Simon Groth's Blog, page 9

Memory Hole

How often do you read a book more than once? Do you ever not make it through a book in the first place? What happens to the books that are forgotten, still hanging around your bookshelf or cloud server (depending on your predilection)? Do you pass them on; lend them to people with no expectation of their safe return? Or do you leave them as is, a trophy of words conquered (or at least attempted) to gather dust and take up increasingly precious storage capacity (those megabytes add up) or box space every time you move?

At what point do you finally chuck them out? The delete button is easy enough, but what do you do with those papery things?

The Spanish art collective Luzinterruptus recently blanketed Melbourne’s Federation Square with more than 10,000 unwanted books collected from the Salvation Army. Visitors were encouraged to taken as many books home as they liked at the end of the installation. On a smaller scale, many years ago an older colleague of mine decided to give away her entire library. As she filled a room with browning paperbacks and I was surprised to learn what exquisite taste she had, with a serious bent towards great Australian works. I still have the books I collected that day, though I confess that after more than eight years, I still haven’t read them all. The books simply moved shelves.

When we talk about publishing, we frequently imply its sense of permanence, especially in print. Words published are words that belong to the ages. Increasingly though, this looks more like a delusion of grandeur. According to best available estimates, 2.2 million new books are published each year. Australia contributes more than 8,000 titles to that ocean (though latest local figures date from 2004; want to guess what that number has done since then?). The online space is of course even more crowded. As Google’s Eric Schmidt famously noted in 2010, we now create as much information every two days as we did in the entirety of human history until 2003.

For new authors, that’s a lot of noise to break through, but even when a work finds its best audience, can it resonate and occupy a space in a reader’s memory before being washed away by the next book and the next book and the next? It seems to me, the only insurance against our books falling down a memory hole is great stories well told.

Literature versus Traffic in Melbourne: http://www.luzinterruptus.com/?p=1357

 

Extending the book

One, two, three, four.

Beat, two, three, four.

That’s how Willow Pattern starts. It’s also the two paragraphs Angela Slatter wrote between midday and 12:04 on Monday 11 June. Over the next eleven hours, Angela made more than 160 revisions to that text before handing it over to editor, Keith Stevenson. She made her final change with just five minutes to spare before the nominal 11:00pm deadline. In between was a roller coaster of paragraphs added and language extracted, modified, subtracted, and refined. Eight words became 4,621 words.

I know this for several reasons. Willow Pattern was written as part of if:book’s experimental publishing project, the 24-Hour Book. The 24-Hour Book was written using an online publishing platform called Pressbooks. Pressbooks retains and timestamps the complete text of every saved version of Angela’s story, stored in an online database and I can access and review that data at will.

Timeframe aside, there’s nothing especially unique about the mechanics of how we made Willow Pattern. All books go through more or less the same processes; that was part of the project’s design. But in a typical publishing environment, so much of the work that goes into the creation of a book is lost: whether discarded or never recorded in the first place. What’s unique about Willow Pattern is that I’m able to quote the statistics at all.

For many readers, a new book from their favourite author drops, fait accompli at regular intervals. The 24-Hour Book offered instead a glimpse into the reality of a book’s world, the hard graft from writer and editor that pulls a story together and makes sense of it and the publishing process that brings the result to the world. What Pressbooks enabled us to do is record information that’s usually invisible, even to a book’s creators. As a result, Willow Pattern is not just the completed volume, it’s also the entire publishing process, the nuts and bolts and the broad range of information that went into creating it.

It’s a database.

Okay, this relegates the print or electronic book to just one expression of the data. But it also opens a world of new possibilities. What if we make full use of the information usually left on the cutting room floor to reconceptualise the book? Can we represent the story’s progress visually? Can we reorder the content chronologically by creation? Can we animate it? Can we analyse the data to find new threads between stories within the book? Watch this space.

The 24-Hour Book is available in both pixels and paper.

This post is republished from my regular column for WQ Magazine and is an extract of a longer essay I wrote for Meanland over at if:book.

Have we emerged yet?

Emerging. There’s a word that tends to stalk writers for a long time. It always reminds me of natural selection: the idea that a writer’s emergence is less from obscurity and more from some kind of primordial soup. Like Godzilla.

