CODEX Hackathon during ALA in San Francisco in June

We’re throwing a literary/publishing/library/book hackathon in San Francisco called CODEX. during the American Library Association conference on the weekend of June 26-28, 2015.

It’s a gathering of people who want to imagine the future of books and reading! Programmers, designers, writers, librarians, publishers, readers.

You can apply and register via Submittable. Thanks to the generosity of our sponsors, we have travel stipends!

Schedule:

  • Opening reception at Github (who is also a sponsor) on Friday with our Recovering the Classics pop-up gallery.
  • Hackathon Saturday-Sunday at Code for America in SOMA(hard capacity is 120).

The theme/challenge will be “connecting.” So connecting around books, connecting around reading, connecting readers and authors, connecting libraries with books. So imagine dating app for readers, Groupon for books, Tinder for book discovery, new APIs,

Partners and sponsors include New York Public Library, the Knight Foundation, Stanford d.school, Dropbox, MacMillan, Kickstarter, HarperCollins, Mailchimp, Github, the Digital Public Library of America, Publishers Weekly, Project Gitenberg, Recovering the Classics, Harvard Book Store.

Among the tools being made available: advance access to the Pinterest API, book covers from Recovering the Classics, Gitbook reviews data from Publishers Weekly, folks to help with the Digital Public Library of America API, Trajectory’s Natural Language Processing engine, the BitLit “Shelfie” book OCR API.

It’s going to be epic.

Why CODEX? Because the codex (modern books with spines) allowed for random access of data, as compared to scrolls, which only allow sequential access.

 

 

 

Recovering the Classics partners with the White House, NYPL and DPLA

Our Recovering the Classics project has teamed up with the NYPL, Digital Public Library of America and the White House as part of the Obama Administration’s eBook initiative for low-income kids.

Here is our cameo!

The Digital Public Library of America: Their network of librarians will volunteer with the New York Public Library to help make sure popular books reach the most appropriate audience. DPLA, in conjunction with Recovering the Classics are also add age-appropriate public domain titles whose text and cover art has been redesigned by leading graphic designers and artists

Jennifer 8. Lee, a cofounder, also recently joined the board of the DPLA.

Full text below.

For Immediate Release

April 30, 2015

FACT SHEET: Spreading the Joy of Reading to More Children and Young Adults

 

Every child deserves the chance to learn and thrive in an environment that is enriched by the latest technology. Two years ago President Obama announced ConnectED, a signature initiative focused on transforming teaching and learning through digital connectivity and content.  Today, building on the progress made to date, at the Anacostia Library in Washington, D.C., the President will announce two new efforts to strengthen learning opportunities by improving access to digital content and to public libraries: new eBooks commitments and the ConnectED Library Challenge.

The first is commitments from publishers to find ways to make sure their content is available to low-income youth in America.  Major publishers are announcing they will make over $250 million in free eBooks available to low-income students.  Nonprofits and libraries are partnering with each other to create an app that can deliver this content and materials from the public domain.  Complementing that effort, the ConnectED Library Challenge is a commitment by more than 30 communities to put a library card into every student’s hand so they will have access to the learning resources and books they can read for pleasure, all available in America’s libraries.

These initiatives represent another way the ConnectED effort is making a real difference for students. Combined with the $2 billion in private-sector commitments, and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) funding for school and library connectivity that includes $2 billion specifically for Wi-Fi, and $1.5 billion more in annual funding — today’s announcement brings the total value delivered as part of this five-year transformation in American education to over $10 billion. And as a result of these commitments, we are on track to meet the President’s goal of connecting 99 percent of students to high-speed broadband in their classrooms and libraries.

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As part of today’s effort, the New York Public Library is developing an e-reader app that will provide access to a universe of digital books, including contributions from publishers and hundreds of classics already in the public domain, to create a book collection for students aged 4-18 from low-income families.  The New York Public Library will work with a network of top librarians will be volunteering their time through the Digital Public Library of America to connect young readers with books that match their reading levels and interests.  New York Public Library will work with Firstbook, a book-donation non-profit, to help make sure eBooks reach students in low-income families.

