Suw Charman-Anderson is a social software consultant and writer who specialises in the use of blogs and wikis behind the firewall. With a background in journalism, publishing and web design, Suw is now one of the UK's best known bloggers, frequently speaking at conferences and seminars.
She recently launched Kits and Mortar, a blog about planning a green, cat-friendly self-built home.
Suw is also founder and board member of the Open Rights Group, a digital rights advocacy group which aims to raise awareness of digital rights issues, to campaign against bad legislation in Britain and the EU, and to support grass roots activism.
Kevin Anderson has been an online journalist since 1996, designing, editing and writing websites for both broadcast and print media. In 1998, he joined the BBC and became their first online journalist based outside of the UK, covering the US for its award winning news website. After coming to the UK in 2005, he developed a blogging strategy for BBC news, helped launch a programme on the BBC's 5Live covering weblogs and podcasts and was on the team that launched the interactive radio programme World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service.
Kevin is now the Blogs Editor for The Guardian, where he is responsible for management, strategy and 'leading by doing' for Guardian Unlimited blogs.
Over the last few months I've working hard on the Creative Business in the Digital Era research project (hence my quietude here), which is examining the way in which businesses are using open intellectual property (IP) as a central pillar of their business model.
The project culminates in three free seminars in central London during March - a full day on 17th March, and two evening seminars on 18th/19th (with roughly the same content in each) - during which we'll talk about what we've discovered about open IP businesses, and talk to people who are actually giving stuff away whilst also making money from it. We've managed to recruit three fabulous guest speakers:
The seminar is aimed at people within the creative industry - e.g. music, publishing, film, TV, radio, visual arts, photography - and from any size of company, whether they are freelances or a C-level exec. The course materials are all being prepped out in the open, under CC licence.
As mentioned, the seminar is free to attend - if you are interested, all you need to do is to fill in our application form.
If you're interested yourself, please do apply! If you have a blog, podcast or Twitter account and would like to mention our seminar, please do. And if you know of anyone who might be interested in coming, feel free to tell them about it.
Our deadline for applications is 15th February, so apply now!
Sincere apologies to my fellow mentors for not getting some of my notes up sooner, but without WiFi on Friday and the mentoring all weekend, I usually ended up posting late at night. Friday, I stayed up until 130 in the morning. I did as much as I could in between sessions on the weekend, but being a mentor, I wanted to do justice to the groups who came to discuss their projects. As for continuing the late night blogging, exhaustion prevented me from doing more over the weekend.
Liz Heller started out in sociology, and she is fascinated how people travel in 'groups and loops'. They formed a company called Buzztone, which "creates award-winning lifestyle, pop culture, urban and guerrilla marketing campaigns". She went on to describe social motivations to keep in mind when thinking about social software and services:
We share a lot in common. We want to be a part of something. We want to share what we love. We all want to be just a little famous. We all want to think that we are the first to find something new. We all want to have friends.
People want to stay in touch with friends they already have. Social networks are seen as ways to deepen existing friendships not supplant them. (Bravo Liz. I couldn't agree more. Media always cover online social networks as if they supplant not supplement real world social bonds. For most of the people I know, it's just not so. And Liz added a new word my vocabulary: Frobligations, friends referrals through other friends that you feel obligated to befriend.)
Her work revolves around marketing campaigns that relied on some of these social needs. They used a social club and lots of social outreach to connect women to French wine. They used feedback from the members to feed back into the social club. (Again, I think this is a key thing that most 'social marketing' companies forget: Feedback. Most of the time, they focus only on seeding their message in social networks, not using those social networks to make their products better and their companies genuinely more responsive.)
They also developed a student network for Microsoft called Spoke. It was the first social network for tech students. It was global and regionalised. It helped to change student perceptions of Microsoft.
Social networks are a filter. She pointed out MoveOn.org, OurChart (a social network for lesbians from the popular programme The L Word), Block Savvy (a niche urban-focused social network) and a number of others. (When people ask me about how I stay on top of developments in digital media and journalism, and one of the best tools I have is a the dozen or so digital journalism experts who blog in my RSS reader. They are my filter, my radar, my early warning trend watchers. Now, seeing all of these social networks developing, I must say that it reminds me slightly of the late dot.com boom when sites took an e-commerce model and chased increasingly small sales niches. Remember all of those pet e-commerce sites? I think there is value in focused communities online, but that is value to me as an end-user. I'm not so sure about value in terms of a sustainable business model. However, I can see the justification if you're looking to build a social network around a marketing campaign, even if that isn't my particular focus.)
Groups and loops for causes. She showed stopglobalwarming.org, a social network following on from Live Earth and Zaadz. Social media encourages face-to-face engagement. Houseparty.com and reunion.com all encourage real world events. (Again, it was really good to hear someone counter the media-driven myth that online social activity creates a world of anti-social people. Whether it's Twitter, Flickr, Dopplr or my blog, these things reinforce my real world social interaction. They helped jump start my social life when I moved to London a couple of years ago. But as Suw says, Twitter gets her out to the pub to spend time with friends.)
I liked the ideas Liz was presenting. The marketing-sensitive consumer in me was possibly too aware of commercial purpose of some of these projects, but Liz wasn't just talking about trying to infect social networks with marketing messages, which seems to me the purpose of some viral campaigns. Social marketing campaigns that don't listen, aren't social, even if they are targeting social spaces online, and her emphasis on using feedback from the community is often missed by many digital marketing companies.
And I really liked Liz' emphasis that there is a symbiotic relationship between online and offline community. It's a myth that online community is a parasitic drain on real world social interaction, and it's great to hear someone like Liz challenge conventional wisdom.
This week is my turn to work with the students on De Montfort's Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media, which I am very much looking forward to. But first, an apology: I had promised to put together a video lecture, but it turns out that video is a lot harder than it looks. I spent most of the weekend struggling with the technology, only to end up at 1am this morning with a video which was both too long and rubbish. I've thus concluded that I need to acquire a few new skills before I start making rash promises about video - I hope you'll forgive me, but I honestly think those are 30 minutes of your life that you can do better things with.
Everything I would have said in the video has already been published, however, in the Open Publishing category of this blog:
What are the numbers? How have Penguin, Tor and Baen seen sales develop over the live of an open book? Do they have any information that would allow a comparison between downloads and sales?
Does open publishing prolong the shelf-life of a book?
Is success genre specific, and focused on internet-literate readers such as science fiction fans and tech books?
Do authors who open publish earn more overall? Do they get more requests to speak, or write for magazines or newspapers? Do they get other paid gigs alongside their writing?
Will the model work when we don't need paper at all? Is open publishing a blip, viable only during the period within which ebooks are non-interchangable with paper books?
Do ebook downloaders buy more books overall?
What's the relationship between audiobooks and ebooks?
There is, obviously, a lot more to say about open publishing and my curiosity is very much piqued by what I've read and written so far. I look forward to delving into the topic even more and look forward to everyone's questions and comments.
