The various types of readers

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(This is the sixth post in a series on the publishing industry’s new product categories.)

(Before I start, I’d like to make sure you know this is all speculation and probably wrong.)

My guess is you can break book consumers into broadly five different kind of behaviours. Emphasis here is on consumers so this doesn’t cover corporate, institutional, or similar professional purchases at all.

  1. Heavy reader. People who buy several books a month, read most of them, and still have a mile-high ‘to read’ list. This is relatively small number of people who have an outsized impact on the market and have mostly converted to ebooks.
  2. The literate reader. People who read anything from six to twelve books a year. How big this group is depends on the language and culture. In 2010 in Iceland, for example, an extensive survey pegged this group at over half the adult Icelandic-speaking population (PDF). For most countries that proportion will be lower. This group has partially switched to ebooks but at a much, much lower rate than the heavy readers.
  3. Blockbuster reader. The reader who only reads one book a year and then only a bestseller. These are the people that only buy authors like Dan Brown, J K Rowling, and whoever the dude is that writes those Jack Reacher novels.
  4. Super fans. They like this here one thing and aren’t ashamed of it. E.g. Twilight fanatics who haven’t read anything else in their lives. Harry Potter nutters. They’ve found that one thing they like and feel no need to branch out. More likely to reread and re-buy that one thing than to read something new.
  5. Gift givers. For whatever reason, these types have decided to forgo the universally accepted traditional gift of ‘cash in an envelope’ and foist their cultural selections upon undeserving relatives and acquaintances.

Group 1, heavy readers, is the one that has been driving most of the growth of the ebooks market so far. They’ve probably either completely switched over to ebooks or will have soon.

Group 2, is, in theory, the next major growth area for ebooks and also the one where ebooks are likely to stall. My guess is that most people in group 2 don’t read on the commute (if they did, they’d probably read more than 6–12 books a year) and so aren’t that affected by the bulk of your average book. A lot of the books they read are lent on or borrowed and so don’t cause major storage issues.

These people read a few books a year and share them with their friends. They have a lot to lose from switching to ebooks and little to gain. Ebooks in general are objectively more ugly. They can’t be shared easily with your friends. They require an expensive device that in many cases is shared across the household (i.e. to read on the iPad you have to take it away from your kids who are using it to play games). The specialised ereader devices cost as much as this reader’s entire year’s worth of reading (i.e. as much as six to twelve paperbacks would cost, but without the benefit of lending). Certain segments of Group 2 do benefit immensely from ebooks (those with poor sight who prefer bigger font sizes and those who do read on the commute). They are also the ones who have probably already switched.

Many members of group 3 will only ever buy an ebook by accident. If you do something only once a year you damn sure want a souvenir. I can’t imagine this group switching in big numbers. Nor should they.

Group 4 will probably buy their favourite book as an ebook, and a hardcover, and paperback, and the UK edition, and the Japanese edition off Ebay. They’ll hunt down a copy from the first print run. They’d kill for a copy of the limited first run from that small publisher before the title got picked up by the big publisher. They’ll read and write fan-fiction (so much fan-fiction). They’ll buy the book in Kobo, iBooks, and Kindle and compare the three but they won’t buy any other title because it isn’t what they love.

Group 5 is unlikely to ever give ebooks. Why give an ebook when you can just as easily buy an iTunes/Amazon gift card which you can then pretentiously wrap? Why give a gift card when you can give real cash? Why give cash when you can just confess that you don’t love the recipient enough to give their gift selection some thought, and tell them to just fuck off and not bother you again?

How these five groups divide the industry between themselves is going to vary wildly from market to market, genre to genre, and ebooks aren’t going to shift that composition in any major way.

Moreover, one person can belong to different groups depending on the market. Here’s Hypothetical Karen.

She:

  • Is a huge SFF fan. Reads several titles a month.
  • Is a semi-regular reader of literary fiction. About six titles a year.
  • Only reads other genres when a mega-blockbuster comes along.

If my theory above is true, Hypothetical Karen’s SFF fiction library would be mostly ebooks, her literary fiction novels would mostly be hardbacks, while the blockbusters would all be paperbacks, probably borrowed from a friend, with the exception of the few that she bought cheap as ebooks. Her shelves would be dominated by SFF favourites—some that pre-date ebooks, some that are just too good to just own in digital—and literary fiction.

But most readers won’t belong to more than one group. I think it’s likely that Hypothetical Karen and her ilk have already had an outsized impact on the market as early ebook adopters but are too small a group to influence future developments to any substantial degree. If this is true then ebooks might have to cross a second chasm after crossing the early adopter chasm since the early majority group might well be smaller than expected and the late majority group could well be more recalcitrant than expected.

Of course, like everything else in this post, this is blatant speculation and probably wrong.

My theory is that these are the four basic reader archetypes (plus one buyer archetype) and that the split between these five groups varies dramatically from genre to genre, title to title. Romance novels are probably dominated by group 1 with a smattering of group 2. Since romance readers are a large collection of heavy readers, it’s unsurprising that the genre is an ebook powerhouse.

Genre readers, in general, are likely to be of group 1 or 2 with group 3 coming in occasionally with individual titles. Most mainstream fiction and non-fiction (like celebrity biographies and autobiographies) are dominated by group 2 with only a smattering of groups 1 and 2.

And a title that is almost exclusively bought by gift givers is likely to tank in digital unless the publisher lucks out in some way and it gets adopted by a niche audience of some sort.

Even though some market segments may well have a much lower percentage of ebook buyers than others, sales successes are likely to boost the sales of all of a title’s formats. A blockbuster in an ebook-light genre is going to sell more ebooks than a mid-list title in an ebook-heavy genre. Big sales trump customer mix every time. The problem is that blockbusters are unpredictable and somewhat random while building a solid genre mid-list catalogue is in theory less so. Which suggests that if you have capital, you should focus on blockbusters and lottery stakes, but if you don’t have capital but do have in-house expertise, you should focus on solid genre offerings.

Of course, this is all conjecture and probably wrong. (“This is all make believe!”)

Figuring this out for real

What you really need to do is to figure this out for your readership. Exactly how to do that is tricky.

You need to find out how reading activity is distributed among your readers (i.e. how many are light, moderate, or heavy readers). You need to figure out their past format choices. Don’t ask them their preferences; they don’t know and will make shit up—people lie. Ask them what they’ve actually done in the past, preferably the recent past. You need to find out how much of what they read they buy themselves. You need to know what genres they’ve bought in the past. You need to find out what they want from you, because that might not correlate with their past choices.

