About once a month I receive an excited press release about a new "interactive" or "immersive" book – a multimedia thing to be experienced on an electronic device – and every single one claims to be the FIRST INTERACTIVE BOOK EVER.
I have been getting these, with the same claim, for about a dozen years now. I cannot think of a single one that has become successful. I cannot think of one that I have actually wanted to read.
They usually contain some kind of sci-fi or fantasy story, and music and video that pops up on your screen as you read. Sometimes alternate storylines can be followed. This is always supposed to represent an entirely new paradigm of entertainment and a vastly different experience from simply reading or watching TV or playing a game. These projects do not come, on the whole, from publishing houses: they come from individual creators or teams.
In other words, they are forms of self-publishing. Frequently, they come from people whose background is the world of technology or advertising rather than the world of art. Why do they, I wonder, persist in pursuing this old-fashioned, unpopular and unwieldy idea?
I'm going to pick, unkindly, on a new one of these, simply because it has just landed in my inbox and it is a perfect exemplar of the strange deceptions of all these projects.
It is an electronic novel from Britain called The Frequency Effect, just launched this week. It is a speculative fiction text, accompanied by the music videos of an indie band, plus links to websites of fictitious companies featured in the novel, and a launch party in London with virtual-reality experiences. The novel will eventually be published in paper form. The author's name, James Stark, is a pseudonym.
It is possibly "content marketing" for something. It is perhaps a student project. The contributors' page mentions "creatives," a term from advertising, not from publishing or art.
Why am I being so mean about such an elaborate and inventive virtual world? Because the first chapter of the novel is up on the website. And the first paragraph of the first chapter is this: "Writhing around slowly with an unconscious economy of movement, Ben began to surface. Firing up slowly and with an empowering lethargy, his mind readied. Sluggish and clogged, syncing with the surroundings, subconscious turned to conscious with a restless tension."
Oy. Hard to know where to start editing with a text like that. You might first underline "unconscious economy of movement" with a question mark to one side, and then go on to add double question marks beside "empowering lethargy." But any editor would realize quickly, as the grammatical errors and the spelling mistakes add up, that the text is not worth editing; that, in fact, the writer must be sent to some beginning writing class first. That this whole project is not in fact about a book.
But we in the business sadly know by now that the artistry of a writer is not what brought a team of web designers and marketers and "innovators" together.
I've been party to these conversations of visionaries, heard their pitches. They often go like this: We have a great idea for a promotion that involves new technology X. People can go online and simultaneously vertically integrally cross-platformize their brand consciousness whatever.
We have this idea that it would take the form of a sci-fi novel. Anyone know anyone who can write a novel? How about Jimmy? He's into that. And he'd probably do it for free to get people to read it. And before you know it Jimmy has a contract to produce 300 screens – or three kilos, or however you want to measure it – of "content." Because we all know you have to have content, too.
Alternatively, these projects originate with Jimmy himself. He cannot find a publisher for his speculative fiction novel, because it is terrible. He decides to market it himself, because everyone knows that marketing is everything and all you need is a good business plan to make a self-published novel lucrative.
So he comes up with this brilliant circa 2002 idea of the interactive Web novel with music and links to a fictitious word and he invests heavily in its design. I get the press release and I can tell that the person doing the marketing and the person who has written the story and the company supporting it are all actually avatars of the same person and I am annoyed and (normally) I ignore it.
Why did these things never take off in 2002, though? Does no one remember how excited we were at the birth of the Web about the possibilities for "interactive" storytelling, with dozens of links that you could follow on every page and a story you could create yourself?
It turns out people don't want to create stories themselves. They want others to tell them stories. And they want the story itself to be immersive – they want the writing to be punchy and powerful and the story to be gripping enough without pictures or a soundtrack.
The best novels are by definition immersive. And if people want to watch a movie, it turns out, they watch a movie. If they want to play a video game they play a video game. The crossovers are so rare as to be exceptional.
The reason that writers keep trying to flog the same crippled marketing scheme for an unreadable novel is that they have – we have all – been taught that conventional publishing is dead and we must find innovative ways to self-publish and self-promote, and that promotion is just as important as quality. This is exactly why conventional publishing is not dead, though: because it has editors who choose what is good before they try to market it.
And the best art is generally not that which is created in the marketing of something else .