I have very little experience with most of these formats (or media, you might say in this context), but one idea that leaps to mind, particularly with SMS, is that an author could do sort of interactive choose-your-own-adventure stories. Not that that in itself is new, but instead of interactive fiction or some such, you might send out a snippet of a story, and at the end present one or more options: "Reply with '1' if you want Captain Intrepid to kick the tentacle beast in the face, or '2' if you want him to run back to his ship crying," that sort of thing.

The next (chapter?) could be written to order based on votes, and the difference with the old books would be that the story would end up with one path ultimately determined. Maybe something like this has already been done. Or it might not be practical anyway for a variety of reasons; for one, I imagine tallying the votes would probably not be much fun. And what's the character limit on an SMS? 400? You can fit more words in fewer characters in Japanese. Still, this could obviously be done in other (albeit less portable) formats.

Interesting ideas though. I like the idea of performances in a virtual space, though if we're talking about something serial, they would have to be exceptionally entertaining to outlast the novelty.

Can Second Life avatars emote? Can they press the backs of their virtual hands to virtual foreheads and swoon?

Neat article! I think novels, or episodic stories in any case, are better suited to SMS/Twitter. When I'm reading a short story, I expect a strong, succinct impression. I wonder about the impact of a short story if it were spread out like this. If the story's going to be spread out over time, I'd expect more of the underpinning and connective tissue that novels have, in terms of detailed worldbuilding, backstory, etc.

I like the theory of interactive novels, but in practice I haven't been as excited by them. When Penguin ran their series of six or so new media stories last year, I felt they were interesting thought experiments but didn't really enjoy them as stories. Maybe that's just a factor of unfamiliarity with a new genre and needing to learn the rules...

Phil and Kaja Foglio are telling a story via twitter. It's done in the form of the journal of a self proclaimed hero who is actually a bit part in their main comic.

Some years ago, I considered SMS as a means of getting very short stories to readers. Unfortunately, the UK network, at least, had a reputation for simply dumping messages if their servers get overloaded--despite the fact that people have paid to have them delivered. So I didn't feel that the medium was up to getting through the message.

Things may be different now.

I am working on an idea for an actual new way to commit fiction, enabled by the web. (New in that I have never seen anyone do what I am trying.) But it is a secret until I have something I feel ready to show.

Yeah, I know: Tease.

Problem is, I am moving way too slowly on this. So someone else is likely to beat me to the punch. I originally wanted to announce it six months ago. Maybe ready by Worldcon?

I've always been attracted by the idea of hypertext, but I wonder if the audio/visual aspect would just be clutter. Anyone got any experience with this?

What the folks did over at Shadow Unit has been really interesting. I would personally love to see something like that pick up, go viral then be followed up by print publications (novelization, RPG supplement, and the like).

Another example in that similar vein is The Secret World Chronicles.

What I think these are both lacking is the direct interactivity that the fans are looking for with the material/character/plot etc.

This reminds me of a Dadaist experiment, which would only be feasible with people of very tiny attention spans.A sort of hyper text exquisite corpse( I said that first Mr. Gibson!). Maybe next generation. But seriously, my newest book was written by a husband and wife, it's a long poem and one would write a line and the other complete it. They would leave the ongoing poem on the kitchen table and they worked different hours so there was always a line to be finished.Something like that on Twitter would be fun. Maybe a Twitter choose your own adventure. I think the potential is there, but someone (a Gernsback ) needs to find that X-factor that will seem obvious after the fact.
@cDave I didn't know the Folio's were doing that!

Being shamelessly printed book-centric (I am a bookseller after all), it occurs to me that -- in my perfect world -- good, handselling booksellers would be able to create print on demand anthologies of their favorite short SF/F, which they could them press on their best customers. I know we have 3 or 4 major SF/F fans on staff, each with a bunch of customers who will (within reason) try anything we recommend. If we each (or collectively) had a POD favorite short SF/F anthology, I'd bet we could sell a respectable number each year.

But, OH, the rights issues. Not my area of expertise.

