Well, nowadays there are open source books. Forking turns them from fixed, unchanging artifacts into living works that grow and develop over their lifespans or even give birth, their very authorships blurring.

That, in turn, reminded me of conversations I had in the past year or so with Alex Schroeder about wikis: an electronic medium, defined by continuous rewriting and blurred authorship, that’s been in decline for a solid decade now. On my blog, I argued it’s because people don’t want authorship to become blurred, but clearly there are exceptions to the rule.

Yet it doesn’t seem to happen very often. While Wikipedia has been around for two decades now, and so have the Creative Commons licenses, the practice of taking a free culture book and building upon it is uncommon. In fact, this is only the second or third case I’ve heard of so far. It’s a lot more common in the field of videogame art, as I wrote in a book of my own. And even that is relative: most people simply stick to reusing free culture works unchanged.

Why it matters? Because, frankly, book publishing these days looks tired and adrift. Maybe people read more, assuming we can trust surveys, but I’m not sure they read books. Indies struggle to sell; big publishers report moving fewer units (yet making bigger profits, go figure); and don’t even get me started about what can be found in Romanian bookstores. Certainly most of my own reading time is spent online, jumping from blog to blog, going back, opening more tabs.

If this makes the web sound like one giant Memex, that’s because it is. It’s how we always wanted to read, but could only take notes, earmark pages or collect newspaper clippings.

Books don’t need to be reinvented. Reading, however, does — as an act inseparable from writing. Because we ache to create, yet our creativity is too often stifled.

Five years ago, I argued on TeleRead that self-publishing is the new punk. Turns out I wasn’t the first one. And you know what else punk is, by definition? A culture of reuse and remix.

That was going to be the end of the story. Let me ramble some more anyway. It’s hard to talk about books and forks without evoking The Garden of Forking Paths. Our story, however, isn’t about hypertext for once, but a future where asking someone if they read a particular book might elicit an answer more like, “Which edition? I’ve read the one maintained by this obscure artist collective in Hamburg as it stood in 2026”. In a way it would be not unlike in the Middle Ages, when each copy of a book was by definition unique.

Of course, medieval manuscripts also never changed anymore once completed, while digital works can remain forever in flux. In practice, however, even wikis settle down after a while, their text as complete and polished as it’s going to get. The original Wiki Wiki Web for example went read-only in 2014, only a few months short of its 20th anniversary. Others remain editable, able to be revived at any time should people want to. And if not, there’s always forking if the license allows it. Modern technology gives us the choice, and that’s what matters.

We’ve been free from the limitations of the past for a good while now. But old habits die hard.

Image: Source. RHeins photo snapped in in 2012 Jin’an, Fuzhou, Fujian, China. Creative Commons 3.0 licensed.

Many early games were, if not outright adaptations, heavily inspired by popular franchises of the time. The licensing could be a bit dodgy. But games complemented  other media and vice versa, and creators learned to use tie-ins in both directions to flesh out imaginary worlds.

As early as 1984, the cult-classic war game Lords of Midnight, by the late Mike Singleton, came bundled with a prequel novella that detailed the game’s premise and backstory, written by the same author. It is an auteur game.

More recently, the original Myst prequel trilogy of novels sold pretty well, if not nearly as briskly as the game. And if you look on Scribd these days, books set in the Warcraft, Halo or Mass Effect universe abound.

Interactive fiction as a promo tool

But going in the opposite direction is just as popular, if not more. City of Secrets, Emily Short’s interactive fiction epic that’s possibly her best known work, was commissioned as promotional material for a music album, if I remember correctly, before the deal fell through, allowing it to be released for free.

Less famously, Christopher Huang recently created a trilogy of text adventures to promote his upcoming novel. And at least they’re both authors with experience in the medium. Other people have used interactive fiction to promote things ranging from Stephen Colbert’s new TV show to a homeless shelter, and these are just a few examples*.

Why games as media tie-ins? Because interactivity can engage the audience in a way no traditional medium can match. Why interactive fiction then, in particular? After all, flashier genres have been harnessed for the same purpose: see The Quest for the Rest by Amanita Design, the creators of Machinarium (watch the promo video for Quest). But that’s not so easy to do when it requires art, animation, programming and sound design, all working together. There’s a reason why even the cheapest-to-create indie games today have six-figure budgets (and I mean in US dollars, not yen).

“Just” words

Interactive fiction, on the other hand, is just words. Well, “just.” Hard anyway, the act of writing is  even more difficult when you must account for all the different ways players/readers will approach your text. But it’s still much simpler than making any other kind of game, and that’s—no pun intended—a game-changer.

