We might think we're quite cool at Year Zero but The Book View Cafe is not just the best known writers' collective on the planet, it's fast approaching Sub Zero. So I was absolutely stoked when Sue Lange agreed to speak to me about the SF collective that's causing such a stir.
You can find Sue Lange at the Book View Cafe (with links to ebooks and free stuff) as well as on her personal webpage and blog.
Her two novels, Tritcheon Hash, and We, Robots are availble from Amazon
Here's what Sue had to say:
1. How do you decide on a name when there are so many of you? How did BVC come about as a name?
Funny you should ask. The name was, in fact, the very first thing we haggled over. We started out as "Online Bookshelf." We decided it was too boring. Then we moved on to "Reads" something or other. Then we had everybody list possibilities. We sifted through probably a hundred names. We had arguments over what it was we wanted to get across. We were an all-girl entity back then and the only thing we agreed on immediately was that we didn't want the site to be pink and girly so we had to come up with something gender generic. We decided we wanted to go with neutral colors for the site and coffee motifs go well with that. Coffee and books go together almost as well as coffee and cigarets so everything came together quickly once somebody mentioned caffeine.
2. Imagine BVC was a real cafe. Tell me about the decor
It's relaxing, yet moody. A great place to intellectualize or veg out. You stop in for a cappuchino and stay for a while. Stay all night, hell, we don't care. Patrons sit in beat up leather sofas interspersed with airport furniture. We're very eclectic and casual in our taste. Every sofa has a stack of well worn magazines with titles running the gamut from The Economist to Interview to Bride's to Scientific American. Every table has a set-up that includes stir sticks, a paper napkin dispenser, stack of book marks, and used Kindle Oberons. The ones in the back include Turkish hashpipe hookahs. Our patrons tend to be health nuts so the pipes rarely get used, but they're there if you need them.
The floor is a black and white checkerboard overlain with huge Keith Haring figures.
The walls are lined with bookshelves. Unabridged dictionaries lay open on stands here and there about the room for that atavistic feel. Free Wifi fills the air as does music from ACDC played at barely perceptible levels. We don't like to cover the sound of the steam from the machines.
The patrons are the best decor any cafe could wish for. They are all the characters in the books we write: aliens, tortured souls, lumbering giants, homunculi, succubi, vampires, bats, rats, cats, unfaithful spouses, damaged adults, disaffected teens, losers, winners, sidewinders, and rascals. Once in a while a protagonist shows up. That's when ACDC gets cranked to full vol.
3. Were you always 100% clear on where you wanted to take BVC or have you found yourselves changing direction as you went?
We have changed but we're also pretty much on track. We evaluate where we are every six months. Actually I think we do that moment to moment, but we do take a vote every six months. on whether or not we want to keep going. When we started we wanted to see if we could figure out what the big deal with Internet publishing and ebooks was. We mostly wanted to figure out how to get our out of print stuff back into the public's hands. After we started growing and saw that we could in fact attract readers to our site and our work, we started to talk about charging money. That was a few months ago. Once we saw that people would actually pay for our work, we started an actual press: Book View Press. We're now almost at the point of taking ourselves seriously. In other words we're wondering about legalities. We keep hoping to stave that off as long as possible, but we're starting to become an Entity, so there you go.
4. You're best known, I guess, for SF but on your site you have a wide variety of genres. How do you think of yourselves?
Each one of us thinks of us in terms of how they use the site, but collectively I think we do believe we're a part of the science fiction community. SF includes fantasy and even horror sometimes so that right there includes three genres. But we do want to branch out more. We're especially trying to come up with ways to serve the romance community. Apparently romance readers are the biggest consumers of ebooks. We have some romance, but I think we're going to try and get some more on the site.
5. The question I most want to ask, from my experiences of running a website for a collective of authors who seem to go collectively apathetic or hyperactive, is do you have a roster for posting?
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Do you mean a schedule? Yes, we do and we are very strict with it. Each author is assigned a day to post fiction and that's their day. We hope each author has something once a week. It's not a requirement, but it's something we look for. The blog is also scheduled. Usually a member blogs on the same day they post fiction but it's not a requirement.
