Next Stop for The Story Prize Finalists: Storyville

Exciting news: Each of the three finalists for The Story Prize—Anthony Doerr, Yiyun Li, and Suzanne Rivecca—will have a story from their nominated collections appear on Storyville in the weeks ahead, leading up to the March 2 event at The New School in New York city. What is Storyville? It's an app for iPad or iPhone that each week delivers a short story directly to a subscriber's device. The stories come from published collections, and an author statement accompanies them. The app also interacts with Twitter and Facebook.

The creator and publisher of Storyville, Paul Vidich, is no stranger to this blog. He has twice contributed guest posts about digital distribution. Most importantly, he's a a short story writer and evangelist, who spent more than a year developing the idea for this app.

The $4.95 price for a six-month subscription to Storyville allows readers to sample a substantial number of story collections. In this case, I hope a taste of Doerr's Memory Wall, Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, and Rivecca's Death Is Not an Option will lead readers to buy the books.

For our part, we're offering Storyville pairs of tickets to The Story Prize event to give away each week that one of these stories runs. That means a few subscribers will get to see the authors read from and discuss their work live on-stage, taking readers on a trip from the newest platform for stories to the oldest.

The Namesake: Will The Digital Age Favor O. Henry-like Storytelling?

O. Henry: Ripe for a comeback?

On Saturday, I attended a reception for the 2010 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, as part of the PEN World Voices Festival. It was kind of like going to an engagement party for an ex-wife you've gotten over. I was series editor of the O. Henry Awards for six years, the 1997-2002 volumes, before Anchor Books abruptly decided to make a change. But it's been a while now, and over the last few years, I've exchanged the occasional friendly email with Laura Furman, the current series editor. I even boxed up my collection of about 20 past O. Henry Awards volumes and shipped it to her. So when Laura sent an invitation to the reception, I gladly accepted.

It was a friendly meeting. The low-key party took place at Idlewood books on West 19th Street. Among the hosts were One Story editor (and Story Prize board member) Hannah Tinti and Tin House editor Rob Spillman. A few of the authors in the 2010 volume were on hand. I also saw A Public Space editor Brigid Hughes (another board member) and past Story Prize finalist and O. Henry Award winner Joan Silber.

One thing that hasn't changed about the O. Henry Awards is the series' ambivalent relationship with its namesake. Someone asked Laura Furman if the stories in the book are like O. Henry's, and she quickly denied any connection beyond the name of the series. I always answered the same way.

Literary fiction branched off from the kind of popular magazine and newspaper fiction that William Sydney Porter (aka O. Henry), published at the turn of the last century as other forms of entertainment appeared. And you're more likely to find his formula of clever plots and surprising twists in television and movie scripts than in stories appearing in one of the prestigious annual literary collections, such as the O. Henry Awards, Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize collection, and New Stories from the South.

Of course, stories written as much for entertainment as for craft are still prevalent in genres such as horror, mystery, and romance, and many of them are excellent. However, popular fiction as a genre unto itself no longer really exists. But here (wait for it) is the twist: The digital age could offer such types of stories a second life. Radio, movies, and TV might have stolen a large part of the audience for popular storytelling, but digital platforms such as the iPad, Kindle, Nook, and Sony Reader have the potential to bring back the crowd pleasing, O. Henry-style story. These devices lend themselves very well to the short form and will be in the hands of a growing readership. So could popular short fiction mount a comeback in the digital age? I'd say, yes. How would that be for a surprise ending?

Note: May is Short Story Month in the blogosphere. This site is all about short stories, and we'll continue to post on our favorite subject throughout the month.

Selling Stories on the Web--The Age of Disintermediation Is Upon Us

For the first time that I know of, it's now possible to easily sell an electronic version of a short story online. Scribd.com, which had previously allowed users to post text to its site, has created an online store (in beta release) that allows authors to sell their work, set their own prices, and pocket 80%. That may not sound like a very big deal, but when you add social networking through the likes of Facebook and Twitter--not to mention Scribd's built-in community--this allows writers to bypass literary magazines and offer short works for sale directly to readers.

