Without me, you would not know what they were saying. I am their voice, their interpreter, their first line of communication, their conduit. Without me, all would be silence.
At least, that’s what I used to tell myself. I was doing a public service; I was acting for the greater good. I was involved – if only in a small way – in Art with a capital ‘A’. It made the days more bearable, as I sat, hunched over my desk, isolated from my colleagues in clunky and less-than-clean headphones, listening to conversations I could never join in, the only words I was allowed the words that I typed. These days I often wonder. That’s why I rebelled.
When I tell people I am a subtitler, they usually don’t know what I mean. After a slightly puzzled pause, their first guess is always that jerky, unruly stream of words spooling out under the news, complete with its stuttering and comedy typos. But no, that is not me. You may not believe it, but that work is done by highly skilled and highly paid stenographers (you might laugh at the typos, but it’s a far harder job than you think). Many of them work part-time and remotely: I know of stenos based in cottages in the wilds of Scotland or the Lakes, logging on to a central server at set times throughout the day for the bursts of misery or excitement that make up the news broadcasts. I often think that must be an odd life, though in my experience, stenos are often odd people. Then again, who am I to talk?
Still, even that skill set is fading: stenos are expensive and in short supply, so now the work is often done by some poor soul locked in a booth in the bowels of some non-descript building, repeating the words on screen to a computer that has been painstakingly programmed to recognise their voice, hoping against hope that it gets the words right.
But me, I’m no good under pressure. Instead, I work on the films and the TV shows you watch; your quiz shows and reality programmes, your soaps, your serials, your comedies and your dramas. I am the person turned to by the deaf, the elderly, the mother trying to watch TV over the heads of squalling children, the couple who can’t understand the rapid fire dialogue and inner city accents of that American cop show they’ve been told to worship. I am the one who has shown you the wonder of foreign lands: of languid French affairs of the heart, of depressed detectives probing the Scandinavian dark, of Asian ultraviolence and beauty. Without me, your world would be smaller. And this is the thanks I get? Is it any wonder I chose to strike back?
It used to be a skill, this work. Valued and rewarded, even as we worked in cramped offices or chilly industrial estates, shipping our painstakingly produced bounty to the broadcasters and DVD companies profiting from our wares. But your ignorance and greed have diminished it, even as your appetite and need for it increase. I’ve stopped telling people what I do, now. I got sick of the questions: “Don’t you just type what people say?” (No. You try it and see how far you get. You can’t type fast enough, and the screen would be so filled with words you wouldn’t see faces). “Do you speak loads of languages?” (No. If I spoke ‘loads’ of languages, surely I’d have a better job than this? We use native speaker translators: our skill is polishing and tidying their words, pinning the subtitles to the speaker, the shot, you that you know what they are saying and when.) “Why do you make so many mistakes?” Ah, now that is the proper question...
There used to be a lot of us. It was careful work, done to strict guidelines, checked and re-checked by people who would query a comma or a word out of place. There were teams of us, and we thought nothing of spending hours on one programme, a day or more on a film, making sure that when you saw it, it was the truest version you could find.
Then came technology and progress and the great god of modernisation. Of ‘rationalisation’, ‘efficiencies’, ‘synergies’ – all words that, when you translate them, can be reduced to one syllable: ‘cuts’. To getting more work for less money, to paying fewer people to do the same job, to use a computer where a person could be. If it meant that standards slipped a little, did it matter? Why aim for good, when adequate is cheaper? Why not pay someone in South Africa or India to do the basics, then ship the files back home for finishing so you can claim it’s still done in the UK and get the plaudits for your employment practices? They may not get the jokes and the references, those people who have never set foot in the East End or Manchester or Glasgow, they may edit out the nuance and render in broad strokes, but the viewer will never know what they’re missing anyway, so what difference does it make? This, after all, is progress.
So now our numbers are depleted. Companies have closed, been bought out, stripped back to the basics. In my office there used to be 12 of us, now there are 5. We work 10 hour shifts staring at a screen: listen, type, pause; rewind, check, edit; listen, check again. It may not be working down a mine, I know that, but it’s tricky and time consuming. Even with the loosening of standards, it’s slow work, and we can’t afford the flash new software being bought by the big boys, the things that will put us out of business in the end. But I find there are advantages. Everything used to be checked and rechecked; no word went out unviewed. Now it is only a sample, a smattering, a fraction of the output – and now I go to work in the cracks.
So this is my reward, and my penance. I make things up. I change them. I started on a small scale: seeing if I could put jokes into subtitles – song titles, catchphrases, that sort of thing. Not quite making them wrong, just making my day more interesting. Something that could easily be a mishear, a dropped sentence now and then – enough that if I got a complaint, if someone actually checked, I could put it down to carelessness or fatigue. But now I am more clever in the ways I tilt your world.
Have you never watched something where the words have suddenly jarred? Someone speaks out of character, a plot point vanishes, the conversation you are following doesn’t seem to match what is happening on screen? That is my small rebellion. I like to imagine you puzzled, disconcerted; perhaps even mirroring my own day – rewind, check, rewind again. Did he really say that? Is that really what is happening? What the hell is going on here? Because this is how I feel in real life most of the time.
It is a subtle undermining, I know. You may never have read a subtitle in your life; you may not even know of my existence, or the existence of my kind – my subversion may never touch upon you. My work may only be seen by a fraction of people, and noticed by even fewer, but when you are losing a war – the war against our skills, our livelihood – then every tiny battle must be made a triumph. I like to think it’s something: a sole fist raised against a world that wants everything cost price. And it’s been seen, I know that, by others in my line. We are a small community, after all, and getting smaller all the time – we know each other, we know the work. Someone at my office saw what I had done, when roped into checking it – our full-time quality control role having long since been ‘streamlined’ away – and instead of reporting me, joined in with my campaign. And perhaps, after a few drinks too many at a consolatory drinks session in the pub (someone else leaving, their job disappeared) we told some others, who went on to tell yet more. Yes, we are a small community, us wordsmiths, but we are connected, even spread out as we are, even those stenos stationed in remote cottages and the speakers stuck in basements. We talk, we have always talked, and even more so now that we know we are under siege. Slowly our message has spread. The clients, who never read anything but the bottom line, have never noticed, but others have. Perhaps you have. Perhaps you haven’t realised. Perhaps you shouldn’t believe everything you read.
