Introduction

In the beginning Ficticities was envisioned as a collaborative laboratory for exploring postcapitalist alternatives to publishing and distributing fictional texts. I intended to tap into writers’ perspectives and preferences about publishing via a series of surveys and discussions. To lure potential survey respondents to the website I posted excerpts from online short stories, anticipating that the stories’ authors would google themselves, click onto my post citing their work, and fill out the latest survey while they were here. However, very few of the cited authors ever showed up here, suggesting that few of them google themselves. So I tried an alternative, more intensive lure. Not only did I post excerpts from short fictional texts; I actively engaged those texts with texts of my own. I didn’t passively expect the stories’ authors to find my posts via google; instead I actively sought the authors out, notifying them of my posts interacting with their work. The tactical question: would more authors be lured to Ficticities via this more proactive approach?

Method

Over a 3-week interval I wrote 14 posts. In each post I interacted with a different work of short fiction, selected randomly from the most recent online issues of randomly selected literary magazines. I avoided reviewing the fictional pieces or rating them based on merit or personal taste, focusing instead on facets of the text that engaged me in some way. After publishing each post I attempted to contact the author of the short fiction on which the post was based, providing a link to the post.

Results

I found something to write about in each of the randomly assigned short fictions. Typically I would find and read the story during the afternoon, then write the post the next morning. The posts averaged around 500 words in length.

I was able to contact 11 of the 14 short fiction authors, typically using Google to locate them on various online social media: websites/blogs, published emails, Twitter, Instagram. I couldn’t contact 3 authors: 1 has died, the other 2 have no readily identifiable online presence.

Of the 11 contacted authors, 5 responded with comments. Three commented here on Ficticities, while 2 others replied briefly on Twitter. One of the responding authors engaged with me in an ongoing online discussion about their story. Each author who responded to my post expressed enthusiasm for my having written about their stories; most also noted their surprise.

The 6 nonrespondents: did they not notice my contact message, or ignore it; how many of them clicked onto the relevant Ficticities post without making their presence known?

Each post was titled with the title of the relevant short story and the name of its author, thereby enhancing self-googling results by the authors. Within a couple of days each of the 14 posts appeared in Google searches. However, there was no evidence of authors finding their way to the relevant Ficticities post via self-googling.

Four of the posts generated quite a bit of reader traffic. Each was a post to which the author commented in reply to my contact; each had quite a number of people clicking in from Facebook. In all 4 instances the author wrote a Facebook post mentioning my Ficticities post, providing a link to it. While a number of the Facebook viewers left comments on the authors’ Facebook pages, none commented on the Ficticities post, clicked the “Like” button, or otherwise signaled their presence.

None of the 5 authors who commented in response to my posts about their stories went on to comment about any other Ficticities posts. I don’t know how many of those authors read any other posts here.

Discussion

Reaching out online to authors I don’t know with observations about their writings was an effective means of engaging with them. Some authors,  referencing my posts about their work in their own social media, expanded my outreach to a wider readership. As a stranger who took their writings seriously in my posts, I may have given the authors a rationale for encouraging people in their networks to read their works. In short, by my tooting their horns they may have felt more confident about tooting their own horns.

I didn’t make any effort to steer authors toward completing surveys. However, I suspect that this “bait and switch” maneuver wouldn’t have been very successful. The writers were interested especially in what I’d written about their own stories, and in letting their Facebook know about their stories and my observations about them. I saw no evidence of their engaging in posts about other authors’ stories, or about the broader agenda of the website. Some did click the “About” page, which describes that agenda in brief, but it seems more likely that they were trying to find out more about the identity of this stranger who, out of the blue, read and wrote about their stories.

Might the text-based contacts I established with these authors be leveraged into some other sort of collaborative endeavor? Would I want to continue writing these posts for their own sake? I’d like to explore those possibilities in subsequent posts.

Now I’m going to check back in on “Between Sleeps,” that Salvatore Difalco story I referenced in my last post, the one where I wrote a comment late last week that has been awaiting moderation. Between my own sleeps has the comment finally been ushered from the waiting room onto the comment thread, or maybe even rejected by the moderator as spam? Let’s see… and nope: still waiting.

In late March I reported that fewer than 10 percent of the short story authors I excerpted in my “Flânerie” posts actually clicked through to the Ficticities website. What about the literary magazines in which those stories appeared: did any of the publishers show up here? Each story highlighted in a Flânerie post was written by a different author and was published in a different litmag. As best as I could discern from limited data, maybe 1 or 2 of those 57 publishers followed the google keyword trail from title-author of stories they’d published back to their citations in Ficticities. None left a comment or sent an email.

If I published an online literary magazine I’d google every story I published for a few months. No doubt there’s a way of placing a standing order with Google to track particular strings of keywords on an ongoing basis, so my online monitoring protocol wouldn’t even require me to do it by hand one at a time on a daily or weekly basis. I’d keep the authors apprised of my findings, passing on the links to websites mentioning their published pieces. And if the linking websites had a comment feature I’d probably also drop comments, at least thanking them for reading and referencing the texts, perhaps also engaging in online discussion.