Not so long ago I gave some examples of what it’s like to write interactive fiction of various flavors. As you can see, it’s almost entirely, but not quite, as easy as enthusiasts of the medium like to make it. Worry not, though; even friendlier tools exist. The recently-launched Texture is entirely mouse-driven (well, except for the typing part), and you don’t even have to install anything to create a mobile-friendly text adventure anyone can figure out. Want to have your mind blown with the same amount of effort? Then you can make a multiplayer world where your players/readers can meet and interact if you sign up for Seltani instead.

I could easily suggest twice as many tools, but the number of references in this article is already overwhelming. Point is, if you have a media product to promote, and you’re considering a tie-in as part of your advertising strategy, a piece of interactive fiction is a good option.  You don’t need a team of professionals to get started even though paying an experienced author for extra quality is a good idea. That’s especially true if your product is already digital in nature, such as a series of e-books or a Netflix movie. You just have to find a good angle, because interactive fiction, more than any other art form, is a literal dialog with the audience. But by the same token, it can be a very personal form of marketing, that doesn’t need to pass many filters on the way to your public.

One more thought: Lately there have been various clumsy attempts to “reinvent the book” for this digital frontier nobody seems to have figured out already. But books don’t need to be reinvented; they’re perfectly good as we’ve known them for centuries now. Better, then, to let a franchise colonize a different, if closely related, medium if you feel static words on a screen are no longer enough, than to mindlessly pile bells and whistles that nobody wants on top of traditional literature.

*For more examples of IF as media tie-ins, see this poll on the Interactive Fiction Database; shout-out to Chandler Groover for his many intriguing suggestions.

I had a wish starting from 5th grade: to publish a book. A wish finally fulfilled this year when my first book, “Usable Software Design” became available on leanpub (sic).

So my friend Alex Bolboacă (photo) begins his account of becoming a published author: a fascinating tale that kept me glued to the screen, even though I’ve been there already, and my patience isn’t what it used to be, either. Don’t be put off by the ostensible subject matter; what little programming jargon is peppered throughout Alex’s article is incidental to the real story. Namely, what it takes to become a (self-)published author — and hopefully remain one. While the process is different for everyone, the lessons we can learn from comparing notes are invaluable.

Some of my friend’s advice should be obvious by now, as often as it’s been repeated lately, but for some reason it still isn’t: that ideas are easy and execution is hard, for instance. Or that you shouldn’t expect to get rich quick. (Seriously, if that’s your definition of success, disappointment is almost guaranteed. Sorry.) There’s less obvious advice, too, that I second, such as to rely on beta-readers rather than editors (because editors by definition don’t see your book the same way as readers), and to keep control of the finished work, which pretty much means self-publishing. But then there’s stuff not everybody tells you, or worse, they give you the entirely wrong advice. By way of contrast, Alex gets it right.

Motivation: If you want to write a book, pick a subject you care deeply about. A vague desire to write about something simply won’t give you the strength to finish. It’s not as easy as some people seem to think! As an aside, that’s why I dislike writing prompts: because trying to approach random subjects that mean nothing to you will feel like pulling teeth, and practice will turn into a chore — the last thing you need. Sure, writing is a craft, and that takes exercise. But you’ll find plenty of issues that move you, and venues to tackle them. Why waste energy on boring school-like assignments?

Working style: Too much writing advice I see online is a rigid list of checkpoints: you should do this, and then that, in this way and no other. But that’s just the tendency of successful people to think their pet method is some sort of magical recipe. You’re not [insert famous writer]; what works for them will fall apart in your hands. So figure out your own process. How often to write, how much at once, whether to outline first, when to edit… it’s all personal.

Speaking of which: Alex advocates the popular “crappy first draft” technique, presumably because it works for him. But in my experience, that just leads to endless editing afterwards, with results that never feel quite right to you. (Readers won’t notice.) That’s why I take the time to write as well as I can the first time around. It’s slower to begin with, but saves a lot of time and trouble down the road.

(That said, I do approve of editing piecemeal whenever you don’t feel like writing, instead of in a big push at the end. In programming we call it “continuous refactoring”, and it’s highly effective in reducing the tedium, not to mention how much easier it is than waiting to do it all at once.)

Impostor syndrome: Another open secret these days is that all creators feel like they don’t really “have it”. We all worry that nobody really cares about what we have to say. Am I even good enough to play with the grown-ups?

The answer, of course, is the emperor is naked. Nobody’s magically competent. We all kind of do our best, getting up when we stumble and moving on, having learned a little better. But you can only make progress if you start in the first place. So get started.

You will, however, need patience. See, what Alex isn’t telling you is that he was in a writing circle twenty years ago, getting his feet wet, and later spent more time blogging or writing technical documentation. He didn’t simply sit down one day and decided to write a book with no prior writing experience. (He’s also an avid reader.) There’s a reason most famous writers weren’t even heard of until they were well into their forties. Here I am at 39, content that my seventh book or so is actually selling for a change, and not even in numbers.

