The Future(s) of Publishing: On New Narrative Structures and the Digital Game-Changer

A few months ago I attended one of New York’s most celebrated and original shows in years: Sleep No More. A loose interpretation of Macbeth that pays homage, in tone and mise-en-scène, to Hitchcock’s films, Sleep No More had me on its premise alone.

However, what really sold me on the show’s genius—and what’s earning it rave reviews and a near-perpetually extended run in its New York City home—is the fact that Sleep No More is less a show than an experience. The set is a world in itself, an entire hotel gutted from the inside and transformed into a ballroom, a graveyard, a mental hospital, a bedroom, a museum, a forest, and more. Silent stewards in black stand sentry in these little worlds but do nothing to discourage guests from trying on gowns in a hospital ward or peeling back Lady Macduff’s bedcovers to reveal the dark stains of blood. The characters are plucked from Macbeth’s playbill but rendered nearly unrecognizable by their 1920’s apparel, their danced rather than spoken dialogue, and their deliberate refusal to separate out into “main” and “secondary” characters. Unconstrained by the conventions that are so integral to most theater as to go unnoticed—that the character with the most stage time is the main character, that any information not delivered onstage is irrelevant, and that all stories unfold in a linear fashion—each of Sleep No More’s characters cycle through their own haunting story, leaving it to the viewers and not the writers to choose how little or how much attention each merits. And if the viewers become the show’s scripters, so too do they become members of its cast, underscoring the show’s themes of guilt and madness by flocking to its characters, costumed in ghastly masks that transform them into the physical embodiments of the specters that haunt Macbeth and the horrors that plague his cohorts.

Sleep No More is not nearly the first piece of experiential theater ever produced, but I’d argue it’s one of the first and most important shows to make full use of an emergent narrative style: a storytelling structure in which the audience’s choices and actions determine the story that unfolds. While each of the characters in Sleep No More follows a script, the sequence of events from start to finish is wholly determined by the audience. Each viewer’s decisions about what characters to follow, what rooms to explore, and what information to ingest creates a new version of the narrative. And while the play’s producers are able to influence its overall emotional arc through external cues like music, set design, and choreography, there is practically no limit to the number of unique experiences that can emerge from the elements the audience pulls together.

I am fascinated by Sleep No More’s complex narrative structure, and I’ve been reflecting on it in the months since I saw the show, especially as I’ve watched publishers and writers experiment within the realm of e-publishing. You see, I don’t think it’s accidental that this innovation in theater has occurred alongside similarly monumental innovations in the way we experience written narratives. And I’d argue that while Sleep No More is a reaction to Shakespeare and to Hitchcock and a rebuttal of the rather ridiculous notion that some stories are more worthy of following than others, it is also an expression of the growing understanding, of writers and readers alike, that stories do not have to be linear.

This isn’t an entirely new concept for the storytelling world. In fact, video games have been embracing this idea for decades, with a range of titles from the Fable to The Sims adopting non-linear and even emergent narratives in order to customize user experience. It wasn’t hard for me to draw a link between Sleep No More, with its file folders full of mental profiles for the show’s characters and telltale blood stains, and the video game Fallout, in which the player pieces together the tragic histories of several different fallout structures by sifting through clues in the debris left behind.

It’s not that books haven’t dabbled in this before now. The Choose Your Own Adventure series of the 90’s gained immense popularity among young readers who devoured its customized plotlines and read each book multiple times to uncover new experiences and twist endings, and countless spin-offs of the idea followed. But at best (and I say this as a childhood fan who looks back very fondly on the series) these books were clunky, prone to spoilers revealed when the wrong page was flipped past or the too-present temptation to return to a previous page if the chapter one’s choices led to wasn’t satisfying. And with the exception of the occasional artistic use of the non-linear narrative form, like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, this structure never gained widespread popularity in adult books.

The missing link is obvious: technology. The very physical form of a book enforces a linear narrative; page 3 must follow page 2 which must follow page 1, and so on. The end has to occur after the beginning because it lies deeper into the physical object—and short of breaking the unspoken rules of literacy (as Danielewski asks his reader to do in House of Leaves) we can’t escape that experience of one event following another in physical books. And just as removing the barriers of stage and seating from the audience’s experience of Sleep No More opened it up to an emergent story structure, so removing the paper-and-ink makeup of a book opens up written storytelling to non-linear and emergent experiences.