Why would I do it, at least hypothetically? To satisfy my curiosity about how many readers refer to the texts online and how they interact with those texts — do they cite, critique, analyze, interpret, make intertextual references, etc. To promote the magazine I suppose. Certainly to promote the authors. Mostly to encourage and to participate in the culture of fiction, the virtual ecosystem that links writers, readers, and publishers through texts.

What about the actually-existing online litmag publishers: why don’t they do it? Evidently they prefer not to.

Backstory:  Last November I launched Ficticities by issuing an invitation:

Enter a collaborative laboratory where fictions are transformed from commodities into cultural resources, from entertaining distractions into worlds that extend their borders widely and freely in the collective imagination; where readers and writers build an alternate fictional multiverse together. The Experimental Agenda: Readers and writers collaborate in designing, building, and testing prototypes for an alternative postcapitalist fictional reality.

I put up a series of posts exploring the design space for forming an anarcho-collective alternative to traditional publishing and self-publishing, with writers organizing themselves into publishing houses and distributing their e-books through reader-run duplicating libraries. I expected these posts to stimulate interest and discussion among fiction writers, leading toward the launch of a few demonstration projects. Unfortunately, those posts mostly rattled around in a solipsistic echo chamber, so I took them all down and regrouped.

On to Phase Two. The plan was to conduct surveys assessing fiction writers’ opinions about two central questions: (1) Could writers and readers of fiction jointly run an open access e-book publishing house of distinction? (2) Would they want to?  In order to attract writers to the site, and thereby to answering the survey questions, I would read and link to short fictions published in online literary journals.

Methods

On 18 March I put up the first survey, designed to evaluate why fiction writers write fiction. I then wrote posts linking to 57 short fictions in an effort to recruit respondents. The Google Forms online survey technology worked nicely: respondents’ results were recorded (anonymously) and aggregated on a dedicated file, making analysis easy. However, the method for recruiting respondents sucked. Few of the linked writers clicked through to the Ficticities site, and even fewer completed the survey. Four people completed the survey, one of whom was me. I don’t know how many of the other three were authors of short fictions linked on the website.

Results

There’s not much point in running statistical analyses on such a small sample. However, to the extent that those four respondents reflect any sort of consensus, some very tentative conclusions can be drawn:

Fiction writers want to interpret the world, to imagine and create, to make an impact on the world, and to have people read what they write. Self-expression is less important.

Fiction writers write for its own sake. It’s also fairly important for them to master the craft and to be regarded as good writers by other writers, by publishers, and by critics.

Making a living from writing fictions isn’t a particularly strong motivator, either directly through selling stories/books or indirectly in padding résumés for jobs as academicians or editors. It’s more likely that writers take those paying jobs in order to support their fiction-writing habits.

Survey questions addressing identity issues — self-expression, thinking of oneself as a writer, associating with like-minded people — were deemed less important. However, the two respondents (I wasn’t one of them) who answered the fill-in-the-blank question at the end of the survey — What is the main reason you write fiction? — emphasized aspects of self:

expression of my freedom

It’s fun. It’s challenging, and it gives me a great sense of accomplishment. The main reason that I write fiction, though, is because I have ideas that intrigue me and I can’t not turn them into stories.

Discussion

Results, though scant, are intriguing; plenty more questions could be posed that would shed light on the postcapitalist publishing agenda. And the online litmags do provide ready access to lots of fiction writers. The challenge is to lure those writers more effectively to the website and to the surveys.

For the first survey I cited recently published short stories, relying on the stories’ authors googling themselves and clicking over here to Ficticities, then clicking again onto the survey. That didn’t work. I would need to track down the authors’ email addresses or websites or Twitter accounts, letting them know about this website and specifically inviting them to complete a survey. It’s not easy to find online contact information even for published short fiction writers, so no doubt I’d miss a significant percentage of eligible respondents. Still, if I could reach half of the story authors it’d be a worthwhile tactic.

Do I need to read and comment on and link all of these stories in order to establish my credibility and to attract the authors’ attention? Or could I just send them emails; e.g.:

Dear So-and-So: I saw your story in the recent issue of X Magazine. I’m conducting a survey of fiction writers and would like to invite you to participate.

I could embed the survey right in the email; alternatively, I could put a link to the survey posted here at Ficticities. I’d establish a deadline for responding — let’s say 2 weeks — after which I’d post the findings here on the website and roll out the next survey, notifying the invitees by email. Then I’d do another fresh wave of emails to new authors. Hopefully writers find the survey questions and answers intriguing, luring many of them back to fill out multiple surveys and thus amping up the response rates. This rolling process of enrolling survey respondents would also build up a reservoir of possible participants in demonstration projects suggested by the survey findings.

Questions, comments, suggestions?