Trends

The online writing site Scribd has been in the news over the last day as someone with the same name as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan--the suspect held after yesterday's mass shooting at Fort Hood--had posted an essay about suicide bombings on the site.

The NY Times joined seven other news outlets writing about a FBI investigation into the work of a Scribd poster with the same name as the shooting suspect: "In one posting on the Web site Scribd, a man named Nidal Hasan compared the heroism of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade to protect fellow soldiers to suicide bombers who sacrifice themselves to protect Muslims."

Based on this newspaper speculation, the essay has been read over 4,000 times and generated 44 comments on Scribd, most of them from readers debating the identity of the essay writer. However, a simple SuperPages search turned up six different people named Nidal Hasan around the United States. As these online writing communities grow, they will invariably be mixed up in news stories--but it is difficult to connect these online personalities to a real writer.

Over at our sibling blog, FishbowlLA, Tina Dupuy interviewed a former LA Times editor about the dilemma facing every writer in the 21st Century: to blog or not to blog.

Richard Rushfield explained why he left his post at a national newspaper to serve as West Coast editor at Gawker: "There were so many times when you'd write a wonderful article for the LA Times, or break some news and it would just be met by the sound of crickets. When you are at the LAT you're at a place where even the website isn't in the central flow of the nation's cultural conversation. But at Gawker one is very much in and a part of that conversation and as one who is writing, in part at least to communicate, that's where you want to be."

Despite this new focus, Rushfield didn't lose his long-form chops. He also wrote a new book: "Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost: A Memoir of Hampshire College in the Twilight of the '80s."

Amazon.com (AMZN) has entered the Twitter-sphere with new program, drawing a mix of criticism and praise among users.

According to TechCrunch, Amazon.com has launched a new feature for Amazon Associates entitled "Share on Twitter." The program allows associates to tweet about products sold at Amazon, generating quick and easy links back to a page on the bookseller's site. In an email to associates, the company wrote: "When Twitter users click on the link in your post and make a qualifying sale, you'll earn referral fees."

Many readers are worried that these referrals might harm the integrity of Twitter. ReadWriteWeb had these thoughts: "Soon they'll start promoting a great book they just read, a DVD they liked, or one of a million other things pulled out of Amazon's vast inventory. None of it will sound out of place given the types of informal conversations that take place on Twitter every day. You won't even know that they're advertising to you until you click through on the link and find yourself on an Amazon.com webpage--and even then, you may not be sure." (Via Jose Afonso Furtado)

As newspapers, literary journals, and digital publishers debate the future of content, one issue looms large: do we need paywalls to earn money for our content? According to The New York Times' public editor, executive editor Bill Keller has said that the paper will decide "within weeks" whether to erect a paywall--setting the pace for everybody from online literary journals to hometown papers.

Last week Five Chapters editor David Daley confessed his own uneasiness with his free journal's role in the publishing economy: "I'm not always sure it's good for the overall reading culture," he said. What do you think? Our blog network is running a poll to find out what all the different media types in the audience think about this crucial topic. Add your answer below...

Do You Think Paywalls Will Save Newspapers?(trends)

Many publishing companies read social trends like tea leaves, trying to mirror them in books. This trend-mirroring focus has had some unexpected results, like monster mash-up overload to a book deal gold rush for comedians.

Today's guest on the Morning Media Menu was Alain Sylvain, managing director of strategy at the branding agency, Redscout. Around the 10:25 mark, Sylvain explained that publishers should stop reporting on these trends and focus on discovering the subtext behind these unexpected events.

Here's an excerpt from the interview: "If we were thinking about innovating a publishing space, we would start with account planning--really getting to the bottom of what consumers think about and want every day. The publishing community holds a mirror up to the culture...Where I think publishing has an opportunity to really offer something new is asking: 'what's the subtext?' Publishing has to get more tapped into what people are really feeling about the world around them, rather than reporting what is."