It's difficult to have a discussion about open publishing without also considering digital rights management (DRM), the software that attempts to control what people do with digitally distributed content. For many publishers, the thought of publishing books under a Creative Commons licence is anathema, but yet they don't want to pass up on the opportunity to distribute their material digitally online. Instead of experimenting with open publishing, they try to find a middle way and frequently they think that middle way is to use DRM to lock up their ebooks and audiobooks.
As you can tell from my tone, I'm none too keen on DRM. It's something I've done a lot of work on with the Open Rights Group, where I was until recently Executive Director. Rather than rehash all the arguments here as to why I believe DRM is bad, I'm going to give you a nice list of links:
My write up of the Government's DRM public inquiry hearing, pay particular attention to the submission from the RNIB/Share the Vision (no. 4) and Audible/SNOCAP (no. 7)
The problem with DRM is that it's a fundamentally flawed technology which erodes our rights and favours contract law over copyright law. It prevents users exercising their fair dealing rights (called fair use in the US), restricts access to those with disabilities, and does nothing to benefit the consumer.
I have been surprised by the relish with which some publishers approach DRM, but in looking for a middle way they've ended up down a cul-de-sac.
It's not just publishing that is becoming an open process, but also writing. The advent of wikis and blogs allows people to collaborate on creative works with complete strangers, regardless of geographic divides. The idea seems a bit strange to creative writers used to what is most frequently a solitary pursuit, but for certain types of writing it can work very well. Opening your work up for proof-reading and criticism right from the beginning can be an emotionally difficult task for some, but bringing together a number of experts to work on a book and provide feedback can result in a much better end product.
Some types of writing are clearly good for collaborative writing - technical books, such as books about computer programming, or factual books with a lot of fine detail benefit from the insight and expertise of more than one person. One such example is The Django Book, written by Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss. Here's a very quick tour of their site:
Clive Thompson did something similar way when writing a feature on radical transparency for Wired. He published his initial ideas about what the feature should cover, and asked his readers for their input. They gave him information and links to use in his research; discussed the implications of his ideas on secrecy, transparency and the hivemind; and helped him shape his feature with views from around the world.
And a project that De Montfort students might already be aware of is the Million Penguins wiki, a join Penguin/De Montfort project attempting to bring strangers together to write a novel. Rather than using a blog and comments to solicit feedback, this wiki allows people to write and edit the novel directly. Unlike The Dango Book or Radical Transparency, which are examples of factual writing where people can pool their expertise on a given subject, A Million Penguins is an experiment to see if people can write fiction together.
The problem with writing fiction is that it's not just a series of scenes put into a logical order, it has to have an internal structure of its own, and that usually comes from one person's imagination, or collaboration between a small number of people (frequently two). It's also difficult for a group of strangers to write with a consistent voice, to avoid cliché, and to develop working plots, sub-plots, themes and motifs. But A Million Penguins is an experiment to see if people can self-organise, and to see how parallel storylines develop as individuals and small groups pick up a concept and run with it in different directions.
It reminds me somewhat of the email role playing games (RPG) that I've been a part of in the past, where people come together, each create a character and weave a story together email by email. Sometimes, email RPGs work really well - when you have a cohesive group who respect each other's contribution, not only is it a lot of fun but the story that unravels is creative and interesting. But it only takes one person being difficult to turn a fun RPG into something tedious and annoying, and I fear that the same is true - possibly more true - of a wiki novel. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Wikis can also be used for non-fiction, just as blogs can be. Justin Patten is currently writing a book called Blogging and Other Social Media: Technology and Law, and is using a wiki to open up the writing process to other social media experts. Again, I think it's slightly easier to write a non-fiction book on a wiki than a novel, but either way it's a non-trivial task.
One issue that springs to mind is, how you deal with someone else posting content that infringes someone else's copyright? It's not feasible to double-check every passage added to the wiki by every user, particularly if your wiki takes off and you have a lot of contributors. It could be troublesome if such a passage was not picked up until the book was in print, potentially forcing all copies to be pulped if legal action was taken.
The answer is, I think, not just that you can generally trust your contributors, but also to encourage contributors to add in references if they spot a passage they recognise as being quoted from another source. Then, inclusion of infringing text - whether innocent or malicious - could be picked up fairly early in the process. Of course, there are no guarantees, but we'll have to wait and see if this sort of concern is even valid.
One final method that I've used a lot for writing up collaborative conference notes is simultaneous note taking, using software like SubEthaEdit (on the Mac). SubEthaEdit allows multiple people to edit the same document at the same time - so you can see people typing, letter by letter. It's an amazing tool for real-time collaboration, and I'd love to experiment with writing something substantive with it. Certainly it'd be a fun tool for co-writing a novel, so long as your collaborators are in the right time zone!
But this openness isn't suitable for everyone or every project. Sometimes, the joy of writing is sitting, on your own, somewhere quiet, and just working through your own thoughts, figuring out what you really mean, getting your own words out of your head and into a medium where they can eventually be shared - when you are ready. Much of writing for me is about self-expression, and that's something that's never going to go away, no matter how much technology provides me with the tools and opportunity to collaborate. That's not a rejection of collaboration, but recognition of the fact that I like to put my self into my writing, and no one else can do that for me. Neither way of writing is right or wrong, it's just horses for courses.
The creative world is not the only one grappling with the implications of open publishing. In the scientific world there has been great debate about 'open access publishing'...
And here I run afoul of terminology. I've been using the term 'open publishing' to refer to the process of publishing your materials for free online, whatever those materials may be, at the same time as you publish a physical version that can be bought. When you start digging into Wikipedia, though, it seems that for some people 'open publishing' means the 'process of creating news or other content that is transparent to the readers'. I was going to cover that under the heading 'open writing', although it may be more accurately described as 'open source journalism' or 'collaborative writing' or 'distributed journalism' or 'networked journalism' or, frankly, any one of a whole number of different phrases.
I think this illustrates just how little consensus there is on these issues. There are so many shades of grey that people are tempted to think up new terms for each one, but I'm going to stick with these two:
Open publishing - making commercially published materials freely available online under a permissive licence that allows for at least some reuse.
Open access publishing - making scientific and medical research papers freely available online under a permissive licence that allows for at least some reuse.
Others may not agree with this, and certainly the issues are more complex than those definitions suppose, but they're going to have to do for now. We can discuss nuances in the comments!
There are some things which are so self-evidently right and good that it’s hard to imagine how anyone could disagree with you. The “open access” academic journal movement is one of those things. It’s a no-brainer. Academic literature should be freely available: developing countries need access; part time tinkering thinkers like you deserve full access; journalists and the public can benefit; and most importantly of all, you’ve already paid for much of this stuff with your taxes, they are important new ideas from humanity, and morally, you are entitled to them.
The parallels between this concept and the one underpinning the Creative Commons/Free Culture movement are fairly obvious. It's not just culture that wants to be free, but also information.
