Bloggasm

Rather than posting here I should be working on my state taxes (I finished federal taxes last night) but I just don’t have the energy for it tonight. Speaking of taxes, the IRS website is incredibly shitty — I know that government websites are known to be terrible but you’d think they’d take extra care with that one, considering it’s the nation’s money-maker.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement.

1. May 1 is RSS Awareness Day, which is certainly something I can support. I knew what an RSS feed was long before I actually started using them. There’s just this odd inertia that keeps you from actually getting on the bandwagon, but once you do you immediately realize it’s worth it. Signing up for RSS feeds relieves some pressure on bloggers to post around the clock because an RSS worldview doesn’t involve you having to check a website over and over again to see if it has been updated. There are some sites I subscribe to that barely ever update, and without the RSS feed I would probably never know when something new has been posted. Rather than explaining what an RSS feed is on my own terms, here’s a handy dandy link to the Wikipedia entry.

2. “Porn for the Blind is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to producing audio descriptions of sample movie clips from adult web sites. This service is provided free of charge.” The description says it all.

3. Jeff Jarvis explores the true value of his blog. Rather than focusing solely on what the blog brings in through direct advertising revenue, he also adds in the money that comes in indirectly — speaking fees, book deals, other gigs — and determines that the blog is worth over a million dollars. Not bad for a site that averages only a few thousand hits a day.

4. This is pretty huge. Gawker Media has sold off three of its blogs, including Wonkette. Gawker founder Nick Denton references the coming online advertising decline, saying he’s dumping his less profitable sites in order to ride out the storm. I still find it weird, though, that they would get rid of Wonkette, which has become some sort of symbol for the rise of the blogosphere as a powerful media outlet — it was often cited in mainstream media stories about the power of blogs. It’s especially a weird move given that it’s a contentious presidential season that has resulted in rising traffic for most major political blogs.

5. It looks like we’re seeing a new use for POD: computer generated books. That New York Times article doesn’t do a great job of explaining how the guy’s company works, but I wouldn’t be able to point to more representative example of the long-tail benefits of Print On Demand.

6. It looks like AP photographer Bilal Hussein, who was jailed for two years without charges, is definitely going to be released. Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, who led the smear campaign against Bilal, has remained mostly silent on this issue.

An anthology of short fiction can often be an odd specimen.

When the book is put out by a large New York publisher, the anthology editor usually works with a small pool of solicited writers. After pitching an idea and getting the book approved, the editor approaches these writers with the theme and asks them to submit either original or reprint stories inspired by it.

The result is typically a mixed bag. While some of the writers use the theme as a springboard to compose brilliant stories that might not otherwise have been written, others inevitably dig themselves into a rut. The end result is a narrative that seems forced, dragging itself through the entire plot until it lies flat between the book’s covers. Without digressing too far into literary idealism, it’s easy to tell that the author wrote the story because it was solicited, not out of some bout of inspiration. This is partially why book reviewers often select a few gems out of the table of contents and then remark that the anthology is “hit and miss” — a collection of failures and duds, a few mediocre page-turners, and one or two brilliant pieces that will go on to be nominated for awards.

Whether the newly-launched site Anthology Builder is the cure to this trend is hard to say. Launched late last year, it’s the creation of Nancy Fulda, a 30-year-old stay-at-home mom and fiction writer who lives in Germany. With the cost of book production steadily decreasing through Print On Demand, the company allows the customer to compile his or her own table of contents and cover art online and have it shipped in print form.

Fulda, who is also an editor for Baen’s Universe (a short fiction ezine), said that Anthology Builder was born out of her own frustrations as a beginning writer; she wanted to sample stories from multiple publications to get a feel for an editor’s taste, but buying sample copies is expensive. There was no way to pluck out a single story for a quick read without purchasing an entire issue.

“Later, when I started publishing stories, I realized how ephemeral the lifespan of a short story really is,” she told me last month. ” A story would appear in this month’s issue of a magazine, and by next month, everyone had forgotten it. It was old news, and three or four years down the line, there really was no way for someone who liked my writing to track down that story, even if they were willing to go through the effort.”

