Wednesday, August 14, 2013

O Brave New World, That has Such Ponies in't!

Before we move on to further reviews, let us pause a moment to remember what came before.  For example, remember those guest posts from the last few weeks?  Well, there's one more column still outstanding, courtesy of AugieDog: not just a talented author, but probably the best-credentialed ponyfic writer I know.  So naturally, when he agreed to write a guest post for me, I gave it a special place of reverence in my posting schedule.

No, wait, that's not right.  What I did was misplace the e-mail and forget to schedule him entirely.

Man, I suck.

Be that as it may, here's said post, reflecting a unique and fascinating look at ponyfic through the eyes of a man with more writing experience than the entirety of FIMFic's feature box, on a typical day.  Click down below the break for wisdom.
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Recollections of my college days gutter like half-quenched candles in my brain to remind me that essays need titles. So let's go with:

O Brave New World, That has Such Ponies in't!

Of course, with my college days literally thirty years behind me now, I find myself, according to every brony survey I've yet seen, skating way out along the far, thin edge of the bell curve age-wise. It also makes me one of the few people within the virtual sound of my voice to remember a time before there was an internet, a time when the few available computers covered whole desks, sold for thousands of dollars, and were less capable than the average modern cell phone.

Ah, the Brave Old World. The one in which, after taking the very first computer class my high school ever offered--a math teacher showing us how to write programs in Basic on several of Radio Shack's finest TRS-80 machines, cassette tape players plugged into the backs to save any programs we might actually put together--I came away completely unimpressed. Computers? Phooey! How could a thing like that have any sort of practical effect on my life?

I then proceeded to type all my essays throughout college--and I mean on an actual clickety-clack Smith Corona manual portable typewriter. That's how I wrote the first short stories I ever made any money from, too, and the scenes that eventually grew into my first published novel.

These tidbits, I hope, will serve to show that I have very little idea of what's going on around me. So if you do come across anything that appears to be advice in this essay, I would advise you to take a good, long, critical look at it. Because the preponderance of the evidence suggests that I seldom know what I'm talking about.

Fortunately, my underlying cluelessness never posed an obstacle in the Brave Old World of the writing business. All I had to do was poke at some words till they sang and danced across the pages like stars on a summer night, stuff those pages into a big manila envelope, and include an empty envelope adorned with stamps and my own address. Then I'd send the whole package off to an editor at a magazine or a publishing house to see if he or she wanted to buy First North American Serial rights or the like and print the thing.

Most of the time, the editor would send the story back inside the return envelope with a little, "No, thank you." I would sigh, send the pages to another editor, and then start working on my next story. Those times that a small envelope came back instead, a "Yes, thank you" from the editor inside with a contract, I would let myself bask for a moment, then get to work on that next story.

Throughout the 1990s, that was pretty much the process to get written work out into the wider world. Fanzines existed, of course, but they had very limited circulation, and for someone like me who was Fluttershy even before I knew who Fluttershy was, the whole social aspect of fandom just made me all twitchy. Still does, for that matter.

But whether fanzine or prozine, only one up or down thumb mattered back then: the editor's. If my story appealed to an editor, then it was through the gate and off to however many thousands of readers that editor's publication might reach. Otherwise, no one ever saw it except the editor and me, and if every editor passed on it, the story became doomed to gather figurative dust on my hard drive, finished but never to be read, a sort of Schroedinger's cat neither fully alive nor completely dead.

That, though, was the Brave Old World. Sure, certain aspects of that world remain: a handful of SF and fantasy magazines still come out on paper; a couple webzines have figured out how to make enough money to keep themselves afloat; the book houses continue finding novels they think will sell and then find ways to sell them.

But publishing's Brave New World isn't somewhere off in the distant future anymore. It's here right now. I have a couple friends who are selling thousands of copies of their novels without benefit of a publisher. Closer to home, I read work on FimFiction from folks like Applejinx, Aquillo, Bad Horse, bookplayer, Cloud Wander, Cloudy Skies, Cold in Gardez, Horse Voice, Skywriter--how 'bout I stop before I end up importing my whole Watch list?--and they're giving away what I consider professional-level work for free just because they can and just because they want to.

OK, maybe it isn't exactly a case of us all disregarding Samuel Johnson's two hundred and fifty year old dictum that no one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. I mean, Skywriter's had a thriving venture with Shaenon Garrity and their "Skin Horse" webcomic for more than half a decade now; bookplayer has a non-Pony fantasy novel due out later this year; Daetrin's novel came out last year; I've got my own second novel finally seeing print this summer and some short stories surfacing in a couple anthologies. But there's been a fundamental shift in how writers can approach the whole idea of "writing for money," a shift I can only think will be good for readers.

