The July 2008 issue of Wired has a thought provoking article by Chris Anderson entitled The Petabyte Age.  A petabyteis an unimaginably large amount of data - 1,000 terabytes or a quadrillion bytes.  The article catalogs a number of important applications using datasets measured in petabytes; everything from agriculture to politics.  Anderson has asserted that the availability of these huge datasets is lessening our reliance on the predictive value of theory and mathematical / statistical models.  Models have an elegant and convenient compactness, but often a limited predictive ability.  “Big data” closes the predictive gaps if you have the storage and processing power to manipulate and make sense of it.

The Petabyte Age is the natural outcome of three “laws” (ahem, recall those compact models).  These are Moore’s Lawwhich governs the growth in computer processing power; Kryder’s Law which predicts hard disk storage cost per unit of information; and Butter’s Law which measures the capacity of the fiber optic network underpinning the Internet.  These laws are synergistic - processing power can be greatly amplified by hooking servers and PCs together in computing networks; storage can be extended via disk arrays; and huge datasets can be accessed over high speed, high capacity fiber optic networks. 

So all this discussion of “Big Data” got me thinking: The whole bibliosphere could be radically changed.

• Authors could tap into gigantic databases to do incredibly detailed research on people and places.  Novelists could scan the entire body of literature to see where “story gaps” might exist to be exploited. 
• Publishers could track readership trends based on accumulated book sales data and accurately predict the success or failure of any book prior to its publication.   
• Readers could go to their favorite online bookstore get a pinpoint recommendations based upon analyses of buying histories, correlated with with behvaioral, demographic and psychographic profiles. 

But the one thing that probably won’t change is the way we package all the new knowledge that “peta processing” delivers?  We will likely use the same book size packets - whether in print or electronic form - we use today.  Why?

The book is the anti-petabyte.  It is perfectly tuned to the human mind.  Stories are how we make sense of things.  Our brains are confronted by petabytes of raw data during our lives; yet the memories we create out of that torrent can be squeezed into a terabyte or two.  The stories we tell - whether of fact or fiction - represents the imprecise model, the compact and convenient approximations that leave us wanting more.  Biologists tell us that this filtering is the core of our success as a species. 

I can marvel at the power of Big Data and Cloud Computing.  But being human, I will always believe the real power lies in the Little Story.

---

Related Posts

• Google Clouds and Automatic Writing
• Information Trapping - An Interview with Tara Calishain The Lean, Green Future of Publishing
• Widgets, Nuggets and Tags on the Cut and Paste Web
• Crowdsource your Book Marketing
• Are There too Many Books?

Bookmark this Post

---

In an earlier post (”Non-fiction Blook Mechanics Part 1: Blook by Design“), we discussed several ways to structure a blog to resemble the structure of a book.  For example, using category labels that could double as a table of contents.  Taking content from blog posts and turning it into a readable manuscript can be a challenging task.  Especially when you have a large inventory of blog posts from which to draw.  In this post, I want to propose two tools - the post outline and post sequencing - that can help you organize your posts into a manuscript in a logical manner, without massive rewriting.

Post Outline

First, use your manuscript outline as a tool for cataloging your posts.  An outline is good writing practice.  But it can also help you organize your blog posts.  Here’s one approach.  Use a numbering scheme for each levvel of your outline.  (Most word processor or other outlining software does this for you automatically.  The top most level correspond to chapters.  Lower levels correspond to sections of chapters and content within sections.  The outline forms the basis for a numbering schema to identify the part of the outline to which your posts will be associated. 

Let’s say you are writing a bog about raising dogs.  Part of your outline might look like:

1.  Dog breeds
1.1  Hounds
1.2  Terriers
1.3  Herding dogs
etc.

2.  Dog grooming
2.1  Coat
2.2  Teeth
2.3  Musculoskeletal
etc.

3.  Dog nutrition
3.1  Diets for puppies
3.2  Diets for adult dogs
3.3  Diets for older dogs
3.4  Organic dogfood
etc.

Post Sequencing

Next, use tags to indicate the specific intended location of a post within the manuscript outline.  One approach to doing this is to use the sequence numbers from the outline.  For example, using the outline above, if you had a post about talking about the different types of organic dogfood, it would appear in the category “Dog Nutrition” and might be tagged as “organic-dogfood-3-3-4.”  Sequence numbers would be as long as the number of levels in the outline.  Blogging platforms accomplish tagging differently, but it is a fairly universal feature.  Such sequence tagging allows you to later use the post search tools of your blog to find and organize posts corresponding to each part of your outline. 

