Well, without dipping into too many cliches about the passage of time, it is nearly five years since the DMU/Penguin wiki-novel experiment, ‘A Million Penguins’, took place.  The project ran from 1 Feb 2007 for five weeks, and all of us who were involved with it remember it as a time of chaos and great entertainment.  Yesterday I was down at Goldsmith’s College, in London, where I was the external examiner for a PhD candidate, Amy Spencer; her PhD was on the Networked Book.  She built her thesis around three case studies of networked books that are also works of fiction, ‘Paddlesworth Press’ , ‘The Golden Notebook Project’, and ‘A Million Penguins’. It’s a solid and interesting piece of research. 

Reading Amy’s thesis promoted me to look at the current status of ‘A Million Penguins’ online.  We heard early last year that Penguin was going to give up hosting the project, and we didn’t have the time, or the resources, to figure out how to archive the massive wiki, with its many many pages, ourselves.  I regret this, though it is hard to see how we could have saved it in time.  So the original site no longer exists.

However, a good portion of ‘A Million Penguins’ was archived by the amazing people at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, and you can find these pages by searching for it via the Wayback Machine. 

During Amy’s viva we talked a bit about the phenomenon of the networked book itself.  Amy pointed out that during the noughties there were a significant number of projects that called themselves ‘networked books’, both fiction and non-fiction, my own on-going project, ‘Flight Paths: a Networked Novel’ among them of course.  Amy wondered if the networked book concept has had its day.  I think that we are now seeing trade publishing approaching publishing fiction in a manner that owes much to the networked book concept, although of course, all in the service of marketing.  Social media marketing campaigns are now being built around books; these campaigns include bespoke web content, games, extra content, author interviews, etc.  These campaigns aim to foster reader engagement around a newly published book, whereas the networked books of the noughties all sought to foster creative engagement with text and other forms of media.  The networked book emphasis was on collaboration and contributing, whereas, of necessity, a trade publishing networked social media campaign is about sales. 

The story takes the premise developed in my digital fiction, ‘Flight Paths’ and develops it further.  It tells the stories of the two characters in ‘Flight Paths’, Yacub and Harriet, and it tells the stories of a number of other characters as well.  At the risk of over-complicating this description, if not the project itself, the novel will have three chapters that will be published in bound book and ebook format, and one stand-alone chapter, a multimedia digital fiction I’m working on with Andy Campbell of Dreaming Methods, called ‘Duel’. 

The weird thing is that I am finding the writing process fun.  Really a lot of fun.  I have no idea why this time around it is fun.  Maybe it’s because ‘The Mistress of Nothing’ was such an epic research job, and while ‘Our Stuff and Our Things’ does require some research, it’s nothing compared to MoN, where I even attempted to learn Arabic (six months of 1-1 lessons:  I know four words).  The writing process - and this peculiar experience of ‘having fun while writing’ - reminds me a little bit of when I wrote my novel ‘Weird Sister’.  That was the only other novel I’ve ever written where I knew pretty much where to start, where to go next, and how to end, before I started writing. 

Hmm.  Maybe there’s a lesson there.  Or maybe not.

So, doubtless now that I’ve written this blogpost, it will all go horribly wrong.  But I just wanted to put it on record - writing can be fun.  There, I said it. 

But now we’re in 2012.  I’ve got a few goals.  I’m going to finish my new novel.  I’m going to work with Andy Campbell on our digital fiction Duel which we’ll launch in November at the ELMCIP conference and exhibition.  I’m not going to travel as much.  I’m hoping my PhD amendments will be passed by the internal examiner so that at long last I can lord it over everyone by making them call me Doctor.  I’m going to figure out how to get my backlist published as ebooks.  The three grant applications I’m involved with will all be successful and then I’ll have work coming out of my ears.  The various Inanimate Alice projects I’m involved with will come to fruition. 

From next Monday I’ll be teaching a weekly class as part of the Guardian/UEA masterclass series.  It’s a six month course called ‘How to Tell a Story’.  I’ve got 12 students for this, and I’m looking forward to getting started.