Major publishers are committing to make available thousands of popular and award-winning titles to students over a three-year period.  These contributions will create a new book collection for students aged 4-18 from low-income families. Students from all demographics will be able to access the public domain titles, whose cover art and typography will be freshly designed by world-class designers and artists.

The new commitments the President will announce today will help ensure the smartphone or tablet that is increasingly a part of students’ lives is also a teaching tool outside the classroom that encourages kids to become lifelong readers.

Hundreds of Millions of Dollars in New Private-Sector Commitments: Today, the President will highlight some of the major publishers and their authors that have pledged to donate titles to low-income students:

  • Macmillan: Providing unlimited access to all of the K-12 age-appropriate titles in their title catalog of approximately 2,500 books.
  • Simon & Schuster: Providing access to their entire e-catalog of books for children ages 4-14, comprised of 3,000 titles.
  • Penguin Random House: Committing to provide an extensive offering of their popular and award-winning books.
  • Hachette: Offering participating students access to a robust catalogue of their popular and award-winning titles.
  • Candlewick: Providing unlimited access to all relevant children’s and young-adult e-book titles in their catalog.
  • Bloomsbury: Providing unlimited access to over 1,000 of its most popular titles.
  • Lee & Low: The leading independent publisher of multicultural books is providing unlimited access to over 700 of its titles.
  • Cricket Media: Offering full digital access to all of its market-leading magazines for children and young adults, including Ladybug and Cricket.
  • HarperCollins: Providing a robust selection of their award-winning and popular titles.

Commitments from Government, Non-profit, and Philanthropic Institutions: Today, the President will highlight commitments supporting expanded access to free books:

  • The Institute of Museum and Library Services: Investing $5 million to support the development of the e-reader app and tools and services to help the public  more easily access e-books and other digital content.
  • The Digital Public Library of America: Their network of librarians will volunteer with the New York Public Library to help make sure popular books reach the most appropriate audience. DPLA, in conjunction with Recovering the Classics are also add age-appropriate public domain titles whose text and cover art has been redesigned by leading graphic designers and artists.
  • New York Public Library: New York Public Library is developing a cutting-edge e-reader app and working with industry and tech leaders to improve the experience for students.
  • FirstBook: a book donation non-profit organization has committed to work with New York Public Library and interested publishes to provide authentication and delivery services to ensure that e-books will reach students in low-income families.

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President Obama recognizes the critical role that libraries play as trusted community anchors that support learning and connectivity at all times and many different paces. In fact, more than 70 percent of libraries report that they are the only providers of free public internet access in their community. Like many modern challenges, improving education for all children requires key leaders to collaborate in new and powerful ways. Libraries are uniquely positioned to continue to build programs and partnerships that bridge the divide between schools and homes and provide educational services to every person in the community.

Announcing the ConnectED Library Challenge: Today, the President will call upon library directors to work with their mayors, school leaders, and school librarians, to create or strengthen partnerships so that every child enrolled in school can receive a library card. These libraries also commit to support student learning through programming that develops their language, reading, and critical thinking; provide digital resources, such as eBooks and online collections of traditional media; and provide broadband connectivity and wireless access within library facilities. Over 30 major cities and counties have announced they are taking the challenge and will work to provide cards to all students.

Communities adopting the ConnectED Library Challenge include: Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Clinton Macomb, Columbus, Cuyahoga, D.C., Denver, Hartford, Hennepin County, Howard County, Indianapolis, Madison, Milwaukee, New Haven, Oakland, Pierce County, Pima, Pocatello, Pueblo City, Ramsey County, Columbia, Rochester Hills, Rochester, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle, Skokie, and St. Louis.

Commitments in support of the ConnnectED Library Challenge:To support the implementation of the ConnectED Library Challenge, the Administration announced new commitments to action:

  • The Institute of Museum and Library Services: Host a national convening this summer to identify and share best practices in reaching universal library card use among public school students.
  • Urban Libraries Council: Lead an initiative that provides a forum for community, library and school leaders to work together to meet city and county education goals by leveraging resources and measuring outcomes.
  • American Library Association:  Drive adoption of the ConnectED Library Challenge through their 55,000 members and align the challenge with existing support and technical assistance provided through their Every Child Ready to Read initiative.