Of course, outlines are subject to change.  Chapters can be added, inserted or deleted and this can cause problems with post sequencing based on outline numbering.  An alternative approach might be to code tags with names that correspond to the outline labels.  Then, if the outline changes, the tags are still valid.  Again, using our dog manuscript oultine above, let’s say your organic dogfood post was about feeding your hound chicken flavored tofu .  Using this scheme, you might code the post as ”nutrition, organic, tofu chicken” where the tags are arranged in the descending order of the outline.  If you had multiple tags about chicken flavored tofu for your dog, you could assign a sequence number as the final tag, or find a label that distinguishes them further. 

The advantage of this approach to tagging is that should you decide to move dog nutrition to some other part of the outline, your post sequences remain valid.  If you make dog nutrition part of a chapter on dog health, you can simply add a tag “dog health” to the head of all your tag lists for dog nutrition. 

Creating an outline and using one of the post sequencing techniques above can greatly simplify the task of organizing your blog content into a manuscript.  Good organization is only the first step.  There are other editorial processes that must be applied to get a manuscript that doesn’t feel chopped up, but we shall save those for later posts. 

---

Related Posts

• Non-fiction Blook Mechanics Part 1: Blook by Design
• Why Every Author Should Blog
• Emerging Blook Motifs
• When is a Blog a Book?

Bookmark this Post

---

Blooks - books based on a blog - are becoming more and more popular.  Authors, especially unpublished authors, can benefit from blogging their material first as a way to build an audience for their work.  There are enough blog to book success stories now to make this an attractive option.  Many of the early blook successes were more the result of serendippidity than plan.  In this post, I outline one approach for authors who are intentional about creating a book from a blog.

Title.  Use the same title and subtitle for your blog that you would like to use your book.  This has the advantage of allowing your blog to double as a book website after publication.  Also, it makes it easy for your blog readers to find your new book.

Table of Contents.  Layout out your blog categories to roughly corresond to the table of contents for your book.  Using exactly the same titles for categories and chapters may not always work.  Also, some standard table of content names won’t make any sense for a blog - e.g. Introduction or Epilogue.  The idea is to have a kind of one to one correspondence in mind so that when you go produce your manuscript, you’ll be able to map your blog content to the right places in your book.

Chapter content.  Your blog posts become the content for your chapters; content tagged for a particular category can go in the corresponding chapter.  If you have a post tagged for multiple categories, the flow of your content will probably dictate which chapter it lands in. 

Bibliography.  The links in your posts become your pointers to reference material that appears in a bibliography or set of end notes.

Visuals.  Pictures, illustrations and graphs may present a bit more of a challenge.  If the pictures you want to use in your book involve licensing or permissions, you may have to use substitues on your blog (or go without) while you are negotiating. 

Author bio.  Most blogs make it easy to share your bio, either as a blurb on your main blog page or as a separate page.  Include your picture, and both a short and long form bio for yourself which can be incorporated later into your book.

As you start to post, you’ll want to use blog statistis to rank content and track your word count to know when you have a book equivalent.  A good rule of thumb for a book equivalent is 50,000 - 75,000 words.  You should also track the word count by category.  Remember that your categories are acting as surrogates for chapters.  You will probably to be sure your content is relatively balanced as you go so you don’t wind up with too much or too little content in each chapter.

There are several ways to rank content.  Here are a few examples.

