Inside
BookViewCafe.com
by
Sue Lange
My life since joining
BookViewCafe.com has been, well, non-existent. Of course I exaggerate. I’m
still breathing. I have a pulse. I am still here. But sheesh,
talk about hectic. I’ve always had too much to do and too many ideas to try,
but life with Book View Café (BVC) is over the top busy.
It all started with the SF-FFW
bunch. This Yahoo group consists of published science fiction and fantasy
authors of the female persuasion. I don’t know who started it or when, but by
the time I jumped on board it was a happy, thriving community. SF-FFW is
helpful with the business side of publishing, not how to get published, but
what to do once you are. The membership includes a heady list of who’s who in
the genre. Not sure how I got there, but there I was, keeping my mouth shut and
picking up nuggets of information from the big girls.
One day Sarah Zettel
got to talking about Cory Doctorow’s philosophy of giving away a portion of
your work in e-form via the Internet. The thinking being you’d boost awareness
of your work and subsequently increase your readership. Apparently lots of
authors were starting to do this and their hardcopy sales were skyrocketing
into six figures.
As happens on the Internet, ideas
and panic were spreading rapidly. We’d all been hearing about these radical new
models that would be arising from the ashes of the soon-to-be-collapsing
publishing empire. We were frightened and thought we’d better jump on the new
paradigm before it became the old paradigm and pretty much useless. We didn’t
know how to go about it, but we wanted on that wagon.
Fortunately, Sarah figured it
out. She’s an amazing woman, Sarah Zettel is. First
she whipped a bunch of us (21 of us, Ursula K. Le Guin
included, to be exact) into signing up. Then she went in search of a programmer
to put together a site for us to explore this new and rapidly aging paradigm.
Somewhere along the way, and
here’s the nutty part, she got me to agree to do PR. I think at one point I
might have grumpily mumbled something about the project not being worth two
hoots if we didn’t have a radical marketing machine. She picked up on my
mutterings and immediately volunteered me to invent the machine.
Sarah is not a dragon lady who
beats her subjects into submission. She is also not Vanna
White, coquettish and getting things done by sheer looks alone. She is neither
politically aggressive Hilary nor sexily provocative Linda Carter. She might be
Wonder Woman, though, the way she ropes people in. All I know is that she’s
gotten a bunch of finicky, ego-centric, crabby, and self-doubting keyboard
peckers (i.e. writers) to agree to not only give away a ton of work without
immediate compensation, but to also participate tirelessly in all types of
promotional activities.
In addition to caring for and
feeding our website, BVC members’ online efforts include group chats, Internet
SF cons, Twitter fic contests, and any oddball
Internet experience that comes down the pike. Sarah also prods us into getting
together out in the real world at cons and so forth to promote our site, our
projects, and ourselves.
Think about that. Nowhere in the
civilized world do writers get together to do anything besides get drunk and
complain about their publishers, yet here we are enthusiastically scheduling
ourselves for group stuff.
Since Sarah’s leadership style
does not include coercion, bribery, berating, or nagging, how does she get us
to do so much? I think her secret is that she’s doing twice as much work as
anyone else. And she happily takes the blame when things go awry, like when the
site crashes or goes wonky. Whatever it is, her formula is working because
she’s gotten us all to do a whole lot of work for our little thing,
BookViewCafe.com.
It’s been hectic and sometimes
even traumatic, but it’s also been exhilarating. We received a lot of attention
right from the starting gate and have been growing since then. Our blog gets
around 7000 hits a month. That’s a lot of people to keep happy with writerly (i.e. witty in a profound way) mutterings. Many,
many sites consist of a blog and a blog only. Our blog is a sideshow. An
afterthought. In spite of its second class citizenshipness
in the world of BVC, our blog hosts at least one, and as many as three, new
posts a day.
When we opened shop in November
of last year, we were already a couple of months behind schedule. Not really
surprising because we had a huge hurdle just in the initial site design. Erica,
our programmer had to take an out of the box software package and turn it into
our “box.” I won’t bore you with the details mostly because I’m not privy to
them. Suffice it to say our site had to have the capability for each author to
put up new stuff on a regular basis, prescheduled for the most part, but also
live immediately if the author preferred it that way. It had to have several
different types of user registrations. It had to have a blog, a private forum,
separate sections for each author, and a front page accessible to all. Each
author’s section had to have multiple functionalities based on what the authors
wanted to do with their space. Most fiction on the site is free, but some
really good stuff is for sale. The site had to have extremely complicated
capabilities, but because authors are simple people, it had to be simple to
use.
These types of things are not
available for cheap and we have no budget. To get the thing started, we all
chipped in a small amount of money to pay for the site and Erica did the rest.
Needless to say our project is evolving as we speak. We continue to find things
to improve the site, and as the Internet evolves we remain in our
panic-stricken mode with Erica scrambling to keep us up to date and on top of
the game.
In addition to the underlying
genius-power Erica provides, the strength of our project lies in our numbers as
well as the collective talents of those numbers. Each of us knows something
about some area of web publishing or promotion.
We’ve got experts who know
Internet protocol lingo and can interpret for the rest of us. We have editors
for our newsletter and production people to do the layout. We have an artist
who works well with images and text on the web. She makes sure our pages are
pretty and have a consistent look. Not an easy thing to do considering we’re
all playing around with our offerings, experimenting and tweaking behind her
back.
We have our social media queens
who make sure our blog, Twitter, and Facebook
accounts are fed regularly.
We’ll be hosting podcasts soon;
we’ve just volunteered one of our members to start recording interviews. She’ll
be starting up her duties in the near future. Stay tuned.
Other members cover the ad hoc
bases: designing flyers, watching the Internet for trends and tools, booking
members at cons and events, or just general organizing and cheering. Cheering
is a big part of what makes us work. Can’t say enough about the cheering.
And then there are those of us
that are helping the BVC name by simply being fabulous. Some of us get on the
NY Times bestseller list. Some of us win Nebulas and other awards.
So that leaves me. My job is to
spread the BVC gospel and write tell-alls like this piece for Arthur. Assigning
me the job of PR whip may be the one mistake Sarah has made in her short and
checkered BVC career. I don’t mind spreading the gospel, especially about
things I truly believe in, but I just can’t help telling the truth.
And the truth is, this is a wild
and hairy venture, but also very time consuming. No surprise there. Everything
that works on the Internet is time-consuming as we’re all hustling to figure it
out. And there is not always a big payback. Sure some people somewhere make a
living blogging, but not many. Most everything on the Internet is free. It’s
real hard to get people to pay for anything.
But we’re learning. We’ve just
started offering for pay content. And Brenda Clough reports that she has made
enough money to buy a crab cake lunch. Her goal is the lobster dinner. That’s
her benchmark for when BVC has become a viable venture for her.
I’m not sure what my benchmark
is. I don’t have any premium content so I don’t know how to measure my success.
A certain number of Twitter followers? An increase in sales of my print books?
Who knows. I’m not even sure I care at this point. After spending ten or so
years trying to figure out how the Internet will bring in readers if I “just
have a presence there,” it is nice to work on an entity that does in fact do
that for me.
And it’s only been six months.
Think what a year will bring.
Drop by and sign up for the
newsletter. Check out our blog and join in the next time you see us at a con or
hosting a chat. And don’t hesitate to tell us what you like or don’t like about
BVC. Erica is breathlessly waiting for her next big redesign assignment.