In 2008, I met a group of writers who were all at much the same stage of emergence as I was. In evolutionary terms, I guess we were at the reptilian stage. Since then, all eight of us have taken extremely different paths. Some of us have been published traditionally and some have chosen to go it alone. Some of us have done both. And some have opted not to engage with the industry all—yet. I would argue we have all been successful, but some of our names you’ll recognise and some you won’t. Though we all now occupy a different habitat, we’re still equals, discussing similar problems and clinging to the same love of writing that brought us together in the first place.

Our conversations reflect the same daily challenges of putting words together and the same pressures, both external and internal.

For me and I think for many writers it’s not necessarily about how many copies are sold or how much money you make it’s about seeing your work published.

I remember when I was writing like a maniac for years and years, always with the dream of snagging a bite from a big publisher. That was the surface motivation. But looking back I realise that the far deeper motivation was that I just enjoyed it so much.

So here’s my question: out of this group of writers, who can we say has emerged and who is still in the process?

This is where the idea of emergence, with its implied destination, begins to falter. At every career stage, a writer is still emerging from somewhere, hoping to land a better deal, a broader audience, more respect, or simply better words on the page.

For a growing number of writers, ‘emerging’ is no longer a temporary state. And that analogy with natural selection suddenly looks less silly than it did when I was referencing Godzilla. I suspect a writer’s crawl from the primordial soup of obscurity is never complete.

When I began thinking about a theme for this year’s Bookcamp unconference, emerging was taking on a whole new meaning. After all, it’s not just writers that evolve. Technologies, forms, the entire industry itself adapts and changes to its environment.

We’re all evolving and we’re all experimenting. That’s what makes the discussion so exciting.

A cross post from the if:book blog.

Bookcamp 2012 takes place in Brisbane on 28 September with special guest Craig Mod.

Bewildering green

I recently came across a detailed and funky infographic on the economics of ereaders. It was full of interesting statistics from around 2010-2011 on the number of books (print and electronic) sold in the US (57 per second), the market share of Kindles (47%) versus iPads (32%), and so on.

But one glaring statement undermined the validity of everything that surrounded it. I’ve seen many writers grapple with the difference in environmental impact of print versus electronic books, but too often such discussions boil down to overly simplistic reasoning and bland questions such as which format is ‘greener’. Our friendly infographic though made what I think is the worst environmental case yet for ebooks:

‘In terms of carbon emissions, 22 books on an ereader is equal to one paper book…The more e-books being downloaded on a single e-reader that holds hundreds of books, the more the environment will benefit.’

Huh? For starters, this assumes that every print book read will be purchased brand new, not borrowed or bought second hand (as the graphic itself acknowledges), but it also disregards the many complexities of this discussion in its pursuit of a motherhood statement.

Many surveys have reported that people who buy ereaders, read more on the screens than they did on paper. Simply put, this means that every ebook purchased does not equal one paper book unsold.

Yes, it takes a bunch of carbon and some trees to make paper books and ship them all over the world, but once a book is made, its environmental impact is over with. If you really don’t like a book, there’s nothing to stop you composting it. Ereaders also use a bunch of carbon in their manufacture (the equivalent of 22 books we’re told), but they also require ongoing energy to run and are made from materials such as plastic and heavy metals that continue to have environmental impact long after you’re finished with it.

On that note, ereaders are also becoming locked into the technology upgrade cycle. We’re not just expected to buy an ereader and fill it with books, we’re also expected to replace it regularly (manufacturers are currently assuming a two-year cycle). After two years of use, that ereader is designed to be just another piece of our growing technology waste problem.

Now, the last thing I want to do is make you paranoid about the environmental impact of your reading (no, seriously), but rather I want to point out the bewildering complexity. Questions lead to more questions and there is no one-size-fits-all answer to which format is ‘greener’. The answer will change depending on how much you read, how you buy your books, what kind of technology you use and how frequently you upgrade it, and even how often you plug it into a wall socket. No two readers are alike and the question of which format is greener depends on too many variables.

It’s not an issue that can be answered by a single sentence in an infographic. Even a funky one.

