre Festival, Sound Summit, Electrofringe and Critical Animals. So if you like writing, poetry, spoken word, zines or comics, get involved! TINA runs from 1-5 October in Newcastle Australia, so go for the festivals, and check out the beaches while you’re there…

Write on!

Remember how the Productivity Commission found that ditching Parallel Import Restrictions would deliver cheaper books for Australians? An assertion suspiciously similar to the consortium of giant chain stores known as, what was it again, oh yes … the Coaltition for Cheaper Books? Well, check out this media release from the Australian Publishers Association for some interesting news on the subject. In response to the damning independent study into the Commission’s report (see this great summary), the Commission is now asserting ‘even if repeal of the PIRs were to cause the cost of books to booksellers to fall but these savings were not passed on to consumers … the repeal of the PIRs would still provide benefits’.

It’s becoming excruciatingly clear just who those ‘benefits’ would flow to, and it sure isn’t Australian readers and writers. Try Coles, Woolies, Target, Big W… who want to restructure the Australian publishing industry into a rapacious beasty feeding on the souls of Australian literary producers.

Don’t be fooled, people, PIR reform is not about delivering cheaper books, it’s about delivering more profit to major retailers.

Verse Novelist, Tim Sinclair

On a lighter note, if you are a young writer living in South-East Queensland, check out the Young Writers Boot Camp at QWC these school holidays, with the amazing Tim Sinclair. It’s going to be zine-tastic!!

Also, have a look at Wordbox. It’s an amazing resource directory of opportunities, festivals, tips & competitions for young Australian writers.

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Playwrights, check out Writer’s Tips, where the lovely Dr Tess Brady interviews seven successful writers (including Louis Nowra, who I met at BBWF09 – he is totally quirky and super-smart!) on how to write a great play.

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Lastly, Kat Meyers and colleagues’ venture into commercial digital publishing has come to an premature end. A confluence of unfortunate events has seen Quartet Press’s demise, and Meyers has issued a statement that demonstrates the sort of transparency, integrity, and savvy that we wish for all publishers:

What is amazing is that the bookish community are being so kind and understanding about our failure. It’s made it even more apparent that readers really want quality, affordable digital books. One way or another, each of us are committed to moving forward and helping to make that happen eventually. Quartet just wasn’t the time or place for us

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Why is it that the more time passes between blogging, the harder it is to publish that new post? To paraphrase writing genius Aaron Sorkin, let’s overlook that I came late to the party, and celebrate the fact  that I turned up at all…

Time to catch up on recent events in the blogosphere:

They’ve started announcing the Book Bloggers Appreciation Week Awards. In particular, check out the nominations for Best Blog Tours – great leads for bloggers wishing to reach a broader audience.

And of course, you’ve all heard that Twitter has announced their new terms of service, summarised in their blog. They are eager to reassure people that, unlike Facebook, ownership of user content will remain with the user. You own your Tweets. But what rough beast slouches towards the Twitterverse? Targetted advertising, folks - it’s just over the horizon. Which is great, because I don’t know about you, but I’m sure sick of having to spend hours hunting down information about the latest miracle-celebrity-weightloss-facecream!

So have you tried the new Facebook Lite? It’s a clutter-busted version of Fb, with old school design to be easy on the download quota.

Like!

Mashable has a great short post on tips on writing for digital markets: take this quiz and let me know how your web content measures up!

• Know your objective: Do you adopt a different tone for articles, blog posts, tweets and status updates?
• Know your audience: Do you think about who will be reading your content, and target your information accordingly?
• Keep it short: Do you omit needless words?
• Make it scannable: Do you write in the F-shape, highlight your main points, and use comprehensible titles instead of in-jokes?

• Embrace constraints: Still feeling frustrated with only 140 characters, or do you enjoy the challenge of working within different physical and cultural constraints?

Give yourself a star for each yes answer. I’m about a three-star web writer. (Room for improvement is a good thing, right?)

And completely off the topic, whose September would be complete without sparing a smile for the pint-sized funkster phenomenon… so much talent it’s kinda disturbing!