I'm a fan of a new promotional thing that's being done online these days, called the "virtual book tour;" that's when a blog agrees in advance to feature a certain author there on a certain day, with the author lining up 10 or 20 of these daily opportunities in a row and calling it a legitimate two- or three-week "tour." One blog might feature a prerecorded interview on their day; another blog might do a real-time chat session, so that readers can jump in with questions too; another blog might ask the author to write a special guest entry for the blog that day, or to be a special guest editor.

What I like so much about this is that fans of an author can actually band together directly to get that author a surprisingly huge amount of publicity; if only ten fans, for example, have readerships at their own blogs of a thousand people, by the end of that fan-produced "tour" that author will have been exposed to 10,000 new potential fans. And since each day features something a little different, and since that author is promoting the entire tour at once at their own website among their existing fans, each of these smaller blogs also get a boost in new readers on their appointed day. (This of course is the fringe benefit of virtual tours -- virtual Deadheads.)

If a smart author combines this, then, with traditional media and occasional blogs with extra-large audiences, there's no reason they can't get exposed to a quarter-million new potential fans or more by the end of such a tour, all from home and for only the cost of a computer and broadband connection. It's a great equalizer, I think, when it comes to using tech to tackle the second part of the publishing process, of what to do once that book is actually out and you now need to actually sell some copies.

I tried doing an SMS short story serial about a month ago and immediately ran into the wall of message length. SMS allows 180 characters. I could crosspost it to Twitter, but that only allows 140 characters. Now, in Japan, 140 characters equals 140 words. In English, I could only get a couple of sentences per text.

My cell phone allows me to put in 1000 characters, which it then breaks into packages. Unfortunately, it will break mid-word and not deliver the packages in order, so I couldn't rely on that.

It was an interesting experiment, but I stopped after 9 episodes because the story I had planned didn't match the constraints of the form. I think I'd try it again, because it was fun, but it would likely wind up being a first person account like Othar, done as if my character where texting in real time.

I was hoping that I'd find a new medium for doing serials.

@Mary Robinette
I love the idea of the character texting in real time. There's a sort of Blair witch, Cloverfield deconstructionist vibe there.

Hugo Gernsback would rely on "donated" content... he wasn't exactly famous for paying on time or what was promised. Sadly, he was probably better than most of his contemporaries about that, including supposedly reputable mainstream publishers like the Saturday Evening Post.

These days, with a bigger fan base (which often enough produces work — particularly artwork — that equals the commercial sector) and the 'net, he'd get plenty of submissions!

The funny thing is, a lot of this kind of stuff has been going on on-line for literally years. There are interactive writing circles on the Internet such as the Superguy Listserv, a humorous superhero fiction mailing list that started in the late 1980s and is still active (albeit at reduced levels as most of their original writers graduated from college and found real jobs that took up most of their time, and no new writers moved in to replace them) to this day. A couple of the people who started out on Superguy have gone on to publish novels or children's books.

On Usenet, alt.pub.dragons-inn, alt.pub.havens-rest, and alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo were open writing fora for fantasy, science fiction, and cyberpunk stories, respectively. In their heyday, there was some great stuff there, and some of the greatest writers I've had the pleasure to work with. It offered many of the benefits suggested by the main post here—the ability for instant feedback, and easy collaboration with other writers just by dropping your own post into their thread. (They were a bit more free-form in that respect than the Superguy mailing list, where collaborations had to be worked out in advance.) There wasn't a lot of separation between fans and writers there, because any fan with an idea could turn into a writer, and work with the writers of whom he was a fan. It was all very interactive, and I wonder what would have happened if there had been a more wiki-ish structure in which the stories could be written rather than the sequentially-posted Usenet.

Alas, they have since fallen into disuse, inhabited only by spammers calling out to each other in the dark.

There's also rec.arts.comics.creative, the successor to alt.comics.lnh, a much more silly and parodic superhero/comic book comedy group than Superguy above. As far as I know, it's still going strong.

