Six-thousand years ago, the Sumer-Akkadians enjoyed a rich civilisation in what is now Kuwait and Iraq. This was the land of the Gilgamesh epic, of complex laws and coherent social systems, of communication that would cross the millennia through painstakingly-created cuneiform texts. The Sumer-Akkadians had a belief system that allowed multiple and flexible deities. With no common gods, each area had its own local selection. The power of any god was identified in the number of its followers.

We  look to the well-followed as much as ever.  Although our heroes and gods are as likely to be worshipped through the media as through sacred ground, the means to become well-followed, and our common respect for this power, is at the heart of what many are hoping for when they look towards publishing their writing.

Have we changed our attitudes as to how these followers can or should be gained? Does the digital world offer something that was never so democratic, or something of the same basic structure as was ever so?

E-books

What’s a book these days? Have we yet reached the time yet when a book is no longer thought of as a paper thing? Does everyone have an e-reader?

At the time of writing there is another typically odious advert on British television trying to show the joys of the e-reader for the reader. E-books (“ebooks”?) being read under trees and even in bright sunshine would you believe it? Also ebooks read by increasingly young actors all of whom will now embrace reading like never before thanks to the compulsion of the pixelated screen over the printed page.

So far, though, we still can’t read them safely in the bath. Or, at least, they take far longer to dry out on the radiator.

There seem to be a number of  issues for amateur writers to muse over as far as the new digital opportunities are concerned.

• Is an e-book still a ‘book’? Is it just a book?
• Do we write differently in digital? Should we?
• Do we still long to be ‘published’ in the traditional sense?
• Will individual, copy-writable stars give way to something more diverse, more openly-sourced? Is this more democratic?
• Will classics still emerge? Will single books still emerge and be treasured, or will there be a perpetual wash of short-lived interests around our taste tribes?
• Do we feel more alone or more in company in this world of e-books and digital dissemination?

I don’t have any answers, partly because these are unanswerable questions. They did however give me some thoughts and these days thinking has to lead to blogging, and blogging feeds the global digi-brain, followers or no.

Gifting books

I’ve recently had bemused scoffing when handing paper books over as presents, because of course these aren’t quite the thing now, not for anyone in possession of a Kindle. Perhaps my  technologically-savvy friends no longer touch paper? Or perhaps the platform is now the driving pleasure in the interaction and experience?

Or perhaps  it shouldn’t matter at all. Isn’t the gift actually one of these words in this order? Isn’t the gift that, having read them myself and connected said words in said order with said friend, I now offer to share an experience and create an additional connection.

Giving books of course does this for us. If you give books as presents you’ll know there’s a particular sense of what the gift is and although the look and feel and bilblio-pyshicality of the whole thing can be important, especially if you’ve scribbled on the flyleaf and added a special bookmark and discovered it’s a first edition Fleurs du Mal, there’s something more.

The thoughts that we had when reading can be magically transferred to a friend or colleague simply through the gifting of a version or copy. We choose to do this, believing perhaps that the gift will return to us its fruit in the form of some classic pub conversation or a sudden realisation in that friend that his/her own problems and proclivities are curiously recognisable in the fictional beings they are introduced to. Maybe we have a faint hope that the giftee will recognise their own disastrous failings in one of the book’s plots and be magically transformed.

What are we gifting then when we give a digital text and what is the commitment of the giver?

Some considerable effort has been expended by publishers to manage the “perceived value” of the e-book. Ideally for publishers and perhaps authors, these dig-tomes are self-evidently the equal of a paper book. This runs counter to the attitudes of many a grumpy Yorkshireman, my father included, who feels that value is best appreciated by weightiness. Gifts, according to many a sage pragmatist east of the Pennines, are best appreciated when they take up some suitably large storage space rather than on any superficial qualities such as meaning. Calling a spade a spade and a book a book leads quickly to the kind of notion that anything electronic – any e-book or e-spade – should be a fair bit cheaper. After all, no paper no ink no transport costs. What else goes into a book? Assuming that writing is, after all, a hobby for the Bronte-minded and should, in any sane world, be handed straight down the digi-path for free.

What is the “perceived value” as marketeers would have it and is this quite so self-evidently the same as a paper book? We might accept that the text is being purchased rather than the book as such. Fine editions aside, there is now an alternative to culling trees and building bookshelves. But the e-publishing phenomena has more questions. If nothing else there are new opportunities around the authors’ delivery of a near complete version of the traditional experience. All the old work around making writerly thoughts look bright and pristine on a page are done direct into machine. For my generation this still has the power to amaze. Writing used to be typewriter and carbon sheets, then it was green type on black screens. To enjoy watching something that looks so like a beloved page appear black on white in a neatly shaped rectangle, how joyous!