I could see this being a tempting possibility for established writers of short fiction. Say you've written a very topical story that it would be best to publish as soon as possible or one tied to a holiday or event. The only print outlet that could possibly publish it within a few weeks is The New Yorker. And everyone knows what a long shot selling a story there is, let alone getting it published when you'd like it to. Beyond that, you're likely to wait months if not years for your story to appear elsewhere, even if you place it immediately. So why not put the story out yourself? You could charge $1.25, and pocket $1 for every copy you sell. And you could time publication so that the immediacy of the story becomes a virtue rather than a drawback.

Of course, writers could also bypass book publishers and post an entire short story collection--the digital equivalent of self-publishing. But I think, unless you'd be doing it to also make each story available separately, you'd be giving up too much. In addition to prestige, publishers can offer print and digital distribution and the backing of their design, sales, and marketing teams (not to mention editing that could sharpen the writing). Getting something you published on Scribd reviewed would be nearly impossible. And most readers still prefer books to reading off a screen. More and more, however, are doing their reading on Kindle, the Sony Reader, handhelds, and other devices.

The downside is that this kind of disintermediation does pose a threat to literary magazines, which are an essential part of the literary community. But they can make use of the direct-sale capability themselves by opening their own Scribd stores to sell individual stories, poems, and essays under their respected imprimaturs. To be sure, many short stories are already available on the Web for free on the sites of print and Web only literary magazines. But why not make work available for purchase, instead, and make some money for the publication and author? The Scribd store even opens up the possibility of establishing an online Web 'zine that delivers stories to readers without even having to set up a Web site.

The possibilities are vast. Here's one more: How about fund-raising for a charity or nonprofit by selling stories, poems, and essays on-line? Thanks to Scribd, the logistics have never been simpler.

Storytelling 140 Characters at a Time—It Could Be More Than A Gimmick

When former New Yorker staff writer Daniel Baum started to spool out on Twitter the story of how he lost his position with the magazine, it got a lot of attention. At first, I had some catching up to do, which meant going to the beginning of Baum's stream and scrolling up until I was following in real time, but once I did, I found that reading his story one tweet at a time felt intimate, conversational, confessional—more than just a gimmick.

On this blog and Twitter, I usually stay on message and focus on short story collections, but Baum's posts and others' reactions to them drew me into an exchange about the potential for storytelling via microblogging. And to my surprise, I found myself touting the possibilities. Some thoughtful points Richard Nash made led me to consider how writing a story using this platform could work in a genuine and interesting way. I'm relatively new to Twitter, and no doubt others have previously taken up this exact subject and approach. I'm also not well-versed in experimental fiction, so I can't make an informed comparison to hypertext or Excel or PowerPoint or any other experimental e-fiction. But somehow this clicked with me.

So how would could someone writing a short story use Twitter effectively? The best analogy, as Sarah Weinman pointed out, is to serialization—in this case it would be microserialization. The biggest difference between this and Charles Dickens' serialized novels or, more recently, Denis Johnson's Nobody Move, have to do with the size of the installments and the means and frequency of delivery. The spirit, though, seems similar.

What would work particularly well on Twitter would be stories that could convey a sense of speaking directly to the reader. Along the way, the writer could consider responses from followers, which could influence the story he or she is telling. And all of the posts from others would comprise metatext to the story itself.

Ideally the writer would be composing as he or she tweets and not simply copying and pasting prewritten text. That doesn't mean an author couldn't be working from notes, an outline, or a draft. In fact that would make it more like composition and less like improvisation. At the end of the process, would lie a complete story or perhaps a draft of one. In fact, the writer could take this story, possibly incorporate feedback, and shape it into a more conventional text narrative. What's most interesting is that, in effect, the reader would be witnessing--and possibly assisting in--the creation of a story.

I'm not suggesting microserialization could/should/would replace traditional short stories. It's just a potentially new platform. Technology is moving fast, and I think interesting opportunities lie ahead for short story writers. Who knows? Great Twitter stories may just be waiting to be written.

Kindle 2: Evangelist? Adopter? Skeptic? Which are you?