The point of friction between author and publisher, though, is slightly different. In the cultural world, publishers get hung up on controlling their intellectual property rights, and in particular about both file sharing and commercial piracy. But the arguments hinge around one economic question: will open publishing bring the publisher (and thence the author) more sales and, therefore, make them more money?
Both author and publisher want to make money, and their needs are relatively well aligned. They both want the author's work to be popular because popularity tends to result in higher sales, and it's fairly obvious that releasing your work for free online increases the number of people who have access to it and thus the number of potential buyers. As mentioned in a previous post, the main debate is about the details of whether open publishing cannibalises or increases sales.
Note: The same works for music and movies, even if those industries haven't quite figured it out yet.
With open access, the needs of the author and of the publisher are not aligned. The author of a scientific research paper wants their paper to be widely read and cited by other scientists. They don't get paid for writing, there's no fee from the publisher for their work - any increase in income comes indirectly from being a successfully published and widely cited authority in your field, and thus being able to command better salaries or larger grants. So the author is not interested in being paid for his or her writing.
The science publisher, on the other hand, is very interested in people paying for access to their journal. It's how they make their money. Thus they see open publishing as a threat - who would pay to access their content if it's available for free online?
This leads to two opposing publishing models: Reader Pays and Author Pays. The former is the traditional 'we publish it, you pay for it if you want to read it' model. The latter has been adopted by some open access journals, such as the Public Library of Science, the Journal of Medical Internet Research, and BioMed Central, which charge authors some sort of fee in order to cover their costs.
There is at least one other way, though, which could be called Third Party Pays, where the costs of publishing are subsidised by an institution, or covered by income from another source such as advertising, grants, etc. Some are even run by volunteers, thus incurring minimal costs.
Only a minority of existing OA journals actually used the most-studied and most-discussed business model for OA journals --charging author-side fees. (Let's call these "fee-based" OA journals.) The majority of OA journals turned out to use business models that had rarely been acknowledged, let alone studied. (Let's call these "no-fee" OA journals.) We thought we understood OA journals but we only understood a subset, and the greater part of the whole was still largely unknown.
I wish I could tell you how many different ways the no-fee journals have found to pay their bills, and which methods work best in which disciplines and countries. But I can't. No one has done the studies yet. A few ships have approached the coastline of this land mass but we haven't come close to penetrating the interior or producing a map.
As Peter says, it would be interesting to find out a lot more about the business models for the 53% of journals that aren't charging their authors - the creative industries could potentially learn a lot from the publishing models used by their science publishing colleagues.
But the science publishing industry - where I started my postgraduate career, I have to mention - is not happy with open access. John Wiley & Sons, Reed Elsevier and the American Chemical Society are three of the biggest members of the Association of American Publishers, which has hired 'PR pitbull' Eric Dezenhall to try and swing the debate their way. This has been seen as an act of desperation and an attempt to derail real debate in favour of soundbite marketing tactics.
The threat is, of course, economic. If scientists prefer free open access journals to reader-pays journals, then the publishers' business model is threatened. Some of the non-economic objections to open access, such as accusations that it does not support peer review, are clearly nonsense. Peer review - the process by which a paper is distributed amongst other experts in the author's discipline so that they can critique it - requires only someone to arrange it and there is no good reason why an open access journal cannot peer review as well as a traditional journal.
Just like the cultural world, though, the genie is out of the bottle and sunning himself on a beach in Rio. Open access is not going to go away, and traditional publishers need to adapt or die. It's scary, and the shape of future scientific business models is not clear, but there's no escaping change.
It's virtually impossible to talk about open publishing without mentioning Cory Doctorow. As one of the most vocal supporters and active users of the open publishing model, Cory is frequently cited as proof positive that open publishing works. I'm not sure that Cory's success means that every person who publishes their work online under a Creative Commons licence is thus certain to also be successful - success relies on a lot more than availability. But what we can say is that releasing his material free online has helped him to build up a loyal fanbase of readers and a significant profile which helps him earn money both directly and indirectly from his writing.
Of course, writing is not all that Cory does - he's also a renowned digital rights advocate with a formidable reputation as an expert and activist who worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He also blogs at BoingBoing, one of the world's most successful blogs, and now he holds the Fulbright Chair at the University of Southern California. But this activity also helps raise his profile, bringing him to the attention of more people who might download or buy his book.
(I must admit that I'd known Cory quite a while before I first read any of his novels. I downloaded Eastern Standard Tribe, liked the first chapter, but before I could get round to buying it, I was given a paper copy by a friend. I don't think I would have heard of Cory at all if it weren't for his work at the EFF, and I wouldn't have come to know him personally if we hadn't then shared an office for a while because of my work with the Open Rights Group. But then, the world is full of these strange conditionals.)
In January 2003, Cory published his first book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, through the world's biggest science fiction publisher, Tor. At the same time, he posted the text online under a Creative Commons licence and let anyone who wanted to download and redistribute it. Within a day there had been 30,000 downloads, and by December 2006 there had been over 700,000 downloads.
Just as happened later to Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture, Cory found that people immediately started to play with his book. At first, it was different file formats - people took the ASCII text and reformatted it into HTML, PDF, PalmOS PDB, Apple Newton PKG, and many others. Then there's a PDF file that when printed folds neatly into a booklet, the entire text as a printable poster depicting the cover art, audio versions and translations.
But it didn't stop at reformatting - people got far more inventive than that. There was the Sausage and Mash Remix, where every word beginning with S is replaced by the word Sausage, and every word beginning with M becomes Mash; the Capipa Remix which reorders all the words in alphabetical order; and the More and Bloodier Wars Remix, where the original is run back and forth through machine translator Babelfish. (All are mentioned on Cory's blog, but don't seem to be available anymore).
Cory's second book, Eastern Standard Tribe, was released the same way in January 2004. Again came the HTML version, the PDF, files for all sorts of different ebook readers, GameBoy Advance files - anything you could possibly want. Other remixes included a speed reader version that flashes the book up on your screen one word at a time, and a (frankly freaky) partial audio version using computer software to record and remix.
None of this creativity would be possible under traditional 'all rights reserved' copyright, but it's not just about enriching the commons. It's also about making a living. In a December 2006 Forbes article, Cory wrote "I've been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money."
That seems to tick the box nicely.
The Forbes piece is well worth reading the whole way through, as Cory talk about open publishing in depth. He puts together more pieces of the puzzle as to how and why this works for him, one of which is to do with the genre in which he writes:
[S]cience fiction's early adopters defined the social character of the Internet itself. Given the high correlation between technical employment and science fiction reading, it was inevitable that the first nontechnical discussion on the Internet would be about science fiction. The online norms of idle chatter, fannish organizing, publishing and leisure are descended from SF fandom, and if any literature has a natural home in cyberspace, it's science fiction, the literature that coined the very word "cyberspace."
Indeed, science fiction was the first form of widely pirated literature online, through "bookwarez" channels that contained books that had been hand-scanned, a page at a time, converted to digital text and proof-read. Even today, the mostly widely pirated literature online is SF.
Which does make me wonder, would books outside of the science fiction genre do so well? I'll come to that in another post.
