Why competition from the internet means children’s writers must get web savvy

My 15-year-old son read three novels last week. Perhaps no mean feat for some, but it sure gave me a warm feeling inside. Normally, the boy would rather be downloading iTunes than flicking through a wedge of bound paper.

What made this reading binge possible? We had no internet access while on holiday in a remote part of Ireland.

Comes the headline ‘Book sales a page turner’ in the Daily Telegraph:

Despite ever greater competition from television, the internet and iPods for people’s free time, book publishers are enjoying a resurgence in British sales.

Stephen Seawright
The Telegraph, 11 Aug 2006

It was a report on strong results for UK publishers, improvements that hopefully signal a recovery in the depressed book market. Cause for celebration? Oh yes, especially for us unpublished writers desperate for a break. But wait – it was not all good news.

Ofcom reported last week that young people (16 to 24 years old) were forsaking old media (books, landline telephones, TV, radio) in favour of a multitude of new technologies. You can read the relevant part of the Ofcom report under section 1.2.2 ‘Young people are moving away from old media’.

Broadband has been key to this sharp change of allegiance – with the number of connections increasing by a humongous 63 percent and the price of broadband falling from £41 a month to as little as £16 a month.

The Ofcom report only describes 16 to 24-year-old media use but we are all painfully aware of how precocious the younger members of this tribe can be. Know your reader, they say in all the How To books on getting published and writing for children. Well, for goodness sake, according to Ofcom, the kids are even switching off the TV – reading’s traditional rival – to get online!

Are writers for children losing their readers to the internet?

Know Your Enemy

Well, do you? Do you know why the internet is such a turn-on for kids? Or do you shuffle into a dark corner and mutter about the youf and bloody new technology? Do you mourn the days when it was enough to take a pen to paper?

But there is no time to moan.

The longer we delay, the further we will be left behind by the internet juggernaut that even now is evolving into something bigger and more pervasive than we ever could have imagined.

You only have to look at a few authors’ websites to figure it out. Most are merely flyers about the authors’ work or, worse, CVs that might as well be on a printed page for all the interactivity they offer. And sadly, a few are only out to impress their mothers, close friends and former associates looking them up on Google.

Now look at what our market is into. You may think you know Ebay and Amazon. The teenagers we write for are into blogging, Flickr, Friendster, Technorati, del-icio.us, wikis, podcasting, YouTube. No time to explain here what these sites are all about except to say it’s all about social networking. Their Web is not just about Google, email and newsgroup discussions, it’s about sharing not just words but images, sounds, videos and authorware programmes. They are not only literate but transliterate.

The transliterate person has the ability to read, write, create and interact across multiple platforms. A simple example might be understanding the variations between reading the print edition of The Guardian newspaper, and reading the online edition - each have their own physicality and navigability, to name but two of many features worthy of discussion. Or the difference between communicating a sequence of events by drawing in the sand with a stick versus oral storytelling versus hypertext.

These are our readers. And when it comes to How to Use the Web they really get it. If you write for younger readers, don’t worry, they will get it too.

So you – we, all of us – writers need to get with the Web or lose out.

Get with it

“If email once eclipsed the letter, it now sits in the shadow of the social Web,” writes Daniel Anderson a teacher at the University of North Carolina in his blog I Am Dan.

Anderson, in a blog addressing teachers of writing and their students, makes the point that “writing can be a social act”, citing blogging as evidence of a significant shift in the way people are writing. He quotes Pew Report figures showing that 12 to 19 year olds blog more than twice as much as older bloggers.

“Writing is moving into social Web space. And Web writers compose with multimedia,” Anderson says, offering a list of suggestions about “what you need to know and what you need to do to write today”.

To write today you need to:

Conceptualize networks,

Find and move materials,

Make rights decisions.

Edit images,

Edit sounds,

Use a movie or authorware program,

Compose prose,

And what else?