6. How does your position within the BVC fit with the rest of your writing life?
My position is in media relations and it is very time consuming. Internet promotion can easily get out of hand. There are so many places to spend time. So much interesting stuff to become a part of. I have enough to do as an author, now I'm looking out for BVC. And opportunities for the collective are bigger and more interesting than for me as a writer so I tend to have more fun promoting BVC than my little old self. I make sure I write fiction at least an hour a day just for myself, but that's not really enough. So many ideas, so little time. And with multimedia, I want to try so many things but formatting sound files, video files, coordinating real life activities, it all takes so much time. I get the feeling I'm getting a lot done but it's probably all crappy. At least I'm having fun!
7. To what extent are you separate individuals who share a common passion for the dircet contact with treaders the internet brings, and to what extent do youwork together - albeit in your own ways - on common projects and questions? For example, when you put your anthologies together, do you find yourselves each contributing a story or do you talk and find that common themes of interest emerge that you explore as a group?
Each member has a different experience with BVC. Some are with us just to take advantage of the opportunities, but most of us contribute to the running of the joint in some way or another. And the various projects have different personnel working on them. The science fiction anthology probably wouldn't have any fantasy-only authors and vice versa. We do stuff out in the Internet too, like our twitter fic contests. Four or five us run a contest. The next contest might be a different set of four or five. Common interests do emerge, projects might come out of that. Once a project has run its course, though, we move on to the next thing, the next group of writers, the next promo opportunity.
8. Tell me about the decision to add an author blog.
That was with us from the beginning I believe. I don't remember a time when we didn't have that. Blogs were all the rage at the time. I guess they still are. We didn't want to have just a blog, even though our site is a bit blog-like what with the new content every day. But the blog was for audience participation because the site doesn't accommodate that.
9. What is the mix of back catalogue and new material on the site?
Most of it is back catalogue. However, one reason BVC exists is for the authors to be able to experiment with the new and weird. So experimental work does exist. I put my serialized novel, The Textile Planet, up because I wanted to try some stuff with multimedia. Nancy Jane Moore wanted to experiment with flash fiction. Almost all her stuff at the site is new and exclusive to BVC. Since we started Book View Press we've talked more about new titles. Our first brand new full length book will be launched next week. It's a steampunk anthology with about ten of us contributing stories to a shared world. It's called The Shadow Conspiracy: Tales from the Age of Steam.
10. What do you think a group like this gives readers that they weren't getting already?
We give readers that haven't read our out-of-print material a chance to do so. For instance, Vonda's "Dreamsnake" was a Hugo and Nebula award-winning book. That should still be available to the public but before BVC it wasn't. Now it is. Also we give readers a chance to sample our members' work for free. Each one of us has some free fiction at the site. And we're all previously published in the print world so it's not just a bag of rags at the site.
11. What do your agents/publishers REALLY think of you doing this?
I don't think any of the publishers are against us. We, as the BVC entity, don't have formal relationships with any of them, but none of the authors have reported any negativity on the part of their publishers or agents. Often when the group has a question about what we should be doing about this or that, one of us will contact his or her agent for advice. In the upheaving publishing industry, everyone is trying to figure this out. No one wants to be compared to the recording industry which seems to have missed out on new and possibly lucrative distribution channels. I think they're pushing for us, hoping we'll figure something out so they can then figure out how they'll fit into the picture. The publishers may be laughing at us for all I know, but they certainly haven't sent any negative vibes our way.
12. I want to ask somethig about the future of digital publishing but there are so many questions, most of which are hackneyed or trite, so how about: if there's a question you thinkpeople should be asking about ebooks but aren't, what is it?
When will the price of e-readers come down?
There's a larger question I wonder about too. What will happen with the supposed loss of gatekeepers and the subsequent flood of non-professional (i.e. unedited) writing available all over the place. Will things get sorted out and some other gatekeeping system be put in place so writers will have to eventually develop a polished approach before they get their stuff out there? I guess I'm really asking: what's going to happen with quality in writing?
Showing posts with label collective. Show all posts
Showing posts with label collective. Show all posts
Thursday, 10 December 2009
Saturday, 29 August 2009
Year Zero is here: So What?
