Courtesy of a tweet by Electric Literature, I came across The Quarterly Conversation’s “Translate This Book” page, a forum where readers can post information on their favorite writers—who haven’t yet appeared in English. Currently, translated literature makes up only 3% of the American book market. Whereas there’s plenty of grand American writing that still isn’t getting sufficient coverage, there must too be room for foreign voices.

Flatmancrooked is currently in discussions with an untranslated Bulgarian writer, and we’re keeping our eyes open for some Zimbabweans, too. But the growing list at QC is simply compelling, and we’d like to extend our search for new material internationally.

We’d love to hear from anyone in our audience who has the ability/interest to translate any of the texts on the linked page. Leave comments on this post, or better yet, email James Kaelan directly. Let’s get some new writers into English!

Mike Shatzkin of idealog.com wonders what will happen to the publishing industry when the ebook eclipses print. This article originally appeared here. There’s quite a debate brewing, so head over to his site.

The “ebook tipping point” has recently been a frequent subject of discussion for me. I started out thinking about the business implications, and now that’s the main focus of the panel discussion I’ll be participating in at Digital Book World.

As I mentioned briefly in my last post, I have lately been turning my thinking toward the huge shift I think might be just around the corner: that editors and authors will have to start thinking “ebook first.” When we get to that point, it will cause an enormous upheaval. And personnel changes.

The way things work today is that the author and editor work together to create the best possible print book. That involves figuring out what to cut more often than it is about what to add. (My wife is a freelance project editor; she announced this morning that she and her authors had just successfully completed cutting tens of thousands of words and over a hundred images from a book manuscript in order to skinny down to the publisher’s desired page count. This is not the least bit unusual.)

The ultimate result of that work is a “clean” manuscript, and whereas a manuscript used to get prepped for physical galleys, now it’s going directly into an XML workflow program or InDesign so that it can be rendered as a print PDF, or any of the various other ebook formats.

If you want video or links or extra editorial material in your ebook—an “enhanced” ebook—that becomes a new creative project beginning when the development of the print version ends.

If you actually want to end up with more than one final “product”: (presumably) one print version and (perhaps) more than one digital version, this is not the most sensible way to do it. It is far easier to look at a complex ebook and figure out what can be held static to create a print version than it is to go the other way around.

Up until what seems like five minutes ago, the static print version was where all the money was. But with the IDPF reporting industry-wide year-on-year gains of 300% of ebook sales through August, and Crain’s saying Random House had a 700% year-on-year increase of Kindle sales through September, the day when ebook sales are financially significant has apparently arrived, and the point when those revenues could be more important than print revenues is in sight. So it may be time to change the objective of the author and editor from “how do we create the best possible print book” to “how do we create the best possible ebook?”

This will require some radical changes in thinking.

1. “Space” will no longer be scarce. This means that nothing of value should be discarded; the question becomes how to best employ any thoughts, writing, or images, not whether to include them. (Warning of a likely unintended consequence: putting mediocre material in the finished product can become a temptation and that does not achieve a more desirable effect.)

2. Background material of any kind will become useful. For fiction, that might mean more in-depth character descriptions or “biographies.” For non-fiction, that might mean source material.

3. Multiple media are desirable. Anything that is relevant to the book in video or audio form or art of any kind should be included. If rights and permissions are a problem, then linking out to the material wherever it is on the web becomes an option.

4. Linking is essential. The author should be recording deeplink information for every useful resource tapped during the book’s creation.

5. New editorial decisions abound. Should the reader be given the option to turn links off (to avoid the distractions)? Does it “work” if linked or multiple-media elements become essential to the narrative of the book? And, if that becomes the case, what are the work-arounds for the static print edition? Should “summary” material be added, such as a precis of every chapter than can serve as a substitute for reading the whole chapter? (That could help somebody skip and dive their way through a non-fiction book, particularly.)

6. How should all of this complexity flow? Books are pretty straightforward: you start at the beginning and turn pages until you get to the end. But ebooks can allow different sequencing if that becomes useful. Can we have beginner, intermediary, and expert material all in one ebook that “selects” what you see by what you tell the book you are?

