Jane Friedman's Blog: Jane Friedman, page 193

The Future of Publishing: 14 Variations (Now Free!)

Last year, on April 1, I released an e-book, The Future of Publishing: Enigma Variations. It was mostly an April Fool's Joke—a joke that cost you $1.99. (Read a full description here, plus reviews.)

In this 39-page PDF, I offer 14 possible scenarios for the future of publishing … exaggerated scenarios. But in the final variation, I do get serious for a few pages.

Now that a year has passed since its release, I've decided to make it available for free.

Click here to view or download all 39 fabulous pages.

My Latest Thoughts on Literary + Tech

 

In the past couple weeks, I've been interviewed as part of a couple pieces from others in the literary community:

Chicago Publishes Podcast : These folks caught me at AWP 2012 after my panel on The Tech-Empowered Writer. Other interviewees include Dennis Johnson, Jotham Burello, and Michael Downs. Click here to listen. 
"Recording on Two Tracks" at The Nervous Breakdown. This article by Erin Hoover asks a provocative and important question: Who do writers want in charge of literary curation? Click here to read.

If the Book Is Dead, Then Why Buy a Zombie?

Detroit Book Repository by TunnelBug / Flickr

Today's guest post is from Jason Braun, who produces hip-hop sonnets from the Midwest.

A year has passed since Jane Friedman's 2011 AWP panel, "The Future of Authorship and Publishing in a Transmedia World," and I'm still sorting through the fallout.

I went to the panel with my friend Jamey Bradbury, a fine fiction writer, who happened to be John Irving's research assistant. Jamey wanted to learn more about e-books. I wanted to see how music might fit into the future of literature. We were immediately thrust into a much larger dialogue.

It was science fiction writer William Gibson who said, "The Future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet." But it is Jane Friedman who is trying to help us all with distribution. Just five minutes into the show, the panelists were tossing questions like Molotov cocktails:

Why dream of being on Oprah's Book Club? Why not be Oprah?
If people ask you at your literary magazine what you publish and you say, "Great stuff," how long do you expect to be around in an age of diminishing funding for the arts?
Free is not a sustainable business model. Do you know how they sell fancy cheese?

In the twelve months since that panel, I have pushed my way into publishing, app design, and promotion. Only now, I have more questions:

Besides the new approaches to marketing that are available to writers, editors, and publishers using app or e-book formats, what is anyone doing to enhance, expand, explode or recreate the experience a "reader" could have?
If we momentarily entertain the notion that the book is dead, even for 15 minutes, what shapes, forms, containers, and distribution streams might we invent?
What are writers, editors, and publishers doing now besides hawking a zombified version of the book?
Frequently the e-book or book-as-app is a less pleasurable experience than that of ink on wood pulp. Our "readers" have a smartphone, a tablet, or computer at their warm fingertips, and as Hacker Historian George Dyson recently said in an interview with Wired, "Computers are idle 99 percent of the time, just waiting for the next instruction." Why create as if this wasn't part of the equation?

The future of the book is limited only by our definition. We could pour narratives, poems, memoirs, how-tos, and manifestos into innumerable forms:

Mix tapes
Audio tours
Tagging online photos with links to audio, wikis, and narrative maps
GPS-enabled apps that start the campfire songs for Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts as they reach the Ozark mountain peak corresponding to longitude and latitude pre-programmed by the scout master.
An e-book in which the "author" has allowed readers not just to choose their own adventures, but to write the work's last chapter and/or change it daily according to the number of click votes it receives on the book's webpage. That would beat the hell out of book club.

Looking for more on this topic? Try these posts next:

The Tech-Empowered Writer
Thinking Beyond the Book: What's Your Demand Curve?
12 Must-Read Articles From 2011
3 Free Books to Open Your Eyes to the Future of Authorship

What Is a Literary Novel?

Today's guest post is by Dr. Sanjida O'Connell, a literary author based in the UK. Her latest book is out in paperback, Sugar Island.

The Literary Novel. We all know one when we see it, although deciphering what it is or telling someone else how to spot one is problematic.

In a tautological definition, literary works are often defined as those that win literary awards, such as the Booker Prize for Fiction. Which would rule out any novels written before 1969 being classed as literary. Another definition is that this type of fiction is "writerly"—clearly nonsense since every book is, by definition, writerly—someone wrote it, after all!

