REB #16: “With the advent of ebook self-publishing and the democratization of distribution … the power of publishing is shifting away from publishers and into the hands of authors and readers where it belongs.”

– Mark Coker interview

Mark Coker, Founder and CEO of Smashwords

Yesterday, I found this interview with Mark Coker, Founder and CEO of the electronic publishing company Smashwords. In it, he describes the changing nature of the publishing industry, highlighting his role and understandably praising his own brand of electronic self-publishing. Thisis marketing 101 after all: you do an interview to raise awareness for your product/service, so why not “talk it up”?

Anyway, I love technology. Outside of books and real-life people, my computer and TV are my best friends. However, I’m apprehensive about this shift toward electronic reading. I already do a lot of my news reading online because of all the blogs and Twitter accounts that I follow. So will I want to sit on my futon this winter, next to a roaring fireplace, and cuddle up with a good…LCD-type screen? An iPad, for instance?

Hell no!

But while I love the tactile sensation of having a book in my hands, turning its pages, flipping quickly to a favorite passage, etc., I cannot deny the convenience that electronic publishing affords the reader (we’ll leave the writer out of the equation for now). The simple fact of the matter is that I’m running out of space for books. When I moved to Baltimore in August 2009, I brought with me a small, 3-shelf bookcase and well over 300 books; I quickly bought two 5-shelf bookcases to accomodate the books, as well as my collection of DVDs. Then in late August 2010, I moved from Bolton Hill to Downtown, where my room is actually a little smaller anyway, so it wasn’t too distressing that one of my large shelves collapsed before I even tried to move it. I’m down to a 3-shelfer and a 5-shelfer. As such, many of my books are now stored and, yes, inventoried in boxes in the downstairs closet. I hate that; my books want to be out of the closet, with me, but alas, they aren’t.

With an e-reader, I still wouldn’t be able to display my books – they’d still be in the invisible “closet” of my e-reader’s storage mechanism – but at least I would have room for them. I guess that’s the tradeoff. I can have more books with an e-reader, I can have them almost instantly, and I can have them cheaper in most instances. But they aren’t books. They’re texts, yes, but they aren’t books, per se.

So why, as a writer, would/should I consider using a service like Smashwords? For one thing, Smashwords itself is free. They only take a 15% bite out of the writer’s royalties, when he/she makes money, which is a far cry from the 50-75% that most traditional publishers take. From an economical standpoint, the advantage is clear: if you (self-)publish electronically with Smashwords, you stand to make a lot more money for your work. There’s also the fact that you don’t have to wade through a sea of rejection letters from publishers, because you, my friend, are self-publishing. For “free.” That’s unheard of, isn’t it? We’re talking about guaranteed publication, here, with 85% royalties and coverage on most of the e-book stores out there (even Apple’s iBookstore and Barnes & Noble’s e-book store are included; I don’t think Amazon is one of them, though – not yet, anyway).

That sounds like a sweet deal, and I’ll probably seriously consider it for book-length works because at least I can get my name and my writing out there. But at the end of this M.F.A. program, when I publish my book of short stories, I still want to see my awesome book cover design on a tangible, traditional book in a brick-and-mortar store. And I want the prestige that comes with having my book hand-picked for publication.

Is that so much to ask?

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #13: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

– Groucho Marx

The Baltimore Book Festival was this weekend. Who went?

If you were there Saturday, chances are good that you saw this guy; chances are even better that you saw his hair. But seriously, Andy Poxon is 16 years old, looks 12, and can shred a guitar like nobody’s business. He’s an accomplished blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist with a full-fledged 13-song album, and he’s not even out of high school yet! You can listen to the songs on his website, download them, or even buy the CD. And I definitely recommend it.

In other news, I walked away from the festival with 4 books for $9. I probably shouldn’t have bought anything because I don’t really have room for any more books, but I couldn’t resist. I got a book of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings (by Nancy Frazier), because of a conversation I had with an acquaintance of mine about the best way to practice painting – copy other people’s work. Over and over. So that’s what I’m going to try to do because I like to paint, but I am so out of practice! I also got John Hedgecoe’s Complete Photography Course, which is a little antiquated because it’s all 35 mm (but I think that’s actually kind of cool!), The Art of Gift Wrapping by Jane Cornell (an awesome and beautiful $1 find), and another book that I intend to use as a gift, so I won’t mention the name, in case that person is reading this.