Next Tuesday, the first three books from the Year Zero Writers collective will hit the world with a vengeance. The three of us writers are obviously excited - we finally get to see if anyone's interested in our books. The other 19 members of Year Zero Writers are pretty excited. If we do well, then they're next. And there are a few writers sitting on the periphery thinking about whether to join us or not (and a couple I'm desperately hoping to persuade to join in). They'll be watching with more than passing interest.But does what we're doing actually matter to anyone else, and why? Well, we're not the first people to self-publish, and we're not the first people to have formed a collective, so I suppose you could say we join the miasma of projects deemed interesting if they poke their noses above the parapets but not until then.
So let me try and explain, in the course of a couple of hundred words, why you should care about whether we succeed 
or fail.
or fail.Writers
The simple reason why our success or failure matters to writers is this: you can learn from what we do right - and what we do wrong. We have set out a clear manifesto, and a clear set of conditions explaining what we are and are not. We are committed to trying a wide range of strategies to promote our work (we are a marketing collective, not a publishing collective). We set out with a clear expectation of what we would like to achieve.
And we intend to report back openly on what works, and what doesn't work. On September 1st, I will issue a projection for my own book, Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, and on the first of every month thereafter I will issue an interim report explaining what's happened over the preceding month, giving figures for sales and downloads, and providing a commentary and analysis.
Perhaps most important of all, if our works gain the commercial and critical success we believe they deserve, we may do something to break down the barriers that exist amongst the gatekeepers of the book world - the reviewers. And tehnext tmie they are approached with a self-published book, they might look before saying no. That matters to all writers, self-published or not (because if we can do it, we will raise the question in many writers' minds: why do we need a publisher?).
Readers
What we're doing matter to readers deeply for a number of reasons - and these are the real reasons we set up the collective.
1. We're new authors, writing quality literary fiction. These are books you will not find through mainstream publishers, because they are simply not a viable commercial proposition. I prposed one way the industry could make them viable last week. E-BOOK ONLY CONTRACTS FOR NEW WRITERS. Whether the industry adopts this model remains to be seen. As it stands, there is no room for books like ours, and no room for talent to be nurtured without pressure for sales. Books like ours would be lost without collectives like this.
2. We are NOT self-publishing because our books aren't good enough for the mainstream. We want our books to look and feel like something you would be proud to pick up in a bookstore. Well-designed, and free of the vast quantities of typos that dog many self-published books. We are self-publishing because that's the only way to get our books into print and into your hands. An agent told me, after reading Songs... that she loved the book, and would love to represent me, but it just wasn't enough of a "big splash" book for a new writer. We don't want to write "big splash" books. we want to write quality, gentle, beautiful, challenging, original books, and we believe readers want to have the option of reading them. If we succeed, then we will have proved to readers they don't have to go to Waterstone's or teh Booker longlist the next time they want a quality read.
3. We fundamentally believe in giving our work away in electronic format for free. We believe it makes business sense, because we will gain fans who will pay for our books. And we believe it gives readers the opportunity to read and decide without having to commit their money to somthing they have no idea about. We took the decision to produce an anthology of writing by 13 of our members, Brief Objects of Beauty and despair, which is, and always will be, free. I am releasing the whole of my novel for free. We've met a lot of resistance to the idea from people who say it devalues culture, and that free means rubbish, but we believe the chance to sample new writers' work for free is fundamental to giving readers choice.
The wider public
There's a bigger reason why our success or failure matters. I've blogged about culture and social exclusion before. Of course we're not going to change the world, and of course our success or failure won't see the perpetuation or the end of vast sectors of our population having their voices silenced by the culture industry. But every time something outside of the mainstream succeeds - in showing that it has a voice worthy of being heard; a product for whihc people are prepared to pay; means of getting the message out there that are not in themselves exclusive - the general assumption that culture is to be found only through recognised channels is undermined a little more. And it becomes a little easier for the next voices who come along to be heard.
So now it's up to you. We launch on Tuesday. I'll put my money where my mouth is with some predictions - and give you a little intro to each book. If you can't wait, you can buy them now:
Glimpses of a Floating World (£8.38)
Benny Platonov (£15.27)
Or if you want to read them over the bank holiday, you can download them in all e-book formats:
Monday, 22 June 2009
Who are Year Zero?