For me, one of the most interesting points Alastair makes is the digital skills gap within the publishing industry, and how they face a rather stark and expensive choice between training current staff and outsourcing digital skills.  The digital skills gap in the industry is enormous, but it runs throughout, from editorial, agents, through to many writers as well.  I feel as though I’m forever trying to interest publishers in my digital projects, though the truth is I probably gave up on this last year after a meeting with my editor at Simon & Schuster in NY, a very senior, very savvy, publisher with many years experience, who looked completely blank when I started to talk about my new digital fiction project, before informing me that S&S has an entire floor devoted to ‘that stuff’.  This is not meant as a criticism of this editor, who has since been further promoted within the firm and I’m sure has quite enough to do without having to completely reskill.  But it depressed me, and made me think, yet again, that the divide between digital innovation in the realm of fiction, and traditional publishing, is as vast as ever.

Alastair includes within the report a quote from me where I managed to make a point about, or get a plug in for, the vast community of electronic literature, digital fiction, and epoetry practitioners who have been innovating away around form and content for many years now, on the other side of that digital divide.  So that’s good. 

A couple of weeks ago I received my first royalty statement from my US publisher; this was the first statement I’d received where I could see a volume of ebook sales set against those of hardcover sales (in the period covered, 25% of units sold were ebooks).  The book, The Mistress of Nothing, sold fairly well (for me!) in hardcover and got up into the top of the escalating royalty rate for hardcovers, 15%.  A hardcover copy of my novel at a 15% royalty gives me $3.31 per copy, whereas the ebook at the decent sounding, but actually lousy, royalty of 25% net, gives me $1.92 per copy.  There we have it.  That is the math.  These figures don’t take into consideration the fact that the ebook might have reached readers who would never buy a hardcover, indeed, might have reached readers who no longer frequent bookshops and only read in digital formats.  But even so, it was interesting to see the figures laid out plainly. 

For several years now, publishers have been banging on about how the move to digital costs them money, how there are many extra steps added to the workload when it comes to publishing ebooks alongside bound books.  But publishers are rarely transparent about these extra costs.  S&S’s statement, quoted in Rusch’s article, “Strong growth in the sales of more profitable digital content was offset by lower book sales” is revealing:  more profitable digital content tells writers all we need to know about actual production costs when it comes to ebooks.  Looks like it’s time to get agitated, again. 

It was an enjoyable day, but for me it felt quite significant in that I thought the level of discussion had moved up a peg or two from workshops of this kind I’ve run in the past. 

This group of people was ready to talk, ready to collaborate, ready to think about what it really means to put text on a screen, what the possibilities are for combining text with other media.  I did not discuss publishing, digital publishing, and/or the digitization of books and, these topics did not emerge during the day.  Instead, the focus was firmly on thinking about new ways to tell stories, and how the participants could use technology to tell stories in their creative and working lives as writers, journalists, and editors. 

We collaborated as a group on a googlemap story - you can find it on the Digital Work page of this website. 

I showed a selection of digital stories to get us thinking and talking - those links are over on the Resources page of this website. 

One of the participants, Alexa Radcliffe-Hart, wrote a great blog post describing the day on her blog, Services to Literature.  Alexa is currently immersed in NaNoWriMo, so best of luck to her with that! 

Here is what they propose:

To Respect the Rights of the Creators of Literary Works in Canada:
1.  Copyright legislation shall ensure the protection of intellectual property and appropriate compensation for rightsholders.
2.  Exceptions to copyright shall be minimized.
3. The publisher shall split the net proceeds of ebook sales equally with the author.
4.  The author shall retain all electronic rights not specifically granted to the publisher or producer and shall have approval of any modifications made to the work.
5.  The publisher shall not exercise or sublicense ebook publishing rights without the express authorization of the author.
6.  When a book is out of print in print form, continuing sales in electronic form shall not prevent a rights reversion to the author.
7.  For ebooks, the publisher in its contract shall replace the traditional “out of print” clause that triggers a rights reversion with a sales volume clause (e.g., less than a specified quantity of ebooks sold in a specified number of royalty periods) and/or a finite term of license (e.g., five years).
8.  When rights revert, the publisher shall provide the author with the digital file of the book.
9.  The Public Lending Right Commission shall provide author payments for electronic books and allot additional monies to this end.
10. Libraries shall acquire digital copies of works in their collections only from rightsholders or their licensing agencies.
11. Ebook retailers shall require the rightsholder’s permission for any free preview or download of an electronic work, and the rightsholder shall specify the maximum amount to be made available.
12. Agents, publishers, aggregators, retailers, and libraries shall ensure that works in digital form will be well protected and will not be shared, traded, or sold outside the boundaries authorized by the contract.