And that’s about it. Sorry these updates are coming so late in the week; I’ve been rather busy with other school work and with looking for a second job. One more post coming tonight or tomorrow!

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #9: “Once you know what the story is and get it right—as right as you can, anyway—it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.”

– On Writing by Stephen King

This week, we’re writing about our author/artist websites, which we will be designing and potentially publishing over the course of the next month. First up: the content of my site.

I’ve had a blog for almost a year now, one that I’ve actually managed to update on a fairly regular basis. I’ve tried to start blogs before but have never stuck with them. That said, since I’ve already got a blog started, I would like to try to incorporate it in some way. But that topic is better suited for my forthcoming posts on navigation and design, so I’ll go into more detail in the next two posts.

On this blog, I do have an “about me” page, a résumé page, a favorites page (favorite books, movies, and TV shows), and even a page to post completed/published stories, books, videos, and other projects (which I’ve done nothing with, as of yet). I’m trying to think of the best way to integrate all this information into the new website or if I even want to; I’m not sure just yet. My best bet may be to keep it on the blog and use the website for something else.

In any case, I’ve already started playing with Dreamweaver—and even tried out a couple of designs—but right now, my favorite design uses the controversial frames method, with a header on the top, a menu on the bottom, and the content in the middle (again, more to come on design and navigation in a future post). If that’s confusing, I’ll try to explain: these are all in the same browser window but are in separate “frames” (kind of like picture-in-picture for the Internet).

The content that appears in the middle frame, so far, consists of a page on which I can list my published works, an about me page, and even my entire blog (with the header and menu intact, in their respective frames, which doesn’t look great with the blog design but could be worse). I’m struggling to come up with more content for the middle frame of the home page, though, the one the reader sees first. As I said in a comment on Mike’s blog, I would also like to include a hypertext narrative of some kind (and maybe some other stories that I’ve written), but that will take a lot of time and effort to (1) write and (2) implement correctly; I suppose it’s something that will evolve over time, even if I have to work on it beyond the deadline for class.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #7: “I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.”

– The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter

This kid is nuts, not just because he went from an iPhone on AT&T to a highly unattractive Samsung candy bar on the Cricket network, but also because he gives his phone number out for the world to call/text him. It got so bad that he had to go to an unlimited plan, hence the switch to Cricket.

I suppose, in a way, it’s awesome that we live in a world where this kind of thing is possible. Where we can display our phone numbers for all to see and have a cell phone plan that allows for this without breaking the bank. In the grand scheme of things, $45 a month is a small price to pay for unlimited conversation. In a world where we can communicate via Internet with anyone—from any soil-covered and Internet-equipped corner of Earth—we can also speak directly to them on what is now becoming an old but trusty piece of technology: the phone. Specifically, the cellular/mobile phone.

On the other hand, it takes a lot of guts to put oneself out there like that because…this is a scary world we live in, and ironically, part of the scariness isthe technology itself and what it might mean in the future. Minority Report(which was first the title story in a book of science fiction stories by Phillip K. Dick) is not that far off. Of course, the other scary part is that some people are just plain crazy. Just read anything by Angela Carter, and you may think she was crazy—but really, she was just brilliant—and that was decades ago! Just imagine who’s out there now! On the streets of Baltimore, or Los Angeles, or London. Waiting to pounce on unsuspecting prey. And mug, rob, threaten. Hurt.

Me, I keep my “purse” close and my cell phone even closer. And it doesn’t hurt to have a bit of pepper spray. Where’s the techno pepper spray, Cricket? You’re certainly no Google Voice.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #6: “There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.”

