WriterL
All material copyright 1997 by its contributor
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September 1, 1997
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NEW WEB VENTURE CHALLENGES TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING
September 1, 1997 *bylines*, a new web publishing venture designed to let writers speak more directly with readers, has opened for business at http://www.bylines.org Jon Franklin, a well-known writer's advocate, author of Writing for Story and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, said the new company was founded to raise the quality of writing while simultaneously cutting costs to the consumer and increasing royalties to the writer. *bylines*is a pay-per-read internet site where readers can buy in-depth articles and stories for as low as 29 cents and books for as little as $1.99. Writers receive 60 percent of the gross income from the sales of their work. "That's right," says Franklin. "Sixty percent. Anyone who has ever signed a book contract with a New York publisher is going to think it's a misprint. It's not. Nor is it some discounted after-expenses accountant's dodge. Writers get at least 60 percent of every dime that comes in, and we may be able to do better than that. At the same time we think we can do this and also make a healthy, sustaining profit." The site opened with 13 items on its virtual shelf, ranging in price from 29 cents to $2.50. Everything except books was priced at less than a dollar. A customer who bought the entire list, which includes several books and almost 600,000 words, would spend a total of $15.88.
WHAT'S ON THE SHELF?*bylines* opened with two original nonfiction novellas. COMFORT ME WITH APPLES, by WriterL editor Lynn Franklin, is about how the orchard industry almost destroyed the apple; now heritage orchardists like Catherine Brocard are trying to bring back the tasty old varieties. FORGING A LIFE, by Kay Frydenborg, is about a farrier (a shoer of horses) who uses his craft to find meaning in life. A third major nonfiction piece traces the construction of a Steinway piano. BIRTH OF A STEINWAY was adapted from a previously-published piece by Michael Lenehan, and is very much in the Tracy Kidder tradition. Opening day also features the debut of two original nonfiction short stories. THE TEST, by John Higgins, is about a street fighter who seeks identity in the ancient art of kung fu. ESCAPE FROM BOSNIA, by Jeff Gailus, focuses on a refugee from Bosnia who drifts through Eastern Europe looking for a promised land. We've even got humor, in the form of THE REAL DIRT, the adventures of a gardening fanatic, and a traditional article, A WORLD OF WORDS, by Jacques Leslie, about a very nontraditional subject -- make believe life in the virtual universe. A scholarly piece on literary journalism by Wynne Brown opens our writing-on-writing series. Readers will also find several previously published books, including the memoirs of a Vietnam war reporter by Jacques Leslie and several literary nonfiction books by Jon Franklin. Other classics are presently being prepared for re-publication, and at least one book is being written exclusively for *bylines*. "There are a lot of very good books out there that get eclipsed by the glitz end of the publishing business," Franklin said. "Books get rave reviews but the publisher doesn't get them into the book store and so they don't sell, and they're out of print in a few months. We can do a lot better than that, and our readers will be grateful. So will our writers. "Meanwhile, we will become a market for the many good books that New York won't buy. I had a book proposal rejected not long ago; the editor said that the sales manager didn't like it. Well, okay. But I'm not writing for the sales managers of the world. I'm writing for people who read, who care about ideas -- for inquisitive people, who want to know interesting things about the world."
WHO IS BEHIND *bylines*The venture is a partnership of Franklin, his wife Lynn, and George Rodgers, formerly a projects editor at the Baltimore Sun. It was put up on the web by a professional journalism association, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and its National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting. "The IRE board gave us a helping hand because, if this works, it's going to be good for journalists and journalism - for that matter, for writers of all kinds. We're starting out with a literary nonfiction book list, but we plan to expand fairly quickly into fiction and poetry," Franklin said. "It's not a nonprofit, though, and while it does have some attributes of a writer's co-op, it isn't one of those either. We thought of becoming a nonprofit, but decided the organization would be more viable, and independent, as a private business. We'll pay taxes. Once we reach a sustaining level, we won't have to be obligated to anyone but our readers, which is the best of all possible situations. To that end we have no plans to take advertisements. "We think the work of quality writers can sell on its own merits, even competing with advertiser-supported work. Why? Why is pay television so successful? Because it knows who its customer is, and does a better job as a result. When you're on a newspaper or magazine you're always looking over your shoulder at the advertiser, cutting costs and wimping out in little ways - and sometimes in big ones. "What we offer is so good, and so inexpensive, that we think we have a better mousetrap. We expect people to beat a path to our door."
