So The Grand Experiment has ticked on into its second week now, and I thought it might be a good time for a little progress report. Quick rundown of the stats so far:
On Wattpad, I have posted two chapters of Soulwoven. They have received 80 reads, 1 vote (Still unclear what exactly the voting is for. Investigation to follow), and 5 comments, several of which are from me responding to other comments. I also have three fans, only one of whom I know in real life.
Book Country I gave up on before even starting, because I disliked their Terms of Service.
Authonomy I have not yet posted anything on, because you can't post anything less than 10,000 words in length there, and that's still several chapters of Soulwoven away.
So I've been spending most of my experiment time on Wattpad, exploring the site and trying to get to know the community a bit. There are a lot of people on there, including a rather astonishing number of teenage girls. In my head, I've broken the community into several groups. To wit:
The writers---the people who write and post stories on Wattpad. I think the age skews a little older in this group.
The readers---people who read lots of stories, but don't have any of their own posted.
The socialites---this group skews younger and seems to be on the site mostly to connect and chat with other people.
Wattpad's social scene revolves around its forums (called "clubs"). I poked around a bit on the clubs last week, started a couple discussion threads and participated in a couple of others. None of them really got any traction. The lion's share of my reads have come either immediately after posting a chapter, when my book floats to the top of Wattpad's "What's New" lists in its various categories, or in the day or so following a thread I started in Wattpad's Writers Club about craft elements in Soulwoven.
All things considered, I feel pretty good about my results. My cover, while I like it, is far from eye-grabbing. I have still barely interacted with the community at all, and when you see Soulwoven on Wattpad's search listings, it reads "2 parts, 6 pages" because of how Wattpad breaks things down. Not exactly impressive. It looks half-finished and amateur.
But over time I expect my plan to post one chapter a week to bear fruit, because it makes the most of those What's New lists. The craft thread I started in the Writers Club, which I intend to keep updating, may draw in more people over time in as well. And I've been posting and updating my status and fiddling with the tools Wattpad gives me for communicating with my fans.
I think of everything I'm doing on the site at this point as laying a fire. I'm putting the infrastructure in place that will be necessary to take advantage of my story blowing up if and when it happens. In the meantime, I'm enjoying myself immensely, because I'm actually, honest-to-God connecting with the people I want to read my book. And some of them, at least, like it.
And that's a very gratifying feeling.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Craft Breakdown! Soulwoven Ch. 1
Greetings gentle readers. For a while now, I've been kicking around the idea of doing blog posts about Soulwoven, and breaking it down structurally in terms of what happens when, why it does, and what I'm trying to do as a writer in any given chapter. The big problem with the idea has always been that most visitors to this blog probably haven't read Soulwoven, and certainly don't have it front of them to take a look at.
Well, now that I'm posting chapters of it on Wattpad, that's not a problem anymore.
So without further ado, I'd like to inaugurate a series of craft posts about my writing and what I'm trying to do with it. Spoilers and technical writing bits to follow, so be forewarned. :-)
We'll start with Soulwoven Chapter One.
Opening chapters of novels are, I think, the most difficult thing to write in the whole world. I have rewritten this chapter more times than any other piece of writing I have ever produced. It's probably on its 20th or 30th iteration, if you go all the way back to when I started writing the book ten years ago. To be totally honest, I'm still not entirely comfortable with it, and I probably never will be.
So! Big points. There are three sections in Chapter One of Soulwoven, each containing its own scene with its own little arc. I'll break them, and what I'm trying to do in each of them, down below:
Scene One: Litnig, Cole, and their father are delivering groceries. There's someone watching them as they do it, which is weird and makes Litnig uncomfortable.
This scene has to do a lot of heavy lifting. It needs to establish the world, the main character, the voice, and immediate tension. And it needs to hook the reader along into going on to the next scene. To handle the first and the second, I drop us into the middle of a typical day in Litnig's life. He and his family are out delivering groceries, which is what they do. Litnig is curious but a little slow, Cole is sleepy and bored, and their father is grumpy and borderline violent. To handle the tension, I introduce something mildly creepy. There's a person watching Litnig. He's a kind of person Litnig has never seen before. He doesn't stop watching him throughout the whole scene. Litnig's father is dismissive of Litnig's worries. And the person watching has sharp, yellow teeth.
To establish the voice, I break rules. I open with a sentence that falls under several "thou shalt nots" of writing: it's got a cliche ("Once upon a time"), and it's got nothing particularly unique going on in it ("a young man opened his eyes"). It could be (and very well might be) the first sentence in any number of stories.