There are 20 of us, ranging from the shy who work behind the scenes for the time being to the media floosies amongst us like Oli and I. I think the number we have is about right for what we’re doing, and the way we work, which is as democratic as possible without grinding to a total standstill. Given that at any one time half of us will be busy, any fewer and nothing would ever get done (and we wouldn’t have the range of skills to draw on). Given that there will always be differences of opinion, any more and, er, nothing would ever get done.
So how did we end up with us? Well, there are two questions there. How did we end up with anyone? And how come it’s us 20 not another 20? And the most important thing, given this isn’t just a piece of navel-gazing but actually intended to be of some use if you decide you’d like to do something similar, is how should you go about choosing the members of your collective?
So let’s start with us. Well, as with 99% of these things, most of it just sort of fell into place a bit chaotically. So if you’re reading this for tips you’re already well ahead of where we were! At the end of 2008 a number of us on a couple of my favourite online writing sites, Harper Collins’ Authonomy, and the critiquing group The Book Shed, started talking about the future of publishing, and the possibilities new technology offered for outflanking the established industry (the exact ins and outs are another post altogether), and we realised there was a great chance for a group of niche-focused, motivated writers with some great books. Fortunately, because I was the gobbiest, I got let off the last of these requirements.
So when, in January, I announced I was going to start a collective, there was a preformed constituency to choose from, consisting of all of us who’d been talking. I seriously doubt, if any of us had simply announced we were starting something from scratch and begun approaching people, we’d have got anywhere fast. As with everything in the creative world, these things are built on relationships. And that’s a good thing, especially if you’re doing it online, because you’ve got to be absolutely sure you’re getting on board with the right people.
Most of our membership came by that route. But there were a couple of places left to fill, which meant approaching people. So how on earth do you decide whom to approach? Well, the obvious disqualifier is forum behaviour. I think I can genuinely say this didn’t affect us. Possibly because it was back in what now seem the halcyon days of beautifully-etiquetted threads, possibly because I’m a gullible twit, I didn’t ever think, “Ooh, I want their book, but no, they’re a prize plonker.” It’s certainly the main bit of advice I’d give, though. I’d never deal with someone I’d witnessed trolling or flaming or partaking in any other jargonese metaphor. No matter how good their book. It’s something I say a lot on forums when people moan and moan about not getting an agent. If I were an agent looking through the forums, that alone would rule out working with them. And if I were an agent – or someone starting a collective – I WOULD look.
So how did we decide? Well, it was quite simple. First off, like any agent or publisher, we wanted books that had a voice. Most important of all for a collective, though, is that you all fit quite a tight niche. The reasoning’s simple. The advantage of a collective is that you’ve got lots of people to work targeting the same market any one of you would have to reach on your own. You’re divvying up the chores, and building a brand people in that market can come to trust. As soon as you have books that push the limit of the niche, you’re expanding the workload not focusing it. And whilst there will obviously be books you like more than others in an imprint, in order to create brand loyalty you have to consistently hit the same buttons, so people know what kind of read they’re in for.
We already hand some brand identity because we had – if not at that stage a manifesto – a set of rallying principles: we were going to deliver books as the authors wanted them to appear, unedited to fit preconceptions of taste and market. We were, essentially, a bit anarchic and 100% indie. Which created its own problems – if you’re not dictating content, how do you ensure brand identity?
What actually emerged from some soul-searching was that we were all doing the same kind of thing for the same kind of people. We were writing slightly edgy contemporary literary fiction (the kind of book the publishing industry isn’t geared up to deal with because the market is just a bit too small), and we were writing it for an urban indie audience – the kind of book you’d see people reading while they sat on Camden Lock smoking; the kind of book people would take out of the back pocket of their skinnies on the Tube.
The authors we approached had to be the ones who wrote this kind of thing.
