The current state of electronic publishing

Of course, if the publisher decides to buy your story, they often have a specific target market in mind and will steer your cutting and editing to that size and shape. ‘Weblit’ is very different. Sometimes this will make a better book. I edited down a 600-page manuscript by a hundred pages and it was a better book. But the screen is infinite and will keep scrolling text, so the size and shape of story changes.

If you have an interesting character or characters, there is both time and space to explore their stories to a depth absolutely impossible in hard copy, unless a publisher is willing to buy a multi-book series, which is less and less likely in the current tight market. There are interesting possibilities of adding sound, image and video.  

One can take a day to explore the point of view of an interesting spear-carrier in the main story, or spin off other stories. Since everyone is the hero of their own story, writing online means there is both time and space to explore such things.

Given that the written word is a way of fossilizing and re-creating the spoken word -- with little flourishes like spelling and grammar to make that recreation easier – the online environment, the very fluidity of the medium, is taking the written word back towards its own roots and origins, the face-to-face conversation; or the performance of the truly great storyteller.

The gap between writer and audience is all but erased. In hard-copy publishing, when a fan reads something, that has just hit the shelves, and wants to rave to you how good it is, most people don’t realize that the last time you probably looked at that particular manuscript was a year or more ago. The author is on to something new and the reaction is usually, at least mentally, ‘Huh? What? Oh, yeah, that! Thanks.’ Online, the post goes up and feedback from all over the world can be almost instantaneous.

The field is expanding exponentially as people get used to the idea of reading on the screen, smart books become more common, and even short short short fiction is being Twittered back and forth and being read on cellphones. I’ve been unwrapping this marvelous expanding horizon just this past year.  

This spring I got tired of waiting years for an editor to get back to me – TOR, a big New York publishing house, has a two-year waiting list and that was with an editor who asked for it. I decided to submit that manuscript to an e-publishing house… (www.e-press-online.com). I’m in the middle of editing that book right now and online editing is fantastic, let me tell you! I look at my first book, typed, cut and pasted together, and it looks like Frankenstein’s monster.  What word processors did for the basic construction of single manuscript, electronic publishing is doing for whole series.

Not that this is all good.  Online books are often seen as the publishing medium for manuscripts that could not be sold to the conventional market.  Perhaps, but no one knows if the hard copy book they’ve just looked at, fresh off the shelf, will be any good either. People will just have to continue recommending books they’ve found to each other, either online or hard copy, as they’ve always done.

Also this spring, I began weblit and I’m averaging approximately 1,500 words per day. I’ve written a hundred thousand words since March.

I have several review sites I need to submit my work to, as I get the time, also all online.  There are two awards for online work that I am aware of though it looks as though the Webby, (www.webbyawards.com), seems to be seizing the caché of being the Oscars of the online world.

The potential for authors to reach their audiences directly, I believe, is the most powerful tool in this brand-new toolbox I’ve been presented with. The struggle between information and entertainment is completely absent in the virtual world.  You don’t need to sacrifice one for the other, knowing that information usually suffers if there is a conflict. There is room for both, not two imperatives struggling for limited print space.

In the past two years I’ve been introduced to a medium that I couldn’t even imagine when I began writing and the virtual world of web literature, or weblit, has taken on force and power in my life since then. I can only speculate the shape it will ultimately assume, if it ever stops changing at all.

During Shirley Meier’s second year Children’s Lit course at Western she had a choice of writing another essay or a short story. She chose the story and wrote 1,500 words that eventually became the opening of a later chapter in her first solo novel. She has had seven hard-copy books published and this year made the leap into e-publishing. She is presently editing a book for e-press, complete with editor, contract and the hope that as a POD, or print-on-demand book, from Amazon, it will do well. Meier is also currently publishing an on-line novel at www.eclipsecourt.blogspot.com.