A few months ago Fulda became frustrated because she had a list of stories she wanted to read but no easy outlet from which to purchase and read them — especially since she lives in Germany. So she wrote and published a post on her blog expressing her desire for a “do-it-yourself anthology website.” Initially, she hoped that someone else would create this site, but after a rush of positive feedback she decided to make it a project of her own.

Anthology Builder’s submission process is designed in such a way so that only reprint short stories are accepted. “We only take stories that have been previously published in a paying market, and even those, I sometimes filter based on whether I think they’ll be a good match for our customer profile,” Fulda said.

Melissa Mead, a 40-year-old writer living in New York, has 11 reprint stories available at Anthology Builder. When I asked her how she originally became involved with the site, she replied, “Actually, I just thought it sounded like fun. I saw some entries about it on LiveJournal, thought it would be a nice way to get some reprints out there being read again, and gave it a try.”

Her marketing of the reprints so far consists of “shamelessly plugging it on my LiveJournal and a few boards kind enough to put up with me.” Like others I spoke to for this article both on the record and on background, she said that she didn’t expect to make much money off the site in the near future. “I think it’s a fascinating idea with great potential that I’d like to help promote,” Mead said, “and because I’d rather have my reprints out being read than gathering metaphorical dust on my hard drive, whether I make money from it or not. I’d love to see it really take off.”

At the cost of $14.95 a book the customer gets to choose 350 pages worth of fiction. For every book sold, the authors get a split of $1.50, the money divided between them based on the word counts of the individual stories. “I had a choice between charging $30 per book and snagging a quick easy profit and charging $15 per book and giving the site a chance to become truly popular, to really become a place where readers come when they want short fiction,” Fulda said. “That’s my dream — to have Anthology Builder become like a mini-Amazon. When people read about a book online and they want to buy it, they go to Amazon, and they find it. I someday want to have enough fiction on the site that when people read about a short story online, the knee-jerk response is to go to Anthology Builder and add it to their next purchase.”

But how realistic is this goal? As I previously documented in a Bloggasm article, short fiction is becoming increasingly hard to market, and few profitable online models have emerged.

Samantha Henderson, a secretary from southern California who has stories available through the company, told me that she didn’t know if the site would become financially viable for authors. “I think it’s a very small niche because the genre is a small niche,” she said. “If they could expand it to other genres — say mystery — as well as mainstream they might sell a lot more product, but I don’t know how difficult it would be or if that is their intent.”

But even Fulda acknowledged that any profitability would come later rather than sooner, and that she has a significant hurdle in marketing the site. “The whole thing is kind of a gamble that way, and we won’t know whether it will pay off for another two or three years,” she said. “But in the meantime, I’m having fun, and I’m providing what I consider to be a truly valuable service to the writing community.”

“This is an exhilarating outer space opera that never slows down especially during the latter quarter of the action-packed story line,” the book review states. “That climax is one of the longest most exciting cat and mouse chase scenes in recent years.”

The review is of Ragamuffin, a speculative fiction novel by Tobias Buckell published by Tor Books. The writer of the review is Harriet Klausner, Amazon’s most prolific customer reviewer.

Klausner has written over 12,000 reviews since she first started posting them in 2000. That’s an average of more than four books a day, seven days a week.

Soon after her review was posted, Buckell noticed several responses to it in the comments section. “HK neglects to tell prospective readers about the Afro-Caribbean dialogue in this novel, the fact that it contains characters from the author’s previous novel, ‘Crystal Rain’ and so many other important elements that I would urge prospective readers to look elsewhere for a review of this book,” one commenter wrote. “Harriet practically never gives anything but 5 stars. Her ratings are not differentiated, therefore pretty useless,” said another. “The incoherence of this review is astounding,” a third added.

