Profiles in Web Fiction: Nancy Brauer and Vanessa Brooks of Strange Little Band

Today's featured authors are Nancy Brauer and Vanessa Brooks of the webserial Strange Little Band. They've been publishing SLB since May of 2009, and the story is really hitting its stride as we enter 2010. Updates are published twice a week, with a bonus story every other week or so.

This is the fourth interview in the Profiles in Web Fiction series. The other interviews in the series can be found here.

The authors describe Strange Little Band as dark, paranormal romance. It follows the lives of Shane and Addison, co-workers whose lives are forever intertwined by their employer, the unscrupulous Triptych Corp. To make things more complicated, both Shane and Addison have paranormal abilities, which turns even their most trivial interactions into epic mind games. Toss in a healthy dose of hormones and you've got the recipe for an intriguing story.

Nancy was kind enough to answer my questions via email.

How and when did you start publishing online?

Strange Little Band debuted on May 1, 2009 at http://www.strangelittleband.com. Vanessa and I have quite a bit of web design experience, so setting up a self-hosted WordPress site was easy. We'd written together previously, but this is the first time we've published a web serial for public consumption.

Why did you decide to publish your work as serial fiction on the web?

I was the one who pushed to publish SLB online. The more I read about the time and effort required to get literary agents' and publishers' attention, the less inclined I was to play the game. The fact that Vanessa and I had already written 140,000 words of the first draft helped, too. Most of the work has been editing, filling in gaps in the storyline, and lots and lots of promotion.

What are the benefits of publishing online? What are the drawbacks?

The number one benefit of publishing online is reader feedback. Interacting with the audience is fun. They tell you when you're doing something right, and when you're not being clear. Vanessa and I primarily communicate with readers through SLB site comments, Twitter, and the SLB forums.

The number one benefit of publishing online is reader feedback. Interacting with the audience is fun. They tell you when you're doing something right, and when you're not being clear.

The flexibility of online publishing is another huge plus. If you find a typo, you click "edit," make the change, hit "publish," and you're done. You're free to change your posting schedule. Want to change the look of the site? Go for it. You can experiment with integrating reader suggestions, creating character Twitter accounts, and more. The only thing holding you back is your time, desire, and web skills.

The big drawback is having to do everything yourself. Unless you've got a substantial budget or an army of fans willing to work for free, the author is responsible for all of the stuff a print publisher usually handles: developmental editing, copyediting, cover art, marketing, advertising, data backups, etc. All of this take a lot of time. The effort is considerable, especially if you have a day job.

Do you monetize your work? Why or why not? If so, how?

Vanessa and I are working on monetizing SLB to cover costs. Our primary goal is to find our audience for future works. Any profit we make is gravy. :)

Revenue comes from three sources: donations through the SLB site, bids from Project Wonderful advertisers, and sales from the SLB Zazzle store. It's a grand, ongoing experiment which is alternately fun and frustrating. We're learning as we go.

What do you think web serials will look like in five years?

That's a tough question. I think there will be a lot more, much like the explosion of web comics. Serials will probably split into two categories: "professionals" and just-for-fun types. By "professionals" I mean those whose authors rely on serials as a significant portion of their income. It's easy to put a donation button on a website. Convincing readers to donate or buy merchandise takes a lot more creativity and effort.

It's hard to say where web serials, video webseries, and other online entertainment will be in five years. So much is in flux right now. Print publishers are struggling, eBook readers are trying to go mainstream, and piracy is rampant. It remains to be seen if consumers will find enough value in digital media to spend money on it. In general people value tangible goods. For some, if you can't hold it in your hands it's okay to grab a copy. I don't mean to stir up a digital rights management (DRM) debate. It's just that writing and publishing anything online takes time. Unless the writer is extremely frugal or independently wealthy, he or she will likely need revenue to justify the time and effort of publishing.

Your web serial is different from others in that it's a collaborative effort. I'm interested in how exactly you and Vanessa collaborate. How do you divvy up the workload?

We wrote the first draft of SLB via email a few years ago. It was a giant email volley with Vanessa writing primarily from Addison's point of view and me from Shane's. We shared the other characters as necessary. The whole thing was made up on the fly! Editing is crucial to keep the voice consistent and not give the readers whiplash from POV changes.

Although we're in editing and revision mode, we still rely heavily on email. I do the editing for the main SLB story posts. Vanessa's writing the bonus stories. We both fill in gaps in the storyline. Who writes the new bits depends on the POV for the new section and my and Vanessa's schedules. Typically we email each other drafts in the body of an email message. We plot and plan by email, IM, and sometimes Twitter direct messages. We've only spoken once by phone!