You need to spatialize the net. Understand computing metaphors, established (desktop, server) and alternative (bus stop, kitchen sink). Know about files and applications. Understand and shape your computing environment. Find archives and databases. Compose searches. Get into the public domain. Know not to be thwarted. Capture. Screen shot. Exercise your fair use. Make decisions. Give credit. Know about layers. Resize. Crop. Add text. Move among media. Compose with a timeline. Fade in. Say something. Shape it. Fade out.

But how?

Here's how the Telegraph report said publishers were responding:

Despite the recovery in British sales, publishers still realise they need to adapt to the internet. Penguin is starting to provide e-books and podcasts to compete as more people move online. In a recent interview, Random House chief executive Gail Rebuck said she was looking forward to the day when she could read a variety of titles in one e-book.

So these publishers seem to think readers want to read books on the screens of their PDAs or listen to them on their iPods. But I would argue that our readers want much, much more.

The good news is that for once we can do something about this problem – unlike scary stuff over which we lowly authors have no control like sinking book sales, publishers not publishing new authors, accountants dictating publishing decisions.

I recently blogged a report YA Voice: Slang and Teen Vernacular based on a workshop by YA author Scott Westerfeld. I was amazed to very quickly get comments from Scott’s readers and, checking out Scott’s blog, I found that he was getting up to a hundred comments a day from teenagers who had discovered his books.

How did he get such a following? Well, apart from the excellence of his prose (I thought Uglies was great!) Scott really knows how to talk to his readers. He publishes their drawings, links to their websites and comments on their comments. It’s a wonder that he gets any writing done at all.

I’m no expert but it’s all new territory anyway – so here are some ideas on how to get with the Web game, with thanks to Scott for showing the way:

Published or unpublished, you can practice talking to your audience through a blog. Check out Scott’s blog to see how he does it. Or try developing a character by putting all his thoughts in a blog. Here's Wilf's blog - wilf being a fictitious boy who admires Buzz Aldrin and loves inventions. Here's another fictional blog by Atyllah the Hen, a chicken with Attitude from the planet Novapulse, here (a la Mork of Mork and Mindy) to research the human condition. Or why not go the whole hog and blog your novel - that is, if you can bear to be critiqued in public!

If you are setting up a website, think interactive – can you update it regularly? Ask your designer about designing for a CMS – Content Management System – an example is Macromedia Contribute which claims you only need word processing skills to update your website. But the quick, cheap and easy way to set up a website you can update is to set up a blog (see Blogger)- it's not hard if you've got the bandwidth.

It’s the social networking that young people enjoy. If you’ve got a website already, is there a space for your readers to publish their own drawings, photos, comments? Here is a teen video collage homage to Scott’s Uglies book and Scott’s homage to their homage.

Have your readers got a reason to return to your website?

Set up an entry for the lead character of your book in Friendster or MySpace. Check out the MySpace page for Scott Westerfeld fans Or how about a blog? Count Olaf (A Series of Unfortunate Events) had a short-lived blog as part of the marketing campaign for the movie version of the bestselling books. Not the most brilliant example but you get the idea.

You can learn a lot from looking at DVD bonus materials. When you’ve published your book, what will your ‘bonus materials’ be? Examples – podcasts, historical background, anecdotes about The Making Of, the true stories behind the fiction, roughs of illustrations, etc. etc.

If your book is still a work-in-progress, you can whet the appetites of readers with tantalising background stories about the process either by blogging or participating in relevant chatroom discussions. Here is Scott Westerfeld’s blog on the book he is currently writing And, taking a cue from the movieworld,
this is the week by week production diary kept by director Peter Jackson while making King Kong. Hmm. We could use that idea.

Visit the newsgroups and chatrooms where your readers hang out. Post a notice when you’ve got new entries and not only will they come to check it out, you increase the ranking of your Google listing!

Good luck - we'll need it.

Do write in if you've got more ideas on how to exploit the Web or links to more examples of authors using the Web to their advantage.

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Update! Publishing News (24 Aug 2006) reports that London-based independent publisher Gravity Publishing is developing a new e-reader that bypasses the internet. By cutting out the web, the e-reader overcomes the rights issues associated with the internet.

