Literary Novels and Fan Culture: Some Thoughts Following The Future of Entertainment 3
Over the weekend I attended The Future of Entertainment 3, a conference organized by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department. The two day event featured back to back roundtables focusing on issues related to social media, audience participation, and “spreadable media,” a term CMS director Henry Jenkins coined as a more appropriate way to describe content than “viral.” (Viral connotes an inexplicable element the “infected” have no control over. It suggests you can “design the perfect virus and give it to the right first carriers.”)
From a post on Jenkins’ blog last year:
Our core argument is that we are moving from an era when stickiness was the highest virtue because the goal of pull media was to attract consumers to your site and hold them there as long as possible, not unlike, say, a roach hotel. Instead, we argue that in the era of convergence culture, what media producers need to develop spreadable media. Spreadable content is designed to be circulated by grassroots intermediaries who pass it along to their friends or circulate it through larger communities (whether a fandom or a brand tribe). It is through this process of spreading that the content gains greater resonance in the culture, taking on new meanings, finding new audiences, attracting new markets, and generating new values. In a world of spreadable media, we are going to see more and more media producers openly embrace fan practices, encouraging us to take media in our own hands, and do our part to insure the long term viability of media we like.
Indeed, our new mantra is that if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.
While I was at the conference, Richard Nash publisher of Soft Skull responded to my article on the iPhone and the novel:
I’ve found in Joanne a fellow believer in the increased salience of the novel, more or less as we understand it now, long into the future…
[We] wish to take as given not only that the mobile internet could provide the means to read novels (various devices), the means to talk about and share them (various social media tools), and instead [merely] think about how it becomes part of the texture of the novel, like the letter and the phone call have.
And we notably don’t assume that the novel becomes a video game. Why should it? They video game already exists—it doesn’t need the novel.
This got me thinking about whether several attributes of “spreadable media” are inapplicable to most literary fiction. (Please note none of these points are meant as arguments for the superiority of literary fiction over other kind of fiction or entertainment.) Also some of these points are true of any type of media but especially true in this case.
- Size — selling 50,000 copies of a first novel is good run. Long Tail or not, 50,000 pageviews or tickets sold wouldn’t qualify as a major audience.
- Time – Reading a book is an investment of one’s time. And we read books at different stages. Someone who read Sleep Has His House seven years ago might have trouble conversing with someone finishing it now. There’s no broadcast or event unifying the audience.
- Solitude - Reading is a solitary experience. The reader’s imagination is as integral to the construction of the journey as is the writer’s words. We may share our books and love the same books, but with a good book, there is always the sense the journey was a private one.
Of these barriers, the solitary, private nature of a great book seems the significant. This isn’t true of genre novels, which are plot-driven, more visual, and for these reasons easier to discuss on message boards and blogs. Then again, running is also a solitary activity, as Kyle Ford from Ning pointed out during a panel on social media. Still, Nike rather ingeniously designed a game and social marketing plan in Nike+. A small wireless pedometer in your sneaker logs miles and tracks your progress. You can compare your run with your friends. The sneaker company even planned a half-marathon in a dozen cities around the world. Says the website: “Nike+ has become the world’s largest running community, who collectively, have run nearly 100 MILLION miles. Yes, 100 million miles. That’s nearly 4,000 trips around the world. Or roughly 5.28 billion running shoes lined up end to end. Or just a whole lot of miles logged by the dedicated runners of the Nike+ community.” (Update 12/1/08: See The Golden Notebook Project as a successful collaboration in reading. More in the comments.)
But size and time are the bigger problems. As Joe Marchese of Social Vibe pointed out, Dr. Horrible happened because it was Joss Whedon’s project. The excitement for True Blood and Barack Obama didn’t happen from social media, it carried over to social media. Kim Moses, executive producer of The Ghost Whisperer (a television series that incorporates an incredibly innovative fan community) said during her presentation that in spite of Tivo and Hulu, the audience will generally make a point to watch a show as it airs on tv. So they won’t have to deal with spoilers. So they can talk about it immediately with other fans.
People did wait outside all night for the last Harry Potter book. But could they do the same for the debut novel from an unknown author?
Fan Communities for Literary Fiction (by Author, by Publisher, by Readers)
There are existing online fan(-ish) communities for novelists. Some are managed by the authors themselves. Tao Lin has an online army. My friend Scott Heim has written three of the most widely acclaimed novels in twenty years, and he communicates with fans over Myspace. Keith Gessen has a Tumblr. Naturally, this blurs the line between fan and friend. And maybe this has to happen for an author to find success. It is taking cues from the sci-fi community, where due to conventions and meetups there never was the sense of the writer as someone walled away, inaccessible to readers. John Scalzi had an interesting post about this a few months ago.