The original graphic is at http://bit.ly/ifbook165

Cover story

In the world of objects, the cover plays an important role. For books, the cover is more than just something to wrap and protect the content. A cover is a sales pitch, a tease, a distillation of the story. Great covers are beautiful and thought provoking. The best might be considered art. Once a book is purchased, the cover is a gateway, something that must be passed through each time you enter or exit the text. When you’re finished reading and you place the book on your bookshelf, the cover becomes part of the book’s souvenir value. You display its spine. You might take it off the shelf and admire it every now and then, even if you don’t read it.

So it’s interesting that digital books place so little emphasis on the cover. Sure Amazon has the cover there in icon form as do most ereader apps for tablets. The Kindle and other eink readers barely bother with the covers at all. To even look at one requires backtracking through the front matter from page one (where the Kindle assumes you want to start reading).

Book designer and writer Craig Mod recently ruminated on these matters in an essay posted to his web site. He concluded that we should stop drawing direct comparisons between what a cover does in the digital and analogue worlds. The digital cover is a different beast entirely and we need to think about how to best design for it. “Hack” is the terms he uses, actually. A simple point of difference that hasn’t been exploited yet is the ease with which covers can be updated and that readers are often alerted by their devices when such an update occurs. When a new book is released, why not update the cover for all the backlist, letting your readers know you have a new title available?

Another interesting approach is to exploit the way books are displayed in ereader apps. Making a series of book covers fit together like a jigsaw doesn’t exactly work on a bookshelf, but it looks amazing in an iBooks or Kindle app library where all the books are displayed face out.

Craig Mod will be coming to Brisbane for if:book’s Bookcamp unconference in September. Check out his full essay at craigmod.com.

If, on the other hand, you just want to revel in great book design and listen to someone who knows a thing or two about it, go no further than Chip Kidd’s highly entertaining TED talk at http://bit.ly/ifbook148

Making Willow Pattern

So exactly one week before I’m writing this, I was holed up in the State Library of Queensland desperately trying to turn about 3,500 words into something closer to 5,000. Now, I hate word-count bragging—to me it’s the literary equivalent of dick swinging—but 5,000 of vaguely publishable words in a little over ten hours is something worth stopping to admire for a moment.

Which I did.

Then I got on with the rest of the job. We had a book to publish after all and the clock was still ticking. Mine was one chapter among nine and we still had cover design, layers of editing, metadata, export and upload still go.

Life in a 24-Hour Book is extraordinary and inspiring, but it’s pretty exhausting. But, between me and the other writers, assisted by a stellar team of editors and volunteers, we did. We went from nothing to a published book in twenty-four hours.

That still kind of blows me away. I have to keep checking. We did finish it, didn’t we?

Now I’m the first to admit, we probably didn’t create literature of the highest order, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t suck either. It certainly looks the part.

I’m writing more about the project from the if:book web site and maybe in other forums.

In the coming week, I’ll be taking delivery of the first printed editions (we can print within 24 hours, but we still have to wait a bit getting the book from New York to Brisbane) and watching the title worm its way into shops both physical and digital. From there, it’s onto new projects, ideas, and actually getting down that futuristic novel that’s been rattling around in my head since late last year.

But before I move on, I wanted to make sure I remembered a few things about making Willow Pattern. Just a few personal memories with no structure or order; just a few details I didn’t want to forget in the rush for the next shiny thing.

Nick calling into question the description of me as a ‘digital experimenter’. I’m still embarrassed that, even with my background as a health professional, I hadn’t noticed the double entendre.
P.M. Newton happily declaring me completely mad.
Krissy quietly rising from her seat, shuffling over to the idea wall and writing “cunt at last!” to much appreciation from the others.
Our volunteer, Mandi rolling back a curtain in the room to reveal the place we would post up our ideas.
Steven thanking me for creating the circumstances in which he realised how fast he could write something.
Rjurik looking into my eyes at 11PM and levelly telling me I looked like shit. Thanks.
Apologising profusely to Angela for forcing her to write like a demon with a neck wrapped in heat packs.
Shortly after deciding on the title, realising the words ‘Willow Pattern’ had been written on the wall from about 15 minutes into the project.
Stopping at 9:00 pm so everyone could simply talk about their chapter. The planned 15-minute meeting actually lasted 45 minutes, filled with amazement at the stories emerging and the vigorous trading of story details (“Can you move that to the fourth floor? I need the vase on the fourth floor.”).
Managing to keep the creeping panic at bay as the first PDF export comes back with a formatting problem.
The flood of relief when Pressbooks‘ Hugh McGuire replied almost immediately to my frantic email.
The completely unexpected emotion at watching the ebook files uploading to the web site. Never before had a progress bar inspired such passion.
Being handed a glass of champagne and surrounded by the writers while still working on the files and emailing the printers in Brooklyn.
Watching the first pics coming through. 
Seeing the book visiting Times Square.
And of course there was that human pyramid, but I’m not likely to forget that in a hurry.

