Long term visioning [UPDATED]
What do we want to see in the future for the weblit field? In two years? Five? Ten? Twenty?
Updates in bold.
By no means should we let naysayers, debates over terminology, or -- perhaps worst -- just the regular grind of glacially-slow growth dampen our enthusiasm. "Keep on swimming," folks and keep your eyes on the prize. If it is enough minds, it will happen. One of our visions already has: see below.
I'm starting this thread as a brainstorming session for long-term goals, visions and ideas.
This is where we go all out in thinking big, big, BIG. No ambition too grand, no goal too implausible, no idea too crazy.
Here are some of my own:
One year: we have weblit awards (one juried, one by reader vote [CHECK! - Rose & Bay Award - took three months).
Two years: the "weblit" or "web literature" meme has spread so wide that everyone looking for it googles "weblit" without even thinking about it. (Hey, maybe it won't even take that long.) The #weblit hashtag is now the one generic hashtag used by Alexandra Erin for her tweets.
In this way, we gain a total of a million more regular readers. Five years, five million.
Two years: Art, graphic design and web design on weblit sites and ads are consistently just as professional and attractive as on major traditional publisher sites & ads. I moved this one up from five years to two. We are SO getting there.
Three years: The New York Times Review of Books is regularly reviewing weblit works. Weblit-only authors are welcomed into professional-only writers' associations.
Three years: a single website has emerged as the premier reviewing/networking/entry-point site for weblit. Five years: it's a household word. Another website (or the same one?) has emerged as the central point for libraries, bookstores, etc. to purchase weblit works as pdf, POD, audiobooks, etc. From more experience in this world, I'm dropping this one as a vision. There doesn't have to be one site for this, any more than there needs to be one dead-tree bookselling site, and competition over whose site gets to be it could cause crippling divisiveness. What will happen is that there will be dozens of sites, and the handful that do the best job of serving readers will become the most prominent. I also see possible categorization by genre.
Three years: clear reader/buyer patterns have emerged that reveal the best ways to monetize weblit writing, and methods are becoming (informally) standardized. These include five amazing ways of monetizing that none of us have conceived of yet. Is Kachingle the first one?
Three years: A universal point system has become so widespread that it is used as virtual money by readers. (In fact, why call them points -- why not weblit dollars & cents? Publicizing a weblit work on a major blog gets $x credit towards subscription, bringing in x many readers gets $x, etc. ...) People are selling them to each other on ebay.
Five years: some weblit authors are getting a million hits a day. Average ones are getting tens of thousands. Weblit authors dominate the eBook market through use of services like Smashwords.
Five years: Ancillary services such as weblit ad design, editing, etc. now generate enough revenue that their providers are making a living.
Five years: Traditional publishers are scrambling to figure out how to monetize weblit. I actually now envision integrated careers: authors selling both online and hardcopy through publishers. It's already happening with established dead-tree authors. It will start going the other way.
Five years: A weblit work is made into a major motion picture.
Ten years: The Web Literature Bestseller List is as significant as the New York Times Bestseller List. Weblit has overcome the idea that it is inferior to dead-tree lit.
Ten years: the *average* weblit writer has found 1,000 True Fans and is thus making six figures.
Ten years: A weblit author wins the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Fifteen years: Nobel. The hot trends in literature in general begin to be set by weblit authors.
Got more...?
Wow, uh, I don't really have anything to add to that list! From your keyboard to the Gods' monitor! 
Well, one thing I'm also looking for are long-term practical ideas for getting us to these goals. You're good at practical ideas, MeiLin!
Here's one: large group of weblit authors chip in to hire an Internet marketing expert to promote the whole field.
Here's another: weblit authors brainstorm on key problem: perception of weblit as inferior, cheesy, trashy, etc. compared to dead-tree lit. Come up with strategy to fight that.
Here are a few tactics:
- First, in the "talking points" category, a rewording of Sturgeon's Law: "Sure, 90% of weblit is crap. 90% of EVERYTHING is crap."
- In the "Look, they did it" inspiration-by-example category: educate ourselves on how political bloggers became a force to be reckoned with, so that the traditional media had to start taking serious note and all of a sudden EVERY newspaper had an online blog. This happened in about five years.
- Professionalize our presentation... leave words untouched but improve graphics, web design, line editing, etc.
- examine how exactly the meme of weblit=trash is expressed/spread on the internet, and come up with specific counter-strategies (perhaps we can get our internet marketing expert to do this).