7. When is the book “finished”? An ebook that is continually being enhanced and updated by the author, perhaps even by the addition of relevant blog posts (to imagine a situation which would be very easy to execute) is a great antidote to digital piracy. But it would surely separate the ebook from the print, which couldn’t keep up with that kind of change. As ebook consumption becomes more common, though, authors won’t want their books to be out of date and they will recognize how easy it is to add new material. O’Reilly Media already includes free “updates” in the ebook purchase price of their books. How long will it be before a trade publisher makes a similar offer? Or before an author requires it as a condition of doing their next deal?

I can’t imagine any veteran editor reading this and not gnashing his teeth, at least a bit. But I also can’t imagine these questions being postponed forever. If I were a 20-something employee in a publishing house, I’d be thinking about this very hard and watching for my opportunity to volunteer.

By Mike Shatzkin

It is rare that I find a publishing house, and a book therein, with which I am so immediately infatuated. But such was the case with Madras Press and their release of Aimee Bender’s, The Third Elevator, a mini-book that went on pre-sale October 1^st. As some of you might note, we’ve had the opportunity to work with Aimee, as she was the judge of our recent fiction contest, and we are tremendous admirers of her work. The Third Elevator is a Bender-ian piece to the fullest; from Madras’ site:

The Third Elevator is the story of a swan, a bluebird, the curious family they form together, and the mysterious elevators in the center of their village—one that rises into the sky, one that opens into a forest, and one that descends underground. Other characters include a miner in search of something beyond the walls of his cave, a logger too gentle to chop trees, a team of kleptomaniacal dove nurses, a king with an appetite for turtles, and his queen, the swan’s first owner.

This short book (only 47 small pages) is a delight. Bender has a way of speaking to her readers so that the most hardened cynic amongst (or in us) becomes immersed in a world of fancy, folly, and occasional horror. The Third Elevator is top-notch surrealism, landing somewhere between Saunders and Bolaño while retaining all the qualities—pithiness, intelligence, and clarity—that have garnered Bender a reputation as one of the best living short story writers.

Now, new fiction by Bender is newsworthy in and of itself, but what makes it even more remarkable is the press that put it out. From the Madras website:

Madras Press publishes individually bound short stories and novella-length booklets and distributes the proceeds to a growing list of charitable organizations chosen by our authors.

The format of our books provides readers with the opportunity to experience a story on its own, with no advertisements or unrelated articles surrounding it; it also provides a home for stories that are often arbitrarily ignored by commercial publishing outfits, whether because they’re too long for magazines but not trade-book length, or because they don’t resemble certain other stories. These are clumsy, ill-fitting stories made perfect when read in the simplest possible way.

Published in regular series of four, our books also serve as fundraising efforts for a number of charitable causes and organizations. Each of our authors has selected a beneficiary to which all net proceeds generated from the sales of his or her book will be donated; these include organizations dedicated to environmental protection, community development, human services, and much more.

What can be gleaned from this is that Madras is doing two exceptional things:

1.) Publishing for charity (so, surely, making very little money).

2.) Publishing pieces that might not otherwise be published and turning them into great-looking little books.

Madras is a small endeavor, but their design aesthetic and website set them apart, not to mention their charitable business model. They’ve also given another home to stories of a “peculiar” length. We here at Flatmancrooked do something similar with our New Novella imprint, though our line is a bit more capitalistic, we admit. Nonetheless, it’s refreshing and inspiring to see a small press with such big heart and a commitment to quality, and I hope to see much more from them in the future.

By Elijah Jenkins

Recently over at The Calliope Nerve, Nobius Black interviewed Jonathan Penton, whose corporation, Make It New Media, bills itself as a print fulfillment and distribution company. I’ll let them explain.

I’d like to start out this interview asking you about Make It New Media. What is it? And what goals do you have for it?

Make It New Media is a Limited Liability Corporation in the state of Texas; a partnership between a number of publishers, editors, writers and artists. I am the manager. Our goal is to be a single firm that artists and publishers trust with media reproduction, marketing, distribution, and direct sales.