If it doesn’t correlate, then take it with a grain of salt. Only trust customer suggestions that they are willing to immediately back with money. You don’t have to take the money, but their willingness to part with it is an important indicator.

How do you find this out? Beats me. Almost every realistic and economically viable way of getting trustworthy information about your readers will be biased towards either heavy readers and super fans or towards digital readers.

If you figure out a way, let me know.

The unevenly distributed ebook future

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(This is the fifth post in a series on the publishing industry’s new product categories.)

Data serves the status quo.

Anything new or undiscovered by definition does not have a data footprint. Existing data collection and filtering techniques have biases that do not take the unknown or unfamiliar into account.

Unless you have a clear theory and a well-designed experiment to prove or disprove it, the only thing more data will tell you is that your preconceptions and existing biases are correct. With enough noise, your brain will find it easy to ‘discover’ patterns and correlations that support whatever it is you want supported. Data, on its own, serves your worldview.

This is the problem with almost all analytics systems in common use. Unless you are running a tightly controlled experiment, the only thing data will do is paint you a general picture of the status quo; it’ll give you the shape of, say, your web traffic—the ‘sources’ of the nameless mass that fills your comment threads with tripe—but it won’t help you discover any of the ‘whys’. Why are they here? Why did they read it? Why did they comment? Why did they (or didn’t) come back?

Why didn’t they buy my book?

To pretend that an A/B test can tell you why a reader decided not to buy the ebook edition of a footballer’s biography is to accept a worldview that is incompatible with the very act of publishing longform prose in the first place.

For a simple A/B test to be able to tell you why a reader made the decision not to choose a book or a format you have to believe that the human mind is a simplistic machine, driven entirely by pre-programmed responses to external stimuli, to be hacked by an enterprising grifter. A mind like that is never going to comprehend, let alone enjoy, extended piece of text. A humanity like that would never have risen out of the mud to read or write books.

You can A/B test small theories and small issues, but it is not an experimental model that will help you find answers to complex questions or understand complex problems.

Before we do anything else, when we have an issue, we need to come up with a theory—an idea for how things work that you can then explore and try to prove or disprove.

Then you need to figure out an experiment that specifically disproves that theory, which is sometimes next to impossible because, we in publishing don’t have access to the environment where the experiments need to be implemented and run.

If this method seems slow and awkward (the only conclusive result you can have is partial disproval, not confirmation), then that’s because it is. It’s also the only way to know. Anything else is guesswork.

It’s a classic quote that is tailor-made for the modern internet: short, facile, glib, simplistic to the point of being useless.

The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.

—William Gibson

The problem with the line is that it’s using the term future as a shorthand for technology and the changes it engenders—equating it with progress.

It has a simple message: progress remains a two-dimensional timeline (past → present → future), but that places, markets, and cultures are unevenly distributed along that timeline. Crap countries are stuck in the past. Good countries have a head start on the future.

As such it isn’t much of an improvement over the standard progress myth. In fact, it makes it worse by adding a dollop of neo-colonialism into the mix. “They are savages because they just haven’t had their share of our ‘future’ yet—not because a broken global economic system is holding them in debt-slavery”.

The publishing industry has bought into this idea wholesale. Some publishing markets are, according to this worldview, further ahead on the progress timeline than others. It also implies that advancement along the timeline is inevitable, even if it progresses at varying speeds. Romance and other genre fiction tend to dominate ebook sales and so must have more ‘future’. Non-fiction less so and must therefore have less ‘future’ and more of that crippling ballast called ‘past’. Big mainstream titles hit the ebook market in seemingly unpredictable ways. Some garner decent ebook sales while others seem to sell only in print. There, the ‘future’ seems to be randomly distributed, like a stress nosebleed over a term paper.

This, obviously, implies that the ebook will either eventually dominate universally or at least capture the same large percentage uniformly across the market.

I don’t think that’s going to happen.

The various publishing markets differ in fundamental ways that won’t be changed by ebooks. As others have said, ‘ebooks are terrific and haven’t changed a thing’.

Some will switch entirely to ebooks. Some partially. Some almost not at all.

If you’re going to generalise about readers, try not to generalise too much and stick to specific tastes and behaviours. Anybody claiming or even implying that an entire age group or economic class broadly behaves in the same way clearly hasn’t been observing book buyers for a long time. Claiming that those under twenty-four prefer print or that the more affluent prefer ebooks is useless even if it were true (probably isn’t) because those categories are too broad for us to guess what sort of books they are buying. Knowing that buyers of a specific genre prefer one format over another is clearly more useful than finding out that two-thirds of the young people who couldn’t avoid your survey didn’t like ebooks. One is actionable. The other isn’t.

It would be even better if we were able to make an educated guess of how a genre’s readers break down into behaviour groups:

  • Does a single kind of reader dominate? (casual readers, heavy readers, blockbusters only, etc.)
  • Or, is the readership more varied than that?
  • Is the distribution of the kinds of readers reliable across the genre or do sub-genres or individual titles differ substantially?

We are largely working blind here and unless you manage to get a critical mass of readers to buy from you directly and then read the books in an environment you control (good luck with that), it will be impossible to get even vaguely accurate guesses.

Some titles aren’t going to sell well as ebooks and there isn’t anything we can do about it except pray they turn into blockbusters. Because, if the title does turn out to be a blockbuster, you can always pay for a proper ebook version once the money starts rolling in.

The converse also holds true for ebook-heavy genres where the credo “ebook-first, print if popular” might well be printed above the door of every publisher (self- or other-) in the future.

If you have a title that is:

  • Visually rich.
  • Or, poses in some way to be an ebook production challenge.
  • And, is likely to appeal mostly to a print buying audience (this can happen for a variety of reasons).

Then the logical action to take is to quite simply not make an ebook version. Unless a high quality ebook is an almost free byproduct of your production workflow spending money on creating an ebook version of a title like that is likely to be a waste of money.

Conversely, print will not be viable for some markets within the industry, generally those dominated by ebook readers or have been thoroughly disrupted by apps and websites.

Either way, the single biggest concern publishers should have is to figure out ways to either discover or change the composition and shape of their readership. Making decisions on digital production will be next to impossible without that knowledge.

