Built of Rag and Bone

I consider myself fairly involved in web fiction, as people go. I remember coming across Tales of MU when Alexandra Erin was still trying to make enough money to quit her day job. I remember starting my own webnovel and talking with other webnovelists about the emerging medium, how it was gaining readers and coming into it’s own as a viable vehicle for fiction. I remember people saying it wouldn’t last, that no one wanted to read fiction on the internet—we didn’t listen to them, but they were saying it.

Now, with the plethora of mobile web browsers and devices like the Kindle, electronic fiction is one of the fastest growing markets, causing some proponents of traditional publishing to ruffle their feathers and get all huffy. Well, the sad news is that e-books, while closely related to webnovels, are not webnovels. This big boom in things like the Kindle and iPhone book apps does not bode well for web fiction writers such as myself. Then again, it doesn’t bode too badly, either.

Big companies like Amazon and Sony have the ability to serve these new devices and make people pay for it. We don’t. We’re usually free, and once (and if) our stories get made into e-books and are able to be downloaded onto Kindles and what-not, they’re no longer web fiction in the strictest sense, they’re blooks (here I use the definition from The Blooker Prize , mostly because I hate the term and want it defined as something other than webnovel). So, tiny little webnovels like Children of the First and so many others can either morph into something else, or miss out on the Kindle craze.

However, all these people reading their e-books are getting used to reading pixels instead of paper. That’s good. That gets people to open up to the idea of reading a webnovel. All we have to do is keep ‘em coming back. One small but important way to stay afloat in the realm of e-books is to set up a mobile version of your site, so that users of iPhones and other mobile web browsers can read your story on their mobile devices. But you already knew all that. I was just getting to the new, exciting part:

The Vook

You might trace this back to online choose-your-own-adventures, or to the predictably all-but-dead Twitter novel , or even to those old animated bedtime stories that my dad used to read off the Prodigy homepage, but people are not satisfied with digital literature, they have to create monsters. (Not that all monsters are bad. These remain to be seen.)

“Publishers are going to be confronted with the idea that either the words on the page have to be completely compelling on their own, or they have to figure out a way to create new sorts of subliminal draws in the new medium” -Sara Nelson, former editor of Publishers Weekly [NY Times ]

Well Bradley Inman may have just the monster for you: Vook , a project that "plan[s] to help authors tell stories using text, video vignettes and social-networking tools that would be accessible online, on multiple e-Readers, and via mobile phones." [Washington Post ]

Now, the main question that seems to be on everyone’s mind, other than whether or not things like Vook will be successful, is what impact this will have on traditional literature and whether this is somehow detrimental to literature and the art of writing. To that I ask, Do oil paintings detract from watercolors? No, of course not, they’re not the same thing, don’t be stupid.

Web fiction (the standard, more-or-less blog-style web fiction) may be in danger of loosing some of it’s audience, but hey, that’s how it goes. Time to learn flash, I guess.

Next Up: Rethinking the way we write , instead of the way we read.