If you are interested in showcasing one of your short stories please get in touch at info@bytethebook.com
Tracey Sinclair works as a freelance writer and editor. Her novel and collection of short stories (Doll and No Love Is This, respectively) were published by independent publisher Kennedy & Boyd, she followed that with a set of three Vampire novels, The Cassandra Bick series (Dark Dates, Wolf Night, Angel Falls). She is also the author or the romantic comedy The Bridesmaid Blues, set in her hometown of Newcastle. Her work has appeared online and in print in magazines as diverse as Sky, Printer's Devil, Yours and Woman's Weekly, and has been performed on the radio. Her first play, Bystanders, was premiered as part of the New Writing Season at Baron's Court Theatre in 2011.. Her literary work is available to buy via Amazon.
You don’t know what it’s like to be alone until the day when your boyfriend, angry as a wasp, leaves you in the crowded plaza in the middle of Cuzco. You sit there, hugging your backpack and kicking your hiking boots against the dusty steps for a minute, and then an hour, and then two, until you’re wild with worry, strung out on fear. Because the sun is starting to set over the Spanish cathedral, and you’ve heard that you have to be careful, that gangs of feral boys will take everything but your underwear. And people are watching you: the hunched lady selling gourds engraved with stories of saints and heartbreak; and the extroverted shoe-shine kids, who come so close you can see the reflection of the sky in their jet hair. Their eyes are hungry. You can’t stay much longer.
But if you go, how will he ever find you again?
You wish, over and over, that you’d given him what he wanted, when all he wanted was for you to say yes, we should stay in that hostel, and yes, we should climb that mountain tomorrow, and yes, we should take our Pisco sours in that bar tonight. Your staunch refusal to be dragged around a foreign country like a child or a package tourist seems trifling. You wouldn’t have come to Peru alone.
You tell yourself: I have my passport and I have money. You flex your independence and haul the red behemoth over your shoulder, then walk briskly across the plaza to a café that’s been emanating wafts of papas fritas.
And that’s when you see him, staring at you from behind his cerveza, wondering how long it was going to take you to make the trip.
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If you are interested in showcasing one of your short stories or reading more of Rachel's work please get in touch at info@bytethebook.com
This one-page (flash fiction) short was first published in Ten Pint Ted & Other Stories & Poems (Fish Anthology 2009)
Words by Chris Russell, photos by Justin Spray
“This isn’t a conference,” said Justine Solomons, Byte founder, in her welcome speech, “it’s a confluence”. And the difference was important — in the spirit of Byte The Book’s ongoing emphasis on networking and collaboration, its inaugural “Confluence” event, held at London’s Google Academy, encouraged people to actively engage and interact with its talks, sharing their reactions with fellow attendees and speakers alike.
Simon Trigg, Commercial Director of Shorthand, talking tools for digital storytelling
Talks and workshops filled the afternoon from beginning to end, covering various aspects of storytelling, technology and audience engagement. Simon Trigg, commercial director at Shorthand, opened the floor with Tools of the Storytelling Revolution, an exploration of the ways in which new technology can be used to present online stories in innovative ways. He described Shorthand — which originally emerged as a journalism tool, but has since diversified — as “sort of like PowerPoint, but for responsive web stories”, and talked about the company’s ambition to empower storytellers through the use of dynamic and intuitive visuals. “The essence of storytelling hasn’t changed,” he explained, “but story formats have, and that’s where we come in”. Shorthand boasts high-profile clients such as ESPN, the BBC, Sky Sports and Honda, and is perhaps best known for the extraordinary web story Grenfell: Messages from the Tower, which charted the harrowing events of 14 June 2017 through a gripping combination of statistics, imagery and personal stories.
Novellic's Founder, Candide Kirk, talking about discoverability strategies
Novellic’s Candide Kirk, meanwhile, discussed discoverability strategies, addressing a problem that all storytellers have — in a saturated marketplace, how do you attract users to your content? She looked first at algorithms, specifically at a process known as ‘collaborative filtering’, which is the technique responsible for the “you might also like” feature employed so successfully by Amazon and Spotify. She revealed that, in many cases, the links you don’t click on are equally as consequential as the ones you do; on Tinder, for example, the potential matches you reject do much of the legwork in determining your future suitors. On the other hand, Candide explained, many sites are beginning to lean away from algorithms towards editorial curation, in response to revelations that users are learning how to game the machines.
Digital Storyteller, Nosa Eke, representing Gen-Z
Bringing an injection of Gen-Z vitality to the programme was Nosa Eke, a “platform-agnostic” filmmaker and storyteller who has been described as a “digital disruptor” for her innovative online series The Grind. As Nosa pointed out, Generation Z were the first generation to be born into a world where everything is not only physical, but virtual, and early access to mobile technology has instilled in them an innate ability to record and store media. Nosa and her peers are also naturally skilled at distributing content on practically non-existent budgets, enabling them to bypass gatekeepers and interact directly with their fans. The Grind, for instance, while hosted primarily on YouTube, was also pushed on more niche platforms such as Periscope, where rehearsals would be broadcast live and fans would interact with the feed, leaving comments and suggesting storylines. The actors often responded in real time, improvising new directions in narrative, and Nosa was able to adapt the story from week to week based on her viewers’ suggestions. More than anything else, this gave the show an unmistakable authenticity, which Nosa identified not only as one of her show’s key features, but as perhaps the most important weapon in a content creator’s arsenal. “It doesn’t cost you anything to be authentic,” she said, memorably, “but it costs you everything not to be”.
