Fan Fiction, The Metric Of Success

 

This is an article I wrote for Jacqueline Lichtenberg's blog Alien Romances back in 2015. It was part of her series entitled 'Marketing Fiction In A Changing World' which writers who want their works to be read would do well to study. What has marketing got to do with fan fiction when we can't sell it, I hear you ask? It all depends on how you define the success of your work.

TGBOTWW 01-10: From Homer to Hippocrates

So I have completed my listing of online locations where the first ten books of the Great Books Of The Western World can be legally downloaded or borrowed for free!

Photo courtesy of Mike’s Great Book Corner

Overview

First Edition 1952, Catalogue

• VOLUME 1: The Great Conversation; The Substance of a Liberal Education 
• VOLUME 2: The Great Ideas; A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World Vol.I
• VOLUME 3: The Great Ideas; A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World Vol.II
• VOLUME 4 : The Iliad of Homer and The Odyssey.
• VOLUME 5: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes
• VOLUME 6: Herodotus, Thucydides
• VOLUME 7: Plato
• VOLUME 8: Aristotle I
• VOLUME 9: Aristotle II
• VOLUME 10: Hippocrates, Galen

The Greatest Books I could never own

Like many people I was challenged during the lockdown to list ten books that I loved. Pft! With all due respect, that's like asking Giacomo Casanova to list the loves of his life! I listed the books that changed my life and one of the first of them was Vol.8 of "The Book of Knowledge", the set of encyclopedias that we had at home when I was in primary school. (Wierd, I know)

This however got me thinking again about the Encyclopedia Brittanica's epic curated collection of The Great Books of the Western World (GBOTWW). If you were rich and wished to flaunt your education, there was no better icon than this bookcase of handsome books! I went through a phase where I lusted after a set of these books so badly I could taste it! Coming from a working class background, they represented to me a secret path to the further education that money and birth had denied me. There was even a ten year reading plan in Vol 1 (p112-131, see more HERE) that was meant to guide you through these 'great books'.

You just had to see them, ranked up on a bookshelf in their state of the art bindings to get a sense that they were a conscious distillation of human knowledge throughout history. I'm a product of my 60's era upbringing, an upbringing that was fixated on the supremacy of the Western world and the idea that seminal works held secrets that their study could reveal about the human condition.

Sanity prevaled. We were a young couple wanting to start a family and the cost of a set of theses books didn't factor in easily with our practical needs. Life intervened - I'm sure you have had similar pressures - and along the way I started to question whether these books really did have relevance in the modern world as the collection became a quarter of a century old.

Thirty-something years later I am retired and find myself revisiting them. Whilst I now have the spare time to read widely, that doesn't mean I can invest ten years in a reading program nor, for that matter, does it mean I have the spare cash to buy the collection or even the shelf space to store it! Fortunately in this digital age, knowledge has become free or at least affordable and can be shrunk to the size of the digital memory that records it.

A night's Googling (that was fun) found that the University of Adelaide had alternative editions of most of the books (that was good) but following their link I found that their online library has been closed down (that's TERRIBLE!). Such a travesty could not be allowed to go unchallenged! The news is not all bad. The 'Wayback Machine' has most of the University's downloads available at this time most if not all of the books available for download and elsewhere on Archive.org has them in other editions and formats, Librivox even has many of them as free audiobooks

So now I have a new reading and publishing project. To find them, precis them, and record for others what I have found. I've started a Google Sites website to record a comprehensive catalogue of the books in the collection, on a number of levels...

1. To find and link to copies of the Encyclopedia Brittanica's GBOTWW that are available online to download or borrow.
2. To find and link to copies of any other editions or translations of the same book with critiques of each
3. To analyse the books and to make a few personal comments about them

I've started level one of the project for the first ten volumes of the GBOTWW on this website so, if you feel the urge to paddle your feet in the classics, go for it! Level 2 is mostly a matter of searching for links, time consuming but not exactly challenging. Level 3 is the challenge, to write up my own thoughts about the book! Although I'm not going to read the books in any great detail - let's get real here: one of them is the complete works of Shakespeare! - the internet gives us access to scholars who have, who can help us place them into context and distil their effect even more. 

However there we have the great conundrum of life! Is the search for knowledge simply to distil the interpretations of others? Or should I start from scratch, read the originals and make my own conclusions? 

The adventure is in the journey! Let's see where this goes!