THE MEDIUM"People ask me, sort of disbelievingly, if I really expect people to read books on the screen. Yeah, in fact, I do. I think they would rather read printed books, to be honest -- at least right now. But the books aren't there, and when they are you often have to wait six weeks to get them. Amazon Books does a better job, and I think they're good for writers because they carry more backlist and because they get them to you sooner. But it still takes time, and it's still very expensive. "Yet, out of a $20 book, how much actually goes to the writer? Maybe 60 cents, unless it is a deep discount book, as so many are these days, in which case the writer gets even less. This means writers can't afford to spend much time on those books, and a lot of them read like it. They're thrown together, and edited on the fly. There are exceptions, of course, but we all know what the rule is. "In the meantime, we're getting more used to reading on the screen. Many of us spend our entire day doing exactly that. So yeah, people will read stories on the screen, if the stories are good enough and that's the only way they can get them. Some people may print them out. There may be home office printers in the future that will print and bind virtual books, and it's clear to me that small, flat screens aren't far off. Then you will be able to take a virtual book to the bathroom with you, which is a criteria people use. "Meanwhile, we are offering something that people can't get anywhere else, and yeah, I think folks are so starved for content that they'll read on the screen. Then, later, when we have better ways, *bylines* will be a household word, at least in the homes of discerning readers. Meanwhile, if anyone is going to beat us out of the market they have to equal our prices and quality. Don't hold your breath." Franklin says people also ask him whether he isn't afraid that people will make numerous copies for friends or students rather than paying for each individual story. "There are always dishonest people. The copyright law is very much on our side, and -- in terms of students -- so are most university attorneys. The Kinko decision served as a good warning. We intend to protect our copyright. "At the same time I think people are basically honest, and that a prof who wouldn't steal a candy bar out of a Seven-Eleven store isn't going to steal a 29-cent story, either. What we are doing is in the interest of authors and readers both. There is a spirit involved, an ethic. And I think our customers will be sensitive to this. We think they may even celebrate it."
THE MARKET*bylines* is aimed at the all-but-forgotten market once held by slick magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. Those magazines and others like them served as the training ground for the great novelists of the first two-thirds of the century. Since they were in practically every middle-class home, they could even be said to have taught generations of Americans to read. Now they are gone. But perhaps *bylines* is, among other things, their heir. "You need to remember that The Saturday Evening Post didn't die because they didn't have readers," Franklin said. "They died because advertisers thought television put customers into a more mellow, trusting mood, and made them susceptible to the hard sell. So companies started putting their advertising money into television, or into niche publications, and the big quality magazines died. "In a way, they died because they had come to depend on advertising for most of their income, the way newspapers and magazines do today. They let their printing budget inflate -- slick paper, sophisticated graphics, all that. What passed for 'cool stuff' in the 1950s. Then when advertisers pulled out they couldn't survive on subscription rates alone." *bylines*, however, is inexpensive to produce, is distributed for next to nothing over the Internet, and is obliged to no advertisers. "In hindsight," said Franklin, "those big magazine publishers had let the economic model skew their priorities and thinking. Today, someone pays fifty cents for a newspaper and that person thinks the economic exchange that has taken place is the purchase of the newspaper. It went, after all, from the box to the reader's hand. "But that exchange was peanuts. A newspaper costs, what, a couple of dollars to produce? That comes from advertisers. The woman who buys a newspaper . . . well, she's not the customer, she's the product. The newspaper has just sold her attention to the advertiser for a buck and a half, two bucks maybe. That's why newspapers don't give a hang about their reader. They're caught in this economic bind. Magazines are in the same fix. Book publishers have painted themselves into a somewhat different corner, in which the customer pays mostly for advertising, distribution, and glitz." *bylines* removes most of the middlemen -- marketing reps, salesmen, chain book stores -- from the artistic process, putting more control into the hands of writers or writer/editor teams. Readers who call up the site can preview articles and books, then use their credit cards to purchase only those stories that interest them. Unlike magazines or newspapers, readers don't have to buy the whole package. "We don't expect reader resistance to be a problem," said Franklin. "It is true that people have to get comfortable using their credit cards over the 'net,' but in my view it's safer than giving your credit card number to some unknown individual on the end of a phone line. And more and more people are buying products over the Internet. We bought some luggage, a few days ago. It was so simple. We didn't have to go into town, we weren't dependent on catalogs people had sent us . . . and because of the efficiencies, the total cost was less that it would have been in a discount store. "At the same time, the prices are right. When we first talked about this, George Rodgers got the idea that people will probably be willing to pay as much for a good novella, for example, as they'd pay for a cup of quality coffee. Our pricing follows that mindset, the "coffee rule," which is how we end up selling original, written-for-*bylines* novellas for 99 cents. Of which 59-point-something cents will go directly to the writer. It's a great deal for everyone." Shorter stories cost less, of course. The least expensive item on *bylines* as it opened was 29 cents, but in the future Franklin hopes to sell shorter pieces of writing for a dime or less.