But it's also a one-sentence summary of this story, and one of my goals with it is to offer the reader the following information: I am going to try to do unusual and difficult things here. I am not going to follow all of the rules. If you're interested in that, and you think I can pull it off, then come along for the ride.
To get the reader to do that, I rely on the tension, and I end with a creepy image of the person watching Litnig smiling at him as he passes by.
Scene Two: Litnig, Cole, and their father return home. Their father starts beating Cole, and Litnig stops him.
By the time we reach this scene, things are hopefully flowing a little easier for the reader. They've made the decision to stick with me to this point, but I still need to hook them. This is the big sympathy scene in the first chapter. Cole does nothing wrong, and his father flies off the handle and starts pounding him. Litnig saves him. We learn a lot about both brothers in this scene---how they handle explosive situations (Litnig tries to defuse them, Cole sticks a firecracker into them), what they're capable of physically (Litnig is big and strong, Cole is not), and how much they think about what they're doing (Cole has a purpose, even when he's goading his father into hitting him. Litnig often just acts). Hopefully, by the end of it, the reader cares about both of them, and finds them interesting enough to continue.
Scene Three: Litnig has the first dream of his life. Something weird happens with the air and there's a scream. Litnig and Cole decide to try to find Ryse.
This scene is where we really start to dig into Litnig's head. I'm still trying to develop sympathy for Litnig, but I'm also sending him on his adventure. In the first scene, there's something weird going on, but it's unclear whether it's going to affect his life. In the third scene, there's something really weird going on, both for Litnig (the dream) and for the world he lives in (the scream), and it affects his life immediately. There's also additional world-building and a brief introduction of Ryse. And at the end, I try to set up a shift to Cole's point-of-view in the next chapter by moving the focus of the narrative from Litnig's actions to Cole's.
There are several things that I don't really like about this chapter. I don't like that it's split up into three scenes, because we won't see that again for another eight or nine chapters, and one thing I feel it's important to do in an initial chapter is to establish the type of structure the reader is going to see. The scenes are short, as well, and the whole just feels a little choppier than I want it to be. But there are distinct arcs to every scene. Combining them just wouldn't work because of that. I also thought at one point about breaking the chapter after scene two and starting Chapter Two with the events of scene three told in Cole's point of view, but Chapter Two feels pretty tight to me the way it is and I don't want to disturb it.
So that's it for Chapter One, really. I want to emphasize that I don't think much about these things when I'm writing. I don't plan this stuff out like this, and this is the first time I've ever written it down (That's one reason, actually, that I'm doing this at all. It's good exercise). When I write, I follow the story. I put characters in a situation, and then I let them react to it.
But when a chapter isn't working, I do think about things like this. It's an editing tool. "What am I trying to do here?" and "What do I need to do here?" are two of the most important questions you can ask yourself, and I'm never comfortable with a chapter until I can answer them.
Chapter Two of Soulwoven goes up on Wattpad tomorrow. I'll break that one down as well a little later on in the week.
Well, now that I'm posting chapters of it on Wattpad, that's not a problem anymore.
So without further ado, I'd like to inaugurate a series of craft posts about my writing and what I'm trying to do with it. Spoilers and technical writing bits to follow, so be forewarned. :-)
We'll start with Soulwoven Chapter One.
Opening chapters of novels are, I think, the most difficult thing to write in the whole world. I have rewritten this chapter more times than any other piece of writing I have ever produced. It's probably on its 20th or 30th iteration, if you go all the way back to when I started writing the book ten years ago. To be totally honest, I'm still not entirely comfortable with it, and I probably never will be.
So! Big points. There are three sections in Chapter One of Soulwoven, each containing its own scene with its own little arc. I'll break them, and what I'm trying to do in each of them, down below:
Scene One: Litnig, Cole, and their father are delivering groceries. There's someone watching them as they do it, which is weird and makes Litnig uncomfortable.
This scene has to do a lot of heavy lifting. It needs to establish the world, the main character, the voice, and immediate tension. And it needs to hook the reader along into going on to the next scene. To handle the first and the second, I drop us into the middle of a typical day in Litnig's life. He and his family are out delivering groceries, which is what they do. Litnig is curious but a little slow, Cole is sleepy and bored, and their father is grumpy and borderline violent. To handle the tension, I introduce something mildly creepy. There's a person watching Litnig. He's a kind of person Litnig has never seen before. He doesn't stop watching him throughout the whole scene. Litnig's father is dismissive of Litnig's worries. And the person watching has sharp, yellow teeth.