We’re in the Best American Short Stories 2014!

We’re excited to announce that four of the stories we published were highlighted in The Best American Short Stories 2014 collection, which was guest edited by Jennifer Egan.

They were:

  • “Chairs in the Rafters” by Julia Glass
  • “Love on Mars” by our own Justin Keenan
  • “ILY” by Tova Mirvis
  • “Seibert” by Adam Haslett

There are 100 notable stories that are first selected by the series editor, Heidi Pitlor, from submissions across the country each year (in print!). Then they are further whittled down by the series editor. So we’re surprised and excited that so many of our stories made it in.

A Pairing for Valentine’s Day: Plympton Joins Forces With DailyLit

We are thrilled to announce at the TOC conference in New York that Plympton is joining forces withDailyLit, the oldest and largest digital distributor of daily serialized fiction. Chosen as the #1 book website by the Sunday Times in London, DailyLit has been delivering great books and series  in short installments directly to readers’ inboxes since 2006. Hundreds of thousands of readers have received over 50 million installments through DailyLit.

This combination of DailyLit’s worldwide distribution platform together with Plympton’s original serial fiction presents a unique and exciting opportunity in cutting-edge publishing. The DailyLit library ranges from classics like Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick to modern treasures by writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Margaret Atwood. Our ambition is to commission and add to that library.

DailyLit was founded by Susan Danziger, formerly of Random House, and her husband, Albert Wenger, a partner at Union Square Ventures whose birthday is this week. The initial idea behind DailyLit was to integrate quality reading into people’s busy, daily lives — through “byte-sized ebooks” as The New York Times put it — a notion that is even more pertinent today.

 

Susan and Albert are now investors and advisors to the combined company, and Plympton will be taking over and expanding DailyLit operations. To oversee the technical aspects of that effort, Jacqueline Chang, an MIT graduate who was mostly recently an engineer at StumbleUpon, has joined us as our technical cofounder and Chief Technology Officer.

As my cofounder, the novelist Yael Goldstein Love, says, “DailyLit has always been about making books a daily part of peoples’ lives again. I’m inspired by it as a writer and a reader and thrilled to have this chance to expand on the great work Susan has already done while also giving our own original fiction a welcoming new home.”

In particular, we’ve been impressed how DailyLit has created an intimate and direct relationship with readers. When Susan sends out the newsletter to hundreds of thousands in the DailyLit audience, people write back personally.

Our vision for the future of DailyLit tackles a number of problems that are facing publishers, authors, and independent bookstores as reading becomes increasingly digitized. Susan and Albert have already created a robust platform for delivering great writing, having launched almost 1,000 critically acclaimed titles from a number of major publishers.

We at Plympton want to bring the DailyLit experience up-to-date by developing new and engaging ways to give readers more power than ever to read what they want, when and where they want.

DailyLit was the first way to get a library of fiction delivered to your phone (“highbrow” as the New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix put it). The first iteration was in 2006, in the ole’ Blackberry and Treo days, pre-Kindle, pre-iPhone. Back then, it was all by email, but today mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are clearly changing the way we read, and we want to re-imagine the entire DailyLit experience. That means everything from commissioning works meant to be read natively in digital format to finding the best way to deliver those stories to readers.

These are issues the whole publishing industry is thinking about, and DailyLit will not only promote Plympton’s original series, but will provide solutions for great serialized titles coming out from other publishing houses, many of whom have made works available on DailyLit in the past.

