Narrative Poetics Dances A Tango With Publishing Technology

PETERMBALL Stuff, Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

The narrative poetics of comic books are driven by the stories relationship with the physical page. Everything must be in a particular page-count, with each scene allotted a certain number of panels and pages, and certain narrative beats work better at the bottom right of a two-page spread just before we flip the page.

Prose seems like the writing process exists oustide the demands of the page, but that’s a function of distance and changing technology. Consider the description of writing a ten cent library, 20,000 word “nickel novel” from John Milton Edwards’ The Fiction Factory:

The libraries, as they were written by Edwards, were typed on paper 8-1/2″ by 13″, the marginal stops so placed that a typewritten line approximated the same line when printed. Eighty of these sheets completed a story, and five pages were regularly allowed to each chapter. Thus there were always sixteen chapters in every story. (Edwards, John Milton. The Fiction Factory)

Edwards is one of the pen names for William Wallace Cook, a pulp writer active around 1910 to the early 1920s, responsible for a prodigious output in the twenty-odd years he worked as a full-time writer. A pulp era where the cost-per-page and printing technology meant word counts were constrained to fit the pages available in the publishing format. 

While I’ve never worked in an environment where the relationship between page and prose was quite that explicit, I got started as a prose writer back in 2007, trying to write short stories of 6,000 words or less. Novellas and novelettes were harder to get published, because so few markets wanted to devote the page count to them (or risk alienating a screen-reader with long walls of text).

Here in 2021, the novella is making a big-time comeback in both digital publication and print, courtesy of ebooks and print-on-demand technology. And so the industry shifts on its axis, and the poetics of SF storytelling adjusts itself in subtle ways.

Wordle

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja

I last woke up and did my daily writing quota back on January 7th, right about the point two things happened.

1) The stress and workload attached to my day job ramped up to a new level, courtesy of our impending program launch.

2) I started playing Worlde first thing in the morning, putting me on my phone instead of a computer. Not long after, I began sharing daily results to a family messenger group, a quick check-in with the fam who’d become similarly taken with the game.

At first, I blamed the bulk of my non-writing on the stress and the anxiety that came with it, but the writing habits didn’t resume after I delivered the draft program and ceased working twelve-hour days. Stress was a contributor, no doubt, but it wasn’t the sole cause.

Today, I resolved not to play Worldle until after 7:00 AM. 

And lo, I have six pages of writing notes and a re-connection to the habit of getting up and doing things for the first two or three hours of my day.

Little things like Worlde don’t derail you on their own—context and a need to soothe my anxiety gave a quick game the foothold that became a morning habit of Worlde, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Sales checks, etc, etc—but once that habit lodged itself into my routine, it needed a change in context to break the flow from one to the next. 

Wordle 249 4/6

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The Back Cover Synopsis in the Backlist-driven world

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

We used to sell books by telling you how exceptional the story was. The whole back cover synopsis pushing you to invest in the character journey and atmosphere of the story contained within. Selling you on the author was a secondary concern, because the author was an invisible presence nine times out of ten. Your primary relationship was with the book, the bookseller, and the story, not the person who wrote it.

Then blogs came along, and then Facebook, and then Twitter. YouTube and TikTok and Tumblr and Snapchat and Patreon and gods know how many others that I’m ignoring in that list. Find an author and like their work? Odds are you’ll be following them on one platform or another, the first step in a long-term relationship.

Which raises an interesting question for marketing books: do we now sell readers on the author and the contents of the book? Make them sound like the kind of author that needs to be followed and engaged with beyond this one story?

Inviting a long-term commitment from a reader might not sell the current book as efficiently as the traditional conventions around the back cover synopsis, but the long-term relationship sells books in two directions: through the backlist, as readers realise there’s more there; and in the future releases the author may make. 

Selling the individual book is a solid choice in the velocity model of publishing, where everything focuses on the now, now, now, but the transition to backlist-focused business models makes the second option far more palatable.