 

The freight train

The other day, I added a little feature to the if:book web site in preparation for our next major experiment, The 24-Hour Book. It’s a small digital timer the counts down the weeks, days, minutes, and seconds until nine writers (including myself), ten editors, and a team of volunteers hit GO on a mad scramble to write, edit, and publish a book in just twenty-four hours. Once I had the timer configured and running on the site, I took a moment to admire it.

There have been a couple of 24-Hour Books. The first was in 2009 and the most recent was this year, both organised from the UK and involving if:book London. Each project is different in both its focus and its end product, but the common thread between them is the use of the timeframe to demonstrate the capabilities and explore the possibilities of working in a digital environment. In every case, we hope to produce something unique to its process, something that couldn’t be reproduced in any other environment.

Collaboration and data is really at the centre of the project (the timeframe is really just a convenient way to get both). Digital and online writing tools are at heart collaborative tools. Our tech for the project is based on a blogging tool and every blogging platform is built to handle multiple authors and editors.

But how do you get nine writers to collaborate in any meaningful way? That’s one of the major challenges facing the team. Together we must make decisions on what kind of book we want to create and only a handful of those decisions can be made ahead of time. Our early discussions have been enlightening, intriguing, hilarious, and hectic: confirmation that we have the right people for the job. Even months out, the adrenaline occasionally kicks in and we get a glimpse of the craziness that awaits us.

All this went through my mind as I watched the countdown do its thing. Turns out I stayed looking at it for quite some time. The numbers burned themselves into my retinas. I think my jaw went slack at some point. There’s nothing quite like watching a freight train bearing down on you. Even if it’s carrying fun and creativity with an impressive group of colleagues, it’s still a freight train.

It’s a book and it’ll take twenty-four hours to make

I was invited to chat about a couple of my favourite books with Tim Cox on Brisbane’s ABC radio this afternoon. Fortunately, the book I’d chosen — Simon Garfield’s Just My Type was also a favourite of Tim’s so we had no trouble discussing the book and the importance of typefaces more generally.

Have a listen here.

Right at the end of the interview, though, Tim Asked me what I’m working on right now. Well, the thing is, right now I happen to be working on preparing a 24-Hour Book.

What do you mean I haven’t mentioned this on the blog until now? Oh yeah. Right. It’s one of those if:book things that happens elsewhere on the web. Okay, if you need a primer on the 24-Hour Book, go take a look, then come back.

Cool, no?

The project has managed to attract eight of the best and fastest writers in Australia whom I shall attempt to wrangle into creating some kind of book in a very short space of time. And you can watch the work in progress unfold on the web, either through a liveblog or reading the text and hitting ‘refresh’ every now and then. Think of yourself as the Beluga whale and us as the mariachi band.

So at the end of the interview, I casually drop this little project without really much detail at all about how it works or who’s involved or anything else. Just the title alone elicited enough excitement and curiosity. That’s when I realised the possibly the best asset of this project are the words:

TWENTY-FOUR HOUR BOOK

If you hear nothing else, you’ve heard the hook.

 

Content, meet medium

Late last year, if:book conducted a two-day workshop on creating your own ebook, part of suite of resources we call The Amplified Author.

For the last two months we have been grappling with the challenges of delivering some of this content online. It’s been a fascinating practical demonstration of how content needs to fit its medium. The care and thought that we have had to put into the work has surprised even hardened futurists like me, lulled into thinking all the hard work was done when we wrote the workshop. The famous last words go like this: “the content’s all there, what more do you need to do?”

