Electric prose

Will the evolving world of e-publishing help or hinder indie writers?

by Kate O'Sullivan and Ian Donnis

On weekday mornings, Mark Binder can usually be found at 729 Hope, a cafe near his home on Providence's East Side, drinking coffee and tapping out the latest chapter of his novel on a laptop. Describing the foibles of the Schlemiel family, Binder writes about a mythical 19th-century Polish village that has been a subject for Isaac Bashevis Singer and other Jewish authors for more than a century. But in contrast to the old-world setting of his novel, Binder's finished chapters are distributed to readers in the most contemporary of ways: via e-mail on the Internet.

Not unappreciative of this ironic juxtaposition, Binder likes the immediacy of getting his stuff out quickly, as well as the prospect of cashing in from what he hopes will be a growing group of subscribers. Although he remains devoted to printed books when it comes to his own fiction reading, the 37-year-old writer has been ahead of the curve in using the Net to seek a wider audience for his work.

In March, Binder was a few weeks into e-mailing 1200-word chapters of his serial novel, The Brothers Schlemiel, when the publishing industry and on-line booksellers were taken by surprise by an unexpectedly large surge of demand -- 400,000 orders in 48 hours -- for Riding the Bullet, an electronic novella by Stephen King. The massive publicity afforded the best-selling writer was a bit of a bummer for Binder, who believes he's among the first to publish a serialized novel that's distributed by e-mail. "But a friend of mine put a nice spin on it," he adds. "He said, `Now that Stephen King's doing it, everyone's going to see that you're doing it, too.' "

It remains to be seen whether writers, like Binder, who lack a marquee name will be able to capitalize on electronic publishing. But there's little question that e-books are already changing the marketplace. Galvanized by the success of King's on-line release, Microsoft and three leading book publishers last week announced plans to dive into the nascent realm of electronic books. And as reported May 29 by the New York Times, a growing number of trade and academic publishers are restricting the bibliographies for traditional books to Web sites, raising questions about the preservation of published material and the evolving nature of books.

To say that Jacob Schlemiel went temporarily insane after the birth of his twin boys might be to overstate it. The poor man certainly had a breakdown. It was as if the mule pulling his wagon down the road of life had suddenly kicked him in the head." So begins one episode of The Brothers Schlemiel. Binder could have also been describing what's happening to traditional publishing. With the arrival of electronic serials and e-books, old-fashioned print is getting something of a kick in the head.

As tech-savvy authors like Binder are exploring the Internet's possibilities, traditional publishers are racing to get into the game. Major publishing houses are digitizing titles. Microsoft has teamed up with Random House and Simon & Schuster to offer titles on its Pocket PC. Electronic books can be downloaded on Web sites like netlibrary.com and barnesandnoble.com, both of which have a limited selection of free books, as well as books for sale at slightly lower prices than traditional paper versions.

According to Microsoft's research team, consumers will have access to more than 1 million e-books in the next year. The software giant predicts that e-books and e-periodicals will combine for more than $1 billion in sales by 2005. Microsoft also predicts that electronic books will outsell printed books in many categories by 2009.

But not everyone is convinced that e-books will supplant the popularity of traditional paper-and-ink books, or "p-books." After all, as others have noted, amazon.com, one of the best known names in e-commerce, built its brand by selling printed books.

Forrester Research in Cambridge estimates that Internet users will download $34 million of electronic books this year and $426 million in 2004. Forrester analyst Carrie Johnson says, however, that these numbers don't necessarily indicate the demise of print. "I don't think e-books in the next 10 years will outsell print books, and that's in part because nobody dislikes the print book experience. There's nothing `broken' in the fiction experience. E-books will be especially useful for textbook and research purposes, and people will want to try them because they're new, but I don't think paper books will ever be completely eclipsed by e-books."

M.J. Rose, a journalist who covers the electronic book market for Wired and has published an on-line erotic thriller, also thinks that e-books and old-fashioned paperbacks will co-exist. "It's just another form of book," Rose says. "There are hard cover books and paperback books and audio books, and now there will be e-books, but they are not going to replace print."

And while the technology sounds impressive in some instances, how many people want to spend more time in front of a computer screen? Poor screen resolution has retarded growth in the e-book industry to date. Sales of specialized e-book reading devices were reportedly below 10,000 last year. In a country of more than 260 million people with a booming economy, the electronic book trend hasn't exactly become red-hot among consumers.

Microsoft, as usual, has been hard at work, this time trying to develop tools that will make e-reading appeal to the masses. In August, the company launched Microsoft Reader, a software application that uses new ClearType technology to improve font resolution. Microsoft claims that ClearType makes print on a computer screen look just like words on a page.

While Microsoft is developing tools to allow us to read War and Peace comfortably on-line, other companies are taking a different approach. Along with the slew of sites offering electronic book downloads, a group of companies are targeting authors, particularly unknown writers looking to get their work published. At xLibris, writers can submit manuscripts either on disk or on-line, along with a summary, bio, and ideas for cover design. The company formats these books-in-progress, returns them for review, and then prepares the books for print in paperback and electronic formats. Budding authors receive basic services for free, along with 25 percent royalties and registration with some on-line booksellers. xLibris provides extra services at additional cost.

Before xLibris appeared on the e-publishing scene, New York-based horror writer Doug Clegg decided to self-publish a serial novel via e-mail last year. "My original intention was just to write the book for free as an experiment," he recalls. "All my writer friends said this was going to ruin me -- that no one was going to read it, that it was going to be like a party where no one shows up."

