My Mem­o­ries of a Future Life
by Roz Morris

If your life was somebody’s past, what echoes would you leave in their soul?

Carol is a gifted con­cert pianist—until an injury threat­ens to end her career. Des­per­ate for a cure, she dis­cov­ers Andreq. Is he her future incar­na­tion or a psy­cho­log­i­cal fig­ment? And can he help her recover?

“Highly orig­i­nal, haunt­ing and com­pelling.“
—Multi-Story.com

Find out more on Ama­zon and down­load a sam­ple to your Kin­dle. You can also lis­ten to a free audio sam­ple of the author read­ing the first 4 chapters.

Tech­ni­cal­i­ties: On the Air or Ether / Miss­ing­ham, Jones, Eisler, Mor­ri­son, Blofeld, Wik­ert, Lipskar

British writer Ewan Mor­ri­son was claim­ing to have spied a “glassy-eyed fanati­cism” among peo­ple “in the throes of the rev­o­lu­tion” of dig­i­tal publishing.

Amer­i­can author Barry Eisler began, “This notion that we’re not going to have lit­er­ary fic­tion any­more…” but was cut off by UK lit­er­ary agent Piers Blofeld, who seemed to want no more than to yell “Ama­zon!” at every­one in an accusatory tone.

And host Philip Jones was try­ing, with lit­tle suc­cess, to pull them all together with a per­fectly valid ques­tion, “Where is the great self-published lit­er­ary fic­tion writer?” — mean­ing how is it that we have yet to see a major lit­er­ary author walk across the street to the self-publishing side of the indus­try! the industry!

Rarely are good inten­tions so frustrating.

Philip Jones

The annoy­ing hour we all shared on Wednes­day dur­ing the fort­nightly Internet-radio/podcast show The Naked Book on Radio Litopia made me real­ize just how far out of their depth some of our pub­lish­ing indus­try col­leagues are swim­ming in the fast-rising tide of tech­nol­ogy. There’s a lot of inef­fec­tual noise being made these days sim­ply because we can make it.

In this instance, The BookSeller’s talk show is recorded live at 3 p.m. ET every other Wednes­day, 8p Lon­don time, noon in Los Ange­les. After the live-cast, a some­what cleaned up tape is posted, nor­mally within 24 to 48 hours.

The ses­sion is led by Jones, edi­to­r­ial chief at The Book­Seller, and by the UK’s lead­ing advo­cate of intel­li­gent dig­i­tal devel­op­ment in pub­lish­ing, TheFutureBook’s Sam Miss­ing­ham.

I’ve been fol­low­ing Naked Radio ses­sions since they began in March and have cov­ered some of these pre­sen­ta­tions here on the Ether, notably this one focused on Ama­zon last month.

Wednes­day, the pin­balling shout­ing match included some of the fol­low­ing ran­dom lines (I ran a tape of my own):

• “Right now legacy pub­lish­ers are solv­ing how to deliver paper books.” (Eisler)
• “A huge amount of min­nows and one enor­mous shark (that would be Ama­zon).” (Blofeld)
• “Don’t inter­rupt because what you just said is ridicu­lous and I waited patiently through all that ridicu­lum.” (Eisler)
• “We have to engage in an ide­o­log­i­cal battle…to pre­serve the sta­tus of our pub­lish­ers.” (Morrison)
• “Surely Ama­zon is one of the dom­i­nant chan­nels for sales of the tra­di­tional pub­lish­ers, as well” as for self-publishing authors. (Missingham)
• “We do see Ama­zon as a hugely preda­tory Amer­i­can monop­oly in this country…people in Britain…are con­cerned about the influ­ence Ama­zon has over the High Street.” (Morrison)
• “Surely if peo­ple were that con­cerned they’d stop buy­ing” (from Ama­zon). (Jones)
• “You’re expound­ing a basi­cally neo-conservative agenda, Barry…” (Morrison)
• “I can’t believe you’re actu­ally say­ing…” (Eisler)
• “No you’re actu­ally say­ing…” (Morrison)
• “Could we stick to the book busi­ness?” (Jones)
• “You’re par­o­dy­ing some notion of Amer­i­cans that you’ve gath­ered from afar…it’s silly, it’s a straw-man argument.”
• “We believe there are social insti­tu­tions that pro­tect us from the market…left to its own devices, the free mar­ket will dam­age cul­ture.” (Morrison)
• “It takes time for authors to find their voice, to find their readership…years and years of being sup­ported, find­ing a home in legacy pub­lish­ers…” (Blofeld)

#Naked­Book what is this per­va­sive atti­tude of draw­ing battle-lines and oli­garchies? I wish we could move more towards a hybrid industry.