I’ll leave you with a quote from NaNoWriMo guru Chris Baty, who attended a live forum at AWMonline this morning:

Once I discovered that there was a reasonably unhorrible book lurking in there all that time, I started wondering what ELSE was inside me. It’s funny what tackling an overly ambitious creative project can do to help people realize their potential.

Happy writing, folks, and I’ll see you real soon (no, I mean it!)…

With QWC’s big announcement at MWF about the new centre for excellence in digital publishing, the Australian Institute for the Future of the Book (if:book Australia), you just knew today’s post was going to be all about the digital, didn’t you?

Based in Brisbane, if: book Australia is only the third centre of excellence of its kind for digital literature established in the world, after the New York and London Institutes … if: book Australia will promote new forms of digital publishing and explore ways to boost connections between writers and audiences.

This morning, The Book Show’s Ramona Koval was in conversation with Bob Stein, Founder if:book. Generally, I am a huge fan of Ramona, but I have to say that she doesn’t do Australia proud in this interview… Perhaps if she’d been able to recall the name of the "thing that has the red light in supermarkets" (barcode scanner), we could have all seemed a bit more across the digital issues du jour. But I think the main friction stemmed from two very different timeframes of vision: Ramona seemed intent of protecting the interests of we, now, who love the book – the bound, traditional tree-book – and just what we think of those who wish to take them from us. Whereas Bob was envisioning the future, near and far.

I listened to that interview while perusing KCDC’s take on the new augmented reality apps available for the 3G iphone. My synapses had a total Gruen transfer moment: surrounded by the growing cybermall of digital technology available or relevant for storytellers, I suddenly became excited about multiplatform opportunities for creating and crafting stories for a wide-range of readers/users/communities, accessible through their preferred media. Excited like I get when I’m planning a scene for a story; dreamy and fidgeting and weirdly hyper, itching for a keyboard and a spare hour.

As a Gen-Xer, I had a childhood free of computers, and now am immersed in a career that depends on them, and a social and creative life that thrives on them. I am comfortable with the thought that in fifty to one hundred years, people are going to experience the publication and communication of ideas very differently. if:book Australia means that local cultural producers will have the chance to be instrumental in experimenting and engaging in new creative processes: cause for enthusiastic cheers, not threatened snarls.

In related digital news, today’s On Line Opinion (Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate)sees Mark Bahnisch discuss some of the myths that underpin both celebatory and catastrophic claims about social media. Mark argues that educators and organisations seeking to work in the digital media space must  review their ‘pop pschology’ assumptions about digital media and instead address crucial issues of privacy and corporate ownership from a sound basis of research.

Enter the brilliant Phoebe Connelly, who looks at the impact of corporate ownership of our digital playgrounds (AKA social media) through the lens of GeoCities’ demise. When the commercial success of a social media site is judged as wanting, the community has no control over the fate of the content they produced. Beyond corporate mercenaries, there’s also the concern of plain old link rot:

In a keynote address at a 2001 conference on preserving digital media, science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling observed, "Bits have no archival medium. We haven’t invented one yet. If you print something on acid-free paper with stable ink, and you put it in a dry, dark closet, you can read it in 200 years. We have no way to archive bits that we know will be readable in even 50 years."

He added, "Tape demagnetizes. CDs delaminate. Networks go down."

Point taken. But are authors responsible for printing books on sustainable materials? Secure digital archiving sounds more like an issue for information managers, not cultural producers. Bring on the super librarians!

All in all, a most interesting day on the intertubes, with many more to come. Have a great weekend, folks.

More facts that hurt my brain: Google estimates there are more than one trillion unique urls on the interwebs, not including dark web pages (not available through public search indexes).

I’m at a workshop for writers about Promoting Yourself Online with the inestimably brilliant Kate Eltham. 