– Unknown author/coiner, but I found it at Board of Wisdom

I’ve been making websites since I was about 12 or 13, when I taught myself HTML (HyperText Markup Language) from a book. Yes, I was a geek—am a geek. That said, I’ve worked with HTML (and the newer CSS) off and on for over a decade.

In 7th grade, I redesigned my school corporation’s website, and the director of my jr./sr. high school’s computer club (called Buddy Step-Up, which is since defunct) liked it enough to ask if we could take over the corporation’s web design. We got it approved, and my design went live. It went through a couple of different iterations after that; it’s now unrecognizable, and frankly, I’m not a huge fan of the latest design, which uses Javascript and is rather slow (sorry Ben, if you’re the designer; it’s nothing personal!).

In any case, I’m not yet up-to-date on the newest version of HTML (which is 5.0), not that it’s officially “released” yet, but it is available for people to use while the bigwigs work out the bugs. So, I guess I would like to learn some of the new tags added in version 5.0. I know about the video tag, and it’s very easy to use. What I don’t know, however, is how to make something like this nifty little page that lets the user drag the text boxes to the trash can. While this looks very simple and, at first glance, not very useful, I think there could be some interesting applications for it. One thing I could do is make a website with short stories on it, and then use this code in order to provide the reader with a way to track what he/she has already read. The reader would drag a story to a trash can, or something else, and it would disappear. He or she could then go through the rest of the stories (or other website elements), out of order, until there is nothing left to read. Then it’s time to log off.

Granted, this trash can webpage is actually done with HTML and Javascript, which I don’t know at all, but I do know that it wouldn’t be possible without the update to HTML. Maybe it’s time to learn Javascript, at least the basics.

I’ve done programming before but never with Java or Javascript. On the other hand, I did use Alice for a class in undergrad; it’s like a front-end to Java, and it’s very cool. The user can program in Java without realizing it. It’s just like making an animated story. Seriously, it’s just drag-and-drop, moving characters and other elements around to create an animated Java program. It’s designed for high schoolers and college students, so it’s very use to use, once you know the basics of the program. Check it out if you’re interested in programming; ignore this paragraph if you’re not.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #5: “The sky is falling, and Gauls everywhere go mad from options.”

– “Asterix and the Battle of Algiers” by Pranav Behari

In my search for an online literary journal, I stumbled upon an excellent one called fail better. Right off the bat, I noticed the lack of capitals in the title, which annoys me, as a grammar (and consistency) enthusiast, but the contents of the journal almost make up for the missteps of the title. Almost. I’ll probably never be completely comfortable with breaking the rules of language, but I suppose there are reasons out there for doing it, and I have done my fair share of rule breaking, as much as it pains me each time. But if you figure out why there are no capitals in the title of this journal, let me know, because I haven’t figured that one out just yet.

Moving on, there is a wonderful interview with Aimee Bender in the latest issue, and if you’ve had Steve Matanle for class at U.B., you’ll probably recognize some of his values in it, namely the idea of writing spontaneously—of “improvising,” as Steve puts it, of not obsessing about the story for weeks on end. Just write it! Indeed, just last semester, I had Steve for Fiction (not to mention Experimental Forms), and we read a story by Bender called “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.” It was one of the most memorable stories from the class, I think, and so when I saw that there was an interview with the author, I was eager to read it.

And now I want to buy Bender’s latest book, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, about a girl who has the uncanny ability to feel the emotions of the people who prepare her food (her mother’s lemon cake always brings sadness). While the title of the novel is just plain awesomesauce, the story’s description is captivating in a way that most mainstream fiction cannot touch, promising a novel reading experience that only Bender could provide (you see what I did there, with “novel”?). While some call her a fabulist, Publishers Weekly calls her a “spelunker of the human soul.” Thus, I contend that Aimee Bender is either a fabulous fabulist or an expert spelunker because, from what I remember of “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt,” and from reading about her latest novel, I’m instantly intrigued by her ability to capture the essence of being human in such a nontraditional story form. Magical realism is a tough sell, but Bender is a successful marketer.

Now I just have to decide if it’s worth the space on my bookshelf to buy a new book, which is especially difficult because this one seems so promising, or if I should buy it on Kindle or some other e-book reader if/when I get one someday. But that’s a whole other issue, for a different day.