• Page views - the level of overall interest in a particular post.
• Comments - feedback from your readership.  A post with a high number of comments is a good indicator of blook-worthy content. 
• Longevity - the number of days since the original post.  This is useful to find topics that might be evergreen
• Concentration - the number of days since the original post for which there were page views.  Some posts may see all their activity concentrated in a few days (e.g. posts related to news stories) and thus may not be as “durable” as a post that continues to receive page views day after day. 
• Density - the number o page views for the post divided by the overall page views for the blog.  This shows the contribution of the post to overall blog activity. 

In subsequent posts, I plan to share more specifics on the blog to book process, including:

• Ideas for editing posts into a cohesive, engaging manuscript.
• Tools that make it easy ways to track and collect your references.
• Using tags as a surrogate indexing schema.
• Creating a compelling pitch card for publishers using your blog statistics.
• Blook techniques for fiction writers.
• Preparing a blog tour while crafting your blook.

I would welcome any thoughts or ideas that others like to share on this subject.

---

Related Posts

• Why Every Author Should Blog
• Emerging Blook Motifs
• Finding Book Gold in Blog Post Archives
• When is a Blog a Book?
• Blog to Book

Bookmark this Post

 

---

 

First consider the size and structure of the blogosphere.  The popularity of blogs has soared in the last few years.  There are now over 100 million blogs tracked by Technorati, which doesn’t even include the more than 70 million Chinese blogs.  According to recent demographic surveys by the Pew Internet Study and the New York Times / CBS News, blogs have become mainstream and represent virtually every audience and topic area. 

Blogs focused on a given topic tend to link to similar blogs.  What this means is you can use blogs to:

• Develop an audience for your work while you write
• Promote your book effectively and at low cost once it is written

A blog bears many resemblances to a book. Both have a title and subtitle that reflect the content of a book. Blog posts can be organized into categories which serve as a kind of table of contents to classify and group related material. Blog posts, typically 300-500 words in length, represent the raw content of a book. Links within posts or on the blog roll serve as a bibliography, showing references to source material.

How do you attract people to your blog? Initially, through searches individuals make on popular search engine sites like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN. By using popular keywords in your blog title, subtitle, categories and posts, your blog will begin to turn up in these searches. You can discover these keywords using keyword discovery tools or simply checking out popular blogs in your topic area. The more you blog, the more others discover and link to your blog content, the higher will be the ranking of your blog site in search results, and the greater the traffic you will receive.

Blog software usually provides a basic set of statistics that allow you to track important information such as number of visitors, page views, referring sites and average time spent by each visitor. Page views and comments left by visitors for specific blog posts provide an indicator of popular content. This makes blogs an excellent way for you to field test and select material to be included in your book.

Once you have cultivated an audience, you can transform your blog into a great marketing platform. For example, you can:

• Feature your book on a special blog page, with your bio, a book description, excerpts, press releases and testimonials; thus your blog can double as a book website.
• Promote your book to a wider audience by arranging a blog tour.  A blog tour is a series of scheduled guest appearances on related blogs, where you have the opportunity to talk about your book. This is a low cost, high impact method to discover new readers for your work. 

The blogosphere is not the only place to market your work, but it can one of the best. 

Whether you are publishing independently or trying to sign on with a traditional publisher, blogging can be key to your success. More publishers are now starting to view the blogosphere as a fertile ground to find promising writers. Why? As an author who blogs, you can quantify your audience and this is attractive to risk averse publishers.  This is, in essence, the new author book pitch.

Blogging is a low risk, low cost way to build your audience while you are developing your work, and then promote your finished book to that same audience. Give it a try!

---

Related Posts

• Blog Touring 101: Around the Blogosphere in 80 Days
• Virtual Book Tours: An Interview with Steve Weber
• Emerging Blook Motifs
• Vive le Permalink! - the Humble Source of Readership 
• Finding a Few of Your Favorite Keywords
• The New Author Book Pitch

Bookmark this Post

---

Wikipedia has popularized the notion of a major reference being created by the crowd - unpaid individuals contributing their knowledge to be viewed and edited by others in a more or less continuous evolutionary process.  According to (what else!) the Wikipedia:

Wikipediais an online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. It was formally launched on 15 January 2001. Initially it was created as a complement and ‘feeder’ to the expert-written English-language encyclopedia project ‘Nupedia‘, in order to provide an additional source of draft articles and ideas. It quickly overtook Nupedia, growing to become a large global project, and originating a wide range of additional reference projects. As of 2008, Wikipedia includes several million freely-usable articles and pages in hundreds of languages worldwide, and content from millions of contributors. It is one of the world’s most popular web sites and is an extensively used reference source worldwide.

