I recently received the following request from a friend & former classmate:

Can you suggest a few key / huge / current books on the evolution of e-books and e-media, especially in the face of print culture? Theory, numbers, personal essays, experiences? How print and electronic texts augment each other or not?

What a great prompt. It brought to mind all kinds of wonderful things I’ve read or seen lately—though most are not in book form.

I thought I’d share my response publicly, and also gather your recommendations in the comments, because I know I don’t have a comprehensive list (yet!).

Books

• Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto (collection of essays)
• The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future by Robert Darnton (read an interview with Darnton, “Do Books Have a Future?”)
• Clay Shirky has two books that look at larger cultural/tech shifts, both of which speak to writing/media/publishing quite a bit: Here Comes Everybody & Cognitive Surplus. (See below for more Shirky.)

Websites, Blogs, Events, Talks

• BookTwo (James Bridle). Check out his blog entries AND his talks, where available.
• Books in Browsers event. Scan for links to presentations and videos.
• Lean Back 2.0. I’ve been mentioning this one a lot lately. See the presentation that kicked it all off.
• The Institute for the Future of the Book. Check out their blog, if:book.

Specific Posts

• How We Will Read, recent Q&A with Clay Shirky. And here’s Shirky’s blog.
• Post-Artifact Booking & What Books Will Become by Kevin Kelly
• Wikipedia & The Death of the Expert by Maria Bustillos

What else is there? Let us know in the comments!

© Tom Gauld | www.tomgauld.com

Today’s guest post is from April Line, a freelance writer and writing teacher. Read her previous guest post for this site, Can Children Develop Adequately Without Books?, and visit her online at April Line Writing.

When I was in the home stretch of my liberal arts studies, something kind of shitty happened. I got pregnant. Being 25, a feminist, single, and centimeters from an MFA program in fiction writing at my choice between University of Pittsburgh, University of Cincinnati, or Purdue; abortion was the obvious answer, right?

Wrong.

There’s no point now in wondering whether it was the right choice, but I’ve got a pile of toil, an excellent six-year-old, and perspective to show for it.

What I don’t have is a terminal degree in the art of my choice, and give-or-take five years of reading and writing.

In April 2011, during my kid’s first year of public school, I was so relieved to reclaim a bit of breathing space that I quit my stupid retail sales job and I went freelance.

Copyblogger told me that I should tweet as a freelancer, so I did (they give great advice); and in May somebody tweeted asking, “Is literary fiction is the new poetry?”

The quotation is commonly attributed to Jonathan Franzen, but it’s a sentiment that’s been around for some time. I recall my mentor and undergraduate thesis advisor telling me that literary writers write for other literary writers.

Seeing it on Twitter gave it startling gravitas, plus my own burgeoning adulthood makes me more willing to see a doughnut’s hole, and it’s been niggling at my literature-loving soul.

And it seems that the fatalistic, academic impulse is going to be to let it just happen: to watch literary fiction’s audience become increasingly smaller, watch the people who write it become increasingly disenfranchised, watch their numbers diminish, even as the growing number MFA programs churn out writers and literature lovers, and deprive us—who would rather read Amy Hempel or John McNally or Joan Didion than Stephanie Meyer or Norah Roberts or John Grisham—of this delicious, delicious, reading.

That makes me sad.

One of the last bits of literary fiction I read before taking my too-long hiatus was Ron Currie Jr.’s God is Dead. That, friends, is a brilliant book. It’s loosely connected short stories set in post-apocalypse America. One of the first bits of literary fiction I read when I came back to reading for love, pleasure, and the experience was Ron Currie Jr.’s Everything Matters! which is also a brilliant book, and my new favorite. It replaced The Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England by Brock Clarke.

My point is that these books are lovely and entertaining. In Everything Matters!, there is cocaine and alcohol addiction, violence, celebrity, conspiracy, and science fiction. In The Arsonist’s Guide there’s multi generational marital unrest, alcoholism, violence, the mafia, fire. In both of these, there are very funny jokes.