Recently a number of critics, publishers and publicists have suggested that literary fiction is simply a genre, like crime or chick lit and should be marketed as such (to ever decreasing readers, according to April Line in her guest post here, Why Isn't Literary Fiction Getting More Attention.

I am defined and marketed as a literary author, although I have never won the Booker. I didn't set out to be in this genre, but now 15 years since the first of my four novels was published, I've been wondering exactly what it is that makes a book literary.

First, for me, is that it should be Intellectual. A literary novel is about ideas. It has an overarching theme distinct from the narrative and a leitmotif running through it. The theme of my first novel, Theory of Mind (perhaps too densely cluttered with ideas), was on the nature of empathy viewed through the prism of a young boy with Asperger's syndrome, a sociopathic boyfriend, a robotics expert and the emotional life of a bunch of chimpanzees.

A.S. Byatt, who famously won the Booker for Possession and who "wept and wept" when her publishers asked her to remove chunks of Victorian prose and poetry, said that she had accepted her novel would only be read by academics and that she imagined she would certainly "fall into the intellectually challenging box."

Linked to their intellectual side, I think literary works have Depth. Of course, novels with great plots usually have sub-plots too, but I'm talking about the interweaving of ideas, themes, plot, and sub-plots. My third novel, The Naked Name of Love, took me ten years from concept to publication and that, plus the Big Ideas (God, evolution and love), helped give it depth. My fourth, Sugar Island (out in paperback this March), was written much more quickly and I believe it has less depth. It wasn't just the time it took to write but also the themes. Sugar Island deals with slavery, with freedom and free will, and because as a society we find slavery abhorrent, there is perhaps less to explore since the issues are so much more black and white for us than they were at the start of the American Civil War.

Critics often say that literary novels are about Character and commercial "mainstream" fiction is about plot. This seems a bit of a simplification. I do think literary novels should have fantastic characters, but the best books all have fantastic plots too. For me, in a literary work, the plot stems from the characters. The main character behaves in a particular way because that is who he or she is and it is their key character traits that drive the plot. Thrillers, for instance, can often have a plot that is external to the character. I'm exaggerating, but in this genre almost anyone could be the "hero" and go through the same process. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is a classic example of a pulse-quickening, page-turner, but would seeing into Robert Langdon's soul help move the plot along?

And last but not least is Style. I think we all expect a classic novel to be written in such beautiful prose it makes you want to weep, pause and stare at the sky or feel the words rolling through your mind like pebbles smoothed by the sea. Again, this is not to say that novels in other genres do not need to think about style but the prose can be more workman-like if plot is the driver. Take Stephanie Myers' Twilight Saga. Supremely popular, these books do not fit into the literary fiction category. They do have interesting characters, they contain ideas (about the nature of vampires and vampire-human hybrids), they reference literature (Tennyson, Wuthering Heights, Romeo and Juliet), but they are predominantly plot-driven, the prose is on the workman-like side, the characters are not deep and the books lack depth. They're still a great read.

So what I'm saying is literary books are not better than any other type of book and elements of what makes literary fiction literary are found in most novels. But if literary fiction is what rocks your world, then go for Wuthering Heights.

How do you define literary fiction?

My Views on Publishing Today

I was flattered when Paper.li reached out to me for a Q&A as part of their community interview series. They've titled the interview How to Get Published, and it covers a wide range of trends related to publishing, authorship, and technology.

A few highlights are below; click here to read the full interview. My thanks to Liz Wilson for a great set of questions.

My lifestyle

Once I'm up, I'm online all day, except when I'm teaching class. Even then, I'm often in front of a computer and streaming online information. Because I have no obligations other than being a professor of e-media at the University of Cincinnati, I'm free to focus all my energy and attention on online media. It's my work and my play.

About success in e-publishing

What determines success in e-publishing, aside from a quality book, is online reach to a target audience, and an ability to market and promote effectively. Once you make the e-book available, no one will know it exists unless you tell them.

About what sites writers need to be active on

I'm fond of saying none. That's because if a writer hates using whatever I suggest is mandatory, then there's little point in pursuing it. People can tell when you aren't enjoying yourself, and it's impossible to stick with something (for as long as you really need to) if you actively dislike it.

To see my answers on how to get published, whether it's vital to blog, top sources to follow on Twitter, and what makes me joyous/despairing about publishing right now … click here!