The reaction, at both stages, was mixed. Which was a good thing because we didn’t end up with 100 people in the group. But a bad thing because we missed out on a couple of the books we really wanted. The reason why was usually – and completely understandably – the same. People either wanted to see how we got on before committing. Or they wanted to exhaust other avenues first. So where does that leave us with regard to them? Well, my personal approach is the door’s always open. The right books, written by lovely people, are always welcome. Yes, I have a list. There are between 10 and 20 names on it. I hope for their sake they don’t come to us, because that would mean they’ve made it. But I hope for our sake they do.
We’re not taking on new people at the moment (the exceptions being those on “the list”) partly because we’ve been through a huge amount together and – despite being based in the UK, USA, Hong Kong, Spain, Greece, Finland, and France – have knitted into an incredibly strong group. Now is the wrong time to unbalance that and risk losing focus. It wouldn’t be fair on newcomers either. Anyone joining up this close to a major release would have to just accept a whole lot of things we’ve agonised over and just aren’t up for negotiation any more.
But once the first books are out there and, I hope, flourishing, that’ll change. Our membership isn’t cast in stone. People are free to leave, and take their book with them, at any time. We are the antithesis of a record label. We are all self-publishers. We have no financial or intellectual property ties to each other. We can come and go as we please. We’ve made sure to make this freedom of movement clear in our Articles of Association.
How do I see us evolving? Well, people will come and go, and I imagine in 10 years we will look very different. I don’t even know if there will be a core membership. But Year Zero will be the same, and its strength will be the same – a commitment to giving readers the very best contemporary fiction, straight from the author’s keyboard; a commitment to building the trust and respect between writers and their readers.
So how did we end up with us? Well, there are two questions there. How did we end up with anyone? And how come it’s us 20 not another 20? And the most important thing, given this isn’t just a piece of navel-gazing but actually intended to be of some use if you decide you’d like to do something similar, is how should you go about choosing the members of your collective?
So let’s start with us. Well, as with 99% of these things, most of it just sort of fell into place a bit chaotically. So if you’re reading this for tips you’re already well ahead of where we were! At the end of 2008 a number of us on a couple of my favourite online writing sites, Harper Collins’ Authonomy, and the critiquing group The Book Shed, started talking about the future of publishing, and the possibilities new technology offered for outflanking the established industry (the exact ins and outs are another post altogether), and we realised there was a great chance for a group of niche-focused, motivated writers with some great books. Fortunately, because I was the gobbiest, I got let off the last of these requirements.
So when, in January, I announced I was going to start a collective, there was a preformed constituency to choose from, consisting of all of us who’d been talking. I seriously doubt, if any of us had simply announced we were starting something from scratch and begun approaching people, we’d have got anywhere fast. As with everything in the creative world, these things are built on relationships. And that’s a good thing, especially if you’re doing it online, because you’ve got to be absolutely sure you’re getting on board with the right people.
Most of our membership came by that route. But there were a couple of places left to fill, which meant approaching people. So how on earth do you decide whom to approach? Well, the obvious disqualifier is forum behaviour. I think I can genuinely say this didn’t affect us. Possibly because it was back in what now seem the halcyon days of beautifully-etiquetted threads, possibly because I’m a gullible twit, I didn’t ever think, “Ooh, I want their book, but no, they’re a prize plonker.” It’s certainly the main bit of advice I’d give, though. I’d never deal with someone I’d witnessed trolling or flaming or partaking in any other jargonese metaphor. No matter how good their book. It’s something I say a lot on forums when people moan and moan about not getting an agent. If I were an agent looking through the forums, that alone would rule out working with them. And if I were an agent – or someone starting a collective – I WOULD look.
So how did we decide? Well, it was quite simple. First off, like any agent or publisher, we wanted books that had a voice. Most important of all for a collective, though, is that you all fit quite a tight niche. The reasoning’s simple. The advantage of a collective is that you’ve got lots of people to work targeting the same market any one of you would have to reach on your own. You’re divvying up the chores, and building a brand people in that market can come to trust. As soon as you have books that push the limit of the niche, you’re expanding the workload not focusing it. And whilst there will obviously be books you like more than others in an imprint, in order to create brand loyalty you have to consistently hit the same buttons, so people know what kind of read they’re in for.