But, hey, just like Alex, I’m living a lifelong dream, and the friends I made along the way, like the things I learned about myself, were totally worth it. And this is why you should go read his story if you haven’t already: because you’re not alone, and you deserve to know it. Have a good read, and dare expand your horizons.

But it wasn’t until early next year that I decided to dip my toe into this self-pub thing myself. Beyond the obvious preparations like getting a cover, it involved becoming familiar with the way Smashwords wants you to submit manuscripts. As it turned out, what seemed like a daunting manual at first in fact boils down to a few simple rules. Which was great, because learning how to include LibreOffice in my workflow without pulling my hair was a challenge. See, Smashwords has this automated process for generating all those ebook formats such that they’ll actually, you know, work on a wide variety of devices. And automated processes by definition aren’t very smart. But hey, most people use Word documents anyway, right? In any event, those I submitted never failed to pass basic validation, so at first it was smooth sailing.

In time, however, things started to become annoying. For one thing, Smashwords isn’t just an ebook store; mainly, they fancy themselves an ebook distributor, partnering with a dozen other retailers. And since each of those have their own rules, each book you submit has to be manually reviewed to ensure it conforms to the lowest common denominator. Worse, that goes not just for the manuscripts themselves, but any little change to the book blurb and such.

Granted, failing these checks doesn’t prevent you from selling in the Smashwords store itself. But see above: they don’t try very hard to sell directly: it’s fairly hard to discover books on your own — I rely mostly on recommendations — and you need an account before you can buy anything, which drives more casual buyers away. As for selling elsewhere through them, I could never find my own books on Barnes & Noble, where I sold a couple of copies; how am I even supposed to promote my presence there?

Just a week ago as of this writing, having some spare change on my debit card, I hopped on Leanpub to buy, you’ve guessed it, a friend’s debut book. First good impression: Leanpub doesn’t require you to make an account, and only asks for minimal information on the checkout form. But after the sale, the web page said something to the effect of, “okay, we e-mailed you a download link; by the way, we also made you an account if you’d like to use it”. Well, why not?

For one, Leanpub is a much smaller retailer than Smashwords: fewer than 4000 books as of August 1st, 2016, versus over four hundred thousand. Leanpub also apologizes for not having a very good store yet, but it looks fine to me: categories, sorting… no tags or recommendations, but book pages are prettier and with richer information. (By contrast, author profiles are barebones.) You also can’t bookmark books for later, or leave reviews at this time. Oh well.

Failing to find other titles of interest, I turned my attention to Leanpub’s other side: the publishing interface. Turns out, you can submit books to them in several different ways, starting with “bring your own book”, importing from a blog, or even from a Word file saved as a web page. More interesting to me were those choices involving Markdown — the format I prefer to write in. For comfort, I chose to enter my text straight in the browser — or rather, copy-paste from my manuscripts, as their online editor is terrible. (Deactivating the browser’s built-in search? Seriously?) And off we went.

Initially, navigating all the book customization options was a daunting proposition; after five titles, I still forget to tick this or that checkbox. But turnover is very fast, with fewer ebook files to generate and no manual approval process. Leanpub even lets me create previews to look over before hitting “publish”. Only ePub, Mobi and PDF files are supported, but the latter can come print-ready, in typical book sizes, with a choice of fonts and other details. Cover size restrictions are less stringent, and getting an ISBN is stated to be “completely optional”.

(Speaking of which, dear Smashwords, can you please stop pestering me about it? I don’t want ISBNs for my books. I just don’t. Trust me on this.)

If there’s one weird thing about Leanpub, it’s their tech support. Right away, I ran into an apparent bug, and e-mailed them. Got a friendly, helpful response before the weekend was over (wow), but then not another word in the intervening week, even though I tried to continue the conversation. Luckily it’s no big deal, but folks, do you even have an issue tracker? Informal e-mails get lost or buried all too easily. (Edit: they fixed it!)

Everything considered, my next ebook is going to hit Leanpub first, because it’s even easier to upload it there than make my own edition manually in Sigil and Calibre, never mind the contortions it takes to supply Smashwords with the special Word file they expect. Leanpub also happens to have a focus on technical books, meaning mine will look extra good in this first edition. How popular they really are with buyers remains to be seen though, and they don’t even provide a daily page view count except via external analytics.

Besides, you don’t want to put all your eggs in a single basket, no matter how well one or the other fits the way you work. The whole point with ebooks and self-publishing is that you’re free to put your wares in front of as many people as possible, and let them buy where they like, how they like. It’s worth putting in just a little more effort and patience to achieve that.

Self-pub is not a zero-sum game, so cast your net wide.