For more

Read my full Q&A with Liz Wilson at Paper.li 
Read Best Tweets for Writers Daily
Read The Jane Friedman Daily

Bestselling Women Authors Discuss Women Writing

Here's a lovely way to start your Sunday. With a nod to Women's History Month, Open Road Media has created a 2-minute video featuring bestselling female mystery writers Ruth Rendell, Susan Isaacs, Jane Langton, Mary Burton and more, sharing their thoughts on women and writing.

A couple great quotes from the video:

"Being as old as I am doesn't stop me from starting something, or carrying on with a difficult job."

—Jane Langton

"To be accepted allows you room to flower, to breathe. You have a great gratitude toward those who accept you."

—Anne Perry

Click here to watch over at YouTube.

One of the Ground Rules of Marketing

You have to target a market. You can't shoot for everyone. That's the topic of my latest post over at Writer Unboxed:

The Marketing Paradox: Start Small to Get Big

Also check out the comments for a few points on how to research your target market and what communication strategies might be most effective in reaching them.

Click here to read the full post and comments.

What Is an Author's Marketing Responsibility With a Traditional Publisher?

It is a pleasure to share this interview with two authors who are also marketing geniuses, Avery Monsen (@averymonsen) and Jory John (@joryjohn). A couple years ago they authored a brilliant illustrated book with Chronicle, All My Friends Are Dead, which became an online sensation and breakout bestseller with more than 100,000 copies sold. This year, the sequel released: All My Friends Are Still Dead.

I was eager to learn more about their marketing and promotion strategy, and they have been kind enough to share their methods and perspective.

While I clearly remember the moment I discovered your first book, All My Friends Are Dead—because I was absolutely delighted by it and HAD to share it—I have no recollection of how it got on my radar!

But at the time it was clear to me the book's preview had gone viral. What were some of the steps you followed to make that happen, and what role did your publisher play, if any?

By the time ALL MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD was published in June 2010, we'd already written one book—a writing and activity guide for kids called PIRATE'S LOG: A HANDBOOK FOR ASPIRING SWASHBUCKLERS—published by Chronicle Books in 2008.

So we had a little bit of experience on the publicity end, reaching out to people, trying to get the word out about our first book. But we'd also gotten the chance to see just how short that publicity window can be and how you have to go all out in the beginning. Otherwise, you just end up posting a link to your book over and over again on Facebook and nobody wants that. (FYI: Our friends put up with a lot. Sorry, friends.)

Truth be told, the two of us spend a lot of time on the phone with each other, coming up with ideas for all kinds of things … and when ALL MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD was released, we wrote up a big list of publicity ideas and stunts that we wanted to try out, which we thought might generate some interest for a book that we thought was really funny—if we don't say so, ourselves—and would appeal to people with similar senses of humor.

At the same time, we're not publicists and we don't fully understand how publicity works. (We don't understand how most things work, actually, although we've been reading a lot of Wikipedia lately.) We just consider ourselves to be two creative guys who can come up with plenty of ideas and be persistent.

So, we had plenty of conference calls with the Chronicle publicity team, who are always super receptive and generous with their time. (Quick example: A second ago, we heard back about something we asked via e-mail 15 minutes ago, on a SUNDAY! It wasn't even a very pressing question. So tons of credit goes to them.)

We have a tendency to get really caffeinated and bring up a lot of stuff at once and necessitate the making of lists and follow-up e-mails and second and third calls, etc.

So, we'd run (and we continue to run) our ideas past them, listen to their feedback and take plenty of their suggestions as well. We really wanted to be involved, though, and we also let it be known that we could be proactive and take the lead on things, anytime it would help.

We're always a little surprised when we hear about authors who are passive about the book that they put a ton of work into upfront. We really subscribe to the philosophy that nobody cares as much about your book as you do, and for good reason. Shakespeare said that. (Not the Shakespeare you're thinking of.)

We make a lot of lists. Some of the stuff that we came up with included:

a video starring Avery as Death
individual postcards with the book cover's image mailed to top bookstores with a personalized note
a city-wide dinosaur hunt, where we'd hide toy dinosaurs all over San Francisco and plot their GPS coordinates onto a website. (This still hasn't happened, although Avery did spend a weekend attaching tags with our website to 500 tiny dinos.)

Also, we started doing these all-day events outside of bookstores, just chatting with people who happened to walk by, which would sometimes turn into sales. We actually have a lot of experience working street fairs and talking to people. Before we were published authors, we sold 'zines and shirts and other stuff that we make, and we're both really comfortable talking to people, which helps. Sometimes we talk to people more than they want to talk to us. Oftentimes. Part of what helps is that we just enjoy goofing around and joking with people and we're not necessarily in it for the hard sell.