And it seems to me that we’re reading more than ever as a culture. We read on the Internet, so many folks are blogging, e-readers and smart phones make books and language so accessible and ever present. I have a copy of The Pickwick Papers on my Android phone.

It seems sad and irresponsible to me that we should just let literary fiction fizzle into the academic ether.

This article at McSweeney’s references NEA studies that indicate that 1982–2003 accounted for the greatest decrease of young people reading literature. But young people are reading more as of 2009 than they did in the 30 years prior. So this new increase in young readers, combined with the decreased cost of publishing e-books, and marketing with social media, seems like an opportunity for literary fiction.

Genre authors are more likely to score five-figure advances (or more) and are almost certain to see royalties. Literary authors clamor after $5,000 advances if they don’t just give up and self pub—and if they see royalties, they’re spare.

Literary authors do book tours, signings, appear at academic conferences, speak on concerns of craft and the academic writing world. They have agents, but their agents don’t interface with their publishers to make sure the books are on end caps in Target or the equivalent.

Why the hell not?

Literary fiction gets marketed differently because there’s a different audience, right? And I can see that argument, sort of. Like if people who appreciate literature didn’t also like to buy inexpensive toilet paper. Or if enjoying 30 Rock and Planet Earth were mutually exclusive. Or if nobody who listens to Howard Stern ever listens to Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

The morale among literary authors is low. Because even though they know their books are great, the mainstream voice is saying, “But not great enough to be worthy of sales efforts!”  The playing field is leveling as reading becomes more digitized, and I’m not the only one who’s saying it. It’s time for literary authors to reclaim a segment of the market. And I want to help.

I loaded up my holiday gift list this year with titles from authors whose tweets I follow, from authors I loved seven years ago who’ve published new books, with writers the mainstream public doesn’t talk about.

Peter Damian Bellis lives 20 minutes away from me, and has written a book called The Conjure Man (available for free here) that was in the running for a nomination for the National Book Award. There are fewer than 5,000 copies out there. It’s not even in too many libraries. It’s a wonderful book that will totally enthrall you, and Bellis is touring blues festivals to publicize it.

Do the people in charge of decisions about marketing books have such a low estimation of the reading public that they won’t even give them the opportunity not to choose literary fiction?

I recognize that we’re probably a hundred long, laborious steps away from end caps in Target, or at least equal market saturation, but we must start walking.

Here’s a step: I’m starting a nonprofit. Billtown Blue Lit. We’ve got a blog. We’ve got a StartSomeGood Campaign, we’re doing a podcast called “Writers Talk.”  We want people to have access to good stuff to read, so we’re going to do good stuff in service of good books.

Maybe you’d like to join us.

April’s fiction appeared in Sou’Wester in 2005. She currently does copy writing, editing, and freelances for a number of regional publications. She is working on a collection of essays and fiction, and on her nonprofit project, Billtown Blue Lit. She lives in Williamsport, PA. Visit her website.

Here are the most brilliant online articles I read this past year. You may not agree with the arguments you’ll find, but you have to give them credit for being original and thought-provoking. They will enrich your thinking about writing and publishing, and give you a more nuanced perspective of the industry.

Also, you probably ought to follow each of these writers in 2012.

[1]
Accessibility vs. Access: How the Rhetoric of “Rare” Is Changing in the Age of Information Abundance by Maria Popova (@brainpicker) at Nieman Journalism Lab

Curators for the win!

Information curators are that necessary cross-pollinator between accessibility and access, between availability and actionability, guiding people to smart, interesting, culturally relevant content that “rots away” in some digital archive, just like its analog versions used to in basement of some library or museum or university.

Because here’s the thing: Knowledge is not a lean-back process; it’s a lean-forward activity. Just because public domain content is online and indexed, doesn’t mean that those outside the small self-selected group of scholars already interested in it will ever discover it and engage in it.

[2]
Wikipedia and The Death of the Expert by Maria Bustillos (@mariabustillos) at The Awl

I feel like quoting this article every time I hear someone bash Wikipedia. But this article is far more complex than just that.

