Why "web literature"?

Awwww, but I was getting all set to start the eLuminati.

Yeah, that's better. Go for it. What's the secret handshake?

O=O

Because we all wear shades and sneak around and such. It's a secret!

I don't know about a handshake, but if you hand me a double tall soy raspberry latte I'll vouch for you.

I prefer to be in the iLluminati, actually.

It was also pointed out that the other popular term, "web fiction," shortens to webfic. Which sounds a lot like fanfic. Where a lot of us started out, and which a lot of us still read, but this isn't fanfic. "Weblit" sets us apart from that. And it allows us to welcome essayists, poets and memoirists to the party.

If you want to keep calling it webfic, you totally don't need my permission, or anyone else's.

Except mine, of course.

Good point about webfic sounding like fanfic - I hadnt' thought of that.

(for Canadians) "Canlit"

And here I thought it was called "Lit,eh?"

I coined the term "blit" for blog-based fiction, but it hasn't caught on. Maybe because it's not all from blogs.
I guess. Anybody know anybody writing online but not using blog software?

Trouble with "fic" (possibly) is that it's not all fiction. For instance, my own FLESHWOUNDS, which is nominally non-fiction anecdotes from the netherworld.

I'd have to agree that weblit works best. And point out that "literature" even extends to work that is not really "literary". The brochure that came with your computer or the manual for your washing machine, for instance. The people who produced it refer to it as the "literature" for the product. (And the illustrations of how to load the washer, etc. as "artwork")

It's a good handle and probably worth everybody getting behind and pushing. (Or at least using if you're more a user than a pusher with intent to sell)
It's a form of branding. Which can go bad at times. Notice "steampunk". What the hell is "punk" about it?

It's a great brand for online writing and I hope it catches on outside the weblit "ghetto".

We have a ghetto?

You've now encouraged me to a) write a user's manual that's entertaining to read (I wrote one once for a friend, I could probably go off of that), b) begin posting my non-fic/non-Addergoole lit.

The intent to sell here in weBlit land is scary, but something I need to understand better, since I've not really tried hard to "sell" Addergoole & it shows in my site-hit numbers.

Lyn (not Lin), thinking

I don't know if it has to be to "sell," so much as to be read. Either way, marketing's involved; people have to know you're out there to buy into it, whether it's with their money or simply their eyeballs.

Exactly. And the difference between the two is called "monetizing".

However, my "intent to sell" comment was part of the strained pun on "pushers" and "users". As in drug terminology.

Yes, indeed! I've been doing this since 1997, prior to blogging software availability, and I'm not even using any CMS. So far I can accomplish a great deal with HTML -- I like the flexibility of regular webpages, where I can add whatever & wherever I want to. I do like some of the organizational aspects of blogs/CMSes, though.

I admit I don't like Blit because it sounds like either a sex term or a bug spray. Honestly? I still prefer webfiction as a descriptor, though I do like the use of weblit as an umbrella term encompassing fiction and nonfiction stuff. Literature is a bit hifalutin' for my work; I'm plain meat & potatoes fiction, born and bred. I don't think there's likely much confusion between webfic and fanfic, since the two have different prefixes and everything.

Man I'm contrary mary today, aren't I?

I think I meant both, interchangeably. It's part of the whole webserial thing that I'm entirely intimidated by at the same time as I know I need to get more into it.

Hunh. I should have a point. And I don't think it should be in this thread. Sorry!

~Lyn, bad at on-topic.

An aspect of this we've been noticing (and might apply to this) is that since there is no accepted name for this stuff, it makes googling really tough.

Say you want to find places where they review weblit. So you type in "review"... then what?

Obviously one group settling on a nomenclature won't solve that, but it's a start.

My intention from the start was to move it way past one group. Of course that can only be done partly by organization, and the rest has to happen organically. I threw out the term weblit(erature) for the reasons I gave, and a lot of people seem to like it, so I'm hoping. But we most definitely need just one term to really pull in search engine traffic. To me that seems like a big frigging door that we have to kick down, and creating a single term is the only way to do it.

Kira wrote:
> Literature is a bit hifalutin' for my work; I'm plain meat & potatoes fiction, born and bred.

Absolutely it's high-falutin'; that's the idea. Another big frigging door that we have to kick down also is the notion that what we do is crap - so - we use language that implies the opposite. Plain meat and potatoes fiction, sure, but the plain meat and potatoes fiction of one era can become the literature of another. I haven't read your work, Kira, but I suspect you might be being too humble in declining the term.

Cont'd from WFG re-design thread on WFG’s forum:

First of all, there is room for both terms in the world. “Weblit,” for instance, includes poetry, which I would think “webfic” does not.

In fact, pondering this search engine matter, I am thinking we should come up with a family of related keywords/hashtags to put out there. As well as “weblit” and “webfic,” “webnovel,” “webpoetry,” “webfantasy,” “websf” or “webscifi” etc.
Why so many words? To help readers of every taste find us, of course!

But it’s the “putting out there” that relates to how the term “weblit” came about. It is about creating awareness of our material through branding it with single, distinct terms. Those terms serve two interlocking purposes.

