The Oscar Peterson Trio with Herb Ellis, guitar and Ray Brown, bass at the Concerthall in Stockholm 1957. Photographer, Bengt H. Malmqvist, Sweden (http://www.lionelhampton.nl/swedishjazzphotography.html)

Jazz, Agile workflows and Integrated Digital Strategy

Here is a link to the improvised musical version of Improvising Madly, the presentation I gave with Brian O’Leary at the recent Publisher’s Forum in Berlin. The music is ‘Take the A Train’, played by the great Duke Ellington and his band.

The presentation illustrates some of the points I made in my article, Let’s Improvise!, published in Publishing Perspectives.

Anna

axica conference and convention centre, designed by Frank Gehry

I was impressed with how the presentations intelligently intersected in interesting and relevant ways. The sense at the end of the two days was of a dynamic network of intelligent content, created by people with vision and energy.

Helmut von Berg of Klopotek was an indefatigable host and organiser and was as passionate about the subject as any of the speakers. It is commitment of this sort that will lead the way.

Brian O’Leary’s keynote address ‘Context First Revisited’ was as relevant today as when he first presented it in 2010, although now the word ‘container’ is simply a term we all use when talking about books. That his terminology has become part of the currency of digital publishing demonstrates how important his insights were and still are for us all.

All the sessions I attended were worthwhile and had something to offer. (As an English speaker, the German sessions were not an option, but looked very good too.) One of the English sessions that made a particular impression on me was that by Gregor Wolf and Christian Kohl, ‘Integrating deGruyter.com e-commerce with the back office software’. This is a side of publishing that most prefer not to think about; social media for instance is so much more exciting to talk about (and yes, as important). But it is precisely this kind of work behind the scenes that is crucial to the success of digital publishing. The presentation was focused, to the point, and the system they described seemed deceptively simple: a mark of true elegance, thorough analysis and hard work.

I want to thank my co-presenters, Ingrid Goldstein, and Brian O’Leary, who are both a joy to work with. I was privileged to have had this opportunity to present with them.

This conference gave me renewed confidence in the future of ‘book’ publishing, whatever the ‘book’ may look like.

Note: This post also appears on the Forum website.

Laura’s readers are used to reading her fanfiction online, with new instalments appearing regularly. We’re going to continue in the same vein, making her novel available to readers in daily instalments over the course of a month or so.

We love using PressBooks for ebook production and jumped at the opportunity to also use it as a reader interface and an online reading platform for subscribers.

Commenting on the initiative, PressBooks founder Hugh McGuire said, “It’s been great to have creative publishers like Say Books thinking of new ways to use PressBooks. There are so many possibilities as we start to better understand digital book publishing, and in the end publishers like Say Books will drive innovation.”

How it works is that the first chapter is freely available to everyone – visit http://fences1saybooks.pressbooks.com/. At the end of the chapter, readers are invited to subscribe to gain access to further chapters as they are released online. Becoming a subscriber entails paying an amount of their choosing via a link to PayPal. They are then given access to the Fences subscriber website on PressBooks, where a new chapter of the book will be uploaded daily, starting on 12 April 2012. Any subscriber who pays $5 or more is also eligible for a copy of the eBook when it’s complete.

Readers are welcome to comment at the end of each chapter, creating the opportunity for interaction with Laura and some interactive development of the text.

At the end of the process, the book will be published as an eBook, sold via estores such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo. It will also be available directly from this site.

Fences tells the story of Emma Fox, a sculptor from San Francisco who travels to Tennessee at the invitation of the grandfather she has never met. She doesn’t like him much, but as for his farm manager… Emma discovers that falling in love is the easy part – staying there is the adventure.

What has come to interest me more than novelty is the possibility of doing something valuable within the canons of well-established art forms.  Can one, for instance, write a book within the constraints of pulp fiction that is also great literature?

In science fiction, the names of Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick spring to mind as authors who may have achieved this. What makes me favour Dick over Lem is that he was never as self-consciously literary as the Polish master. Save for his last few books, Dick always kept the plot moving and the thrills coming while the moral and ethical dramas unfolded.