I think there are still a lot of fanfic communities out there that carry on this kind of interactivity. I know that the RP Congress is one such site, for people who "roleplay" in the MMO City of Heroes. Their characters know each other, and can participate in each others' stories. I had a blast a couple of years back doing a long, elaborate storyline there in which I "crossed over" with a number of the RPC's better writers (including Mercedes Lackey, who writes CoH fanfic in what little spare time she has).

More recently, a site called Ficlets has come along. This is a site where people post story segments that are under 1024 characters long, and other people can come along and write branching sequels or prequels to them. (In practice, most people just end up sequelling their own stuff because there's far too much stuff written for people to see and sequel.)

Whether this kind of interactivity could ever be harnessed for the professional publication industry is an interesting question. Cory Doctorow wrote a short story/novella recently for some bookstore magazine looking ahead into the future of bookstores (I can't dig up the link, maybe someone else can) in which collections of the "best of" an ongoing shared-universe Internet writing setting were periodically bound and sold as printed books. I suppose that's a possibility.

The problem is the dichotomy between the rapidity of interaction on the Internet timescale and the time-consuming nature of rewrites and editing that are required to turn a story from barely-better-than-slush into a thing of printed beauty. The best of the stories from Superguy, Dragon's Inn, Haven's Rest were, in my opinion, barely a step down from commercial quality. (An in fact, were better than some commercial books I'd read.) But there was an awful lot of crap in there, too—and sometimes the crap and best interwove just because they were interacting with each other in the story setting. How do you deal with that?

There have been a number of other interesting new-format writing experiments going on. For instance, a number of writers have decided to offer subscriptions to subsidize the writing of drafts that publishers haven't wanted, on the "Storyteller's Bowl" model. The most high-profile have been Diane Duane with her The Big Meow project (just recently returned from a year-plus hiatus due to health problems and deaths in the family) and Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's Fledgling and Saltation novels, which have since been picked up for eventual full publication by Baen. Though the "Storyteller's Bowl" method seems to have worked well in the specific situations for which the authors needed it, it is likely to be successful only in that kind of situation—an established writer with name recognition value who has a project unlikely to be publishable by "traditional" means. It is doubtful that many people would be willing to chip in for further chapters of a work by a complete unknown.

Anyway, the more new (or old) things people try, the more likely some of them will be successful. What with all the changes computer and Internet technology is bringing, it is a very exciting time to be a reader.

@Okorikuma, re: fiction written to audience order. See Underland Press' wovel, which is doing essentially that.

@cDave, re: Foglio's story via twitter. This is supplemental to their main comic, as you point out, and I think Twitter (and most of these brevity-by-tech-necessity formats) are going to be, at least, interesting experiments in nudging readers about your main content. I don't think you can sustain a novel-style narrative in 160 increments, or if you try, then you're blasting so much content through the feed that you're approaching spam. (Or, you run into what @MaryRobinette mentions above: message length walls.)

@Robotech_Master, re: Storyteller's Bowl idea. This dovetails with the whole 1000 True Fans concept, and is a model that, yes, only works well if you've got the thousand already lined up.

@neutronjockey, re: Shadow Unit. Yes, and everyone should go look at the site there a little bit. It's a new paradigm, that is really just applying their skill sets (the word) to an existing format. It is clever, engaging, and yeah, more of us should be doing it, because it hinges upon the very thing that makes all serial fiction good: the writers are having fun, and the readers have an excuse to come back every week (or whatever their publication schedule is).

And I think any new venture, or rumination about such a beast, needs to consider why it exists, or rather, what need it fulfills. SMS-based novels in Japan fill a niche that is tied to how the Japanese market uses their phones, which isn't necessarily the same way we use ours. Gernsback saw a readership who wanted cheap, regular pulp material. The Shadow Unit folk started out with their project because they wanted an outlet for their fascination with serialized TV crime drama, and the fact that they've hit an audience only means they (a) are doing good work, but (b) have found like minded souls.

John has been throwing out conversational gambits over the last week to suss out where we're at: are we still readers? Has the internet changed how we read, and how often, and what we read? I know that I don't read nearly as many books as I used to as a kid, but that is, in no small part, related to all the other distractions (DVDs, video games, online fora, the Distraction Of The Day from the 'tubes) that have become part of our daily existence. But, all of us still read--still enjoy reading fiction. But when? Where? How?