Wednes­day 8 August 12 16:00 via Twit­ter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@BenGalley

Ben Gal­ley

What this Seat­tle sling­shot of a jam ses­sion was sup­posed to be was a debate on the sta­tus and future of self-publishing between Eisler and Mor­ri­son, prompted by Morrison’s article(s) in the Guardian.

Ewan Mor­ri­son

As cov­ered in our Extra Ether: Shad­owy Plat­forms and in Writ­ing on the Ether: Olive Branch, Mor­ri­son is headed to the Edin­burgh World Writ­ers’ Con­fer­ence, as last year, with the sweaty sheen of sum­mer provo­ca­tion all over him.

Last year he inflamed every­one with some “end of books” chat­ter. This year, in The self-epublishing bub­ble, he’s declar­ing that self-publishing is a largely wrong-headed trend, if not out­right fad, and that the use­ful­ness of online pro­mo­tion of books is a bub­ble that should burst or be dis­si­pated within 18 months.

But many pod­casts, videos, and audio pre­sen­ta­tions these days are being made to less than ideal stan­dards. It can all be a bit of a reach. Some­times a noble reach, actu­ally, but still a reach.

Barry Eisler

It’s enough that Radio Litopia’s trans­mis­sion cuts out sev­eral times an hour. And that’s whether you’re lis­ten­ing on the site’s in-line player or via iTunes, which I pre­fer. Even on good days, much of the audio input is Skype lines, pro­vid­ing that strangled-honk sound to voices at times. What’s more, on Wednes­day, Radio Litopia’s chat room func­tion­al­ity was only intermittent.

Of course, nobody gets up in the morn­ing deter­mined to put together another semi-comprehensible pod­cast. Glitches will be glitches, and there are no vil­lains here. In fact, I’m going to the length you see here because I think a great deal of this BookSeller/FutureBook team and I like their spunk in try­ing to con­struct an hour-long show with key fig­ures (Pottermore’s Char­lie Red­mayne, Small Demons’ Richard Nash, Unbound’s John Mitchin­son, etc.).

Sam MIss­ing­ham

But there are things that can be con­trolled. All is not the luck of an evening’s draw. And as a news pro­ducer, I can sug­gest some of them. Many of these points can be applied to more than one form of elec­tronic con­tent, by the way, not just to podcasts.

• Pro­mote your show, includ­ing its guests and topic, in writ­ing. For Naked­Book, there should be a story on The Book­Seller and on The­Fu­ture­Book blog and on the Radio Litopia Naked Book page sev­eral days ahead, nam­ing the guests to come — with their Twit­ter han­dles — and announc­ing the focus of their event. A few tweets won’t do it. Cur­rently, you can find out who was on a show once the edited tape goes up, but that’s as late as those charm­ing dri­vers who use their turn indi­ca­tors once they’re around the cor­ner. They tell you what they did, not what they’ll be doing.

• Don’t over­load your guest ros­ter. In this case, Eisler and Mor­ri­son — the two authors meant to debate — would have been more than enough; they arrived ready to chew each other’s legs off. The inclu­sion of Piers Blofeld, the agent (with­out any lack of respect meant for Blofeld, with whom I have had some very help­ful cor­re­spon­dence in the past) was a need­less and noisy com­pli­ca­tion. He seemed to feel his job was to declare his rag­ing hatred for Ama­zon, which wasn’t announced as the topic at hand. In most instances, two guests are plenty, par­tic­u­larly with both Miss­ing­ham and Jones as show hosts.

Crowd watch­ing in Olympic park missed two rounds of fight because some­one on pro­duc­tion team thought they’d do a live inter­view instead,nuts

Thurs­day 9 August 12 11:49 via Twit­ter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@fieldproducer

Neal Mann

• Con­sider hav­ing short-segment “appear­ances” by use­ful fig­ures, if applic­a­ble and avail­able. In this case, author Joanna Penn — who had writ­ten for The­Fu­ture­Book blog of her objec­tions to some of Morrison’s points about her career in his Guardian writ­ings — was “in the house.” She was very vis­i­bly fol­low­ing the dis­cus­sion via Twit­ter (since the chat room wasn’t work­ing), and could have offered a state­ment, maybe a quick Q&A with Jones, Miss­ing­ham, or even Mor­ri­son, by Skype or phone, and then jumped back off. Patch­ing her in this way could give the show another voice but with­out the Blofeld-weight of yet another full guest.