These responses are part of a larger backlash against Klausner, a mixture of conspiracy theories, skepticism and ridicule. The most tame of these criticisms simply point out that she rarely includes anything in her plot summary that isn’t on the back cover, indicating she hasn’t actually read the book. Others say that her sentences often suffer from grammatical quicksand, tripping over themselves and in need of editing. The most radical members of the backlash offer theories that she either works for Amazon or the publishing industry, astroturfing the customer reviews section to promote sales. Nearly all express annoyance at her tendency to only give four and five star ratings.
***

(Harriet Klausner)
***
“You know, I think if she did post more negative reviews she would have more credibility as maybe a freakish speed reader,” Buckell said. “I think everyone tends to dismiss her as a result of the relentless positivity, and she’s become a bit of a joke in the industry (particularly among authors). Many readers seem to be picking up on her reviews and are using Amazon’s rating system to rate her reviews as unhelpful.”

As for Klausner’s review of his own novel, the author noted that there wasn’t much in the plot summary that didn’t appear on either the back cover or the publisher’s press release. The only part that sheds any evidence that she actually read the book exists in the last line, which notes a plot point not publicized in the promotional text.

But despite these shortcomings, there have been reports that major publishers send advance review copies to Klausner by the truck load. She’s been quoted at saying that she receives an average of 50 free books a week in the mail. This has raised questions about not only her ability to sell books, but the promotional power of Amazon customer reviews in general.

Richard Eoin Nash is the editorial director of Soft Skull Press, a medium-sized publisher that prints about 30 titles a year. I asked him if he would ever consider sending Klausner a review copy.

“I’ll be candid, we don’t if for no other reason than that we’ve no idea how to send her books!” Nash said. ” But it is quite possible we would in principle.”

Soft Skull has its own version of Klausner. It’s an Amazon customer reviewer named Kevin Killian, who focuses on books that would fit into Soft Skull’s niche.

“We send to him as often as we can remember which isn’t often enough,” Nash said. “But those folks, their activity is likely not restricted to Amazon—the kinds of folks we want to reach blog, do an occasional Amazon review, do an occasional print review and are ‘influencers’ either in person or online.”

The barrier for sending out advance review copies can be low depending on the case. The cheapest would be about five dollars if the book is thin and sent by regular mail. At most, it could cost as much as $25 if it’s a heavy hardback and sent Fedex. And it’s absolutely free if the publisher can get the reviewer to accept a digital download of the book.

With the dozens of review copies sent to Klausner every week, publishers are seemingly trying to bypass the traditional book review system. Before customer reviews were possible, outlets like Publishers Weekly and Booklist were sometimes the only coverage a book received if it wasn’t picked up by a major paper. Some of the reviewers from these publications have expressed dismay at the prevalence of the customer review.

“There’s been a lot of teeth-gnashing among professional book reviewers about the rise of citizen reviewers,” said Keir Graff, the online editor for Booklist. “I’m not too troubled by the trend, however. Amazon book reviews are just another version of the ‘rate it’ function found on sites selling other products…Booklist and other professional reviews still run above the customer reviews, and I believe that most Web users are savvy enough to know the difference between the two.”

Graff has worked at Booklist since 2001 and has been senior editor of its online site for a few years. To him, customer reviews serve a different function, focusing on other facets than professional reviews. A reviewer for, say, Publisher’s Weekly, usually adheres to a strict criteria of analyzing a book when writing his or her critique. Customers have much more flexibility.

As for Klausner’s writing, Graff hasn’t been impressed so far.

“I haven’t read a review of hers that I found useful or thought-provoking,” he said. “I think her industriousness is an entertaining phenomenon, but she’s perhaps a better example of compulsive behavior than genuine book reviewing. Perhaps she’s trying to set an unbreakable world record for the greatest number of books reviewed–but she’d probably enjoy herself a bit more if she slowed down and focused on the words on the page, not the number of books she’s reviewed.”

Of course Klausner has reviewed one of Graff’s own books, so he might be biased. For his book, Cold Lessons, the reviewer gave him four out of five stars, and Graff had to read the review several times to even understand what it meant, the language was so confusing.

Sample sentence from the review: “”He begins to investigate the drug cartel preying on the local students over the objection of his travel writer wife of over three decades Lolita, but soon finds himself wondering if the red pen is mightier than the sword, make those guns.”