This publishing process is known as “crowdsourcing,” a term coined by James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds.  Crowdsourcing has been used to create textbooks and to solve problems in science and business.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary may represent the first instance of unpaid volunteers contributing to the creation of a master reference work that, for its time, challenged the capacity of an individual or even a dedicated team of experts to create.  The process of assembling and editing the content for what is now the world’s foremost English dictionary was described by Simon Winchester in his book The Professor and the Madman.  The idea of using non-experts to help gather the raw content for the proposed dictionary was suggested in 1857 by Richard Chenevix Trench, dean of Westminster and archbishop of Dublin, in a speech he gave at the London Library entitled “On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries.”

He proposed a new, comprehensive dictionary for the English language that would provide essentially a biography of each word; it’s current and historical definitions, nuances and usage.   The project was gigantic in its scope and scale.  The idea of such a dictionary wasn’t new, but the method Trench suggested for gathering the lexicographical content for each word was unusual and exciting.  Here is Winchester’s description:

. . . here Trench presented an idea, an idea that - to those ranks of conservative and frock-coated men who sat silently in the library on that dark and foggy evening - was potentially dangerous and revolutionary.  But it was the idea that made the whole enterprise possible.

The undertaking of the scheme, he said, was beyond the ability of any one man  To peruse all of English literature - and to comb the London and New York newspapers and the most literate of the magazines and journals - must be instead “the combined action of many.”  It would be necessary to recruit a team - moreover, a huge one - probably hundreds and hundreds of unpaid amateurs, all of them working as volunteers.

The project commenced about a year after Trench’s speech.  The dictionary would draw from three periods of English literature:  1250-1526, 1527-1674 and 1675 to the present day.  A circular was issued asking for volunteers and each volunteer would specify what period they would read from.  They would create word lists as they read and also search for words of particular interst to the dictionary editorial team; then they would provide the context for the occurrence of these words.  Volunteers would record their findings on slips of paper.  Each slip would contain the target word, the date, the title of the book or paper in which it was found, the volume and page number, and finally the full sentence in which it occurred.   Volunteers would then submit these to the dictionary’s staff, which sorted them using alphabetically organized oakboard pigeonholes (54 in all).  The senior editor would then sort through these slips to find those of the greatest interest and necessity for the compilation of the dictionary. 

The project moved forward with fits and starts.  It’s original editor, Frederick Furnivall, eventually handed off the task of managing the compilation to James Murray, who was better able to motivate the volunteers and obtain sponsorship from Oxford University’s press.  The first complete version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was published in 1928.  The compilation, editing and publishing of the dictionary took over 70. 

The scope of the achievement is best characterized by the number of words it defines (over 500,000), the detail of its entries and the sheer physical heft of its printed volumes.  The OED team were the early pioneers of crowdsourcing.  Their version of the “wiki” was done without the Internet and computer technology.  It was also less democratic - while it used volunteers, the fate of the material they submitted was subject  to the scrutiny and control of the dictionary’s editorial staff.  In this sense, they were a not fully evolved ”proto-wiki.”  But the project demonstrated the wisdom of crowds and provided an important historical precedent for using amateurs to create important, large reference works. 

Wikipedia, with over 2.2 million articles and  961 million words, has vastly exceeded the Oxford English Dictionary in its scale and the speed of its growth.  However, Jimmy Wales, the charismatic founder of Wikipedia, would no doubt offer a tip of the cap to the tireless, passionate staff and volunteers of the original OED who for their accomplishment in creating an enduring and monumental reference work. 