Jane Gauntlett (left) with her assistant Freya Campbell, reminding attendees that audiences need to feel
Other highlights of the day included Guy Gadney’s presentation on AI in storytelling, which charted his company Charisma.ai’s progress in giving personality to digital characters, aiming to take us beyond the placid, call-centre monotony of Alexa and Siri. Writer and performer Jane Gauntlett talked about her work in theatre, reflecting that the art and tech worlds often find it very difficult to communicate with each other, and that “what people remember is how something made them feel”. Elsewhere, product manager Hari Patience-Davies explored how classic Hollywood story structure is being used by corporations to improve customer experience, revealing that companies are using classic narrative techniques such as cliffhanger hooks to keep customers coming back for more. “We are all shaped by the stories we consume,” she said, which was about as close as anyone came to summing up the day in one sentence.
Tom Chatfield and Michael Bhaskar exploring whether machines will take the storytelling jobs
As Confluence entered the home straight, Michael Bhaskar and Tom Chatfield tackled the prescient issue of whether machines will, eventually, take all the storytelling jobs. Michael pointed out that, historically, humans haven’t been especially successful at predicting which tasks robots will be snatching from our species. In the early days of artificial intelligence, for instance, it was assumed that teaching a computer to win at chess would be infinitely trickier than, say, teaching it to point at a dog and say “dog”; however, we have since learned that the latter task presents by far the greater challenge. Nevertheless, predictions were made: Michael forecasted that a market will emerge for highly-customised, AI-generated novels where the reader can ask a machine for, say, “a three-hundred-word story about cats and helicopters, with a sad ending, set in Paris” and the computer will deliver instantaneously. “Writers will not go out of business, though,” he added, “because although machines will soon be able to construct perfect narratives, most of us want our stories to come from people who are messy and human, who go out and get drunk and make mistakes”. He also anticipated that the translation industry will change beyond recognition, predicting that publishers will soon be able to publish their titles in multiple languages, simultaneously, at the touch of a button. “But it won’t be publishers who’ll own the software,” he concluded, “because we’re too far behind the curve. It’ll be Google or Amazon”.
Sam Conniff Allende encouraging attendees to 'Be More Pirate"
Finally, the day was rounded off with a swashbuckling flourish by the inimitable Sam Conniff Allende, author of the offbeat marketing manifesto Be More Pirate. In a talk bursting with soundbites, Sam spoke of the power of stories to, quite literally, change futures: “Storytelling is about the world we want to create; it’s about speaking it into existence and fighting for it to become true”. He urged the Confluence audience to engage in “professional rule-breaking”, adding that “sometimes in life, the right thing to do is to do the wrong thing”. Invoking the renegade, anti-establishment and — as it turns out — socially responsible ethos of pirate culture, he spoke of revolution and unrest, insurgence and protest: “All your life, you’re waiting for the grown-ups to fix things … until you realise you are the grown-ups, and there is no masterplan. No one is coming to save us. We need a rebellion!”.
Sam Conniff Allende inciting rebellion
Ultimately, argued Sam, “it matters not only how good your story is, but where and how you tell it”. Or, to put it another way, as storytellers, publishers and content creators, we’d all do well to remember one universal truth: a story can only change the world if it gets heard.
We are incredibly grateful to our partners for this event: digital storytelling platform, Shorthand, print and e-book global distributors, Ingram Content Group, book club app, Novellic, indie animation studio, Tapocketa, designers, typesetters and typographers, Hybert Design,publisher software specialists, Circular Software, publishing and management service providers, Alysoun Owen Consultancy and Academy London for hosting the event.
If you enjoyed this report and want to keep up with the latest happenings in publishing as well as network with publishers and authors alike keep yourself posted by visiting our events page here. You can join us from £36 a quarter here
More photos can be found on our Facebook Page
Ahead of Confluence later this week Alastair Horne interviewed, Emma Barnes, founder of Snowbooks and Consonance, who offers some insights into her newest venture, Make Our Book.
‘Consonance is really a magical time-and-calmness-generator’
Agency. It’s all about agency.
I started independent publisher Snowbooks in 2003 as a pendulum-swing reaction away from the sort of job that comes with a car and a big salary but is fundamentally empty. It was my first conscious grasp of the reins of my life, really; taking control of my time to spend it on something fruitful, important to me, and creative. Something that had a chance of leaving a modest, positive, dent in the universe.
Consonance is an attempt to share the love; to provide other people with the chance to spend their time on what matters. Sure, a prosaic description of Consonance is that it’s a back-office title management, workflow and royalties system. But it’s really a magical time-and-calmness-generator. It gives the gift of harmony -- harmonious data, harmonious relationships at work, harmonious workflow -- so people can spend their time and energy on the creative task of making and selling better books. And I really believe that in these strange times, amplifying creative, thoughtful, considered voices makes a measurable difference, and I am very proud that we are an enabler of the publication of the wide range of books that Consonance’s clients create with such verve and competence.
‘Make Our Book is proper publishing for schools’
So, if Snowbooks was about giving myself agency, and Consonance is about giving all publishers agency, then Make Our Book is about giving agency to an important group who have rarely experienced it: children.
As a child, you’re always told what to do, what to think, how to be. Your work is prescribed, assessed, put on the wall, then discarded: it’s pretty awful, really. (Cue fervent nodding from my 10-year-old.)
Make Our Book is proper publishing for schools: it automatically designs and lays out a book and its cover to a professional standard. Teachers – usually the school literacy co-ordinator – set up an account on the web app. The children write and illustrate their pieces, usually as a project over Book Week, which makes for a refreshing change from 22 Harry Potters and 14 Elsas From Frozen. The older children type up all the work, which ticks the ICT skills box nicely, and a teacher scans and uploads their illustrations. At this stage, the automatically-typeset PDF is downloadable, making for a lovely proofreading and editing loop, to give children the chance to make their work as good as it can be (without this stage, they feel less proud of the finished result). The school collects pre-orders from parents and carers, and the book is delivered to school a few weeks later.
Each individual piece is a story in itself, each chapter a snapshot of a child’s class, each book a story of how the school works and thinks. And, ultimately, it’s the story of a childhood itself which is so compelling. Our first school customers have done more than one Make Our Book project, annually. So you get this astonishing progression over five or six books of a child’s work, from the early handwritten scratchings in Reception about a favourite character, to the polished, rounded prose of a Year 6 primary school veteran, fronted adverbials and all.