Over the last several months, our editorial team have been busy commissioning new series for Plympton/DailyLit and have been thrilled to discover how many writers are eager to try their hand at this old-new form of storytelling. Upcoming titles will include original fiction by, among others, Rachel Kadish, author of the critically-acclaimed novels From a Sealed Room and Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story; Deni Bechard, whose debut novel Vandal Love won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; National Book Award Finalist Edith Pearlman; and Julian Gough, whose novel Jude in Ireland was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and who has twice been nominated for (and once been awarded) the BBC short story award. We also remain committed as ever to discovering emerging talent and giving a platform to great writing that might otherwise not find a home in an increasingly shrinking marketplace.

We are particularly excited to unveil WinkPoke, an ongoing series of short stories about love in the digital age. WinkPoke is literature’s answer to The New York Times’ “Modern Love” column, with each installment a rich, fictional look at how we navigate intimate relationships in a world dominated by Facebook, FaceTime, and dining companions too obsessed with their phones to notice the growing look of despair on our collective faces.

Finally, we’re one of eight finalists in the SXSW Accelerator startup competition in the entertainment and gaming category. We’ll be on stage on March 11 in Austin. We’re planning to reveal more of our DailyLit plans then.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? You can email me and yael at yaelandjenny[at]plympton.com.

We're helping to curate The Twitter Fiction Festival

We’re super-excited to note that Plympton’s own Yael Goldstein Love has been announced as part of the selection panel for the Twitter Fiction Festival. We’ve seen a sneak peak of some of the submissions, and they are good!

Reminder, the festival runs from November 28-December 2, 2012.

Andrew Fitzgerald’s’s note about the panel is below in entirety.

With the submission deadline for our Twitter Fiction Festival coming up on Thursday, now’s a good time to introduce you to the people who will help us decide what to showcase. They come from all across the writing world, and we’re thrilled to have their input.

 

  • Ben Marcus’ most recent book is The Flame Alphabet. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, Conjunctions, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. He teaches at Columbia University.
  • Emily Raboteau is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Professor’s Daughter, and the forthcoming Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora. Her fiction and essays have regularly appeared in the Best American series. Raboteau also teaches creative writing at City College, in Harlem. Her website is www.emilyraboteau.com.
  • Lee Ellis (@lhe2103) is the Assistant Fiction Editor at The New Yorker. For the magazine he has edited Michael Ondaatje, Paul La Farge, and William Gibson, among others. He is the recipient of The Henfield Award at Columbia University, where he completed his MFA in fiction.
  • Meg Waite Clayton (@megwclayton) is the nationally bestselling author of four novels:The Four Ms. Bradwells, The Wednesday Sisters, the Bellwether Prize finalist The Language of Light, and the forthcoming The Wednesday Daughters. Find out more atwww.megwaiteclayton.com.
  • Ryan Chapman (@chapmanchapman) is the marketing director for The Penguin Press. His recent campaigns have been for books like Zadie Smith’s NW, Nate Silver’s The Signal and The Noise, and Thomas Pynchon’s work in e-book format.
  • Sean McDonald (@neverrockfila) is Executive Editor of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  • Teju Cole (@tejucole) is currently Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. His novel Open City won the PEN/Hemingway Award. “Small fates,” his Twitter storytelling project, has been featured in the New Yorker and other magazines.
  • Yael Goldstein Love (@ygoldlove) is the Co-Founder and Editorial Director of Plympton, a publishing house devoted to serialized fiction. Her first novel, Overture(paperback title: The Passion of Tasha Darsky) was published by Doubleday in 2007. She graduated from Harvard University with an honors degree in Philosophy.

 

Looking at the incredible array of submissions from around the world thus far, our panelists certainly have their work cut out for them. In addition to the stories they elect to spotlight, we hope to hear from many other voices sharing their stories throughout the Festival with the #twitterfiction hashtag. There’s still time to get your submission in front of the panel — if you have a big idea that could revolutionize storytelling on Twitter, submit it here!

Andrew Fitzgerald (@magicandrew)
Media Team

Join Plympton’s brainstorm for the #twitterfiction festival.

Plympton will be taking part, somehow, in the Twitter Fiction Festival (11/28-12/2). As we’ve mentioned before. Anyone can apply: published, not published, self-published.