Plus ça Change

Whilst frantically adding the script for an old audio drama skit to the latest Personal Logs I realised that I didn't have the original audio online to be listened to by the curious. I'll update this post with more info as I get the time.

The skit can be downloaded from HERE

To double space or not to double space?

A recent thread on Wendy Stevens' Facebook page leads me to dash off a quick post to gather some links regarding the contentious issue of double spaces after periods - ie between sentences. At TrekUnited Publishing I always used The Chicago Manual of Style as the provenance for taking out double spaces in published works...

The view at CMOS is that there is no reason for two spaces after a period in published work. Some people, however—my colleagues included—prefer it, relegating this preference to their personal correspondence and notes. I’ve noticed in old American books printed in the few decades before and after the turn of the last century (ca. 1870–1930 at least) that there seemed to be a trend in publishing to use extra space (sometimes quite a bit of it) after periods. And many people were taught to use that extra space in typing class (I was). But introducing two spaces after the period causes problems: (1) it is inefficient, requiring an extra keystroke for every sentence; (2) even if a program is set to automatically put an extra space after a period, such automation is never foolproof; (3) there is no proof that an extra space actually improves readability—as your comment suggests, it’s probably just a matter of familiarity (Who knows? perhaps it’s actually more efficient to read with less regard for sentences as individual units of thought—many centuries ago, for example in ancient Greece, there were no spaces even between words, and no punctuation); (4) two spaces are harder to control for than one in electronic documents (I find that the earmark of a document that imposes a two-space rule is a smattering of instances of both three spaces and one space after a period, and two spaces in the middle of sentences); and (5) two spaces can cause problems with line breaks in certain programs.

Joel Friedlander's website, The Book Designer - my goto for commercial publishing - has this as the #1 rule of his '10 Quick Tips to Get Your Manuscript Ready for Publication'...

Get rid of extra spaces. Whether you’ve used them for spacing or between sentences, your file should contain no double spaces at all.

Joel, however points to Dave Bricker's website, The World’s Greatest Book, which is more conciliatory saying,

Few subjects arouse more passion among writers and designers than the debate over how many spaces should follow a period. If you adhere to a style manual, you’ll be hard-pressed to find one that doesn’t specify a single-space—but popular arguments in support of the single-space turn out to be mostly apocryphal. The single-space after a period is a simple style evolution—and it’s a fairly recent one.

Farhad Manjoo, writing in Slate.com and Business Insider, is absolutely unequivocable...

Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.

Unfortunately there seems to be no consistency in the teaching of typing, with comments on Wendy Steven's Facebook thread saying how typing teachers in two consecutive classes at the same school were teaching opposing standards! However perhaps the most helpful from a practical sense (as always) is from Jacci Howard Bear in her web series for about.com on Desktop Publishing...

Professional typesetters, designers, desktop publishers, and anyone who truly cares about fonts and typography should use only one space after a period or other ending punctuation. However, it doesn't necessarily need to be a standard space character. Desktop Publishing software makes it easy to experiment with other space characters to achieve the best appearance on a case-by-case basis. Save the double spaces for typewriting, casual email, term papers (if prescribed by the style guide you are using), or personal correspondence. Learn how to remove extra spaces between sentences. For everyone else, do whatever makes you feel good.

What size should I make my cover? 1 - Paperback

Probably one of the more common questions asked about eBook production is, what size should I make my cover? Like most things, if you ask this of three people, you'll get three different answers! I make no pretense to having a definitive but here are my thoughts on the subject which might help to put things into perspective.

The first thing to consider in any creative endeavor is to ask, what do you want to do, what is your aim, your end result, what are the design considerations? What do you want it for? For me, I want a single graphic (I'm late! I'm late!) that can serve a number of purposes...