It’s most likely the first time that a child sees themselves on the same level playing-field as the authors of the books they are told to read. They have the power to write something that matters and persists.
‘Technology’s an enabler; it’s not the point.’
Holding their book in their hands for the first time is most likely the first time that a child sees their work as worth persisting in a very grown-up, real way. That’s why it’s important that the books look like real books; no god-awful Comic Sans, low-res images or overly-jolly clip art illustrations. Again, thank heavens POD has come on so much in the last 10 years. No more stripy colour blocks: designed right, POD books can look almost as gorgeous and artefactual as long-grain litho.
Technology underpins this process. All three of my endeavours are heavily steeped in technology, and Make Our Book wouldn’t be possible without three key changes in technology: platforms as a service; print on demand and standards. But it’s an enabler; it’s not the point.
Our "platform as a service" suppliers provide everything you need to host and serve a web application, from the database and web servers to asset hosting and backups, all for around $70 a month -- an incredibly low price for something that could have cost tens of thousands of dollars, 15 years ago.
POD enables us to programmatically send content and cover data to the printer, and for them to print and post a single unit, economically.
There are a range of technical standards which allow us to send instructions to services in a format that will be readable. Browser compatibility, phones-as-cameras, printer APIs, programming languages: standards quietly underpin everything about the modern technical world.
And the code itself is written by me in my spare time in Ruby on Rails, the open source web development framework we also build Consonance in. All hail @dhh for extracting it from Basecamp 12 years ago – it’s a framework that has enabled thousands of people like me to discover the joy of programming, and the agency it brings (do you see a theme developing?!).
“If you have a side project, it’s yours.”
At Consonance, we’ve been trying to get people in publishing to try out programming themselves for years. For the most part, with some honourable exceptions, it’s not worked. I think it’s because we’ve promoted programming in the abstract, with courses and ideas that, yes, are related to publishing, but still just theoretical courses.
I actually think side-projects might be a silver bullet, though: the single, quick, effective key to a more vibrant publishing industry.
If you have a side project, it’s yours. You’re invested. You want it to work, and it’s that drive to get *your* thing to work how *you* want, that gets you over the infuriating hurdles that are an inevitable part of the early (and, indeed, middle and later) stages of learning to code. You don’t just get a new skill out of the effort; you get a sense of self-worth, and proof that you can achieve what you set out to achieve. Agency, again.
Side projects do come with a heavy dollop of privilege-assumption. Not everyone has a laptop, or the headspace to essentially have a second job alongside the day job, family and other obligations. But they are also a way for the more privileged to balance things out a bit and build things that solve real problems.
At General Products Ltd (that’s the business behind Consonance.app) we devote 10% of every staff member’s time a week to a personal side project. We’ve found that from an employers’ point of view, side projects are a fantastically cheap and simple way to deliver continuous professional development, and to encourage staff retention. Who honestly does their best day-job work on a Friday afternoon, anyway? It’s like we’ve reclaimed this time in the week to make it useful and inspiring.
Maybe all this talk of agency will make people consider whether their life is going in the right direction, and whether they should consider the personally-transformative power of programming a little deeper. I’m not saying everyone will immediately resign from their jobs as soon as my session’s over... but there’s nothing like a bit of an existential crisis on a cold Friday in February to get you thinking.
Emma Barnes will be speaking about Make our Book at Confluence on Friday. You can buy tickets here.
Janey Burton did her degree in Law and then spent a few years writing for Sweet & Maxwell’s journal Current Law, and teaching Criminal Law, before moving into the publishing industry. She worked in varied Editorial and Marketing roles at literary agencies and a small publishing house, before moving to Penguin to work on their ebook rights project. She now works freelance as a Publishing Consultant, offering general publishing advice as well as editorial and contracts services. Most recently she negotiated a paperback rights deal with Lightning Books, on behalf of the author Nicola May, whose ebook edition of The Corner Shop in Cockleberry Bay was the bestselling ebook in the Kindle Store.
She thinks it’s important that unrepresented authors advocate for themselves when offered a publishing contract, and here she offers some advice for so doing.
Contracts really aren’t as scary or impenetrable as some think. They’re more a bit dull, in the way that tedious but necessary aspects of life are. As with arranging a yearly check of the boiler, it’s miles better to make the effort than suddenly to find you have no heating or hot water, and are hostage to a large bill for parts and labour.
In all the excitement of receiving an offer to publish a book, and its attendant possibilities, it can be easy for the author to regard the contract as mere paperwork, not requiring much attention. This is a mistake, and once the contract is signed it’s a hard mistake to remedy. Here’s a few tips to insure against regret.
- Read the contract: You don’t have to feel daunted. These days, publishing contracts are often relatively short, maybe only five pages, with fairly straightforward language, and almost no Latin or instances of Heretofore or Whereas. The type may not even be unreasonably titchy, but 10 or 12 point.
Still, you may find you don’t understand all of it and there are a few points you want to query – this is fine and brings us to the next point.
- Ask questions: Even if you think they’re silly or you ‘should’ know the answer. An unrepresented author is not expected to know anything much about contracts or the publishing process, and as a general rule people who work in the industry are very friendly and won’t mind questions. So, ask the question, honestly it’s much the best way to get the answer.
- Understand what you’re giving, and what you’re getting: First, look at the Grant of Rights clause near or at the beginning. This clause will outline which rights the publisher is getting, in which languages, and in which territories they may sell their editions.
The Term of the contract may also be here, or in a separate clause – is the publisher getting the rights for the full term of copyright (author’s life plus 70 years), or a shorter defined period such as 10 years?
Also, look for the Termination or Reversion clause, which explains in what circumstances the rights may be returned to the author.
And, of course, look at how you’ll be paid: there may be no advance, so what is the split of royalties? The royalties may be calculated on the book’s RRP, or on the publisher’s net receipts, or even on net profits, and each way will affect how much the author receives, so you may want to ask questions about how the calculation is made.