Sex, violence, and stílbrot

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(This is the fifth Stumbling into Publishing post.)

One flaw (out of many) that’s endemic in my writing is that I tend to introduce detail that’s either irrelevant, too early, or too late. Like describing the cut and pattern of somebody’s clothes before the cultural origin of said design becomes important or adding superfluous technical detail to a post when you only need the general idea. A lot of the time adding detail detracted and obfuscated the effect I was driving for.

This tendency of mine was exacerbated in the stories by my decision to have an objective third person narrator and not quite doing it properly.

The perspective I used in the stories was modelled after the Icelandic Sagas. All of the sagas have in common a narrator who can see almost everything that happens but cannot read minds. Or, more specifically, what is described is whatever could plausibly have been relayed by a third party witness because the sagas were pretending to be historical documents of actual events—stories about real people relayed down a couple of generations. E.g. if a murder happens in the story where there aren’t any witnesses likely to blab about it (like in Gíslasaga Súrssonar) you can’t describe the murder, nor can you say for sure who did it. When somebody dies alone you can’t describe their final moments. And clearly, you shouldn’t be able to have any scenes at all featuring a character alone unless you can be sure they told somebody about it afterwards. So, anything that can be witnessed is fair game but you can’t dip into character’s minds or be sure of their motivations.

So, it’s a saga-specific twist on the common objective third person narrator pattern.

I bent and broke this rule several times in the stories in minor ways, but in each case I figured that the character’s motives or actions would be so obvious that stylistic consistency would take care of itself. Of course, that meant the end result was closer to a quirky style of my own than intended, which was probably for the best.

A corollary of this stylistic approach is that you don’t shy away from describing what happens. If, as happens in Gíslasaga (my favourite saga), a character has to tighten his belt to keep his innards from flopping out of a belly wound, you describe that. If another character gets his head and torso split in two down to the navel, you describe that.

And that’s where my self-censorship kicked in again.

Which is a statement I know surprises a lot of those who provided feedback on the stories while I was writing them. It’s plain that if I hadn’t dialled back the violence in places some of the stories would have been intolerable to read to those who were kind enough to be beta readers.

But to assume that the problem lay in the detail of the descriptions is to mistake a symptom for the actual problem. The real issue with these stories is simply that they were much too oriented on, well, fights, which was a consequence of too faithfully following the tropes of the sword and sorcery genre. Fighting people, monsters, undead, whatever, it was all too much. Violence should be disquieting and discomfiting. Reading about violence should make you feel bad—at the very least unnerve you. And if violence takes over the story that’s because there’s too little story, not because the action is described in too much detail.

(At least, in this specific case. Different things apply to different stories and styles, I’m sure.)

I can forgive myself for that. I chose to fall into the generic sword and sorcery crap trap. Beating things into oblivion is part and parcel of that particular snake pit. It wasn’t what we call in Icelandic Stílbrot or a break in style. (Breaking style is one of bigger writing sins a writer can commit according to Icelandic literary tradition.)

Shying away from depicting sex, however, definitely was a break in style. Which embarrasses me as an Icelander because, as I said above, not committing stílbrot is one of the Icelandic literary commandments.

Thou shalt not break style.

Instead of plainly and pragmatically describing what was going on, almost every time something sex-related happened I chose to, in filmic terms, fade to black or pan away as if I were a 1950s prude trying to adhere to the Hays Code. Or, which is worse, when the story would have benefited from it, I often avoided it completely.

The stories definitely suffered because of this omission. A sex scene between Cadence and her husband in the first story would have told the reader so much about how they managed to navigate their admittedly now loveless relationship with at least some care and emotional investment. It would have given their relationship an added dimension, made them less like caricatures, and transformed their fate into a proper tragedy. They had been in love once.

A sex scene between Cutter and Parell in the fourth story would have provided a much needed contrast to the violence and highlighted how unfair Cera’s situation was.

The sex doesn’t have to be pornographic for it to work. The love life is an important dimension to a love affair or a relationship and omitting it completely flattens the relationship’s depiction.

Say you have two characters whose marriage is one of convenience. You present them as almost strangers, a certain distance in their every conversation—their coexistence nothing more than a necessary formality. But if you manage to add a sex scene between them where they engage with each other as peers—a scene that is full of compassion, tenderness, and negotiation—that changes how people see their relationship. They are clearly not in love. They may not even be friends. That still doesn’t mean they don’t share something flavoured with arousal and tender feelings.

Or, to be even more crass, you can have a couple who are loving and affectionate in all other scenes but where the sex scene is one-sided and almost brutal where one partner dominates the other, that changes how readers see their relationship in ways that you can’t with any other kind of scene.

A sex scene lets you add a series of sensations and an emotional dimension to the relationship that you couldn’t have otherwise depicted.

I gained nothing by omitting sex—prudes are never going to be reading sword and sorcery stories nor are they likely to enjoy anything I write, not even the blog posts—but by avoiding sex I diminished the stories’ capacity for emotion and sensation.

Which were two things the stories could have done with a lot more of.

Recipe for pundit response to Hugh Howey’s suggestions

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Recently, Hugh Howey wrote two interesting blog posts that outline what changes he would enact if he became the benevolent dictator of a large publishing company.

Don’t Anyone Put Me in Charge

I recently posted an audacious claim that major publishers are bound to emulate indies, which would be quite the reversal. I want to now explore how publishers could actually do this, how they could learn from self-published authors. Because I want publishers to do well. I want them to help new authors break out. I want them to keep bookstores open and readers happy. So what I’m going to do, in a very rambling fashion, is pretend that someone just put me in charge of a major publishing house. Let’s say HarperCollins (just to pick one at random). Here’s how I would blow the doors off my competitors and become the #1 publisher in the land (overtaking indies, which I estimate now rank #1 in total sales).

The post is full of suggestions on community, formats, bundling, contracts, schedules, marketing and locations that publishers really should take to heart. The slightly embarrassing part, though, is how many of them are common sense observations that should have been implemented years ago.

My Second Month on the Hypothetical Job

But now we’re in the second month, and we’ve got the easy changes behind us: DRM is a thing of the past; hardback sales have shot up with the ebook bundling; our authors are using the forums and coming up with great ideas (that we actually listen to and implement). Things are great. But they could be better. Now that we’re #1 and have some leverage, we’re gonna drop the bunker busters.