1) they stick in people’s minds and so create awareness. What we are doing is something that simply did not exist before. So there was no language for it. If you have no language for something, it does not exist for practical purposes. That’s especially true on the Internet, which runs on language, even mechanically, which leads me to:

2) they are the tool by which people who have no idea of the existence of our work find it, by using search engines.

To create awareness – to bring what you are doing into linguistic existence – you can’t just decide on a term. You have to do two other things, that correspond to the purposes above: 1) spread it (which includes creating a term that has enough appeal to spread easily) so that it becomes the designated term, partly organically, and 2) use it in search engine optimization.

So back when I was starting out, this past spring, I envisioned a group of writers co-ordinating efforts to choose a term and do these things. I figured the thing to do was find the key people and enroll them in this idea. If it was a good idea, I figured, they’d buy in; if not they’d give me good reasons why not and I’d give it up.

First person I proposed it to was Eli, after I found Novelr. We exchanged a couple of emails in late April, including one dated April 29 in which I wrote:

“> You know one thing that I think would help all of us IMMENSELY... is if we
> agreed on one term for what we are doing and then promoted it unmercifully.
> I get next to zero search engine traffic because people don't know what to
> call what I've got. Web fiction... online fiction... blooks... digital
> novels... what do you search for / use as keywords? The web comics people
> have done it with "web comics" -- we need to do it also because then we'll
> be vastly more findable and it would help every single one of us.”

Eli never answered that email, so I assumed he wasn’t interested. A little discouraged – I was a noob at this and very nervous -- I put the idea aside for a while, but then, in September, contacted the next person I identified as both key and approachable, MeiLin, and suggested "weblit" on Sept. 12. She tried it out with the twitterati she knew, they liked it, and within eight days she had this site up and running.

The intent from the start was co-ordinated group actions, of which spreading the term was but one, albeit central. We SEO’d, we tweeted, we talked up the term and the medium, we opened stores on Zazzle, we put the logo designed by Irkdesu on our websites, we planned (though have not yet executed) a weblit antholozine. We discussed how to use the brand, how to spread it, decided to kill a few ideas and pursue others. And the term did indeed spread. Though it did not exist in this usage anywhere but between my ears since Sept. 12, 2009, it now returns 13,800 hits, most of those on the first pages are generated from what we’re doing, and on the Online ID calculator it scores a good “digitally distinct.”

It was my understanding that the community had not tried anything like this before. If someone had told me, “We’re already doing that and the term is webfic,” or even, “Yeah, we should do that, let’s use ‘webfic’ because that’s the most popular term right now,” I’d have jumped on board and SEO’d and tweeted and hooplah’d for “webfic,” just the same. The important thing was to cement one term (or, as per above, one term per genre) in the public’s mind. But no one told me anything like that, so I gathered the field was open and I was free to propose one.

To address some specific points made on the WFG redesign thread:

Re the silly sound of the word: it doesn’t matter. Once a term becomes well enough known, the silly sound fades. “Weblog” sounds silly, too. “Blog” sounds like a sound effect, possibly an eruption of swamp gas. No one hears that silliness any more because everyone’s first association on hearing the word, now, is the meaning.

Re “weblit” being dishonest or unrepresentative: the Oxford English dictionary definition of “literature” is: “written works, especially those regarded as having artistic merit.” I can’t imagine Eli meant to suggest that no online work but Corvus has any artistic merit. But I think too much has been made of the division between “literary” and “non-literary” or “literary” and “genre.” Everyone who reads has seen genre works that are brilliant, and works touted as literary that are nothing but pretentious b.s., so you wonder just how the author was able to snow the editor, publisher, etc. into thinking there was profundity there. This is why, to repeat a point, the pop works of one era can become the literature or classics of the next. Harry Potter springs to mind; most people would consider it more popular than literary. But in 100 years it will be considered literary.

So I don’t think we should be perpetuating a division which is arbitrary, and we should definitely not say the division falls between web and dead-tree. We want to offset the idea that everything on the web is bad, not support it. Because that is the main barrier to our growth, imo.

But there’s even a bigger aspect to branding a field. You are not only declaring what it is, but determining what it will be. Insofar as “weblit” connotes artistic merit, the field will attract and generate artistic merit. That can happen in two ways:

1) It galvanizes people in the field to strive harder for artistic merit.

2) It attracts writers who are committed to artistic merit to join the field.

So… how to settle the argument?

I don’t think we have to decide weblit or webfic, either/or. Because we’ve already separated definitions. (And besides, the Internet isn’t an either/or place.) OED again: “fiction: prose literature, especially novels, describing imaginary events and people.” Thus the name of Web Fiction Guide is perfect, because that is exactly what it reviews and promotes.

So I’m going to suggest that writers of online novels use both “weblit” AND “webfic” as SEO keywords, plus a genre-specific one as desired (which perhaps we can agree upon in another thread, with those who write in the genre in question being the thought-leaders) while online poets use both “weblit” and “webpoetry” (with or without the space as we decide) …etc. And organic spreading, we all just do as we are inclined.

I hope this helps.