To establish the voice, I break rules. I open with a sentence that falls under several "thou shalt nots" of writing: it's got a cliche ("Once upon a time"), and it's got nothing particularly unique going on in it ("a young man opened his eyes"). It could be (and very well might be) the first sentence in any number of stories.
But it's also a one-sentence summary of this story, and one of my goals with it is to offer the reader the following information: I am going to try to do unusual and difficult things here. I am not going to follow all of the rules. If you're interested in that, and you think I can pull it off, then come along for the ride.
To get the reader to do that, I rely on the tension, and I end with a creepy image of the person watching Litnig smiling at him as he passes by.
Scene Two: Litnig, Cole, and their father return home. Their father starts beating Cole, and Litnig stops him.
By the time we reach this scene, things are hopefully flowing a little easier for the reader. They've made the decision to stick with me to this point, but I still need to hook them. This is the big sympathy scene in the first chapter. Cole does nothing wrong, and his father flies off the handle and starts pounding him. Litnig saves him. We learn a lot about both brothers in this scene---how they handle explosive situations (Litnig tries to defuse them, Cole sticks a firecracker into them), what they're capable of physically (Litnig is big and strong, Cole is not), and how much they think about what they're doing (Cole has a purpose, even when he's goading his father into hitting him. Litnig often just acts). Hopefully, by the end of it, the reader cares about both of them, and finds them interesting enough to continue.
Scene Three: Litnig has the first dream of his life. Something weird happens with the air and there's a scream. Litnig and Cole decide to try to find Ryse.
This scene is where we really start to dig into Litnig's head. I'm still trying to develop sympathy for Litnig, but I'm also sending him on his adventure. In the first scene, there's something weird going on, but it's unclear whether it's going to affect his life. In the third scene, there's something really weird going on, both for Litnig (the dream) and for the world he lives in (the scream), and it affects his life immediately. There's also additional world-building and a brief introduction of Ryse. And at the end, I try to set up a shift to Cole's point-of-view in the next chapter by moving the focus of the narrative from Litnig's actions to Cole's.
There are several things that I don't really like about this chapter. I don't like that it's split up into three scenes, because we won't see that again for another eight or nine chapters, and one thing I feel it's important to do in an initial chapter is to establish the type of structure the reader is going to see. The scenes are short, as well, and the whole just feels a little choppier than I want it to be. But there are distinct arcs to every scene. Combining them just wouldn't work because of that. I also thought at one point about breaking the chapter after scene two and starting Chapter Two with the events of scene three told in Cole's point of view, but Chapter Two feels pretty tight to me the way it is and I don't want to disturb it.
So that's it for Chapter One, really. I want to emphasize that I don't think much about these things when I'm writing. I don't plan this stuff out like this, and this is the first time I've ever written it down (That's one reason, actually, that I'm doing this at all. It's good exercise). When I write, I follow the story. I put characters in a situation, and then I let them react to it.
But when a chapter isn't working, I do think about things like this. It's an editing tool. "What am I trying to do here?" and "What do I need to do here?" are two of the most important questions you can ask yourself, and I'm never comfortable with a chapter until I can answer them.
Chapter Two of Soulwoven goes up on Wattpad tomorrow. I'll break that one down as well a little later on in the week.
Thursday, July 5, 2012
The Grand Experiment: Cover Imagery on Wattpad
As I think most of you know, I posted the first chapter of Soulwoven on Wattpad this week. Part of that process involved some significant monkeying around with the placeholder cover image I generated for it, but the blog post on putting a chapter up had gotten long enough that I thought I'd post separately about the cover.
Eventually, I hope to have someone from the Wattpad community do me a snazzy, proper cover. There are a lot of forum threads in which people volunteer to make book covers for others, and they're pretty amazing.
But in the meantime, I decided to mock up a cover using a Wordle of the entire manuscript and Microsoft Paint (Yes, I work on a PC. Apple makes lots of nice things, but I abhor them as a company). I came up with the following:
Which is a bitmap of about 700x900 pixels. Now, when you post a story, Wattpad auto-generates a cover for your book that includes its title and your picture. It's actually not that bad, but I wanted my own cover image on there. Wattpad requires a .jpg or a .gif and suggests a resolution of 256x400. So I went into irfanview, which is an awesome, free, image editing program, and resized my cover mockup. Unfortunately, it left things a little stretched out, so I returned to the drawing board and started from scratch. After some fiddling and wrestling (my kingdom for Photoshop!), I got this:
Which uploaded easily as a .gif (when I tried to upload the original bitmap, it just didn't work--no error message, no explanation. The cover just didn't change). I went with a .gif rather than a .jpg because the colors washed out less.