There we go, the end product can be whipped out from the desktop and can now sit beside billions of other texts on digital shelves.

Billions. Is that a newly scary thing for us. How many words can now be published direct. No editors. Perhaps no edits. Or perhaps a draft in public now to be tweaked over and over.

If libraries and book shops ever seemed oppressive to an amateur, to the unpublished, what now?

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

We can let Robin Williams and the i-pad ad deliver an answer this question – but how much bigger is that digital library, the electronic version of the warehouse of forgotten books that kicks off Shadow of the Wind? How much more space to get lost in?

With our ability now as authors to publish direct, there are numerous potential shifts in the power nexus. If traditional fame and the desire to be known, to spread ideas and images that are identifiable and individual, is as strong as ever then it is marketing gurus we now want. This is the apparent shift in the business of the publisher. But perhaps, like the digital coding world, other things are shifting too. The need to recognise individual sources may become less important to us. Sharing, mashing, borrowing, using – are these a stronger direction for the digital than a simple repackaging of something that looks and feels very like its papery forebear?

Paratext, hors-texte and other useful trucs from France.

Critics are hot in pursuit of questions around what a digi-text is. For a start whether format can be separated from the “text”. Can the paratext as Genette has it can be regulated to interesting effect?

Paratext, for those who aren’t working on their narratology dissertation at the moment, is basically what exists as a housing or context for the words – typeface, number of words on page, cover, shop its bought in, friend who recommends, colleague who dogears the naughty bits etc. Some of this has a parallel in the e-reader, some doesn’t. E-readers have their own and will no doubt improve upon the current offer which in 2013 is a fairly bland casing and a do-it-yourself kit of sizing and percentage shifts.

Derrida famously said “Il n’ya pas de hors-texts” – which in our devious English way we have toyed with and mauled, largely considering it to either imply that “everything is language” or that there is nothing outside a/the text.* Is this as true for the digital text that feels curiously both more fixed and yet more mutable than its paper-based equivalent. Housed behind glass and in many ways untouchable, un-dog-earable, unattainable etc. Highly permanent and at the same time strangely fragile – where does it exist? Is its being simply a tide of binary possibilities?

If there’s nothing outside a text or no “hors-texts” our digital version is surely different in many ways. It’s not the same thing as giving/reading/owning a traditional book. It can’t be. It shouldn’t be.

Will we reach a stage where paper versions are only produced in swanky bindings at extraordinary prices, leaving run-of-the-mill reading experiences to the screen edition?

Already, first time authors are lucky to be offered a paper version of their first novel. Yet, this is what writers seem largely to want. The digital edition is somehow not quite as authorised, not quite as respected. It’s not quite the same thing to be published for e-book as to have a version in Waterstones that you can go in and fondle, point your friends to and sign.

However atavistic, the pull of the reading tradition as we consider a new digital version highlights the newness of a digital reading experience:

• One reader mentions the memory we hold of whether a piece of reading was on the left or right hand side of a book, a sort of geo-location for favourite quotes and a bond with the book.
• Many discussions have been held on page counts and what the reading experience requires in a novel in terms of that sense of when to anticipate the major turns, including the conclusion.
• Others wonder at book marks and dog-ears – nicely illustrated by Alan Yentob’s programme on the subject – and at the need to shout to book group members, “but what about when he gets his kit off on page 69..?”
• The very coverlessness of e-books allows for new reading habits, public consumption of texts that are not an advert for what we’re reading
• And our bookshelves, the display of our pasts and our proclivities. Do we choose differently now they’re all in a download cloud from Amazon?

Websites and front covers

While we’re talking about those paratexts or hors-texts that condition our thinking around books, there’s a heavy expectation that we go in through a title page, first page or cover. This is a particular way of looking at the world in general and it has an interesting effect on how people react to websites.

Early websites had ‘splash pages’ replicating a cover, or gateway experience, a moving graphic that was in essence a book cover, one which said, “now we’re starting”, “get ready”, “begin to expect”. These even felt half-way to a film experience, as though the new web-reading was going to borrow from a range of exciting sensory possibilities.

It’s still very common for the uninitiated to be overly concerned with the notion of what’s on the homepage of a website. In fact homepage access to many large websites is low, typically below 35%. We no longer have to have a homepage or title page or book cover. We can go straight into whatever gobbet is delivered at random or by choice and deal with it according to need or whim. Nice. It’s a new feature, isn’t it? Except that many – most? – books allow a ‘dip in’ option… so is this new to digital? Or better in digital? Who’s choosing how we read? Do we even need a digital author to enable our selectivity?

is it still writing?