Finally, one of the stories in the latest issue of fail better is called “Asterix and the Battle of Algiers,” and, as a former student of French, this title grabbed me right away. I have yet to read the whole story, but I plan to do so; with an opening line as great as the one I used for the title of this blog post, how could I not finish it?

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #4: “Rosy fingered Dawn touched the night and it blushed at the embrace of a new day.”

– Odysseus, She by Katherine Phelps

It took several Google searches, but I finally found a website with a link to a website with a link to a website with a catalogue of hypertext narratives, one of which I love. How meta is that?

While I’m not crazy about the title, Odysseus, She—a re-imagining of Homer’s The Odyssey—is a perfect example of postmodernist storytelling via hypertext. The novel features several instances of audio/music; that in itself makes it unique. But then comes the story itself and the order in which it is told.

Odysseus is a woman with a daughter named Telemakhe instead of a son named Telemachus, and, as per hypertext and postmodernist tradition, the story is told in a nonlinear fashion. Granted, the original Odyssey features nonlinear characteristics as well (and the website even graciously includes a translation of it), but the new version deals with this aspect in a very modern way—or, actually, postermodern. The reader chooses to follow either Odysseus or Telemakhe for the first part of the novel. At the point where mother and daughter should be reunited, the reader is treated to a dual-view page in order to catch up on and make sense of both characters’ paths before merging them and moving into the revenge phase, with Odysseus and Telemakhe now working side-by-side. In the final chapters, there are several more choices for the reader to make, ultimately affecting the outcome of the story.

The overall effect of reading this extraordinary hypertext novel is that the reader witnesses a reading experience that is (probably) unlike anything he or she has ever experienced, and one that may be the wave of the future. Indeed, it may be about time to come up with a new word for such an experience; plain old “reading” just doesn’t cut it anymore. For more on hypertext narratives, particularly the goal of Odysseus, She, check out the author’s notes on the Perspectives page.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #3: “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

– Stephen King

Well, I’m still not sure if it’s more productive or not to find things we dislike rather than like, but here’s what I do know: I love Stephen King’s website.

It’s the polar opposite of Stephenie Meyer’s, in both content and design. Stephen King (Stephenie, Stephen—interesting coincidence there, eh?) has not only produced a much vaster (and far superior) body of work but has also managed to hire an excellent web designer and team of professionals to help him. Just look at his latest book cover (see picture above)! It’s so smooth and sexy, yet simple, which also happens to be a perfect description of his website.

The layout of the home page (and the entire site, in fact) is crisp, symmetrical, and has great contrast. A Flash slideshow at the top of the page announces King’s latest endeavors and books, while a tabbed menu runs along the top to navigate from page to page. When necessary (on subsequent pages), a well-implemented vertical menu appears to the left, unlike the plain, ugly, looks-like-a-mistake vertical menu of Meyer’s website. Text is sometimes divided into two columns—e.g., in order to separate news updates from product/book releases (on the home page), showcase certain multimedia items as distinct from multimedia news (on the Multimedia page), and minimize scrolling (on the FAQ page). Likewise, text and pictures are divided into two invisible but distinct columns (on the Misc. page), providing a crisp and beautiful but small separating line that announces close association between picture and text while still providing a little distance. Finally, while the website does use Arial, it does not do so exclusively, as the large section headers as well as the top matter (tabbed menu, etc.) are set in seriffed fonts like Times New Roman, to provide a little contrast and, therefore, separate the different elements of the page.

As far as content goes, King has taken great care to provide a wealth of information about his works and himself. Whereas Meyer’s page looks almost amateurish and barren, King’s is sophisticated, full, and dark, and it matches his personality as well as those of his characters. It is essentially another extension of his work, adding to the dozens of movies, miniseries, electronic stories/books, and other projects based on King’s work. For instance, he is currently in the middle of a project wherein he invites readers to take photographs that have some connection to his body of work and send them in (e.g., King’s Cross station in London shares his name and, King jokes, there must be a Deschain Bakery and something like a “Welcome to Stephenville” sign that can be photographed, somewhere in the world). FYI, if you don’t know, Deschain is one of King’s memorable characters.