New ventures in the publishing industry are showing this realization. Coliloquy launched last month with the self-proclaimed intention of “taking advantage of new technology to reinvent the way authors and their audiences interact with reading and narrative.” To quote their press release:

By delivering titles as active content applications, rather than static publishing files, Coliloquy enables new kinds of engagement made possible by advances in electronic book distribution. Multiple “what if” story lines let authors and readers explore different permutations of character relationships. TV-like episodes can grow and change, based on reader choices, voting, and feedback. Fans can reread a key scene from a different character’s point-of-view or unlock new content.

Writers and publishers of more traditional fiction are recognizing similar opportunities for their own publishing programs, as the enhanced-e-book-turned-emergent-experience Chopsticks demonstrates. And while The Wall Street Journal pointed out in a recent article that interactive e-books and book apps have yet to prove themselves profitable, it nonetheless called the technological shift rocking the industry “what could be the most significant transformation of books and reading behavior since Gutenberg.”

Interestingly, one of the contributions of Gutenberg’s printing press to storytelling may have been the widespread adoption of linear narratives; Shakespeare’s sonnets weren’t bound into a numbered order until their first printed compilation after his death, and in the old bardic practice of storytelling from which the tales of Odysseus originated, a bard chose his next plot point from a collection of stories he’d memorized based on his audience’s whims. And now, in reading’s next major revolution, we could see a shift away from linear narratives once again.

That said, am I kissing plot structure as we know it goodbye? Are non-linear narratives and interactive reading experiences the future of publishing? I’d say no. And, well, yes.

Storytelling is an art older than written history, and it’s undergone more changes and existed in more forms than we can count. It will continue to exist in more forms and styles than we can predict. I truly believe that as long as there is reader demand for specific types of stories, be they linear or non-linear or interactive or emergent or anything in between, there will be people who continue to create and distribute those types of stories.

So no, I don’t think this is the future of publishing. I think it is a future of publishing. It is an exciting opportunity to explore something new, to meet demands that have begun to surface or that have existed for a long time and been satisfied in other ways, like video gaming and roleplaying. It’s a call to open our minds to the many different ways to tell a story, and an opportunity to experience and embrace the potential for literary quality in myriad types of media. And in that respect, I can’t wait to see the future of publishing play out, in digital and in printed form.

The Epic 100 Followers Giveaway of Awesomesauce and Ponies! (Unicorns Are Included)

It's about time I gave away something awesome on this blog; you guys have been listening to me prattle on about publishing without the incentive of free books and unicorns for long enough! It's also just about time for me to reach 100 followers, and I'm not patient enough to let the scales tip on their own. So! Here's how this is going to work. Please read all the rules very carefully; if you skip one, I can't consider you for the prize. To enter, you must do each of the following things:

1. Become a follower of my blog. (If you're already a follower, congrats; you're a third of the way there!)

• If you don't have blogger, you can still follow me by clicking the RSS feed button in the bar on the right of your screen.
• If you are a Facebook friend and read these posts that way, you still must become a follower through Blogger or my feed in order to be eligible. Sorry.

2. Share this contest on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, your own blog, or wherever else.

3. Leave a link to your post in the comments here, along with your email address so I can contact you if you win.

That's it! No weird point systems, no extra credit for posting about it multiple times (though I will love you a little bit extra if you do). Just join this site, share the contest, and let me know about it. You have until 11:59 pm on Tuesday, May 24th to enter.

What's at stake, you might ask? Well, now would be a good time to decide whether you're a stalwart defender of print books or a pioneer of new reading technologies because, in keeping with the title and theme of this blog, the prizes will encourage you to think about both. The winner will have a choice between these two fabulous prize packages:

The Traditionalist	The Techie
A copy of Zombies vs. Unicorns signed by Kathleen Duey, Justine Larbalestier, Diana Peterfreund, Carrie Ryan, and Scott Westerfeld	A subscription to The First Line literary magazine for your e-reader
A gorgeous handmade bookmark of your choice from bumblebooHandmades' Etsy shop	A Kindle, Nook, or iPod nano armor from ittybittyscraps' Etsy shop
These super-cute dinosaur pins (har, har, get it, because print media is going extinct?) from Etsy	This pretty pretty unicorn pin (also har, har, because e-books are supposedly the unicorn that will save us) from Etsy

I'll choose a winner using random.org on Wednesday, May 25th, and you'll have your choice between the two packages. If I get a super-overwhelming number of entries, maybe there will be a second winner who will get the package leftover. So what are you waiting for? Start following, sharing, and commenting!