The use of reading matter differs greatly from the iPod model of music consumption. When you realise the lack of rights security comes from expressly delivering texts into computers and computer-like machines that can talk to the Internet, all else follows.

But doesn't all the talk of e-readers miss the point of the internet? Surely getting people to read off monitors and expensive little electronic devices is not the best use of the web. people are connecting to people, not to display formats.

Radio Roundup on Children's Writing

Here in the United Kingdom, radio is a wonderful resource for those interested in writing and books. BBC Radio broadcasts many programmes on books and reading – Open Book, A Good Read, Book Club, and Front Row are the main ones.

My problem has always been that I tend to listen to radio only when driving or as I'm getting breakfast for the kids. These days, nobody sits down of an hour to listen to the radio. But it is so worth it, especially if you are an aspiring writer looking for inspiration.

Here are some radio highlights so far this year on the subject of books for children – do have a listen ... they're all available online:

• The picture book writer and illustrator Bridget Strevens Marzo and Penni Cotton, a specialist on children's literature, discuss how mothers are portrayed in picture books. This was a Mother's Day special on Woman's Hour – it opens with the voices of small children comparing their own mothers to the mothers in books like Dogger by Shirley Hughes, Goodbye Mog by Judith Kerr, The Sad Story of Veronica Who Played the Violin by David McKee and Really Really by Kes Gray and Nick Sharratt. Listen to Mothers in Picture Books item, aired on 24 March 2006.
• Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses was discussed by an audience that included teenagers on Book Club (click on 'Malorie Blackman April 2006' on the 'Listen Again' column on the right hand side). Blackman was in great form and it was touching to hear the thoughtful questions of teenagers.
• Open Book interviewed illustrator Quentin Blake about the Lester stories he wrote in the seventies, which he read aloud and illustrated on the children's television programme Jackanory. Listen to the programme featuring Quentin Blake, aired on 30 April 2006.
• Open Book also interviewed novelist Philip Reeve on completing his Mortal Engines quartet. Listen to the Philip Reeve interview, aired on the 12th of March 2006.
• Chocolat author Joanne Harris is not a children's author, but I really identified with this Open Book programme where she talked about why Ray Bradbury, one of my favourite childhood authors, may have made his name in sci-fi but deserves a place in the pantheon of really great storytellers and wordcraft. Listen to the Joanne Harris feature, aired on the 26th of February 2006.
• Front Row interviewed Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), who will be ending the highly successful Series of Unfortunate Events with the 13th book on Friday the 13th this October. Unfortunately, the programme will only be kept online until the 14th of June but if you read this before then, go to Front Row and click on Wednesday. If you don't catch this piece on time, here are some quotes from the interview:

  'I enjoyed writing for children's books .... you never love a book the way you love a book when you are 11. It's been exciting to meet so many 11 year olds who have my book in their heads.'
  
  'It is strange (writing adult novels again) because after writing so many children's books, one thinks of the audience a lot – not necessarily because of commercial success or that kind of expectation – but I myself kept returning to my own childhood memories again and again (to remember) what I liked to read and what kind of experiences I had ... what I thought was frightening.'
  
  '(Pleasing the audience) is something you don't hear a lot of adult novelists discuss. They often say, 'This was a story that was important for me to tell, or there was this historical detail that I found so fascinating or important ...'

Stay tuned, as they say.

Squeeze chain creates new routes to publishing

Some of us would love to imagine that the book business was about reading, not selling.

The Meg Ryan character in the film You’ve Got Mail sums it up beautifully when she talks about Shop Around the Corner, the children's bookshop her mother ran:

The world is not driven by by discounting … it wasn’t that she was just selling books, she was helping people become who they were going to be. When you read a book as a child, it becomes part of your identity in a way that no other reading does.

But how the world has changed!

Independent booksellers are fighting to keep their customers in the face of competition from chain stores.