When one talks of literary crime writing, the name James Sallis tends to come up. While I find this author’s work conceptually appealing, I struggle to like many of the books. I gave up on The Killer is Dying recently because the author refers to various characters as “he” without enough clues as to who “he” is in this chapter, as he uses three or four different focal characters. Maybe that was exactly the point, that the characters were somehow one and the same, but it proved a fatal impediment to my reading pleasure. In the James Sallis books I’ve read, I’ve also failed to discover greatness of intent – the literary ambition seemed to me more technical than profound.

So if I were asked about the greatest literary crime writer, I’d nominate Jim Thompson. While not my favourite crime writer, he has written at least two books in pulp format that transcends the genre beyond any reasonable expectation.

I have written elsewhere that Pop. 1280 gets my vote for greatest pulp crime novel of all. But The Getaway might be an even greater literary achievement. Here is a story about two armed robbers running from the law that goes through a wormhole to emerge as a deeply symbolic, quite surreal, morality tale.

What makes this achievement doubly impressive is that page for page the book reads like pulp fiction – the author never sacrifices entertainment value for the sake of significance.

Doing this – giving readers a profound experience while rewarding them all along with spicy snacks – strikes me as a greater achievement than giving readers a profound experience they feel like they’re working for.

Getting a rejection slip is a disappointment for any author. Here you are, pouring your soul or at least many hours into a project and some stranger says it’s not worth publishing. Feeling hurt, wronged or angry is normal.

But it would be wrong to assume that this has to be the author’s response. I recall at least one rejection letter where I saw the publisher’s point totally. The book was unpublishable. I appreciated their candour and learned a lot.

In fact, even long before my first book was published, I learned a great deal from being turned down. After submitting two or three manuscripts to a publisher over the course of nearly ten years, one of the senior editors invited me to a meeting. “You keep sending us these manuscripts,” she said. “You have talent, but all your work suffers from the same problem.”

She proceeded to explain to me what I did wrong. My next manuscript was accepted and the book received a very positive critical reception. The following two books I submitted to mainstream publishers were accepted for publication too. There was the expectation that I’d have an ongoing, successful career…

Instead, I started collecting rejection slips again!

The first was the one I mentioned where they were right. Even when I disagreed with publishers, I appreciated it if the rejections were considered and thoughtful. What grated was when they clearly:

• didn’t give the manuscript proper attention (I’ve encountered some jaw-dropping misreadings),
• dismissed it for non-intrinsic reasons (economic downturn, overfull publishing programme, etc.) or
• didn’t even look at it at all.

The thing for authors to remember is that publishing houses are commercial enterprises. Quality isn’t the only factor to consider. A brilliant book about bullfighting or big-game hunting is not likely to sell as well as a mediocre one about saving dolphins. And projected sales are crucial in traditional publishing – printing and distribution are expensive.

To a large degree, e-publishing circumvents these cost barriers, so that quality rather than expected popularity can be the publisher’s primary criterion.

When I embarked on this publishing venture with Say Books, I was determined to be more respectful of authors than some of the publishers I had dealt with. Still, it is necessary on occasion to write a rejection letter. It is no fun. Treading on the dreams of others isn’t easy, nor is it a responsibility to be taken lightly.

On the least dense end of the scale you might find a self-published genre novel that has one significant thought per page. Anyone reading that page gets little more from it than, say, the fact that the investigator is talking to a witness. This watery stew is not particularly rewarding for the reader. Typically books of this nature would have lots of aimless dialogue or lists of visual details.

On the other end of the scale is poetry, by its nature the densest form of writing. In poetry, the basic units manipulated by the poet are very small – a phoneme, syllable or word. A good poem may require the reader to ponder every one of these, laden with significance as they are.

Notwithstanding the odd poetic turn, the basic unit in prose is larger than that of poetry. It’s the sentence. Prose stands to poetry as chemistry stands to nuclear physics – you deal with basic units of a different order. Being a non-academic type, I cannot point to any evidence in support of this assertion. It’s an opinion formed through more than 30 years of intense involvement with writing, nothing more.

