I had the good fortune of spending several weeks in Costa Rica in February 2010. The first ten days on Peninsula Papagayo revolved around family time, catching up with my nephews and lots of windsurfing.
In the middle of week two my in-laws headed back home and my wife and I headed down to Tamarindo where we met up with friends who write, create beautiful art.. and surf! This goofy little vignette was my first dabble with iMovie. A bit of surfside fluff for your amusement.
For years I’ve been talking about stories and storytelling. For years people have rolled their eyes and reminded me that storytelling is for kids. Okay, that’s not quite true. I’ve managed to win over a few along the way who’re willing to admit that stories and storytelling are among the most vital building blocks of community, of education, of entertainment, of marketing, of sales… Especially in the last few years. Finally folks seem interested in storytelling. Storytelling is cool! This makes cocktail parties a little more exciting for me, and it encourages me to explore further, question more, dream bigger.
This morning I woke up thinking about the intersection of storytelling and technology. My mind was racing. My rumination included various dissimilar but related ingredients including:
Intersect – a site where people can share stories and chart them by time and place to see where their paths might cross.
Storify – a next-generation storytelling platform that lets you build stories from social media.
Hacks/Hackers – “a network of people interested in Web/digital application development and technology innovation supporting the mission and goals of journalism.”
Paper.li – a newspaper-style interface for curating and accessing Twitter content.
Apture – a tool enabling readers to search and explore rich content and media from the web without even leaving the page
I haven’t acted in a few years, and my first inclination was to decline when I was approached last winter. But then I read the play. And I reconsidered. Not because of the politics. Not even because of the uncanny coincidence that my character was also a creative writing teacher. Two stronger reasons compelled me, a longstanding fascination with acting as a form of storytelling and the notion that remembering how a play is produced (as seen from the inside out) might serve to make me a better president of the Depot Theatre board. I’ll weigh in again on this once we conclude our run.
Last night was our fourth performance of six. Not out best. That was Friday. We really aced it on Friday. Actors were at the top of their game, and the packed audience didn’t miss a beat. Such fun. Virtual reality in the oldest sense! It’s a quirky play, especially fun for me to play Gordon since I’m both a teacher and a writer. Reminded me of moments in the classroom when a lesson was really humming along, students were totally in the zone and ideas were popping. An amazing experience. Addictive. Just ask a teacher. It also reminded me that my first moment in a classroom was storytelling… But that tale for another day.
On the other hand, I spent yesterday experimenting with Intersect’s story sharing platform, and urging Storify to let me “alpha preview” their storytelling platform. Both services offer so much promise! I really enjoy the stripped down simplicity of Intersect, but I’m fascinated with the curatorial potential of Storify. Both platforms are still mere glimmers of what they might become, not exactly prenatal, but early, early in their development. That said, these two technologies offer two of the essentail ingredients for the future of journalism: intersection and curating. I don’t just mean sharing content easily and across multiple platforms. I don’t just mean offering a clumsy threaded link list to interested story followers. I mean that convergence of these two platforms could literally reinvent journalism, collaborative, real time reporting and storytelling.
Stories, by their very nature are rhizomic. Instead of simply converting traditional print journalism and storytelling to digital (most of what the large media outlets have undertaken so far), the future isn’t flat. Nor is it linear. Nor is it ever in final format. The future is fluid. Information is viral, mutable, shareable. Collaboration is critical. Content affinity is critical. Similar and/or complementary content must connect. And as the massive proliferation of content overwhelms us, curating and aggregating and reviewing/commenting and fact checking become essential. Information strata and intertextuality and multimodal media must interlink, be sortable, trackable. Trying to flatten this future model of journalism, of storytelling into one dimensional print interface will not only be more and more challenging, it will also be less and less necessary, less and less desirable.
