Scotch, Books & Freeware: A Conversation Between Derek Winkler and Chris Eng

Derek Winkler: author of Pitouie, a multi-storylined mystery novel just released by The Workhorsery, a small publishing house out of Toronto. Chris Eng: author of My Salute, a punk romance novel which will be serialized on HoodieRipper.com starting in January. Two first-time novelists with divergent publishing strategies and sometimes divergent philosophies about publishing (though sometimes not). In this lengthy conversation, the two authors go head to head as they hash out the popular digital vs. print argument, talk about the future of books, discuss current and upcoming options for writers, and settle absolutely nothing… though have fun doing it.

CHRIS: Okay, so let’s start this at the opposite end of the process from where interviews usually start. You’ve just finished your manuscript, typed ‘The End’ and downed a glass of scotch (or however you like to mark such events). Did you have a firm idea of what you wanted to do with your manuscript after that point? Was it always your intention to shop it around for for a hard-copy publisher? What did you feel like your options were?

DEREK: Damn, I knew I forgot to do something with that first draft; I neglected to type “The End.” Must have been the scotch.

I’ll confess, my first choice was to do it the old-fashioned way and find a publisher to put out an actual paper book. Call it ego, I guess. I wanted my first novel to be a “real book.” It was a bit hypocritical of me, because I do believe that self-publishing and online publishing are rapidly becoming as respectable and every bit as “real” as passing a manuscript through a gauntlet of publishers. After a year and a half of pitching the book to traditional publishers, I was just about ready to throw in the towel. I got some very enthusiastic rejection letters that led me to believe Pitouie was worth reading, but nobody in the biz seemed willing to bite. I figured I’d give it a few more months, then toss the thing up on the web somewhere, just so I could draw a line under it and move on to other ideas. The Workhorsery was, in fact, my last roll of the dice. If they’d said no, Pitouie would be a homemade ePub now. But they said yes, so I got to impress my parents by handing them a “real book.”

I understand you’re going straight to the online world with your new project. Did you consider traditional publishing, or was the lure of the new frontier simply too strong to resist?

CHRIS: When I was writing My Salute, I had every intention of having it published by a traditional publishing house, but in the couple of months that followed reality began to set in regarding exactly how long that process would take. I didn’t want to have to wait years for it to see print (if it got published at all), so I guess my impatience was a major factor in that decision. Then there was the fact that my target audience is basically punks (as well as whoever wants to read about them). Punks don’t traditionally have a lot of money, so it seemed like an easy (though perhaps not financially prudent) decision to take cash out of the equation and offer it for free. The final factor, which I came to after everything else, was that online publishing allows for a much wider range of storytelling options. Music, video and other digital media can all be utilized to tell stories in deeper ways and make the experience more immersive. Admittedly, you can use any or all of them in a website tie-in for a print book, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to integrate multimedia aspects from the beginning. The downside of that choice is, of course, that DIYing a multifaceted digital world means all my expenses are coming straight out of pocket and it’s essentially a gigantic vanity project. A gigantic vanity project with exponentially more work.

DEREK: I understand the appeal of the immediacy of online publishing, as well as the value of the multimedia possibilities. I’m playing around with them myself in a little vanity project of my own. You mentioned the expense, but you gotta admit, the web is a pretty cheap place to work compared to something like film or music production (unless of course, you’re planning to do full-blown film and music production to make stuff for the site (then again, punks traditionally don’t trust shit that’s too polished, so you’ve got a built-in justification for keeping it cheap and nasty (you so rarely get to stack closing parentheses three deep))).

CHRIS: No, it’s true. I have friends that still put out vinyl records and that has a way higher cost to bear than my project, even if they have a pretty straight-ahead method of recouping their costs (by selling the records). I mean, domain registration and web hosting are both essentially dirt cheap and with web design you can pick the level of cost you’re willing to suffer. It’s mostly when I move past the “sequential words” part of the book that I’m seeing the costs rise. For example, I’m paying an artist to work with me on some illustrations, which, while quite reasonable, isn’t insignificant when you add up multiple pictures. But the internet is by its nature a medium where people expect visual stimulation and I’m willing to provide that by hiring artists I respect. It’s a justifiable expense as far as I’m concerned.