Unfortunately, once uploaded to Wattpad, something terrible happens to your cover image. It gets all blurry and lossy and just generally gross. I made several unsuccessful attempts to fix this, and it seems to have happened to many more covers than just mine.
So my cover is uglier than it should be. But at least I have one. :-)
Eventually, I hope to have someone from the Wattpad community do me a snazzy, proper cover. There are a lot of forum threads in which people volunteer to make book covers for others, and they're pretty amazing.
But in the meantime, I decided to mock up a cover using a Wordle of the entire manuscript and Microsoft Paint (Yes, I work on a PC. Apple makes lots of nice things, but I abhor them as a company). I came up with the following:
Which uploaded easily as a .gif (when I tried to upload the original bitmap, it just didn't work--no error message, no explanation. The cover just didn't change). I went with a .gif rather than a .jpg because the colors washed out less.
Unfortunately, once uploaded to Wattpad, something terrible happens to your cover image. It gets all blurry and lossy and just generally gross. I made several unsuccessful attempts to fix this, and it seems to have happened to many more covers than just mine.
So my cover is uglier than it should be. But at least I have one. :-)
Sunday, July 1, 2012
The Grand Experiment: Posting Soulwoven Ch. 1 on Wattpad
Ladies and gentlemen, we are go for the launch of Soulwoven on Wattpad. After two weeks of needling and noodling and stressing out over the first chapter, I've whipped it into what I think is decent shape, and it's time for it to go out into the world. (If you're just looking for a link to the book, it's here.)
So here's what it's like to post a chapter on Wattpad:
You can start either by clicking the big "Create" button at the top of the main page or selecting "Add a Work" from the "My Works" tab of your account. Either option takes you to a clean, simple writing interface that has a small text box for a title and a big text box for the main body. It also has a text box for inputting tags and gives you drop-down menus for sorting your story into Wattpad's categories, choosing an appropriate age level for your story, and selecting a copyright license and distribution options. Under an "Advanced" tab, you can also include links to YouTube, photos, external links, and toggle the story's visibility between public (readable to anyone) and private (only readable by your Wattpad fans and yourself).
It's a very cool suite of options overall, but the titling confused me straight off the bat. I was uncertain whether I was setting a title for the book or for the specific chapter that I was uploading. It turns out that you're initially doing both. You have to go back and edit some things from the "My Works" tab in order to have separate story and chapter titles.
I started out by copying the text of Soulwoven's first chapter from Microsoft Word and pasting it into the main text box. It worked pretty well, though the formatting got a little garbled. Wattpad doesn't seem to like indents or tabs. It also changes the font into something I don't like very much (I think it's Arial or Calibri. It probably looks good on mobile devices, but not so much on my laptop screen).
After getting the text of the chapter in place, I turned to the "Categories" drop-down menu. It sits next to a link to the site's category descriptions, though the link isn't automatically set to open in a new tab and could cause you to lose a draft when clicking it if you aren't careful (hint hint Wattpad!). After a quick perusal of the options, I chose Fantasy ("Stories in this category are usually inspired by mythology and magic") and Adventure ("Adventure novels involve an exciting and often risky task that the main character must successfully complete") to describe Soulwoven.
When setting tags, you just have to freehand. There's no tag cloud or other way to know what tags are popular on the site. Using my evil day-job powers as an SEO wizard, I tried to think of search terms my ideal reader might pop into a Wattpad or Google search box. I eventually settled on "teens, magic, high fantasy, sword and sorcery, lots of characters, epic fantasy." Wattpad adjusts these to its own format as well, but you can change them later, and I probably will.
After "Tags" comes "Copyright." Your choices are "Not Specified" (the default, which I hope means you are de facto reserving your rights), "All Rights Reserved," "Public Domain," and a wide variety of Creative Commons licenses (which allow others to use or reproduce your work under certain conditions). Wattpad has a not-very-helpful link nearby to explain the options. The page they send you to only describes the Creative Commons licenses, and the nomenclature that Wattpad uses for those licenses doesn't match up with what's on the explanation page. It's therefore difficult to tell which Wattpad options grant which Creative Commons licenses. I chose "All Rights Reserved" anyway, because I do still want to sell this thing someday.