A guest post by Paul Vidich

The Kindle 2, Amazon’s new product has generated a lot of buzz about the future of e-books. Buzz is good because it demonstrates the interest of a community in the promise of a product. This condition, however, is often directly related to the desperation of the community, which is certainly palpable in the corridors of the humbled print empires.

So, what of the Kindle 2? What of the transition to a digital reader such as Kindle, iPhone, or the Sony eReader, all of which promise to enable electronic acquisition and consumption of text on simple to use, portable devices? Format transitions are new to books, which arguably haven’t had a technological shift since Gutenberg, but format shifts have occurred five times in fifty years in the music industry. Are there lessons?

Music’s current format shift is moving from physically distributed goods to electronically distributed goods, and movies are marching down the same path, although several years behind. Typically, consumers don’t adopt new formats unless there is a high order of magnitude improvement in experience – that’s what it takes to get past the switching costs, old libraries made obsolete, new behavior to adopt, etc. This was the case in the transitions from LP to CD and VHS to DVD. Digital music (e.g. iTunes) has caught on because it offers several improvements on the CD: a more convenient retailing experience (browse at home in a store that never has stock outs), ease of acquisition (a download takes less than a minute), the ability to buy a track and not the whole album, comprehensive storage and easy library navigation on the PC, and a simple transfer to a portable listening device with lots of memory.

The conversion to digital music has occurred without improving the sound quality, a major factor in prior format shifts. In fact, the acoustic quality of the digital download is inferior, some say significantly inferior, to the CD. But that hasn’t made a difference to consumers, who value the new experience holistically. Consumers buy downloads, even when the songs are still free on p2p networks, because they value the chain of experiences. People listen to music, but they pay for an experience.

So, what if any, lessons does this hold for e-books? The Kindle 2 has one remarkable quality and several features that are nice, but my experience, and that of my unscientific sample of other new Kindle 2 owners, suggests that there will have to be several rounds of ergonomic innovation, presentation and display enhancements, and content product ideation for a mass market to adopt the Kindle.

My Kindle 2 arrived via Fedex with my user account already established, so the unpacked device, once turned on, synched immediately to the Amazon store, and I was able to make a purchase without typing name or credit card information. Amazon has made buying and downloading e-books very easy, but the promise of flat screen reading falls, well, flat. The screen is clear, but words on the screen lack a book’s restful quality, the wonderful feeling that the text has been stamped or pressed in place, the feeling of permanence.

If you’re a book lover, repeated reading on the Kindle may help you overcome the loss of satisfying tactility, in the same way that we’ve all learned to accommodate reading PDF files on screen. For me at least, this means that so long as I have a book nearby I’ll always choose the book over Kindle. But books are heavy and the Kindle weighs less than a pound, so I might use the Kindle to take e-books on business trips or on vacation, or a college student might buy an electronic textbook, or even a chapter of a text book (if sold that way), because the trade-offs of weight, convenience, and experience favor the digital version. The Kindle 2, in short, feels more like an evolutionary device and not the revolutionary device that previously transformed the music and movie businesses as they changed from tape to CD, or VHS to DVD.

This week has seen two noteworthy announcements about e-readers. Sony, which expects to release a wireless web connected e-reader upgrade in 2009, announced that its site is making available for free half a million public domain downloadable books. Fujitsu announced the release of a color screen e-reader in Japan ($1,000). And Plastic Logic, a venture start-up that’s raised $200 million, will ship mid-2009 an e-reader that links to newspapers, magazines, and fictionwise.com, the e-book retailer Barnes and Noble recently purchased.

Sony’s free book announcement does begin to change the appeal of an e-reader, although not the consumer’s preference for books. Consumers adopted new entertainment devices (CD players and DVD players) when there was sufficient content to enjoy the device. Sony’s announcement begins to enhance the consumer value proposition. After all, the unique attribute of text is that a word written in 1840 is the identical word used today. The text of Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, published that year, is identical to the text available in contemporary reprints. Technology has not changed the intrinsic value of reading the written word, whereas technology has been fundamental to the continued improvement in audio and video entertainment experiences.