If there is a posterboy for open publishing, it's Cory. He has the amazing enthusiasm and drive of the pioneer, and I can't imagine he'd be happy anywhere else but out front, where the experimentation happens, where the risks are unknown, and where he can carve his own path.
But not everyone coming on behind is going to meet with the same success as Cory. Giving your stuff away is but one part of the story. You also have to work your arse off - I actually don't know anyone who is as prolific and hard-working as Cory. I remember once sitting in the office with him, listening to him type with the speed and ferocity of a man possessed (deadline notwithstanding). It made me feel deeply inadequate. And, of course, you have to be a good writer, and that itself takes a lot of hard work and dedication, and years and years of practice.
I just reread it and, three years later I find nothing in it has dated. Larry was kind enough to let me interview him for my blog post, and his words ring true now just as they did then. I strongly recommend that all De Montfort students reading this spend a little time reading both the essay, and exploring the links in it.
The temptation when you're looking at a topic of open publishing is to focus on the case studies of people and publishers who are making works available online for reuse, but it's really important to take a look at the wider context within which writers, publishers and booksellers are working and related issues such as DRM and piracy (which I will also address at length in another post). You can't consider open publishing in a vacuum, despite the temptation to focus in on just that one area, otherwise you get just a fraction of the story.
Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation.
Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
Lesson 5: File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
Lesson 6: "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service.
Lesson 7: There's more than one way to do it.
Tim examines each of these lessons in detail, but rather than attempt a summary, I recommend that you go and read his post and get it straight from the horse's mouth.
John Scalzi wrote a fantastic post in May 05 about the changing nature of a writer's business model in an age where everything is easily copyable. A snippet to whet your appetite:
I won't get into how much of my writing income over the last four years comes directly and indirectly as a result of writing on this site, except to say it's six figures and the leftmost number is not a "1," and not nearly all of it comes from book sales. This is not bragging (or not only bragging, shall I say); the point to made here is that an ambitious writer can use a non-commercial presence to generate a non-trivial amount of income. In my case, the content here, like the content on Penny Arcade, is un-pirateable; I don't charge anything for it, and I don't care if you send it along to whomever you like. But it brings in thousands of people every day, some of whom would probably spend money on Scalzi merchandise. Like, say, a novel, however it is published.
Or not a novel, actually -- why not a novella? The market for novellas is very small right about now, because most publishers don't like them; they don't fit into the mass-market publishing paradigm very well at all. But if I don't have to worry about my publisher's production albegra, maybe I could sell one. Or not sell it at all -- maybe I'll post it up on the site with its run subsidized by an advertiser. I have eight to ten thousand visitors on a daily basis; think there's an advertiser out there who might be willing to shell out for 100,000 ad impressions over the run of the novella?
Point is, in a pirate age, I think I still stand a good chance of continuing to make a very good income from writing. Since I don't think we'll get to a pirate age, this is even better news for me, because I have the advantage of generating writer income the old-fashioned way as well as in this new way. Multiple revenue streams are a writer's friend. Now, get this: I'm not particularly clever, and I'm awfully lazy. If I can do this, pretty much any writer can. Yes, it does take time and effort to generate a readership (seven years, in the case of the Whatever). Tell me how this is different from publishing today.
Scalzi makes an excellent point: Just because business models are changing doesn't mean either that the publishing industry will die, or that the writer will find it harder to make a living (bearing in mind that it's already hard).
According to a report from The Publishers Association, in 2005, there were approx. 60,000 book publishers in the UK and Ireland, and about 1.6 million titles were available for sale, including 206,000 new or revised titles. The total value of sales was £2,768 million, and 788 million units were sold (giving an average price of £3.50). Consumer sales were £2,396 million for 2005, up 8% on 2004 (compared to a 3% increase in 2004 over 2003). Book exports were also up 3.7% to £1.41 billion, with the US the biggest market. Decide for yourself if those numbers indicate an industry in rapid decline, or one that's healthy.
It seems pretty difficult to find up-to-date statistics on how much authors earn in the UK, but an old post from 2000 on the Dark Echo site says:
You think you should be able to make a living as a writer? A survey by the Society of Authors (U.K.) shows that dream may be even further from reality than we thought. An article published last Thursday by The Guardian/The Observer Web site BooksUnlimited (reported the survey -- first of its kind in nearly 20 years -- "shows that the universal creative dream of self-sufficiency through writing is receding farther than ever. . . Almost half British authors earn less than the £5,000 yearly minimum wage and three quarters make less than the national average of £20,000." Only one writer in seven actually lives on earnings from writing. In other words, "You live better with toilet cleaner on your fingers than with ink."
I can't find the original article on the Observer site, nor an update version of this survey, but it's still true to say that it's bloody hard to make a living out of writing, whatever type of writing you do. But it is dramatically easier now to access to your prospective audience, to nurture a community of fans, and to benefit from a variety of income streams, such as advertising on your site or merchandise. Which means that if you get as much of your stuff as possible in front of as many people as possible by giving it all away, you have an opportunity to make money both directly and indirectly from your writing. For those who understand this, it could be said that it's now easier to make a living as a writer, not harder - although it's important to note that 'easier' is a relative term.
Again, though, we're left with a lack of real hard data here. Do authors with blogs earn more than authors with out-of-date/static websites or authors with no web presence? Does an online presence only favour authors of specific genres? Do authors who give their works away online earn more than those who don't, for authors at the same stage in their career and working in the same genre? (Although, jeeze, you'd have a hell of a job getting a meaningful statistical comparison out of that one.)
The problem, of course, is that authors and publishers generally don't like giving away this sort of data, so ultimately we are left with only anecdote and experience to inform us.
When I think of 'open publishing', the first thing I think about is people like Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow and Tom Reynolds who have all persuaded their publisher to allow them to release electronic versions of their books at the same time as the physical dead-tree version. (More on those three later.) In all cases, this seems to have been to the benefit of the book, but to give your book away at the same time as you put it up for sale is a bit of a leap of faith. Why would you take that risk? It's far from being a proven economic or promotional strategy.
I think Chris Saad gets to the heart of this very quickly, when he asks, Am I being heard? He says there is:
A fundamental human need that I think podcasting, blogging and all forms of social/citizen journalism speaks to... the need to be heard. People just want to feel connected and understood.
At a very basic level, Larry, Cory and Tom share in common with me, you, and pretty much everyone else a desire to be heard, to be read, to have the things that we've laboured over appreciated.
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail, also confesses that he just wants to be heard (although he doesn't seem to have published an ebook version of his book):
I know I shouldn't say this, but I'm actually delighted to see that my book has been pirated and is available on Bittorrent. (Presumably this is the audio book version, even though it claims to be an "ebook", which I wasn't aware existed. UPDATE. One file is the pirated audiobook, the "ebook" is actually this ChangeThis pdf of the original Wired article, which was already freely available).