Extending a trend that has swept through the publishing industry like an airborne virus, Ravenous Romance has launched what is reportedly the world's first zombie love anthology--bringing romance to the most gruesome subgenre in horror literature.

Entitled "Hungry For Your Love: An Anthology of Zombie Romance," the anthology is edited by Lori Perkins. Featured authors include: Brian Keene, Lois Gresh, and Michael Marshall Smith According to the company, St. Martin's Press has bought reprint rights to the anthology, and it will publish next year. Ravenous Romance will also publish a digital audiobook version.

Here's more from Perkins' introduction: "[At] the Ravenous Romance office, I informed my colleagues that we would be doing a zombie romance anthology. They were emphatically skeptical. We posted the thesis on Facebook and hundreds of readers said they couldn't imagine romance with rotting corpses. Oh, ye of little faith. The zombie mythos is the perfect metaphor for the end of an era, for a society beset with change it doesn't understand but knows is here."

As the magazine industry is pummeled by layoffs, the short story has become an early casualty in this economic disaster for print publications.

Today's guest on the Morning Media Menu was David Daley, the editor and founder of the short story website, Five Chapters. Daley explained how he built his website from scratch in 2006, serializing a short story every week in five easy-reading pieces--his site now earns thousands of page views a week. In addition, Daley gave a candid look at how online literary journals have affected the short story market.

Here's an excerpt from the interview: "I'm not paying these writers anything, and we all know what's happened to the short story as a form in magazines. There used to be the Atlantic had one every week, but now they only do it once a year. There used to be more fiction in GQ and Esquire. Now all of those places don't run fiction. All the places where authors might have gotten a few dollars a word for their stories have gone away. They are left with things like Five Chapters--which, in a way, is good for me--but I'm not always sure it's good for the overall reading culture."

Editor's note: Esquire still maintains a fiction page here.

Tomorrow novelist Neil Gaiman and a thousand Twitter followers will write an audiobook script together on Twitter--an epic test to see if the Twittersphere can actually cooperate on a story.

The whole project starts on this Twitter page at 12 EST tomorrow (October 13). Gaiman will tweet the first line of a story, and the Twittersphere will add the next sentences, continuing the story in a round-robin style. To be included in the mix, your addition to the story must be tagged #bbcawdio and be sent to the correct Twitter page. Here's an example we composed, purely for instructional purposes: "@BBCAA: After writing his first tweet, Neil Gaiman immediately visited GalleyCat.com, his favorite website in the world. #bbcawdio"

Here's more from the sponsors, BBC Audiobooks America: "When roughly 1000 Tweets are logged, we'll edit the contributions and compile a script, then head into the studio to record and produce the audiobook. The final audiobook will be downloadable free on our website and also available as a digital download at iTunes and other audiobook retailers."

The world's first Twitter-lit adaptation has won the People's Choice Award at the international Filminute competition.

Twitter author Arjun Basu (pictured) rallied his army of Twitter readers, a readership gained as Basu publishes bite-sized, fictional tweets like this short short story every day: "They tolerated the ennui of their jobs, bought off by promises of spectacular riches sometime in the future. At retirement, they bought guns."

Now Canadian director James Cooper adapted one of Basu's stories into a minute-long film called "Life." As the press release about the winning films shows, the short film genre is booming--start writing your Twitter scripts today...

The Twitter stream appears to have frozen in the early afternoon, undoubtedly distressing many GalleyCat readers. UPDATE: Everything appears to be back to normal. Nevertheless, here are some publishing tweets for you, published on a good old fashioned blog platform...

NASA will bomb the moon tomorrow. What's your favorite moon-related book to prepare? (140-character limit-exceeding note: This editor recommends the e-book version of "The Moon Pool" by Abraham Merritt)

Six kids' books by Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, are headed to the big screen.

It turns out literary and publishing blogs have a secret formula!

Brave CBS Early Show weather anchor crosses the country on $50 and the kindness of strangers.