---

Related Posts

• Crowdsource your Book Marketing
• Collaborative Fiction - Still in the Laboratory
• The Wisdom of Book Loving Crowds
• The Quiet Revolution in Book Writing

Bookmark this Post

---

Humanity never tires of hearing a good story.  In ancient times, stories were told around a roaring campfire.  The oral tradition evolved and continues even after the written word had become the dominant way to retain cultural knowledge.   Radio and now podcasts are its modern incarnation. 

The  podcast novel is finding its place in the bibliosphere as a way for indie authors to build an audience when publishers won’t bite.  Some authors have achieved remarkable success telling their stories in the ”podiobooks” format.   JC Hutchins is one example.  He has built a highly active Internet community around his work without ever publishing in print form.  He has finally relented and decided to publish one of his novels, 7th Son: Descent, which goes to print iin 2009. 

So what is a podiobook?  A podiobook(or podcast novel) is a term coined by Evo Terra to describe serialized audio books which are made available in podcast format.   Innovative authors are evolving podcast novels by adding more production values.  In some sense, it may follow the creative arc of old time radio drama.  Some of these enhancements include:

• Guest voices on a podcast
• Sound effects
• Music to heighten the emotional impact
• Building community with the podcast audience by posting listener feedback on a blog associated with the podcast

All of these add emotional impact and help the reader better imagine the story.  Creating a podcast movel takes  work, however.  A lot more work than, say, creating and writing a blog.  Some of the considerations you will need to make include:

• Format - i.e. whether single or multiple voices, other production values, how long each episode should be, etc.
• Recording equipment and editing software - the tools you use will depend on the requirements of your podcast as well as your comfort level with technology; don’t underestimate the learning curve
• Time investment - episodes can easily take upwards of 8 hours to fully produce and distribute; longer if you’re adding voices, sound effects and music
• Costs for hosting, storage and throughput
• Tracking downloads and getting / responding to feedback from your audience

There are many good references to help you get started.  One of the best I’ve found is Podcasting Bible by Steve Mack and Mark Ratcliffe.  The authors provide a comprehensive overview of the subject and take you through the four stages of a podcast:

• Planning,
• Recording and editing
• Encoding
• Distribution

One of the things you’ll need to be especially aware of - success has its costs.  Generally, podcast distribution services charge for storage and throughput.  Throughput can be expensive if thousands of fans start downloading your serialized story podcasts.  Be sure to check the terms of your podcast hosting service or distribution network and calculate what a popular podcast might wind up costing you.

Even if you’re writing a work of non-fiction, you can use a podcast to promote your book.  Patrice Anne-Rutledge published an article in Writers Weekly on promoting books with podcasts.  The article is a comprehensive collection of tips and resources that budding podcast authors will find very useful. 

As a yonng child, one of my fondest memories was being in school and having the teacher read a story to me and my classmates at the end of the day.  Podcast stories, when done well, let me recaptre that experience.  Podcast novels and poidobooks are just the latest step in the great oral tradition of storytelling.

---

Related Posts

• An Interview with Podcast Novel Superstar Scott Sigler
• Author Exchanges - A Better Way to Discover Promising New Wrtiers?
• Author Podcast Marketing Samplers
• You’re on the Air . . . a Podcast of One’s Own
• Podiobook Communities
• Pod Trailers and Book Casts

Bookmark this Post

---

The New York Times reported that popular writer Cassie Edwards , who has written over 100 historical romance novels, was recently accused of plagiarism by bloggers at Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books.  The bloggers discovered similarities between excerpts from several of Ms. Edwards’ works (Running Fox, Savage Longings, Savage Moon and Savage Beloved) and passages from various sources. 

In a follow-on post on Saturday, January 13, the same bloggers reported that a reader had found that Ms. Edwards may also have lifted text from Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the fictional work 1930.  The reader, a woman named Amy, sent the blog an e-mail which detailed 17 different instances where another of Ms. Edwards’ novels, Savage Dream, appears to have borrowed from Laughing Boy. 

Edwards commented that she didn’t realize she had to attribute her sources in a romance novel, saying “When you write historical romances, you’re not asked to do that.” 

Signet Books, a division of Pengin Group which has published a dozen of Cassie Edwards’ novels, said it was investigating the alleged plagiarism and was checking all of the works she had published with them. 