My publishers want to make money, and I like them so I usually do what it takes to keep them happy, but in truth I just want to be read/listened to by the largest number of people. Leave it to me to figure out how to convert that reputational currency into cash--just get me in front of the biggest audience and I'll do the rest. My agent doesn't want to hear this, but I'd rather take a smaller up-front advance or lower royalties in exchange for more liberty in distributing free versions, because I think I'll actually be better off in the end.
Anderson, however, tangles up a few threads in his piece, the first is a discussion of equivalence: ebooks are assumed not to be equivalent to books; digital audiobooks are assumed to be equivalent to CDs.
Reading an ebook isn't currently a great experience. Specialised ebook readers are expensive, and most people don't like reading on-screen, so the ebook is seen as not equivalent for a paper book, i.e. people are more likely to go and buy the paper version if they like the ebook. Thus it is beneficial to release a free ebook so that you can reach as wide an audience as possible, as you stand a good chance of converting ebook downloads to paper book sales.
Conversely, it doesn't really matter whether you have an unlawfully downloaded copy of an audiobook, or the real thing, whether bought as a download or as a CD, because either way you are probably going to listen to it on your iPod, computer or other MP3 playing device. The assumption is that giving away ebooks encourages sales of paper books, but giving away audiobooks, or allowing unauthorised downloads, will cannibalise the sales of the legitimate ebook. This is exactly the same logic as used by the RIAA and BPI for suing file-sharers, and the rest of the music industry for attempting to slap DRM onto everything in sight. It's a very compelling and sensible looking argument, but it's based on unproven assumptions behind the motivations of the downloader/buyer.
We don't have much real evidence to go on when looking at the cannibalisation of audiobooks by P2P versions. I'm not aware of any studies that focus on audiobooks. But certainly within the music industry the picture is not as clear as it at first seems. Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpfcompared real download data and real sales data (pdf) and found that downloading does not have a statistically significant impact on music sales, except in the context of the most popular songs, when it was shown to improve sales slightly. Could it be that the same might be true of an audiobook?
The other issues is the assumption, again promulgated by the RIAA and BPI, that every download of an unauthorised file, whatever it be, is equivalent to a lost sale. In fact, there are many different motivations and outcomes: Some people are nearly sure they want to buy the item but want to try it first, some people are curious and don't know if they would buy but can be convinced, some people were never going to buy it anyway (so no lost sale as there was no intention to buy), and some people really are lost sales - they would have bought it but they downloaded it instead.
The question is not if some sales are lost, but if more sales overall are gained because of the free version? Providing a free version does not necessarily cannibalise sales overall, but instead acts as a promotional tool encouraging them.
Counterintuitively, there was a study last year that showed that people who downloaded the most MP3s also bought the most music. Sadly, I can't lay my hands on a link right now but I'll try to find it. Perhaps, as the audiobook market develops, this could hold true for audiobooks too.
Finally, there is an intimate relationship between a book and its audiobook version, and I don't think that we really understand how users relate to both together or each separately. What makes a book compelling, and what makes an audiobook compelling are two different things, and my reasons for buying each different. I'm absolutely certain to be buying Neil Gaiman's next book, whatever it is and whenever it comes out, because I'm a fan and I love his stuff. I trust him, as a writer, to produce work that I enjoy. I would be unlikely, however, to buy an audio version of one of Neil's books if it was read by Some Random Voiceover Guy, because for me there's no incentive to do so (I don't frequently listen to audiobooks). But an audiobook actually read by Neil, or by Lenny Henry, is a different kettle of fish because I already have an emotional involvement with the author as a fan of his, and with Lenny Henry by virtue of the fact that I saw him and Neil reading one of Neil's books at an event I went to a while back. My motivation for buying that would not be a desire for any old audiobook version, but a desire specifically for Neil's or Lenny's audiobook version.
So when Anderson says that he can't see the case for producing legitimate free audiobooks, he's treating them as if they are wholly separate from the paper book or ebook, and as 100% equivalent, and I don't think that we can say that with any certainty.
What really happens if you both sell and give away an ebook? What really happens if you both sell and give away music? Didn't seem to hurt the Arctic Monkeys, after all. But until someone somewhere does a rigorous and balanced study to find out, we're stuck with a bunch of poorly formed assumptions and music industry propaganda.
Right now, I'm left with more questions than answers. The publishing industry, though, is being pushed into experimentation in a way that the music and movie industries are not. Authors are forcing publishers to do things that might seem counterintuitive, and we're slowly starting to figure out, through trial and error, what all this means. Still lots to find out, though, about this open publishing idea.
Last year I was invited by Sue Thomas and Kate Pullinger to go up to Leicester to give a lecture about the impact of blogging on writing at their Narrative Laboratory for the Creative Industries seminar, Blogs, Communities and Social Software. This year, I have a return invitation, not to lecture in person again but to be one of several guest lecturers contributing to De Montfort's Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media via a variety of online venues. I thought for a while about giving my lecture in Second Life, but decided that that might be a case of the medium obscuring the message with technical difficulties - if your computer's not powerful enough to run Second Life well, it can a very frustrating experience. Instead, I'm going to be recording a short video which I will publish here on Strange Attractor and we'll have a discussion with the students in the comments.
My topic this year is 'open publishing' and everything related, and in the spirit of openness, transparency and discussion, and with the realisation that there are a lot of people out there who know a lot more than I do about this, I have decided to publish all my research here, as I go along. So you'll get to see all my sources, my half-formed thoughts, my wrong turns and my wild goose chases - and you'll be able to join in now, if you feel like it.
My video is due to be published on Monday 26th February, and I'm currently feeling like I really should have started putting this together before now, but them's the breaks. Hopefully, if the wider community feels like joining in, we can pull together a set of links, notes and finally a video that will both engage the students and prompt a discussion about what all this social software and open licensing really means for the publishing industry.
A note of caution, though. I can't say that I really have a clear cut idea right now about the shape of the video, so don't expect this to be all that well structured! I'm also planning a lot of small posts, rather than a few big ones, so it might get a bit 'stream of consciousness'-y.
Again, if you want to download the podcast directly, you can click here. (29:32 14.2 MB)
I’ll add some more detailed show notes, but Suw starts off talking about her excitement about Second Life, watching the progress of Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond and the wonderful radio programme, This American Life.
That's the title of the talk I gave last week at IBC and that I have given in various forms at other places over the last year. I began the talk by showing off some numbers from Dave Sifry's most recent State of the Blogosphere reports, the latest one being from early in August. Technoratiis now tracking 50 million blogs, and that's just a self-selecting sample of people who have registered with the site (well self selecting and plenty of splogs, spam blogs, which the Team Technorati is working on trimming from its ranks). That's a lot of people.
The mainstream media, or MSM for short, can give 16-year-olds trying to lay their hands on the latest fashion a run for their money when it comes to herd-like activity. And newspapers, TV networks and everyone else trying to protect or resurrect an old media business model have jumped enmasse on what Jon Stewart called the 'Blogwagon'. But it's mostly been an unthinking, headlong rush towards the blogosphere, "to get snaps" from the good-as-advertising-gold 18-to-34 demographic.