The idea for Make It New Media began during a postal rate hike, a few years ago, under the Bush Administration. The United States Post Office was considering eliminating its “media mail” class, by which books can be sent more cheaply than other parcels. This would’ve had a devastating effect on small presses in this country. Many micro publishers were protesting the USPS’s proposal. You might remember some other, bigger, totally ineffectual protests going on at the time, and I was highly skeptical that Washington would be listening to the complaints of the small press. I began to contemplate a way around the problem, and I concluded that small pressers should stop warehousing their own books, and instead contract firms that printed and shipped the books from a single location. Lulu.com does this, but it’s geared for self-publishers, not small presses. I wanted to create a firm that did the same thing, but was well-suited for micro presses. Upon investigation, I was astonished to find how cheap the necessary printing and binding technology has become. I began to talk to my friends in the industry, and eventually, Make It New Media, LLC was born.

When I say “technology,” I refer to Print-On-Demand: the process by which single copies of books can be rapidly made from a computer file. Unfortunately, it has not caught on in the Do-It-Yourself circles which are rightfully integrated with the small press. The simple methodology of POD (print, fold, bind, and trim) is not widely understood. Corporations have risen to market POD, and they’ve surrounded it with industry buzz and meaningless jargon that is naturally mistrusted by individual micro-publishers. These corporations have been purchased by larger corporations such as Amazon and Ingram, and many individual publishers utilizing POD have lost control of their own distribution and marketing. But small publishers of art and literature, with a smaller profit margin, have been largely ignored by these huge companies, and squeezed into an inappropriate business model. Literary publishers who pre-date POD technology seek to disassociate themselves from this debacle. POD, by its inexpensive nature, could be something passionate and joyful, an ecstatic extension of the Do-It-Yourself movement; instead, it is mired in the stink of vanity publishing. But the technology is solid, effective, and easily personalized. It has the potential to assist artists and publishers of every stripe in taking control of their of their work in a way previously impossible.

Meanwhile, the USPS decided not to eliminate media mail, though their rate hikes do tend to tax small presses more heavily than big ones. And Make It New Media grew from a cost-saving measure into a unique business model: the leap from the “Do-It-Yourself” philosophy that has made the small press such a necessary counterpoint to mainstream presses into something new: “Do-It-Ourselves.”

We want to work with artists and publishers to create media which truly reflects their vision, and distribute it to those who truly desire it, in a way that creates goodwill among consumers. Products should be unique and recognizable, carrying a branding appropriate for the artist and/or publishers involved. We want to produce books for our clients that emphasize the creativity of our clients, not ourselves. That’s why we want to spend time with each individual client and give each project personal attention. We know that the goal is to fill people’s bookshelves, not on-line catalogues.

Tell us about Unlikely Stories and Unlikely Books.

Make It New Media is a company dedicated to fulfilling the visions of other editors. Unlikely 2.0, the current incarnation of Unlikely Stories, is my editorial vision, and predates the creation of MINM by a decade. I started it in 1998, when I was twenty-three years old and completely clueless. I had absolutely no business attempting to run a literary journal. Fortunately for me, there was no competition: there was no other Web journal putting out neo-pulp writing (more on that term below) on a regular basis. I was able to publish monthly. And although I was out of my depth, I was very disciplined. Unlikely Stories defined transgressive Web literature for a long time, and inspired numerous imitators—sometimes very blatant imitators. I was focusing strictly on poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction, and lucked into publishing such diverse geniuses as Shane Allison, Laurel Ann Bogen, Tom Bradley, Wendy Taylor Carlisle, Ira Cohen, Alan Kaufman, Peter Magliocco, B. Z. Niditch, Elisha Porat, John Sweet, and Nina Zivancevic.

By the beginning of 2004, the quality of Unlikely Stories had been surpassed by newer sites, and my vision for it had stagnated. The anti-academic rage which had fueled my early work was leaving me; I was discovering more serious evils in my world, both in the vicious, often violent nature of the small press and the U.S.’s amazingly rapid slide into fascism—oh, and did I mention my phone was fucking tapped? I was increasingly of the opinion that every U.S. citizen was obliged to try, however futilely, to stop the current political trends, and that creative writers were obliged to make a sincere, if easily mocked, effort to speak out against the systematic dismantling of the democratic aspects of our republic.