• If you’re work­ing in audio only, you need guests to iden­tify them­selves each time they start to speak, or have a host do it. “Barry here”…“this is Ewan again”…“Piers back to yell about Ama­zon once more”…“it’s Sam jump­ing in for a moment…” and so on. It’s not your audience’s job to have to guess-the-speaker for an hour.

• Struc­ture the debate. Get together a run­down of talk­ing points based on the recent writ­ings of your incom­ing guests, and use it to fill them in ahead — get it out to them in an e-mail — and again as a last-minute reminder before show­time, too. It’s not enough to just bring on two sea­soned fig­ures in their respec­tive fields and ask them to have at each other. There should be a planned path­way through the sub­ject mat­ter, signed onto by all concerned.

• Explain to all par­ties what will and won’t be tol­er­ated in heated exchanges. Then fol­low through. Don’t be afraid to use the cough but­ton and mute a guest who refuses to shut up when it’s the other guest’s turn to speak. Your show serves not the guests but the lis­ten­ers. Your cus­tomers are your audi­ence mem­bers, not the per­son­al­i­ties on-air. If a guest won’t prop­erly allow some­one a chance to have her or his say, that’s rip­ping off your audi­ence. Sup­press the unco­op­er­a­tive guest’s audio until it’s her or his time to speak.

• Once a recorded ver­sion of the ses­sion is posted, include a tran­script. At the very least, you want a short write with key points landed.

Simon Lip­skar

Here’s a good exam­ple of one way to han­dle this help­fully but with­out a full tran­script. It’s The agency model’s impact on ebook pric­ing with O’Reilly Media’s Joe Wik­ert inter­view­ing Writ­ers House Agent Simon Lip­skar (a Twit­ter refusenik, appar­ently, I can find no han­dle on him).

The fin­ished ver­sion lists key points from an on-camera inter­view with time codes so you can scrub to per­ti­nent ele­ments of the dis­cus­sion. (One of the severe draw­backs of video and audio pre­sen­ta­tions is that they’re not search­able for words or phrases. Time codes are your best bet.)

Joe Wik­ert

At the end of the day, it’s up to all of us to learn from these events and ask our­selves ques­tions about our own work and about what our audi­ence, the writ­ing com­mu­nity needs and wants.

If you’re about to post a video of your­self talk­ing — with no visu­als to enhance the tape — and you could have cre­ated a search­able, excerpt-able, quickly scanned text, the ques­tion to ask is why? Same for audio. And same for podcasts.

These are lin­ear instru­ments, they have to be seen and/or heard, and that requires time that might be bet­ter spent on other tasks.

If we’re to use these var­i­ous means of info-sharing, we need to be sure we’re hon­or­ing each other with enough value to make them worth their while.

Jones:

If you both talk, no one can hear you scream.

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Click to read this week’s full Writ­ing on the Ether col­umn at JaneFriedman.com.

Worst trend since Uggs: Inter­net videos. I’d rather skim text for 10 sec­onds than watch a talking-head for 3 minutes.

Wednes­day 8 August 12 13:10 via Hoot­SuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@jeffwilser

Jeff Wilser

About Porter Ander­son

Porter Ander­son, BA, MA, MFA, is a Fel­low with the National Crit­ics Insti­tute and has done spe­cial read­ings in the psy­chol­ogy of the arts at the Uni­ver­sity of Bath, UK. As a jour­nal­ist, he has worked with three net­works of CNN (CNN USA, CNN Inter­na­tional, CNN.com) and was on the lead devel­op­ment team for CNN.com Live. He also has worked on The Vil­lage Voice, Dal­las Times Her­ald, D Mag­a­zine, Sara­sota Herald-Tribune and other out­lets. He writes the weekly (Thurs­days) WRITING ON THE ETHER col­umn at JaneFriedman.com and (Mon­days) ETHER FOR AUTHORS col­umn at PublishingPerspectives.com. Ander­son also is a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to WriterUnboxed.com and to Dig­i­tal Book World’s (DigiBookWorld.com) Expert Pub­lish­ing Blog. He has been posted by the United Nations to Rome (P-5, laissez-passer) for the World Food Pro­gramme, and served as Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life in Copen­hagen. He is based in Tampa and his pri­mary medium is Twit­ter. Fol­low him @Porter_Anderson

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