by: Elizabeth Weise
Best-selling authors Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear are looking back to the future. This month, they launched a story —The Mongoliad— using a 175-year-old publishing model. Their novel-as-app (or app-as-novel) is coming out in weekly, serial segments, complete with cliffhanger endings and a cheap subscription rate.
Literary luminaries such as Charles Dickens (The Pickwick Papers), Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo) and Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina) published some of their most popular works in the serial format in the 19th century.
Today, instead of reading serialized stories in magazines, readers will pay $5.99 at mongoliad.com for a six-month app that gets them a chapter a week zapped to their smart phone, iPad or computer. The creators hope to have the book available at the iTunes store in the near future.
Stephenson and Bear, along with a group of other writers, illustrators and martial artists, have embarked on a historical tale, set in 1241, about a roving band of misfits that ends up helping to beat back the Mongol hordes intent on taking Europe. The story, up to four chapters in its first month, promises to be swashbuckling enough to keep a reader's interest but intricate enough to satisfy the duo's usual readers of their historic and science fiction. It's planned to last for one year, at which point a second "volume" will begin and — gasp — the first one may even be published as a print book.
The business model is akin to the "just in time" idea behind inventory. "We're aiming for a more agile, real-time product, in which we cheaply produce small amounts of material and make it available at a very reasonable price and avoid having to take the big risks," Stephenson says.
Extras add value: A mini-encyclopedia provides links throughout the story to research and background on the period, the characters and medieval sword fighting techniques. There are even videos of fight scenes choreographed by martial artists.
About 15 people are involved in the project, including an animator, seven writers, some researchers, a videographer and a fight choreographer for the sword fights. "They'll all be paid if it starts making money," Bear says.
This isn't the only such endeavor out there. The trickle of serialized novels hitting screens large and small in the past few years, from vampire stories to mysteries, promises to become a flood. It is a big trend in Japan. The model is just beginning in the USA but looks to loom large as readers get comfortable with a format their great-grandparents knew well.
Short segments of text make sense for today's readers, says Laura Shackelford, a professor of English at the Rochester (N.Y.) Institute of Technology, who studies digital media.
"Researchers have found that the younger generation has a much shorter attention span and tends to read in a more scanning way," she says.
Though the idea of reading a weekly update on a phone instead of a book might seem odd to people in their 30s or older, it's not at all for those in their 20s or younger. In fact, for them, sitting down to read a 200-page novel may be difficult, says Shackelford.
"It's very old, and it's very new," she says.
This latest variation is part of an ongoing reshuffling of how we read and what form we read in. Writers are trying to figure out how to get readers and make money.
In 1996, Stephen King's The Green Mile was published in six monthly paperback installments. The full novel was published in a single edition in 1997.
Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, published in 2000, first developed a cult following online as it was released in pieces, then became a bestseller when it arrived in print.
Sourcebooks in Naperville, Ill., is publishing a book titled iDrakula that's got its own app. The story by Bekka Black is told via text messages, e-mails and voice messages.
The serial fiction of the Victorian and Edwardian eras never actually went away, it just morphed into radio, films and television, says Graham Law, a professor of media studies at Waseda University in Tokyo.
The TV show Lost is a great example, Stephenson says. "They're telling a long story in a short, episodic format."
He admits that younger generations may need to be retrained to get used to cliffhangers, a story style their grandparents, who grew up on weekly serials at the movies, felt at home with. In the case of Lost, he says, "the audience didn't quite know what to do with it, they didn't want to be left hanging."
Bear says the notion of multiple writers telling a story is one Americans are very familiar with, but in a slightly different setting: Television has always used multiple writers.
Mark Teppo works as The Mongoliad's story editor. "On TV, he'd be called a 'show runner,' " Bear says.
None of this is going to make publishing go away, says Stephenson, who's got 10 well-regarded print novels to his name.
"It's become clear to us that the skills and the aptitudes of people in the publishing industry ought to translate pretty well into this model. Nobody's going to have the same job title, nobody's going to get their paycheck from the same source, so it's going to feel like a huge disruption. But what those people do for a living is they recognize work that has a potential to reach an audience, they cultivate a relationship with a network of people who care about stories and literature, they manage projects, they help writers get the work out.
"Very little of what editors and agents do is really about physically putting ink on paper and shipping it around the world, it's about intangible skills that are as valuable as ever," he says.
Another thing the Mongoliad creators like is that they can change things and make them better as they go. "You may find that a new version of Chapter 3 has been downloaded to your device while you were sleeping," Stephenson says.
"That can preserve us from the trap that serial novels always used to fall into, where they'd say, 'If only I could go back to Chapter 1 and change this one thing!' Think of it: Little Nell would still be alive," Bear says of Dickens' main character in The Old Curiosity Shop, a book published in serial form from 1840 to 1841.
This makes for a new form of writing, Stephenson says. "In the old days, you had this concept of 'You start off with rough drafts, and you do more drafts, and it gets better and better and approaches this end state.' That's an artifact of how printing presses worked. We wouldn't have settled on that production process if Gutenberg had invented the iPad instead of movable type."
from: USA Today
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