Weird Things About Being A Digital Author

The cover of  The Elias Anomaly. You could read it
on Wattpad if you wanted. But you'd be the first.

It has often been my contention that I was an artisanal author before I knew what that was. Not for me the hassle of sending stuff off and waiting for the rubber stamp of mid-list approval. Not for me the irritation of people actually reading what I write or caring about it. No. I write for me. I know I am a good writer. I live in the hope that one day someone else will agree with me. If it doesn't happen, well, the world's loss frankly.

Nevertheless it's no good writing things in this day and age and letting them fester on a hard drive. To show intent of actually publishing something one should "get out there" and "build a fanbase". One should, at least, make the attempt, I feel, anyway.

With this in mind I have put a few things up on Wattpad like my spiffing Kafka meets cyberpunk meets Douglas Adams affair The Elias Anomaly. Now complete and available through this perfectly wonderful online e-book delivery system.

At some point soon I shall make paper and electronic (e.g. Kindle) editions available also. This brings us to the point of the weird things mentioned in the post title.

Writing with this method, in these channels, changes the business of writing after a certain point. If you are writing something fresh, i.e. drafting out, then nothing has changed there. Likely it never will. You bang out the words, you get through the material. You write. No problem.

After that it gets tricky.

For a short while (Just over a century?) it has been accepted that authors may not edit their own work. Many reasons are given for this but chief among them appears to be that editors like to eat. Now, in an ideal world where every book was to be given the respect it deserves this would be a no-brainer. If I could be assured that everything I wrote would make enough money to pay for my time and the time of an editor and a cover designer then I would happily pay for these things.

This, however, is not the case. This leaves an author with few choices. One is to admit that writing is a hobby that they like to spend money on. Pay the cover designer, pay the editor, eat the losses. That's cool if you want to do it. No problem with that as an approach.

The other is to find workarounds. This is my approach. I realise I am not a great artist and I am a mediocre cover designer. But hell, mediocre professional cover designers get paid. If I'm doing what they're doing for free I'm a winner, right? Additionally tools like Hemingway help me do a serviceable job of editing. I've read some very poorly edited small press stuff recently, not that I am one of those editing pedants.

The age of meticulous editing on everything we read is over. As the means of production come down in cost and the available stories expand to every conceivable taste it is inevitable that some things you read will have less than perfect editing. My stuff has typos in it, for sure. I have to admit this. I have done the best that I could and I can't do more.

However, I've read stuff recently where there are malapropisms, blatantly wrong uses of words, words added that don't exist AND typos. These things were edited by third parties. It turns out all those copy editors with high and mighty arrogance about how undervalued they were had a point all along. Being a super-editor takes some chops.

I am a good editor, not a great one. Compared to this other stuff I've read that purports to exist in a semi-legitimate state my stuff is golden. Sad but true.

So I am a one man band. This I have become used to.

The really odd thing is that I have evolved working practices to optimise the flow of work going out and they introduce bizarre tasks at weird times.

For example, the best way to edit alone is to go a chapter at a time. The best way to ensure that you are concentrating to your very hardest on that one chapter is to bang it out via Wattpad as part of a serialization. So you take the chapter, Hemingway it and then "publish" it for the delectation and delight of young adults writing mopey, awkwardly eroticised post-apocalyptic steampunk fantasy. No, really, I've just described 95% of what's on Wattpad. Check it out if you don't believe me.

The only problem with this process is that in order to make it look nice on Wattpad you must design a "cover". You don't have to but if you don't take it seriously who else will? No one. So you must have that cover ready before you're even ready to re-edit for public consumption. That's weird.

What's even weirder is that if you have, oh, I don't know, some kind of Patreon thing going on then you might want to promote what you're doing in that medium. Before you can though you really ought to have some sort of video.

I know, mental. You've written a first draft, then you have to design a cover and bang out a video before you're even ready to drip feed your work onto the web. In addition the commercial version of the work won't even be ready until after the thing's already been serialised onto your digital platforms.

In addition you've just graduated from cover designer to short film-maker in your efforts to go it alone.

Never mind weird, being a serious independent author is just a hell of a lot of work. Oh well, off to my editing software I go. Time for me to produce some actual content. 

Yay! Social Media Humiliation In The Sidebar

Because it would be silly not to I have added a Wattpad widget to my connect sidebar panel. It tells you how many wattpad points I currently don't have! Yay for javascript used to embarrass and humiliate.

The Elias Anomaly

Well, I suppose it had to happen.

Maybe it didn't have to happen, in the strictest sense, but I threatened it enough on the podcast and what-have-you. So I present for your perusal and delight "The Elias Anomaly" on Wattpad. Blurb to follow.

Who is Joseph Elias? 

There wouldn't be much point asking Joseph. When he takes a trip down a glowing tunnel located behind a local department store he discovers not only that he is wrong about a great many things, but also that he has little idea about how to make things right. 

Dulcinea Fernandez thinks she's got Joseph's number, but how much can a Caretaker of Endoverse Inc's gigantic artificial reality theme park, AKA The Cluster, really be expected to know about anything? The answer, unsurprisingly, turns out to be 'not very much at all'. 

There are others who claim to know something about Joseph Elias, the Agent, and Simon Grace of the Department of Sub-Realities, for example. The problem there being their transparent motivations to fulfil darkly mysterious agandas, which essentially reduces their trustworthiness to zero. 

In the end it's up to Joseph and Dulcie to sort out the problems of Joseph's anomalous existence on a journey that will make you question the nature of reality and consciousness all the while not quite being able to get rainbows to render correctly.

This is, obviously, a development of the serial work I was doing last year, but I haven't tied myself to such a punishing schedule for this one. Don't expect weekly updates but I will be getting to the end as it's within view of my current place within the text.

I'm also interested in seeing how Wattpad works with regards to it being a sort of DeviantArt for writers. I am still yet to find anything on there that enthralls me enough to get past the first couple of chapters. I might hope that if you go and check out Elias I might have made that task, for you, just a little simpler.

Safe Prediction For 2014

It's not really safe, not at all, but that's the nature of predictions. All I have to offer beyond the fact that to me this one seems kind of obvious is that all the other things I've deemed kind of obvious in the past have come to fruition. The only problem is that I never made a big thing out of my predictions, and sometimes they have odd wrinkles. For example, in 2005 I was banging on about the inevitability of Self-Publishing becoming a "thing", I just didn't see the Kindle Event Horizon where everyone started reading e-books on their devices.

Anyway this is my prediction for this year:

Wattpad will go supernova. It's already pretty big within itself and a few people outside the Wattpad-osphere have noticed the phenomenon. By the end of 2015 to "Wattpad it" as in "to put a work onto Wattpad" will be a verb and Wattpad will be a name with the same status as Facebook and Google.

You read it here first.

IMPORTANT CAVEAT: I have yet to find a single readable thing on Wattpad but the kids seem to dig it. I live in hope of finding something I like on there but it's pretty difficult at this stage to know where to start.

People who talk about Wattpad seem to all be on Wattpad and talk about it on Wattpad. Therefore there are no meta-Wattpad watchers or commentators as yet. This is the only part of the mega-phenom recipe that is missing at present.

The basis for my conclusion is that if all a phenomenon is missing is a meta-discourse then, well, it's right at the tipping point of becoming some kind of cultural staple, surely.

You read it here, well, not quite first, but more specific second.