Lit Soup Book Block Features Virgin

My agent, Jenny Rappaport, has a blog, Lit Soup, and she's been doing this really cool thing where she gives authors a chance to write a post about their recently published book.  I did one for her for Virgin, and it's up today, so go check it out.  And if you're an author with a book out, go check out her book block guidelines, because I hear she's looking for more.

Comments

[Todd]

Thanks for the response-very enlightening.

[Jessica Freely]

Todd, thanks for your post. Of course the quick answer is, I dunno. But that's no fun, and you raise some really interesting questions.

For instance the question of how the phone will impact novel structure and format: All of us at Book View Cafe were surprised to learn that users of TextOnPhone's Portable Reading application for iPhone preferred novel length downloads.

So, as to that, my answer would be, not at all, except in that the medium does seem to lend itself to serial work. I'll go even further (man, I love a limb to climb out onto) and hypothesize that rather than emphasize shorter work, phones will actually lengthen novels, or perhaps evolve them into never-ending serials.

I think the reason for the preference for longer work, not only on phones but in epublishing in general is that once you've found someone you like, you want to get as much as you can from them before casting yourself once more upon the heaving tides of internet availability.

As to eBook vs. iPhone - DeathMatch 2009: The book is often touted as an "invisible technology," based on the idea that once you're reading a book in print format, it quickly, "disappears" and you are in the story, no longer sitting in your chair holding a bound shief of paper approximately two pounds in weight. The assumption is that the invisibility is a function of the delivery system, the book. What will probably determine whether ebooks find a permanent place in our repetoire of electronic symbiotes, or phones will prevail, is whether that invisibility is in fact a function of the printed page or the e-ink screen, or if it is actually a property of text itself. Well-written text, anyway.

And there's a really easy way to find that out. Read a book on your phone (if you can). But to be fair, make sure its a really good one.

[Todd]

Really interesting post! If you are so inclined, I'm interested in your thoughts on a broader aspect of e-publishing, a topic which is all still fairly new to me. (if this too off topic or too long, feel free to delete).

Right now, e-readers are doing their best to approximate all the physical aspects of the printed page, and there are certain parameters-page, text, and paragraph size, for example-which years of traditional print have trained readers of fiction to expect. Lately, though, there seems to be a growing consensus that the cell-phone, not e-readers, will be the medium through which e-publishing reaches a true saturation point in popular culture. Case in point: right now Apple is featuring in their commercials a book app for the iPhone.

But it seems to me that reading, say . . . Anna Karenina, on a cell-phone will require us to recalibrate to a degree our physical relationship with the text. So I’m interested in how you envision that shift occurring. Do you see the novel form changing in any way to better meet the physical parameters of an evolving technology in which small = better and portabilty is priority?

Of course, I’m preaching to the choir here, but this technological shift in publishing, coupled with the practically-symbiotic relationship entire generations now have and will continue to have with their personal devices, offers, I think, the potential for prose fiction to permeate the cultural conscience in way that it hasn’t since the early twentieth century. Too, beyond the technology just being exciting, I think writers who wish to remain relevant going forward ignore what’s happening at their own peril. So I’m really curious as to what questions, if any, writers should be asking themselves when it comes to the craft of writing and how evolving methods off delivery could impact it.

Or is that not even the right question?