The second post then tackles returns, print on demand, free books, more marketing, branding, and authors. All of which is good.

So, here we have a couple of excellent, well reasoned posts on what needs to be done in the publishing industry. The best part is that we can already guess how the responses will go. The incumbent response to common sense suggestions is a genre of blog posts that really doesn’t get the credit it deserves, considering how incredibly widespread it is. So, to make the task easier for all of you pundits and publishing industry insiders, instead of picking the posts apart or responding to them (I mostly agree with them anyway) I’m going to give you an easy recipe for how to write a standard pro-industry response to blog posts like Hugh Howey’s.

Recipe for generic publishing industry insider response to articles demanding change

  1. Call common sense, toned-down blog posts ‘controversial’ or ‘provocative’. Especially if everybody with sense agrees with it and has expressed public support for its ideas.
  2. Pretend that things have already started to change so much that some of the suggestions are redundant, then mention how the issues mentioned aren’t that big a problem anyway and, actually, the way publishers have been doing it in the past is much better that what is suggested.
  3. Pick an inconsequential detail and deny it. Make sure it’s something that has no bearing on the overall argument but serves to subtly discredit the blogger without attacking them directly.
  4. Respond to a suggestion, making sure to waffle on by bringing in random observations as if they were counter-arguments. Pick one of the points made and write around it without addressing it directly. Try not to attack the suggestion head on but draw in non sequiturs and pretend they are relevant arguments. (‘But if that were true about book retail, all cats would be Sagittarians, wouldn’t they? Also, university professors. I mean, university professors!’)
  5. Act as if the suggestions aren’t based on independently verifiable critical observations by a third party on the publishing industry in general, and instead act as if they are wholly subjective opinions based on a single blogger’s personal experience and therefor not generally applicable.
  6. Make up a huge, big issue that isn’t in the post at all and then take the blogger to task for being for or against it (make it look like it was the post’s main topic even though it wasn’t mentioned at all) or lambast them for not going into such an obviously vital and important issue (derail it, baby!).
  7. Finish off by pretending you’ve just explained why the status quo is inevitable and also why that is the absolute best way that things can ever be and that any change is bad. So, so bad. And difficult to accomplish.
  8. Bonus points if you do any of the following:
    1. Imply that self-publishing is a bubble.
    2. Trot out the ‘ebook growth is stalling’ idea.
    3. Tell a story about somebody doing something stupid and then pretend that’s a strong counter-argument to whatever you want to argue against. Because stupid people are always relevant.
    4. Imply, or even outright claim, that self-published books are of a substantially lower quality than than the trite, homogenous, celebrity-obsessed output of other-publishing (as opposed to self-publishing). (‘Not a celebrity? Fine! We also love has-been and burned out celebrities. Niche markets! Loadsa money in them.’)
    5. Hint at every opportunity that this or that reform is expensive and requires a lot of work. Gotta make sure they know they should be hiring consultants!
    6. Hint at every opportunity that this is a complex problem that needs to be properly understood… by sending your staff to workshops, conferences, etc..
    7. Imply that other-publishers are somehow responsible for keeping the general quality of books high.

Just follow this recipe and you’ll have a kick-ass post that guarantees you a few more rides on the publishing industry consultancy gravy train. After all, would publishers give shit-loads of money to people who tell them that their stupid mistakes are stupid? Would they hire consultants who unnerve them with ideas and suggestions that require actual cultural change to implement?

Of course not. Publishers only give money to people like that by accident, like when their books turn out to be bestsellers.

Bling it up for education

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(This is the fourth post in a series on the publishing industry’s new product categories.)

One industry gambit these days is to annotate a literary classic with videos and audio and all sorts of interactive content before foisting a cacophony of celebrity videos on unsuspecting students—who are wholly undeserving of the torture, annoying as they can be.

The theory is that these apps are the natural progression from those hefty annotated versions of Shakespeare’s crap and other similar monstrosities that are used in education.

Unfortunately, education has become a cash cow for almost everybody except teachers and students—both are regularly forced to buy overpriced rubbish coughblackboardcough by a novelty-seeking idiot managers—so the prospect of ‘rich and complex’ (read: expensive) apps and ebooks fills the business peoples with glee.

(Whenever you hear of anything becoming a success in education, you can guarantee that students and faculty got shafted somewhere in the process. They always do. Education today does not exist to educate. It’s a vehicle that lets governments and local councils reward their corporate patrons with easy money while coincidentally babysitting children and adolescents at the same time. Education does very little educating.)

(I hope you can tell that I used to lecture at university, teach teenagers at junior college, and spent a decade or thereabouts in academia.)

Very few of these apps, or ‘rich’ textbooks in the iBooks Author style, are going to be long-term successes (at least, not if they are allowed to earn their keep on their own merits) for a simple reason: they don’t add anything that the reader values.

What most students need is for ebook reading apps to support two things:

  1. Proper—sophisticated—hypertext support so that the experience of reading an annotated classic is more natural and switching between the main text and an annotation is fluid and seamless. Bonus points if the student can easily add hypertext (and a variety of link types and styles) to the text.
  2. An easy way to get a student’s highlights, links, and annotations out of the app and into a writing program while maintaining structure and metadata so they can use them in their notes and essays and references.

And, of course, all of the above is kind of useless if it is joined at the hip to a single title. Curricula worldwide vary too much for this to be bolted on, ‘value-add’, features custom-built by a single publisher.

Stamping yet another talking head into the margins of yet another literary classic doesn’t help them at all. Getting another poncey TV celebrity to gush about how much they loved a piece of overrated mandatory part of the national curriculum does not add value. Worse yet, getting dozens of them to read the same goddamn passages of the same goddamn book that most students rightfully hate as the goddamn reactionary tripe it is, does not add value to the text.

It’d be different, of course, if studying performances of poetry and plays was a core part of the modern curriculum. But it isn’t. It’s all about the text not performances. Analysing performances isn’t marked or valued by the core curriculum so no student will get any value out of an interview with an actor on how they approach the role of Hamlet.

It should, obviously, be a part of the curriculum since digital video and apps are democratising access both to recordings of performances and to expert analysis thereof. But, it isn’t.

I should outline my basic educational philosophy since it goes a long way to explain why I hold the above opinions.

Of course, at most five of you will ever read this far since most blog readers will just scan the first few paragraphs and then decide I’m a nutter without reading any further.

