What does it mean to be a writer in the digital age? For many, nothing more than it did when books came only bound, never downloaded. You have to be good. Better than good. You need an agent, an editor and a publisher, and it wouldn't hurt to have some marketing savvy to help things along. So you blog, you Facebook, you tweet. You keep your day job, work on your next book, and life goes on as it has for nearly every author since the advent of the printing press and moveable type. This is all well and good, except for the fact that everything is changing.
E-publishing is democratizing the industry. Anyone who wants to publish independently can, from the casual writer to the industry juggernaut. The way books are published is changing. The way books are bought is changing. The way books are read is changing. But while we engage in a debate over the sustainability of brick and mortar bookstores, outmoded business models and the future of print, we have overlooked an essential part of the new paradigm. It isn’t the just the book that’s evolving, but the stories themselves.
Enter transmedia: a multifaceted storytelling approach that expands a storyworld across multiple platforms. If you want to learn more about transmedia, check out Simon Pulman's essential Transmythology, and take a few minutes to listen to Jeff Gomez, President of Starlight Runner Entertainment, explain it because there are few who can explain it as succinctly. With transmedia, our stories become more expansive, more interactive, demand a larger mythos and become the antithesis of the traditional three act structure as there is no clearly defined beginning, middle or immediate end in sight. As this new storytelling platform evolves (having already been embraced by the film, television and advertising industries), it will become necessary for the authors to rethink their role within the publishing industry. We must position ourselves not as writers, but creators (think of the clout that label carries in the television industry) and hope that this will open the door to a more collaborative role than previously allowed. After J.K. Rowling's Pottermore announcement, Simon Pulman spoke of the necessity of this type of collaboration in his post, Pottermore: Initial Observations. On face value, Pottermore seems to have been conceived through near unprecedented alignment of interested parties. It appears that Bloomsbury, Scholastic and Warner Brothers are all on board and, for the time being, working collaboratively towards a focused and mutually beneficial goal: ensuring that Harry Potter remains a valuable and robust entertainment brand. In a conventional paradigm where publisher and movie studio rarely communicate on material issues, this may represent a paradigm shift.
Naturally, the inclusion, endorsement and participation of Rowling herself is critical. Without her presence, the whole endeavor would be instantly dismissed by fans as unofficial, inauthentic and perhaps even a little cynical. Jeff Gomez has been preaching the need to involve a property’s “Creative Visionary” for years; it appears that advice is finally being heeded. Rowling retains a sizeable, yet just, chunk of equity in her creations; in spite of this, all parties have been financially enriched by her participation. Let’s just hope similar leeway is given to creators who are not yet household names with the leverage Rowling possesses.
Pulman makes an essential distinction here between the kind of leverage an author like J.K. Rowling can wield as opposed to the kind of leverage someone like myself has, which is to say none. That being said, if I can push my story beyond the page and connect in a meaningful way to an audience that hungers for greater participation in the storyworlds they embrace, then I have made myself more relevant to those actively seeking this type of content and the Creative Visionaries behind it.
In the prologue to his book The Art of Immersion, author Frank Rose writes,
We know this much: people want to be immersed. They want to get involved in a story, to carve out a role for themselves, to make it their own. But how is the author supposed to accommodate them? What if the audience runs away with the story? And how do we handle the blur—not just between fiction and fact, but between author and audience, entertainment and advertising, story and game? A lot of smart people—in film, in television, in video games, in advertising, in technology, even in neuroscience—are trying to sort these questions out.
I wonder if you noticed as I did the notable absence of ‘in publishing' in that last sentence. The publishing industry is playing catch up but that does not mean the author has to be left behind. As writers, as the Creative Visionaries, we must not only ask these same questions for ourselves, we play an active role in shaping the answers and the future of the industry.
In Part II of Rethinking Authorship in the Digital Age, I will examine the pitfalls of using technology as a crutch and the author's role in protecting against the erosion of the reading experience. In the meantime, I welcome your comments and hope you will join in on the discussion.