I don't think books, as we grew up with them, are going to go away in our lifetime. In much the same way that they didn't disappear when motion pictures started, or popular music began. I think they are fighting a hard fight against shortened attention spans, and things like SMS-style novels and Twitter stories are, in some ways, an effort to marry content to narrow time slices, but there are still too many people that like a good, solid narrative for it to die any time soon.

The Potemkin project was an interesting experiment in serialization, and for those who followed it every month, there was some fascinating opportunities to get lost in the narrative as the threads kept expanding every month (essentially, each month we'd add more content and "re-index" the hypertext links in the older material to weave in the new stuff; I know, don't get me started on how much of an administrative headache that was). But, how that it is done, I think the enthusiasm necessary to get into it is much higher than those who get swept up by it earlier (which isn't to say that it is unaccessible now, but there isn't the same support network to ease on into it; though I could be wrong, those who've gone and looked will have to let me know how much it sucked them in without any prior knowledge of what it was).

I think online publications either need to be ephemeral (there and gone before they get stale), or they need to be aware of the aggregated weight of their history. If I say, "Go read the Potemkin Mosaic; I'll wait here for you to finish it," I'm going to be here a long time. If, however, I say, "Go read the latest fiction burst--oh, it's only a thousand words," you'll be back shortly. And, frankly, you'll be more inclined to do it, instead of bookmarking it and never getting around to reading it. The sheer mass of material available in the Potemkin Mosaic, or in Shadow Unit's backmatter, means that, for those who find the material fascinating, they're set for a goodly amount of time, and you know you've just found a new fan. Everybody wins.

And that's simply a new expression of the old paradigm of following a novel series, and we are all those people. We have authors and series that we wait avidly for, and that we'll go wherever they lead us, because we know they're going to give us what we want: entertainment. But, for everything else, and to come back to John's question: how and where are we going to read those things that aren't long-term relationships?

The point Mary raises is a very good one. One of the problems that has evidently emerged with the SMS novels in Japan (which some people evidently call "subway novels," because several successful authors have composed them on the subway back and forth to work) is exactly the one of message length.

Yes, ideograms make it easier to pack more in than an alphabet does, and yes there may be some authors out there who can take to the restrictions the way A. R. Ammons took to writing poems on the back of adding machine tapes, but still the form seems to be dictating the content to a certain extent, the way it did a little over century ago, when movies and recordings could never last more than one unedited two- or three-minute take.

The most suggestive possibilities for creativity, I think, are in the idea of "emergence." I think the possibilities for collaborative art, even of the old-school narrative kind, are all there, but still mostly untapped. I keep getting this feeling, though, that pretty soon we're going to see a great work of narrative art that has been collectively created by an online community that, for the most part, has never shared physical space.

rogerothornhill writes: "I keep getting this feeling, though, that pretty soon we're going to see a great work of narrative art that has been collectively created by an online community that, for the most part, has never shared physical space."

Except for the "great" part, which I think you mean in the literary sense rather than the more colloquial "Wow, that's great!" sense, that description precisely fits the online communities I mentioned in my post above. Superguy, APDI, APHR…maybe they're not Classical Works of Literature, but they are terrific exercises in worldbuilding and interaction—and just as there is some dreadful slush in there, there are some terrific stories of great artistic merit. It's just that few people outside those particular writing circles actually get to see the stuff.

@Robotech_Master: And Shadow Unit would seem to be a successor to the Superguy model of the shared free-form universe. So, yeah, it does seem that the desire for such a structure hasn't died entirely.

What about a site with rotating serials? There's a number of places that have writers going off about craft and process in rotating format (each gets their own day of the week to post). What if it were serials? Each one advancing a little bit per week, but interspersed with others? Heck, they could even start to overlap.

One of the things that almost no one's touched on, is that what gets created has to be something that people will have interest in. That means, getting someone, or someones, involved that will draw in fans.

As Mark points out, it's great if you have those 1,000 fans already lined up, but I don't think people appreciate how hard it is to create those 1,000 fans. Building a creative career normally takes talent + time. And time is not the friend of the internet or the internet culture.