We already hand some brand identity because we had – if not at that stage a manifesto – a set of rallying principles: we were going to deliver books as the authors wanted them to appear, unedited to fit preconceptions of taste and market. We were, essentially, a bit anarchic and 100% indie. Which created its own problems – if you’re not dictating content, how do you ensure brand identity?
What actually emerged from some soul-searching was that we were all doing the same kind of thing for the same kind of people. We were writing slightly edgy contemporary literary fiction (the kind of book the publishing industry isn’t geared up to deal with because the market is just a bit too small), and we were writing it for an urban indie audience – the kind of book you’d see people reading while they sat on Camden Lock smoking; the kind of book people would take out of the back pocket of their skinnies on the Tube.
The authors we approached had to be the ones who wrote this kind of thing.
The reaction, at both stages, was mixed. Which was a good thing because we didn’t end up with 100 people in the group. But a bad thing because we missed out on a couple of the books we really wanted. The reason why was usually – and completely understandably – the same. People either wanted to see how we got on before committing. Or they wanted to exhaust other avenues first. So where does that leave us with regard to them? Well, my personal approach is the door’s always open. The right books, written by lovely people, are always welcome. Yes, I have a list. There are between 10 and 20 names on it. I hope for their sake they don’t come to us, because that would mean they’ve made it. But I hope for our sake they do.
We’re not taking on new people at the moment (the exceptions being those on “the list”) partly because we’ve been through a huge amount together and – despite being based in the UK, USA, Hong Kong, Spain, Greece, Finland, and France – have knitted into an incredibly strong group. Now is the wrong time to unbalance that and risk losing focus. It wouldn’t be fair on newcomers either. Anyone joining up this close to a major release would have to just accept a whole lot of things we’ve agonised over and just aren’t up for negotiation any more.
But once the first books are out there and, I hope, flourishing, that’ll change. Our membership isn’t cast in stone. People are free to leave, and take their book with them, at any time. We are the antithesis of a record label. We are all self-publishers. We have no financial or intellectual property ties to each other. We can come and go as we please. We’ve made sure to make this freedom of movement clear in our Articles of Association.
How do I see us evolving? Well, people will come and go, and I imagine in 10 years we will look very different. I don’t even know if there will be a core membership. But Year Zero will be the same, and its strength will be the same – a commitment to giving readers the very best contemporary fiction, straight from the author’s keyboard; a commitment to building the trust and respect between writers and their readers.
Monday, 15 June 2009
Year Zero: Week One
Year Zero Writers has existed as a group since January. Which makes writing a progress column one of those “where on earth do I start?” exercises.
So where I start is this. A twice-weekly column. On Tuesdays I’ll bring things up to date with the “why” and the “what” of the group. And later in the week I’ll take things forward from where we are now.
Rather Like I did with my 10 commandments, I’ll start out with one of those contents-page type columns to give you an idea of what’s coming up over the coming weeks. So, here we are:
1 (this one!) What do Year Zero Writers stand for? What’s our manifesto?
2 How do you go about setting up a collective? What were people’s responses to the project?
3 Why a collective?
4 We are not a small publisher. We are a group of self-publishing writers with common goals and a common theme to our writing.
5 Marketing – how do you get the economy of scale of being a group without losing individuality? How do you decide what to do and what not to do?
6 Quality control. What does it mean? How important is it? How does it work in a collective?
7 Tip-toeing through legal minefields
So, this is our manifesto:
The problem
The Factory: agents, editors, media arbiters of taste, publishers. A chain of filters that takes raw fiction, cuts it, sells it on, cuts it again until the street product peddled to readers is weak, toxic, and addictive.
YEAR ZERØ exists to eliminate the impurities and deliver prose in the pure and raw.
Pushing the boundaries of substance through new technologies, YEAR ZERØ provides prose just as addictive, in many cases just as toxic, but with a powerful, instant high that will stay with you for life.YEAR ZERØ is not an industry. YEAR ZERØ is not a group of writers. YEAR ZERØ is not a set of beliefs. YEAR ZERØ is an approach to culture.
· Culture is the breath we suck from each others’ lips.
· Culture is not alive. Culture is life.
· Readers and writers, like all producers and consumers of culture, cannot exist apart from each other. They exist only insomuch as literature flows between them. Inasmuch as The Factory exists to separate readers from writers it exists only to bring death, to create ghosts and hollow men.