If you read the Grant of Rights clause and think ‘oh, I didn’t realize I’d be tied in for so long’ or you read the Termination clause and think ‘I don’t understand how I could ever get the rights back’ then bring it up – these things can be changed. And so to our next point.
- Negotiate: An unrepresented author will be offered the ‘standard’ contract, and far too many just sign it without negotiating even one point. Some of those authors come to me later and ask for help changing the contract or getting their rights back. The fact is, there’s very little I can do at that point – the author agreed the contract and, short of an actual breach, it remains valid.
Here’s another fact: no competent agent would recommend their client sign a publisher’s ‘standard’ contract without first negotiating it and getting changes (perhaps putting in some of their own wording, written by their own contracts manager). You deserve no less.
The ‘standard’ version of the contract is the version that favours the publisher most of all! You are allowed to ask for changes – they won’t think you’re being unreasonable unless you are unreasonable.
Even better might be hiring someone suitable to negotiate for you. This can keep the relationship between publisher and author comfortable and friction-free, as it’s a third party who’s presenting the argument for changes, and it may be more effective as the intermediary you choose should have lots of familiarity with publishing contracts and a solid understanding of the industry and what changes may reasonably be requested.
- Get Help: If you’ve done all your research and you feel you understand publishing contracts very well, you may genuinely not need any more help and in which case, go ahead with my blessing. If not, and if you are not represented by an agent, please consider the value of spending a little money on getting the contract right before signing it. There are individual freelances and small companies that offer this kind of service, as does the Society of Authors to their members.
Getting some help does not negate my advice above about reading and understanding the contract – you could consider it an insurance payment, to avoid future regret.
Janey can be contacted via janeyburton.com or on twitter @JRFBurton
Words by Chris Russell, photos by Justin Spray
Byte The Book’s opening event of 2019 tackled the topic of events and festivals, and how authors can best navigate the live scene in order to boost sales and reach new audiences. Helen Bagnall, co-founder of Salon London, chaired a panel comprising Tania Harrison (Latitude Festival), Sharon Canavar (Harrogate International Festivals) and broadcaster and author Natalie Haynes.
The panel from right to left, Tania Harrison, Natalie Haynes, Sharon Cavanar, and chair Helen Bagnall
Helen turned to Tania first, asking her about the obstacles that authors and festival organisers face when planning events. “Whatever you’re presenting,” began Tania, “the challenge is to find a format that’s engaging”. There are numerous ways an author can connect with live audiences, she suggested, and discomfort with public speaking (which is extremely common amongst writers) needn’t necessarily be an impediment to taking to the stage. “We had an author once who did their interview in the dark,” she explained. “And then there was the visual artist David Shrigley, who told us he was happy to appear at the festival as long as he didn’t have to speak. So, instead, he simply drew.”
Audience listening intensely to our panel discussion at the h Club
Natalie then offered some anecdotal experience from the front line, having herself battled through over a decade as a touring comedian before becoming a novelist. “These days,” she reflected, “everyone expects us to be performing seals as well as writers, even though those two things are almost opposite jobs. You have to be ‘extra you’ on stage, and ‘not-at-all you’ in your book. It can be very difficult achieving both”. When asked for her advice regarding how authors might decide which opportunities to take on, Natalie was unequivocal: “For me, if they don’t pay, it’s a no. I am not a charity. My mortgage is not paid by exposure”. Beyond that, she said, if you’re unsure whether an appearance is worth committing to, “consult your publicist. They have a pretty good instinct for these things”.
Natalie used to be a stand up comedian - she's still very funny!
And what about during the events themselves? What advice did the panel have for writers? “It’s not just about ‘plug the book, plug the book’,” counselled Sharon, “but about working out what’s truly interesting for your audience. So don’t just read from your novel; draw out concepts from it that inspire discussion. Communicate with your chair in advance so they know what you’d like to talk about”. Tania agreed, stating that, for her, the key was to “find the essence of each project”. “The aim is to bring the idea out of the book,” she said, “and into real life.”
Another full house
When the discussion was opened to the floor, one audience member — admittedly with his tongue firmly in his cheek — questioned whether, in a world of social media, there was even a place for live events anymore. The panel were unanimous, pointing out that a Twitter feed, or even a TV special, will never replace the frisson of a live show. “Social media is curated,” argued Sharon, “whereas at an event, you can actually get to know someone. You can un-peel their layers”.
As always lots of great networking at Byte The Book
Finally, Natalie summed up the mood of the evening with a few concise words on the unique, if elusive, appeal of the live experience: “Sometimes, during live shows, something magical happens. Not always… but sometimes. And that’s why we do what we do.”
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Ahead of Confluence next month Chris Bateman talked to Alastair Horne about his session on Narrative Design.
Chris Bateman’s experience of narrative design is second to none. His consultancy International Hobo Ltd, which specialises in the subject, alongside game design and scriptwriting, celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year. When I speak to him about his session at Confluence, entitled A Crash Course in Narrative Design, he suggests that it will offer ‘a very quick introduction to the challenges of narrative design and how a conventional narrative writer can use the skills they already have to great benefit’. He’s keen that such writers should become involved with games – ‘Video games need help from people who understand conventional narrative’ – but also wary of what can happen when they become involved: ‘the reactions they have tend to be coloured by their experience in the medium they’re coming from, and it doesn’t necessarily prepare them for what it’s like to work in a video game context’. If you’re a writer from traditional media who wants to work in games, he suggests: ‘You need to set aside everything that you understand about narrative structure and begin learning from scratch about narrative design, about the game design aspect of how games work.’