EDITORIAL PROFILE*bylines* managers refer to the site as a "gallery of fine writing," but in merchandising terms it probably comes closer to resembling a video store. But whatever it is, Franklin emphatically says it's not a magazine. "People sometimes call it an Internet 'magazine,' and I always get huffy. Magazines are mostly financed by advertising - in fact, I have seen articles lately that more and more magazines clear their stories with advertisers. This is bad business, all around. "What's more, magazine readers must buy the whole package to get a single article. This is a rip-off, insofar as few readers are interested in more than one article. At most, they flip through the rest. You can't blame them, when you see the pabulum in most magazines. So please, please don't call *bylines* a magazine!" Besides, *bylines*' editorial policy stresses reportage on social and cultural truths that will endure more than a month or two. The novella, Comfort Me with Apples, for example, examines in microcosm those commercial trends that have rendered not only the apple tasteless but also brought us the plastic tomato, the cardboard peach, and the leather cucumber. Forging a Life deals with the human need to somehow knit together the future and the past - an enduring story, in our future-shock world. "We want our stories to be 'humanistic', in the truest sense of that word," Franklin explains. "We want to explore life as it is being lived by real people here at the bitter end of the Twentieth Century. "Let's take politics, for example. Well, let's not take politics. If *bylines* has an editorial stance, in political terms, we're more or less centrist. But it is our position that the politics that fills our newspapers, magazines and television news hours is mostly fluff. Journalists like it because they know it, and it's cheap and predictable to cover. "We think politics is important, and that citizens ought to be involved. But we don't think ideology is the center of people's lives. What's more, we think they're sick of journalists trying to make it so. We think folks are more interested in their families, their pets, their commutes to work, how their job treats them, the pressures that build between genders in this culture, the bugs that are eating their tomatoes. They're not only interested in problems and scandals, either. "They want to know how other people manage to come to terms with life in the modern age. They want to hear about heroes -- and I don't mean sports heroes. We don't do sports, either. I'm talking about the kind of heroism you see exhibited by a teacher who cares, or a physician who wants to matter to her community, or someone who bought 100 acres of cheap land somewhere and is trying to restore the ecology. We are interested in temperate voices, constructive views . . . we're not talking about 'good news' here, but 'real news.' We think that people who cope are news, that people who build are news, and that people who have ideas are news. "For example, there is a little town here in Oregon that needed a library, but there wasn't any money. So people pitched in to build it, on a volunteer basis. It was, as you might imagine, quite a goat-rope. People ended up screaming at each other. The federal government got involved. Things got screwed up, nailed to the wrong places . . . you can imagine a bunch of amateurs building a library. But they overcame all these problems. They made it work, as humans are capable of doing, and now the town has a fine new library. That is a good example of a *bylines* story, and we hope to have it up on the site sometime soon. "Not that we're billing ourselves as a 'good news' outfit. We have other stories in the works that are certainly not good news for anyone. We have one that seems to be turning out to be an expose. This is of interest to gardeners -- of which there millions, and they support a multi-billion dollar business. Well, it may turn out that your local nursery has been selling you a certain kind of popular plant, a very popular plant, that has been pre-infected with a virus that is all but guaranteed to kill it, in time. But not today or tomorrow. It'll thrive at first, and then die after just enough time has passed that the gardener will blame herself. She may even go back to that same nursery and buy another plant just like it . . . and have the whole aggravating experience again. "No, it's not Watergate. But it touches people, real people, where they live. We think they care about it, and will pay the price of a cup of coffee to get the story. And I ask you, when was the last time that your local newspaper had anything like this? It wouldn't dare! Every nursery in the county would pull its