Next comes "Rating." You can choose G, PG, PG-13, or R, and Wattpad provides specific guidelines for each. The last box, "Distribution," offers you a choice between "Keep my story on Wattpad only" and "Help me promote my story on other sites." No helpful link this time, just a tooltip that mentions the possibility of your story being available through Wattpad's "online partners such as Sony eBooks, Google Bookstore, and Scribd." I left it on "Keep my story on Wattpad only," because the thought of my book in an online bookstore without me getting paid is not one I like.
Finally, you need to check an "I have read the terms and conditions" toggle and either "Save" or "Save & Publish." I chose "Save," so that I could make sure my chapter looked reasonable before anyone else saw it.
I'm glad I did, because the formatting got quite garbled when I saved. Wattpad has a button called "Remove spaces" that resolved the problem, but it also got rid of much of my formatting. What I was left with is all left-justified, with no indents. The spaceless draft survived the saving process much better than the original did, however, so that's what I'm going to stick with for now. Once you save as a draft (or publish), you can edit your chapter any time under the "My Works" tab of your account. You can also upload a cover image, name your book, add another chapter, and write a description of your story.
So that's it! On the whole, I give the Wattpad interface a resounding B+. It's good, and its weirder wrinkles can be worked around, but it did leave me scratching my head a few times.
More importantly, the first chapter of Soulwoven is up on Wattpad! This means that those of you who have been clamoring to read it for ages can. It's viewable here, you don't need an account to access it, and I hope that you like it. I'd love to hear your thoughts, whether on Wattpad, here, on Facebook, on Twitter...wherever suits you.
Incidentally, I noticed yesterday that Wattpad went down for most of the day, and its community was distraught. Lots of people, mostly teenagers, posted upset messages on Twitter and Facebook. This place has a real following full of readers who care very deeply about it, and who have chosen to spend their free time there instead of watching movies or playing games or even reading books that have been professionally published.
I think that's very, very cool. If I had spent my teen years doing that instead of sinking hours upon hours into hack and slash video games, I would be a better writer today.
So hats off to them, and hats off to Wattpad, and let's see how this experiment goes! :-)
So here's what it's like to post a chapter on Wattpad:
You can start either by clicking the big "Create" button at the top of the main page or selecting "Add a Work" from the "My Works" tab of your account. Either option takes you to a clean, simple writing interface that has a small text box for a title and a big text box for the main body. It also has a text box for inputting tags and gives you drop-down menus for sorting your story into Wattpad's categories, choosing an appropriate age level for your story, and selecting a copyright license and distribution options. Under an "Advanced" tab, you can also include links to YouTube, photos, external links, and toggle the story's visibility between public (readable to anyone) and private (only readable by your Wattpad fans and yourself).
It's a very cool suite of options overall, but the titling confused me straight off the bat. I was uncertain whether I was setting a title for the book or for the specific chapter that I was uploading. It turns out that you're initially doing both. You have to go back and edit some things from the "My Works" tab in order to have separate story and chapter titles.
I started out by copying the text of Soulwoven's first chapter from Microsoft Word and pasting it into the main text box. It worked pretty well, though the formatting got a little garbled. Wattpad doesn't seem to like indents or tabs. It also changes the font into something I don't like very much (I think it's Arial or Calibri. It probably looks good on mobile devices, but not so much on my laptop screen).
After getting the text of the chapter in place, I turned to the "Categories" drop-down menu. It sits next to a link to the site's category descriptions, though the link isn't automatically set to open in a new tab and could cause you to lose a draft when clicking it if you aren't careful (hint hint Wattpad!). After a quick perusal of the options, I chose Fantasy ("Stories in this category are usually inspired by mythology and magic") and Adventure ("Adventure novels involve an exciting and often risky task that the main character must successfully complete") to describe Soulwoven.
When setting tags, you just have to freehand. There's no tag cloud or other way to know what tags are popular on the site. Using my evil day-job powers as an SEO wizard, I tried to think of search terms my ideal reader might pop into a Wattpad or Google search box. I eventually settled on "teens, magic, high fantasy, sword and sorcery, lots of characters, epic fantasy." Wattpad adjusts these to its own format as well, but you can change them later, and I probably will.