It’s been over five years since the landmark study in Nature that showed “few differences in accuracy” between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. Though the honchos at Britannica threw a big hissy at the surprising results of that study, Nature stood by its methods and results, and a number of subsequent studies have confirmed its findings; so far as general accuracy of content is concerned, Wikipedia is comparable to conventionally compiled encyclopedias, including Britannica.

[3]
Advice for Young Journalists in the Digital Age by Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) at Columbia Journalism School

This is actually a PDF of a speech given to journalism grads. Great for all kinds of writers.

What you’re looking for, ultimately, are stories. Statistics, to anyone who knows anything about them, aren’t factoids—4 out of 5 dentists agree that Colgate is the best toothpaste, Uganda is the 118th most populous country—but instead quanta of information that can be pieced together, just like all the other information that you collect as a journalist, to help you write stories and inform others about the world.

[4]
There Are Some People Who Don’t Wait: Robert Krulwich on the Future of Journalism

Here’s another graduation speech worth a read. Ed Jong at Not Exactly Rocket Science (Discover Magazine) introduces the full text of Krulwich’s talk.

Think about NOT waiting for a company to call you up. Think about not giving your heart to a bunch of adults you don’t know. Think about horizontal loyalty. Think about turning to people you already know, who are your friends, or friends of their friends and making something that makes sense to you together, that is as beautiful or as true as you can make it.

[5]
Is the Future of Physical Book Publishing the Same as the Future of Reading and Writing? by Daniel Nester (@DanielNester) at We Who Are About to Die

This one is so good I keep pulling it out during arguments on Facebook & Twitter, or mentioning it during conference talks.

It never ceases to amaze me how ebooks, the one truly positive sales story in publishing, is also the one topic that is brought up to point out that The Sky is Falling in publishing. The economic models that make an ebook and produce a book are largely the same–people read, edit, then publish. After that, it gets really cheap and efficient for the ebook, and really dumb and slow for the physical book.  But books, physical ones, continue to serve as the measuring stick.  This has a lot to do with aesthetics and fetishizing what a book’s job is, of course, which is to provide text for a person to read. It’s an important time and takes a significant chunk of one’s time, reading. Never mind that much of what we do reading-wise and practically all of our writing occurs on-screen.  The book as object for many remains sacrosanct.

[6]
The Web is a Customer Service Medium by Paul Ford at Ftrain (@ftrain)

Powerful.

That’s what I tell my Gutenbourgeois friends, if they’ll listen. I say: Create a service experience around what you publish and sell. Whatever “customer service” means when it comes to books and authors, figure it out and do it. Do it in partnership with your readers. Turn your readers into members. Not visitors, not subscribers; you want members. And then don’t just consult them, but give them tools to consult amongst themselves. These things are cheap and easy now if you hire one or two smart people instead of a large consultancy. Define what the boundaries are in your community and punish transgressors without fear of losing a sale. Then, if your product is good, you’ll sell things. (Don’t count on your fellow Gutenbourgeois to buy things. They’re clicking the little thumb icon on YouTube like everyone else.) If you don’t want to do that then just find niche communities who might conceivably care about your products and buy great ad placements. It’s a better online spend.

[7]
The Resume Is Dead, The Bio Is King by Michael Margolis (@getstoried) in The 99 Percent

I find this so important I teach bio writing to all my e-media students.

Gone are the days of “Just the facts, M’am.” Instead we’re all trying to suss each other out in the relationship economy. Do I share something in common with you? How do we relate to each other? Are you relevant to my work?

That’s why the resume is on the out, and the bio is on the rise. People work with people they can relate to and identify with. Trust comes from personal disclosure. And that kind of sharing is hard to convey in a resume. Your bio needs to tell the bigger story. Especially, when you’re in business for yourself, or in the business of relationships. It’s your bio that’s read first.

[8]
The Ultimate Crowdfunding To-Do List: Before You Launch by Nathaniel Hansen (@nathanielhansen) at his own site

Don’t even think about launching a Kickstarter (or crowdfunding effort) without reading this first.