But like the Soft Skull editor, Graff agreed that the barrier for sending a review copy to her is so low that it’s worth a try.

“With so many books vying for so little review space, a Harriet Klausner review may be the only coverage some books get,” he said. “So if you operate on the assumption that anything is better than nothing, I guess it’s worth a review copy. The fact that her reviews seem to be uniformly positive is probably a factor, too. And a blank page on Amazon looks pretty lonely. Having one of her reviews there is proof–or is it?–that at least one person’s read the book.”

Of all the people I interviewed, Jenny Davidson seemed the least skeptical of Klausner’s reviewing abilities. Davidson teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature for Columbia University and is the author of The Explosionist, a novel forthcoming from HarperCollins Children’s Books.

To her, Klausner pays adequate service to genre fiction, which in its more pulpy versions can be easy and quick to digest.

“I’m a bit of an obsessive reader myself–I read fast, and I read a lot–and I would say that when I read the kind of paranormal romance, say, that Harriet Klausner is fond of, it would probably take me less than an hour and a half,” Davidson said. “I try not to do this too often, it’s the novel-reading equivalent of binge-drinking, but I have certainly had quite a few days in my life where I read five novels straight through, all in a row; usually crime fiction. So my take is that she’s sincere but misguided, not deliberately fraudulent.”

The author finds Klausner’s reviews often humorous and doubts that it has much effect in who buys a particular novel. She dismissed the various conspiracy theories about her working for the publishing industry as “farfetched.” At best, Davidson considers the reviewer’s power as neutral, unlikely to hurt or help a book’s sales.

Graff, the Booklist editor, seemed to reach the same conclusion.

“I don’t believe that one person could read that many books in any manner that I would recognize as ‘reading,’ but only she knows the truth,” he said. “I will say that in her review of Cold Lessons, she did include some details that weren’t in the publisher’s synopsis–although, perhaps predictably, she got the tone wrong.”

A few years ago, Jason Sanford became visibly frustrated. It was during a conversation with the editor of a year’s best short fiction anthology. When Sanford asked the editor to consider stories published in his online literary journal, storySouth, the editor responded that he didn’t consider online magazines to be “real” publications.

Sanford, 36, once edited for Meadowbrook Press, a publisher distributed by Simon & Schuster. Five years ago, he launched storySouth to showcase fiction, nonfiction and poetry from what he calls the “new south.” To him, his free online publication was just as legitimate as any print journal. With an average of 1,000 visitors a day and a rigorous editorial process, it reached a wider audience than most university publications. In his frustration,the Million Writers Award for online fiction was born.

“A few years ago I wrote an essay which made the case for why online magazines give more exposure to new and emerging writers than traditional literary journals,” Sanford said. “Basically, most print literary magazines have a total circulation of between 500 and a 1,000 copies. This results in fewer readers than a site like storySouth receives in a single day. When you add in printing costs to this equation, then it’s easy to see why so many literary magazines are either establishing online presences or going totally online.”
***

(Jason Sanford, creator of storySouth and the Million Writers Award)
***

For the Million Writers Award, readers, editors and a round of judges nominate stories that were published online in that year. Stories published in print journals are considered as long as they also appeared online. At the end of the nomination period, Sanford chooses 10 of those stories as finalists. He then sets up an online poll and the public is encouraged to read and vote on their favorite stories. This year, the winner received a $300 cash prize from the Edit Red Writing Community. The winner for 2007 was Catherynne M. Valente, for her story “Urchins, While Swimming” (originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine).

According to the award’s creator, the nominees gain more notoriety which can boost their careers.

“Winning awards helps any author in his or her career,” Stanford explained. “Due to the internet—where anyone can publish their work—and the increasing numbers of books being published each year, more writers than ever are competing for attention. This makes it hard for deserving authors to find readers. When authors receive awards, that helps them rise above the clutter. An award tells a reader to check an author out; to take a little bit of their valuable time and see if this writer might be worth reading.”