Continuing this unscientific line of thinking: I said above that the density of significance refers to the ratio of sentences to significant realisations. These “realisations” are items of information with significance in the context of the book and the reading process.

To be significant in a novel, an item of information has to:

1. Advance the plot.

2. Heighten the drama.

3. Reveal the character.

4. Ravel the theme.

5. Build the atmosphere.

6. Strengthen the semblance of truth.

7. Be interesting or entertaining in itself. (Point 4 does this for me, by the way. Isn’t “ravel” an intriguing word!)

Ideally,  each sentence in a book should do one or more of these things. Expressed mathematically, the ratio of sentences to significant realisations should be >1.

This presents writers with a useful tool to improve their own writing: Look at your sentences one by one and ask of each whether it adds significance in at least one of the ways listed above. If not… cut it. Your book will be better for it.

Of course, it is possible to write a book with a high density of significance in this sense and still not have a great work of literature. Great literature requires that the significance goes beyond the confines of the written text itself, to include elements such as relevance, resonance, insight and beauty.

But if a book does have good density of significance, it will at the very least  be a good read that rewards readers for their trouble. Which is an admirable goal in itself. Readers deserve every reward a writer can give them.

There is what I would call the ‘Master’ view: the all-seeing eye that knows everything, plans everything and creates clear structures to realise a certain vision. This is most appropriate to the ‘Enterprise’ model, particularly for industries where compliance is incredibly important or for highly structured modular content.

The other is the ‘Darwinian’ view: life develops largely through chance, circumstance, and constraints, making use of minute building blocks (DNA) to combine and create new life forms in endless and unforeseeable combinations. And, likewise, the binary nature of digital (so simple that it’s either on or it’s off) makes content uncontainable, unconstrainable and endlessly combinable. This paradox is both a threat and an opportunity.

Everything is ‘overnetworked’ and finally unknowable, with content moving and changing and developing in an organic way, depending on the context (see again Brian O’Leary’s work). We may long for control and some publishers try their best to enforce it (DRM anyone?), but we don’t have ultimate control of content anymore.

There is a place for standards, and I am a firm believer in them (it makes things so much easier, for one!) but perhaps it is at the ‘substrata’ that they are most important. So perhaps our job is to  make sure that our content can find its way in this world for our and our authors’ benefit by concentrating on the smallest element, the ‘DNA’ if you will, by working with taxonomies and concentrating on deep tagging and metadata.

At the same time, while the content can be reduced to bits and bytes, it is created, developed and nurtured by people. We all, whether we are the content strategist, publisher or the author, want to tell stories that make hearts sing (and yes, bank accounts grow) wherever they may be.

What’s your story?

I was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, but my parents are from Ohio and California. They never expected to stay in Memphis when they came, and they spent a lot of time keeping me and my brother away from the Southern accent. So I’ve grown up with an interesting mixture of Southern, Californian, and Northern heritage.

Laura Bontrager

I graduated with a degree in English, and then worked as a behavioural aide for a boy with autism, and my poetry was published in various magazines and journals. Currently, I work in the library of a boys’ private school in Memphis. And I write.

When did you start writing and why?

I started telling stories first with my Barbie dolls as I created scene after scene of soap-opera-worthy tragedy. And then I wrote down stories because I wanted to illustrate them, not because I particularly loved the words. I felt I could show the pictures in my head better by creating pictures (but I turned out to be only a mediocre artist). Then I really got down to writing somewhere around 12 years old; the stories needed out. It was Holocaust survival tales (I was fascinated with WW2), and ‘magical realism’ (wizards and secret quests). And then those morphed into what is now called fan fiction. I wanted my favorite characters in my favorite TV shows to get together, to realize their love for each other, or to face certain doom and triumph. I rewrote episodes or I gave the characters backstories. I still didn’t think of it as writing though.

When I was about 15 years old, an English teacher took me aside and showed me how to write. Not just essays or research papers, but poetry. I was still writing fanfiction, this time related to The X-Files, but she showed me how to make words string together in beautiful ways, sounds, images. Now my words were the illustrations, now poetry became my first way to get the stories out.

