Web & Tech

Yesterday afternoon, former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman came to the Center for Publishing, a division of NYU's School for Continuing and Professional Studies, to talk about her new company, Open Road Integrated Media, which aims to publish electronic editions of backlisted titles by big-name authors like William Styron, Pat Conroy, and Iris Murdoch along with, in separate branding tracks, original fiction and non-fiction by other writers, quite possibly including some with no prior publishing history. Friedman also introduced the audience to Open Road president Jeffrey Sharp, who previously ran a film development division at HarperCollins and will be engaged in similar efforts in his new position—but high-profile action items like a movie version of Styron's Lie Down in Darkness appear to be of less day-to-day importance than the development of a steady stream of marketing videos to promote the Open Road titles. Friedman was adamant, however, that such videos would not be integrated into the books themselves to create "vook" hybrids. "We do not want to disrupt the purity of the read," she declared. "We want the marketing to drive the reader to the book."

The audience at the lunchtime talk was a mix of NYU students and publishing execs—we spotted Russell Perreault, Robert Miller, Matthew Baldacci, and Peter Workman, among others—and came loaded with questions; while Friedman did deflect a few topics (DRM, piracy, and the Google Books Settlement), she spoke at length about her company's willingness to collaborate with the "legacy publishers" who held print rights to Open Road backlist titles and possibly even to license rights to paper editions of Open Road originals. She also offered her thoughts on e-book pricing, which she's initially aiming to keep at levels comparable to trade paperbacks: "The value of an e-book is the same value for the person reading it as any other format of the book," she offered, rejecting the notion that digital editions had to be "cheap."

(photo courtesy of NYU; full disclosure: senior editor Ron Hogan is an adjunct faculty member at the Center for Publishing)

After a week of sifting through Twitter feeds, GalleyCat has completed the rough draft versions of our Twitter Lists--but we need your help to make them complete. In an ongoing effort to make the GalleyCat Twitter feed more user friendly, we are building a few fancy new Twitter lists that will break the hundreds of publishing posts we read every day into curated, easy reading collections.

We won't even pretend that these lists are comprehensive. We will perpetually update these lists with your suggestions--send @GalleyCat a message to add your favorite feed to the appropriate list.

Here are the new lists. For inspiration, check the Best Author Twitter Feeds. For help finishing your manuscript, check the Best Writing Advice Twitter Feeds. For help promoting your book, read the Best Book Publicity Feeds. For up-to-date intelligence for your book, check out the Best Publishing News Twitter Feeds. For buying books, visit the Best Bookstore Twitter Feeds.

Here are our earlier lists: For a look at publishing's future, check out the Best Digital Book Twitter Feeds. For a look at publishing's socially-networked present, check out the Best Publisher Twitter Feeds. For an inside look at book deals, check out the Best Agent Twitter Feeds. Finally, check out the collected Twitter wisdom of the speakers at the upcoming mediabistro.com eBook Summit.

While working on a book about Liberia, one journalist discovered a way to connect Liberian communities online--turning her print project into a full-time multimedia vocation.

Today's guest on the Morning Media Menu was Ruthie Ackerman, founder of the hyperlocal website, Ceasefire Liberia. Through a variety of multimedia projects, Ackerman's site connects Liberian immigrants with Liberian communities in Africa--using social media to share news, poems, essays, and pictures between separated communities. The writer shared advice about building hyperlocal sites with other communities.

Here's an excerpt from the interview: "I started writing a book about Liberia...I had gone there to see what was going on with youth there, especially the ones that had went through the war there. I had heard they were slipping through the cracks ... Then I realized that one of the biggest Liberian communities was right here in New York City--which is where I live--on Staten Island."

What's wrong with reading digital text? Too cheap? Too computerized? Too many devices? For one writer, the answer is obvious.

In a Christian Science Monitor op-ed, author Trevor Corson explained his problem with digital reading: "Vertical orientation makes no sense in an increasingly paperless world that we view in the horizontal frame of our computer screens. 'The document' needs to be reconceived as something that goes not up and down, like paper, but sideways."

His essay focuses on the web application, Tofu. It was created by a programmer in England named Amar Sagoo. As illustrated by that graphic, the simple program rearranges digital text into columns, allowing the user to read in columns from left-to-right, rather than endlessly scrolling down. Here's a quick summary of the reading experience, from the essay: "The columns are arranged sideways in a way that's completely native to the width of the screen." Mac users can explore the program here.

Every week editors, writers, readers, and publishers engage in sprawling literary discussions on Twitter. All the microbloggers in the audience should join their local Twitter chat.

Highspot created a handy-dandy list of some popular literary Twitter chats to help you find a chat. The list included the following hashtags, follow the links to read posts:#editorchat, #followreader, #kidlitchat, #litchat, #platformchat, and #writechat.

We're sure GalleyCat readers can remind us of more, add your favorites in the comments. In the meantime, here's some good advice about following literary chats, from the article: "Use the Twitter search page and enter the chat’s hashtag. This will pull up all the tweets for that chat. Set up a new column in TweetDeck using the chat’s hashtag as a search term. Again, this will pull up all the tweets for that chat. Use an app such as TweetChat."

(Fourth Story Media CEO Lisa Holton looks on as creative development and marketing manager Ariel Aberg-Riger browses the Amanda Project website.)

"I was thinking more and more about how we publish books and how we reach our audiences," Lisa Holton told us as we sat at the work table Fourth Story Media shares with Cookstr in their South Street offices, "and about how young people incorporate technology into their lives. How do we develop traditional book publishing but marry it to various online and digital media in a way that makes sense to readers?" Last summer, after leaving her position as Scholastic's president of trade publishing, Holton launched Fourth Story as an incubator for the multi-platform stories she had in mind for young readers.