Our original intention—to record a live presentation and plonk it online—might have worked for a few web hits and to mark the event for future reference. But our goal for The Amplified Author online was to make a useful resource in its own right, something that complements the workshop, but doesn’t rely on it.

Very early in the process it became obvious that, unlike a live speech or panel session, a straight audio or video dump wasn’t going to work. So we went into the studio. Pre-recorded presentations are a very different beast to a lecture in a live room, something we immediately discovered on the sixteenth take of the first session. The work had to be much more tightly scripted, with most asides removed to create refined and streamlined content.

The result is a series of videos that fly through the information, content that is designed to be stopped and started, and replayed as many times as necessary. It also needs to be augmented with text that fills in the gaps usually provided by presenters through asides or questions, a little like magazines and newspapers do with breakout boxes.

We’re still experimenting with The Amplified Author, exploring what works and what doesn’t; something that is likely to continue for some time yet.

It’s a clear demonstration that creating great content on a variety of platforms requires careful consideration of both content and container. You might have a story that would create a wonderful interactive book for a touchscreen device, but unless you know how your audience uses those devices and what you expect them to get out of it, your work will likely come up short. Even reasonably straightforward text-based digital books suffer when created with no regard for the devices used to access them and the expectations of people reading the text.

Creating great content across platforms is anything but a cut-and-paste exercise.

The Focus and The Freak, Concentrate

I’ve been working for some time with the eminent Vancouver-based writer and sibling of mine, Darren Groth on a series of short young adult novels. The first of these is now available on the Kindle platform.

I’m often asked how we go about collaborating on a work of fiction. While all books are collaborative to some extent, shared authorship duties are relatively rare in our game. To be honest, it took us quite a while to figure out a collaborative approach that worked for us. We tried a few approaches unsuccessfully. Although our styles of writing are not that different from each other, the trick is finding a way to make them flow together. What we realised is that every project needs a champion and, while sharing text is relatively easy, a story’s vision can’t be doled out in a 50/50 split. Concentrate, a young adult novel, marked the first time we worked as a writing team, each of us taking on roles as necessary to serve the story. Here’s how I described the process three years ago:

We have tried collaboration before a few times. We tried taking alternate chapters. We tried taking on different characters. Nothing really worked and I consigned the whole endeavour to the ‘revisit one of these days’ file. Little did I know Darren was hatching his own variation on the concept.

What we eventually hit on was taking alternate drafts. The result was similar to writer-editor only with the editor taking a far more active role adding character layers and additional narrative. Our model was less ’50 per cent text each’ and something more like what Joel and Ethan Cohen do: share the writing credits where one or the other might take the lead on any individual project. Seems to work well for them. Why not us? We are already brothers after all.

It seemed to work for us. Not only did we finish the story, but Concentrate was shortlisted in the prestigious Text Prize for young adult writing later that year. So that’s something.

We’re now in the home stretch of a new collaborative work in the same series. This one is called Wake and it’s one we’re both really excited about. But with the new work under construction, we felt it was high time to bring Concentrate into the world. But we didn’t want this to be a big hairy deal, so we have realised the book for the Kindle platform. We hope to have an EPUB format available soon too, but for now it’s Kindle only.

We’ve also made it available in two editions (and under two titles) The original Australian story Concentrate will be released in the coming weeks. Available right now is the North American version: The Focus and The Freak. This is what’s it’s about:

The Focus and The Freak is a story of faith after loss, determination after setback and hope after defeat.  Combining the best elements of magic realist and literary young adult fiction, it contends there is no more powerful thing in this world as heartfelt belief.

If you’re in Australia and you want to hold out for the Concentrate, that’s fine, but if you want to collect them both (something neither I nor Darren would discourage), you can grab your copy of Focus. And be sure to rate the story and leave a review. Because, you know, that would be a nice thing to do. And you’re a nice person. Aren’t you?

UPDATE: Concentrate is now available too.

Buy The Focus and the Freak from the Kindle Store for US$3.99.

Buy Concentrate from the Kindle Store, also for US$3.99.