I get A LOT of requests to help with kickstarter campaigns. Through trial and error on over a dozen kickstarter projects, hours of lectures at Emerson College, and countless meet ups, phone calls and emails with artists and innovators, I’ve refined a “best practices” list that I share when I decide to get involved with a project. I’ve been fortunate to run my own successful campaigns, but also have helped out on over a dozen innovative artistic endeavors all of which have been successful in some way. What you’ll read here, and hopefully in the future, is what I’ve found to work (to the tune of almost $350k and counting).

[9]
The 7 Biggest Fan Page Marketing Mistakes by Brian Carter (@briancarter) at All Facebook

Facebook is changing constantly, so this article will eventually become out of date, but not quite yet.

Fan Page Mistake #1: Assuming People Go To Your Fan Page (Versus Seeing Your Posts In Their News Feed). Most people, if they ever go to a fan page, only go there once. Some highly interactive pages get more visitors, and you can bring fans back to the page or to specific tabs with posts or ads, but usually fans see your page’s posts via their news feed.

[10]
Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings? by Paul Ford (@ftrain) in New York magazine

Another fabulous piece by Paul Ford.

We’ll still need professionals to organize the events of the world into narratives, and our story-craving brains will still need the narrative hooks, the cold opens, the dramatic climaxes, and that all-important “■” to help us make sense of the great glut of recent history that is dumped over us every morning. No matter what comes along streams, feeds, and walls, we will still have need of an ending.

[11]
What Books Will Become by Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly)

Kevin Kelly is one of my favorite futurists to read. The best book I read this year was by Kelly, What Technology Wants. (You can see my Kindle highlights on this book, and others.)

For a taste of his thinking, this is one his great posts on the future of books.

The current custodians of ebooks—Amazon, Google and the publishers—have agreed to cripple the liquidity of ebooks by preventing readers from cut-and-pasting text easily, or to copy large sections of a book, or to otherwise seriously manipulate the text. But eventually the text of ebooks will be liberated, and the true nature of books will blossom. We will find out that books never really wanted to be telephone directories, or hardware catalogs, or gargantuan lists. These are jobs that websites are much superior at — all that updating and searching — tasks that paper is not suited for. What books have always wanted was to be annotated, marked up, underlined, dog-eared, summarized, cross-referenced, hyperlinked, shared, and talked-to. Being digital allows them to do all that and more.

 

[12]
Monoculture: How Our Era’s Dominant Story Shapes Our Lives, a book review by Maria Popova (@brainpicker) at Brain Pickings

This is unrelated to writing and publishing (at least specifically) but you should read it anyway. It’s a review of a new book, Monoculture. When you’re done, subscribe to Brain Pickings, Popova’s e-newsletter.

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” poet Muriel Rukeyser famously proclaimed. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are how we make sense of the world and our place in it. Some stories become so sticky, so pervasive that we internalize them to a point where we no longer see their storiness — they become not one of many lenses on reality, but reality itself. And breaking through them becomes exponentially difficult because part of our shared human downfall is our ego’s blind conviction that we’re autonomous agents acting solely on our own volition, rolling our eyes at any insinuation we might be influenced by something external to our selves. Yet we are — we’re infinitely influenced by these stories we’ve come to internalize, stories we’ve heard and repeated so many times they’ve become the invisible underpinning of our entire lived experience.

What did you read this year that you found indispensable or pure genius?

Buddha once said that just as we can know the ocean because it always tastes of salt, we can recognize enlightenment because it always tastes of freedom. There’s no essential difference between real love and enlightenment. While many people see commitment as a trap, its healthy versions actually free both lovers, bring out the flavor of their true selves, and build a love that is satisfying, lasting, and altogether delicious.

Read more at Oprah.com.

A nice companion piece, also by Martha Beck: “How to Love More By Caring Less” (very Buddhist in its approach as well).

I guess I used to think of myself as a lone agent, who made certain choices and established certain alliances with colleagues and friends. Now, though, I see things differently. I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. … Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.

And though history has made us self-conscious in order to enhance our survival prospects, we still have deep impulses to erase the skull lines in our head and become immersed directly in the river. I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experience, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you’re playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some people when they feel enveloped by God’s love. And it happens most when we connect with other people.

I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year.