1. As a cover that could potentially be printed out for a physical, "dead-tree" "A" format mass market paperback book
2. As a cover for a pdf paperback
3. As a cover for an ebook in ePub and mobi format
4. As promotional artwork, both full-sized and as a thumbnail

Each of these has different design considerations but I have a template that I'm confident can cover all of them! In the next four blogs I'll step you through the design requirements for each of these end products. (NB all dimensions are shown width x height)

THE HARDCOPY

• According to Wikipedia an "A" format mass-market paperback (MMP) is 110mm x 178mm (4.33" x 7.01")
• Allowing "bleed" of 5mm all round, this comes to 120mm x 188mm (4.72" x 7.40") for just a cover page.
• This is only part of the story though! If you want a wrap-around cover for your book, you need to allow for "bleed" on the top, bottom and outside edge *plus* the width of the spine which depends on the number of pages and weight of paper used!
• Take for example Lulu, one of the highest profile Print On Demand (POD) publisher. They don't have a book size that exactly matches the MMP standard size, but their "Pocketbook" perfect bound book at 107.9mm x 174.6mm (4.25" x 6.87") is virtually identical, checkout HERE for the dimensions and HERE for a templates. They advertise that their Pocketbook can go up to 740 pages which, according to their spine calculator would be 35.46mm wide (1.40") using publisher grade paper. Sooo... if you want to make a wrap-around cover for your book, you need to know how many pages it is, what weight paper you are going to have it published on, plug this information into the spine calculator and it will give you the spine width, cover size and even where the spine begins!
• For my purposes a wrap-around cover is not a design consideration for three reasons...
• You'll notice I said that this was for "a cover that could potentially be printed out"? I've given up on the idea of approaching a printer to publish, say, a dozen copies of a fan fiction novel. Realistically, the loss of revenue to a copyright owner from this would be so small as to be incalculable but I still get vents about how it is illegal, immoral and an attack on the very foundations of the western economy. No worries. If you don't want my business it's not my loss, it's just for personal satisfaction anyway.
• Without knowing what paper weight I'd publish on or the number of pages of my potential book, I can't make a realistic estimate of the width of the spine for a specific book, and thus can't say how wide my wrap-around cover should be.
• Since I want to design a template that can be used for all the books I publish, I am currently working on simply generating a front cover only which will have bleed on all four sides. If I were to get it published, I'd create a separate back cover and a spine that bridges between the front & back.

Next: The pdf paperback!

Pdf Publishing: Options! Give me options!

EDIT 2021: The header for this blog post was a Flash "book case" of TrekUnited books in Issuu. Flash is no9 longer supported by modern browsers and so it is now dead. A pity because it was a really intuitive way of promoting and making available pdf publications. This post was updated in 2015 and deserves to be updated again.

Open publication - Free publishing - More fan fiction

Pdf Publishing: so you have a great looking book you want everyone to read, how do you put it online? Most people just have it as a link to a downloadable file. That works - its simple and it gets the job done - but it doesn't let people browse your work before they download it.

This is what we have been using to date, that's an example embedded above, is Issuu, however they are putting a lot more weight behind their paid service and limiting their free features... www.issuu.com/TrekUnited

July 2015: Limited free service but they've added a rather good Facebook app.

Scribd is a long-running social publishing site for sharing original writings and documents in various formats, for private or public viewing, in four Languages along with a commercial store. I note that S&S are using Scribd for advance copy. http://www.scribd.com

July 2015: Scribd is no longer free for readers which creates a problem for fan fiction

DeviantArt, the bastion of amateur art, has a pdf publishing plugin 'scroller' much the same as the one in Scribd. The major value of using DeviantArt is the community, you have a captive, supportive audience here! TrekUnited Publishing has a group here at... http://tu-publishing.deviantart.com/

July 2015: Still a good solid performer

Yumpu is closest in looks to Issuu with flipping documents that they say you can create in only 2 minutes, one click Facebook integration along with Twitter, Linked In, Google+ and Pinterest. German focus but international distribution... http://www.yumpu.com/

July 2015: Still seems good value

SlideShare is the world's largest community for sharing presentations but also also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars. With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million pageviews, it is amongst the most visited 200 websites in the world. Focused more on the real world than fiction! http://www.slideshare.net

July 2015: Still free but of little use for publishing fiction

Joomag sounds like it has a number of features that Issuu doesn't such as Video & Audio (Issuu actually does support audio), a Photo Gallery, Popups and an iPad app. This one bears looking into! http://www.joomag.com

July 2015: the free option seems to be unlimited and ad sponsored 

Zyyne is an online platform that boosts your publications : they are more vivid, easier to disseminate and can be read on any medium. A powerful analysis tool allows you to see who has read them and how. http://www.zyyne.com/site/en/

July 2015: The fact that they offer a thirty day trial suggests this is a commercial platform

MegaZine3, a powerful, userfriendly, open source ActionScript3 based page flip engine. http://www.megazine3.de/

July 2015: They seem to be morphing into a commercial platform