After "Tags" comes "Copyright." Your choices are "Not Specified" (the default, which I hope means you are de facto reserving your rights), "All Rights Reserved," "Public Domain," and a wide variety of Creative Commons licenses (which allow others to use or reproduce your work under certain conditions). Wattpad has a not-very-helpful link nearby to explain the options. The page they send you to only describes the Creative Commons licenses, and the nomenclature that Wattpad uses for those licenses doesn't match up with what's on the explanation page. It's therefore difficult to tell which Wattpad options grant which Creative Commons licenses. I chose "All Rights Reserved" anyway, because I do still want to sell this thing someday.
Next comes "Rating." You can choose G, PG, PG-13, or R, and Wattpad provides specific guidelines for each. The last box, "Distribution," offers you a choice between "Keep my story on Wattpad only" and "Help me promote my story on other sites." No helpful link this time, just a tooltip that mentions the possibility of your story being available through Wattpad's "online partners such as Sony eBooks, Google Bookstore, and Scribd." I left it on "Keep my story on Wattpad only," because the thought of my book in an online bookstore without me getting paid is not one I like.
Finally, you need to check an "I have read the terms and conditions" toggle and either "Save" or "Save & Publish." I chose "Save," so that I could make sure my chapter looked reasonable before anyone else saw it.
I'm glad I did, because the formatting got quite garbled when I saved. Wattpad has a button called "Remove spaces" that resolved the problem, but it also got rid of much of my formatting. What I was left with is all left-justified, with no indents. The spaceless draft survived the saving process much better than the original did, however, so that's what I'm going to stick with for now. Once you save as a draft (or publish), you can edit your chapter any time under the "My Works" tab of your account. You can also upload a cover image, name your book, add another chapter, and write a description of your story.
So that's it! On the whole, I give the Wattpad interface a resounding B+. It's good, and its weirder wrinkles can be worked around, but it did leave me scratching my head a few times.
More importantly, the first chapter of Soulwoven is up on Wattpad! This means that those of you who have been clamoring to read it for ages can. It's viewable here, you don't need an account to access it, and I hope that you like it. I'd love to hear your thoughts, whether on Wattpad, here, on Facebook, on Twitter...wherever suits you.
Incidentally, I noticed yesterday that Wattpad went down for most of the day, and its community was distraught. Lots of people, mostly teenagers, posted upset messages on Twitter and Facebook. This place has a real following full of readers who care very deeply about it, and who have chosen to spend their free time there instead of watching movies or playing games or even reading books that have been professionally published.
I think that's very, very cool. If I had spent my teen years doing that instead of sinking hours upon hours into hack and slash video games, I would be a better writer today.
So hats off to them, and hats off to Wattpad, and let's see how this experiment goes! :-)
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
The Grand Experiment: Wattpad and Moral Rights
Yesterday I got an e-mail from Wattpad in response to my question about moral rights. It reads:
So color me impressed by the quickness and thoroughness of their response. It was much more than I expected. I have to say that all of my interactions with the company so far have been positive ones. And now I have a pretty reasonable explanation for why they ask their contributors to waive their moral rights.
First chapter of Soulwoven to go up soon, friends and readers. I've been busy this week with an article I'm writing for Clarkesworld and a short story I'm submitting to Writers of the Future, both of which have deadlines that must be met.
But I still plan to get that chapter up this week, by hook or by crook.
Hi Jeff,
Great question! Moral rights, as we understand them, are rights to protection of the integrity and reputation of the work in question. These rights cannot be assigned to a third party, but by asking authors to waive them we are attempting to protect ourselves from situations where one author's work ends up displayed (for example, in a list based on a search term) along side a set of works which impugns the integrity reputation of the work in question by association, and as a result the author files a suit against us. As previously mentioned, moral rights cannot be assigned to others, but by waiving them you forgo the opportunity to seek compensation from Wattpad if you think your work has been poorly associated in our attempts to display it to others.
Hopefully this makes sense. We're looking to clarify our terms as much as possible. The team at 500px.com has done a great job of this, we think, and we'd like to follow suit.
Mike Beltzner
Head of Product
So color me impressed by the quickness and thoroughness of their response. It was much more than I expected. I have to say that all of my interactions with the company so far have been positive ones. And now I have a pretty reasonable explanation for why they ask their contributors to waive their moral rights.
First chapter of Soulwoven to go up soon, friends and readers. I've been busy this week with an article I'm writing for Clarkesworld and a short story I'm submitting to Writers of the Future, both of which have deadlines that must be met.