DEREK: I agree that good art costs a lot, and that good art can make a good website great, but it’s amazing what you can do on your own if you really need to. My online vanity project is a series of connected sci-fi short stories (very short, actually, not to mention bleak), illustrated with animated gifs. I’m doing the web design myself, because I know how to do that. The illustrations are all hand-drawn, then scanned and animated with freeware image software. They’re hand-drawn by me, in fact, and I can’t draw for crap. If anyone comes down on me for the crudeness of the art, I fully intend to shrug my shoulders and say, “Hey man, don’t you get it? That’s all part of the aesthetic.” The project will be hosted in a sub-directory of a site I’m already running, so my total cash expense is zero. All it’s costing me is time. I love the web.

CHRIS: Still, even though you’ve found a publisher who is paying you to print your books, you’re not likely swimming in a Scrooge McDuck sized money vault. There are probably parallels to be drawn between digital and print in that regard, and I think the greatest commonality between them is that however we’re published, at the end of the day we all write for love, because we’re sure as hell not doing it for the profit. Or if you do, you’re likely suffering from some kind of brain damage. Earning enough money to pay the bills is good, though.

DEREK: Yeah, I won’t be giving up my day job any time soon. Still, even if I never make more than pocket change from Pitouie, getting paid for my work makes me a Professional Writer of Fiction, which is what I’ve wanted to be since I was about 10. Of course, if no one were willing to pay me, I’d keep right on writing regardless, but I’d still keep trying to make it to the ranks of the pros. It’s another ego thing, I think.

I think all books will be digital books very soon. I think we’re the last generation of writers who will even have the option of ink on paper. That’s another reason I wanted to try for at least one “real” book.

CHRIS: Wow. I hadn’t considered that angle. Now I’m a little scared.

DEREK: I’d like to be able to look back and say, “I was there when it all changed.” I can already do that for the Internet. When I first started using it, you still needed to know Unix. Everything was done from the command line. There was no such thing as the World Wide Web. (I feel old now.) Less than 10 years later, the net is the single most important medium on the planet. I gave away my TV set last year because I can get everything I want to see online. I could probably do the same with my bookshelves today, except for sentimental value.

CHRIS: I completely agree with you. I’ve been paring down my bookshelves over the past year and a half or so and ultimately gotten rid of around 80 boxes of books. I still have four large bookshelves in my house packed full. But the thought that I could pack all of the books I sold AND all the ones I still own into a gig or two worth of files is staggering. The other thing I discovered to my shock last year was that I genuinely enjoy reading on my phone. The interface is pretty seamless (as long as the book is formatted well) and it’s even backlit, so I can use it to read in bed. That is an embarrassingly huge plus for me.

DEREK: I have a Kobo myself, and it’s no strain at all to read the longest of novels on it. Then again, you’re talking to a guy who once read Pride and Prejudice on a first-generation Palm Pilot.

CHRIS: You are a brave and foolhardy man. Still, I don’t think people are wrong when they talk about the tactile sensation of holding a print book in your hand. I think there might be an overemphasis put on it by people who are unwilling to give a fair chance to (or I guess just simply don’t enjoy) reading ebooks, but there is definitely something in holding a book. And I’d be the first to admit that I want hard copies of all my favourites. I don’t know that books will ever really die, but I think that they are going to morph into items where, to compete with cheap or free offerings online, incredible design will have to become a prime selling point. And I’m okay with that, because sometimes I want to read a story where its container is more or less irrelevant (ebooks generally fill this niche) and sometimes I want to hold a work of art.

DEREK: That’s fine, but to me, what you’d be holding would be closer to a sculpture or an oil painting than a book. To me, a book is a series of words imparting some meaning, and it doesn’t matter if they come packaged in a leather-bound first edition or a tattered second-hand paperback or a string of ones and zeros. After the Great Digitization, I’m sure there will be skilled artisans making book-shaped objects that are hand-lettered in organic ink, illuminated with gold foil and bound between covers of engraved titanium. To a certain group of people, they’ll be highly collectible objects and passed down to the children, but they won’t be for reading. They’ll just be for having. Wouldn’t want to spill coffee on a work of art.