What tips would you share with others interested in publishing serialized fiction on the web?

First and foremost, be patient. Unless you can throw a lot of money at an advertising blitz, it'll take time for readers to find you. Make it easy for them. Think about who might like your story. Connect with them, be it on Twitter, forums for similar web serials, or other ways. To get started, check out successful web authors like MeiLin Miranda, MCM, and Alexandra Erin. Novelr and WebLit are warehouses of good ideas, too.

It's also important to plan your story ahead and have a posting buffer. By the latter I mean have two or three posts ready to go at any given time. Unfortunately, I don't always follow my own advice on this front, so the day before posting can be stressful. At least I usually have the first draft done, so it's only last-minute editing.

Be sure to check out Strange Little Band's website.

Read the other interviews in the Profiles in Web Fiction series.

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Copy-editing - can it be crowdsourced?

A popular trend in Web-land these days is called crowdsourcing. In a nutshell, crowdsourcing is using the collective efforts of a really large number of people to tackle a specific problem. As it turns out, the Web is a fantastic tool for gathering large numbers of people from around the world and focusing them on a task.

A notable example of crowdsourcing occurred recently in Britain. The British government released a set of documents detailing the expense reports of all its MPs. The publicly-available documents amounted to roughly 459,000 pages, presenting a monumental task to anyone that might want to figure out exactly what their government is spending money on.

The Guardian, a UK newspaper, put up a website that allows visitors to review these expenses one page at a time and flag any that seem questionable. If an expense is flagged by multiple people, it becomes a candidate for investigation by the paper.

The Guardian realized that its own small staff would never be able to scrutinize such a mountain of paperwork, so they decided to crowdsource the problem. So far, that decision has paid off. Many questionable expenses have been brought to light, and the people responsible are being held accountable for their actions.

Recently, I started thinking about how one could apply crowdsourcing to writing. Writing is traditionally a solitary pursuit, but I think that there are opportunities here. While it doesn't make sense to crowdsource the writing of a first draft, some of the other steps in the process might be viable candidates for help from the crowd.

The research process has already been greatly assisted by crowdsourcing. Sites like Wikipedia, Ask.com, or even Flickr are excellent resources, and are actively maintained by thousands of users worldwide. 

Manuscript review lends itself nicely to the application of help from others. In fact, there are already several websites that use the power of crowds for the purpose of reviewing manuscripts or short stories. I will talk about a few of these in a post to follow in the next few days.

I started thinking about other steps in the writing process, and realized that copy-editing might be an excellent opportunity to utilize the efforts of the crowd. Like wading through mountains of government expense documentation, copy-editing an entire manuscript can seem like a near-impossible undertaking. 

What if there was a website that allowed writers to submit their manuscripts (or short stories, or articles) and have others copy-edit their work? I'm just brainstorming here, but I'm thinking that the process might work something like this:

1. Writer submits their work to the site for copy-editing.

2. The submission gets chopped up into page-sized chunks of about 500 words. These chunks are anonymized, so that editors can be impartial, and also so that no one can piece together the entire manuscript.

3. Other users of the site volunteer to copy-edit. I'm thinking that most of the users on the site will be writers, and the expectation will be that one should copy-edit the work of others if one expects others to copy-edit for them. An "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" sort of arrangement. Or perhaps a writer would need to accumulate a certain number of points or credits (earned by editing the work of others) before they are allowed to submit their own work for editing. 

4. A user requests work to copy-edit. They receive a single page-sized chunk to edit, which is a reasonable amount of work to deal with. They copy-edit the page and modify the text so that it is correct.

5. When the editor has completed the edits, they submit the edited page.

6. The original writer receives status updates via email, and can log in to view the editing that has already been performed. They can compare the original page with the edited page, and can therefore see exactly what copy-edits have been suggested.

7. The writer can take all the editing suggestions they've received and apply whatever edits they deem appropriate.

So what is the carrot here? With crowdsourcing, there needs to be something to entice people to contribute their time and energy. In the example above, the Guardian played on people's innate distrust of government to turn them into watchdogs. They also turned it into a bit of a game, adding a "leaderboard" that tracked the most productive users. The copy-editing site could do something similar - have some sort of points system and reward the top-contributors with recognition or some other perks. Or it could be that you need to do some copy-editing of other submissions if you want to get your own work copy-edited.

That's the basic idea. Now I'll do a little crowdsourcing of my own: what do you think of such an idea? As a writer, do you think the site would be something that you would use? Something you'd contribute to? I look forward to reading your comments.

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