With the behemoths able to secure huge discounts through bulk-buying, bestselling titles are now routinely sold at half their cover price, sometimes less. One independent I talked to reported finding the most recent Harry Potter (list price £16.99) at an absurd £2.99 in the local supermarket. Online, Amazon was yesterday offering it at £4.99. How does the small shop, which once looked forward eagerly to the annual Potter bonanza, compete with that? Are independents destined to follow second-hand bookshops, which have been all but obliterated by the internet, into oblivion?

Stephen Moss, The Best Sellers
The Guardian, 22 May 2006

Among other pressures, big book chains feel squeezed by supermarkets muscling in on their territory – with more and more consumers buying their books from supermarkets (a 41 percent rise in 2005 over 2004, Publishing News reported in March). That's apart from competition from the internet, of course.

So they’re discounting ferociously and squeezing the publishers by charging massive fees to put their titles on “recommended” lists and three for two offers – as described in a Sunday Times article yesterday:

No authors appear on recommended lists unless their publishers pay the fees, and those refusing to pay may not even find their titles stocked … The most expensive is WH Smith’s “adult gold” scheme, which is currently being presented to publishers who are expected to pay £50,000 a week per book for a place.

This guarantees a prominent position in the store’s 542 high street shops and inclusion in catalogues and other advertising. For the critical four-week Christmas sales period, it would cost a publisher at least £200,000 per book.

Robert Winnett and Holly Watt, £50,000 to get a book on recommended list
The Sunday Times, 28 May 2006

This puts publishers on the defensive. With that kind of outlay, their books have to make money – sooner rather than later. And so resources are poured into building a buzz around a book through marketing and publicity because by no means can they risk failure. But they can only do so much.

Which in turn puts the squeeze on us writers.

Increasingly publishers must put their faith in the commercial acumen of literary agents to spot the writers who can maximise their investment. “Concept” series are on the rise – books developed by companies like Working Partners who employ writers to write to a brief (series like the Rainbow Fairies, Animal Ark, etc). Many publishers no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts.

With the door to getting published becoming narrower and narrower, it is no wonder that so many writers are turning to self-publishing (not to be mistaken for vanity publishing, in which the author pays a company to publish their book ). Self-publishing, it seems, is the new gateway to catching a publisher’s eye:

Look at GP Taylor, author of the children's novel Shadowmancer, which was bought by Faber in 2003. He now has a £3.5m six-book deal, and a film deal worth millions. The American rights to Shadowmancer were sold for £314,000, rumoured to be more than three times JK Rowling's cheque for the American publication of the first Harry Potter story.

Taylor, was a 43-year old vicar in Cloughton, North Yorkshire. He was advised that no publisher would touch his tale of good and evil set on the North-East coast in the 18th-century. So he sold his motorbike and published Shadowmancer himself for £3,500.

After selling 2,500 copies in a month, largely through word-of-mouth, he was recommended to the agent who signed JK Rowling to Bloomsbury. The rest is a self-publishing dream come true.

Jane Dowle, Scribblers are doing it for themselves
Yorkshire Post Today, 5 Sept 2005

(You can read Wall Street author Andy Kessler’s self-publishing success story)

Interestingly, the venerable Arts Council has funded a website called You Write On –

The free website to help new writers develop, and to help talented writers get noticed and published.

The website uses a structure similar to techy websites like Experts Exchange where users interact and collect points according to their input. Instead of points, You Write On trades in critiques – the more you critique, the more you get your worked critiqued, and the better your work gets, the higher your rankings get - with the ultimate prize being a critique from publishing professionals.

The site has been online since January. In March, two reputable literary agencies, the Christopher Little Agency (representing J.K. Rowling) and Curtis Brown (representing Margaret Atwood), offered to consider the five highest rated works per month.

A consistently top-rating book will be chosen as book of the year – the prize: You Write On will publish and distribute your book to Amazon and several book chains, with the author retaining all rights and royalties.

Once upon a time, self-publishing was something of a last resort for aspiring authors. But in this new world where it is easier for a writer to squeeze through the eye of a needle than get published, self-publishing may become a respectable route to getting publishers to notice you.