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Total Control! Wait, Is That a Good Thing?

January 18, 2012
January 18, 2012

E-publishing is changing everything about the publishing industry, and the trend is only going to continue.  I used to respond to such sweeping changes with abject terror (probably something to do with my deeply-held belief that everything was a sign of the impending apocalypse), but I’ve grown enough as a person that I can now react to predictions of vast technological changes by appreciating how cool they are instead of feeling an urge to stock canned goods. 

Shit, if the rapture doesn’t take me because I haven’t been forgiven enough, and civilization collapses, how will I eat?  I must learn to hunt!

*ahem*

I no longer believe any given technological change will spell the collapse of human civilization, but I do still try to keep a critical eye on new developments.  I despise the mindset that all change is good as much as I do the mindset that all change is bad.

All the typical criticisms of e-publishing – bad editing, opening the floodgates, no quality control, no marketing outlet – have been beaten to death elsewhere.  But a new one occurred to me the other day (or at least, it was new to me), and I wanted to share it.

When I first uploaded Alex, I was able to rush it just a bit (read: push myself to do it, do it now) because I knew if there were any glaring issues, I could always upload a new version.  I got feedback from a couple of my beta readers later that day about the final action scene, and their feedback seemed solid, so I made changes to the scene and did just that: re-uploaded with the book with the changes.  It was only a few word tweaks (a gun “coughed” sparks instead of “vomiting” them, etc.) that did nothing to change the actual content of the scene, so I wasn’t particularly worried about it.

Later, I updated the Acknowledgements section as well, to include the names of all the people I was thanking instead of just my relationships to them (“thanks mom, thanks wife, thanks kids”), and to add a new one thanking my high school Humanities teachers, Brad Olson and Sue Hein.  Again, not a super big deal.

Now, since the end of November one of my favorite pastimes has become to open the Alex sample in Amazon and just sort of stare it, trying to convince myself that it’s real.  This usually involves a little scrolling, a little reading of my favorite parts, a little admiring of the cover shot (when it was still there… grr… that’s a story for another post).  In the many times that I’ve done this, I noticed something that bugged me.  The last sentence of the second paragraph read, “He had no urgency in the morning….” and I felt that the pronoun was a little ambiguous.  This particularly bugged me because that pronoun ambiguity was something I struggled mightily with when writing Alex.  When your book has one male main character, and he is typically interacting with another male character, “he” is a pretty dangerous word and has to be used carefully.

I wanted to change it to “the boy.”  But then I remembered something from my childhood.

My friend, Ryan, and I read The Hobbit as kids (we were just those kinds of kids) and there was a typo in our particular edition which spelled Bilbo’s name as “Biblo”.  Now, you may not find that hysterical, but we did.  I remember chortling over it until I got tears in my eyes.  Looking back, I don’t think it was so much that the name sounded funny (though it did), I think it was also a bit of glee/pride on our parts that we had found an error in a real, printed book.

I’m not saying that errors have a right to exist, or anything like that (dear god, that sounds like a DS9 episode waiting to happen), but it made me think: at what point does my shady use of the “he” pronoun stop being an error, and start becoming a mark of my writing style at the time I wrote the book?

Or, put another way, at what time does my meddling with my own work become screwing around with an established piece of literature?

Yeah, yeah, I’m not Mark Twain or Stephen King.  No one’s probably even gonna notice that I did eventually sneak in there and change that pronoun.  But that actually makes the question more poignant to me, not less.  I plan on doing a lot more writing, and at some point Alex won’t just be “my first novel” – it’ll be a record of my early writing style.  In screwing around with it, I’m changing that record.

Does this matter?  Well, take it to an extreme to see what’s got me bothered.  Say I never stop screwing around with it.  It’s mine, after all.  I can do whatever I want with it.  What if in a few years I decide that I’m not happy with the way a scene went, or the way Ian’s relationship with his wife resolved?  What if I want to change the ending?  I can do it, and no one can really stop me.  Isn’t this intellectually dishonest?

If it’s just me, that’s one thing – but now extrapolate this capacity to the entire writing world.  If e-publishing becomes as prominent as I suspect it will, at some point nearly every author will have this ability to modify their work at whim – and with your average e-reader always or almost always connected to the internet, e-book providers can replace the old copy wirelessly without the readers even knowing.

There are ramifications there.  I’m not sure what all of them are.  I think it would be a very interesting topic to explore in more depth.

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6 Comments/in Commentary, Writing Life /by Adam Nicolai
6 replies
  1. Shifty Bastard says:
    January 19, 2012 at 7:25 pm

    Hmmm. Very interesting topic. This is something I'd not considered before, except in relation to a certain endlessly meddling filmmaker whom I will not mention but whose name rhymes with "Forge Pucas". My own personal feelings say that an artist should stop working on a particular project at some point or, if they must continously update it, keep a copy/record of the original work readily available for public display. After all, a work of art is not just record of the artist's creative evolution at one particular moment, it's also a record of the entire time/era in which it is written. You can learn oodles about any given historical era from its creative output. Of course, I realize most e-publishers are merely correcting grammar and not changing their entire narrative structure, so maybe I'm just overreacting. It's an interesting topic to keep an eye on.