They really want to push Twitter as a creative platform for storytelling. What does that mean? Well we are just beginning to brainstorm. If you want to join in, sign up for our twitterfiction[at]plympton.com discussion email list, or jump in on our Google doc.

Need inspiration? A great example discussed was Pulitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Egan’s short story Black Box, which was published both on Twitter and in the magazine this past May. As Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker, explained at the #twitterfiction NYPL event: Egan spent over a year on it, with an intent to be published on Twitter, even though she was not herself a Twitter user. The  8,500 word story was parceled out between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m.  for 10 days. It was an example of “tune in” fiction.”

Another great example of narrative fiction on Twitter is Arjun Baju, winner of the Shorty Award, who tells terse narratives in exactly 140 characters.

Last, similar to Baju, The Guardian recently asked novelists to write a complete story in 140 characters (in the spirit of Ernest Hemingway, and”Six Word Memoirs“?). Some of our favorites:

James Meek: He said he was leaving her. “But I love you,” she said. “I know,” he said. “Thanks. It’s what gave me the strength to love somebody else.”

 

Helen Fielding: OK. Should not have logged on to your email but suggest if going on marriedaffair.com don’t use our children’s names as password.

×

 

Announcing the Twitter Fiction Festival! Online from Nov. 28-Dec. 2, 2012 #twitterfiction

Today at an event at the New York Public Library, Twitter’s Andrew Fitzgerald announced the first ever Twitter Fiction Festival, which will take place from November 28 to December 2, 2012.

 

 

Anyone can apply, published, not-published, self-published. An estimated 12-20 authors will take part, judged by the strength of the creativity of their submission. The festival, which will have a schedule of events, will take place entirely online. (With a few fun events IRL, including one at NYPL on December 2!)

Fitzgerald, who himself is a fiction writer, argues that Twitter is a platform ripe for experimentation and that we are only in the early stages of learning what we can do with the 140 character tweet. Great examples of authors experimenting with Twitter include Jennifer Egan and Teju Cole.

Why is Twitter doing this? As Fitzgerald explained, Twitter believes that it “is a platform that could be exceptionally powerful for storytellers,” Fitzgerald said. “Fiction is part of that.”


“Fiction is an area where we have seen a couple of experiments, but we’d really like to inspire more,” he said. “To think of Twitter as a place to tell stories as performance, to write as performance. We want to encourage more of that. We think it makes Twitter as a platform a more exciting place.”

And we are excited to say that @plympton, which believes in the potential of digital storytelling, will be part of the Twitter Fiction Festival! We don’t know what we will do yet, but if you want to collaborate, sign up here to join our discussion group at twitterfiction[at]plympton.com (this is a mailchimp form, but we move you over to our plympton list)


What are some of the past efforts of narrative on Twitter? A great example was Pulitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Egan’s short story Black Box, which was published both on Twitter and in the magazine this past May. As Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker, explained at the #twitterfiction event: Egan spent over a year on it, with an intent to be published on Twitter, even though she was not herself a Twitter user. The  8,500 word story was parceled out between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m.  for 10 days. It was an example of “tune in” fiction, Fitzgerald said.

Another great example of narrative fiction on Twitter is Arjun Baju, winner of the Shorty Award, who tells terse narratives in exactly 140 characters.

Last, The Guardian recently asked novelists to write a complete story in 140 characters (inspired by Ernest Hemingway, as was “Six Word Memoirs“?). Some of our favorites:

James Meek: He said he was leaving her. “But I love you,” she said. “I know,” he said. “Thanks. It’s what gave me the strength to love somebody else.”

 

Helen Fielding: OK. Should not have logged on to your email but suggest if going on marriedaffair.com don’t use our children’s names as password.

For more information, email fictionfestival[at]twitter[dot]com.

Jenny on “The Third Tier” of Publishing

The Seattle Times just published this piece by Jenny on the emergence of the “third tier” of publishing, and what we can learn from the blogging revolution.