Clegg had minimal set-up costs as he e-mailed the novel through a free list service. He also established a Web site, took out banner ads on horror sites, and has since sold the rights for hard cover and paperback versions of his e-serial. Clegg is now at work on a second e-serial, due to begin this summer. Referring to his venture in e-publishing, he says, "It's become so lucrative, I couldn't not do it again."

But although some e-publishing Web sites will help aspiring authors to put their work on-line, they can't promise, of course, that every author will find commercial success. With all the new material expected to be released on-line, readers may have a hard time weeding through the choices, says industry observer M.J. Rose.

"When you put 500,000 e-books on the Web and you expect readers to deal with them, that is really asking a lot," Rose says. "First, the reader who happens upon some of these books is going to see that they're not well-edited. They will start to think that all electronic books are poor quality. Second, how many readers are going to want to sift through all of these books for the gem? How is the reader going to find the 300 fabulous ones out of 300,000?"

Because of this potential overload, new, independent authors will face yet an additional obstacle in challenging the primacy of established writers. It may be another case of the rich getting richer, says Forrester's Carrie Johnson. "The bottom line is that yes, the Web will unearth new talent, but the best-known authors will have the most success," she says. "There are a couple of reasons why Stephen King's [on-line novella] did so well. First, he's one of the best-known authors in the country. And second, he has sort of a cult-like following. How much will the Web escalate new authors to the forefront? We don't know."

Clegg echoes these concerns. "I'm hoping some of the big New York Times best-selling authors will remember to say when they get on-line that there were a lot of people there before them," he says. "It's going to get crowded and the people with the biggest budgets are going to make the biggest splash." Clegg credits the success of his serial novel to word-of-mouth and the press coverage he received because he was introducing something new -- an e-mail serial novel -- way back in the spring of 1999.

Like a lot of writers, Mark Binder enjoys weaving a good yarn that transports himself and his readers to a different place. Referring to the 19th century setting of his serialized e-novel, he says, "one of the interesting things about the people who've subscribed, they've reported it actually takes them out of their office. They're working or eating, but they're not in the 20th century."

When it comes to fiction, "I like not having to write about computers and commercialism and television, and sort of cutting all that stuff away," he says. "That's a part of our life and it so dominates it, so it's nice to write stories where none of that is happening and, at the same time, it's fun."

The Brothers Schlemiel is named for two of its main characters, identical twins born in the first chapter of the novel. The Schlemiel (Yiddish for "bumbler") family lives in Chelm, a fictional village of simple folk who have a knack for doing foolish things. The town really exists, but the Chelm myths of a funny, backward people are truly myths, and may not have any basis in the actual place. For Binder, who unsuccessfully tried writing mysteries and thrillers, it's a satisfying wellspring for his storytelling.

But despite the old-world quality of this fictional milieu, Binder closely monitors the latest developments in electronic publishing. There are several computers in his home office, which is decorated with articles and ads about e-publishing, and his four-year-old son sits at one, chatting with a cousin on a telephone headset while playing an electronic story game. Binder opens his latest electronic toy, which looks like a mouse pad but is used with a stylus (much like a Palm) to send written notes and drawings to the computer. He's writing a review of the gadget, called a Wacom Graphire, for Home Office Computing.

Binder began writing fiction as a student at Columbia University and he's maintained this interest while writing for newspapers, including the Phoenix. In 1993, he began writing tales about Chelm, the mythical Polish village, while working at the weekly Rhode Island Jewish Herald. "There was a hole in the paper one day because someone hadn't turned in a story on time, so I sat down and wrote a short story to fill the space." Binder recalls.

He continued to write the stories and sell them to other Jewish newspapers. Later, while working at the Chelmsford Independent in Chelmsford, Massachusetts (no relation to Chelm), Binder wrote a column that was sent to subscribers via e-mail. The column, which was pegged to the arrival of the new century, has since ended, but the idea of distributing a serial by e-mail stayed with Binder. He decided to focus on the Chelm tales in earnest, writing them in serial format and distributing chapters by e-mail. Using word-of-mouth, he started selling the complete novel by subscription ($10 for two years of installments) at his Web site, www.markbinder.com, after Houston's weekly Jewish Herald-Voice agreed to carry the serial story.

Weekly installments of The Brothers Schlemiel are short enough to read easily on the screen and they carry readers into an ongoing story. Modern readers unfamiliar with such classic serial writers as Dickens and Dostoyevsky may liken the experience to watching a TV sitcom or drama, since television producers use similar techniques to entice viewers to tune in each week. "It's like a performance," Binder says. "I'm performing this novel . . . I have to hook people right away at the beginning, and I have to hook them again at the end for the following week."

Binder has big plans for his novel. Although he has attracted a small group of subscribers (a few hundred, he says), Binder hopes to ultimately make $100,000 from subscriptions and sales of the stories before the novel is finished in early 2002. He's formatting it for both the Palm operating system and Microsoft's ClearType. Binder's also making the first four chapters available for download on mightywords.com, a self-publishing site. He'd like to enhance his stories with sound and computer-generated visual effects, and is considering using hypertext links to send readers to different parts of a tale.

But even with his belief in the possibilities of e-publishing, Binder has the same dream as countless authors before him: that one day, he'll get that call from his agent, indicating that his creative toil is going to be memorialized between the covers of an old-fashioned hard cover. "I love books," he says, "and I'm convinced books are going to be around for a long time."

Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis[a]phx.com.