Ahead of a conference paper on digital writing I tried out a sort of artwork. The words “is it still writing?” were put up on a computer-fed screen, appearing at intervals and in a font to suggest a trace of neon signage.

For me, if not for those who walked past it, this had a number of possibilities that vied for attention as the principle statement, among them: Is the machine continuing its writing? Are the words an example of non-moving writing? Does this process continue to be defined as writing?

In the same vein, but more usefully for this post, in what way do we approach the ebook or the word-processed writing exercise and in what way has this affected how we choose to write?

Some tutors are legendary in forcing classes to work with pen and paper. It requiring a different pace of thinking. This ties in nicely with the photographer who uses glass plates in order better to engage with the process and the need for patience, selectivity and dedication to a single creative event.

If you like putting text cross-wise like a Georgian crossed-letter, or like to make a line bend from horizontal to vertical, or if you like an illustration, diagram or set of linking arrows, then the e-writing method seems horribly limiting. It’s almost as though the published page has choked creativity and still forces us to mimic it. All those years of English teachers trying to get language students to arrange their vocabulary into mind-maps and mushrooms and snails and webs rather than making lists that start in the top left – always a method that fails to work with the brain’s best practice and yet so familiar to the reading experience.

Text that defies linearity has brought some famous cases. Remember when Lewis Carroll was trying to get the mouse’s tail poem correctly to the type-setter he had to clip out each word from the proof and paste it into place, this having been expunged in the process. It’s hard to imagine a new Appolinaire coming up with graphic poetry as a writer in a world dominated by digital writing – this kind of practice seems much more likely to be fostered in illustration or graphic design or something else that has paper and pen at its core and hasn’t quite leapt aboard the one-way digi-train.

Links and loops

There are two things that digital writing has claimed as its own domain for creative practice: links and loops.

Much work exists on how loops now replace directional narratives. Many a critical theorist has spent many an hour noting the incremental changes in the notion of story. New thinking encourages us away from the traditions of a linear effect with start and finish clearly indicated and instead offers notions of restarting at recognisable points  in order to retrace or redo what is already known. It seems to be one of society’s inherent gameification modes, we treat everything in the way we treat computer games ,with multiple lives and multiple opportunities to repeat and reassemble and revisit.

The phenomena of rewatching, reviewing, re-reading what is familiar is also up for discussion, do we value something more that we have read twice. Do the dead come back to life? Does the digital encourage this any more than having a favourite book? If so does it encourage this to an extent that can challenge our notion of what reading quintessentially is?

The loop allows us, though digital means, to introduce gobbets that can then be put together in an order that pleases the end user. We don’t have to indicate a beginning or an end. We can offer a random beginning. We can make this beginning change. Rather than random generation of an entry point, one can be generated dependent on the user, governed by gps locators or time zones. Wow. Stacks of potential.

But hang on, has story itself been transformed?  Does anyone actually want to read this way (anyone who’s not doing academic work on the digital story)?

Does any story experience allow for there to be no beginning and end, or is this part of a set of definitions that separate it usefully from the more messier set of “stories” that is life itself? Does the reader wish to approach a story with a sense that this is the beginning of an experience or to be treated as an interloper in process? 

Some theorists argue that story will have a necessary intimation of prior completion. Where is the story before it is told? Although the answer is of course ‘no-where’ and this is a the root of the illusion of prior conception, neither is it easy to conceive of as being without a beginning. The bounds of what a story is are stretched if there is only infinite possibility and nothing seems to have been structured, whether that is in linear or looping form. If it just goes on and on like Eastenders or virtual life games, is this a story or something different, something too much like life itself.

The lack of beginning, the opportunity not to start from a page that is turned over, the notion that we are not dealing, when we take on a website or other digitally transmitted text, with a gateway to the experience as we looked at above with the replica of book cover, this is not an easy shift in terms of readerly thinking. It is one however that begins to suggest that the digital reading world might offer challenges to the traditional experience.

The other “extra” we get in a digital engagement is, apparently, choice. Choices in the traditional book market are fairly straightforward and fairly drastic. Do I keep reading or not? If NO please dispose of paper in suitable recycling bin. Do I recommend, do I share, do I buy multiple copies, do I re-read, do I re-visit favourite portions? If so, in what order? These seem to be the types of choice around the old fashioned paper variety of book. If YES, please purchase signed first edition for self to possess.