The bloggers at Smart Bitches uncovered the apparent copying by plugging excerpts of Ms. Edwards’ books into Google and then comparing passages side by side.  An article on the Marywood University Library website provides an example of how this can be done.  The University of Maryland College website also provides a list of plagiarism detection tools. 

The book publishing world has been periodically rocked by scandals involving plagiarism.  For example, Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life was pulled from bookstores after it was learned that she had copied portions of another author’s work.  The problem seems to be getting worse.  A few years ago, an article apppearing in Slate entitled How to Curb the Plagiarism Epidemic, cited the gorwing problem of high rpofile plagiarism.  As plagiarism detection tools get more sophisticated, expect more instances of established authors being ”savaged.”

---

Related Posts

• Taking Care with Copyrights
• SEO 101 for Publishers & Authors - An Interview with Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin

Bookmark this Post

---

Book Vid Lit

by Sheila Clover-English

Sheila Clover English, the CEO of Circle of Seven Productions, has been a pioneer
in book video production, marketing and distribution for authors and publishers

---

Book videos are becoming a popular and accepted form of book marketing.  During the past several years, I have produced and distributed many book videos and found them to be potent devices for attracting readers and selling books.  But authors and publishers who venture into this new realm need to understand a few things about web marketing in order to use this new tool effectively.

Book Videos are Objects of Desire

First, book videos work because, unlike the advertisements we are used to from the print or broadcast media, they are objects designed to be found and consumed as the result of intentional searches.  By this, I mean that individuals find book videos because they are searching for information or resources related to a particular topic or interest.     The very fact that an individual found a book video as a result of their own searching means the odds are greater they will watch it - and if they find it compelling, that they will buy the book. 

For example, if an individual likes cave pearls and this is their hobby, they might search on the term “cave pearls.”  They may look on YouTube they may look for blogs about it.  When they do they will find the book Pearl Jinx by Sandra Hill. It is a story about people hunting for cave pearls.  “Did you say cave pearls?!  Wow!  I love cave pearls!  This might be something totally new for me!”  Now, they have found a book about their favorite topic and are more likely to take that next step and buy it.

This is what makes book videos such a useful online marketing and branding tool for books.  They turn up in searches for book trailers.   But, because they are tagged, book videos  can also be returned in general search results related to the topic of the book.  Book video can nurture potential readers or bring established readers to topics they want to read about.

Use Tags to Help Readers Find Your Book Video

Tags are descriptors attached to the videos you upload to online video sharing sites.  They are important because they help people find your video.    Tags are a form of “meta data” - information about your book video that search engines incorporate when they index your content.  When an individual types a keyword or phrase into a search box, this meta data is what the search engines uses to return search results.  For this reason, tags are very important.

There are three types of information you should provide when you upload your video online.

• Title. Make the title clear.  Be sure to include your name as well.  People will be able to find you according to what’s in your title.
• Description.  Don’t let your description become a commercial.  Make it exciting. My experience with producing and marketing book videos shows that this is how you get people who are interested in your topic to pick up your book.  Use the description to write what is exciting and unique about your book!   Some video sharing sites limit the number of words so choose yours carefully. If you use your name in the title, don’t waste your limited description copy to repeat it.  Keep your description topic focused, not just genre specific.  Give the reader a feel for the story. 
• Tags.  Tags are another device to help people find you. Tags allow individuals to search for your book video using specific words.  Again, there is no need to include your name as a tag, if it is already in the title.  If people want to find youspecifically they will go to your website.  Often, the number of tags you can use is limited.  Use terms that capture the essence of your book without being so popular that your listing will appear near the bottom of results from searches using those terms.  For example, you would probably want to avoid using terms like “love” or “sexy.”  Try out your tags in searches on the sites where you are planning to upload your video.  The number of items returned by the search query will let you know how much competition there is for thosee terms.

Using the descriptors above help people find you whether the topic of your book is vampires or football.  Note that I always include the word “book” or “novel” in the tags just to be sure people understand what they are looking at is a book.

Tell a Good Story to Energize your Web Marketing

People looking for what you have to sell are more likely to buy it.