So what does the enormous complexity of the interwebs mean for an author seeking to create or maintain their platform through online presence? As web platforms move towards conversation models, an expectation is forming that users can contribute and reproduce content – I’m looking at you, Gen Y! So authors, don’t worry about trying to control use of your content, because that power now lies with the users. Instead, concentrate on supporting users to find and spread your content in ways that you both want. Scatter your delectable content like biscuit crumbs to increase your findability on the interwebs. And respect the multi-channel factor: don’t expect people to leave their channels and come to you – take yourself to them.

it’s hard for writers not to get hung up on text and readers. But we need to think about photos, videos, images, podcasts etc as well as text. A great example: what did Cory Doctorow’s website look like 5 years ago? Ask the internet archive. Then compare to craphound today.

Savvy, much?

Oops, now it’s my turn to facilitate the session: twenty authors exploring different social media platforms and reporting back on how they are being used or could be used by authors. We have a great group here today, including poet Graham Nunn and debut author Belinda Jeffreys. Joanne Schoenwald just created a twitter account for her alter ego Lucy Gabrielle. She got a magazine review out of it within 15 minutes. Seriously.

The interwebs can hurt your brain and suck your time like a vampire, but it is absolutely awesometown. And everyone should spend some time in awesometown, right?

Right.

QWC rejects Commission’s stance on parallel importation of books
As you know, Speakeasy and the Australian writer’s Marketplace are both published by Queensland Writers Centre. QWC has released this statement on recent developments regarding the parallel importation of books:

On Tuesday 14 July, the Productivity Commission published the report of their investigation into copyright restrictions on the parallel importation of books. Since then, the issue has received a great deal of media coverage and we’ve had many calls and emails at QWC about this issue.

QWC does not support the removal of copyright restrictions on parallel importation of books. We believe it will be harmful to Australian authors and local content. You can read our submission to the Productivity Commission in this pdf. 

We are working through a number of channels to address this issue. We also support the efforts of the Australian Society of Authors, Australian Publishers Association and Australian Booksellers Association to achieve a more reasonable outcome for our industry. You, too, can help.

To learn more about how authors are affected by this issue, we encourage you to read the information on the Australian Society of Author’s website.

To take action against the report or find out how you can support the cause, visit Ausbooks or the Australian Society of Authors.

Agent Sydney breaks down the issue of ‘cheaper books’ for us over at Call My Agent:

Whenever you pay less for something than it is worth, someone loses. The loser is NOT going to be the public company that sells you the product; it is going to be the primary producer. This is the lesson our farmers have learnt. This is the lesson Australian writers are about to learn. If you value your Australian stories and the films and TV shows that are made from them – such as Underbelly – you will value the writers who created those stories. They are irreplaceable.

Lifting the current restrictions on the parallel importation of books will likely not make books cheaper, but it will definitely cheapen them.

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I am still entrenched in Tweet Camp at Booksquare University, and can highly recommend it as the place to learn everything about engaging with Twitter for business or pleasure: from simple tips like what sort of tweets there are and how to build your tribe, to a guide to Twetiquette and suggestions for integrating your Twitter use into your existing online presence and use of social media. The resources are fantastic, very professional and occasionally hilarious, like this guide by Constructive Grumpiness on 10 Irrational Behaviors on Twitter that’d make you look crazy in Real Life.

More about a writer’s life online: an upcoming QWC Wordpool seminar will look at the rapid changes in Australia’s writing and publishing industry: where will books fit in the digital future and how will this affect how we read and write? Join cyber celebrity and industry heavyweight, Mark Bahnisch, in a discussion as to what this means for Australia writers and readers, as he attempts to answer… what is the future of writing? Details here.

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Writing Race AWMonline forum tonight from 8-9pm AEST – come and check it out.

Independent booksellers alert: make sure you are on ZeeMaps at wikibibliotheque.

For writers looking for inspiration, here is a pdf publication of Words to Inspire Writers, a free digital release of the book edited by Gregory Victor Babic and published by F. C. Sach & Sons. It is ‘A perpetual calendar of classic writing-related quotations — on writers, writing, words, books, literature, and publishing — specifically selected to illustrate the writing process and to motivate authors every day.’

Internationally successful Allison Rushby (AKA Alli Kincaid) is joining us tonight for the Writing Race 8-9pm AEST. Join this friendly and motivated online writing community by logging into AWMonline forums (subscriptions to AWMonline start at $19.95).