- lose the idea that our readers are all kids, and feel free to play to older audiences if we so desire. This is based on demographic research done on Daily Kos -- survey found that the largest age cohort of Daily Kos readers were in my age group, 45-55. Yes, people of that age DO read stuff off the screen.
- shamelessly jam our noses in the public trough and use the money for promotion/professionalization of the field. In Canada there are Canada Council grants available for artists in all media doing assorted things. In the USA -- National Endowment for the Arts? Do they have an experimental or new media category? A whole bunch of weblit authors TEAMING TOGETHER might gain their notice. Hire a grantwriter.
- Pull on our contacts, for mentors/info/publicity
- erase genre boundaries. Genre serves as a way of keeping some writers and some work in ghettos. Write stuff that doesn't fit into the boxes and then blow the boxes away. Description is still needed so... alter terminology... How about one I first heard years ago, "Literature of the fantastic" for sff? Or, a Canadian term: "speculative fiction///// literature?" On the web that's going to get shortened to "speclit"... Use the term "literature" bigtime.
A lot of these are things I've been seeing in the future for WebLit myself! Good calls there. I tried to design the logo as a mark/brand that would look good on the spine/back of a book (or on an ebook cover). I want WebLit or Blit to be a word as common as Blog.
(A Blitz is a lot of Blit posts in a short time, a Blitzkrieg is a word war! )
I'm actually in favor of genres, but don't back off just yet - I think the internet is giving us new genres. I don't think of them as cages so much as just a buzzword for summarizing what your story is. We don't just have fantasy anymore. There is dark fantasy. There's the many flavors of steampunk and noirpunk and gothpunk and technopunk. It's like tweeting about your novel, except with a 2-word limit. And it REALLY helps people find the 'flavor' of story they're looking for at the time. Trad pubs seem to narrow down genre a lot and make a lot of black and white calls, but the internet's been good at finding an audience for every 'specialty' genre there is. Hell, steampunk's on fire right now on the internet.
Anyway, genre is good for marketing, you just have to be able to bend the terms to fit your story - not the other way around. I do like some sort of stamp on a story that gives me an idea of what I'm in for, and I think that's the role genre should provide. The mistake publishers have made with genre is to pigeonhole stories into so few of them, and I think a lot of it is just to cater to bookstore shelving systems that are obsolete on the internet.
The reason I feel so strongly about this is because I've been involved with a lot of literary writers in Academia and the disdain I've seen for 'genre writing' is rivaled only by the notorious lack of money that their 'literary writing' makes. What's funny is that so much of that 'literary' writing could BE in genre if they just labeled it as such. They're all just stories! It's just that people are more likely to want to buy something when they know it's something similar to what they already like. That's a big part of marketing pushes, and it works.
"Speclit" sounds good. How about "speculit"?
Honestly, genres have evolved so much!
guh. I am not a fan of the term 'speculative fiction' namely because the people I've heard use it are the type who'd never read 'science fiction' but if you rebrand it... ya, literary snob much? 'Course, I won't read 'reality fiction' so... we've all got our biases.
Anyways, awesome list Karen! Way to think big.
And I really like the idea of grants, though who knows how that works with the whole cross-border of the internet.
Good Christ, woman! You're a regular fountain!
Oh, yeah, I'm full of 'em. Well, full of something.
This is an expensive proposition. But if we get enough people together--a trade association, like cotton or the wool council--we could probably do it. I think this might be Irk and Char nonprofit territory. Dunno. Should we get a quote, see what we're up against?
I've been using that line for a while now and I think it's awesome.
I think this is an awesome idea and should get its own thread pronto. I can start a Case Studies forum, perhaps?
This is the NUMBER ONE PROBLEM WE FACE. I mean, besides the "90% is trash" part, which isn't really a problem, it's reality no matter what media you're dealing with (as I watch an extremely weak new sitcom). It's one of the reasons I started DN, so that people could have a professional-looking presence. That's why we have the professional services resource listing. If you're serious about this, you hafta level up, my friends. We don't have publishers to do it for us--not that they're doing it for mainstream authors, either, but we have to take the steps to look professional.
Well, yeah, being 48 myself, but I tell ya: "everyone" told me my audience was going to be women 35-55. It's 55/45 F/M, heavily weighted to the under 25 crowd.
In the US, we artistic types have a reaction to the suggestion we get NEA grants: AHAHAHAHAHAAHA *breath* AHAHAHAHA! See, you're in Canada. We're in the US. We don't do shit like that down here; artistic types are *supposed* to starve, or at least pull coffee at a Starbucks. Canada, free health care and free ISBNs. US, sell your house to save your life and buy your own damn ISBNs. And try not to burn yourself on the steam wand. It's called "freedom." Look it up. [/sarcasm]
See, I think genre tags are useful. Let's granularize!