The first venture—The Amanda Project—is now in play, as HarperTeen has published the first in a projected eight-volume series. The initial story was developed by Melissa Kantor, whom Holton had first published back at Hyperion, with individual volumes assigned to different authors. At a website (developed in collaboration with Happy Cog Studios), readers who've gotten sucked into the story of three high school classmates, who weren't friends to start with, banding together to figure out what happened to the one girl they had in common, can create online personae for themselves and add new perspectives to the weekly mini-puzzles supplementing the narrative in the print volumes. ("They've immersed themselves way more deeply than we thought they would," Aberg-Riger confessed; at one point, putting the clues in one puzzle together, the teen players began to organize a trip to Paris—sending the Fourth Story office into a frenzy before they realized the girls were just plotting out their characters' travel plans.) The first four books will tell one story arc which, combined with the revelations gradually unfolding online, will set up a second story arc for the back half.

The effect, we commented to Holton, was like a participatory soap opera, or a massive Dungeons & Dragons campaign with one dungeonmaster and hundreds of players; she brought up the classic text-based puzzle games Infocom created for home computer owners in the 1980s, which set us both on a nostalgia kick for their adaptation of The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, one of the truly great interactive fictions. (Interestingly, that was the second time this month we'd found ourselves in that conversation!)

"A lot of adults had a really hard time grasping this," Holton says of the way the books and the website link together into one overarching immersive narrative, "but I would explain it to a 13-year-old girl and " (she snaps! her fingers) "she'd get it in 30 seconds. In fact, beta users used to tell us it took them a long time to figure the website out, and it would turn out 'a long time' was five minutes." Inspired by the initial success of The Amanda Project, Fourth Story is already preparing another series, a science-fiction-themed narrative aimed at young male readers. "In some ways, this is radically different than what I'd been doing for the last 20 years," Holton reflects, "but the basics are still the same... What's the story? And how do you think readers will be interested by it?"

As literary journals and writers migrate online, it becomes more difficult to create a sense of community between readers in the vastness of cyberspace.

Today's guest on the Morning Media Menu was Jürgen Fauth, co-founder of a social networking site for writers called Fictionaut. Fauth discussed how his site has opened up a new community space for literary magazines, building a socially-networked model for 21st Century writers. He also explained how up-and-coming writers can become part of the site's growing community.

Here's an excerpt from the interview: "What happened is a lot of editors at literary magazines--especially the more web savvy people who saw the potential of [Fictionaut]--jumped on and established groups for their magazines. Electric Literature, Keyhole, Word Riot, Juked, and Pank are all on there. It's turning Fictionaut into a bit of a hub where you can go and read some stories and you see what groups it came from--it leads you off into to discovering those magazines."

It's not enough for authors or publishers to build a website—once the site's online, it needs regular attention from readers if it's going to thrive. And we're not just talking pageviews. Jennifer Pullinger has five tips for those of you looking to transform your audience into a community, from putting your personality out in front to encouraging readers to get more directly involved in the conversation.

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you're not a member yet, you can register for $55 a year, and start reading those articles, receive discounts on mediabistro.com seminars and workshops, and get all sorts of other swell bonuses.

Since 1995, writers have created computer-based interactive fiction stories for an annual competition--space operas, medieval quests, and countless other adventures that allow the reader to guide the plot.

Here's a short introduction to the genre: "In interactive fiction you play the main character. You type commands which determine the actions of the character and the flow of the story. Each piece of interactive fiction presents locations, items, characters and events. You move about, exploring and learning. As you do so, you will encounter puzzles which impede your progress. Part of the fun of interactive fiction is solving these puzzles."

Check out this GalleyCat editor's favorite pieces from last year's contest: "Everybody Dies" by Jim Munroe and "Violet" by Jeremy Freese. If the digital book-friendly medium makes you excited, you can help judge the 2009 competition. Download this year's interactive games on this page. After you've played five or more games, follow this link to vote for your favorites. Votes are due by November 15th, 2009. (Via Post Position)

Our friends at PRNewser passed along some recent statistics from eMarketer.com that underscore the significance of the new Federal Trade Commission guidelines controlling how blogs must handle "endorsements" of consumer goods: This year alone, the FTC's determination that newspapers and magazines do journalism but blogs do product endorsement will affect, in the abstract, 27,900,000 people, or 14 percent of the U.S. Internet's "population." (In practical terms, the number affected is significantly less, because many bloggers don't even review consumer goods, let alone receive them for the purposes of review.)

Let's imagine for a moment that the FTC created a set of guidelines that would bracket out 14 percent of American print media and hold it to a different standard than other publications, or bracket out 14 percent of America's radio and television stations and hold them to a different standard than other broadcasters. How long do you think it would take for some serious protests, including but not limited to calls for congressional intervention, to begin?

When you look at the other chart eMarketer.com sent us, though, it's easy to understand why the FTC thinks it needs to do something (even if you happen to believe it's doing the wrong thing).

By the end of next year, more than 100,000,000 Americans will be reading at least one blog at least once a month—that will be more than half of the U.S. Internet "population," and (according to Census Bureau projections) 33.8 percent of the entire U.S. population. We get that the FTC wants to protect that substantial demographic from consumer fraud, and it's perfectly reasonable to insist content funded by commercial interests for the express purpose of promoting those specific commercial interests be identified as such, the same for blogs as it is infomercials and "special inserts." The problem lies in the FTC's determination that a not-insignificant class of bloggers has been, is, and will be engaged in commercial speech when just about nobody else involved in the actual "transactions" involved believed that to be the case, nor do they believe it now just because the FTC says so, nor will they believe it once they are compelled by federal regulation to behave as if they do.