Another shift, I see is in mainstream readers thinking about publishing houses as they do record labels. That the catalog was curated. That there is some reason this book was published on this particular imprint and if you like one book they printed, you’ll like another. Right now, readers don’t really have brand loyalty with publishing houses. But a publisher can aggregate support for a multitude of books at once by emphasizing their shared origin.
A smart publisher is going to figure out a way to encourage fan communities. And I bet it’s going to be a small press with an existing reputation for excellence — Small Beer, Dalkey Archive, Soft Skull, Akashic Books, Melville House, etc. A minor example exists in McSweeny’s Internet Tendency with user submissions for humor content. But that started several years ago. A new model, should work as Moses from The Ghost Whisper, explained. She thinks about the website and series as a “loop” — the audience goes from once back to the other. The show encourages the website. The website encourages the show.
Existing online communities (Goodreads, LibraryThing) find common ground in the act of reading itself. This isn’t always the best way to way to find like-minds and share passions. (See Jessa Crispin’s article on a bookstore event we attended a few years ago, as how one constant reader might not have much in common with another.) It does however make room for wider applications — maybe a mobile service that helps you find book clubs. Recommendation agents can be expanded upon.
Collaboration in Creation:
A major problem with novels is they take a long time to write and you probably won’t get paid when you finish. If you are paid, it’s probably not very much.
At the conference, there was some discussion of sellaband.com, raising recording budgets for musicians through micro-payment. Could this ever assist a writer? Maybe? Doubtful? It’s nice to think about. There is the Concord Free Press, a nonprofit which exists on donations of services (writers, designers, printers.) Books are also given away for free.
Collaboration in creating an actual work of literary fiction is tricker to discuss. It just hasn’t happened yet. (Well, it did and the product was a failure.) It is pretty obvious why it’s easier to collaborate on Wikipedia than on a novel. We might jointly write something resembling Burrough-style “cut-ups” or something experimental — and it could be very good — but it won’t be the sort of emotionally committed personal writing that we come to expect from a great literary novel. Yochai Benkler pointed out in his presentation, the “storyline in a novel is different from documentary,” which is why collaborative platforms just aren’t being built for the former. Were a project in a motion, it would inevitably take the tongue-in-cheek sense of “this will be crap but let’s just try” that NaNoWriMo admits to.
First You Need a Good Book
Ballardian is a great example of organic literary online community. It’s very well-written, frequently updated, and widely read. It as much explores the writing of J. G. Ballard as it does his obsessions and themes in a contemporary context. There is a forum and much activity in the comments. Simon Sellars, who runs the website independent of the author and publisher, even hosted a contest for cellphone-shot home movies inspired by Ballard’s novels.
This might have something to do with Ballard’s unique appeal to artists and musicians. His books are plot-driven with familiar imagery easy to sample and remix. But it also offers promise for other authors. Publishers need to try to find authors who inspire and engage. Maybe one day a similar site will exist for Junot Díaz or Tatyana Tolstoya. First you need to find quality and foster it.
We can’t move on to the conversation of fan communities and social media when the product itself isn’t delivering. In store displays are more effective than price cuts. So why is prime Barnes and Noble real estate wasted on hastily written, unsatisfying novels, which in turn end up in the remainder bin? Like the bad debts that created the financial collapse, publishing houses have for too long traded on unremarkable books.
It’s worth noting J. G. Ballard, still isn’t published in the United States. A known author, a known genius of an author with a wide online fan community is cut off from his contemporary audience here. Likewise, where were the major publishers when Thomas M. Disch needed them? This is an author of immeasurable talent, who should have seen success before he killed himself earlier this year. He’s precisely the sort of author who inspires passionate and loyal fan communities.
A basketball scout wouldn’t restrict his search to Park Slope. So why do publishers only really print authors who live there? Here’s another idea: outsource the slush pile SETI and Wikipedia-style. I’d love to take a look at it.
Random House or Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are now both in tremendous financial difficulty — freezing pensions and suspending new acquisitions. This isn’t just the greatest blah blah blah since the Great Depression. It’s a problematic business model. It isn’t comparable and shouldn’t be compared to what is happening with newspapers, where advertising has changed and online content is a substitute for print. Web content isn’t a substitute for a novel. I find the more time I spend online, the more I crave the quiet escape of a novel. But to work as a technology respite, a novel first must be exceptionally well-written.
I’m reminded of Neal Steaphanson’s comment at a recent reading. I believe the question was was — as remembered by Diana Kimball — what is the point of writing if the world is full of unread books? He said the life of a writer is now like a monk’s experience. In a world of “creatives” with sky-high income, we’re the ones who live simply and act simply.
The novel won’t ever die. The more I think about it, the more I agree that fan culture/spreadable media is essential to literature, and will succeed in spite of constraints on time and size. The first step is a great book.
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