Oh, MeiLin, I love you so. XD It's the sad truth, though. US does NOT value its artists. YAY CAPITALISM. >:/
If y'all are serious about getting "legit", I'll help out as much as I can. I'm not a professional, but I've gone through the incorporating process before and kindasorta know my way around the process, and I'd happily serve on the board in some form. I think that if we do this, though... we really should start considering legal council, just to make sure we don't fuck up in some horrid fashion.
... ditto a grant writer, etc. etc.
Maybe the first step is coming up with fundraising ideas? I really think that we really could benefit from creating a trade organization, but it's not going to be a cheap process.
*giggle* NEA grants. That's a good one. *gigglesnort*
I know marketing people. I can get at least some numbers going.
I'll have some awesome ideas about fundraising after I sleep and dream about weilding a bullwhip for Pink Floyd while they play worship music in a largely fundamentalist church again. That tends to inspire me. Primary idea is that short-term, we need a 'commodity' to get us buzz. Kind of like how everyone on Twitter has a friggin' Mad Men avatar right now, but not quite.
And for fundraising we need to split the 'pot' as it were. One fund for each project we have, so hosting gets its own fund, marketing its own fund, promotional materials get theirs... etc. I highly recommend ChipIn! http://www.chipin.com/
Dividing money is going to be hard because we will need to make sure contributions are earmarked for what people intend to contribute to, and when it comes to stuff like 'promotional materials' we need to decide what funds will cover in application to that, if funds cover any of it. And fund-raising projects need to be agreed ahead of time on as to what they're raising funds to pay for in specific. These are really important to decide as early as possible and at least have some vague rules for when it comes to the core project. Saves on drama and hassle.
I'm really tired and I ought to sleep wooooooo.
Gosh, I read this whole thread and I feel like someone punched me with a star-studded glove! Karen, your list is great...more like fantastic. I guess I think small! The first thing I thought of when I clicked on this thread was "Weblit Conventions!" And that was pretty much it, lol.
I have nothing else of value to say, m'fraid. This stuff is a bit beyond me. I WILL say though, that I'm glad I read this thread. Makes me feel really optimistic for the future.
Holy crap, guys! This is so exciting! *bounce bounce bounce*
I mulled this over during lunch. Here are my thoughts at the moment.
- Demographics - We need to know who's reading our stuff! Earlier this week I added a Crowd Science demographic survey to strangelittleband.com . Five people out of about 600 visitors have filled it out. That's a great response rate considering that many visitors dropped by because of Project Wonderful ads.
Anyway, I'd be happy to share the SLB demographic data with others here. (It's anonymous, by the way.) It would be interesting to pool our data and see how our audiences compare. If you use a Crowd Science survey, to make sure we have the same questions choose these categories:
Arts & Entertainment/Other
Arts & Entertainment/Books & Literature
Arts & Entertainment/Online media
Misc/Blogging - Mobile devices and e-readers - The use of iPhones, smart phones, Kindle, etc. is exploding. We need to make our content easily accessible on these platforms. I've explored this a little, but really need to step it up. An iPhone app would be sweet! (And I don't even have an iPhone.)
- Pitch the WebLit story like whoa - It's surprisingly easy to get an interview with local papers and radio stations by contacting reporters with a good pitch. That's how I was able to tell my local NPR radio station audience about SLB. I think that local and possibly national media would be interested in what we're doing to get the WebLit ball rolling. Let's brainstorm a pitch! We could approach our local media, bloggers we follow, podcasters, and finally the big fish.
Thoughts?
Re: Surveys--
We could collect demographic data in one big clump together; there are services where we can put up a survey and point everyone there. Or one of us with the capability (like me) could do it some place (like here).
A couple of things...
For marketing - maybe try getting some figures from these guys too: http://www.theadvanceguard.com/ (JC Hutchins did an interview with one of them a few weeks ago), they kind of specialise in doing new media/social networking type advertising, and since our work is online, that would seem to fit what we need.
Portable media - I have a .mobi version on my site (wibblypress.mobi), which basically provides a stripped-down version of my site, which makes it better for viewing on phones, etc, as there isn't as much to download.