But I still plan to get that chapter up this week, by hook or by crook.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
The Grand Experiment: Registering on Wattpad
(Standard disclaimer again, since I'm talking terms of service again: I'm not a lawyer. This is not meant as legal advice. If you want legal advice, get it from a lawyer. Nonstandard disclaimer: I am exhausted, but I want to get this up tonight. Apologies in advance for typos and lack of coherent thought.)
So I'm already registered on Wattpad. Have been for several months now. It's the site that gave me the idea for The Grand Experiment in the first place. But in the interest of fairness, I went back through the registration process to see how it matches up to Authonomy and Book Country.
The "Join Now" button on Wattpad was easier to find than Authonomy's, but not quite as prominently placed as the one on Book Country. Once you click it, you're prompted to sign in with Facebook, or, if you desire, with e-mail. Since I'm stingy with my Facebook details, and I try to keep my personal life as separate from my professional online presence as possible, I opted for the e-mail approach.
Wattpad asks for a username, e-mail address, password, date of birth, and gender when you register. In contrast to Authonomy and Book Country, its terms must be clicked through to on a separate page. Once you get there, however, they take up the full page rather than a tiny box.
The Wattpad terms link straightaway to separate pages for its privacy policy and community guidelines. Why they're compartmentalizing their information so much, I'm not entirely sure, but I'll get to those documents later.
Their account terms are pretty standard, except for continual emphasis on being 13 years of age or older and a line about sex offenders not being allowed. Wattpad "may attempt to notify you" when changes are made, but explicitly reserves the right to make changes without notice as well. Users are "encouraged" to only create one account, but the site does allow multiple accounts per person, perhaps because it doesn't have any sort of voting feature.
Wattpad users agree not to distribute user submissions, alter the website, or access user submissions except through the website. Like the other sites, it also bans "commercial use," which includes "sale of access to the Website or its related services on another website; use of the Website or its related services for the primary purpose of gaining advertising or subscription revenue; the sale of advertising, on the Wattpad.com website or any third-party website, targeted to the content of specific User Submissions or Wattpad.com content; and any use of the Website or its related services that Wattpad.com finds, in its sole discretion, to use Wattpad.com's resources or User Submissions with the effect of competing with or displacing the market for Wattpad.com, Wattpad.com content, or its User Submissions." Not quite as stringent as Authonomy's, but leaving plenty of room open for them to object to practices they don't like. They also specifically ban "commercial solicitation."
The site's policies to protect user content are pretty strict as well. Users agree to access other people's submissions only for personal use via normal operation of the website. They are prohibited from tampering with security features as well as from copying or distributing submissions. So if your content gets ripped off of Wattpad, whoever did it at least acted in violation of their agreement with the site, for whatever good that may do you.
The grant of license (quoted in full at bottom) to Wattpad feels pretty standard, except that you explicitly waive your moral rights. After some noodling, and a reexamination of the best definition of moral rights I could find online, I figure this may have something to do with the fact that Wattpad wants to be able to display your story in whatever format they want, as long as you still grant them the license to do so. I suppose they want to avoid lawsuits if they change their site or app design and someone flips their lid. I have contacted them to ask about the clause. We'll see if they respond.
One other thing I dislike about the Wattpad grant of license is that it doesn't contain a term of license. It doesn't say "forever," or the like, which is nice, but it also doesn't specify how you can revoke the grant. There's some wishy-washy language in there about removing or deleting content that I suppose has something to do with it, but it makes me nervous nonetheless.
Which brings me to what I think makes Wattpad stand apart from Book Country and Authonomy, and why I'm willing to sign up with Wattpad and not Book Country even though both have grants of license that make me nervous. I know that Book Country authors have been published by Penguin, the company that owns Book Country, but not that they've been published by anyone else. This is problematic to me because even if the Book Country contract grants it crazy rights, it's no sweat for Penguin to put out the book. Book Country will not compete with them, because they own it. Authonomy (run by HarperCollins) suffers from the same issue.
But a Wattpad author got a contract from Simon and Schuster for a novel she had posted on Wattpad. Three other publishers bid on the same book. That tells me that Wattpad's terms are pretty safe. Four different publishers were willing to buy the right to put the book out, regardless of the grants that had previously been made to Wattpad.
So I trust Wattpad. Maybe that's a bad decision, but at least I'm making it in conjunction with several large publishing houses.