Which is good, because it means I don’t have to appeal to the moron constituency for the rest of this piece.

The only thing you learn in school, college, and university is what you do—the methodologies, rituals, and practices of each discipline. What you remember isn’t what you learned because, most of the time, what you remember isn’t what you memorised in the first place.

You see, memory is notoriously useless. It degrades severely with time. It peaks very early (late teens to early twenties) considering the lifespan of the average human and is downhill from there. It is extremely unreliable—the very act of recalling something modifies the memory—so you can’t completely trust what you remember. In the very few situations memory is truly reliable it’s because it has been supported by habit, routine, rituals, and practices. So, again, actions and methodology are really all that you learn.

(There is quite a bit of research and evidence going back decades that lend credence to the above view of memory, by the way.)

This is the reason why universities, colleges, and schools today are, In My Not So Humble Opinion, next to useless for pedagogy. They are brilliant social institutions: halfway houses where barbarian teenagers are contained—figuring out the basics of community, friendships, and relationships—until they are fit to enter society at large. Teachers, on the other hand, have been reduced to over-qualified babysitters. At many institutions they are no longer allowed to grade people based on the work that went into the papers they write or the work they do. They can’t give those who plagiarise a stern warning by giving their essay a failing grade. In many of these establishments, ‘C’ is the lowest grade a teacher can give without getting reprimanded either by their superiors or by irate parents, who seem to think that taking away a vital feedback tool will improve their children’s education. Teachers at earlier stages of the school system (as in: not university) spend most of their time preparing students for standardised tests, which are educational toys that bear no resemblance to any sane practice outside of education. In the universities, teachers spend most of their time getting students to exercise rote memory skills until they have done their time and can be stamped ‘fit for employment’ with a diploma.

The only thing those kids are learning is how to sit still, listen to an authority figure, and take exams. And textbooks only work for autodidacts. (Autodidacts are people who habitually integrate what they read by exercising the new ideas they encounter. True autodidacts aren’t people with a talent for memorisation. They habitually integrate new ideas by doing, if not actually, then virtually—visualising actions as they read.)

What you learn in history class, for example, shouldn’t be dates or names or events, but how to discover those facts through research and present them, verbally or in writing. And the only way to teach that is to make the students do it. If a teacher can’t give a student a lower grade for not doing the work, then they are, by definition, not allowed to grade them for what they have learned. They are only allowed to grade them on a temporary biological anomaly: the young brain’s superior ability to recall facts.

Which should make it obvious why I consider most of these ‘rich’ educational apps—classic texts littered with videos or textbooks with zooming 3D and images—to be a waste of money. They don’t help the student do anything. But if you integrated proper writing tools into the reading app, enabling styles and structure in the notes the student writes and proper export tools for those notes so they can easily use them in their papers, then you’d be doing them a real service.

As writer, editor, and horseperson Seriouspony is fond of pointing out, there is a big opportunity here for changing the structure and writing of textbooks to match what we know about memory and learning—compensating for the basic flaws in human memory by changing the text, not by adding inconsequential interactive ‘bling’.

This is something publishers and writers could do that would have a greater impact on learning than any of these ‘enhanced’ apps or ‘rich’ textbooks.

The current educational orthodoxy among both educators and policy makers has for a long time been that education is a matter of moving information between two receptacles: the textbook and the student. Improving eduction in this worldview is largely a matter of improving the receptacles (better textbooks or better students through weeding out the incapable receptacles, i.e. the poor and those they consider genetically unsuitable).

You’ll note that the teacher’s skill at teaching doesn’t enter into the equation in this worldview. If this theory were true you’d be able to replace teachers with minimally trained low wage workers, so long as they made sure to use the latest textbooks. And because policy makers do believe this theory, this is basically what they’ve been attempting to do in the public education systems in many western countries.

It’s a worldview that has been thoroughly undermined just by research into memory—that’s without even getting into the results of other studies in education and learning, or experiences in countries where this model has been avoided. It’s understandable that people who labour under this delusion don’t worry too much when the practice of essay writing or presentation or other methodologies of the disciplines taught is being debased. In fact, if you think those practices get in the way of moving ‘stuff’ from one receptacle to another, you might even prefer them to be abandoned completely and cheer when they stop making students write essays.

It’s this very same worldview that drives the development of new textbook technologies, more interactive online learning environments, and the adoption of tablets in the classroom. None of these are designed or intended to improve the doing that the student does but to improve the source receptacle—add decoration and ’bling’—resulting in better teaching through better containers with more features.

Which is a pity, because the current drive for change and adoption of new classroom technologies could have been an opportunity to reform teaching; bring the doing in the classroom up to date with the doing in real life.

The above philosophy of eduction is not mine and it certainly isn’t new. It was best outlined by John Dewey in 1916, almost a century ago, in his book Democracy and Education.

(Yes, both my opinions on art and media and my opinions on education are based on Dewey’s ideas. At least I’m consistent.)

The core of his ideas, the essential heart of his view of education—long since forgotten—is that a public education system is not there to prepare people for the labour market; it’s not there to give kids skills they can use to get jobs and be better at them; it’s not there to improve the economy or increase the student’s chances of earning more money upon graduation.

The heart at the centre of his philosophy of education is that the only defensible purpose for a publicly funded education system is to create enlightened voters. Voters who can make informed and reasoned decisions when it comes to voting in elections.

The public education system is there to make citizens, not workers.

Anything else we get is a bonus.

Conversely, the motivation behind modern education—the system we have now—isn’t nearly as pragmatic (for what motivation is more pragmatic than the wish for a stable society with few opportunities for demagogues and fascists?). The foundation of modern education is a rapacious desire for more money, more power, higher acclaim, and more bodies under your foot that you can trample in your rat race up the status ladder.

Schools today are training grounds for mercenaries who understand that grades and status are a matter of power and coercion, not skill and practice. The parents know this and the students know this. We all know this.

And like all mercenaries, we sell out our ideals, our loyalties, our service, to the nearest scumbag willing to pay, while we let our governments serve the highest bidders.

Blogging has trained me to assume you’re stupid

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(This is the fourth Stumbling into Publishing post.)

One of my biggest regrets with the Knights & Necromancers series is how generic it sounds.

Not just the title—if it were just the title I could have fixed that by changing it.

No, the problem is that the stories seem impossible to summarise without sounding like generic cookie-cutter sword and sorcery fiction because that was the foundation I built on. I’d like to think I made something more of it but that ‘something’ is a thing too vague to boil down and market.