Re media blitz (weblitz!) - weblit needs to have a findable presence on google before we go ahead with that. This site is too new for Google to be finding it yet and it's not finding any thing else of ours either. We want to tell the media that if they tell people to google "weblit" or "web literature" they'll find our stuff... but that has to be true first!
Illise wrote:
> Gosh, I read this whole thread and I feel like someone punched me with a star-studded glove! Karen, your list is great...more like fantastic. I guess I think small! The first thing I thought of when I clicked on this thread was "Weblit Conventions!" And that was pretty much it, lol.
Well, that's a good idea too, and thinking small has its place, but basically, the trajectory and eventually fate of the field will be determined by our collective mental image of it. This thread is a good example: the moment a long-term vision of the field was presented, everyone started coming up with ideas for how to attain it, and we're talking about how to implement them. It's in our minds and the more we spread it to other people's minds, the more it becomes reality.
As I write, I am talking to a guy who knows of a program that serves but one purpose: to visit a website over and over so as to raise its profile on Google... I'll acquire it and perhaps we can all run it for weblit.us 
BTW I love the image "someone punched me with a star-studded glove."
I would STRONGLY advise against trying to game Google like this. You could end up banning us, not helping us.
Yes. This. *sigh* Google doesn't look kindly on gaming their rankings, and personally, I'd rather achieve a good ranking through hard work than, well, cheating.
I just want to point out that Tales of MU was never optioned by the Sci Fi network. That was an April Fool's gag.
I thought there'd been talks, but everyone assumed that it was a gag because she was calling it the "SyFy Network" - and this was before a lot of people knew about the name change. -_-
Never mind the Google gaming idea! (Call me web-naive...) I backed off it in a private email to MeiLin, now I'll do so here. And I would CERTAINLY would NEVER have done such a thing unilaterally.
Re AE & option -- well now I feel DOUBLY like an idiot. (Sigh)
I assumed you were kidding about the Black Hat google thing all along.
My impression is, by the way, that you can fool karma for a long time, but not Google. Whenever people figure out cheats like that, Google susses them out and figures out some alogrithm to shaft them.
Don't feel bad, Karen!
Five years: the more successful weblit authors are doing real live book tours across North America, chatting their works up to media from one town to another. Because we have the money to hire publicists to set it up.
Virtual booktours we could be doing right now.
A literary agent does his own long-term visioning -- Will Authors of the Future Need Publishers?
Consider his list of things that publishers do for authors -- other than distribution -- as a checklist of services that we need to contract, possibly collectively
Valuing artists doesn't mean that the government redistributes the wealth of uninterested third parties to the chosen few that the government favors. Americans remain hesitant to use government force to support their taste in art. Besides that, the government is not exactly efficient and the NEA has been caught in the past using art for dubious purposes (pornography a la "Piss Christ" and in 2009, colluding with "artists" to push Obama policy objectives with their art). That this is a rape of both art and the citizen scarcely needs to be said.
I propose that because capitalism sucks, that we abandon all efforts to monetize weblit/webfic starting tomorrow. The system is corrupt and generates unequal results, but we are only adding fuel to the fire by trying to obtain a piece of the pie for ourselves. Our money would be better spent moving to some worker's paradise, where a statist system is already set up for us. I'm open to suggestions as to the particular country!
In the end, the taste of forcing others to support me trumps the taste of convincing people to buy my work of their own volition. Free choice is so overrated! We all know that people just don't know what's really good for them until the government not only chooses the artists, but also forces the people to enjoy said artists. By then, that noose of government favor may be uncomfortably snug around our own necks, but who cares? We'll be successful! Integrity is for suckers, after all.
But oh, back to working out ideas for contracting for services and other evil capitalist ideas. I have an Obama youth conference I have to attend. Sorry to interrupt!
Entertaining rants aside, this isn't a political forum. I, for one, would be happier if it stayed that way.
I'm not quite sure why you felt the need to post this, RiP, but all right, then. No capitalism for you. (Yes, I know you were being satirical.)
ohhh, I see. Because one of us hangs out at DailyKos! Got it.
There are people of many persuasions here. This is not a political site, and I don't want them dragged in here. The DK comments were referring to whether "older" people read; it was a useful statistic the poster had to hand and nothing more.
For the record, my own sarcastic comments were not necessarily an endorsement of NEA grants, only the futility of applying for one. I've never applied for one myself, and don't want one. Though I would really dig on some free ISBNs.
And now, back to figuring out how we can all make a little dough-re-mi.
In three years I want to see legitimate review sites and legitimate reviewers covering weblit, with subscribers who follow the reviews in their rss feeds.