In short, this is the website of a great writer who has been around the block a time or two and who, most importantly, has a strong, established voice and style. King knows himself, his characters, and his readers, and his website reflects this knowledge. His fictional world is generally so real and truthful, so well-crafted, that the seam of the “lie”/myth/fantasy is barely noticeable; likewise, the structure and design of his website are both so fitting and proper that they do not hinder the reader’s online surfing experience.

Meyer could learn a thing or two (or fifty) from him.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #2: “I guess I just violated the treaty.”

– Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

I’m sorry to any Twilight fans, and actually, I swear this has nothing to do with the fact that Stephenie Meyer wrote those much-loved-but-much-hated books or that her name has a weird spelling (Steven-ee? Mee-er?), but I just don’t like her website. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not really her fault—unless she designed it.

I dislike her website because of its design inconsistencies and the butt-ugly “Click to order Bree Tanner” button on this page. Indeed, that page is probably the worst on the site. The lone book cover at the top, next to that ugly button, looks out of place; the mouseover does nothing for it. The iframe of Stephenie’s Amazon store has an unnecessary scroll bar. The “Choose a Book” section is segregated, not to mention redundant and clumsy (click the book title to see an ugly pop-up, featuring yet another picture of the book covers for each of her books; click the covers to buy them from Barnes & Noble, which, okay, is valid because it’s different than Amazon, but still…). Once you’ve got a book chosen and its pop-up opened, each one has a title—except the last one. Oh, and the first book? Yeah, that link goes to Amazon, not Barnes & Noble, and did I mention there’s no ugly pop-up for this one?

Inconsistency personified.

Moving on, I find that the horizontal and vertical menus on the site are fighting each other for attention, particularly because there isn’t a vertical menu on the home page, so that just looks awkward. Additionally, the background pictures at the top of the page are inconsistent from page to page (tab to tab). Furthermore, I think that the text lines of the pages with large chunks of text (e.g., the blog-styled home page, the bio page, etc.) are far too wide. The reader has to follow each line almost all the way across the computer screen (at least on my 15.4″ MacBook Pro), which is tedious, and it therefore discourages the reading process. I’d rather read War and Peace all the way through—in one sitting—than read each page of Stephenie Meyer’s website, or any of the pages.

The final straw is that, as per the site’s CSS file and my eyeballs, the site is set in Arial with Helvetica as a backup and the generic sans-serif specification as a fallback; I’d love to know what that generic sans-serif font would be and look like because these (Arial and Helvetica) are ugly fonts!

Is this too harsh? I’m wondering if it’s more fun or just more productive to highlight things we dislike/hate rather than things we do like. I suppose we’ll find out in the next blog, when I discuss a writer’s site that I actually like.

And again, I’m not saying this is Stephenie Meyer’s (or Twilight’s) fault, even though some might agree that I have every right to blame them just because the books exist and because Meyer is a terrible writer, from a line level (even my friends who are Twilight fans—you know who you are—agree).

No, I won’t go that far—not today.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #1: “She is a selfish, hypocritical woman, and I have no opinion of her.”

– Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

I’ve never read this book in its entirety, nor have I seen any of the (probably) hundreds of movie versions of it, but I did read the first two chapters in undergrad. This is the only line I remember; I love it almost as much as Lady Gaga loves weird and Veronica Mars loves a good mystery.

And with that, I welcome you to this blog about/for literature. This totally and completely electronically published metablog was commissioned by my Electronic Publishing class at the University of Baltimore, which I attend under the banner of M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts.

Hi. My name is Roger, and I’m Fiction. What’s your genre?

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely. As I called the new blog “Roger’s E-Pub Blog,” I’m going to include a prefix for the titles of these syndicated blog entries: REB, followed by the number of the entry. I’m also going to add a REB tag to these entries so my readers can find them all easily. This is the first one, so its title is prefixed REB #1. Got it? Good.