After all, in this Brave New World we've entered, universal distribution is a given, not the prize at the end of the process. Writers just learning the basics of putting sentences together are posting their stories to the same section of the worldwide web as folks who have ten or twenty stories under their belts. And it's not some magazine or publishing house editor that authors have to court in order to gain readers. It's the readers who come wandering by on their own, wanting to be courted and looking for interesting things to read.

And yes, there are places like Equestria Daily or Equestria After Dark to help readers find interesting stories of one sort or another, but the stories themselves already exist. They're just as accessible as every other story on the web, and these aggregator sites are less gatekeepers, allowing only certain stories to make the jump from invisible to actual, than they are sign posts that point to stories the folks behind the sites think their readers will like.

That might seem like a small change, but it's a big step toward what I'm looking forward to--with a quick glance back at the evidence presented earlier in this essay concerning my lackluster performance as a soothsayer. Because we've all found authors whose work in the wide world of Pony we enjoy, and I can't help but think it's only a matter of time before more of those authors unveil non-Pony work that they can legally sell to us through the small-press or Amazon's various self-publishing programs or with a Kickstarter campaign.

And I plan on being right there when it happens clicking Paypal buttons or the equivalent.

O Brave New World that'll have such Ponies in't! The paddock gates have been flung open, and some of the writers who've been learning the ins and outs of storytelling 'round these parts might just be eyeballing those open fields, might just be thinking about trotting out that way to see what they might discover there.

I for one can't wait to read about it when they do.

19 comments:

  1. I know that RavensDagger has taken several steps into the Brave New World of Internet book publishing. So count him as one of the few to break out of the stable and gallop off into the distance!

    I myself do not have any plans to publish anything I write, as I'm content with just getting the occasional pat on the back for my work. But who knows? Further down the line, I may take advantage of the tools available to get something original out there.

    Great post!

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    1. Thanks!

      That's one of the things I love about the whole FiMFiction.net concept: folks who wanna write Pony stories and folks who wanna read Pony stories can come together and just do those things with no fuss and no muss. It's practically a self-contained ecosystem!

      Mike

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  2. The one thing I can't get over in this Brave New World, as you put it, is legitimacy. Times past, it used to be that putting work out through a publisher (something I have sadly never experienced, for lack of trying) meant that it had been vetted. It was the literary equivalent of the peer-reviewed science journal article.

    But now we have vanity publishers and instant ebooks and people just putting stuff on their websites with a Paypal donate button nearby, and I can't look on those as serious efforts, any more than fanfiction. (Please ignore the fact that I recently bought a hardcover copy of a friend's fanfic.) They are essentially the same thing: "Hey, I wrote this, please read it." Well, just who the heck are you, then? If the writer becomes the only obstacle to the distribution of their work, how do we know that work is worth reading? Especially when the only obstacle to the reader is the pay wall? (Ignore here institutions such as Amazon's preview pages.)

    I think that's why we have EQD (and EQAD to a lesser extent). Readers, at least some readers, still want someone out there saying "Yes, this is good, it's worth your time" even if we aren't dealing in paying for the privilege of reading.

    You said the BNW here discussed is good for readers, and I won't deny that. But what about the writers? Goddammit, if I could go back and develop some other talent, I sure as hell would leave writing behind because it's the most frustrating, fruitless, unsatisfying artform to pursue, until someone gives you a favorite or a few dollars. It's like Stockholm Syndrome of the self.

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    1. Legitimacy:

      Is an issue I find FiMFiction helps with. Right now, I've got something like 25 writers on my watch list because they've written a couple or three Pony stories that have appealed to me in one way or another. If one of them posted, "Hey, I've got this non-Pony story I'm selling for a buck and a half," and the description of it sounded interesting, I'd certainly spring for the cost.

      "Stockholm Syndrome of the self" is such a wonderful phrase, I may hafta find some way of stealing it from you... :)

      Mike

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    2. I accidentally write clever things just frequently enough to maintain the illusion that I am, in fact, a real writer.

      go5it

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    3. That's as good a definition:

      Of "real writer" as I've yet come across. As near as I can tell, most writers are an unnatural amalgam of Trixie and Fluttershy: "Behold my latest work of genius, mortal readers! If you wouldn't mind, I mean...."

      Mike Again

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    4. As near as I can tell, most writers are an unnatural amalgam of Trixie and Fluttershy: "Behold my latest work of genius, mortal readers! If you wouldn't mind, I mean...."

      Ouch.

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    5. I'm very much:

      That way myself, though I'm so unused to public speaking that when my inner Trixie comes out, I tend to become even more ham-fisted than usual, knocking over people's figurative coffee cups with my wild gesticulations.