Sony’s decision to open up 500,000 public domain downloads for free, is a significant value proposition. And, Sony’s offer is a fraction of the many millions of public domain documents (books, essays, manuscripts, archive materials, etc.) that have been digitized in the past ten years. Think of Borges, whose seminal short story, “The Library of Babel,” broached the notion of the “catalogue of catalogues,” which in today’s terminology would become “the index of indexes.” The question is: How does all that free content change the value proposition for e-readers, and how does an e-reader differ from a small laptop computer or from iPhone reading applications? The answer, no doubt, has already been written, but we’ll have to wait for it to appear.

Mix Books Redux: March of the Penguin

Harking back to a September TSP post and a guest post from writer and one-time music industry executive Paul Vidich, the subject of assembling digital custom anthologies has once again come up. As Leon Neyfach reports on the New York Oberver's Web site, as part of Penguin Group USA's Penguin 2.0 initiative, in 2009 customers will be able to choose from stories, essays, poems, and other "standalone texts" to create custom-made collections, then print them on demand. The article goes on to say:

"Taking sites like AnthologyBuilder.com and iTunes as inspiration, Mr. Gomez said, Penguin hopes the 'Custom' program will tap into people's desire 'to remix a little and to shuffle their playlists.' He cautioned, however, that he 'would never want to break apart an entire book' and thereby render the full-length volume obsolete the way iTunes has done to the 74-minute LP."

Surely, he must know that if this catches on, it could well deconstruct short story collections. As I said in September:

"Getting back to the iTunes analogy, I was recently thinking it would be great if you could make your own anthology of your favorite stories, poems, essays, etc., and give it to friends in the form of a bound volume, the way you make a mix tape or mix CD. Call it a mix book (a term already taken)."

Could this be the tipping point? AnthologyBuilder.com seems to offer mostly science fiction stories written by little known authors. Penguin Classics has an enormous backlist, including a lot of short fiction by authors such as Sherwood Anderson, Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Graham Greene, Thomas Hardy, O. Henry, Washington Irving, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, Rudyard Kipling, Ring Lardner, D. H. Lawrence, Jack London, Somerset Maugham, Herman Mellville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain, and collections by more contemporary writers including Dorothy Allison, Donald Barthelme, Saul Bellow, and Stephen King. Now that's a list worth reintermediating.

Guest Post: Paul Vidich on Digital Distribution of Short Stories

(Note: This post is in response to the Sept. 10 post, Mixed Books? Mixed Feelings, below.)

Paul Vidich left Time Warner in 2006 after 19 years as a senior executive in its AOL and Warner Music divisions, where he was executive vice-president in charge of worldwide strategy and business development. At Warner Music, he negotiated the first major label license agreement with Steve Jobs for iTunes, which set the precedent for Apple’s subsequent acquisition of music rights from the other music majors. Vidich left Time Warner to pursue a career in writing and now attends the MFA program in creative writing at Rutgers-Newark. He is a board member of Poets & Writers and other cultural institutions. His short stories have been published in several online and print publications, including Wordriot.org, Wheelhousemagazine.com, and Mrbellersneighborhood.com.

The nature of the Internet is that it doesn't respect forms that are tied to technologies that it makes irrelevant; the album was the creation of the long playing disc and then the CD--artists recorded albums to fill the space available. Of course, the artists who worked in the medium saw their collections as the work itself, and consumers didn't necessary agree. They often remembered or cared for one or two tracks.

The analogy to books only partly holds up. Certainly, the consumer will have the same desire to pick and choose digital stories according to preference, which threatens any collection or compilation. And to the extent that reduces the buying of traditional books it will change the book industry. On the other hand, many of the consumers who actually read (those important educated buyers of books) have not been sold yet on the value of a digitally distributed book. Many (most?) still like to own the physical product.

I suspect this may change over time. When that changes happens I doubt that consumers will buy digital stories with the purpose of downloading and printing them into custom collections. More likely they'll download, store on a drive, and print them individually as a convenience to read, as they would today with a magazine article. This whole area is quite fascinating and still in its early stages. My take is this: If the technology permits it and the consumer finds value in it, it will happen, industry/profits/intransigence/paranoia notwithstanding.