· Culture speculates; culture takes risks; culture hijacks every human artifice and structure in the name of life.
YEAR ZERØ exists as a conduit for this process.
We are not YEAR ZERØ. We are some of its voices. You are its heart.
Why? I hope the thing that’s come through more than anything else in this blog is my belief that culture is a conversation. It’s about readers and writers talking, about the living, breathing, dynamic relation between them. The more I talk about writing, the more I read from my own writing in public, the more I know that something happens when this relationship is direct that just can’t happen in any other way. Which doesn’t mean books aren’t for curling up with in the bath. But that when you curl up and block out everything but the sound of the words on the page, you somehow have to know the only voice you hear is that of the author (that’s sort of rhetorical – I’m not making a statement about POV :-)).
I have a feeling, though, that literature for me will always be about more than words on the page. Having just come back from a conference where I got to take part in a writing workshop with one of the most inspiring writer/teachers I’ve ever met and to give a paper based on my novel – watching the audience’s faces as they listened, I will always want to do it in a way that gets people excited by words and stories in an immediate way.
All kinds of writers can share these goals. Next week I’ll explain how we arrived at our current 20 members.
So where I start is this. A twice-weekly column. On Tuesdays I’ll bring things up to date with the “why” and the “what” of the group. And later in the week I’ll take things forward from where we are now.
Rather Like I did with my 10 commandments, I’ll start out with one of those contents-page type columns to give you an idea of what’s coming up over the coming weeks. So, here we are:
1 (this one!) What do Year Zero Writers stand for? What’s our manifesto?
2 How do you go about setting up a collective? What were people’s responses to the project?
3 Why a collective?
4 We are not a small publisher. We are a group of self-publishing writers with common goals and a common theme to our writing.
5 Marketing – how do you get the economy of scale of being a group without losing individuality? How do you decide what to do and what not to do?
6 Quality control. What does it mean? How important is it? How does it work in a collective?
7 Tip-toeing through legal minefields
So, this is our manifesto:
The problem
The Factory: agents, editors, media arbiters of taste, publishers. A chain of filters that takes raw fiction, cuts it, sells it on, cuts it again until the street product peddled to readers is weak, toxic, and addictive.
YEAR ZERØ exists to eliminate the impurities and deliver prose in the pure and raw.
Pushing the boundaries of substance through new technologies, YEAR ZERØ provides prose just as addictive, in many cases just as toxic, but with a powerful, instant high that will stay with you for life.YEAR ZERØ is not an industry. YEAR ZERØ is not a group of writers. YEAR ZERØ is not a set of beliefs. YEAR ZERØ is an approach to culture.
· Culture is the breath we suck from each others’ lips.
· Culture is not alive. Culture is life.
· Readers and writers, like all producers and consumers of culture, cannot exist apart from each other. They exist only insomuch as literature flows between them. Inasmuch as The Factory exists to separate readers from writers it exists only to bring death, to create ghosts and hollow men.
· Culture speculates; culture takes risks; culture hijacks every human artifice and structure in the name of life.
YEAR ZERØ exists as a conduit for this process.
We are not YEAR ZERØ. We are some of its voices. You are its heart.
Why? I hope the thing that’s come through more than anything else in this blog is my belief that culture is a conversation. It’s about readers and writers talking, about the living, breathing, dynamic relation between them. The more I talk about writing, the more I read from my own writing in public, the more I know that something happens when this relationship is direct that just can’t happen in any other way. Which doesn’t mean books aren’t for curling up with in the bath. But that when you curl up and block out everything but the sound of the words on the page, you somehow have to know the only voice you hear is that of the author (that’s sort of rhetorical – I’m not making a statement about POV :-)).
I have a feeling, though, that literature for me will always be about more than words on the page. Having just come back from a conference where I got to take part in a writing workshop with one of the most inspiring writer/teachers I’ve ever met and to give a paper based on my novel – watching the audience’s faces as they listened, I will always want to do it in a way that gets people excited by words and stories in an immediate way.
All kinds of writers can share these goals. Next week I’ll explain how we arrived at our current 20 members.
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