So in March 2004, I shut Unlikely Stories down, with a half-formed plan for Unlikely 2.0, which some friends and I released in June of 2004. Unlikely 2.0 is a multimedia journal of culture and art, with an emphasis on, but not a dedication to, transgressive and neo-pulp material. In most months, we publish twice—a text-based issue at the beginning of each month, and an issue focused on audiovisual material mid-month. We currently run two serialized columns: “A Sardine on Vacation” by Bob Castle, and “Opposites Day” by Tantra Bensko. We’ve serialized reviews by Dan Schneider and limited-run stories by Bill Berry and Richard Jeffrey Newman, among others. A list of artistic luminaries who have graced Unlikely 2.0 can’t really be condensed into this space—Unlikely 2.0 covers more than 2,000 web pages of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, essays on culture, diverse essays of political thought, reviews, interviews with figures of artistic and political import, visual art, film, spoken word and music. We’re able to keep it going due to a sincere belief in our mission—we thing that we have something to share, and that sharing our vision is worth the brutal hours, miserable incomes, and cobwebbed genitals that a project of this size requires. We are half missionaries/half megalomaniacs, and we are a unique presence in American literature.

In 2005, we published a couple of poetry chapbooks, and I eventually started referring to these chapbooks as “Unlikely Books” because “An Unlikely 2.0 Production” always looked stupid, and I don’t know why I ever used it. This year, we’ve ramped up production, producing chapbooks by Anne Lombardo Ardolino and Belinda Subraman, and we’re currently running The First Annual WRITE REAL GOOD Poetry Chapbook Contest, as an antidote to what passes for competition in literary circles. Next year, Unlikely Books will be taking advantage of the services of Make It New Media to go to the next level in print publishing. In 2010, we will publish poetry chapbooks by Donna Snyder and Lawrence Welsh, and we’ll run another WRITE REAL GOOD contest. We’ll be publishing a two-author paperback of poetry, with Monolith by Anne McMillen on one side and Soy solo palabras but wish to be a city by Leon De la Rosa (with illustrations by Guillermo Ramirez) on the other—a flip-book, like the classics from 2.13.61 Publications. We’ll be publishing a two-author book of essays, with My Hands Were Clean, by Tom Bradley, on Alistair Crowley and his influence, and Dr. Gonzo, by Deb Hoag, on the sickness in our approach to mental health. And we’ll be publishing Unlikely Stories of the Third Kind. Loosely, Unlikely Stories of the Third Kind will be a print edition of the Unlikely sites—“print” in the sense that it’ll be 400 pages sandwiched between a CD of Unlikely Music and a DVD of Unlikely films. It will contain some of the best of Unlikely Stories and Unlikely 2.0, as well as new and exclusive material.

Our expansion into paperback books warrants a party, and we’ll be having one, in the only arts venue big enough, sexy enough, and physically uncomfortable enough for the job—our paperbacks will be released at Burning Man of 2010. Be there. And bring me presents.

By Nobius Black

Shya Scanlon’s article about web serialization, first appeared in the Faster Times. On Tuesday, John Gorman over at Paper Cut published an interview with Mr. Scanlon. You ought to read that, too.

Part I

Make it short

To answer the first question, I don’t think we need to look much further than that scene in Thomas Hardy’s novel, that literal cliffhanger. When you’re not getting everything at once, what makes you come back? (Wait for it.) Not coincidentally, the notion of suspense points to a divide (though by no means a neat one) between literary fiction and many other genres. Put simply: literary fiction, at least contemporary examples thereof, doesn’t do suspense.

This is no secret, of course. Many writers of literary fiction have abandoned the idea that there should be something aside from the language or characters themselves that keeps a reader reading. Any kind of plot device meant to keep people reading is seen (rightly) as a trick, and hence (wrongly) an insult to the intelligence of both author and reader. The conversation here walks a fine line between, on one side, the continually raging debate about the border between genre and literary fiction, and on the other, the estrangement some readers feel from the seemingly hermetic work being done in certain corners of the academy.

But I won’t go there.

Suffice it to say, serialization belongs to genre writing for good reason: genre is where you get suspense, fast action, and other elements, pacing or otherwise, that create an itch in the reader to return to a prematurely ending text. It should come as no surprise that writers who avoid suspense also have little interest in exploring or adopting a mode of distribution that relies quite heavily on tactics such as the cliffhanger.