How do you use a video to get people interested in reading your book?  In my experience, the answer is straightforward. Make good videos.  Make the videos appealing, exciting and entertaining.  Perhaps the best advice to give here is:  don’t use a video to sell your book.  Use it to sell your story and make potential readers want more.  For example, give them one sentence that asks a question they will want answered:

“If you could go back in time and change 20 seconds of your life, what would it be?”

That’s a great question to make someone read on or go to your website. That puts them in the story. What would they do is what they will be asking themselves.  It lets the viewer invest themselves in a story they don’t know about.

Or you can make a statement that ties into other entertainment that might resonate with the viewer.  For instance:

“James Bond meets the Geek Squad in this romantic comedy about spies, planes and TV sci-fi programs.”

That let’s your viewers know about the story and still makes them wonder what in the world that could be about?

Think bigger when you market your book.  Get your readers to buy into your story. Get them to want to invest their time in it by investing themselves (asking questions, hitting a topic they already like).

Most books are targeted at a specific readership.  The internet offers the best way to aggregate niche audiences.  Make it easy for them to find you, then make them want your story.

---

Related Posts

• Marketing with Book Videos - An Interview with Sheila Clover English
• Taking Care with Copyrights
• Pod Trailers and Book Casts
• Book Trailer on a Budget
• Book Trailer - The New Book Cover?
• SEO 101 for Publishers & Authors - An Interview with Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin

Bookmark this Post

---

Halloween approaches.  Night falls early and the wind howls menacingly.  Leaves swirl and crackle along the ground.  Thoughts turn to Dracula and Frankenstein.  Meanwhile, novice writers huddle in their homes and gear up for NaNoWriMo.  All of which conjures up the question:  Could a software program write a novel?  Yikes!  Open those pod bay doors, Hal, and let me out!  Any time we consider having an automaton perform an acitivity that we have always regarded as distinctly human, it sends shivers down our spines.  But let’s close our eyes for a moment, take a deep, calming breath and explore this a bit. 

First, what would it take for a computer program to create a believable work of fiction?  Certainly it would need some state of the art linguistic processing capability.  Not just the ability to create syntactically and grammatically correct prose, but also an understanding of semantics.  And that’s just the foundation.  On top of that Robo Writer would need the ability to conceive interesting stories, create memorable characters and animate them with credible dialogue and behaviors.  Could the same kind of fallible logic that frustrates our use of the word processor and spreadsheet possibly do any of this?

Well - not yet.  But the technologies required are continually evolving.  An example of linguistic processing improvement is WhiteSmoke.  WhiteSmoke software analyses text on-the-fly or at the user’s request and suggests grammatical improvements, amends spelling and enriches text through suggesting alternative or additional wording.  What is interesting about WhiteSmoke’s approach is that it is supported by an online database that constantly crawls Internet sites for common usage of English.  It uses that knowledge to edit prose based on the type of English style selected, for instance commercial, legal, medical, casual, creative, executive and even dating.

There are numerous programs, for example NewNovelist and WritersBlock that break down fiction writing into a defined process and help writers to plan their story and organize their research. 

Beyond these baby steps, one can imagine databases of characters, built up from standard physical and psychological profiles, similar to those used in law enforcement.  Drawing on the work of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, other databases of archetypal story themes could provide templates into which scanning software could plug items plucked from news sites, blogs and other social media to generate stories.

The ultimate way to decide whether a computer had arrived at literary competence would be something like the Turing test.  Alan Turing, one of the father of the modern stored program computer considered the question of how we could know whether a computer had achieved human scale intelligence.  He devised a simple test.  A human sits in a room and can communicate with another entity on the other side of a wall by exchanging written messages through a slot in the wall.  The human participant can ask the entity any kind of question to determine whether it is human or machine.  If, at the end of the questioning, the human can’t tell whether the entity is human or machine, then effectively the computer program has passed the Turing test and achieved the level of human intelligence.  In fact, there is a contest, held each year, to determine whether any software has met this criteria.  The winner of this annual contest is the best entry relative to other entries for that year, regardless of how good it is in an absolute sense.  (No one is claiming absolute victory yet.)