Publishing After Barry Eisler: What Will the Industry Look Like When Its Bestsellers Go Rogue?

So, we all remember that a month ago Barry Eisler turned down a $500,000 deal in favor of self-publishing, right? He certainly wasn’t the first author to have the idea that he could make more money by taking his books’ publication into his own hands, but the numbers made his announcement, as Joe Konrath said, “one for the Twitter Hall of Fame.” It stopped the publishing world in its tracks for a moment. And it got me thinking about the future of publishing.

In conversation, Barry told Joe:

…The new generation [is] looking at self-publishing differently... The question—“Should I self-publish?”—[is] going to be asked by more and more authors going forward. And… over time, more and more of them were going to be answering the question, “Yes.”

This is exactly what’s happening now. I’m not the first example, though I might be a noteworthy one because of the numbers I’m walking away from. But there will be others, more and more of them.

In all honesty, I think Barry’s right—there will be more and more authors who choose to self-publish as time goes on, and especially as digital sales continue to rise. As he and Joe agreed in their interview, it’s a matter of numbers: by self-publishing digitally rather than publishing traditionally, an author makes more money on every single copy sold.

Before you scrap your query letter completely, though, let’s take a look at those numbers. As Nathan Bransford explained in an essential blog post on the math behind publishing decisions, in order to make from self-publishing exactly what he would have made from that six-digit deal, Barry Eisler is counting on selling at least 71,633 ebooks. Can he do it? Probably. Assuming he’s already selling that many copies (if not more) of each of his books, it’s a safe bet that his large readership will stick with him and keep his numbers high.

Well, that’s all well and good if you’re Barry Eisler, or Stephen King, or Dean Koontz, or Jonathan Franzen—especially if you can count on your day of Twitter fame to sell copies of your book for you, the way I bet Barry Eisler can. But what about the little guys?

See, Joe and Barry agreed in their interview that publishers aren't needed anymore. But, as a great many writers and editors alike will tell you, there are some definite benefits to working with a publishing house.

Perhaps the most important, especially as writers’ need for help with cover design, layout and printing decreases, is the benefit of a devoted marketing force. The average writer doesn’t go from a debut novelist to a household name on his or her own. Sure, it happens—you need look no further than Nathan Bransford’s post and his numbers for Amanda Hocking. But it doesn’t happen frequently, or without the author (or a devoted team close to the author) having a very special skill set.

Publishing doom-and-gloomers will tell you that it’s only a matter of time before all the publishing houses go under, that the internet will eliminate the need for "gatekeepers," and that anyone can and will be discovered through the internet. But really, I don’t think that e-publishing is going to save every writer from obscurity. It will certainly increase the number of writers who have access to publishing, but will it increase the number of readers, or even distribute existing readers evenly among all the writers being published?

I don’t think so. If anything, e-publishing makes good marketing and curation all the more important. With more and more books vying for attention, it’s going to become that much harder to stand out. Editors, "gatekeepers" if you must call them that, who have a strong eye for what will appeal to people, and marketers who know how to reach those people will become more important than ever. It’s a hard, hard world for the as-yet-unknown.

So when I think about the future of publishing in the digital era, I wonder not about what will happen to the New York Times bestselling author, but about what will happen to the debut author, the writer of literary fiction, and the quiet novel with a niche audience. Publishers have, for so long, financed their operations through bestsellers and hesitated to take on a riskier project with a potentially small or difficult to reach audience. But if the bestsellers break away from traditional publishing, will the industry fold, or will it redefine itself?

Perhaps the strength of publishers in a new era of publishing will be their ability to devote time and attention to niche audiences, to find new talents and voices, and to develop literary projects for the devoted reader. The profits would be smaller, and the industry would change significantly. It’s hard to imagine that the big four could make this transition smoothly. But it may be that small, independent houses are in the perfect position to consider it.

I don’t really know what form publishing will take in the digital era. I agree with Joe Konrath that “paper will become a niche while digital will become the norm,” whether that takes one year or ten. I certainly don’t want to see my job disappear, or the good work of editors, marketers and designers all over the world become valueless. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that publishers need to be flexible and adapt to their evolving roles as technology changes the media it delivers. And I think, if finding and promoting new talent and literary voices were to become the new role of publishers, I could be okay with that.