Is this really about giving a voice to the already voiced, as Jon Stewart says? What value is it to our audiences to serve up 'news sushi', content we already produce and publish but just served up in bite-sized blog bits in reverse chronological order? And I can hear the editors out there saying: "But blogs are just snarky comment, and hey we've got snarky columnists in spades. We are so going to own the Technorati and iTunes Top 10." (And I've heard them say this.) Sorry, but if you want to sit up on high and keep pushing your content out at the "great unwashed masses", YouTube, CraigsList and their successors are so gonna own your asses.
This is not about changing your content management system. You've already sunk a lot of cash into those. This is about changing your culture. What do blogs allow you to do that you don't already do?
Blogs can get you closer to your audience
And that's exactly where you need to be. I met Robert Scoble at a Geek Dinner here in London last summer, and he talked about having a conversation with his customers on how Microsoft could better serve their needs. I don't really understand when journalists moved away from their audience, but many people have that impression.
Blogs can bring new voices to your journalism
Since when did journalism become a game of pick the pundit? It's lazy, and it's turned a lot of journalism into a talking shop amongst pundits, politicians and other journalists. Google yourself some new voices. In the last year, blogs have helped me bring serving soldiers in Iraq onto programmes, helped me hear from a Saudi teenager calling for women's right to vote and let me eavesdrop in on a guy's thoughts as he left New Orleans to escape Katrina.
Blogs can get you closer to the story Blogs and a world of tools that have grown up around them make creating multimedia stories in the field easier than ever. I'm an online journalist because I believe that the internet is a revolutionary medium. I can do better journalism with blogging tools: Real, raw and in the field, while being in constant contact with my audience. What do they want to know? What questions do they have for the people I'm interviewing?
Blogs could just re-invigorate western democracy
OK, OK, maybe I'm getting a little carried away. But I'm still an idealist at heart. That's one of the reasons I got into journalism. Steve Yelvington, who really should be in your RSS reader, put it this way recently:
The end of mass media. Here's what the 20the century gave us: A population of consumers whose economic role was to eat what they're served and pay up. These "people formerly known as the audience" are alienated, disengaged and angry. Instead of setting our sights on building a nation of shopkeepers, bankers and passive consumers, what if we set our sights on building a nation of participants in cultural and civic life? Perhaps this world where everyone can be a publisher will not be such a bad place.
And as Steve says a few days later in his blog, there isn't a silver bullet, and I'm not going to try to sell blogs as one. But Steve told me in Florida a year ago that blogs represent a complex set of social behaviours that we're just understanding. Blogs are just the tip of the ice berg in this fast moving world of participatory media. Blogging and the mainstream media has to be more than 'me-too-ism', and it can be. With a little thought to understand these new behaviours and a willingness to actually accept and adapt to these changes instead of wishing they weren't happening, we might just have a chance.
I was the first person to blog about the launch of Michael Tippett's participatory news network, NowPublic, which marries news stories from the media and public with "crowd-sourced" media such as photos and videos. I saw Michael demo NowPublic last February at the fabulous Northern Voice conference in Vancouver. Over a year later, just a few weeks ago, Michael, Kevin and I met up at a conference in London and had a really nice evening talking about everything, almost except NowPublic.
NowPublic met with early success when U2 played a 'secret' gig in New York. The photos posted on the site were fantastic - a realtime record of a gig posted without the aid of paid photographers or the traditional media. As an event of national and international interest to U2 fans, it was a bit of a no-brainer for people who were there to take and post photographs.
Since then, NowPublic has become one of the fastest growing news networks, with (and here I quote from the press release) "over 15,000 reporters in 130 countries and over 2 million unique visits a month. During Hurricane Katrina, NowPublic had more reporters in the affected area than most news organizations have on their entire staff."
But what is news? We frequently thing of news as being events that have national or international importance, but much more news happens at a local or hyperlocal level and these are the types of events that we are less likely to share because they don't 'seem like news' to us. We also tend to think of 'news' as being the same as 'current events', but in actual fact it spreads far wider than that, into technology, science, sports and beyond.
This is where NowPublic has huge potential - to be a repository of hyperlocal and focused news that is defined not by the sections in your newspaper or the packages on the 1 o'clock bulletin, but by the people who are involved or who witness what happened. We can make our own news - we just have to remember that what we are experiencing is newsworthy.
I myself have contributed to the site a paltry once, when I reported on a "five alarm" fire in San Francisco last July that happened just a few blocks away from where I was staying. I could have contributed more often, and one missed opportunity in particular springs to mind.
Kevin and I were walking to Holborn station in London, only to find that area sealed off. To find a tube station shut is not that big of a deal in London, but the fact that the surrounding roads were sealed off and the place was swarming with police was much more unusual. Had I had any presence of mind, (or a decent cameraphone), I would have taken some snaps, posted them on NowPublic and asked if anyone knew what had happened. Something patently had, but the traditional news outlets didn't cover it, and the London Underground site never even mentioned the closure of the station. Yet there was news there - I could smell it. My curiosity nearly killed me.
But much participatory media happens at the behest of an authoritative source - XYZMediaCo requests photos of a specific event, or a news anchor invites people to text or email in questions. Under some circumstances - such as the London bombings or the Buncefield fire, the media can be inundated with images and reportage. But we, the public, frequently forget that smaller events are news too, and retraining us to think more critically about what is news is a hefty challenge I am sure that Michael will relish.
I'm up at De Montfort University in Leicester at the Narrative Laboratory for the Creative Industries (NLab) seminar, Blogs, Communities and Social Software. I'm speaking later, but managed to get up here in time to catch the first panel discussion.
The Institute of Creative Technologies, who runs the NLab, has got a new building, and this is the first event to be held here. It's half-finished, but already has a small kennel of Aibos and is apparently also going to be getting some flying insect robots too. Cool! I'll have to come back when they've got them installed.
As to my own talk, that's about blogging and writing, blogging writers, and Creative Commons. Thinking about the things that authors are doing with blogging in preparation for this talk got me really quite excited and, if I can find the time, I'll write more about it.
The audience here is mixed, with some people knowing about blogs already, and some people being complete novices. That makes it a hard audience in some ways, because you either bore or baffle, so I'm very much focusing on showing what other people are doing, and am not really going to talk about concepts.
Right... to the first panel.
Speakers
Josie Fraser, Educational Technologist
Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media, De Montfort
Chair: Gavin Stewart
Sue Thomas - Why RSS is important, and why you should have it
What is RSS? The easiest way to find out what RSS is is to go to the BBC site and look at their explanation, via the 'What is RSS?' link.
[Goes on to provide very basic explanation of RSS.]
[Demos Bloglines, as aggregator, the clippings function, publishing your blogroll, seeing other people's blogrolls via subscription to the same feed.]
Josie Fraser - Weblogs and Web 2.0 in eduation Used to write for Engadget - gadget based movie reviews.