The answer to the second question is perhaps no less clear. After all, what is the Web good for? It’s an efficient, inexpensive, and easy way to disseminate and discover information (too easy, some say). That there is no reliable profit model for that information yet doesn’t phase those of us who doubt our work will ever be profitable anyway. And sure enough, the proliferation of online literature in the last decade has been profound: a testament to how intense the need is of people to share the written word, both others’ and their own.

This goes for all genres of literature, of course, and as a consequence it’s easy to find examples of all different types of writing on the Web, from love stories to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. But amid all this difference, one thing everyone seems to agree on is the need to limit length. And here we have another clue to the destiny of serialization.

Three quarters of a century after Ezra Pound uttered his now-famous edict “Make it new,” there’s a new imperative in e-town: Make it short. The Internet, we’ve apparently all agreed, is no place for long forms. Who has the patience? Whether or not this is actually true (meaning, whether or not people would read longer works), authors of literary fiction have responded to the online imperative by simply writing shorter and shorter fiction. In the last few years, flash fiction has quickly become an enormous force in the online literary world, with new FF venues—some of them quite excellent—sprouting up every week.

But with their inclination to operate on some permutation of suspense, genre writers have another option (though you can find genre flash fiction). These authors have been able to respond to the Web reader’s short attention span by dipping back into a proven publication model: serialization. The option has many merits, especially when Web traffic remains the only real pathway toward potential monetization of online content. But beyond economics, serialization keeps readers engaged. And in the event that, as did Dickens, the author writes as the work is being serialized, and listens to her readership during the process, there is an opportunity to make use of the Web’s other great utility: interaction.

Hey look, another Le Car!

The question remains, however: have “literary” authors announced their final verdict on the usefulness of serialization, Web or otherwise? I think another parallel trend in contemporary letters bears mentioning here, if not because we can draw concrete conclusions from it, and more because it seems to suggest that the border between literary genres and conventions is not so impermeable as our publishers and their marketing experts would have us believe. I’m referring of course to the kind of fiction called, among other things, slipstream, cross-genre, and new wave fabulist. This is fiction that defies easy genre categorization via sometimes quite liberal use of various historically distinct conventions, without forgoing an attention to language and characterization normally indicating “literary” ambition, and is represented by some of the most respected contemporary literary figures, including Michael Chabon, Jonathan Letham, and David Foster Wallace, to name just a few.

If writers are shedding conventions in this way, could it only be a matter of time before they start serializing their efforts? Or, to put it another way, might the results of their new forms lend themselves well to serialization? A quick online search after writing that question revealed one possible answer. Cory Doctorow, whose work is arguably squarely in the sci-fi genre, is far from a writer of pulp, and his non-fiction has earned him some acclaim as a futurist. Doctorow’s next novel, to be published by Tor this fall, is being serialized on Tor.com. It hasn’t been long, for that matter, since Playboy serialized Denis Johnson’s foray into noir.

But will other writers follow suit? Will readers remain open to such experiments? Will publishers catch on to this trend, and begin to exploit the promotional potential of serialization—especially serialization that reaches across venues? I guess we’ll have to stay tuned.

By Shya Scanlon

Shya Scanlon’s poetry collection, In This Alone Impulse, will be published by Noemi Press in December, 2009. His novel, Forecast, will be published by Flatmancrooked in spring, 2010. Shya received his MFA from Brown University, where he was awarded the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction.

Shya Scanlon’s article about web serialization, first appeared in the Faster Times. This morning, John Gorman over at Paper Cut published an interview with Mr. Scanlon. You ought to read that, too.

Let me begin with something I call my Le Car theory. When I was growing up, every time my parents bought a “new” car, I’d begin seeing the same model all over the place, as though it had only just then sprung from the oily earth. “Hey, look,” I’d tell my father as he drove me to school, “another Le Car!”

I began my own online serialization in July, and within the past month or so I’ve seen Colson Whitehead continue a story on Twitter he’d begun for a journal called Significant Objects, Eric Rickstad propose posting chapters of his next novel online as he writes them, J.A. Tyler post chapters of his novel The Zoo, A Going every 24 hours, Soft Skull snatch up Matt Stewart’s Twitter-serialized novel The French Revolution, and Necessary Fiction begin accepting novel submissions for serialization.

From my perspective, then, there seems to have been an uptick in online efforts at serialization, but the Le Car theory would suggest that it’s just that: my perspective. Whatever the case, I began to wonder why, if it’s been going on, it hasn’t caught my attention before, and whatever the reason, whether or not the model has a future. Didn’t it used to be common practice? What happened?