We envision two Turing literary tests for a computer generated work of fiction.  

• Soft test - Human readers can’t tell it’s not human generated.
• Hard test - Human readers not only can’t tell it’s not human generated, but they’ll actually purchase it. 

For the moment, let us suspend our judgment about whether we want computers writing books and see where such a technology might take us.  Here are some speculations.

• Publishers could eliminate those pesky authors.  (Well, maybe not entirely.  Authors, in addition to their writing contribution, are also the most important part of the marketing equation for a book.  Perhaps Disney could chip in some animatrons.) 
• Authors could use software programs as writing assistants.  Few authors are expert at every aspect of writing:  story, scene structure, character, dialogue.   Let the software do some of the heavy lifting e.g. fleshing out the minor characters or adding polish to the dialogue.  The good news is, software programs won’t ask for title credit.
• Reverse the process.  If a program can write a novel, couldn’t it also read a novel.  Goodbye slush pile!  Publishers could employ armies of “robot readers” who would funnel the good stuff up the food chain.    They could also take a manuscript that had been accepted for publication and rework it into a salable work.
• Mass customization.  Who says a book has to be the same for every audience.  Let the software add subtle cultural nuances for different audiences in different countries.  Kind of like the way McDonald’s tweaks it burgers for different tastes in different countries.

There is precedent.  We’ve already seen technology invading the film and music industries.  In each case, the human element isn’t replaced, but empowered.  So Robo Writer may just turn out to be a friendly Frankenstein.  Maybe some wealthy, aging patron, seeking a bit of immortality, could offer a substantial prize for the first work of fiction written entirely by a computer program, to pass the hard literary Turing test.  Who knows, maybe one of this year’s NaNoWriMo contestants may turn out to be disembodied bit of logic.  On the Internet, nobody knows you’re not human.

---

Related Posts

• The Quiet Revolution in Book Writing
• A Second Life for your Blog Novel
• NaNoPreMo - a pecha kucha warmup for nanowrimo

Bookmark this Post

---

October is here and it’s NaNoWriMo season.  NaNoWriMo, as you may recall, is an annual event where authors strive to write 50,000 words during the month of November.  That’s a grueling 1,667 words per day.   I say grueling because I compare it to writing 3 blog posts of about 500 words per day.  Ouch!  Of course, no judgment is passed on the quality of the writing - the goal is strictly to get to 50,000 words.  The idea is to inspire new writers to get in the discipline of writing daily.  The editing and revisions come later.  The event has become very popular and last years had 79,000 entrants, of whom 13,000 made it to the 50,000 word mark.

But what about the story itself?  Wouldn’t it be nice to have some feedback on the overall story itself before you make the time investment required for 50,000 words?  How about a pre-event NaNoPreMo (for National Novel Preview Month) to test out your concept?  Here’s how it might work. 

• Capture the essence of your storyline in visuals with a digital camera, or a camera equipped cell phone.  The nice thing about using a cell phone is that you’re more likely to always have that with you - important, since ideas can occur anywhere.
• Next, e-mail your pictures to your Flickr (or other photo site) account.  Mark it as private if you don’t want to share it with others. 
• Tag your photos to make it easy to organize and assemble them later.
• Put them into a simple pecha kucha style PowerPoint.  (Recall that the pecha kucha format is 20 slides, 20 seconds for each slide.)  Add text and / or audio as needed.
• Show your stuff at a pecha kucha event to gather feedback.  These showings could be sponsored by local NaNoWriMo groups.  Let the feedback occur during socializing / networking that follows the presentations.

The process wouldn’t be too time intensive and could be a good precursor to an in depth book outline.  I would run NaNoPreMo during September and give aspiring authors all of October to adjust their story outlines in preparation for the November frenzy.   The first step in writing a novel is having a good story that people will want to read.  Something like NaNoPreMo could help new writers get over that hurdle before they confront the spectre of the word meter.

---

Related Posts

• Visual tagging - the next new book review?
• Tumblr - stream of conciousness blogging

Bookmark this Post

---