A presentation about innovators in self-publishing

Times when writers were the last people on earth to embrace technology are over. Internet with all the advanced tools and solutions is a chance to be at the forefront. Pioneering can draw unexpectedly huge attention, also from the potential readers of your book.

There are two kinds of innovation: driven by money and driven by idea. Self-publishers don’t have money, so they invent new ways to use what’s available and free – technology.

I’ve described several examples in this presentation, now I’d like to focus on one of them. In my opinion it’s a brilliant case of how writers can innovate to involve readers in their writing. It’s Google Wave.

When the new service from Google opened for users with invitations, writers were one of the first groups to populate the new ecosystem. They were starting literary waves to write mostly short stories, with a help of other members of their waves. Great writers who started what I call “wave fiction” were Adrian Graham, Tonya R. Moore and Brent Millis.

If you remember what Google Wave was about, just imagine the excitement when you were able to see the author writing a story in front of your eyes – or rewriting it after seeing a comment from another participant of a wave. All in real time!

Now, imagine that such tools are taking off every day. What you need to do is to find a way to creatively use them.

You’ve probably heard of Instagram, extremely popular photo sharing tool for iPhone. If you are writing a travel book, why don’t you share photos of destinations you’ll cover? Sounds like a good teaser. Or you can be more creative and instead of pictures you can share text, sentences or short paragraphs. It’s easy to do, you can use a note taking app, make a screenshot and add a vintage filter to give a cool look.

Microstories created on an iPhone

Other photo sharing sites to consider are Plixi, Yfrog and Twitpic. You can always use modern blogging platforms like Posterous or Tumblr to upload creative content. There is absolutely no limit in what you do and how you do it. Check for example microfiction stories I create completely on an iPhone and share via Posterous to 10 other sites.

If you prefer to innovate with audio tools, try AudioBoo. It’ a social platform where you can share voice recordings taking up to 3 minutes. You can record the clips on the go as AudioBoo offers free applications for iPhone and Android.

A very interesting site was launched recently by Electric Literature. It’s Broadcastr – a social media platform for audio stories. The uniqueness of a service is that the stories are location-based. It opens a whole new array of opportunities to tell more engaging, real, authentic and tangible stories.

Analysts predict that 2011 will be the year of group messaging, which allows to send instant text messages to a private group of your friends. Why don’t you try Beluga, GroupMe or Fast Society and find out if you could build a group of ambassadors of your new book?

Related posts

• 27.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Learn and Improve
• 20.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Sell Globally
• 06.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Build Better Relations
• 29.04.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Reduce Costs
• 22.04.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How Technology Is Making You More Powerful [Introduction]

"Self-Publishing: How You Can Innovate" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

Related posts

• 13.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Innovate
• 17.11.2009 -- Google Wave and publishing – will it blend?
• 14.11.2009 -- “The War Machine” – a wavefiction by Made in DNA
• 10.11.2009 -- “Bathrobe Guru” – a wavefiction by Small Stories
• 09.11.2009 -- Pierwsze grupy collaborative fiction w Google Wave!

"Alert: self-exploding wave [picture]" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

Last week, the internet was rocked when Google handed out the first 100,000 invites to its new collaborative communication platform known as Wave. From the outside, the entire concept seemed a bit confusing, and the look from the inside wasn’t much better. But, after a week, many of us are starting to overlook the newness and instead focus on how to use Google Wave to make work more productive.

What is Google Wave?

That’s a difficult question. To understand what Wave is, minimal knowledge of several disparate technologies is required: email, instant messaging, collaboratively edited documents (wikis), and message boards. Add in a dash of other technologies – polling options, digital maps, games, chat rooms, and video – and you can quickly start to see why Google Wave is difficult to explain. The platform is essentially a wealth of potential, so much so that a starting point can be hard to find.

Understanding Wave

The easiest means to understand Wave is to look at situations that it replaces – the easiest being a project that is group emailed. Authors and editors are routinely emailing documents back and forth, annotated with changes, suggestions, and criticisms. If the email is just between two people – the author and the editor – then keeping up with everything is relatively simple to do. However, if a third person is entered into the mix, or a second email chain is started, then the cohesive flow of information is shattered. Here’s an excellent real world example of just such a conundrum by Moonrat.

Now, let’s compare that situation to how Wave works. An author is easily able to create a Wave and paste in the latest draft of the chapter an Editor has requested. After inviting said editor to that Wave, both the author and editor can alter the document in real time, each able to see what the other is doing as it happens. There is no need to email the document back and forth, no need to wait. Comments can be added inline or onto the document as a whole. When others are invited to the Wave, Google has a playback feature, which allows the participant to view all of the changes, comments, and suggestions made in chronological order.