CHRIS: Do you think that working in a digital medium would affect the way you write at all? I mean that in the sense that the project I’m working on now, which I’ve planned to serialize from the start, is being written in 800-1200 word chunks — a length I figured (using completely unscientific methods) was probably the optimal amount people would want to read onscreen. Is that a constraint you’d even want to work with or do you prefer to remove all the stops when you sit down to write?

DEREK: I don’t think writing for an online audience needs to change my writing style, although it might. Writing for a website specifically certainly brings with it a set of constraints that are built-in to the technology used to view it, meaning the personal computer. But the PC is losing its position as the main way people access online content. I think that, in a very few years, almost everyone who wants to read something online will use a device like a smartphone or a tablet or a dedicated e-reader instead of a PC. The experience is so much nicer.

CHRIS: That’s a good point. When I’m writing in chunks I tend to think about people who are going to be reading my story while they’re slacking off at their jobs, which may not say much for the work ethic I’m projecting onto my audience, but it’s likely true for a lot of people. It’s likely equally true that people will be lying on their couch with their tablet or phone, though, and as previously stated, I love that experience. I don’t have a tablet yet but there’s a couple of Android ones I’m kind of coveting.

DEREK: I think I can stick with the traditional novel form in the digital world, if I want to. You, on the other hand, with your multimedia ad-ons, will have even more work to do to generate a version of your site that’s optimized for these brave new devices. Have you made any plans for this?

CHRIS: Yeah, that’s something I’m working on and considering. There’s free hosting out there for pretty much whatever media you want people to be able to access, but being an author with fairly limited resources means I don’t have the liberty of building a comprehensively integrated website with companion iPod/iPad apps from the ground up. Though, now that I think about it, that’s what Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear and company were shooting for with www.mongoliad.com and the apps still lagged behind by a couple of months because they had to wait for Apple to approve them. So, even when you have a fully-skilled team of tech-wizards at your disposal, there are still things that can potentially trip you up. (That said, now that it’s available, the app looks fantastic.)

DEREK: I have grave concerns about apps as a concept; specifically, the centrally-controlled and very arbitrary approval process.

CHRIS: No argument there.

DEREK: From a content producer’s point of view, it would seem to be trading one set of inflexible and slow-moving gatekeepers for another. What I love most about the net is the way anyone can toss anything out there without having to get permission from anyone. However, all the corporations that make money from content distribution want to lock down the online world in the name of higher profits. Apps seem like they have the best shot at getting the job done. If that happens, we’ll just have to start over and build a new Internet from the ground up. But I have faith that armies of happy hackers will always find ways of getting around the locks on our shiny, corporate-approved consumer devices.

CHRIS: So what’s next for you? Are you going to sink your efforts into the digital vanity project or are you going to work on another traditional book? Or, considering it sounds like you’ve got a love and appreciation for both mediums, are you going to try to straddle the line and incorporate both?

DEREK: My digital vanity project is just for fun and shouldn’t take long to finish up. After that, I’ve got about a quarter of a first draft of a second novel I’ll be getting back to, plus rough notes for a couple more. What I’d really like to take a stab at is a video game. I’ve got a couple of ideas that are modest enough that I could almost get a beta running all on my own, with a little grinding of teeth. I think video games are the next great narrative medium, right up there with books and movies and TV. Gamers are getting more mature, and pretty soon they’re going to want something with more substance than “Boom. Headshot.” There have always been some games that filled that niche, but I think that niche is getting ready to go mainstream. When it does, we’ll probably have to think up a name for the experience other than “game.” Whatever the name turns out to be, I’d like to try making one.

What about your future? I know your new thing is just getting started, but what do you see coming say five or 10 years down the line?

CHRIS: This. I’m totally serious. If HoodieRipper gets going the way I hope it will, I have enough fuel to keep it going for at least five to 10 years. Probably more. I consider it an indefinite and open-ended project right now. And even if I’m totally off-base about people’s responses to it, I’ll still have published a novel and a bunch of short stories, made a few people happy and be moving on to the next idea. Ideas are, thankfully, something I’m not in short supply of. And it sounds like you’re not hard up for them either. Nice.

(Photos by goXunu and Ryan Fitton on Flickr. Click through to their galleries.)