I think this is an excellent list of rights and it covers many complex issues succinctly.  There are a few things that seem to me redolent of wishful thinking:  ‘3. The publisher shall spit the net proceeds of ebook sales equally with the author.’  This can happen, and indeed I have had this happen with one of my books, but that publisher was unusually transparent about the costs of producing the book, as well as the cut the retailer would be taking, etc.  6 and 7 are both excellent, but ‘8. When rights revert, the publisher shall provide the author with the digital file of the book’ also seems to me to be… optimistic, not the least because if a publisher has invested in design, layout, etc for an ebook, the question over who owns that digital file is a little murky - obviously the writer owns the text itself, but do they also own the file that the publisher has paid to create? 

‘10. Libraries shall acquire digital copies of works in their collections only from rightsholder or their licensing agencies.’  Paired with 9 and PLR, this should work.  But there’s a larger question about libraries and digital files:  a library system only needs one copy of a digital file, if that file can be accessed across their entire digital network.  Publisher, libraries, and writers still seem to be pretending that a digital file is the same thing as a single copy of a book.  I think this is an area that would benefit from creative thinking. 

I love the idea of a bill of rights for the digital age, and its great to see TWUC taking a well-aimed stab at it. 

He’s not talking about ebooks, which do the job of getting text onto ereaders fairly smoothly.  He is talking about literature, with a capital ‘L’ - Literature - and how it is possible that literature is under threat in an era where publishers become spell-bound by the potential for bells, whistles, and animated audio clips to add ‘value’ to works that a decade ago would have been published as plain old ‘books’. 

It’s a fascinating post, with a few wobbly bits in it, (like where he asserts that text is ‘not platform-dependent’ - it was last time I looked at my collection of medieval scrolls), but the bit that struck me most forcefully was where he writes this: 

‘“Storytelling” is what we do for children. It is the infantilisation of literature. And while there is much of interest in children’s literature and children’s publishing, to emulate it is to debase     literature, and ourselves.’

In the past few years while I’ve been attempting to talk to people about what I see as the vast potential new technologies have to offer to both writers and readers who are interested in thinking about finding new ways to tell stories, I’ve often found myself referring to myself as a ‘storyteller’.  And this never fails to make me feel uneasy.  I’m not a storyteller, if what a storyteller means is someone who is really good at telling stories in any sense of our oral tradition.  In my own life, I don’t tell stories, I’m not an adept raconteur.  What I am is a writer, someone who sits alone most of the time, working on text, crafting text, shaping text, and, hopefully, creating literature.  So I agree with James on this. 

However, I wonder if the term ‘literature’ can be stretched away from the ‘long form prose narrative’ that James is so attached to, that I am also attached to as a writer and a reader.  I consider my own attempts at experimenting with the new technologies to tell stories ‘literature’, in the same way that the books I write are attempts at creating ‘literature’.  But ‘Inanimate Alice’ and ‘Flight Paths’, among other works, are not literature-as-we-know-it.  But they are also not stories with media as additive; they are stories with rich media at their heart. They are more than the sum of their parts - or at least, that’s what I aspire for these works to be. 

One other quibble with James’ excellent blog post.  He states:  ‘no application or television programme is equal to a well-written, long form text.’  Well, I just read ‘One Day’ which many people would argue qualifies as a well-written, long form text.  I enjoyed it, and like everyone else, found it hard to put down.  However, I’d argue that ‘The Sopranos’ and, oh, let’s say, quite possibly ‘Nurse Jackie’, are equal to it in terms of cultural significance and quality.  But that’s where our arguments about what is art, and what isn’t art, sink into the swamp.  So I’ll end there. 

Charleston is one of my favourite spots in England; it’s an old house in the Sussex Downs, once home to Bloomsburyites Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.  It’s an entirely atmospheric house, with the artists’ hand-painted walls and furniture throughout.  There’s a lovely garden too, and when the house is hosting a festival, the visiting writers get to hang out in the kitchen of the house, where we are fed delicious lunches and teas, and allowed to use the loo that Virginia Woolf herself, Vanessa Bell’s sister, would have used. 