Hypertext fiction seems to be offering something else, something that allows even at its most basic, a choice of reading directions. Something not so different from the footnote/endnote potential most common in reference and academic text but also present in a few much-enjoyed novels. Do I click here to find out more about the background of character x – do I ‘carry on’ with ‘the story’ without knowing this additional detail that was promised? Alternatives can take us neatly along the lines of those 1980s children’s magazines that allowed you to choose with the character, or the comfortingly primitive algorithms of the early adventure games – do we enter the beast’s cave Yes or No? If yes go to page 5 if not go to page 10.

If we have choice – if these are choices that provide loops and revisits and new ideas of where a beginning might be or what an ending (closure) might be – does it feel like a narrative, does it feel like a story, or is this something else?

The truth of linked text is perhaps that there is limited potential here that is not dealt with better by more formalised genres that cover this kind of choice. Adventure gaming on boards or online gives, for my money, a better version of that sense that we are “inside the character’s response to choice”. If these are the new reading, then what has become of the old reading?

Choice and loops. This seems to characterise the departures that e-books can and have made. In some extreme versions the experiments depart far enough from the accepted definitions to require new terms and not to be seen as the simple advance of the book, the text or the story. In some ways it re-establishes the best definitions of story.

There may well be nothing outside the text, no hors-texte – do we care?

The whatness of bookness

There are some good examples of e-storytelling that aren’t books or games. Here’s a plug, Ingen elge på vejen den dag – No Elk on the Road that Day (also No Moose on the Road that Day – but let’s save it for another post that this translation misses the the careful distinction in English between elk and moose). Anyway, check out a nice little essay on loops and those narrative-types that allow you in and out with no beginning or end other than the one you bring to it as an engager – Cf when life becomes a loop Noah Niehaus

Engaging with this story means entering on a real day, finding oneself with a lexis that offers something of a traditionally written portion and then exiting in order to re-enter and find another portion on another day, there being a correspondence between real and story days of the week.

Is this a book? What is a book? In a set of handy notes on the whatness of bookness, Philip Smith recognises that the defining point is not so easy. “A teddy bear with writing on it is not a book.” No, well, probably not, though I’m not sure who might ever be in a position to wonder if it was or not.

The book is not the text, although it is traditionally associated with it, and these two elements appear often to be mistaken for the same thing. The book is the hinged multi-plane vehicle or substrate on which texts, verbal, or tactile (the latter would include braille and other relief or embossed effects, found objects, pop-ups) maybe written, drawn, reproduced, printed or assembled.

What is a book, and is an e-reader in any way a part of that book or is the book going on “within” or “without “ it. Without the human (e)reader? –perhaps some sure-footed academic could get a handsome grant to run a project of that title at some university or other.

E-publish and be damned

Technophile Douglas Adams was passionate in many interviews on the subject of the need to get rid of the papery thing that the book was and for it to be replaced by a technological advance of some sort. Yet for the current crop of writers, especially those who grew up reading books of the heavier, more papery, page-turnery variety, there remains something holy about print and about the book.

Ask anyone who is aching for publication and it is unlikely that the ebook carries the principal thrust of their dreams. A publisher offering e versions only, even with a modicum of promotion as part of the deal, is considered a pretty charmless alternative.

Can you blame them? Writing a book is hard work and for most has no rewards beyond completing the tale itself. Here’s a scenario: if you are remarkably best-selling for a first timer let’s say you do a classic print run of 2000 copies for which there’s a one pound royalty and the book is 80,000 words, You write 500 decent words per day – allowing for deletions, self-editing and so on – which means 160 working days if you remain inspired, do no planning and have no breaks. As an earner that means 32 working weeks and the kingly sum of 4K in the bank. You might get a real break and sell 5 times that but even then it’s only just sounding a plausible alternative to real work and it’s only for that one with no guarantee of a follow-up success. So – given the work load it seems pretty empty result if you’re just being thrown up on an e-publishers website.

It also flags up the passion with which many writers commit to their work regardless of publishers, agents, readers or other elements of the industry.

Then there’s self e-publishing. Is that another step down some scale of what being published is? For most it’s not actually being published, is it? You’d be disappointed if a published author came to visit your writing group and you found they’d just lobbed their own stuff through Kindle Direct, wouldn’t you? You want someone who’s followed, who’s known, who has been dubbed worthy by the multitude. Nothing wrong with the self publishing route of course, there’s that legendary group who kickstarted immortality in this way – Bronte sisters, Kenneth Graeme, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and so on – but it’s not quite what you’re aiming for when you sit down at the word-processor with an ambition to write. As an author you want something else.

