New Playgrounds for Readers & Writers: Growing Online Book Communities

Ran into Sue Nelson Buckley, veteran Sunday Brunch chatter and TC’s current Best of the Boards winner between sessions, so I said hello, and we sat together during this session.

Waiting for online book communities session to start with @s_nelsonbuckley 11:19 AM Oct 1st via Seesmic for Android

It would help if I remembered the hashtag 😛 #bcvan10 11:24 AM Oct 1st via Seesmic for Android

The presenters were @namastepublishing and @nickb from Protagonize, a collaborative writing site. Protagonize is popular with teens (12-18 is most common age group; 23 average age of users down from 28 initially).

@AngelaCrocker @nickb shares that @protagonize was inspired by the Choose Your Own Adventure style. Love it!

Ratings make people behave badly—game the system to increase their popularity.  (But aren’t ratings also a huge part of what attracts people to a social-networking-style writing site?)

@katrinaarcher Apparently ratings encourage bad behavior in communities because people try to inflate scores

@katrinaarcher “popularity” needs to be an aggregate of several metrics, not just a single rating for it to be useful.

Namaste has a mascot who tweets.

@AngelaCrocker Interesting @NamasteBooks created @Bizahsays as a friendly face for their online community.

Hmm, maybe TC needs a mascot. The snark could start tweeting… #bcvan10 11:31 AM Oct 1st via Seesmic for Android

Protagonize puts a Creative Commons license on work by default (users can change).

@kindacrazy @protagonize and his support of #creativecommons. Share and share alike!

Which makes sense with a collaborative model. Also, goal of Protagonize seems to be primarily first draft, just-for-fun writing. So users may be less protective of their writing. However, in my experience newbie writers are the most protective of (paranoid about) their writing. Which makes me wonder, if they’re mostly teens, do they really understand Creative Commons (and copyright, for that matter)? Considering how many adult writers do not, I’d be surprised if many actually knew what they were agreeing to.

@AngelaCrocker @nickb working on a professional dashboard for aquisitions editors & agents to filter @protagonize content. Useful.

Ok, I’ll admit, I snarked a bit when this came up. I think the chances of a collaboratively-written first draft of a story with 27 different authors being discovered as the next big thing by an agent/editor who just happened to be cruising the site might be just a tad overly optimistic. Then again, I have been accused of being cynical 😉

@jmv cultivating more detailed feedback is a challenge; both overly positive and negative @nickb; ie: @thetyee uses “best comment”

Which goes back to what I said earlier: part of the appeal of a social-networking-style writing site is that you can click-rank (the author, the story, the collaboration, etc.). You don’t have to think about what was written and come up with some original feedback of your own like at old-school forums like TC. TC is never going to have a million users, because actual workshopping (giving thoughtful critiques, rewriting work in response to feedback) is hard and most people aren’t interested. Many people want to write just for fun (which is awesome, as long as one is realistic about what it is) not to practice/master a craft.

Anyhow, a million users would be unwieldy. What we want is a critical mass, whatever that is, where the forums feel busy & active—people are participating in discussions, giving critiques as well as asking for them—but aren’t so busy that it feels overwhelming to people who are already juggling multiple responsibilities.

@katrinaarcher blogger outreach important when launching a community. After launch, use SEO

fwiw, I see bloggers complaining about pitches all the time on Twitter. Hard to do right, apparently. What they do like: developing a relationship via reciprocal comments, tweets, emails, etc. Which now that I think of it, goes back to the lesson from previous session: if you tell the blogger to use your awesome whatever because it’s so great, they’ll be turned off (even if it truly is great), but if you just leave a trail of breadcrumbs and they “discover” it’s so great on their own, next thing you know they’ll be telling on their friends about it.

@katrinaarcher Sorry to disappoint the introverts but @seancranbury says you also have to meet people in real life to grow a community

Ideal, but not always possible when your community is spread across the world. (Aside: I hate the use of “in real life” to mean offline/in person. Online communication is real life, too.) Was thinking we could do some recruiting at NaNoWriMo meet-ups: they’re free and everywhere and full of writers…

@shannonsmart create systems that encourage good behav from users

@LisaManfield When building an online community, give readers some sense of ownership

A rating system that rewards helpful behavior like constructive critiques might be something to look into for @toasted-cheese. #bcvan10 October-01-10 12:12:02 PM via Seesmic for Android

Thinking rather than ranking just for the sake of ranking (“I’m the best!”) perhaps points could be assigned for giving feedback, and then they could trade the points for some benefit like an in-depth crit from editor once they had accumulated a certain number?

(Idea totally stolen from from my grade three teacher who had two paper chains hanging from the ceiling in the classroom. Every time she was pleased with the class about something, we got to add a ring to one of the chains. When a chain got to the floor, we got a treat.)

Other ideas I think might encourage people to participate more without ratings/rankings:

1. a word count and/or time writing tracker
2. a goal setting list (where items could be crossed off as completed)

Yesterday: Recap of first session

Tomorrow: Recap of third session

From Paper to ECatalogues: The complicated problem of replacing something simple

The first session I attended was about shifting publishers’ catalogs from paper to digital (these are the catalogs that publishers use to sell books to booksellers). I decided to go this one because it’s an example of a print to digital shift that is actually happening (not hypothetical, like the death of the book ;-)).

They started by noting how frequently paper catalogs have to be put out due to corrections, additions, etc. A new paper book is published every half-hour (300,000k / year) just in the US. A benefit of ecatalogs is that they can be constantly updated, so the listings are always current.