Which books do you like the most?

It’s so difficult to narrow this list down to just a few. There are genres and time periods that garner their own full-length lists, but I’ll try to give a sample of the books that shaped me as a writer and as a reader.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle: I came late to L’Engle’s children’s books because I came by way of her adult fiction (A Severed Wasp, Certain Women). I’d read A Wrinkle in Time in fifth grade and it had been too much for me; but reading it again in high school was like reading my soul. Every book of hers I could get my hands on, I devoured. Over and over again. Her writing is poetic and sensual and beautiful and innocent. I want to write just one thing as good as hers.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood: I love dystopia and this was the beginning of it for me. Atwood’s novel is written like a memoir and it reads like a warning – Remember this, how quickly it happened, how life was for us. But it’s fiction; none of it happened. I still think every person should read this book, should remember this book, hold it in their hearts closely. Not because it’s about how women were subjugated in a fictional dystopia, but because it’s about how easy it is for human beings to degrade those that are different from us, how easy it is to forget that we all share in humanity.

The Gift of Asher Lev by Chaim Potok: This book deals with an artist, his God, and his art, and the uneasy alliance between the two. It spoke to me at a time when I was determining, for myself, how serious I was about making writing my life’s calling, and how serious was God, as well, about calling me. I needed this book, all of his books really, like I needed air.

Touch Not the Cat by Mary Stewart: All of her Gothic romance novels, really, were inspiring to me in the middle of heavy English canon reading for my literature classes. She found a formula and employed it over and over again but with such different results, such interesting details, and such timeless stories. She wrote back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, but she opened up an entirely new genre for me. From her novels, I got into Wuthering Heights, and Victoria Holt, and a host of pop fiction from that time.

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton and The American by Henry James: I’d read Ethan Frome in high school and fell in love with her dour realism (though you won’t find many who also love this). House of Mirth, along with James’s The American, became the first novels I read as a critical reader – thinking about how the story was structured and why, analyzing the characters and the motifs and the themes as I read. Not after I read, not while writing the paper, but during the actual process of reading. These two novels I had to read at the same time for two different classes (so I couldn’t tell you which one did it), but it was with these two that the switch was flipped in my brain for how a story works.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner: I can’t even. I flail like a fangirl when I get to Faulkner because I can’t even imagine writing like this. He just . . . he breaks open the world and sets it on fire. He slaps it all down on the page and makes you work for it, and when it’s all over, you realize you’ve been swimming in something amazing and strong and overwhelming, and there’s nothing to do but stop going against its current and ride it out.

Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard: For non-fiction, this is the most poetic and beautiful writing I’ve yet to read. Dillard takes up a lot of themes that are personal to me: religion, God, suffering, faith, nature’s brutality, God’s mysticism. She doesn’t have any answers, but she gives me, as a writer, a lot of beautiful images to understand my own drive to write.

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger: The supernatural element of this love story is what made me take it off the shelf, while the beautiful details, the poetry, is what kept me reading it. The logistics of the two lovers’ tangling timelines, their lives intertwining from the beginning of things, their fated and perhaps doomed love . . . it captured me like nothing else.

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby: Any Hornby novel is fantastic and funny and wickedly clever, and he does it right in the middle of real stuff, actual life problems. This novel is all about music and what it does for us. Rob has just been dumped by his girlfriend, Laura, for the guy who lives in the upstairs apartment. He narrates his top ten list of breakups as he tries to answer an important question: Can he really love a woman with a terrible record collection?

My most recent reads, which I haven’t yet had enough time to know if they will be pivotal to my own life (but they feel like they are), include City of Thieves (David Benioff), A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan), A Mercy (Toni Morrison), and Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins). I mention Hunger Games because a huge chunk of my reading time is spent in young adult fiction. The amazing thing about the YA market is the wide-open mind its readers have. Anything goes: sparkling vampires, an orphan boy-wizard fighting evil, steampunk, alternate history, time travel, medical horror, kid secret agents . . . Anything goes. It keeps my imagination sharp and reminds me to never shut the door on what can and can’t be done. Anything can be done if I write it correctly.