    Biblo! (Giggle)

    Reply
  2. Ethan says:
    January 19, 2012 at 9:48 pm

    I think "Biblo" is hilarious! I sometimes love finding type-os in books (they're actually quite common if you look hard enough). I suppose it reminds me that everyone makes mistakes and I shouldn't be hard on myself. Assuming that many self-published e-books are primarily edited by the authors themselves, I'd expect to find more type-os in self-published e-books. Authors are the worst editors of their own material. I think it's just because you know what you're saying, so your brain can correct the errors more easily and get right to the content, whereas others have to actually look at the words more closely to get to the content.

    As for technology, I admit I'm a little curmudgeonly about e-books. I like to hold a real, old-fashioned book in my hands. I like having piles of them on shelves around my house. I like the way they smell, and the idea that a particular book has a particular history. I have some old used books that smell like pipe tobacco and have notes from distant strangers in them. I love re-reading the same copies of the Lord of the Rings trilogy that I got for Christmas when I was 12. I realize that e-books are the wave of the future and there are good points (less clutter around the house, easier for traveling, cheaper, etc.). I'll jump on the bandwagon when I have to, but the bibliophilic part of me is sad about the demise of printed books. But I take heart that Capt. Picard keeps some old books around even in the 24th century!

    Reply
  3. Adam J Nicolai says:
    January 21, 2012 at 8:23 am

    It's all right, Ethan, you've got the right to be curmudgeonly. I still like a real book now and then too. The convenience of an e-reader is hard to top, though. It's pretty awesome being able to carry your entire library with you, and still read it in ink.

    As for Picard, I'm sure when the 24th century comes around, paper books will still be there. Probably not as common as they are today, but they'll be there.

    Shifty – Forge Pucas is obviously the exact person I was mainly thinking of. God forbid I (or any author, really) ever become so atrociously abusive to our own work and fans.

    Reply
  4. Ethan says:
    January 22, 2012 at 12:36 am

    I was initially reluctant to give up CDs, too, but now I pretty much buy all my music on iTunes for the sake of convenience. I haven't been as enthusiastic about ebooks, but I recognize the same conveniences are there. I didn't mind reading Alex on my laptop, though!

    Reply
  5. docstar says:
    January 23, 2012 at 8:16 am

    Might I first say "All the typical criticisms of self-publishing" – since epublishing is only a format.

    Secondly, I have a deep dislike, nearing hatred, of people revising their work on an on-going basis. If I purchase a book, I don't expect to have to re-purchase it every time the author decides they should have done something else. That should have been determined before they put the darn thing out there. Certainly, revising after several years have passed, and making it clear that it's a revision, is acceptable. But epublishing allows authors to do the editing that should have been completed before publishing – and too many do just that.

    Reply
  6. Adam J Nicolai says:
    January 23, 2012 at 6:48 pm

    Self-pub vs. E-pub: While I can see where you're coming from there, I'm not sure I entirely agree.

    The issues I mentioned were, "bad editing, opening the floodgates, no quality control, [and] no marketing outlet". Bad editing and lack of quality control I can grant as a self-publishing problem (to a point… see below). Opening the floodgates, though, is definitely an e-publishing phenomenon. Before e-publishing, self-published authors weren't able to pour bad stuff out in the kind of volume they can today. That issue was brought up by e-pubbing. "No marketing outlet" I actually only mentioned as an argument that's frequently brought up, not one I believe in. I'd argue E-pubbing is a marketing outlet in and of itself, if you play your cards right.

    But saying "e-publishing is only a format" is downplaying how revolutionary it is pretty hard. In many ways, it enables self-publishing to a degree never before possible, which enables far lower prices, far better deals for authors, and a host of other changes. It's a format, yes, but it's also a distribution channel and a radical shift in the level of publisher control over content.

    On your second point – again, I agree to a point. Honestly I felt a bit slimy even doing as much immediate revision as I did (which wasn't much), and I'm hoping to do less next time around. Frankly, though, I had priced the book at $.99 for the first two weeks partially to account for the fact that my newness to the process would require some experimentation from me. One of the things I wanted to try first-hand was updating the novel to see what the process was like. I feel like I've got a good handle on it now.

    I've noticed, though, that this does seem to be a trend. I know people who work in project management, and quite often they tell me about solutions implemented internally that are not perfect, but with a "day two" install pre-planned to correct the issues. Every new piece of software that comes out (but especially games) seems to have a patch released on day one or two that corrects a number of bugs the software shipped with. Any time near-instantaneous electronic updating is possible, it seems like this will be a natural consequence. Again, I don't think is unique to self-publishers. In the software world, huge corporate publishers are doing it all the time. If book publishers aren't doing it yet, my guess is they will be soon.

    I've found a grand total of one (count 'em) typo in Alex since I published it, and I corrected that. In addition, there was that small pronoun ambiguity in Chapter One that was bugging me, and I changed that. Are those changes really that harmful? Would it be better to keep a "flawed" version of the book out there?

    Reply

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