What is that something else? Recognition perhaps, not in the sense of global fame, but more that someone has appreciated your efforts and given it the stamp of that approval. Someone who matters, someone who knows what a good book is.

Something more like the stuff that bookshops trade in, something with weight and solidity.

If your main aim is to commit your emotional and intellectual self to some hard version that can live through the ages in the manner of the Lindesfarne Gospels, somehow a float of pixels seems a bit lightweight. A bit easy to do, perhaps. Not the right sense of privilege that a book would give. The next stage in the degrading of the written word and the biggest change since Gutenberg. And of course what is really wanted is that sense of being special. If not hand written, they should at least be works that have been pointed out and labelled as fit for human consumption.

Is this kind of statement still valid in the digital ocean?

Publishers often seem like the enemy, the gatekeepers, the threshold guardians. They have risen to a position of power over a process and in our world where power is at its most palatable when shared or democratised or decentralised. Publishers are  in possession of a sort of imperial blessing. They can touch works and make of that typescript something other, something better, something that has been approved.

In the look-at-me-daddy of the grown up writerly world, the publisher is the ultimate parent figure, one given largely to scorn.

No, there is something about the printed work that is not in the digital work. Of course the digital extras are fine, pretty handy for the extra clients we have no doubt. Sell a few hundred thousand of those to the e-reader clients, yes please, but what we really want is something else. It’s perhaps best represented by the library or the shelf or the bedside cabinet and the contents of a piece of furniture that houses, or is built to house the literary work. A print version has something, and it does not even have to be the nicest print version.

Yes we want followers, but in some way we want our followers, like our gods, to be real.

Tips for writers: should I e-publish?

Yes – it’s out there rather than in a drawer. Especially if you’ve got an old MS you’re not going to do anything more with.

You may not get the editing that publishers offer, and you may not get the bragging rights you crave, but for most people it’s better than nothing and it may keep you going for that next big project that you do want to hawk around agents.

Worth bearing in mind that some genres do well for amateur e-publishing – romance for example.

Companies offer opportunities and tools for promotions.

Use the e-book to test the marketplace. If it sells it could impress someone who’s prepared to help with publicity. Is our book and our need for the printed version any different?

Don’t think that just sticking it online is publicising. If you want to actually get the book to go anywhere it takes constant marketing – through social media etc. Some sources reckon on 80% of your time being on sales, hence the attraction of a publisher.

How easy is it? Very – lots of handy hints on publishers websites. Just create an html file ( Systems don’t even require clean html and it can be generated through word) upload a cover and you’re up and published. Anyone who fancies the hobby of a smarter cover etc, it’s catered for too.

*(A digression here which also serves as a test for footnotes in the digi-lit:
On Derrida and his horse text, I’m reminded of a good little thread in an alumni magazine not so long go in which academics were asked to note amusing mistakes in literary history. This is of course a fantasy for academics who get to chuckle into their chests about that simply hilarious jape that Virginia Woolf pulled on Lytton Strachey over a misplaced colon. It’s not the most comedic of professions after all and the chance to air that much loved and fiendishly arcane witticism can reward the kind of ribald prof who’s been wondering for years why he never got his chance in stand-up.

So, the joke I’m thinking of goes something along the lines of this: There’s this earlyish translator of Jaques Derrida goes into a pub… his efforts manage to become acknowledged as a standard translation soon after publication and, well, this nobly bilingual phraseologist manages to work havoc in the academic world by translating “[I]l n’ya pas de hors-texte” as “there is nothing outside the text.” Chaos spews forth as of course countless anglophiles now believe that Derrida is making a claim that bewilders in its boldness. Cue four decades of academic debate and much beard scratching, black polo-neck tweaking and a pipe or two of rough shag.

Perhaps you’ve not yet managed to quite “get” this gag. No worries. It’s never made Channel 4s ultimate comedy routines, although I think there was a video-log version of it among the prize winners on You’ve Been Framed.

The joke is, apparently, that the “hors-texte” holds a meaning that some less philosophical minds would see as critical. The “hors-texte” was mis-delivered as “hors de texte” something along the lines of the “out-text” rather than the “out of text.” The “out-text” however includes various interesting bits of a printed page for the Francophile bibliophile. It includes the margins and gutters and page corners and illustrations and captions – possibly a whole range of such things and leads nicely to that whole preoccupation that inspired Genette and his paratext.

So Derrida, apparently was not so much saying that everything is language as that everything on and around a block of writing is actually part of the text.

Joke’s over.

Mignon!