      Self-promotion that doesn't make folks roll their eyes and sigh is something of an art form, I find myself thinking... :)

      Mike Once More

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  3. Ah, a fellow outcast from the age before the internet was a thing. You may be one of the few pony fans I've encountered who is actually older than I am. I recall learning a bit of BASIC on my dad's 1980 IBM 8088, with 256 kb of RAM and no storage.

    Interesting to see your take on fiction from someone who is actually in the business. I'd have almost expected you to be resentful of it, given that the current culture ratchets up your competition by several orders of magnitude. As for myself, I'm at a stage of life where I already have a solid career, and so have no aspirations of writing as anything more than a hobby. Aside from de-ponifying my stories, I don't know that I'll find another source of inspiration once this franchise has run its course--while I've always enjoyed writing, nothing until now has sparked my interest enough to do so in anything approaching an organized and focused manner, so who knows if anything else will afterward.

    My sister is actually an English professor, and she was curious to see a couple of examples of things I'd written. She's never replied to comment on them. I take this as a bad sign.

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    1. Pascoite, you might be surprised to learn that most authors have day jobs or spouses that work full time. In the last few decades, writing has been paying so poorly that only the very popular authors can manage to support themselves on writing alone.

      And don't worry too much about your sister's unresponsiveness. An English professor is more concerned about things that only matter to other English professors. Most readers just want an entertaining story. Look for criticism from average people who read a lot.

      Oh, and welcome to the OFF Brand Bronies (Old Fart Fan Brand Bronies). There are more of us that you might imagine.

      -EE

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    2. I've been completely unable:

      To remember who said this, but someone once pointed out that we writers aren't really in competition with each other when it comes to readers. After all, it takes from a couple months to a couple years to write a novel, and a reader can devour that same novel in a matter of hours.

      Demand will always outstrip supply when it comes to storytelling, so all I can do is hope that I make enough of an impression on readers that they keep an eye out for my next piece amongst all the other pieces they're keeping an eye out for... :)

      Mike

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  4. Augie,

    I just want to say that Half the Day is Night is the first MLP fanfic I ever read, and if it hadn't been so good, I probably wouldn't be such an avid user of FiMFic today. Congrats on being a gateway drug!

    -EE

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    1. As they used to say:

      In the Pogo comics, "I is quietly proud." Or is quoting Pogo another sign of an OFF Brand Brony? :)

      Mike

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    2. Pogo was the best!

      We have met the enemy... and he is dem durn kids who won't git offn mah lawn!!! ;)

      -EE

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    3. I've actually been thinking:

      Recently how grateful I am that the kids are letting me play on their lawn...

      Mike Again

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  5. "After all, in this Brave New World we've entered, universal distribution is a given, not the prize at the end of the process.... And it's not some magazine or publishing house editor that authors have to court in order to gain readers. It's the readers who come wandering by on their own, wanting to be courted and looking for interesting things to read."

    Some time this year I'm gonna write a big rant on my blog about why the future of publishing will look like fan-fiction. Publishers had NO IDEA that young men had any interest in romance, and it's the single most-popular type of fiction among bronies now that they can read it without having to go into a store and be seen buying a paperback with a bare-chested Scotsman and Chancery italic font on the cover.

    Internet publishing shouldn't just mean e-books. It should mean you can discuss a book with the writer while she's writing it. It should mean you have programs that help you find fiction uniquely suitable to you, not a "recommendation" system that shoves bestsellers in your face (like Amazon's). It should mean you have a place to go to discuss the book with other readers, a community big enough that you can find people with a similar outlook, but not so big and disorganized that you feel lost. It should mean there is no clear distinction between amateur and pro, or between self-publishing and "real" publishing.

    ... but it should do so in a way that lets authors make money.

    If nobody builds this soon, I may have to do it myself.

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    1. Sort of like:

      FiMFiction without the FiM and with some sort of micro-payment system attached? Maybe the first chapter's free, and if folks like it, they can literally subscribe to the story, paying fifty cents or however much for each additional chapter when it appears?

      That it sounds feasible to me should be a worrying sign with my pronosticatorial history as described in the article here, but I can't offhand think of anyone else who's tried such a system. Definitely worth researching at any rate!

      Mike

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    2. I imagine that could lead to way too many epic-length fics

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    3. My guess would be:

      You'd get a lot more abandoned fics, too. An author posts a first chapter, gets 16 subscribers, then hasta decide whether it's worth the time and effort to produce the second chapter for that size of an audience.

      And I know Bad Horse has done some research on the average attrition rate in Pony fic on FimFiction--lotsa views for the first chapter, half as many for the second, maybe three-quarters of that number for the third, and so on. So even in an atmosphere where the stories are free and focused directly on the audience's area of interest--Ponies--there's quite a large drop-off as stories continue on.

      As with most things in writing, it's a conundrum wrapped in a puzzlement wrapped in a mystery. A conpuzztery, if you will.

      Mike Again

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