After trying, again and again to summarise the series, I’m forced to come to the conclusion that the premise probably is, a little bit at the very least, a little bit uninspired.

While I can pick out individual elements that definitely aren’t generic, the whole they compose looks and feels rather generic.

Which makes sense, since I felt rather uninspired writing them. My internal censor was in full force throughout. Whenever my mind got sucked towards something weird, I dialled back towards the more normal. Whenever I got fascinated by something I found interesting but was definitely off-beat for a fantasy story, I either skipped writing it or edited it out after the fact.

Most of what I normally write I write for myself. Both fiction and non-fiction, most of it simply goes into a folder in my Dropbox, only revisited if I need to reconnect with the ideas, emotions, or reasoning I was trying to preserve. A lot of it is perpetually half-finished. Which is okay. A lot of it gets deleted once I begin to find it stupid. Which is also okay.

It’s just that one thing I learned while blogging is that you people hate the non-fiction pieces I enjoyed writing and love the ones I hated. (‘You’ in this context being the generic aggregate bio-matter of the people who visit this site.) So, paradoxically enough, if I really like something I write, chances are I will never blog it.

Seriously, the difference in the traffic the two get is usually just about an order of magnitude. (I.e. over 10x, a real order of magnitude.)

The most popular posts in my blog ‘career’? Either posts that are magnets for email-happy lunatics (i.e. facile posts that nonetheless manage to be ‘controversial’ in some way), boring pieces that outline the blatantly obvious in as simple terms as possible, or lightweight pre-digested fair (like listicles or ‘this versus that’ fight posts).

What blogging has trained me to do for public writing is to remove all subtlety, abandon any structure that requires people to read from start to end (seriously, if you lay out a problem at the start of a post and follow it with suggestions for fixing, people will call you an arsehole because they only read the start and not the suggestions), tone it down (morons will ignore logic if you call an idiot an idiot), explain everything (even the stupid super-obvious stuff that shouldn’t need explanation), and generally assume that the readers are more boring and less imaginative than a senile middle manager three days from retirement in a large bureaucratic organisation that would make the offices from Gilliam’s Brazil look like Brazil’s Semco.

Because if you—my generic aggregate blog reader bio-matter—aren’t a fucking idiot then as a collective you do a bloody fucking good impression of one.

(And a lot of you are nutters too, judging by some of the emails and comments I’ve gotten in the past. Long emails. Long long crazy crazy emails.)

Once you get sucked into the trap of thinking that your writing can be of use, the temptation to adjust the writing to be more ‘effective’ gets pretty strong. The problem is that ‘effective’ blog writing—the writing that blog readers actually read and act upon—tends to be drivel because those same readers ignore most things more substantial.

Without blogging, I would probably be unemployed today. Which is a fact that weighs heavily on my mind whenever I consider giving it up completely to preserve my sanity.

The trouble with fiction is that, in storytelling, the writer’s emotions are at least partially infectious. If I am not fully emotionally invested in the story, that comes across. It might not be something you can pinpoint and it might not even be readily apparent, but that lack—that hollowness—is there no matter how well you write.

But, you, my reader, have trained me well. My experience with blogging has trained me to tone everything down, because the web is full of touchy fucks. It has trained me to simplify everything, because otherwise you’ll misunderstand it. It has trained me to chunk everything, because otherwise you’ll ignore it. It has trained me to make everything facile, because anything with nuance will be grossly misrepresented by you. All of these lessons work well to drive up blog traffic and kill productive discussion in favour of meaningless yay or nay prattle, but they absolutely destroy fiction. All you get is faceless people tackling vague problems in a generic place.

Moreover, blogging has trained me not to publish because I am not a robot and I have to write about what I have to write. I write what I like in the ways I like and then I close the file unpublished. Because publishing it would be pointless at best and a magnet for trouble at worst.

Blog readers are the worst kind of reader in the world. They arrive eager to misunderstand and ready to be angry with you.

Fiction readers arrive generous with their time but expect a world rich and complex enough to inhabit and a cast of characters who seem real and recognisable without being too familiar.

They are two audiences in diametric opposition. Any lesson learned for dealing with one, must be unlearned for the other. Not realising this sooner was, obviously, a major mistake on my part.

(Not saying fiction readers are saints. A lot of them are dumb fucks with an axe to grind. But, compared to your average blog reader, they might as well be old J.C. himself returned to save us all from our sins.)

Afterwards, before I actually published them, I tried to reconnect with the stories, trying to find facets in them that I could emotionally invest in but without ‘weirding’ them up too much. I hoped to make the characters feel as real to you as they do to me. I don’t know if it worked.

What I do know is that if I had just followed my writing interests, followed the lines and threads that captured my attention, I would have enjoyed the writing process much more.

It probably wouldn’t have sold any better but I doubt anybody would have felt that it was generic.

Ergodic literature

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(This is the third post in a series on the publishing industry’s new product categories.)

Ergodic literature is a fancy term for being intentionally over-wrought and difficult. Sometimes this can be an effective tool, much like when a psychotic gym teacher forces you to run several times around the Reykjavík Pond the exercise makes you appreciate a coke and a hot dog (with ketchup and crispy fried onions) that much more. Or, you know, the effort makes arriving at the destination that much more blah blah blah.

(Actually, the only thing the psychotic gym teacher accomplished was to teach us how to sneak off and get hot dogs when we should have been jogging around the pond.)

The app Fish, for example, plays with being deliberately difficult and not allowing you to tap back and revisit earlier chapters. Reading it is a one way trip. You go from the beginning, to the end, and then you can start over. You cannot flip back. You cannot browse forward. You read it, in order, or you don’t read it at all.

Author control over the reading process also used to be a feature of many early hypertexts. What? That wasn’t just because they were a UI mess? Well, yes, that as well. They were an UI mess compounded by a severe case of ‘intentionally difficult’. Arseholes!. Lesson learned: only let yourself be deliberately difficult in a feature when the others are easy peasy.

The non-psychotic rationale behind this approach is often (mistakenly, in my view) conflated with a school of thought pioneered by John Dewey. You may know that school of thought by the more commonly known facile formulation by pseudo-intellectual bildungsphilister catchphrase artist Marshal McLuhan:

“The Medium is the Message.”