Good bye conversation confusion.

Uses For The Publishing Community

Wave does a fairly good job of facilitating communication, bringing conversations and group-work into the real time in a method that’s intuitive and relatively stable. This means that the relationships that provide the real muscle in the publishing industry – that between author, agent, and editor – can be streamlined to increase productivity.

For the more forward-looking publishers there is even more good news. Google is releasing the source code for Wave as open source software. This means a publisher could setup an internal version of Wave, and only grant access to established clients – thus keeping everything away from prying eyes until the book is ready.

As the technology grows and more people migrate to the system other uses will certainly crop up. One which is clearly obvious is for digital writing groups. With users easily able to post documents, and changes able to be made in real time without the need for specific software or downloading anything, groups can easily start a Wave for each person’s specific writing and track progress with the writer. The ability to privatize replies means that even harsh criticism can be made without isolating the author.

And then there will be authors who undoubtedly use the open nature of Wave to invite new readers and directly involve them in the writing experience – pulling back the veil if you will. Watching a writer compose and monitoring the drafting process might make some writers uncomfortable (especially draft hounds with tragic spelling like myself), but the converse is that granting such access directly to the reader has the potential to be a terrific marketing tool.

Not All Upsides

Granted, Wave isn’t perfect. It’s barely ready to be used, slowing down the browser and occasionally getting buggy. But, for a product just out of alpha, it shows some serious potential. Upon running the collaborative editing test for this article, I noted three key areas of interest which need improvement.

Paste Support: Google Wave doesn’t copy correctly from external documents into a Wave.

When I copied my initial document in from Open Office Writer, a lot of spaces were dropped between words. This turned my document mushy. I’d experienced similar issues on other platforms before, and the XML backend of the word processor is typically to blame. The quick solution was to paste the document into a text editor (like Notepad on Windows or GEdit on Linux) and then re-copy that document stripped of all formating into the Wave. Doing so meant that any italics or bolding used were lost, but at least I didn’t have to run through the document chasing spaces.

Track/Approve Changes: Unlike Microsoft Word, Google Wave doesn’t have an easy method to approve changes.

When two or more parties are editing a document in Word, that same XML layer which proves a pain to copy into Wave also allows for data about who did what to be stored. This means that a document has an owner who must approve changes that another user makes.

In Wave, it’s easy to see what changes were made, and still relatively easy to see who made them, but all changes are made in real time. This can either be a detriment or a boon, depending on the relationship of those involved.

The other burr this spurred up is a lack of finalized document. Markups and comments can come quick and heavy in Wave, especially when conversations about decisions get included into the inline commenting. Stripping out these changes to export a finalized document can be annoying.

Wave Can Be Quiet: Right now, the people you need are not yet users.

Google sent out 100,000 invites on the 30th of September, and gave each of us 8 “nominations” for further invitations. So far, only two or three of my nominations have turned into invites. This means I’ve had to reach deep into my extended social networks to find others on the system. The upside is that I’ve been able to work with new people who weren’t otherwise major players in my day-to-day, and I’ve met a dozen or so new people. The downside is that the person I might really need to start a Wave with is likely not on the system.

The first complaint will likely be taken care of shortly, and the third complaint is one which Google is still actively addressing by giving out invites – thus allowing for a slow but stable growth. The middle issue, the ability to export a finalized document, is the one which will likely make or break the system for most users. Even if Google keeps everything online and in the cloud, the data needs to be manipulated into documents than which can be printed, emailed, and exported into other programs.

Will It Blend?

In the long run, I think Google Wave will be a powerful force for those who want to use it. The system is a lot like checkers – takes two minutes to learn and a lifetime to master. Those who achieve a measure of competence, and after documents can easily be imported and exported, will find Google Wave adding significantly to streamlining productivity.

After about a week with the product, I’ve already found that email and IM are now “too slow” to take full advantage of my work style. But, as with all tools, your mileage may vary.

Related posts

• 13.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Innovate
• 03.12.2009 -- Alert: self-exploding wave [picture]
• 14.11.2009 -- “The War Machine” – a wavefiction by Made in DNA
• 10.11.2009 -- “Bathrobe Guru” – a wavefiction by Small Stories
• 09.11.2009 -- Pierwsze grupy collaborative fiction w Google Wave!