The idea of serialization is indeed an old one—it’s been around at least since the first night Scheherazade saved her own neck by uttering some approximation of “stay tuned,” but it didn’t really come into its own until the 19^th Century-notably in England—when it was embraced whole-heartedly as a cheap alternative to book-buying, a medium at the time prohibitively expensive for the working class.

These weekly or monthly serializations were where many of the day’s great authors got their start, perhaps the most famous example being Chuck Dickens. Of course, Dickens went on to serialize most of his fiction, for the simple reason that, as it reached the broadest audience, it continued to be the most profitable way to publish.

Despite his fame and influence on the Western canon, however, Dickens was arguably not the most influential figure in the story of serialization. In September of 1872, Thomas Hardy began to serialize his third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes in Tinsley’s Magazine. At the end of one of the published sections, Hardy leaves a central character hanging off the edge of a cliff, and in the process captured and coined what would ultimately become a defining element in this populist story-telling tradition.

Follow the money

But let’s back up a bit, because Hardy was hardly alone in developing/embracing conventions we now take for granted in certain genres. Actually, a trend had been emerging over the previous twenty five years which would, in the next century, ultimately result in what we now see as the most recognizable form of serialized fiction: comic books.

Though “affordable,” publications such as that which featured Dickens’ early work (Bentley’s Miscellany), were still, at a shilling, a splurge for working class adults. And throughout the 19^th Century, literacy rates were climbing steadily, especially among children (universal education started in England in 1871—in the U.S. it wasn’t until 1918, though by that time most states were already diverting taxes toward public school). So the movement toward even cheaper (one penny), youth-oriented serials was inevitable, and the “story paper” was born.

This later part of the century must surely have been the hay day for serialized fiction. Story papers were filled with pulpy content, adventure stories and true-crime, stories set in exotic locations (such as the Lost World genre, founded by Sir Henry Rider Haggard and epitomized by the novel with the same name by Arthur Conan Doyle) and tales of the macabre (Poe’s work turned up in the same journal that published Dickens). This continued throughout the early part of the new century, when the state-side “pulps” sought to out-do one another with the increasing use of visual content-full-color covers, dramatic illustrations and the like—until, in 1934, Famous Funnies became the first publication to use what’s now considered the traditional comic-book format.

While this process was unfolding, two technologies were developed that would each have radical implications for serialized fiction, and for story-telling in general. The first of these was of course the advent and popularity of motion pictures. The second was the streamlining of industrial printing technology. Film was an immediate sensation in Europe until the First World War—when it moved to Hollywood to get even bigger—and the industrialization of printing made unheard of print runs (20k and more) a reality, which gutted the costs and made them available to almost everyone.

There is a narrative here about the rise of the image in popular culture, and any investigation into what happened next with comic books would need to address that, but the point I want to get at, here, is that “serious” serialization fell away, as the reading public could now afford complete books, or, if they wanted a quicker fix, could get their story in the form of film (and, before too long, TV), and what was left was, for better or worse, primarily rooted in genre.

Serial fiction has always been a populist practice. It began as a way to reach a broad audience and, true to the laws of supply and demand, changed to suit the needs and purchasing power of that audience—a process similar to what’s occurring online. So let’s return to my shortlist of Web serialization projects, because I have an admission to make: it’s woefully incomplete.

In fact, there is quite a lot of serialization online, but my Le Car theory only partially explains my ignorance of it. Like comics (until the more recent rise in popularity of literary graphic novels), it’s been perpetuated largely by genre writers. There are indeed several websites devoted to serialized genre fiction, notably fan fiction, and of the personal blogs or author sites on which I’ve found serialized fiction, by far most of them are genre authors such as David Wellington, whose very popular zombie novel Monster Island is now also available in print.

This leaves us with two questions: 1) What is it about serialization that might attract genre fiction authors? and 2) Why the Web?

Read Part II

By Shya Scanlon

Shya Scanlon’s poetry collection, In This Alone Impulse, will be published by Noemi Press in December, 2009. His novel, Forecast, will be published by Flatmancrooked in spring, 2010. Shya received his MFA from Brown University, where he was awarded the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction.