What happens when a story comes to you where you are reading? What new types of storytelling are made possible when narrative accesses technology to personalise itself to you?

Breathe is a digital ghost story to be read on your phone. It tells the story of a young woman, Flo, who can communicate with the dead. As Flo attempts to make contact with her mother, Clara, who died when she was a young girl, other voices keep interrupting. The ghosts that disrupt Flo’s search for Clara recognise your surroundings and begin to haunt you, the reader, in the same way they haunt Flo.

For the past two years, I’ve been participating in a research project called Ambient Literature. With colleagues from the University of the West of England, University of Birmingham, and my university, Bath Spa, we’ve been investigating the locational and technological future of the book, scoping the field of digital literature and thinking about what urban data flows and the smartphone as a reading and listening device can bring to storytelling. At the heart of this research lie questions about how literature can make use of novel technologies and social practices to create evocative experiences for readers. The funding for the project (provided by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council) has allowed for three creative works to be commissioned as practice-as-research and Breathe is my response to that commission.

Breathe is a collaboration with the digital book space Editions at Play, which is itself a collaboration between Google Creative Labs Sydney and the London-based publisher Visual Editions. What we’ve created is a literary experience delivered using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and context recognition technology that responds to the presence of the reader by internalising the world around them. The story uses place, time, context and environment to situate the reader at the centre of Flo’s world as the book changes in ways that we hope are both intimate and uncanny. It’s a book that personalises itself to you.

The story takes about fifteen minutes to read; it is available for free and can be read on mobile devices via www.breathe-story.com.

The two other commissioned works, Duncan Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then, and James Atlee’s The Cartographer’s Confession, take diverse approaches to the challenges set by the research project; each of these works was created with a different set of collaborators. Along with the three creative pieces, the Ambient Literature project is producing a range of publications, from a how-to toolkit for writers and makers to a scholarly book co-written by the research team. As a creative writer, it’s been fascinating to work on Breathe, which builds on my own work in the field of digital fiction. With Visual Editions and Google’s Creative Lab Sydney, I couldn’t have asked for a better team of collaborators to bring this personalised locative ghost story to life.

As Anna Gerber, Creative Partner at Visual Editions, says, “Breathe is a story for anyone who wants to know what it’s like to read and experience a personalised book. Here, the book knows where readers’ are, the street names around them, the cafes nearby – and will give them a chill when they see their digital and real worlds combine. Breathe plays with readers’ minds as it explores what books can be like when you marry technology, literature, readers’ physical spaces and their everyday worlds.”

One final note – The Ambient Literature Project is looking for participants to try out Breathe and talk with us about their experience. If you are interested, follow this link to the sign up form.

I have tried again and again to become another person. I have spent years trying to think my way into different people’s heads, language, rhythms. These people have sometimes been real people. More often they have been narrators and characters. Sometimes, though, they have been writers – writers I tried to be.

One was the imaginary author of a novel that was published as King Death. I was convinced this novel should come out not by me but under a pseudonym – that of a Japanese woman. I wanted the novel to appeal to readers of Banana Yoshimoto.

This didn’t happen because my agent assured me that anyone reading King Death would know it was by me. (Still not sure about this.)

With Lilian’s Spell Book, the novel I first put out on the Wattpad website and am now publishing on kindle, I had another serious go at being another writer – in Lilian’s Spell Book’s case I was going to be Alex Warden. (Alex being either male or female but, in my mind, definitely female.)

The whole idea behind the book, right from the start, was that I – Toby Litt, male, “established”, literary author – might be putting potential readers off.

Here’s a quick summary of the story:

Lilian’s Spell Book is a paranormal adventure novel about an ordinary English family – mother, father, pre-teen son, baby daughter – who inherit an extraordinary house. They move to this vast Elizabethan mansion in rural Sussex from their small South London maisonette. Very soon, they all find out their new home is haunted. But it is the mother of the family, Jeane Jonson, who begins to suspect that the secret to the house lies in the Elizabethan portrait that hangs in a gallery just off the vast entrance hall – a glittering, gorgeous oil painting showing the proud, red-haired Lilian holding in her hand a small leather-bound book. But the real wonders start when the narrator discovers the book itself, in the secret library of the mansion. Lilian’s father was an alchemist…

Find Toby Litt’s latest novel here too.

What I hoped was to have my unnamed narrator be as close to her reader as possible.

In fact, by writing my narrator as I did, I was trying to entice my reader – a new reader for me, I hoped – to discover the book I’d made for her.

When the time came to submit the novel to publishers, I confused matters by insisting that it went out under the Alex Warden pseudonym.

This didn’t fly – none of the major publishers went for the novel, which they were told was by ‘someone they would have heard of, when the author’s identity is revealed’.

Lilian’s Spell Book was a ghost story, and publishers generally liked the first half, but then it didn’t continue as they expected. Put bluntly, it wasn’t scary enough for them.

But I’d never intended it to be scary. The haunting that takes place is meant to terrify only until it starts to be understood, after which it becomes wonderful.

Before J.K. Rowling gazumped the idea for her Book of Spells, I’d thought of calling Lilian’s Spell Book not a ghost story but a ‘wonderbook’.

After being rejected by all the publishers I’d hoped would love it, the novel sat around on my hard drive for a couple of years.

Cut to 2013, when I was teaching a residential creative weekend at Tickton Grange. This was part of the Beverley Literature Festival. (So, thank you to them.) I sat in on a presentation by Alysoun Owen, Editor of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. She was talking to my students about ‘bespoke tips on getting published’.

Alysoun mentioned What Pad – I think that’s how I first wrote it down – as one interesting platform. (So, big thank you to her.)

Once back home, I looked Wattpad up. Conventional publishing had told me Lilian’s Spell Book failed because it wasn’t scary enough – it took a generic detour. Fine. I’d see what readers with no investment in it thought; readers who’d got it for free.

Publishing on Wattpad also gave me the chance to do something I’ve always wanted to do – serialize a novel. Between 14 October 2013 and 10 December 2013, I put a new chapter of Lilian’s Spell Book up every day. (I did this under my own name, rather than Alex Warden. I wasn’t risking any future confusion about who’d written the book.)

Whenever a new reader started on the Prologue, I got a notification – and I made sure to message them, to say I hoped they enjoyed the book, if they got the chance to keep reading.

My first impression was that a lot of the readers were young, and the messages they sent back were often enthusiastically mistyped. These weren’t fussy people. What they wanted was a good story that gripped them – and that they could get for free.

I was really delighted. These weren’t my usual readers. Most of these new readers had no idea I’d written other books. They sometimes said I should keep going, because I had talent. I found this incredibly touching, and encouraging.

I wasn’t hiding my identity or that I wasn’t a first-timer. On my Profile page, I’d put up a biography, explaining a little about who I was.

Alex Warden aka Toby Litt (https://www.wattpad.com/user/TobyLitt)

I hoped a few readers might cross over from Wattpad to the world of physically published books. I’m not sure if any did. The Wattpad readers seemed to be a separate bunch. A typical message might say, ‘I enjoyed your novel so much I couldn’t put my phone down until I finished.’ Being read on phones – this was new for me.

I had been worried that as soon as it became clear that Lilian’s Spell Book didn’t follow the conventional ghost story structure of escalating scares, including false ones, that word would get around that the book was a disappointment. (Word on Wattpad can get around really fast – there are readers’ comments at the bottom of each page.) But as the days went by, the number of readers increased, and quite a few were sticking around waiting for the next chapter.

As a Wattpad author, you get access to a lot of stats about what you’ve written and how it’s being consumed. I immediately learned that the drop-off in readers between the Prologue and Chapter Five was high. Lots of people read openings of books online, just as they would if they picked a physical copy up in a bookshop. I tried not to find this disheartening.

Only about 4% of the readers who read the Prologue get to the final chapter. But the drop-off from Chapter 6 to the end is far more gradual. If a reader makes it to Chapter 6, there is a 50% chance they’ll continue to the end.

Writerly vanity would want both figures to be 100% – instant and total addiction, no quitters whatsoever. That’s never going to happen. (Not in my experience.)

By itself, without promotion, Lilian’s Spell Book picked up a much bigger than average readership. (I’ve put a few stories on Wattpad that have had around 200 reads in total.) Quite often Wattpad books are only read by a dozen or a few dozen people.

Each chapter that’s looked at is counted as a ‘read’. That’s exactly equivalent to a hit on a webpage. A hit doesn’t, of course, mean that someone has read a whole page, just opened it in a browser. But consecutive hits make it almost certain that someone is reading attentively. The number of reads for the final chapter is likely to be the total number of people who have finished the book. For Lilian’s Spell Book this is around 7,000 in four years. The reads figure is an impressive 750,000.

After Lilian’s Spell Book had been around for a few weeks, Gavin Wilson of the Wattpad Team contacted me.

He said they’d noticed that Naomi Alderman, another Wattpad author, had mentioned me in a tweet. It was possible, Gavin said, for the site to feature a novel. This would mean it appeared on the home page of both Web and App. Algorithms could be nudged, coaxed. Lilian’s Spell Book would appear on reader’s screens a little more often. I said yes.

The effect was immediate. Lilian’s Spell Book got into the top 10 in Paranormal and Adventure, and fairly soon was number 1 for Paranormal Adventure (when you combine both categories under the search). Then, for a while, it was the most-read Paranormal book on the whole site. [3 March 2014.]

Some of the other books there in the most-read had up to three million or in one case seven million reads.

Until very recently, Lilian’s Spell Book tended to climb back into the Paranormal top 200 every weekend. I can only assume that new readers find it, carry on for more than a couple of chapters, increasing my stats.

The comments I’ve had – because I politely asked for them, but also because they’re part of the culture of Wattpad – have been very useful. They’ve ranged from pointing out typos to full editorial run-downs. The most frequent comment, I think, was that people would like to know more – or to have a sequel in which the character Lilian is able to speak for herself.

In the Afterword, I asked for specific feedback on one part of the book. The narrator is a mother with two children, one of whom is still being breastfed. Several publishers saw this as a real flaw. In terms of plotting, it limited the main character – she wasn’t so free to roam around the haunted house, and to get into trouble. (Although she does do this increasingly, as the story progresses.) I asked in the Afterword whether the breastfeeding was off-putting, whether it was too much? Some people definitely thought so. Others said it was one of the things they felt was most refreshingly different about the book. They understood what I had been after – that the book was about the alchemy of family, and how that can turn time to gold.

When I finished writing Lilian’s Spell Book, in a hotel room in Belgium, I wept. Nothing else I’ve ever written has had such a powerful effect upon me. Partly because I was a little hungover and exhausted. Mainly because I thought, I’ve done it!

‘It’ being write a book that was straightforward, heartfelt, not distancing, and that would get through to lots of readers.

I’d also constructed a really complicated book (in terms of plot and backstory) but managed to bring it home, and in a way that felt genuinely achieved.

I thought it was the best end of a book I’d ever managed.

The disappointment when it didn’t find a publisher had been very deep. I hoped I’d written a gift of a book – it was returned; it felt like it had been unopened.

Wattpad enabled me to give the book away as a gift – I’ve made no money from it so far, except the £50 I’m being paid for this blog. Everyone who’s read it has done so for free. But now that the Spell book has found an afterlife on Wattpad, I’ve decided to go the whole way.

As so very few of the reader’s comments have been disappointed, I can only assume that the publishers were wrong and the readers – and I – were right. Ghost stories can be about wonder and healing as much as horror and screaming. I’ve decided to take Lilian’s Spell Book to other readers – making it available on Kindle to start with, then elsewhere.

I’ve been reluctant to do this because I like the first home it found, on Wattpad, and the readers there who made me think I’d done the right thing by not hiding it away as a shameful failure.

I believe that Lilian’s Spell Book is different from my other books. One of my tests of whether a book of mine is successful is whether or not, looking back, I can easily imagine myself writing it – can I trace an obvious line between it and me? If it’s too obviously me, that’s a disappointment.

So, I think I’m able to be a little proud of Alex Warden – the writer I believed I was, that I believed I was going to become, all the way through writing Lilian’s Spell Book. She wrote a good book. But I am more proud of the kind, insightful, magically enthusiastic readers of Wattpad. They collectively performed their own alchemy – bringing a dead book back to life.

Recently, my collection of flash fiction, The Paradise Project, was published simultaneously as an ebook and in a book-arts edition using technology that would have been familiar to Johannes Gutenberg: hand-set type impressed on handmade paper with a hand-operated press.

As the two versions progressed, I had a stunning realisation: publishing has circled back to its roots. I, the writer, was expected not only to produce the words, but to collaborate in both the making and the marketing of these past and future books.

To that end, I spent time in the studio with the paper artist commissioned to produce the endpapers, using plants from my gardens. What started out looking like a slurry of wet Kleenex did indeed resemble a sheet of limp paper on a humid day by the time she lifted it from between the blankets of the paper press.

“See that?” she said, pointing to an almost imperceptible indentation surrounded by an infinitesimally thicker ridge. “That’s a papermaker’s tear.”

I found it hard to see that tiny dimple as an imperfection. The entire landscape of the page was a riot of dips and clumps, knots and swirling fibres, as if the paper itself were supple, complex, alive.

A few months later, the papermakers, typesetters, proofreaders, and Hugh Barclay, the irrepressible octogenarian owner of Thee Hellbox Press, gathered to put The Paradise Project to bed. One by one we took our turns at the flywheel of the antique Chandler & Price press.

After this, the metal letters would be dumped into the hellbox, the 294 printed copies would be bound, and there would never again be books that were exactly like this.

I had helped set the type, choose the paper, smear the ink, and now it was my turn at the flywheel. I placed a folded sheet of thick, creamy paper upside down on the tympan as Hugh instructed. I centred the page as best I could, and gave the flywheel a whirl. I felt like a contestant on Wheel of Fortune. 291.292.293.294

I lifted the last page off the press. It looked like all the others we’d printed that afternoon, nothing to declare its ultimate place in those four and a half months of printing. Ironically, the page we’d just pulled 294 copies of—page 48—was the first page of the last story I’d written for that collection. In it, a man complains to a woman he meets in a park that his children and his children’s children have “no sense of history. No sense at all.”

While the others hoisted glasses of single malt to toast the occasion, I read the story, thinking how fine a gathering of words could sound when they were this beautiful on the page. Then I noticed, in one corner, a faint smudge. I peered more closely. The smudge was clearly a fingerprint.

“Oh dear,” I said, showing the page to Hugh. “Should we print another?”

“We should charge extra!” Hugh exclaimed, dismissing my question with a wave of his hand. “That fingerprint—that’s what makes this copy distinct. Human. It says, ‘Somebody printed this.’ Imagine what it would be worth, a book with Gutenberg’s fingerprint!”

There are no fingerprints on the ebook version of The Paradise Project, only the smudges readers leave on their plastic e-ink screens.

That’s not the only difference between publishing in paper and pixels.

While Hugh and I chose hand-made rag paper for the guts of the letterpress book, my ebook-designer son, Erik, and I blithely skipped past considerations of heft, texture, colour, and tooth. Epaper combines ink and paper in one; even typeface is delivered as digital software that a reader can adjust to any size in several different fonts. For hours I toiled in Hugh’s grubby studio, hunting-and-pecking metal letters and sliding them, upside down and backwards, into a chase, but with a few strokes to Erik’s keyboard, my text instantly flowed into an EPUB file.

Does that make a book designer as redundant as the guy inking metal type with a leather pouch? Well, no. My son sent me the pages of Paradise as a file that I say is onscreen, but it wasn’t. The pixelated image of the words were on the screen; the file itself was a knot of coding, an intangible, almost-indecipherable Rosetta stone. The designer’s skill is in making the text accessible across every electronic reading device now existing, and yet to be invented (as they like to say in film contracts).

I played with the EPUB file on my old and new phones, my iPad, my laptop and ancient desktop, shrinking the text, then blowing it up until I could see it across the room. No matter how I manipulated the words, the flow was perfect.

“There’s a certain magic to this, a certain finesse,” Erik said quietly. “Really, really clean code is a beautiful thing. In the same way that a smooth-running press with a perfect skim of ink and a perfect bite of type into the paper, and perfect consistency to the prints—in that same way, there’s beauty and elegance in a well-coded ebook.”

The printed page that Hugh pulled off the press was a material object. It rustled lightly in my hand. I recognized the words that I wrote, the metal letters that I slid into the chase that Hugh set in the press, perfectly inked, to make the words appear on that rectangle of pressed rags.

I looked at the page head-on, as I might look at a painting. Then I held it up to the light, as the paper-maker taught me to do, to look for variations in opacity and how the paper fibres were dispersed. She called this the look-through. Then I held the printed page at a raking angle to the light—the look-down—to check the texture on the surface caused by the felts, the moulds. I watched for papermaker’s tears.

Hugh plucked it out of my hand and offered it to me again, on edge.

“Like this,” he said, holding it perfectly flat, at eye level.

I looked across the terrain of the paper, its landscape of hills and hollows cradling thick, chocolate ink. I could have got lost in there.

“On paper like this,” Hugh said, “words make an impression.”

Bath Spa University’s Graduate College and the British Library invite applications for a fully funded AHRC PhD studentship on the topic of ‘Digital Publishing and The Reader: Interactions between Readers and Writers of Creative Texts in Digital Environments’.

Closing date: 23:59 (GMT) Monday 2 May, 2016.

Interview date: Tuesday 17 May, 2016.

The studentship will begin on 1 October 2016.

About the Collaborative Doctoral Award

This studentship is for three years full-time study at doctoral level, with the option of an additional six months training or placements.

The student will have all fees paid, will receive a bursary for living expenses, and will also be supported in necessary travel and conference costs. The student will be jointly supervised by Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator and Ian Cooke, Head of Contemporary British Published Collections, of the British Library, and Kate Pullinger, Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media, and Dr Laura Little at Bath Spa. At the British Library, the studentship will be located in the Digital Scholarship and Contemporary British Publications teams. The student’s investigation will operate within Bath Spa University’s regulatory framework for research degrees.

The purpose of this collaborative research project is to investigate the changing nature of publishing in digital environments, with particular emphasis on examples which encourage interaction between readers, texts and authors. The research focus of the project is located in library and information science and publishing. Through focused case studies, it will provide policy-relevant research for the British Library on issues related to collection-building and representation of cultural activity in Britain. This project fits within the AHRC ‘Digital Transformations’ research theme, in particular examining emerging media and ‘communication and creativity in a digital age’. Its focus is on examining the interaction between readers and authors, and the role of new technologies in shaping these interactions. The changing nature of UK publishing is central to this research, and it fits firmly within the RCUK’s ‘Digital Economy’ theme, including topics such as: the reproduction and dissemination of knowledge; new forms of expression; changes in publishing; and notions of authorship. The project would address three specific questions:

• Technology change in digital publishing, including new technologies and reuse of existing technologies to support interaction between readers, texts and authors.
• The impact of technology change on behaviours of readers and authors and their interaction with texts;
• The significance of these changes for memory institutions, in particular questions on collection building and other activities to represent these changes in reading and authorship behaviours and technologies.

Digital technologies are transforming reading, writing and publishing, creating multiple opportunities for writers and readers interested in experimentation and innovation. Within a few years, all emerging writers will be expected to be engaged with new forms and/or platforms as well as new ways of connecting with audiences. But what does it mean to write text for a screen? What happens to literature once it moves off the page and into a web-browser, onto tablets, mobiles and other devices? As the digital and physical merge, what territories will literature explore? As interaction between readers, writers, and texts becomes more fluid and pervasive, existing across multiple platforms and modes, how will the life of a text be captured and represented by memory institutions like the British Library? Currently, reader-writer interaction is seldom captured and archived alongside the text, though engagement with writers and their texts online is a hugely popular activity with large and vibrant communities and networks already existing.

Any research project that addresses questions around technological change in reading and publishing must also address the impact of these changes on authors and texts. Situating this collaborative doctorate within Bath Spa’s creative writing department – a department that is unusual in its in-depth engagement with digital technologies – will give this researcher unprecedented access to researchers and practitioners in this field. For instance, within the time period of the doctorate the student will be able to run in-depth on-going case studies looking at the writing process, pre-publication, publication, and post-publication reader engagement of books by award-winning literary writers like Prof Tessa Hadley, Prof Philip Hensher, Prof David Almond, Prof Maggie Gee, and Prof Fay Weldon. Case studies could examine the role of technology plays in all these key stages, from writing to reader engagement across book festivals, social media, social reading and whole ecosphere of publishing currently. As well as literary texts, case studies could be built around the work that Prof Kate Pullinger and Prof Naomi Alderman do in the field of digital fiction, games, participatory writing projects, and collaborative texts.

Benefits and training opportunities for the student

Locating this research at the British Library provides a means of framing it within a national cultural and collecting context. From the point of view of research-informing-policy, it will enable the researcher to tackle questions that could not be practically addressed elsewhere. The British Library is both a major publisher of digital works, through large-scale digitisation projects and the creation of online learning platforms (such as Discovering Literature), and has been involved in collection management of digital objects at large scale. In addition, recent work on data, digital scholarship and the creation of BL labs has created an environment of innovation in new digital publishing, well-suited to the themes of this project. The student would be located in the Contemporary British Publications team and work with colleagues in Digital Scholarship and Web Archiving. The student would draw on staff expertise and experience in developing and delivering an online learning course, crowd-sourced projects, and managing born-digital collections.

The UK Web Archive, which the British Library manages, could be used as a source of longitudinal information on recent change in online publishing. There would be scope to develop a themed collection within the Web Archive to reflect digital publishing technologies in a context relevant to the PhD research project. The project would also be a close compliment to the ‘Academic Book of the Future’ programme, in which the British Library is a partner. There are strong thematic links between this project and the CDP on issues such as: author engagement with new technology platforms; how changing social and technological environments impact on research and publishing; and the opportunities and challenges raised by new collaborative practices in research. The duration of the studentship provides a time period within which to identify change in digital publishing, and to see specific publishing projects develop. More generally, the student would be encouraged to contribute to the cultural engagement activities of the Library through development of an interactive and collaborative text project. At Bath Spa, the student will have access to research training via the Researcher Development programme, which consists of a suite of courses, workshops, activities and online materials informed by the work of Vitae and their Researcher Development Framework.They can attend staff development sessions organised by the Academic Staff Development Centre. The School also sponsors a range of events and activities, including visits from publishing industry professionals and writers.

Supervision, management and procedure

Supervision will be carried out by Pullinger and Wisdom, with monthly joint supervisory meetings at either the British Library or Corsham Court, where Bath Spa’s Graduate College is located. Additional involvement from Cooke and Little will take place at regular intervals throughout the academic year. The PhD will be hosted by Bath Spa University and will conform to Bath Spa’s doctoral regulations, including the award of the final degree.

The research timetable of the PhD student will be confirmed at the approval of the student’s Research Plan, which must be submitted within three months of the start date.

Funding details

The duration of the PhD studentship is three years, full time, subject to satisfactory progress, with an additional funded six months for industry placements or research training. The stipend will be paid at the standard research councils’ rate. For 2016/17 the annual stipend is £14,296, plus an extra £550 that is added to the stipend for AHRC CDP students to help towards additional costs incurred by the need to work across two institutions. The British Library will provide financial support for research-related costs of up to £1,000 a year. If the PhD is not submitted for viva within 3.5 years, the student will become liable from that date onwards for Bath Spa’s pro-rata fees and/or continuation fees.

Person specification


Essential

• Undergraduate degree in related discipline
• Masters level qualification in related discipline or professional equivalent.
• Proven ability to work independently

Desirable

• Experience of working with digital publishing or archiving
• Demonstrable knowledge of the current landscape of digital reading
• Experience of working collaboratively with individuals and organisations

How to apply

Full details of how to apply can be found here.

Prospective candidates wishing to informally discuss an application should contact Kate Pullinger at Bath Spa or Stella Wisdom at the British Library.

Enquiries about the application process may be directed to PGR Admissions.

“Design works not because people understand or even appreciate it but because it works subliminally.” – Erik Spiekerman

Erik Spiekerman is one of the world’s most renowned book designers and typesetters, with over 323,000 followers on Twitter. We interviewed him last year at Reedsy and left us with this perfect quote. The core principle of design remains the same, whether it’s applied to apps, websites or books. It’s more than making something “beautiful”, or “appealing”, it is there to subliminally influence the experience of the user/reader.

When you open a book, you don’t think about the margins, the spacing, the font, the drop caps, the scene breaks; however all these interior layout details subtly influence the pace at which you read, and can go as far as create an atmosphere for the story.

The cover assumes a similar function. I often hear designers saying that they create “eye-catching” covers. I always wondered, what does “eye-catching” mean? Surely, flashy colours, big fonts and strong contrasts are eye-catching… But that’s not what they are referring to. A good cover is there to catch the attention of the right audience for your book. It needs to convey the story, the atmosphere, the genre in one single image or illustration. Again, it works subliminally in the mind of readers: when walking in a bookshop, or browsing through an e-retailer, our attention span for every cover we see is of just a few milliseconds. Choosing the one we pick up is a decision vastly influenced by our subconscious.

Because design works so much in the subconscious of readers, it tends to be neglected by a majority of self-publishing authors, who are often on a budget. Since starting Reedsy, we have seen a huge interest from independent authors for working with professional editors, less so for working with a designer (especially when it comes to interior design or typesetting).

Self-publishing and the rise of templates

Typesetting is not cheap, especially since today’s technology in this field is not all that up-to-date. After investing in editing, proofreading, ebook formatting and (sometimes) cover design, most independent authors can’t afford to hire a book layout designer to design and typeset the print edition.

Moreover, it is no secret that self-publishing is predominant in genre fiction, where the layout of the books is actually pretty straightforward (no images, tables, graphs, illustrations, etc.). As a result, more and more “template services” have emerged in the past few years, making indie authors’ lives easier when it comes to print and e-book formatting. Some websites sell them (like Joel Friedlander’s Book Design Templates) while others make theirs available for free as part of their publishing services (like Bookbaby or Blurb). Our Reedsy Book Editor, which we released this week, also leverages the efficacy of templates, while providing more customization possibilities.

This DIY tendency and the “templatisation” are arguably a good thing for simple interior design, but the same cannot be said for cover design. No survey has been carried out to firmly back this up, but it is my impression after two years of working with independent authors that professional book design is still being vastly underestimated. Most authors coming to Reedsy for editing either create their own covers themselves using royalty-free images, or purchase pre-made covers (the equivalent of “templates”).

The problem with this is two-fold: first, authors are generally just as good with images as designers are with words. The low standards in DIY book design have given birth to entertaining websites such as Lousy Book Covers or Kindle Cover Disasters.

Then, on top of the quality problem, the automation capabilities of digital publishing and the rise of self-publishing raise the question of the standardisation of book design. Even publishers are more and more wary of taking chances with covers, and want their professionals to stick to strict genre guidelines (look at how many thrillers have fog and pine trees on their cover). This is something I’ve discussed several times with Reedsy designers and they share my impression:

“I think there’s only a small window of time in which you can emulate an idea and still be successful. The rest of the time you’ve got to try something different. It is a risk, and although people have to take risks, they usually don’t want to be the first one. Even publishers will say to me: ‘this book has sold quite a bit and it looks like this, can you do something similar?’” – Stewart Williams

So what is my fear? Simply that we are moving towards a time where books within a same genre will pretty much look the same, inside and out.

New formats and opportunities for differentiation

Of course, this is a slightly pessimistic view of the current state of book design in the publishing industry. The popularity of “star typesetters” like Erik Spiekermann proves that millions of people out there are still passionate about layout design and typesetting. The thriving of independent publishers who place a high value on design, like Faber & Faber in the UK, is another sign of this.

Moreover, though digital formats have introduced a form of “standardisation”, they have also opened new doors to authors, publishers and designers. You can adapt your novel into a graphic novel. You can create limited hardback editions of a successful book, with custom typesetting and design. You can create “apps” for children’s books, offering a more immersive narrative experience. There is almost no end of possibilities.

While new formats can be expensive to produce, they offer a unique opportunity for authors and publishers to “go the extra mile” for their readers and differentiate themselves. They also create new distribution and revenue channels: audiobooks, apps, games, etc.

In the end, “design” is there to there to both support the story and make the book stand out. This is just as true now as it was before the emergence of the digital formats. It is taking self-publishing authors a bit of time to realise it – and to admit that crafting stories and crafting covers are two very different skills. The ones who do, however, are way ahead of the competition.

In the end, “design” is there to there to both support the story and make the book stand out. This is just as true now as it was before the emergence of the digital formats. But it is taking self-publishing authors a bit of time to realise it – and to admit that crafting stories and crafting covers are two very different skills. The ones who do, however, are way ahead of the competition.

So if you’re just starting out, and becoming a “professional author” is your goal, I will leave you with three simple design recommendations that will immediately get you much closer to your objective:

• Hire a cover designer: even if you know what you want on your cover, even if you have sourced the image yourself, hire a cover designer. You don’t have the knowledge of typography, space and arrangement that designers have. And you don’t have the experience.
• Hire a layout designer: machines cannot replace art: free tools and templates will “do the job”, but they won’t differentiate your print book from thousands of others.
• Do your research: whether you’re going DIY or working with designers, look at bestselling books in your category. Purchase the print editions, see how they are designed and formatted. Compare their covers and look for recurring themes or elements. Trusting your designer’s instincts always comes first, but knowing what works out there is vital to steer them in the right direction

And again, don’t underestimate the power of good design. Just because you don’t “see” it doesn’t mean it’s not changing the way readers will read your book.

I should say right from the start that the ebook revolution has been wonderful for me as an author. I’ve made more money out of my self-published ebooks than any of my twenty-plus children’s books that have been conventionally published, have enjoyed the process enormously and gained a new, and entirely unexpected, audience. And yet despite this modest success, I’ll be looking for an agent and a traditional publisher for my next book.

Ten years ago, I had the idea for a trilogy of stories aimed at young teens, set in a large English country house through three generations and featuring the servants who lived and worked there. My first heroine would be a fifteen-year-old housemaid in 1890 (country house parties, Edwardian decadence, shadow of the workhouse); her daughter a reluctant kitchen maid in 1914 (male servants leaving for war, the house becoming a hospital, women taking on men’s work); her granddaughter would arrive at the house in the spring of 1939 (impending war, the house on hard times, Jewish children fleeing Germany). And so the ‘Swallowcliffe Hall‘ series was born, before Downton Abbey was even a twinkle in Julian Fellowes’ eye. An editor signed me up on the strength of three synopses and a few chapters and everyone seemed filled with enthusiasm. I wrote the three books over the next three years, but by the time the second had been published, it was obvious they weren’t going to be bestsellers. My editor went on maternity leave, the covers were dreary, there were hardly any foreign rights deals, reviews or promotions from the bookshop chains. Even my bookmarks had typos.

When Downton Abbey became such a success a few years later, I suggested reissuing the books with more enticing covers, but the proposal was vetoed by the publishers because ‘children don’t watch Downton’. I knew, though, that I would spontaneously combust if I had to watch another episode without doing something for my poor languishing stories. So I got the rights back, because hardly any copies had been sold over the last few royalty periods, and set about turning them into ebooks. This was in 2011 and my publishers seemed unaware of the potential of digital rights; they hadn’t previously released the stories in ebook format and had no plans to do so in the future. To be fair, children aren’t such great consumers of ebooks, and the trend for adults reading YA fiction hadn’t reached its peak.

My first formatting steps were tentative but, encouraged by guidance and enthusiasm from fellow children’s authors (thank you, Sue Price and Katherine Roberts), I persevered. The timing was perfect: suddenly there were thousands of readers, particularly in America, all desperate for English nostalgia; thanks to Kindle, I could reach them. Michael Boxwell’s ‘Make an Ebook‘ explained the mysteries of metatags, so I shamelessly added Downton Abbey tags wherever I could.

I had no idea what to expect, but sales of the ebooks began to build, helped by a well-timed paid promotion through Kindle Nation Daily. Several factors were on my side, although I didn’t fully realise that at the time. My books had already gone through the editing process, and the original printed versions (under different titles) had attracted reviews on Amazon which I was able to link to the ebook versions. I’d worked as an editor in children’s publishing myself, so had some experience of commissioning covers and an idea of the importance of marketing. My stories were ready to go – they just had to be formatted. Although they had first been published for children, they were carefully researched and historically accurate, and adult readers seem to love them too. Ebooks aren’t limited to a particular shelf in a bookshop; they can be enjoyed by anyone who comes across them and likes the look of the free sample. An author no longer has to worry whether bookshops will be – understandably – reluctant to take subsequent titles in a series if the first has been slow to sell.

To date, I’ve sold over 40,000 copies across the series, roughly two books in the US to every one in the UK. I have readers from Alabama to Alaska and, although the Downton Abbey effect has probably peaked, I’m still getting new reviews and daily sales. One woman said these were the books she’d enjoyed most on her Kindle so far. She gave me five stars! And Wuthering Heights one! (OK, that is a bit odd, but I’m not complaining.) I’ve been able to control pricing and check sales on a daily basis. Because I receive 70% of the cover price, I’ve been able to keep it low and still earn twice as much as I did from my print book royalties. Equally important, self-publishing made me feel like an author again. I wrote and released another story in the series, aimed less specifically at children – ‘Eugenie’s Story‘, told from the ‘upstairs’ side of the house – and a teen ghost romance. And yet…

It can be lonely, thrashing about in the self-publishing pool. I realised that ‘Eugenie’s Story’ was different from the other Swallowcliffe Hall books: less straightforward, with a comically unreliable narrator. I seemed to be heading in a new direction and wasn’t sure whether to continue. And if I carried on self-publishing, who was to say whether my books were any good or not? By the time sales declined, I might be too far off course. So I trod water for a while, beginning and abandoning a Bridget-Jones-hits-the-menopause type comic novel, before surrendering to a need for structure and advice. I’ve just finished the first draft of a novel for adults, written for a Creative Writing MA at City University under the guidance of tutors and external markers. I’m not going to self-publish it because I want someone to help make the book as good as it can be, telling me to keep working at this aspect or that, and telling me finally when to stop tinkering: a disinterested arbiter who also knows the publishing world and can offer me impartial advice. And when the novel’s ready, I don’t want to be the only one announcing my brilliance to the world. It feels better when someone else has a hand on the marketing tiller.

I love the control that self-publishing brings: being able to check sales figures daily, to adjust prices instantly and see the effect that has on sales. And I love my beautiful and personal new covers, with a photograph of my great-uncle Norman featured on ‘Grace’s Story‘ and my mother on ‘Isobel’s‘. Self publishing has given a new lease of life to a series that would otherwise have sunk without trace. For my next project, though, it’s time to call in the professionals. I want someone else to judge whether my writing makes the grade before it goes out into the world – just because you can self-publish, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should.

The publishing industry has undergone many changes over the last few years, many of which can be attributed to the disruptions brought about by digital technologies. Alongside the rise of self-/ indie- publishing we are also seeing new types of publisher emerge, publishers who are turning traditional models and methods on their head and finding new ways of doing things.  In our ‘New Publisher’ series we interview some of them about their approaches and what they hope to achieve by doing things differently.

Ramon Dodd  speaks to Nikola Richter, founder of the Berlin based digital publisher Mikrotext. 

New platforms, new distributors, new genres … digital publishing has redefined the way we create and consume literature in the twenty-first century. Not only has the ‘how’ been redefined, the ‘what’ has too: what we read and write and what we define as literature are evolving.

Based in Berlin, Mikrotext has found their niche publishing shorter works of contemporary fiction and non-fiction in eBook format. It’s first publication featured Facebook updates from Aboud Saeed – described as the ‘Syrian Bukowski’ – who was posting from Syria in the midst of the turmoil.

Mikrotext’s founder, Nikola Richter is an author and editor and curator of the Net Culture strand of Berlin Festival. We caught up with her to find out more about Mikrotext and to get her views on the state of digital publishing in Germany.

1. When did you decide to start Mikrotext?

I’ve always been into blogging and publishing but in 2012 a British Council scholarship gave me the opportunity to dive deeper into digital publishing. Soon after, in January 2013 I set up Mikrotext and the very first edition came out in March that year. We published an essay by philosopher Alexander Kluge, and status updates from the young Syrian writer, Aboud Saeed. It was so successful we edited a print version of his eBook and published it in English: The Smartest Guy on Facebook.

2. Which genres of work is Mikrotext publishing?

New forms of writing that develop on or with the web – unique digital realities. I’ve mentioned Aboud Saeed’s Facebook status updates. Aboud does not regard himself as a Facebooker, but as a writer, and his works are considered to be literary short texts and prose. We’ve also published an essay on genesis (The Magpie Experiment by Jan Kuhlbrodt) which started as a blog. The most experimental eBook so far was a collection of spam mail received by the Munich essayist, Thomas Palzer, Spam Poetry. But we’re also interested in other short prose, such as short stories, novellas and essays. The eBooks we publish are in our editions are thematically-linked, and contemporary issues such as ‘freedom on the web’ and ‘how to deal with creation and autonomy’. The upcoming topic is surveillance – and will comprise a novella and an essay.

3. Why focus on shorter works?

Reading habits have changed dramatically in the digital age and at any one time we can be reading several articles in multiple open browser windows, switching from text to text, device to device. Often when we open a new page, we scroll about looking for keywords and to check how long the articles is. Sometimes we read only part of an article or sections that are not necessarily connected. With Mikrotext, we wanted to recreate a proper concentrated reading experience on the screen, and I think the eBook allows this: it’s not browser-based and there is nothing to distract you from reading. Some of the available eBooks however don’t offer quality shorter texts, and by this I mean, texts that are longer than a newspaper article but shorter than a novel – shorter works of prose and non-fiction that can be read on a journey, on the tube, or while waiting at the doctor, that can be carried around and are available when you want or need them.

4. What’s happening in the German eBook market? Does it reflect the experience of other European countries such as the United Kingdom?

I think it is very difficult to compare reading habits in different languages and countries. Germany is one of the biggest book markets in the world with a huge number of books being published each year per capita. There is a vast readership and a prolific landscape of bookshops, despite Amazon. From what I know, the developments in the US and Great Britain are strongly linked due to language, economics and politics. The epublishing situation in other European countries is totally different. At a book fair, a Polish publisher told me that the eBook is virtually non-existent, though some are experimenting with access-free education online. In France, publisher Moyen-Courrier, has started to publish new journalism from American magazines. Here in Germany things have been moving very quickly since the start of 2013. In Berlin, you’ll now find ten or more epublishers, plus several epublishing start-ups, and my guess is that Berlin will become Europe’s international epublishing city. Amazon recently launched its Amazon Kindle Singles in German – pretty late timing considering the number of domestic publishing houses which are already up and running. I think the indie publishers had good timing!

5. What’s the future of digital publishing in Germany?

We still have a long way to go. The readership is still very traditional. Smartphones, tablets and ereaders are quite common, but only the latter are used for reading. There is a big lobby in Germany defending the ‘Haptik’ of a book (loosely translated as look and feel), and promoting the belief that text is only readable (and valuable, for buying and reviewing) when it is printed on paper.

6. What does epublishing offer writers and readers of short fiction and non-fiction that traditional publishing doesn’t?

Due to its nature, epublishing can react more quickly to topics and developments in current affairs. Also, a text can be reworked much more easily without throwing away tons of paper. Then there’s the distribution – once it goes online, an eBook is global. It’s also important to say that epublishers also care about the texts they publish and they choose and edit with the same care as traditional publishers might. Epublishing is proper publishing but it is using the ways of the web.

7. What should authors know about epublishing before they decide to publish?

Just read eBooks and see what’s out there! You’ll find out all you need to know about just how professional things are becoming, and the possibilities in typography, distribution, multimedia, social reading and more.

You can find out more about Mikrotext on their website: www.mikrotext.de; Twitter: @mkrtxt; and Facebook.

Other interviews in our ‘New Publisher Series’:

Tom Chivers of Penned in the Margins 

Matthew Crockatt of And Other Stories

Scott Pack at The Friday Project

CompletelyNovel.com is an online publishing community and social-sharing site for book-lovers which helps self-published writers to publish quality print editions at competitive prices.

We spoke to Anna Lewis, co-founder of Completely Novel, about why print is still important in the digital age.

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Are print books still relevant for independent authors?

With eBook sales on the rise and Kindle eBooks surpassing the sale of print books on Amazon last year, more people are asking – is print still relevant in this increasingly digital age? The answer from our point of view, and the point of view of our hundreds of writers who choose to publish through our platform in print, is a definite ‘yes!’.

 So, why are printed books still relevant? We outline just a few of the reasons below.

To have and to hold

Yes, we thought we’d start with the most basic reason: that with all the technology in the world, there are still many of us who love the feel, texture and smell of a physical book. We like going into a bookshop and running our fingers along the spines of the books until we find the one for us; we like showing them off on our bookshelves; we like to feel the pages lessen in our right hand as we near the end of the story. There is something exciting about books that made us all fall in love with them in the first place – and that’s something the typical eBook can’t quite replicate.

To give and receive

 The technology for sharing or gifting ebooks has been slow to develop and is still not very advanced – some have even said that it’s little more than glorified file-sharing. Wrapping a book to give to your family or a friend feels better than sending an email with a voucher code on it – it’s more tangible and immediate.

A book launch or signing also requires a physical product, and while there are some programs to allow for digital autographs, there is still something important to us about having an author sign a physical book.

Print books in a digital word

There are those who argue that print books cannot survive in an increasingly digital world. There is no denying that the way we access storytelling has changed in recent years – we now download films and music, and can watch performances over the web or our television. However, the printing of books has also become increasingly digitalised, meaning that traditional and self-publishers can now print-on-demand and save thousands of books from being printed unnecessarily. New technology has also altered the production of books – making them easier to design, and allowing editors and designers to be more creative with typesetting and packaging. Rather than hindering print, technology has helped books evolve and inspire a new generation to read.

What writers think

We are a publisher dealing mainly in print, so we’re obviously going to have lots of good things to say about the paperback. So, why don’t we hand over to some of our writers, to find out why they opted for publishing physical books.

Tom Evans

For entrepreneurs, having a published book in your name can help hugely in establishing your credibility, differentiating you from your competitors and attracting clients. Using print can be particularly attractive as you have more freedom and control when it comes to using images, graphs and tables in your book, which might get mangled by the reflowable format of eBooks.

Tom Evans is a life coach and works with a large number of clients helping them to find direction and inspiration in their careers and personal lives. Handing one of his books such as In The Zone to clients is a useful way of letting them digest the practices and principles in their own time. Print on demand means he can do that as efficiently as possible.

“Even though everyone seems to be using eReaders these days, print books have a place in this new world. At my talks and workshops, people still love having personally signed copies my books. If I am doing a talk for 23 people, I know that I can order exactly 23 books at no cost penalty and they will be delivered within 5 days, sometimes in two!”

Christian Paris

Christian Paris penned ‘A Pretty Smart Way To Catch A Lobster (The Alice In Wonderland Years)’ to tell the story of how he was inspired to start a club and the many adventures he had in the ten years that the club ran for. There’s a large group of people who remember the club and may also have been part of the various weird and wonderful projects that Christian ran alongside it. Having a printed book was a way of saving and sharing those memories with that group of people.

“To me a book has to be held, to be touched, to turn over, to read the blurb on the back and to take a sneaky look at the pictures inside, before settling down and reading it. Once read it can be lent to others and then to be treasured.”

Andrew Sykes

‘Crossing Europe on a Bike Called Reggie’ was written by Andrew Sykes, a keen cyclist. It has been a highly successful book among other travellers and cyclists, both in terms of eBook sales and print sales. Here’s why he opted for print:

“Selling eBooks is great but to actually see your literary effort in a printed book is something quite special. Apart from that initial wish, it obviously opens up the books to more traditional markets and has allowed me to get the books into around 100 Waterstone’s stores nationwide as well as being sold through online channels such as Amazon. Many people prefer (for very good reasons) having a book in their hand to hold, to bend, to lay down on the floor, to put on their coffee table, to throw at the cat! You can’t really do that with an eBook.”

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So there you have it. If you want your readers to get more from your book than just the text (such as a means of animal control or memento to treasure), print offers plenty that keeps it relevant, and interesting – for publishers and independent authors alike.

Digital technologies have given writers countless opportunities to experiment and play. New forms of digital writing are possible online and writers are embracing their potential. They give us a chance to reconsider our roles as writers and provide us with unexpected ways to connect with our readers.

The networked novel has emerged over the past six years as a form of digital book that is written, edited and published online. Whereas a printed book is closed, the networked novel is open.  It exists online and can include text, audio, video, links to other online sources and anything else you can imagine. Picture a piece of fiction that is constructed in the same way as Wikipedia and you begin to see how a networked novel can be possible. It is not written in isolation by a single writer. Instead, several writers work together to produce a more fluid form. As with Wikipedia, the networked novel actively asks its readers to become its writers and take part in the writing process. It is an opportunity for collaboration and innovation and a new form of narrative is possible.

In this open structure, the traditional view of who is a writer and who is a reader is challenged. A writer can potentially take on a role of editor or facilitator and support a piece of fiction to take shape. It can be a challenge, as a writer, to let go of control over the narrative but what is produced can be brilliantly unique.

The experience of both reading and writing the networked novel is a social one. As readers can actively collaborate, it turns reading from a solitary act to a social experience. What we think of as a book is challenged. It becomes a place for readers and writers to work together, a platform for invention and a space for collaboration. As this form of novel can be linked to other places online, the boundaries of what we know as a book are stretched.

Several writers and organisations have experimented with this form of digital literature – here are some you might like to explore.

The Silent History

Launched in October 2012, The Silent History is a serialised collaborative novel available as an iPhone/ iPad app. Readers are able to access elements of the story both through their digital devices and in specific physical locations and contribute their own writing.

 www.thesilenthistory.com

A Million Penguins

 Launched in 2007, A Million Penguins was a raucous and riotous experiment. Using a wiki format, a novel was written collaboratively and anyone could change it as it was being written.  It was a challenge for its editors, from Penguin and De Montfort University, to hold control over what was produced.

A Million Penguins is no longer online but has been archived by the Way Back Machine. It can be found by searching the archives of www.archive.org for www.amillionpenguins.com from 2007.

Flight Paths

In 2007, The Writing Platform’s editor, Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph launched Flight Paths, a networked novel that used stories, videos and audio to tell a story. Its aim was to make the writing process collaborative. Readers were invited to contribute their ideas and these contributions were used to shape the digital novel.

 www.flightpaths.net

Songs of Imagination and Digitisation

Songs of Imagination and Digitisation was launched in 2009 by IF:Book. Inspired by William Blake, this book contained moving images and interactive elements. It offered readers the experience of interacting with digital text, audio and video and the opportunity to contribute their ideas as comments.

www.songsofimaginationanddigitisation.net

The Golden Notebook Project

The Golden Notebook Project, designed and run by the IF:Book, ran for five weeks from late 2008 to early 2009. It documented the experiences of seven readers as they read the novel The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing while a virtual community of readers to discussed the text. These discussions became a form of networked book, one which explored the nature of collaborative reading.

www.thegoldennotebook.org

Let us know what you think about networked novels – and any favourites we’ve missed – in the comments section below. 

Writer Kate Pullinger, Editor of The Writing Platform, is also a professor at Bath Spa University, co-sponsors of The Writing Platform. At Bath Spa, Pullinger runs a series of lunchtime talks, aimed at all the postgraduate writing students who study at the Corsham Court Campus. These talks, Digital Corsham, are given by writers, academics, publishers, and pundits, all of whom are interested in writing and publishing in the digital age. The talks are filmed for The Writing Platform.

This third short film in the Digital Corsham series features Charlotte Abbott, an e-publishing consultant and journalist. Here Charlotte talks about the how to approach discoverability in a digital world.

Further viewing: Philip Hensher and Naomi Alderman Digital Corsham talks.