"Google Wave and publishing – will it blend?" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

[wave id="googlewave.com!w+-AmnUC3OC" ]

Related posts

• 10.11.2009 -- “Bathrobe Guru” – a wavefiction by Small Stories
• 13.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Innovate
• 15.11.2010 -- Google-translated fiction – wersja 2.0
• 27.07.2010 -- Creating One Picture Story – a Step-by-step Example
• 16.06.2010 -- Create Your Own One Picture Stories

"“The War Machine” – a wavefiction by Made in DNA" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

[wave id="googlewave.com!w+vhXGKzR0D" ]

Related posts

• 14.11.2009 -- “The War Machine” – a wavefiction by Made in DNA
• 13.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Innovate
• 15.11.2010 -- Google-translated fiction – wersja 2.0
• 27.07.2010 -- Creating One Picture Story – a Step-by-step Example
• 16.06.2010 -- Create Your Own One Picture Stories

"“Bathrobe Guru” – a wavefiction by Small Stories" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

Tak więc, gdy dostałem zaproszenie od ludzi z TED (i przełamałem niechęć do siedemnastej nowości technologicznej tego dnia), próbowałem odnaleźć się w nowej zabawce Google… i odłożyłem przyjemność na później.

Wave nie robi wrażenia, gdy próbujemy go wykorzystać do tego samego, co wszystkie istniejące już programy mailowe, komunikatory i mikroblogi – do nadawania komunikatów. Prawdziwy przełom kryje się w możliwościach, jakie daje podgląd na żywo tego, co piszą inni. Po paru takich sesjach na żywo, muszę przełamać swój introwertyzm i dokończyć to zdanie wielowykrzyknikiem – przeżycie jest niesamowite!!!!

Oczywiście collaborative fiction nie istnieje od wczoraj, wręcz przeciwnie, ma się dobrze, wymieniając choćby wikipowieści (np. A Million Penguins). Ale Wave przenosi relację autor-czytelnik na zupełnie inny poziom. Czytelnik jest świadkiem procesu twórczego. Komunikacja jest jednoczesna, a nie linearna, co wywołuje zupełnie inny rodzaj napięcia u czytającego. Wszystko dzieje się na naszych oczach, a to wywołuje uczucie, że świat umyka, ucieka, zostawia nas w tyle. To uczucie jest paliwem mojej twórczości, więc zanosi się na to, że ugrzęznę w Google Wave na dosyć długo.

Więcej o zaletach tego narzędzia napiszę w oddzielnym artykule. Teraz chciałbym zasygnalizować, że powstają już “fale” literackie. Po raz kolejny okazuje się, że pisarze cyfrowi nie oglądają się za siebie, tylko eksperymentują z nowymi narzędziami, na niespotykaną dotąd skalę. Zostałem zaproszony do kilku takich grup. To cudowne uczucie uczestniczyć w czymś zupełnie nowym i przełomowym – i to w samej beta-awangardzie. Trzy z grup zapowiadają się znakomicie. Punktem wyjścia każdej z nich jest opowiadanie lub początek opowiadania. Uczestnicy mają wpływ na rozwój akcji.

The War Machine

Grupa prowadzona i moderowana przez Made in DNA. Opowiadanie sci-fi pochodzi z 2007 roku, więc ciekawie będzie zobaczyć, jak tekst ewoluuje i rozwija się, gdy do dyspozycji jest Google Wave.

Dangerous Lolipop

Opowiadanie napisała i jego przebieg moderuje Tonya R. Moore. Przed samym opowiadaniem podane są zasady gry, czyli lista reguł, które muszą być przestrzegane przez uczestników fali.

Bathrobe Guru

Fala założona przez Adriana Grahama (blog.smallstories). Uczestnicy grupy mają możliwość wyboru opcji rozwoju wypadków – głosują za pomocą gadżetu yes-no-maybe. W gadżetach (tych przyszłych, bo na razie jest kilka) kryje się wielki potencjał na uatrakcyjnianie akcji i interaktywność z czytelnikami/współautorami. Opowiadanie do przeczytania tutaj.

Jeśli macie ochotę wziąć udział w którejś z grup (i jeśli już macie konto Google Wave), wystarczy wysłać ping ma mój profil (nizejpodpisany[at]googlewave[dot]com), a dodam was do grupy. Nikt nie wie, czy będą istniały za dwa tygodnie, więc warto się pospieszyć.

Na koniec najlepszy jak dotąd pokaz możliwości Google Wave.

Related posts

• 13.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Innovate
• 22.03.2011 -- 19 artykułów dla self-publisherów
• 10.03.2011 -- Uwaga! Konkurs literacki, nagroda – profesjonalne wydanie książki w serwisie Wydaje.pl
• 16.02.2011 -- Self-Publishing przebojem wchodzi na rynek (oraz co zrobić, żeby był to rynek polski)
• 25.09.2010 -- Jak opublikować książkę w iBookstore

"Pierwsze grupy collaborative fiction w Google Wave!" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.