If it's online, we expect it fast. When we put things online, we expect people to find them quickly. Someone might have a great idea, but not be established enough for anyone to see it. Even established players can have see a lack of success (I don't want to say failure) if the idea is too new.

Things mentioned in this thread that I didn't know about until now:
Underlands Press 'wovel'
Shadow Unit
Foglio's twitter novel
Secret World Chronicles

All interesting things to check out. Many of them, have high-profile people or some sort of fan-base to pull interest out of to begin with. But what do you do if you're new?

My hope is that through sites like this, we can bring attention to people trying something new, something different, and give them enough of an audience to be able to keep going. So I'll keep my eyes out for innovative things that are happening, and I hope you guys continue to let me know about cool things.

@markteppo - The Daily Cabal while not a serial, seems an interesting experiment. Daily flash fiction (therefore brief, therefore appealing to an internet audience, which seems predisposed to shorter hits of information) from a stable of authors. Readers can subscribe to the feed, so they don't even have to site.

That said, I don't hear much about the site. In fact of all the stuff mentioned here, I've only heard of 3:
1) Shadow Unit - because it has 2 authors with reasonable name recognition attached to it
2) The Penguin experiment - because it had a big name publisher attached
3) Your Potemkin project - this one strikes me kind of as an outlier. I may simply know it because I love the whole Farrago's site (it's a brilliant place to find new experimental work), but I've seen it referenced in a few places, most notably Jeff Vandermeer's blog.

So, while all these projects seem to have the right idea, I still come back to the key problem being getting the word out. I suspect I'm beginning to sound like a broken record, but I honestly believe there's an enormous amount of fantastic content out there, ready for the plundering, but that people simply don't know about it.

Maybe the internet needs an editor.....

@orchard: I refer you to Free SF Reader and Not Free SF Reader. However the brevity of the reviews can lead to... well, once they reviewed something of mine and it read "Killer fibs. 3 out of 5" Which both does and doesn't give the story its due.

The Fix is also a good place for reviews - definitely more detailed than the two above, but less complete.

There's a bunch of other places to look. But I think the sheer volume of stuff put out on the internet limits the ability to edit it.

@JWood - Which posits a couple of interesting questions: why don't people know it? If these people are "readers," then why are they not looking for things to read? Let's put aside the question of publicity for a moment (assume, for example, that publicity will be available at your beck and call on this site, slashdot, and boingboing), and ask: what would capture readers? What would cause them to (a) come back and (b) tell their friends? Format? Content? Innovative use of technology?

The comments on John's earlier post about who reads short fiction had that sort of deathly echo to it, like eighteen people shouting across an auditorium built for a thousand. If the ratio of readers to creators has decreased with the advent of the Internet, then it doesn't matter that there is tons of fantastic content out there. There aren't enough readers to see it all; or, conversely, there is too much for any reader to enjoy it all.

But that's always been true. Hell, the stacks of unread books in my office is testament to that.

I think getting the word out is a problem, but I don't think it is key. I think what your content it and how you present it will facilitate the evangelizing.

How about slightly customizable (digital) novels such that every copy is unique? It would be easy to insert meaningless stuff: names, colors, simple preferences, but more important details could be much more interesting. Like intensity of conflict and romance, explicit content, vocabulary level, minor personality traits. Readers could have a profile which lists their preferences, and the novel would be compiled to match their tastes.

You could also (with programming that is not all that sophisticated) generate a few sub-plot twists that are not based on preferences, to be surprising and unique. "In my copy, Bill made it through that battle unscathed. He lost a leg in yours? I saw another version where he stayed on the planet and got married."

The overall plot would remain the same in the system I'm envisioning. But the smaller details would change in every individual copy.

What if your stories were a series of YouTube videos?

Even easier and cheaper than videos is animation.

Actually, it may not be easier, but it can be cheaper, especially if you use a program like Scratch which, being free and designed to be used by kids, is right at my level.

It's well-designed and simple to use. With an artistic touch, you could create something startlingly effective.

One of the greatest strengths of the internet is scale of participation available. The best way to capitalize on that is to give individual users licence to create as they will, within a defined setting. This works in games, why not in stories?

You could create a world, a defined setting. This could be various sites, each with its own setting.

One world (site) with a "hard" science fiction setting, with very precise rules, atmosphere, life forms, architechure, whatever.

One world with a high fantasy setting (I suppose like WoW, but I've never played it so I can't be sure). It would have distinct magical rules, monarchies, landmarks, maps, etc.

Another world, completely different.
And so on.

People could naturally gravitate to those sites/worlds that appeal to them.


So, you've built your world: It has everything that it needs to function, everyone has access to that material. What about the stories?

You could break that up into categories, short fiction (with several sub-categories), longer fiction with independant charachters, themes, etc., and perhaps one long epic that shakes the ground and spills into all the other stories.


These could be submitted by the individual users, and the highest quality works (either chosen by moderators or the users could vote, I suppose) would be put on the site.

New material could be put up say, once a month.

It's weird what can catch your attention, as a reader. One day I was nearly at my stop on the subway and didn't want to get out something new to read, so I started looking at the classified ads in my newspaper.

Where I discovered a story of thwarted love. Two people who were in love, but kept apart for various circumstances. The ads spoke of attempted meetings which did not take place, expected letters which did not arrive, missed phone calls and appointments, etc. There were also ads by each lover lauding the other, conveying desperation at being kept apart, or heaping scorn on a person who stood between the lovers.

There was at least one ad nearly every day, and some days several, especially once a third person became embroiled in this relationship.

It was, as you can probably tell, addicting, even though I had no idea who these people were, or whether this was something real or an exercise in storytelling.

After several months, however, I stopped reading, because events had become repetitive. I'd look once a week or so, just to see if anything "new" was taking place, and eventually stopped looking at all. A few months after that, in a moment of idleness, I check the classifieds, but there was no sign of the star-crossed lovers.

All of which is to say that if you do it right, I expect people will read it. If they find it in the first place, of course.

They also offer a limited edition of each issue as well as an annual anthology collecting the online fiction. Neil has stated that he's not sure if this method will work in the long run but that it's working nicely for now.

I don't see the Clarkesworld signed chapbooks and annual anthology going away anytime soon. Not only are they a stable source of income for the magazine (unlike donations or online ads), but they also make the stories available to a still significant body of readers that don't read online. We've start offering audio fiction for similar reasons and it's probably not long before I'll have to work on designing content for cell phone readers. In the end, all this is is distribution.

SF existed before Hugo. What he did was package and market it in a way that worked well. I think that's what we're still waiting for with online fiction. A lot of these experimental forms are repackaging or combining ideas from old ways (radio, tv, film, choose your own adventure, comics, fan fiction, stage, improv) and applying them to new mediums. Don't get me wrong. This is a very good thing for the field.

Unfortunately, we're missing one thing that Hugo had... by the time he launched Amazing Stories, magazines were well-tested and widely adopted. We don't have e-readers or similar devices that have attained that level of market acceptance. Our distribution model is incomplete.

We had in New Zealand an attempt at a multimedia soap - short episodes on a local station but to get the full story, you also signed up to get SMS messages on your mobile. You got part of the story by reading SMS messages between characters. Not entirely sure how well it worked.

There are some really nifty ideas & concepts being tried out but I think we're looking at two different things here:
1. How to get your stuff to your readers.
2. How to make money off it.

"What Would Hugo Gernsback Do?"

I don't know, but he'd explain it at great length.

Althoug not everyone's cup of tea - Flash Fiction would be ideal for most of these ideas. I subscribed some time ago to G. W. Thomas' Flash Shots daily email of flash fiction which takes literally seconds to read. You can check them out at www.gwthomas.org. They vary in quality but there are glimpses of genius. Still too long for just one text but perhaps more doable than longer fiction pieces.

In fact there is no reason why you coudln't do a series of Flash Fiction stories based in the same "Universe" to build up characters, setting and even a story arc.

Actually .... I'm off to experiment ...