I have a rather odd history with the house.  When I first came to live in London when I was twenty, I was lucky enough to find myself living in a large squatted house smack in the centre of town, beside Charing Cross train station.  The other occupants of the house included a number of artists and writers, including a woman called Fanny Garnett.  Fanny was in the process of moving to France; when she left London, she gave me her bike.  But before she left, Fanny took me, along with my friend Marilee Sigal who was visiting me, down to the English countryside to see her mother.

I was completely ignorant of most things English, let alone things Bloomsbury, at that time; in fact, I found almost everything in my new London life surprising and baffling.  So when Fanny’s mother - Angelica (daughter of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell) - turned out to be living in a decrepit though extraordinary house set deep among the hills of the Sussex Downs, I thought nothing of it:  everything was extraordinary to me, so a visit to a house where the walls were decoratively hand-painted was just part of the strange new world I was inhabiting.  Marilee and I slept on the floor in the studio - the house had fleas, and damp, and there were holes in the floor, but it was extremely beautiful and like nothing I had ever seen before.  Angelica was in the process of moving out - but I didn’t know this - and handing the house over to the Trust that runs it now.  But no one referred to the house as ‘Charleston’ at that time. 

So when I was first invited to the Charleston Festival some years later, I had no idea that this was the same house that I had visited with Fanny and Marilee.  I attended the festival with a profound sense of deja vu, and then it took me a bit of time to figure out that Fanny’s mother’s house, and Charleston, were one in the same.  When I was at Charleston, again for Small Wonder, four years ago, I told the curator of the house, Wendy, my story about having slept on the floor in the studio.  It so happened that Marilee was coming to visit me that November, and Wendy invited me to bring Marilee to the house then, despite the fact that it closes to the public at the end of October.  We had the most fabulous visit on that occasion, tramping around the house with Wendy’s expert guidance, tracing our memories of our visit with Fanny onto the lay-out of the house now that it has become a museum. 

So now when I go to Charleston I feel that, in some tiny way, the house is mine in a way that no other museum could possibly be.  Something was there - indeed, we were. 

I like these stories - I wouldn’t think it was worth re-publishing them alongside the newer stories if I didn’t.  And they have a broad range of subject matter as well - from a story told by the wife of a murderer, to a story about a young man who keeps getting his girlfriends pregnant, to a contemporary vampire story.  This is good.  There’s lots of sex, which somehow surprises me - I think sex is one of the things I’ve found it harder to write about as I get older.  Maybe it’s to do with having young kids and suddenly thinking, eww, what if THEY read these stories, which seems much worse than the prospect of being read by my parents.  I used to worry about what my mother would think, but I never worried enough for it to stop me from writing exactly what I wanted to write.  And now, with my own kids as potential future readers - hmm.  Much tougher somehow.

And so on I go, proofing, cringing, laughing, and sighing.  Red pen and post-its and fed-ex.  A totally analogue experience.  There’s a lot of pages here.  Twenty-five years worth of writing short stories. 

It’s been interesting putting the book together, revisiting my collections Tiny Lies, from 1988, the first book I ever published, and My Life as a Girl in a Men’s Prison, published in 1997.  Both books contain stories that seem like relics from ancient times - cassette tapes! going around to someone’s house because they don’t have a phone! - opening a weird window to my own past history as a writer.  The new stories include a series of linked stories all about the same character.  The collection is big, nearly 500 pages.  I do love the short story as a form, and it’s been great to have this chance to publish new work alongside older stories. 

You can buy the book in Canada from booksellers as well as online. 

I’m here for the Melbourne Writer’s Festival.  I’ll be doing two events; the first takes place tomorrow and is a collaboration with if:book australia, the good folks who invited me over.  I haven’t met any of them yet, though of course I ‘know’ Kate Eltham and Simon Groth online, and we’ll be meeting up tonight for the first time.  Tomorrow we’ll be running BookCamp Australia, a day-long unconference on the subject(s) of what next for reading and writing.  I’m looking forward to a day of discussion and questions and talk, talk, talk, something that digital book people are always good at. 

On Saturday we’ll be doing a panel, ‘The Connected Book’.  At both events there’ll be people I’ve met online already, including a few educators who work with ‘Inanimate Alice’, so it will be great to put faces to names. 

It’s been great having a few days in Melbourne which strikes me as a fantastically liveable city, full of great bars and cafes and gardens and beaches and cool little shops and art and a multitude of peoples from all over the world - everything a city needs, in fact.