We also made that website, which came to your attention and you were so nice to tweet about. That has a preview of about 10 pages of the book. It's a very simple website (now with the sequel added), and when you're done clicking through the pages, there are links on how to buy the book or share it on your preferred social networking site. So, a lot of people helped us spread the word through Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr. (We'll address Tumblr in your next question. We read ahead, since this is an e-mail interview and we're relatively quick readers.)

Your books are BIG on Tumblr. So is Tumblr one of your favorite or preferred social networks? Are you both active on Tumblr aside from the marketing of this book? How did you manage to crack that community with your first book? Serendipity? Good connections? Or, as one person has written, is it because the book is the "most Internet-ready nugget known to humankind"?

Well, something we realized is that ALL MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD is not really a book that can get a traditional review in newspapers and magazines, for the most part. We did get a few, but it's an illustrated humor book with around 300 words. So any attention we were going to get was probably going to be on the Internet, not from a typical book reviewer or news outlets.

There is something Internet-ready about our books. We definitely agree with that. Part of that has to do with the fact that we spend an inordinate amount of time online. We haven't clocked it, but we probably spend more time staring at a screen than living real lives, which may help explain why we'll both end up, ultimately, alone. That is, we'll never meet our soul mates and, if we have met them already, we didn't realize it and they lost interest in us while we were refreshing our Amazon pages. This might all be off-topic, but if any of your readers are looking for potential mates who are also published humor-book writers and who check their Amazon ranking three times an hour, we're more than happy to use your blog and your good name as our dating site, Jane. Thanks in advance for being a reference and/or wing-woman.

SO ANYWAY: Tumblr. We're relatively active on Tumblr in our non-book-release seasons. We have a comic called OPEN LETTERS, which appears in weekly newspapers around the country (and we're always looking for more papers, editors: wink, wink, cough, cough, seriously), and which we post on Tumblr once a week. Avery also has his own page, which is both a personal blog and a place to add animated GIFs like a janitor who just can't get his floor cleaned. Most of the stuff we put up doesn't relate to our books at all. This is important, we think, for a couple reasons:

1. It's just good to stay active and keep producing things. Creativity is a muscle that needs to be stretched even when you're not getting paid for it.

2. Giving things away for free online builds up goodwill. People are more likely to reblog the promotional GIF for our book if they've already reblogged some other funny animations we've made. (That sentence is a complete guess. We have no facts to back it up. But it seems true, right? And if it seems true, it is true. Vonnegut said that. Again, not the Vonnegut you're thinking of. We're talking about Kurt Vonnegut.)

I'm not the first one to mention this, but your method of sharing the book preview is somewhat unusual—an animated GIF (screen capture above, click here to view). Why do you prefer this method?

We had the website with our book-preview and then, almost as a happy accident, somebody on Tumblr decided to turn it into an animated GIF, which a bunch of people enjoyed and was passed around all over the place. If you're familiar with Tumblr, you know that they make it super-easy to reblog something that you like and a lot of people seemed to like this. So, our GIF took off. Thanks to her, we even held a Tumblr record for a while, when the post got 38,000 notes, or some such thing. So when our latest book, ALL MY FRIENDS ARE STILL DEAD, came out, we did it again.

OK, one of the reasons we're doing this interview is because I tweeted about your website when the first book came out. It's pretty amazing to me that you have such good records that you contacted me more than a year later, with a personal note, saying that you appreciated that one tweet, and would I be interested in having a copy of the sequel. (So few authors have that kind of savvy, patience, and time, in my experience.) Can you give us a glimpse behind the curtain here as far as your process? This has to take loads of time!

We think it would be strange to us to release a book and not devote a lot of time and energy to it and, as mentioned, we're surprised if we ever hear about authors who don't want to be involved in this leg of it. We treat is as a job.

Again, we're trying plenty of different things and we're always pleasantly surprised when anything works out. We're spending a decent chunk of each day on publicity and things like this, while working on a new book for Chronicle.

We're in the process of trying to get a little publicity video together for the sequel, along with scheduling some events, setting up some giveaways and reaching out to people who we think might be able to help spread the word, more winks. We also continually update our Facebook page and try to get fans of our book excited about our new stuff.