Although it’s a somewhat restricted example of the sort of story aggregation and curatorship that could be possible with next generation tools, Tim Carmody’s (@tcarmody on Twitter) “Lobbying for Followers on Twitter: A Love Story” offers an amusing and powerful example of where we’re headed. Add video, audio, slide shows, comments, forums, etc. to the equation, and it’s staggering what you wind up with. How will we navigate, sort, verify, absorb, enjoy this new content interface? Verdict’s still out, but I can’t wait to begin experimenting.
Which takes me back to the video and to Tristan Harris, the CEO of Apture, who waxes enthusiastic but befuddled about the need for a convergence in technology and storytelling:
“You need people from a computational background and from a storytelling background to be able to satisfy the interest of say a publisher who is trying to tell stories and the people who consume information while also satisfying the… and leveraging, I guess, the technology of the medium itself that let’s us do innovative things that we couldn’t do before.”
Yes, we need those people. And we need them to imagine and build and support the next generation of storytelling tools. In the mean time, I’m going to keep exploring their efforts while telling my own stories. And I’m going to continue enjoying the fact that folks finally know (and care) what I’m talking about at cocktail parties!
Generate Some Serious Book BZZZ : With help from the marketing experts at AuthorHive, your book can be the talk of the town. No matter what your marketing experience or budget, our marketing consultants can help you create an integrated campaign to tell your story. (viaAuthorHive)
Yet another sign of the times, shifting services toward writers, empowering the author to step increasingly into the shoes of the publisher. Have you had any experience with AuthorHive or a similar book marketing service? Is it the wave of the future?
Amazon predicts that it will sell more e-books than paperbacks by the end of next year, and that they will eclipse both paperback and hardcover sales combined shortly thereafter. “I predict we will surpass paperback sales sometime in the next nine to 12 months. Sometime after that, we’ll surpass the combination of paperback and hardcover,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told USA Today… [So] paperbacks and hardcovers may soon become a minority in the world of books. (Mashable.com)
Is Bezos bluffing in order to help drive the market? Or is he spot on? One day soon we’ll know, and in the mean time we’ll keep worrying, celebrating, laughing, panicking, arguing…
A warm welcome to Intersect, a virtual campfire for storytellers around the globe. This Seattle startup, under the able leadership of former Microsoft vice president Peter Rinearson, promises the connectivity and community of Facebook with the storytelling prowess and archive of your favorite uncle!
As on Facebook, Intersect users create a personal page, [but] the big differentiator with Intersect is that stories get matched to a specific time and place, with visitors able to locate a person’s story on a map or scroll through an online timeline of a person’s life.
“Basically, it gives people the ability to tell stories collaboratively and in a way which we think is going to be really interesting and fun,” said Monica Harrington, who joined Intersect earlier this year as chief marketing and business development officer. “It is really about bringing storytelling to the Web.”
“Stories are how we communicate values, essentially how we connect with one another,” Harrington continued… “There’s no way to tell our stories in a way where we can be connected together,” she said. (techflash.com)
Perhaps claiming to bring storytelling to the web is a little bold, since there have been all sorts of web-based digital storytelling options for a decade or so. But it does sound like the first user-friendly community open to the public for sharing storytelling. And for searching out stories. An open archive for storytelling. Open source storytelling!
I’ve offered to participate in their beta launch, and I’ll post updates if/when I get the chance to play around with the prototype. Throw another log on the fire and let the stories flow… I’m contemplating a narrative meander around Crown Point fort. What story would you tell?
Tim Ferriss and Ramit Sethi (video via youtube.com)
Ever wish you could sit down with a couple of bestselling authors and ask them what they think about the whole digital/traditional publishing debate? Here’s your chance. Sort of…
Tim Ferriss (Image: Scott Beale)
Tim Ferriss (@TFERRISS) and Ramit Sethi (@ramit), both New York Time’s bestselling authors, dish up raw, unfiltered and honest impressions of today’s book publishing world. They discuss both the benefits and the drawbacks of traditional publishing and self-publishing, and — though this video only offers one-way info flow — you could always shoot them follow-up questions via Twitter.
Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweekclimbed to the coveted top slot on The New York Times, Business Week, and The Wall Street Journal bestseller lists, and Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich popularity continues to drive more than a quarter million readers to his blog iwillteachyoutoberich.com every month.
If you’re wading into this brave new world of digital publishing, it might make sense to listen to these guys!
One of my favorite experiences living in Essex, New York is watching the sun rise out of Vermont’s Green Mountains, reflecting across the surface of Lake Champlain. This morning, the dense cloud bank on the eastern side of the lake created a dramatic effect, a narrow glimpse of color and light, refracted on the bumpy water then gone, snuffed out almost as quickly as it began. Once the sun rose into the clouds the light flattened and the mood changed. An interesting start to this post-Labor Day week…
Smashwords is an ebook publishing and distribution platform for ebook authors, publishers and readers… At Smashwords, our authors and publishers have complete control over the sampling, pricing and marketing of their written works. Smashwords is ideal for publishing novels, short fiction, poetry, personal memoirs, monographs, non-fiction, research reports, essays, or other written forms that haven’t even been invented yet.
It’s free to publish and distribute with Smashwords. (Smashwords.com)
I’ve been hearing more and more about Smashwords.com lately:
And just about everywhere else that folks are chewing the publishing industry fat. I’ve wandered their website and read miscelaneous tidbits here and there, but I’d really like to hear some firsthand accounts. Have you published a digital version of your book with Smashwords? What was your experience? Thanks!
While Amazon eBook sales now do exceed hardcover sales by a ratio of 1.43 to 1, we should remember that many of those “sales” are 25-cent downloads, many of them are free, and many of them are what, if we saw them in print, could be easily be mistaken for brochures rather than honest-to-goodness books. (Have you noticed every internet marketer seems to have a free Kindle or iPad edition of their latest “free report” these days?) In fact, according to the NY Times, half of the best selling books on Kindle are being given away for free by the publishers. Why? In order to promote sales of the paper versions.(davidweedmark.com)
David Weedmark (@DavidWeedmark on Twitter) weighs in on the digital/traditional publishing debate. Print publishing is far from dead, according to Weedmark, and despite paper and ink’s much hyped funeral dirge, “the print publishing industry is still today the dominant player.” And tomorrow? Weedmark does acknowledge that e-book sales represent 8.5% of overall book sales as of mid-2010, wheres they were only 3% in all of 2009 (according to The American Publishing Association) which would seem a pretty staggering indicator of the change now underway.
Writers basically have two choices: they can build enough of a platform to entice an acquisition, or build one that’s bigger than just books and enables their long-term independence. (And by independence, I mean making a sustainable living, not just self-publishing your book via Amazon or Lulu or Smashwords and declaring yourself an “indie”.)
Similar to work-for-hire vs. creator-owned, it’s evolving into the difference between being a writer and creator. In the digital era, writers sell stories, while creators build storyworlds.
The former is a transaction-based existence focused on the traditional publication of books or articles, with everything else viewed as ancillary. The latter is an approach that sees traditional publishing as just one of many ways via which a storyworld — your fictional universe — can be experienced, and focuses on your ability to reach and engage with readers across a variety of channels. (loudpoet.com)
Why “limit yourself to just writing and publishing a book?” Guy LeCharles Gonzalez asks over at loudpoet.com. The ever burgeoning array of media channels is encouraging a new era of writers, storytellers who see the transmedia evolution as an exciting and promising renaissance.
What about you? Do you long for the black and white publishing world of yore? Or are you ready to embrace the multimodal storytelling opportunities emerging today? And tomorrow?
That image above is one of the “picture poems” I included in 40×41: Midlife Crisis Postponed and it combines contour drawings that I made in 1994 during my final year in college with abstractions from photographs that I took in Peru in 2011. I’ve previously posted elements of “Contours & Artifacts” in Choice (June 4, 2012) and Wonder (December […]
climbed to the coveted top slot on The New York Times, Business Week, and The Wall Street Journal bestseller lists, and Sethi’s 
popularity continues to drive more than a quarter million readers to his blog 