Valente, the winner of the award, agreed with this idea. The author has had her novels and poetry collections published by both small and large publishers for years, but has only recently begun to sell short fiction.

“I hope it will increase the visibility of my short fiction, which often gets overshadowed by the novels,” Valente said. “But awards always help–I think the best thing that the Million Writers Award has done is to drive hundreds of people to read ‘Urchins, While Swimming.’ Most of those people would never have seen it otherwise, and that’s a fantastic result. Time will tell if it will drive my short fiction further.”

For Valente, deciding whether to publish a short story in an online or a print publication often takes deliberation. When considering print publications that don’t pay pro rates, she first considers whether she could reach more people through her blog.

“The advantage of online publications, as I see it, are these: they are not beholden to print costs, and are therefore often more adventurous in the work they will accept,” she said. “They have the potential to be seen by many, many more people than any print magazine or anthology, if the story is widely linked and catches on…also I do feel that the short fiction community is enlivened by the internet, and I love participating in that–to me it is a lot like the old oral tradition, with computers as the campfire around which we gather to tell stories.”

Though it’s impossible to gauge the Million Writer Award’s direct effects, short stories and essays that originally appeared online have begun to be selected for year’s best anthologies. The Best American Short Stories, for instance, recently published a short story by Cory Doctorow that was first printed at Salon.com. I pointed this out to Sanford and asked if his motivation for running the award has changed over the years.

“Yes, that’s why I started the award. However, you are correct that in the last year or two, ‘best of’ anthologies have begun to reprint online fiction,” he replied. “While I praise this change, I’m not sure it’s really that big a deal. What we’re seeing are more traditional print authors publishing their works online; as these authors publish outside the dead-tree-bindings of print publications, the best of anthologies are following them. What I don’t see are these anthologies publishing much work by authors who have published almost exclusively online. While the Million Writers Award honors all online fiction—including stories by established authors—one of our strengths is that we also highlight new and upcoming writers who are only known online. I don’t see the print anthologies doing that. Perhaps they will in the coming years. Until then, I’m simply happy that the Million Writers Award has helped raise the profile of online fiction.”

Have you come to the conclusion, like countless others, that the novel as an art form is dying, but you can’t figure out what killed it? Well Edward Champion has created a convenient list of possibilities for the final death blow to the genre:

Here’s a helpful list for New York freelancers who need to write a needlessly alarmist newspaper piece about what may be killing the novel. So if you’ve run out of ideas and don’t quite know an angle, here are some casuistic ideas for your future pitches! Remember, if you collect a check from any of these ideas, I’m only asking 5%. Be sure to send a check to me within 45 days after the piece runs. Good luck and Allah’s speed!

***
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The publisher Simon & Schuster partnered up with a company called MediaPredict, which uses a science called prediction market. It allows users to gamble with fake money on what books or movies will become successful, and it turns out that the predictions will be right with a 16% margin of error. This is different than focus groups, which have scientifically been shown to be only partially successful. The New Yorker has an article up about the science and how it works.

Whenever I read articles like this one, I decide that it’s time to open my wooden case and take out the world’s smallest violin: My book deal ruined my life.

The journalist decided that he was going to find every gag-inducing walking cliche of a writer and scribble down as they bitch and moan about how their lives have been ruined— devastated, I dare say! — ever since they decided to become writers.

The worst of the bunch:

Yet, still, the dreamers dream. Brendan Sullivan, 25, moved to New York after studying creative writing at Kenyon College in Ohio.

He hasn’t landed a book deal for his novel, but is determined to find a publisher. “Writing has ruined my life and cost me many, many girlfriends,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I have thrown away several careers and one college degree to spend my time working in bars, D.J.’ing in bars and drinking my rejection letters away. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, and I’ve made many of them since I started …. I also abandoned my agent with words harsher than those I’ve saved for lost loves.”

Mr. Sullivan has held 27 jobs to support his writing career, from selling chapstick on the street to being a night guard in an art gallery (“That was my favorite job ever, because I just sat in a chair and read novels all day,” Mr. Sullivan added.)

via nick