As for contacting you, we've learned that being diligent about saying "thank you" to people AND staying in touch with folks who have said nice things about us is really important. We'd like to be able to tell you that we keep an Excel list of everybody who's every mentioned us, along with notes with what they said, but we don't. (If we ever get an intern, this might be a good first task!) We do have Google Alerts on our own names and all of our books, so we're instantly notified whenever anybody says anything about us or our stuff. Treat that as a warning, general public.

In your case, you just happened to come up when we were discussing influential people that we should to contact. We've also learned that personalized notes go a long way. We've been on the receiving side of press releases before and we know how easy those mass e-mails are to ignore.

And thanks for calling us "patient." We'd like to think that we're in this for the long-haul, so we're getting better at biding our time, making contacts, saying thanks, and then remembering those same people in a year or two when we have something new out.

So, yeah. We just remember being really excited when you tweeted about us. (How on Earth did you get 150,000 followers, by the way? You're like a regular Ashton Kutcher or President Barack Obama. We'll do ANYTHING. Seriously: think of the worst thing. We'll do that for a few more followers. You know that question you asked us about Tumblr up there? We pose the same thing to you, re: Twitter. You're a force, Jane. And we're @averymonsen and @joryjohn.)

If you haven't already clicked through to see the books referenced throughout, you absolutely must. Much gratitude to Avery and Jory for their time in offering such valuable insights.

How to Get Media Coverage for Your Book

Today's guest post is by Ken Brosky. I asked him to share his experience because many authors have made the same mistake he has. Plus, his advice on how to do things right is spot on.

In addition to his post, I recommend you read one of my rants, I Hate Press Releases—and hopefully you'll never end up wasting time OR money.

For the past two months, I've been documenting my attempts to promote my first short story collection on my blog in the hopes that other writers might be able to learn from my mistakes.

And boy, have there been some mistakes. But they're the good kind of mistakes. They're the mistakes you learn from and don't make twice. They're the mistakes that make for an entertaining story.

Take, for instance, my misguided attempt at conducting what the experts called PR, or—to the layperson—public relations. I assumed that in order to send out a press release, you had to spend money. Not only that, I also assumed in order to contact actual press—the keyword here, I think—you needed a professional company to do it for you.

Wrong. And wrong.

I ended up spending money on something that had no value to my book whatsoever.

First off, you don't need to pay to submit a press release. You can do it for free. You can go here or you can go here for a list of additional resources. It matters not. What matters is that your press release becomes available, ends up being indexed by Google, and ends up being read. Using a free press release website accomplishes all of this.

So what do those "paid" services end up doing? Well, apparently they distribute the press release to news media outlets. How many can depend on the company. Usually "thousands" is their general estimate. It sounds like pretty good odds. If the company I hired was sending my press release to "thousands" of news organizations across the country, I figured maybe a dozen or so responses to my press release would be a fair expectation.

The actual number? Zero. A big, fat zero.

This doesn't mean, however, that I haven't had some success with book reviews and press contacts. In fact, I've been incredibly lucky so far. I did an interview with Madison's newspaper, which published a full-page article about the book. I had another newspaper from my hometown mention the book, as well as a local arts magazine feature story.

How did I do it? Easy: I contacted them.

I sent a personalized e-mail with details about the book and then I waited. That isn't to say this avenue hasn't come with its own number of failures—I still haven't heard from the biggest newspaper in Wisconsin or any college newspapers—but that's just part of the game. You'll fail, but sometimes you'll succeed, and if you learn from the failures, you'll be more successful.

When it comes to paying money to submit a press release, learn from me: save your money.

Your Efforts Snowball Over Time

Last week, I spoke with Joanna Penn about trends in the publishing industry, e-books and self-publishing, and online marketing (and some other stuff!).

You can see highlights of our conversation over at her blog, listen to the podcast, or watch the video!

Here's a brief overview of my Twitter comments, as summarized by Joanna:

On twitter. Jane has over 150,000 followers. Jane was an early adopter but didn't understand it initially and so abandoned it. Once she had figured it out, she loved it and used it strategically. Her early start was part of the growth of her account. She was one of the first people in writing and publishing tweeting useful links and has stuck to this strategy. She tweets 3-6 times per day and doesn't use it very conversationally. Twitter has had an amazing impact. Jane explains some of the opportunities that have come her way through the connections she's made online. [I second this - Twitter, along with blogging, has changed my life.] Social media opportunities also snowball over time. It doesn't happen immediately. Have patience. Be authentic. Enjoy the process.