So, making something difficult, making it require some sort of effort, skill, foreknowledge, or time, changes the meaning of that something, because the medium with its difficulties has an inherent meaning. A piece of text that is only visible when you’re constantly drawing circles on your phone while hopping on one foot means something different than the same text on an otherwise straightforward website. Text that can only be read while standing in a bus stop in Croydon means something different from the same text in an ebook.

Academics love this line of thinking.

—Let’s wrap barbed wire around the reader’s iPad while I stomp on their toes and you threaten to defenestrate their pet Chihuahua.

—Ooh, what if we attach a GPS to the Chihuahua so the reader can see on the iPad where it lands? Locative media!

People obsessed with ‘innovation’ and doing ‘edgy’ things also like this approach. Computers are already a difficult pain in the arse. Making things difficult is easy and—bonus!—turns out it adds arty meaning to shit you don’t care about enough to do properly.

Yay!

(Err, no. Most of the time readers will astutely observe that interactive ergodic literature is hostile to the reader. It also alienates every sensible person on the planet.)

It’s conceivable that this approach might be appropriate under some circumstances. Such as when the source material really does benefit from being closely tied to a location, or when the effort involved demonstrates something meaningful for the text. But even then the benefit is undercut by the fact that it’s fucking annoying.

Does my antipathy towards ergodic literature make me a populist. Yes. Fuck off.

This trend is particularly tragic because Dewey’s ideas (and McLuhan’s by virtue of being derivative as hell), as far as the artist and author are concerned, have more in common with wabi-sabi than ergodic literature. It’s about embracing the imperfect means by which you tell a story or create art, acknowledging the means, their flaws, their strengths as a fundamental part of your creation. It’s not about pissing off the reader.

What I thought I wanted versus what I really wanted

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(This is the third Stumbling into Publishing post.)

The project idea was simple: write and publish a series of novella-length ebooks.

The reason was even simpler: to learn about ebooks and publishing.

I had a few requirements at the start.

  • I was only going to put together four to six stories. Not just for my sake, but also for the reader. I wanted to make sure that the reader had an end in sight.
  • I needed to pick a genre.
  • Ebook only. I have nothing against print, I’m just not curious about the ins and outs of print publishing like I am about digital.
  • My sister would be doing the covers. We had been looking for projects to work on together for a long long time. This publishing project then led to Studio Tendra and the Oz Reading Club, and will lead to more.
  • I wanted to do the whole shebang: ISBNs, formats, design, website, etc. Because that sounded like fun. (Which it was, for the most part.)

I didn’t do this to get published. I don’t have any particular desire to be published or have my writing widely distributed, but I do find the idea of an ongoing readership interesting, especially if it can pay for the work in some way.

The covers turned out great. My sister is a fantastic illustrator. The ebook files were easy but a tad overworked (e.g. there was no point in them being epub3 at the time, way ahead on the curve on that one). The website was easy (websites is what I was doing for a living at the time.) There was more paperwork, bureaucracy, and admin than I expected but nothing overwhelming.

The problems I encountered were both obvious and subtle.

One obvious problem is that I’m crap at marketing. That’s fine. I knew that going in.

The subtle side of that problem is that while I’m pretty sure most of my regular blog readers know about my fiction, they just aren’t interested in it. If I had a penny for every time somebody told me they really liked my blog but didn’t have time to read my fiction, it’d be a bigger pile of money than what I earned from selling ebooks.

Which meant that I was starting from scratch when it came to marketing these stories, I just didn’t know it at the time.

Another obvious problem was with my choice of genre and style. I picked fantasy but didn’t really bring in any of the tropes or traditions people expect from fantasy. Which made it even harder to market. Then again, marketing the stories wasn’t the real problem.

I had four choices for genre. The first was literary fiction. Which, frankly, I’m pretty sure I can’t pull off. Mostly because literary fiction is just a genre fiction with really boring rules and tropes dominated by a big pile of snotty authors. The second was crime fiction. But every other Icelander on the planet is writing crime fiction, so that ruled that out, even though I’m a fan of the genre.

Fantasy or Sword and Sorcery was the genre I chose, mostly because it was safe. It’s a big genre with a big following and plenty of room for variety. Or, so I thought. A big potential audience ought to be easy to market and sell to, right?

I think, in the end, that was a mistake. The mistake wasn’t in choosing fantasy but in choosing it as a safe option. That cut down my emotional investment in the stories right at the start. This in turn compromised my motivation and led me to vacillate during the publishing process as I tried to rediscover the emotional core of the stories and reconnect to them, which then caused the delays. If other people aren’t connecting with the stories, it’s probably because I was finding it difficult to connect with them while writing.

The genre I really wanted to do was oddball unclassifiable weird stuff that would probably qualify as SFF—as in, not scifi, not fantasy, but in the wishy-washy, hand-wavey area that both of those belong to.

At the face of it, that sounds like an even less practical choice than literary fiction. Prose scifi is a tiny niche these days (TV and cinema scifi being less tiny) and, if anything, looks like an even less inviting clique than the fantasy crowd. It’s a community full of old and middle-aged male authors saying awful and horrible things and self-important fans who castigate new writers for not fitting in with their favourite flavour of scifi (hard, space opera, near future, post-human, mundane, whatever). Most of them sound like exactly the sort of people you try to avoid when you go to the comics store.

—“Oh, no. It’s a Scott Lobdell fan. Don’t make eye contact!”

(Some writers simply have very creepy fans.)

Wanting to do weird-ass stupid stories that are so hard to categorise that you’d have to just stick with SFF over either scifi or fantasy seemed like a crazy stupid idea. So, I didn’t.

There’s a lot of nice and incredibly clever people in scifi, doing incredible work. Athena Andreatis, Ann Leckie, Debora J. Ross, and Tobias Buckell being a few examples of the many good, smart, and eminently sane members of the SF community (all with good blogs as well), but as a whole the culture surrounding the genre looks worse than inhospitable. It looks outright hostile.

It was a mistake to think I would have to engage in the culture and community around the genre in any way. Fuck community. I’m crap at it, so I’m not going to do it. And, as it happens, these genres—both of them—are crap at it as well, so it all works out.

Anything oddball might well be harder to market and sell. It might not be. Anything that is different should, in theory, be easier to sell because it is easily differentiated. Different makes it identifiable. Different does limit the upside: the maximum number of sales you can make. (Too different: too small an upside.) But, remember, you start with zero sales. Alienating a bunch of non-customers doesn’t matter if it brings you your first real customer.