Which movies or TV shows do you like the most?

Castle, obviously, right? But there are always rotating favorites that captured me at one time or another for their stories or characters. X-Files, Lois and Clark, Lost, Veronica Mars, Doctor Who, Downton Abbey (a new favorite), Blood on the Wire, Bones, MI:5, The OC, Battlestar Galactica, How I Met Your Mother, Arrested Development, The Office, West Wing, Friends, Remington Steele, 24. . .oh I could go on and on.

As for movies, I like an eclectic mix of horror and family and comedy. I can’t explain why a movie will strike me, but I do know when it works. Memento, The Sound of Music, It’s a Wonderful Life, Stranger than Fiction, Laws of Attraction, Two Weeks’ Notice, Fight Club, The Nines, Donnie Darko, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Joe vs the Volcano, Love Actually, Mr & Mrs Smith, Moulin Rouge, The Natural, Raising Arizona, Spanglish, Secret of My Success, oh and the Back to the Future series, Stigmata, Stir of Echoes (which no one ever knows, but it’s Kevin Bacon and so freaky), Win a Date with Tad Hamilton, and What About Bob?. . . just to, uh, name only a few.

What do you do in your spare time beside writing?

Not much? Haha, no actually, I’ve got an active spiritual life, and I spend a lot of time with the kids in my church’s youth group. I teach tenth grade girls on Sunday mornings, I mentor a few girls during the week, and I volunteer in our women’s ministry, doing an odd assortment of things. Because I work at a school, I have my summers off, which allows me to focus on novels and on youth group stuff. I have a group of good friends who get together during the week for dinner, and I jazzercise almost every day; I love a good aerobic workout, and the music and the moves keep my brain interested. I read like crazy too, but I’ll read good fanfics too if friends have recommended them to me. I’m in a book club at work, and I’ve been forced to read things I never would have picked up. I suggest everyone get in a low-pressure book club and just try it.

Finally, I love San Francisco Giants baseball. Pitchers and catchers report for spring training in ten days, and I’ve never been more ready for baseball! My twitter account will soon be flooded with comments including the #sfgiants tag, and hordes of friends will be unfollowing me due to my rampant, rabid love of Giants baseball. I have undying loyalty to the 2010 team – your 2010 World Series Champions – but the whole history of Giants baseball has been with me since I was a kid. Baseball has a way of cropping up in everything I write.

You quote Kierkegaard at the end of your emails, which I find interesting. Any story behind that?

I always like to end with a quote in my signature, and before Kierkegaard it was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and before her, it was Annie Dillard.

Browning’s quote was “Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God.” The idea being that God comes down and touches everything, but how many of us are looking? It’s a reminder to myself to look for him, his mystery and love and grace, wherever I’m at, because he’s not far from me.

Dillard’s line was from Holy the Firm, “What can any artist set on fire but his world? What can an artist use but materials, such as they are? What can he light but the short string of his gut, and when that’s burned out, any muck ready to hand?” Dillard’s words are a balm and a comfort for me when I realize that I’ve been cannibalizing my life, my family’s life, my friends’ lives for my writing. Because what else do I have? What else is this all for, but to be resuscitated in a story, a poem, to bring life to the reader?
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.”

Kierkegaard’s quote is a reminder that it’s so easy to lose track of who you are, whose you are, in the middle of a busy and self-centered life, even in the middle of the writing life. And more importantly, I think, is that it reminds me there are people who go quietly out of the world, lost without love or hope, and if something I say or write, some small thing, can help those people remember who they are and whose they are as well – that they are Created and loved and not alone, never alone – then that is worth it, worth all of this.

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One of the reasons may be that much of the current language of content management uses the language of logic, with little attention to the lyrical or personal. The reason for this may be that most companies using CMSs up until now have been businesses outside the creative field. Within these contexts, the purely rational language of content management may be valid.