Challenges in narrative design:
‘we had to find a way to tell a story without worrying about the order of events’
Bateman’s recent work on The Persistence, the well-received VR game for PlayStation 4, offers some striking examples of the particular challenges involved in narrative design. The first problem came with creating the material that teaches the player about the game mechanics and their role in the story. Virtual reality, he suggests, has both increased the amount that the player needs to be taught – at least until ‘a common control mechanism gets agreed upon … and that doesn’t seem very likely at the moment’ – and reduced the length of time that such teaching can take: ‘since VR is trading on immersive presence, you really don’t want to break the player out of that experience if you can help it’. Often, he says, ‘the time you have to deliver information is the time it takes for the player to walk from where they are now to where they have to be next’. As a result, the onboarding content in The Persistence ‘went through more rounds of editing and cutting down dialogue – and particularly exposition – than I ever thought was possible.’
The second challenge resulted from the the decision to randomise the layout of the spaceship on which the game takes place each time it’s played. Bateman’s team needed not only to come up with narrative justifications for this – ‘there’s a malfunction on board the ship, which is designed to reconfigure itself for various useful scenarios, and now it’s randomly reconfiguring itself all the time’ – but also to ‘find a way to tell a story without worrying too much about the order of events, because the content’s not coming at the player in any particular order’. The solution, it turned out, was to borrow a model from what Bateman likes to call ‘the corpse-looting games, like System Shock and BioShock, where much of the storytelling proceeds by you finding dead bodies.’ The Persistence even works the multiple lives typically enjoyed in such games into its fictional world: the protagonist is already dead but has had their mind uploaded into a cloned body, which can be recreated as often as it is killed, but with increasingly damaging psychological effects: ‘It’s all the stuff that most video games brush under the carpet. “Game over” is usually treated as something that didn’t happen; you immediately rewind. In this game, each time you die, you remember it.’
Free-to-play and predatory practices:
‘the video games industry is not great about having these discussions’
The business has changed significantly over the twenty years Bateman has run International Hobo. The biggest challenge, he says, was ‘the free-to-play business model. So many of our clients didn’t survive, and it very nearly put us out of business. I did look at whether we could move into that space, but the bottom line is that those games are all minimal viable products; you’re trying to get the simplest game up as quickly as possible, so there was no role for us. Fortunately, it turned out that the free-to-play model was going to sit alongside the traditional business model.’
Though Bateman sees benefits to the free-to-play model – ‘for a lot of companies, it enables them to get an audience they could never get another way, because the cost of marketing is astronomical’ – he remains an outspoken critic of some of the more predatory practices used to make money from such games. Having long been convinced that the industry needed to self-regulate or face governmental intervention, Bateman seems unsurprised that the latter has now come to pass: ‘the video games industry is not great about having these discussions.’ His own attempts to encourage debate by proposing panels on the subject at industry events were met with reluctance: ‘they didn’t want to have the discussion in public, because it looked like a PR disaster, but not having the discussion was a much bigger disaster’. As countries pass their own legislation to deal with the problem, a largely common market for games – outside China – risks becoming more fragmented, to no-one’s benefit.
New opportunities for indie publishers:
‘Not since the 80s has it been this viable to make small-scale projects’
International Hobo has recently announced that it will soon be developing its own game projects in addition to working with clients. The impetus behind the move comes partly because of the broad range of skills brought to the team by the company’s most recent batch of interns, and partly by Bateman’s desire to have ‘one more crack at game development’ while he still has time. It’s also a good time to be making such a move, he thinks: ‘There are opportunities today that there haven’t been for quite a while. Not since the 80s has it been this viable to make small-scale projects that can still hope to make a good return. The distribution culture is in place; the fact that the games are now being distributed online changes the way that the publishing model works. In the 80s, it was cheap to make the games because they were small, and then you could record them onto an audio cassette and ship them to shops or via them mail-order.’ The move to CDs and cartridges brought higher costs, both in manufacture and the perceived obligation to fill the increased amounts of space available with content, but with the arrival of Steam, the digital online marketplace for games, along with the Apple and Google app stores, ‘it doesn’t matter what scale the project is any more; there’s a whole different set of economics now that allows for games targeting a viable niche audience.’
Bateman has opted to crowdfund the development of Silk, the first independent game from International Hobo, as an experiment, not because he thinks the route is the future of the business – ‘The heyday of the Kickstarter-funded video game is already over’ – but because the anticipated audience for the game, a retro tribute to the 1984 game The Lords of Midnight, is a good fit with ‘the sort of audiences which fund Kickstarter games’. Ultimately, though, a version for the Nintendo Switch is planned for release via a conventional publishing route.
Chris Bateman’s session at Confluence, ‘A crash course in narrative design’ takes place at The Beach at 15:45. Buy tickets for the event here.
Emily Meets A Man Who Looks Like Hitler by Kate Ansell
At the bus stop, in the gloaming, a man approaches Emily. He is dressed as Hitler, at first glance, though in the longer run he turns out just to have a carefully clipped moustache. He asks Emily about the number twenty four. Emily says she knows nothing about the number twenty four but it probably does go to Trafalgar Square, yes. They all do.
Mainly she wants him to stop talking. She wants him to sit at the bus stop with his Nazi-inspired facial hair – which, by the way, is nothing more than socially acceptable pubic hair – she wants him to sit here and remain silent while they await their respective buses. Emily has already decided, she decided the instant he approached, that she would not get the same bus as him. No. She wants her own bus, her own space. As much room as she can. She certainly does not want to sit next to this man on the bus. She will not get the same bus as him.
There are saving graces. He does not seem prone to talking and she is pleased about that. Minutes pass and he says nothing. He continues to look like Hitler. No buses come. He offers her a polo mint but does not attempt to discuss it. Emily shakes her head. She does not want a polo mint. There is silence.
Why would you grow a moustache that makes you look like the despotic leader of a European state? This and other questions forge in Emily’s head. His fingernails are dirty too but she doesn’t entirely notice this, not yet. Dirty and bitten and stained with earth from where he’s been squashing daffodil bulbs into flowerpots for his sick, nearly dead, dying wife.