Interested in getting teachers up to speed on what's happening in the rest of the world. Edublogs: blogs in or about education by learners, practitioners, researchers, policy makers etc. Blogs are individual, groups e.g. schools, universities, etc.
Misconception that schools in the UK are lagging behind in tech, but they're not. there is a lot of exciting stuff going on. Warwick Uni, for example, offer blogs for all universities, and people are using Amazon-type models in their blogs, so looking at book reviews, film reviews, CDs, etc.
Walsall Schools have a large blog community, with subscribers across the UK. Marketed as easy way for teachers and learners to have a web presence. Traditional websites never get updated, and for schools that's not useful, so with a blog they can put info up straight away. They can have headmasters posting info for parents, for example.
Notables:
Barbara Ganley
Gateshead Central Library
James Farmer's edublogs.org, also learnerblogs and uniblogs, all hosted online. Problems that he has had are with firewalls in schools.
Edublog Frappr map.
Edublog Awards in third year.
Use of emerging tech reflects state of learning tech in all institutions in the UK - it's patchy, it's not embedded, and it's not joined up. But bloggers are all about community, so there is a different agenda. Web 2.0 techs are sociable and community building, so fundamental shift now in how tech is being delivered in schools and university.
Many constructivist arguments for using blogs, not just in education, but generally. It's an ideal platform for citizenship, participation, collaboration. Develop e-literacy which is fundamentally important. Formative value: Develop voice and provide ability to explore online, v. empowering.
Positivist concerns: retention, achievement, progression; evidence and supporting the curriculum. Very specific aims, don't always sit well with blogging.
Issues that need addressing re: staff skills and current practice
- e-literacy and legitimacy of new tech (still in question, lots of suspicion)
- small pieces loosely joined vs. one size fits all
- training and support (some teachers are still struggling with email, so how do they go from that to engaging with blogging and social software?)
Duty of care, re: child protection
- literacy and resilience vs. moral panic (over sites about anorexia, etc.)
- online identity. what happens if you're blogging through university, become completely googleable, and what you did ten years ago affecting how you are perceived now; lots of employers Google
Systems, re: network management:
- privacy, spam, filtering. these systems are often imposed on schools, and they have no control over them.
- hosting, ownership, data protection
Debate Q: What makes certain software social?
Josie: The difference is, people talk about Web 2.0 in terms of social software, but the truth is that socialability has being going on on the web for years, chat, user groups, discussion boards, these are all sociable. The difference is that social software is more geared up to making friends online, although that's been possible online for a long time. More online dating sites, which is a huge market and is becoming acceptable in a way that it wasn't two years ago. But you can interact with it easily, use it easily, and interact with the writer.
Sue: I'd add to that the fact that social software society is a different kind of society and it has its own rules and behaviours, so the other side is the society that is produced by the software. It affects the way we regard each other, what we know about each other, what we make public. The idea of social software enabling your data to be added to the mix. E.g. MySpace, the engagement that people make involves a trade-off - their clicks, prefs, data is being logged. Same as your loyalty card logs your shopping data. That's the hidden trade-off.
Was asked, Don't young people worry about privacy? What is going to happen when they realise there's so much data being held? Young people know they are making their trade-off.
Josie: But it's not being talked about in those terms. General practice for blogs is that you are being very honest, very earnest. In a way that's sad because it's played off against going online and creating a fake life, and playing with identity.
I am on a crusade against the word virtual, because it's not virtual. there is no distinction anymore. It is real. The number of people who have fallen in love online... there is no separation. It is as real. And if we pretend there is a distinction we are kidding ourselves.
Q: People develop new coping mechanisms for making sense of what is happening online, because it is different from everyday life. That's a difficult aspect of social software, because the making sense mechanisms that we have are different from the ones that we need to develop.
Sue: You have to use it to be able to critique it, because often looking from the outside it really doesn't make sense. It's the difference between being a passenger in a car, and driving a car.
Josie: This comes back to digital literacy. How do we talk about this stuff to people who don't even like using email. There are techs emerging at the moment that are characterised by the fact they are very user friendly. So a blog is where you go online and fill in some forms. It's easy. So the way that I get people into it is to get them to go into eBay, and they manage that ok when they see something they want to buy.
There is reticence amongst a lot of teachers to engage in this, but Web 2.0 makes it easier for them. I've tried to teach teachers how to use Dreamweaver and it's a nightmare, and it's not what they need to know. But show them Blogger and you can get them up and running in half an hour.
Q: Quite often people know how to do the digital side, how to create the blog, but they are becoming aware now that they are creating an identity. People don't always want their world online. They have something against the social side of it, rather than the technical side of it.
Sue: The problem is that blogs have got a name for being boring and petty. So when you say 'you should start a blog' people think that you are saying 'you should write about what you had for breakfast'. I even thought that myself. I thought I'd be in a constant state of panic about what I'd written.
I got into it when my book Hello World came out, and I needed a website, and a blog was easiest. I just used it as a content management system.
But I think people do, because they don't know what else they want
Gavin: I got interested in people using blogs, playing with cultural identity, e.g. hamster blogs, dog blogs, etc., and this is a sort of creative writing class blog. These blogs have minute readership.
Q: People think they have to write for an audience. My blog is writing for myself, and it was portable - could access it from anywhere. So part of the problem is that you're immediately faced by this audience issues. Took me a long time to send a link out to people about my blog.
Sue: You're interested in vlogging. Do you want to tell us about it?
??: It's video blogging, but with hypertext. A true blog can't be a book because you can't print the links that make sense of it. So a vlog has hyperlinks, and links in the footage itself that bring other content in, people are working on video commenting etc. People are basing it around traditional, old media, in terms of it being news content. It lends itself to that, but it's more than that. In the way that people are doing blogging as creative writing, vlogging is creative film work.
Kate Pullinger: There's a ticking bomb, which is the business of privacy, and what it means for everyone to be publicising their lives, such as the undergraduate. For example, Heather Armstrong (Dooce). It's a huge issue.
Me: No one got fired for blogging, they got fired for doing or saying something stupid. And with privacy, maybe we will have to learn to be more forgiving in future.
Josie: Digital literacy in terms of children and learners understanding the implications of what they are doing is important, but we need teachers and parents to understand this.
And we can bury stuff. We can blog solidly for three years and bury the older stuff. Employers don't spend hours on this. Stalkers do, but employers don't.
Sue: We are growing up on the web, we are learning how to do all this stuff. When you learn to write, you gradually learn that there are certain things you don't write, or don't show people. Now we need to become literate with the web. Someone I knew a couple of years ago, who is very literate and started teaching, and started blogging about his class as you would tell your friend. And you think 'Don't you realise that the students who made your life difficult today will read your comments tonight?'. And people don't grasp it, it's naivety.
Q: It's part of the growth process. And the important thing is often not the host blog (e.g. Slugger O'Toole), but the conversations that they are hosting.
Josie: The use of blogging in the US elections was something that highlighted the fact that blogs weren't all about personal diaries, and that it could be a professional tool that's very powerful.