But, honestly, I don’t care anymore. Fuck sales. My interest is what counts. If I want to be clever, I’ll be clever and play with the thing until it won’t fit anywhere in any genre. If I want to be stupid I’ll be stupid and make something that gives me joy and visceral thrills even if other people groan at the idiocy of it. If I want to be anonymous and alone, I’ll bloody well be anonymous and alone and write in the dark.

Fuck sales.

Which brings me to…

My biggest mistake was not choosing to write the stories that fascinate me the most either emotionally or intellectually. That’s the one that came back to bite me again and again. That choice meant that the stories never quite clicked, never quite worked, never had that spark you drive for. That choice meant that the whole process was a lot less fun.

You have to care about the end result—personally, intellectually, and emotionally.

Otherwise what’s the point?

The mistake of ‘enhancing’ novels

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(This is the second post in a series on the publishing industry’s new product categories.)

A novel does not benefit from a host of videos of talking heads, interactive maps, or the kind of gunk that clutters up most DVD extras. A novel is not a movie. The film production and marketing process lends itself towards the whole DVD extras phenomenon. You have dozens of unused scenes, a special effects team, the filming crew, and an army of people performing various roles. The stars are loved by millions. The movie’s launch and its production are events. Even a bog-standard TV series has buy-in from society at large and a wealth of collateral material that is rare in publishing.

A novel is just one person sitting in a room for what is sometimes years, occasionally talking to a couple of other people, with an itty-bitty burst of social activity towards the end. Some of them may launch with a bang but the revenue curve for most novels bears no resemblance to that of either a successful or unsuccessful movie.

Moreover, the interactive content most publishers have bundled with their ‘enhanced’ novels is hideously misplaced. They are marketing assets locked in a sealed, unseen, container.

All those talking head videos? Put them on the website. That interactive map of the fantasy world? Website. Unused scenes? Website. Those commentary bits on the author’s manuscript?

You guessed it. Put it on the website.

The core value of a movie is spectacle. (Obviously, I’m talking here about the US-oriented movie industry, not the form. The cinematic medium is capable of considerable nuance and subtlety. Hollywood, however, isn’t.)

Extras feed into and complement the spectacle. The selling point of a novel—even the cheap-o, sleazy, low-brow ones—is to disappear into a new world for hours on end. Marketing assets help readers discover novels to step into—explore the feel of it before they commit to reading. They don’t add any value when fused into the body of the novel like a malignant tumour. There they become a distraction.

Book apps, where you take a linear novel or piece of narrative writing and pin interactivity on it like a tail on a cartoon donkey, don’t make sense. They make slightly more sense for non-fiction titles (hence iBooks Author’s focus on textbooks and the like) but even there the costs often outweigh the benefits.

If we are looking for publishing titles—or even new ideas that have no print history—that would benefit the most from being digital—the most logical ones to look at are titles that are confined and limited by print.

A book that works great in print, that is adapted perfectly to its form, is exactly the worst candidate for digital. It’d suffer from high expectations on the part of the readers (because the print version was great) but it would also see little improvement in digital. Because it was already good.

This is the quintessential lose-lose double whammy. Like an author whose skills have managed to attract an audience that consists mostly of expert readers, you’ve navigated yourself into a scenario where you’re surrounded by passionate people with high expectations and both the capacity and motivation to outline, in public, your every single fault. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, your audience will find reasons hate you.

Instead of enhancing novels, what we should be looking at are titles and types of books that are a little bit awkward in print, ones that are useful and loved because of their subject matter, but have never had a chance to bloom due to the limitations of the printed form.

Those are the ones worth ‘enhancing’.

Pessimistic ramblings and other fun links (week overview + further reading)

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My stuff

  1. I wrote an end-of-year, start-of-year post

    Lot of people thought it was pessimistic and depressing. It’s probably depressing, but that’s because life is depressing (economic collapse, environmental collapse, corruption, plutocracies, etc., etc., it’s sensible to be depressed about the state of the world).

    Is it pessimistic? No, I don’t think so. I can think of a lot worse scenarios (lot lot worse). In this scenario at least people are writing.

  2. I announced the end of the Knights and Necromancers series

    And made the last two stories available for free. I hope to explain what I think of how the project went.

  3. I talked a bit about how to approach new kinds of products

    In a nutshell: stop following others and start doing research. It isn’t hard. Hire somebody to do it if you’ve been in management too long to figure it out.

  4. Stumbling into publishing

    I wrote about the genesis of the Knights and Necromancers self-publishing project. Hopefully a start of a series. We’ll see.

I may have lined up almost thirty posts to publish on the blog over the next month or so.

Fun stuff by others

Angelo Badalamenti explains how he wrote “Laura Palmer’s Theme”

Noelle Stevenson explains why Frozen is a reason to be slightly hopeful

I enjoyed Frozen. I don’t condone its failings, I had my issues with it, but in the end I saw a movie aimed at a mainstream audience where the central relationship is between two sisters, who love each other and try to save each other and have their own distinct personalities. A movie where the romantic interests are secondary and relatively incidental to the love between two women.

More here…

Judge says Arthur Conan Doyle estate can’t bend the law to suit their business model

There was one other part of the ruling that was somewhat important. In our post about the the Conan Doyle Estate’s response, we noted that the Estate tried to argue that every work after the initial Sherlock Holmes story should not be considered a “derivative work,” so various case law concerning derivative works should not apply. As we noted, there was no legal basis for this, and the only real reason the Estate seemed to come up with was that it was somehow insulting to suggest later works were “derivative.” Thankfully, the judge rejects that argument as well.

From “Judge Says That Sherlock Holmes Is In The Public Domain”.

Then some crazy-ass idiot over at Publishing Perspectives argues that the judge was a busybody for adjudicating based on law and legal precedent instead of storytelling logic:

When Courts Adjudicate the Quality of Literary Characters

No, he wasn’t adjudicating the quality of literary characters. That’s just stupid. And even if he were, the quality of literary characters should never trump the law. According to this line of reasoning judges should always make decisions based on what would make a better story, which isn’t just stupid, but also insane. The Arthur Conan Doyle estate wanted him to base his ruling on vague ideas like literary quality but the judge rejected it for good reason: it’s a very stupid idea.

Apparently the gender neutral term for niece/nephew is nibling