Read the full article.

Since the first strum on the oldest lyre, literature has been about competition and the possibility of recognition. Pindar, the father of lyric poetry, took as his chief subject the winning of games, and the spirit of the end-zone dance has been with us ever since. Horace satirized everything except his own appetite for fame. Milton mourned Lycidas not because he stood beyond all prizes but because he died before the prizes would be won. The subtlest souls still show up in Stockholm to make the speech. Fame, honor, the laurel, and the bays, this more even than getting back at the girls, or the boys, who left you for another—the writer’s other great motivation—is the poetic passion.

But before we rush to overcome procrastination we should consider whether it is sometimes an impulse we should heed. The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. … Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.”

In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic [doing something against one's own better judgment] and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point. The procrastinator’s challenge, and perhaps the philosopher’s, too, is to figure out which is which.

… a parallel revolution was taking place in the publishing world, as authors and their agents began to rewrite the terms of their relationship with publishers. One of the instigators of that revolution was Mort Janklow, a corporate lawyer who, in 1972, did a favor for his college friend William Safire, and sold Safire’s memoir … to William Morrow & Company. Here is how Janklow describes the earliest days of the uprising:

“So Bill delivers the book on September 1, 1973 … Larry Hughes, his editor at Morrow, calls me and says, ‘This doesn’t really work for us. … We feel bad about it, because we love Bill. But we’re going to return the book to you, and we want you to give back the advance.’”

… Janklow knew nothing about the publishing world when he agreed to help his friend, and remembers looking at that contract for the first time and being aghast. ”My first thought was, Jesus, does anyone sign this?” he said. … “There were no parameters on what acceptability meant. So all the publisher had to say was ‘It’s unacceptable,’ and he was out of the contract.”

Janklow decided to fight. … Hughes referred Janklow to the publisher’s lawyer, Maurice Greenbaum, of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst. … “So I went to see [Greenbaum], and he said, ‘Let me tell you about how publishing works,’ and off he went in the most sanctimonious manner. I was a serious corporate lawyer, and he was lecturing me like I was a freshman in law school. He said, ‘You’re in a standards business. You can’t force a publisher to publish a book. If the publisher doesn’t want the book, you give the money back and you take back the book. That’s the way the business has worked for hundreds of years.’ When he was finished, I said, ‘Mr. Greenbaum, I’m not trying to force the publisher to publish the book. I’m just trying to froce the publisher to pay for it. This acceptability clause was being fraudulently excercised, and I’m going to sue you.’”

What happened? The case went to arbitration, and Morrow settled.

Then, one author after another called Janklow asking him to present them, and he began extracting concessions from publishers. Janklow said, “The point I was making was that the author was more important than the publisher.”

From Solitude by Anthony Storr:

Many fortunate people do make intimate relationships which continue until death, and which constitute their major source of happiness. But even the closest relationship is bound to have flaws and disadvantages, and it is often because people do not accept this that they are more unhappy than they need to be, and more inclined to abandon one another. If it is accepted that no relationship is ever ideal, it makes it easier to understand why men and women need other sources of fulfillment. As we have seen, many creative activities are predominantly solitary. They are concerned with self-realization and self-development in isolation, or with finding some coherent pattern in life. The degree to which these creative activities take priority in the life of an individual varies with his personality and talents. Everyone needs human relationships; but everyone also need some kind of fulfillment which is relevant to himself alone. Provided that they have friends and acquaintances, those who are passionately engaged in pursuing interests which are important to them may achieve happiness without having any very close relationships.

From Solitude by Anthony Storr:

The capacity to be alone is a valuable resource when changes of mental attitude are required. After major alterations in circumstances, fundamental reappraisal of the significance and meaning of existence may be needed. … Changes of attitude take time because our ways of thinking about life and ourselves so easily become habitual. …

Suppose that I become dissatisfied with my habitual self, or feel that there are areas of experience or self-understanding which I cannot reach. One way of exploring these is to remove myself from present surroundings and see what emerges. … No one can tell, until he has experienced it, whether or not this necessary disruption of former patterns will be succeeded by something better. …