ads." *bylines* AND WriterL TO UNDERSTAND *bylines* you need to know about WriterL, an internet association of writers and editors. WriterL is a three-year-old moderated, edited, membership-only daily conversation between professional nonfiction writers. About 300 writers, most of them professional, are presently subscribed; membership is open. The *bylines* venture is not formally connected with WriterL, but they are informally inseparable. WriterL is owned by the same people who own *bylines*, is operated out of the same IRE complex of servers, and is cross-listed with *bylines* on the *bylines* home page. Most of the details of *bylines*' artistic and commercial strategy were worked out in consultation with WriterL members, and all but one of the inaugural stories and books were written by WriterL members. WriterL is edited by Lynn Franklin and moderated by Jon Franklin. As a rule it comes out five days a week, but when there is a lot of conversation and literary news it may be published on Saturdays and Sundays as well. It arrives in the members' electronic mail boxes. "I started WriterL because it seemed to me that writers were among the loneliest people in our society," Franklin said. "If you're a writer, you're probably the only one in your neighborhood, and if you belong to an organization of writers you probably don't have much contact with it. Perhaps a monthly newsletter or a convention once a year. "WriterL arrives in members' mailboxes every morning. A lot of them read it while drinking coffee, and send in their own two bits either then or later. Sometimes WriterL issues are 500 words long, sometimes 5,000. We run literary nonfiction that has appeared elsewhere, and our members could critique and discuss them afterwards. We argue about books. We talk about techniques, tools, agents, sales, ethics, editors . . . you name it. "It's a whole new kind of publishing creature. I'm always at a loss of what to call it, and the word 'community' is very tired. But that's what it is. Magazine and newsletter readers aren't a community, and neither are most listserver members. That's because most listservs aren't very civil. We, on the other hand, are quite civil and polite. When we fight, we do it by Hoyle's rules. We are told its one of the few places on the net where women are active participants. It's the editing and the moderation that make a difference, I think. "But whatever it is, it seems to be important to our members. They pay for it, and keep paying for it. They donate to it. I tried to change the name once, to something sexier than 'WriterL,' and I practically got lynched. They said it was a tradition . . . it had been on the Internet for two years by then, I think, and I guess that's a long time by 'net standards. Anyway, the name stayed WriterL. And it's important to people. You ought to hear the crap I get when we miss a day for some reason!"
WHERE IS *BYLINES* LOCATED?Since the Internet is everywhere, so is *bylines*. It was handled, originally, by IRE, which is physically located on the University of Missouri Columbia campus. It resides on a commercial server belonging to NewsEngin Inc. in St Louis. Jon and Lynn Franklin manage the editorial content and produce WriterL from somewhere in the Oregon Coast Range rain forest. Jon Franklin teaches at the University of Oregon, in Eugene. George Rodgers exercises his editing genius across the continent, in Baltimore. WriterL members are international; our members range from Australia and Canada to Japan and Peru.
HOW THE SITE WORKSInitial visitors to the site praise its simplicity. It has no graphics, downloads rapidly, and has only a few levels. Customers may browse the table of contents and look at the jacket copy (which usually includes significant excerpts) without registering or logging in. People new to the internet and those who have never downloaded will find this an easy and very forgiving site to practice on. The site has a free TIPS document at the top of its table of contents. Readers have a number of choices. Except for books, they can read on line and save to disk what they see on the screen. The more elegant solution is to download. At least two downloading formats are available. The book or article can later be called up in the reader's word processor. For more information, contact Lynn Franklin at writer@bylines.org or call 541 929-3284. Jon Franklin is at the same number, or at jonfrank@bylines.org; George Rodgers can be reached at GGRodgers@aol.com or 410 964-2183 Brant Houston, executive director of IRE/NICAR can be reached at 573 882-1984 or via email at brant@ire.org George Landau, President of NewsEngin, Inc., can be reached at 314 865-4204 or via email at george@NewsEngin.com |