WHEN I was a young New York Times technology reporter at the turn of the millennium, we scrupulously defined “blog” as short for “web log,” followed by helpful descriptions now wince-inducing in their narrowness — “a personal website” or an “online diary.”Within six years, blogs and online-first media have become an ascendant force in the political — and cultural — landscape.

The book-publishing industry is now going through the same painful transition, as the world’s largest book fair, Frankfurt Book Fair, opens Wednesday in Germany. It’s a perplexing time for authors. Opportunities are shrinking with the publishing houses who have long underwritten the livelihoods of writers. Meanwhile, Amazon.com and other e-reader and tablet platforms beckon with promises of potentially lucrative self-publishing that bypasses traditional gatekeeping and distribution.

Of the 100 best-selling titles of all time on the Kindle, an astounding 27 were directly released through Amazon.com’s self-publishing platform. But do-it-yourself publishing is burdened by DIY marketing, copy editing and cover design. It’s a distressing path for writers who just want to write.

But a new choice will emerge, if changes in journalism over the past decade serve as a guide.

In journalism, a watershed moment came in 2004, when the Democratic National Convention credentialed 36 bloggers as members of the media. (My article headline: “Year of the Blog? Web Diarists Are Now Official Members of the Convention Press Corps”). And by the 2008 presidential election, blogs and online-first media had come to dominate politics. One-person endeavors, such as Talking Points Memo and Daily Kos, matured into full-fledged businesses.

Investor-backed ventures such as The Huffington Post and Politico were launched (now both have won Pulitzer Prizes). And by then, The New York Times and other media stalwarts had taken the cue, rolling out their own expanding suites of blogs.

So we see a sequence: Legacy media organizations — in this case newspapers, magazines and cable networks — are buffered by a Cambrian explosion of individual voices initially viewed with a “not-one-of-us” disdain by the establishment. In between, a third tier is rising that combines the scale and rigor of enterprise with the nimbleness of the newcomers.

That third tier is now emerging in book publishing, bringing together the production quality and professional aesthetic of the imprints with the flexibility and speed of a digital-first mindset.

Startups, such as the Atavist and Byliner, started with short-form nonfiction, and are expanding. Hollywood producer Scott Rudin and media mogul Barry Diller recently announced a headline-grabbing $20 million investment in their new digital-publishing venture, Brightline. New companies are targeting romance and erotic literature, one of the most vibrant areas in e-publishing.

My first book was published by a traditional publisher. My new literary studio, Plympton, is making a bet on serialized fiction for digital readers.

These digital opportunities will be good for writers, and readers, in the long run. More efficient distribution and “printing” frees us from the cost constraints of paper, brick and mortar. Publishing can open itself up to creative new formats and the resurgence of old ones. Just as television allowed for a viewer experience distinct from that in movie theaters, digital readers can give us a different experience from the dead tree. Already, we are seeing experimentation with serials, novellas, subscriptions and lending libraries. Books can be re-imagined. Novels can be updated.

To be sure, there are worrisome trends that come from a shifting landscape: concentrated market power, fragmented platforms, incompatible and rival formats, demands for exclusivity and a drumbeat of legal battles.

Marketing of e-books (unless you are Amazon.com) is still an amazingly hard nut to crack. There is no effective equivalent for the front table at a bookstore and accelerating readers’ discovery of new titles along an infinite digital bookshelf is neither art nor science yet.

The publisher who solves that challenge will discover a large part of the formula for long-term success.

Jennifer 8. Lee is co-founder of Plympton, a literary studio focused on serialized fiction. She is the author of “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles” and a former New York Times reporter who splits her time between Boston, San Francisco and New York.

Yael’s Open Letter to Writers

Yael Goldstein Love wrote the below piece for The Huffington Post:

Fellow fiction writers,

Let’s be frank: we’re not the healthiest-minded bunch. If we were we’d spend our days doing something more pleasant than writing fiction. But lately we seem to have taken a turn for the worse. We look out at the shifting landscape of publishing – e-books rising, big publishers quaking – and obsessively ask, both publicly and privately, Is the novel dead? Is it all Fifty Shades of Twilight from here on out? Are we going the way of the poets, soon to be read by only each other?