Some of the meetings I go to, if you say a blog is a diary they will shout at you and throw things at your head, because it's not. It's a website. The difference is that it's easy to use. You don't need to know HTML.
[M]anagement's parallel universe is supported by a comprehensive literature in which imaginary concepts and attributes are earnestly described and referenced, as if they really existed. 'Passion' and 'delight' are such parallel concepts. So is 'excellence' (well to the fore on the Gate Gourmet website).
Worse than management-speak is marketing-speak, which is even further divorced from reality. When businesses use words that are fundamentally at odds with the every day experience that we have of them, when they talk themselves up to the point of risibility, that's when people just turn off, put them in the 'deluded wankers' category and move on to much more down to earth sources of information, such as blogs.
When will managers and marketers realise that we know they're talking shite? The only people fooled by management-/marketing-speak are the manager and marketers.
Doesn't take much to read between the lines in MSN's Thought Thieves short film competition, produced in conjunction with Film Education, an organisation I now propose we rename the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Film.
Once you’ve started admitting your “personal suck,” you can sample from an endless menu of tricks that may or may not help you improve things in your life. As long as you don’t lose an eye and can still get your work mostly done on time, where’s the damage in experimenting?
Quite right.
Although I have come to realise over the last day that the fact I am a 'professional' blogger is actually allowing me to bring the art of procrastination to new heights. All these posts you've been reading recently, here and on CnV? All displacement activity. All little acts of creative procrastination. There is one particular task relating to one particular project with which I am a bit late that I am persistently putting off because I don't know where to start. It just so happens that the by-product of this procrastination is a whole bunch of blog posts, so I look like I'm actually working even though I'm not actually working upon that which should be benefiting from my attention.
Procrastination may be the thief of time, but it's also the god of blogs.
Procrastination. It's a killer. It's the bane of my life, and probably yours too. I've been working for myself for the best part of eight years and, although I am more self-disciplined now than I was when I started working as a journalist, being stuck in a small room 24 hours a day and having no clear delineator between work and leisure hours does mean one can slip a bit too easily into the 'all waking hours are for working' mentality. That, in turn, results in parts of your brain rebelling and then procrastination sets in and I'll finish this post when I've updated my iPod...
There are a whole bunch of theories about time management and why the desire to sit and mindlessly rip CDs into iTunes is more attractive than the thought of doing $arbitrary_task, but recently I've read two accounts of dealing with procrastination that I rather like.
I was previously aware in a general way that my impossibly-high standards for myself can get in the way of accomplishing things, and the other evening I blogged about precisely that. What I was missing was that this is actually something I can get my hands around, as it were. It's not just some sort of abstract concept, it's a concrete, specific behavior that occurs in a particular context: when considering options for doing something, I'm validating them against criteria.
Instead of allowing himself to start work on a first draft, if you like, he was attempting to force himself to start at the end by producing the finished thing. This is something many creative people do - we compare our first efforts to other people's final draft without ever taking into account the blood, sweat and tears it took them to achieve it. When we don't find the comparison favourable, we become insecure about our abilities and this is, in my opinion, the root cause of most creative blocks.
Eby goes on:
[...] I think I know how to fix it. The primary inhibition code I found in my head is, "don't do the wrong thing". This is a simplified form of the actual code, of course; it contains a mixture of ideas such as not making mistakes, not redoing work, doing what is justifiably correct with reference to external criteria, and so on. But the primary intent is to "avoid wrong action", where "wrong" is defined as "not right", and "right" is a function call to everything I know about what "right" might be, be it with respect to "right for business", "right morally", "right technically", etc. [...]
Anyway, the fix is ridiculously simple: just bump down the priority on those criteria, putting a filter in place to only inform me of issues with potentially serious or costly consequences that cannot be undone. Cutting and pasting documentation and doing some rephrasing of it doesn't count as serious consequences. Another way of thinking about it is this: don't tell me what's wrong, tell me if there's something to do that's right. (With the exception of serious irreversible consequences, of course.)
In other words, stop being so picky and just get on with it. Unless what you are doing is going to result in death or dismemberment, don't think about how it might be wrong, think about how it might be right. You can tidy up the loose ends later.
It's like when people say 'I don't know where to begin' - the answer is 'Begin anywhere - wherever you begin is the beginning'.
This point of view is supported by Steve Pavlina who writes a great piece on overcoming procrastination. He looks at some of the reasons why we procrastinate, beginning with:
[...] Thinking that you absolutely have to do something is a major reason for procrastination. When you tell yourself that you have to do something, you're implying that you're being forced to do it, so you'll automatically feel a sense of resentment and rebellion. Procrastination kicks in as a defense mechanism to keep you away from this pain. If the task you are putting off has a real deadline, then when the deadline gets very close, the sense of pain associated with the task becomes overridden by the much greater sense of pain if you don't get started immediately.
He also suggests a few ways to get moving on a task:
Realize and accept that you don't have to do anything you don't want to do
Think of starting one small piece of the task instead of mentally feeling that you must finish the whole thing. Replace, "How am I going to finish this?" with "What small step can I start on right now?"
Give yourself permission to be human. [...] Realize that an imperfect job completed today is always superior to the perfect job delayed indefinitely.
Guarantee the fun parts of your life first, and then schedule your work around them.
It's a good read, and I'm going to try the 30-minute method myself tomorrow in an attempt to get done some of the things I need to clear up before I go to Boston on Wednesday. Put basically, the 30-minute method is working at a task for 30 minutes then giving yourself a reward regardless of result. The promise of a reward (always have been one for self-bribery) and the fact that anyone can concentrate on anything for 30 minutes usually results in you achieving more than you would if you tried to complete a set task or work for longer.
As Pavlina says, "Don't worry about finishing anything. Just focus on what you can start now. If you do this enough times, you'll eventually be starting on the final piece of the task, and that will lead to finishing."
“People think that you have these things called ideas and that writing is a matter of imposing them on the subject material, whereas it’s only in the writing that I discover what it is that I think.”
This is me precisely, and this is why I blog - it’s in blogging that I realise what it is that I think about the things I am blogging about. Indeed, I do the same thing when I’m talking. Thoughts don’t spring forth fully formed in my head, they sort of ooze out of my mouth, shaped by the words I used to express them, frequently mutating along the way. It’s comforting to know I’m not the only one whose brain works like that.
Not knocking. It’s a bad habit I have. But to be honest I think it’s a learned behaviour. It’s so consistently led to excitement and drama that I have to admit I’m probably intending to do it on some subconscious level. Bedroom locks were made for girls like me.
At first, as my eyes adjusted to the light, I thought Lilith was meditating. My last roommate was into yoga. But Lilith was on her knees, rather than cross-legged. And she was surrounded by candles, a thick circle of dozens and dozens of wax stubs. The window was open; it was cold in there, the light spastic.
When Kate discovers that her roommate identifies as a demoness, she figures it’s too sacrilicious a secret to keep to herself: she tells all on her blog, roommatefromhell.com.
This is the basic gist of my new book, An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil, a tale of the ur