But that’s just one theory—what’s yours? What do you think will become of publishing in the digital era?

Baltimore's CityLit Festival Presents Publishing in the Digital Era: A Panel for Publishing's Progressive Thinkers!

Dear illustrious readers! It is nearly time for Baltimore's CityLit Festival at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Which means it's nearly time for our panel, Publishing in the Digital Era. The festival is one week from tomorrow on Saturday, April 16th. Exciting events will go on all day, but my event is at 3:30 pm in the library's Poe Room.

In case you've forgotten, here's a quick description of the hour-long event:

E-books. Vooks. iPads. Technology is altering how we read and deliver literature. Co-sponsored by BackList, this timely panel, composed of local writers and publishing professionals, will explore and discuss the ever-changing face of publishing—and what it means to writers—as we move further into the digital era.

I'm excited to announce the full list of panelists, which includes:

• Charisse Carney-Nunes, Award-Winning Children's Book Author (I Am Barack Obama) and Founder of Brand Nu Words (digital publishing)
• David Drager, Poet, Entrepreneur, Software Engineer, and Founder of Lit4.us
• Allissa Richardson, Knight Foundation’s Institute for Interactive Journalism Grant Recipient for cutting-edge mobile journalism (“MOJO”) lab at Morgan State University
• Myself, Rachel Stark, Freelance Editor and Editorial Assistant, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins
• and Moderator Felicia Pride, Professional Writer, Book Blogger for AOL, Publishers Weekly Contributor, and Founder of BackList, an organization that specializes in producing engaging and interactive content across platforms

I can't tell you how excited I am to meet and share a stage with all of these fabulous Baltimore creatives and entrepreneurs.
I hope you'll join the audience in asking smart questions, enjoying with rapt attention, looking on in awe, or throwing vegetables from the back row. Bring your iPads, Nooks, Kindles, and more for what's going to be an awesome discussion!

Did Gutenburg Worry about Making Artists Redefine Themselves?

I just read this fabulous article on the Pictorialists, the rise of photography to the status of an art (which, by the way, I discussed in my first blog post), and the way Hipstamatic and other apps introduced for the iPhone recently have tried to recreate that movement's feel. The article did a great job of explaining how Pictorialism came about organically as a reaction to technological advances at the time.

Originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and championed in America by Alfred Stieglitz, Pictorialism was a movement in the art world that placed value on hazy, dreamlike photos which emphasized light and mood more than actual readable scenes. It's often wrongly assumed that photos from this time period look so different from today's ultra-sharp images because the artists were limited by the technology available to them. In fact, it's quite the opposite; with Kodak's release of the first handheld camera for amateurs, the technology needed to make high-quality narrative photographs had just become all too available. It was no longer enough for professional photographers -- already working hard to earn the art world's respect -- to own and know how to operate complex photographic equipment. Thus, photographers who wanted to stand out as artists in a field now overrun with "snapshooters" began tweaking photography to look as similar as possible to what was already considered a serious art: painting.

Reading about Pictorialism in The Atlantic, I couldn't help but compare the cultural changes that photographers faced at that time with the cultural changes that publishers and writers face today. With the popularity of digital technology like the Kindle, the Nook and the iPad and of e-publishing in general, publication of a sort is available to more writers now than ever. Anyone with a bit of design sense and some familiarity with technology can create e-books and print-on-demand books. And with the increasingly common creation of new initiatives and imprints like Kindle Singles and Odyssey Editions, it seems that the variety of works and writers hitting your e-bookstore of choice is set to get more varied by the day. Never has publication been so accessible to the amateur writer.

That said, there are some definite differences between our situation as writers, readers and publishers today and the situation of those early-20th-century photographers: most notably, the fact that writing was long ago established as an art form. If you ignore the fact that many genres and target audiences still fight to be considered legitimate literature, you could say that we, unlike Stieglitz, don't have to try to romance the art world in order to prove that we really are artists.

Still, I think that most artists do try to set themselves apart from the masses, and it sure seems that "the masses" just got a whole lot more massive. What do you think? Is publication by an established house still enough to offer the kind of status artists often seek? Or, will writers trying to establish themselves as artists have to work harder to separate themselves from the masses in the greater world of publishing? Leaving aside nay-saying about the supposed shortcomings of web content, do you think literary writing is going to change as a reaction to technology? Where are we going to see those changes -- in style, in format, in content, or somewhere altogether different? Please, Writer Friends, do enlighten me!