Publishing companies, however, are different. They are based, and always have been, on a love of creativity, on emotional connection. Yesterday, I read Brian O’Leary’s recent post ‘Innocence and Magic’ and was impressed too by the insightful comments. Those words reminded me yet again of why we are involved in publishing and why it is important.

Clearly, there is a rational reason to be thinking about content strategy in publishing, but we need to find a language that enables us to talk about it in ways that make sense to, and for, the publishing industry. Brian’s wonderful ‘Context First‘ shows a way to do this, drawing on one of Rushdie’s stories to make his point.

Perhaps a more personal, more lyrical language of content strategy and content management will have broader appeal too. After all, wherever and whatever people are writing, hearts and minds are at work.

I tweet about Castle under a ‘Castley’ pseudonym, and fangirl with the best of them (many of them teenagers, but also a fair smattering of English majors, doctors, teachers, film/media types, and of course, Firefly fans). What became increasingly interesting to me as I watched the show and followed fans on Twitter was the way the show crossed the usual boundaries of fandoms, media types and genres. I was particularly fascinated with how a show about a crime writer seemed to be encouraging young people to read long-form narrative that they might not have read otherwise, if they read books at all.

On the one hand, there are the very successful, high profile, offical tie-in ‘Nikki Heat’ novels (the main character of the novels written by the eponymous Castle), themselves the supposed work of ‘Richard Castle’, complete with a cover photo of Nathan Fillion/Richard Castle.

On the other hand, there is ‘fanfic’, fan-written fiction that flies under the radar. I kept seeing references to ‘fanfic’ on my Twitter timeline and decided to take a look. Expecting the worst (and believe me, the worst is there too), I was delighted to find not only OK writers, but truly brilliant ones, none more so than the fabulous ‘chezchuckles’ (took me a while to get the Edith Wharton reference).

Fanfic sits at the margins of mainstream creative endeavour, and interrogates established views of what it means to be a writer; the meaning of intellectual property, creativity, originality, ‘ownership’, boundaries, and the nature of ‘public’. Of course, as a publishing person and daughter of an artist, I have an uneasy relationship with how fanfic steps on these well-established fences, but am fascinated too. This leaching of boundaries is exemplified by the infinite trail of hyperlinks on the web (Derrida anyone?). Fanfic too seems to embody a paradox that is afforded by the digital space: it both harks back to the days of Dickens in the way it is written and ‘published’, and also shows a potential path for mainstream publishing.

The longer fanfics are serialised, with the popular ones being updated every day or so. Many chapters end on true cliff-hangers; readers are included in the writing process. Writers invite their readers to review each chapter and sometimes even to suggest pointers for the narrative arc. ‘Beta’ readers, who qualify for the role by being writers themselves, edit the chapters before they are posted. An incredible community is built around the stories, and Tumblr and Twitter are alive with cross blogging, reviews, and accolades for favourite writers.

And the fans read and read.

From the perspective of the Studio, the fanfic is integral to keeping interest in the show alive, for instance during the Summer hiatus, or if fans have been disappointed with the ending of an episode (Castle fans have a favourite saying: ‘in Andrew M Marlowe we trust’, but he puts us to the test sometimes). Fanfic could be seen as free marketing, and it has been acknowledged by the writers and cast of Castle that fan power, particularly on Twitter, played a huge role in getting ABC to retain the series after its modest first season (the show is now well into its fourth).

Laura Bontrager

So as well as being a fan of the show,  the ‘mechanics’ of fanfic interests me from a publishing perspective, and of course, I love good writing. After having read a few stories by ‘chezchuckles’, I wrote to her to ask if she had written any of her own material, and it turns out that ‘chezchuckles’ is Laura Bontrager, an unassuming school library assistant (I just knew she had read widely) from Tennessee, who indeed had written an unpublished novel.

So together we will be publishing Laura’s novel, a romance, appropriately called Fences, and we will once again use the web-based production tool, PressBooks to produce it. PressBooks seems the ideal vehicle for reader interaction and engagement (in addition to producing valid EPUBS).

To good writing, wherever one may find it.

Always.

Addendum: You can follow Laura on Twitter @lily_bart (yes, another Edith Wharton reference!).

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