The fear is palpable in any group of fiction writers larger than zero. (Non-rhetorical question: how often do you come away from a literary gathering without some new tidbit of doom? The famous writer who couldn’t sell her new novel. The legendary editor who’s been canned.) The effects of this fear can be seen in our bad behavior. Take, for example, the embarrassing overreaction to the e-library LendInk, when the Twitter-fueled confusion of several dozen novelists brought down a site that was actually making them money. (It has since gone back up.) In 2010 The Guardian observed that in the United States, “Declaring the death of the novel is now almost as much of a literary tradition as the novel itself,” and since then I’d say the balance has shifted.

 

Irritable. Pessimistic. Beset by feelings of worthlessness. There’s a term for this pattern of emotions. It’s called “depression.” We, as fiction writers, are collectively depressed. We might not be depressed as individuals; but we have become depressed as a group.

How did we get here? According to a dominant theory in psychology, it was probably through a process called “learned helplessness.” Faced with our seeming inability to prevent an undesirable outcome (to wit: the death of our chosen profession), we turned to despair. But we can prevent this undesirable outcome. And we should. In the face of learned helplessness, doing something is everything.

There are those who already are. Novelist Steven Elliot launched an indie book club through his online culture magazine, The Rumpus. Like a handful of other indie book clubs –Emily Books, The Nervous Breakdown – his club tries to fill the gap left by neighborhood bookstores by hand-selling the kind of literary gems that tend to get overlooked in the blockbuster culture of Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Ann Patchett has thrown herself bodily against fate by opening one of those brick and mortar bookshops that are so endangered and so missed. Novelists such as Jess Walter, Nicole Krauss, and even Margaret Atwood are experimenting with new forms through the creative digital publisher Byliner. And there are countless more examples.

Me, I’ve paired up with former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee to found a company calledPlympton, which is reviving serialized fiction as a popular medium. I have many reasons to think this is a good idea: television shows such as Breaking Bad and Mad Men have gotten us in the habit of ingesting our big stories in bite-sized chunks; the serial is a form that demands compelling plot; and digital serials have the potential to add a social element to both reading and writing.

Others seem to think it’s a good idea as well. Byliner just launched their serial imprint with Margaret Atwood’s Positron. In October, St. Martin’s and Movable Type will be jointly rolling out Jamie Brenner’s serialized novel The Gin Lovers. And Amazon has just unveiled their new Kindle Serials program, which sends new installments of a serial novel directly to your e-reading device. (Full disclosure: three of the initial eight Kindle Serial titles are products of Plympton.)

But whether reviving the serial is a good idea isn’t really the point. Nor is the point whether any one of these literary experiments succeeds or fails. The point is that doing something is an antidote to learned helplessness. It feels good to do something. Far better, certainly, than watching and waiting in existential dread.

And the point is also: we owe it to readers to pull ourselves out of learned helplessness. A little bit of depression may come with the territory of being a writer; but too much, and paralysis sets in. At the extreme, some of us might find ourselves unable to write at all. In our pessimism we might give up on fiction, like poor Thomas Hardy whose despairing decision never to write another novel impoverished all readers to come. But even for those of us who keep on going, bogged down by fear and helplessness our writing is apt to sag – to become less inventive, less playful, less exuberant. We owe it to everyone who loves books not to let that happen.

Creation is what fiction writers are good at. We create psyches, able to draw readers in to seeing the world in entirely new ways. Hell, we invent worlds. We try to reinvent language every time we lay our fingers on the keyboard. Surely we can invent new ways to get our stories into the hands of an appreciative audience.

Innovation has never been easier to implement, and hundreds of thousands of book-lovers are on the other side of your laptop. Reader networking sites such as Goodreads can lend new power to word of mouth. Lean companies such as Plympton can take the risks big publishing houses are increasingly shunning – on heady novels, experimental novels, novels not easily classified in traditional marketing terms. This is an exciting time to be a fiction writer. But only if you’re willing to let it be.

Hopefully,
Yael Goldstein Love