One important thing that ecatalogs enable is curation. With an ecatalog, salespeople who are familiar with their clients’ interests can create custom catalogs tailored to their interests. That is, if a salesperson knows that a client is interested in books on X, Y, and Z, she can put together a catalog that only contains books on those topics. (The flip side is that a custom catalog precludes serendipity.)

Most books are sold and bought by people who haven’t read them (wait, what? you’re not reading 300k books/year? slacker ;-)), so the catalog copy (kind of like a jacket blurb) is really important. Most books are bought on this basis. Catalog copy is not written by the author (who does write it? someone at publishing house, I guess?).

There’s a romanticizing of new books, but the backlist is really important. (Assume ecatalog is better for backlist, keeps it visible, whereas print would just feature new releases?)

@chelseathe In the world of 3000000 titles, the curatoial role of the sales rep becomes even more important #ecat

@boxcarmarketing The role of the sales rep is even more important with ecatalogues  #ecat

Book industry is cutting edge! The ISBN innovation (assigning an individual # to each edition of a book) in ‘80s came from within the book industry. Apparently, this is one reason why Jeff Bezos decided Amazon would sell books—they were ready for the internet.

Challenges of going digital: clients must be able to flip, browse through catalog as quickly online as in print. There can’t be any refresh time. Need to be able to move from one book to the next seamlessly, as if flipping through a paper catalog.

I perked up when they said this, because OMG, yes. This is designing with the user in mind. I want to contrast it with my experiences trying to read ebooks on SFU Library website. Gah, awful, will not use unless desperate. Now, I’m no Luddite, so why not?

1. Major refresh/lag time, which is super annoying.
2. Too much visual clutter to read onscreen.
3. If you try to skim through the book to see if it will be useful to you, i.e. flip, as you would with a paper book, a warning pops up saying you’re going too fast (this, as you’re weeping in frustration at the lag time), and you have to confirm that you are not stealing the book before you can continue. No, I am not joking.
4. If you decide that there’s a portion of the book that will be useful to you (say, one chapter) and and you decide to print it out to read offline because of the uber-annoying interface, it will probably tell you you’ve exceeded your page quota before you get all the pages you want printed. Yes, I only needed 2/3 of that chapter, thanks.
5. So, after all that aggravation, you end up having to make the 2-hour round trip to the library anyway to get the paper book. Grrr.

It’s pretty obvious that these ebooks are designed from the pov that copyright must be protected at all costs and all readers are thieves. What I’m not clear on is why they even bother, unless it’s to sour readers on the whole experience so they flee from ebooks forever (I don’t think that’s going to happen). I mean, they definitely  discouraged me from making use of these ebooks unless I can’t make a trip to the library, but it’s not like I’m rushing out to buy a copy of the book instead; I’m just taking the paper version out of the library.

Moral of this long-winded anecdote: Be Ye Not Annoying to Your Readers.

The number one  thing that sells a book is the cover, not the description, so it’s important that the cover image be prominent (Raincoast has it at 1/3 screen). (Takeaway: adding images to TC was a great idea.)

Right now, they are using ecatalogs in conjunction with print catalogs. Going cold turkey is not the most efficient because of the learning curve. It’s easier for sales reps to sit down with a client and flip through a paper catalog together. Also, they want people to choose to use the ecatalog, not force them to use it.

@chelseathe Think of the ecatalogue as just another tool to add on to the print, not as ‘the future’ #ecat

Sales reps generally make a lot of annotations in their catalogs. They have a master copy for themselves and have to transfer (rewrite) these annotations for clients. The ecatalog software allows sales reps to make both public and private annotations on the book listings, which eliminates the necessity of repetitively copying these notes (can just refer clients to the ecatalog).

(I think this’d be something to think about for TC, but I’d like it to be hidden, i.e. click to read notes/comments, because I want to keep visual clutter to a minimum.)

Publishers are also able to link from a book’s listing to book trailers, author website, publisher website, etc. (Similar to what we’re trying to encourage in author bios.)

@boxcarmarketing Cool – BookNet’s ecatalogue system will link to video and audio  #ecat

Yesterday: introduction

Tomorrow: recap of the second session

One day in early August I saw someone on Twitter mention BookCamp Vancouver registration was open. Intrigued by the name, I went to see what it was about. Well, it turned out to be a one-day UNconference (modeled on BarCamp) about books and publishing and reading—“BookCamp Vancouver 2010 Unconference: Exploring New Ideas in Books, Publishing and the Future of Reading”—and it was being held at SFU downtown (so convenient!) and it was free (the perfect price for a perpetual student!). So I registered.

I figured at the very least I’d get an Absolute Blank article out of the deal.

In the end I found a supervisor for my committee (woohoo!), met TC’s current Best of the Boards winner in person, had a (much-needed) day away from working on comps essays and SSHRC proposal, got lots of great ideas, both about (e)books/writing/reading for my research and for generating support for Toasted Cheese, and yes, got more than enough material for an AB article. BookCamp ftw!

Unsurprisingly, when I sat down to write a post recapping the day, it ended up being more than a single post. So here’s my recap, broken up into six parts, article to come sometime in the future. Haven’t quite figured out the angle yet, but maybe a more general “what to expect at an unconference” kind of thing?

I’ve interspersed my notes—taken on my phone, haha! (is the use of electronic devices at a book conference ironic? discuss) and fleshed out here—with my tweets and some tweets from other attendees.

At #bcvan10 … first attempt at livetweeting! 9:37 AM Oct 1st via Seesmic for Android

Tomorrow: recap of first session.