She does not notice this, Emily, she does not notice much. It is getting darker, she doesn’t care and, to be fair, that moustache is pretty distracting. He must know, she thinks, he must know he looks like Hitler. You don’t grow a moustache like that without knowing. For a brief, mad, second, she believes he is Hitler, that he might lead her home and gas her for looking a bit Jewish, although she is not Jewish, really. A distant aunt somewhere on her mother’s side used to visit a Synagogue occasionally, she’s been told. That’s pretty much as Jewish as it gets in Emily’s family – i.e. not Jewish at all.
It’s OK, though. He’s not going to gas her, this man. He’s just going to sit there and suck polo mints and wait for his bus, the number twenty four which, by the way, is not the bus Emily will be getting. No.
She’s pleased he knows nothing about her, not whether she’s Jewish or not, not even what bus she’ll be getting. For example, he doesn’t know her brother’s not called anyone in a week and a half and she fears, quite secretly, that he might be dead. He’s not dead, her brother never calls anyone, he’s just lazy, but he might be dead and she wouldn’t know if he was. That’s all. The man at the bus stop does not know this about her, nor anything else, and his ignorance makes her feel powerful.
She notices the dirt on his fingernails now, only because he lifts up his hand to scratch at a stray hair and she is momentarily distracted from the moustache itself and sees how filthy he is. She does not mind. She does not find it unattractive. She wonders, briefly, what he’s been doing with his fingers, those fingers, other than gassing Jews. She does not give it much thought; it is something she considers only in passing.
It occurs to Emily that he might be contemplating her own chipped nail varnish, the cracked, broken, worn out manicure from three weeks ago, the dry skin around her bleeding cuticles, the hands she couldn’t be bothered to sort out because it’s too much effort to go to a chemist. Because the man at the party put her index finger in his mouth and sucked very hard and said he liked the taste of her nail varnish. He said he liked the taste of lots of things, but mainly the nail varnish: alcohol and lacquer mixed with sweat and flesh and poison, he liked it a lot. And later, he bit into a patch of skin around her collar bone, clenched it between his teeth and pinched very hard, left a mark, a red mark, a small one.
The man who looks like Hitler does not care at all about the state of her fingernails, she knows that. She does not know he is thinking of his wife, hoping she is still alive and hoping she is dead too, trying not to remember the translucence of her skin and the sharp corners of her hip bones pressed against the cotton duvet cover he had dry cleaned because it was her favourite and it was worth it, hoping she will live to see the daffodils bloom and hoping it is quick and painless and he will get through it as peacefully as she will.
Emily sees him take another mint and press it against his teeth with his tongue, a sound like metal against china. Against her better judgement she looks over to him and wonders why he doesn’t just take a razor to his face. The moustache is mostly black but it does have at least three colours in it: some grey hairs, one ginger, a smattering of blond. It is a thing of wonder. It disgusts her. Mostly it disgusts her. The mint chinks against his teeth again.
Suddenly, he lifts his hand and digs some discoloured snot from his nostril with the corner of one sharp fingernail and Emily does not mind as much as she thought she might. These things are human, they are what happens, they are what everyone does when they think no one else is looking, they are what people do when it no longer matters what other people think. She wishes her bus would come now. She is bored of waiting. She does not want to look at his moustache anymore.
The Hitler man folds foil around his mints and places the packet in his back pocket. He does not look at Emily again. She wonders, briefly, incorrectly, if this will be one of those moments. A coincidence, a happenstance. A moment when two people meet quite by chance at a bus stop, on the platform of a train station, with no connection whatsoever, nor any reason to speak. And something happens, one of them drops their wallet, loses their ticket, shares a tube of sweets they cannot eat all by themselves and suddenly, unexpectedly, they lose themselves in each other’s souls and forge a connection so deep and intense that for years to come they will be thinking of one another almost constantly, his clear green eyes, her perfect fleshy lips, pining for each other while they fuck ungrateful spouses or scratch their cracked fingernails down the back of inadequate lovers. Wishing they had had the courage to speak but grateful that they did not, remembering always the fleeting, accidental touch they shared when one of them stands up to leave and turns around to apologise without really needing to.
Emily does not give it much thought. This is not one of those moments. A bus arrives. The number twenty four. The man with the Hitler moustache stands, boards the vehicle, pays his fare, does not look back. The bus pulls away. He is gone.
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If you are interested in showcasing one of your short stories on this site or reading more of Kate’s fiction please get in touch at info@bytethebook.com
One of our founding members, Caroline Goldsmith worked in-house for various publishers (from independents to one of the big five). Her official roles have taken her through sales, marketing, publicity and rights and contracts but experience within small organisations also meant that she worked closely with editorial and production, gaining a fully rounded view of the publishing process. She also ran an independent press, Red Button Publishing. Now she helps authors publish independently both with us and via www.goldsmithpublishingconsultancy.com .
Continuing our Byte Experts series here's some of her advice to authors on avoiding the pitfalls of self publishing:
A few months ago I received an email from a friend who had been looking for a publisher for his newly finished manuscript. He’d received an ‘offer’ from a publishing company and wanted to know what I thought about it. The first alarm bell was that I had never heard of the imprint. The second alarm bell was that they wanted my friend to stump up £5,000 for ‘production costs’. The third alarm bell was that this was the second ‘offer’ that my friend had received from one of these companies in less than a year. They were seeking him out.
There are publishing scams out there. But they are easy to spot if you know what you’re looking for. Here’s my list of warnings and some tips for navigating your way through the process:
1: Dodgy contracts: Some scam outfits will try and bamboozle writers with complicated contracts. The contract may include a rights grab - where the writer is tricked into signing away rights that the publisher has no intention of exploiting (like TV or audiobook). Other contracts may have no termination clauses so even if a publisher does not fulfil their promises the writer cannot take their work anywhere else or even publish it themselves. Signing a contract that is eventually revealed as a bad deal is like being trapped in an unhappy marriage for authors and you will face a legal fight to get your book back.
2: Are they aimed at writers or readers? Successful publishers will be trying to reach readers because they are the people that make bestsellers. Is the publisher sending you unsolicited emails? Are they targeting you through social media? If they are making more of an effort to get the attention of writers than readers you might want to question exactly who they are making money out of.
3: Google the company. Are they advertising on search engines for writers to submit to them? Ask yourself whether you would see a similar paid-for Google ad from a company like Penguin Random House. You wouldn’t. It’s also really easy to find reviews of companies that have already burned writers. Some reappear under new names after the first name is tainted by legal action or consumer complaints. Search for as much information as you can. Treat them with total suspicion until your search proves they have nothing to hide.
4: Fees: This is perhaps the biggest giveaway that an outfit isn’t on the level. Whether the charge is for reading your manuscript, editing and cover design or the cost of printing the book, an honest publisher will not ask an author to cover any of this cost. Fees can range from a few hundred pounds to thousands. The highest fee I’ve seen quoted has been £7,000 and it’s worth knowing that for less than this a writer can publish themselves quite professionally on print-on-demand platforms, using freelancers and retain full rights to their own work.
I hope these hints help you navigate your way through the cowboys. It’s worth bearing in mind that there are way more good guys out there than bad. And that, with careful planning and budgeting you can publish yourself independently for far less than £7K. There’s a wealth of freelancers like myself on the Byte the Book Directory offering a friendly and honest service on anything from editing to cover design to ebook formatting. So, if in doubt, don’t sign on that dotted line just yet.
Good luck!
Caroline can be contacted via www.goldsmithpublishingconsultancy.com or on Twitter via @GoldCaro
The Consumer by Sarah Tinsley
The bus lurched, full of leaning bodies. Each of them clutched handbags, trollies, rucksacks, canvas totes with meaningful slogans folded into careful squares. All were waiting to be filled. The emptiness of them leached into the spaces between the creaking floor and the sharp snap of the electronic doors. It reeked of a lack of things, of desire.
At her destination, the bus vomited them onto the grey pavement. Hard concrete underfoot, huge signs shouting from windows. All their promises, just for her. Pushing forward, a stray arm jerked against her elbow, spinning her backwards. A foot pressed onto her exposed toes – red sandals, in the sale, last month. Buffeted by the greed of others, she pressed forward, intent on prizes.
Her phone guided her to the best places. Took her hand and pointed each one out with a red circle, to mark its importance. Here you could expand the sad flop of your carrier bags with the most for the least money. Here you could take one delicious item and have the other, thrust in your sack, at no extra cost. Here you could be painted and primped, with free samples. Here you could sink your teeth into raw fish flesh for a third of the normal price.
Hours spent dragging other people’s food over a barcode scanner. Mopping up the spilled pineapple juice in aisle seven. Smiling at the groaning parents with their large boxes of cereal. Pinning the laminated badge over her shirt-enclosed breast. This was her reward.
Inside the first swollen department store, bargains dripped from the walls. Scavengers looted the racks, garments falling to the floor, trampled under shoes bought two weeks ago, ready to be replaced. In the distance the electronics beckoned, recognisable by their black sheen and the clump of bodies seething around them.
That could wait. A gaudy dress squawked at her from its hanger. But others had heard its call. Applying her elbow to the nearest set of ribs, she clambered over a heap of discarded fabric, perhaps a stray arm buried under there, and clawed it from the hanger. Such a bright blue. And that material, the hang of it. Hot For This Season, and definitely suitable to Transform From Office To A Night Out. She clutched it close, breathing in its newness.
But there was a jacket, too. Stripes to Flatter Your Figure. This would be a harder task. Another had it already in her grasping fingers. Try the polite approach, that might work. She reached over, smiled, scraped her fingernails up the exposed skin of the woman’s forearm. The grip eased just enough for her to release it into her care. Perfect.
All it needed was some jewellery. A Statement Piece. She would be one of those people admired in the street. Perhaps those reporters would see her, put her between those train-flicked pages, a beacon of fashion to the dowdy.
Scattered finery littered the floor. Necklaces, bent bracelets, it was like walking over a dragon’s hoard. What she needed was gold, something to glint and catch the light. Her magpie eyes fell on something, half-submerged on a hook with nothing but dull wooden beads. A chunky chain, adorned with fake-diamond lumps. It would sparkle and clamour at her wrist. But there was only one left.
She watched as another swooped in. Lacquered nails stretched around the stolen item. The usurper turned, headed for the tills. She would have to act fast.
Snatching a pair of earrings from the REDUCED section, she lunged forward, tripping, falling to her knees. In one movement she drove the studs into the woman’s calf, just above the line of the slingback. A trickle of blood could just be seen through the 20-denier tights.
With a shout, the treasure fell to the floor. She scooped it up, dodging around the hair accessories display to avoid recriminations. Her prize was clutched close to her chest. A whole outfit already, after only thirty minutes of shopping time. Imagine what she could achieve in a whole day.
Her key scraped in the lock. Heaving her body up the stairs, she collapsed on the sofa in a satisfied lump. Bags were lined up each arm, two strapped over her back, a huge box clutched between her hands. As she leaned forward to place it on the coffee table she winced, the twinge in her back jarring from the extra weight and the miles walked – she hadn’t been able to fit on the bus.
She peeled the packaging off the black hulk – Active Shutter 3D, LED 720p, High Contrast Ratio, Internet Connected HDTV. Her reflection was muted in the 50” display. The smudge of a bruise on her cheek, the red ribbon of blood trickling down from her split lip. She let the bags slide onto the floor, unstrapped the ones around her shoulders, a jab in her side from the cracked rib.
Now she could try her purchases on. Retreating to the bathroom, she shaved, plucked, moisturised, fragranced, painted with colour – especially over the black eye – styled, sprayed, and froze herself in the single click of a glorious selfie. A perfect summary of herself, sat amongst the debris of her purchases in the beautiful peacock dress.
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If you're a member of Byte The Book and interested in entering our monthly short short story competition and have your story featured on our site and also get a mention in our newsletter please do get in touch at info@bytethebook.com.
The closing date for our December showcase is 30th December 2018. Please send your entry to info@bytethebook.com and mark it December Byte Shorts. Stories should be no longer than 1,500 words (although shorter is preferred).
Due to the volume of entries we can't give feedback on all entries.