The rest of the terms are pretty standard. Your account can be canceled for breaking the terms, which includes posting anything containing "hate crimes, pornography, obscene or defamatory material, or excessive length." You provide a pretty standard set of indemnifications (if you post something and they get sued, you're liable). The contract can also be transferred to someone else on their end, but not on yours
After reading the terms of service, I clicked through to the privacy policy. It's pretty standard for a website, at least in my experience. They share anonymous, aggregrated information about you ("We have X number of users between the ages of 13 and 21"), and they share your personal information in order to protect themselves or their users and to operate the site. They also promise to inform users (hooray!) if they go through a "business transition" (i.e. they're acquired by another company) and their use of personal information will change as a result.
Finally, the content guidelines. You can't post copyrighted works (again), pornography, or graphic depictions of serious drug use, prostitution, suicide, and all types of abuse. They also ban (again) "any material that is unlawful, obscene, defamatory, libelous, threatening, pornographic, harassing, hateful, racially offensive, or is otherwise inappropriate." More interestingly, they rate content G-R. Content that includes but does not graphically depict "serious drug use, prostitution, suicide, and all types of abuse," must be rated R and is not eligible for promotion by Wattpad.
So that's that! To me, Wattpad is interesting in comparison to Book Country and Authonomy for two reasons: First, it's clearly aimed at a teen audience. Second, it's independent of any publisher. I like it for both reasons.
I'm planning to post the first chapter of Soulwoven on Wattpad this week, although I have some questions about where it fits within their content guidelines. More on that, however, as I deal with it.
*As promised, the grant of license: "For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting User Submissions to Wattpad.com, you hereby grant Wattpad.com a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the Wattpad.com Website and its affiliates. You also hereby waive any moral rights you may have in your User Submissions and grant each user of the Wattpad.com Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website. You understand and agree, however, that Wattpad.com may retain, but not display, distribute, or perform, server copies of User Submissions that have been removed or deleted."
So I'm already registered on Wattpad. Have been for several months now. It's the site that gave me the idea for The Grand Experiment in the first place. But in the interest of fairness, I went back through the registration process to see how it matches up to Authonomy and Book Country.
The "Join Now" button on Wattpad was easier to find than Authonomy's, but not quite as prominently placed as the one on Book Country. Once you click it, you're prompted to sign in with Facebook, or, if you desire, with e-mail. Since I'm stingy with my Facebook details, and I try to keep my personal life as separate from my professional online presence as possible, I opted for the e-mail approach.
Wattpad asks for a username, e-mail address, password, date of birth, and gender when you register. In contrast to Authonomy and Book Country, its terms must be clicked through to on a separate page. Once you get there, however, they take up the full page rather than a tiny box.
The Wattpad terms link straightaway to separate pages for its privacy policy and community guidelines. Why they're compartmentalizing their information so much, I'm not entirely sure, but I'll get to those documents later.
Their account terms are pretty standard, except for continual emphasis on being 13 years of age or older and a line about sex offenders not being allowed. Wattpad "may attempt to notify you" when changes are made, but explicitly reserves the right to make changes without notice as well. Users are "encouraged" to only create one account, but the site does allow multiple accounts per person, perhaps because it doesn't have any sort of voting feature.
Wattpad users agree not to distribute user submissions, alter the website, or access user submissions except through the website. Like the other sites, it also bans "commercial use," which includes "sale of access to the Website or its related services on another website; use of the Website or its related services for the primary purpose of gaining advertising or subscription revenue; the sale of advertising, on the Wattpad.com website or any third-party website, targeted to the content of specific User Submissions or Wattpad.com content; and any use of the Website or its related services that Wattpad.com finds, in its sole discretion, to use Wattpad.com's resources or User Submissions with the effect of competing with or displacing the market for Wattpad.com, Wattpad.com content, or its User Submissions." Not quite as stringent as Authonomy's, but leaving plenty of room open for them to object to practices they don't like. They also specifically ban "commercial solicitation."
The site's policies to protect user content are pretty strict as well. Users agree to access other people's submissions only for personal use via normal operation of the website. They are prohibited from tampering with security features as well as from copying or distributing submissions. So if your content gets ripped off of Wattpad, whoever did it at least acted in violation of their agreement with the site, for whatever good that may do you.
The grant of license (quoted in full at bottom) to Wattpad feels pretty standard, except that you explicitly waive your moral rights. After some noodling, and a reexamination of the best definition of moral rights I could find online, I figure this may have something to do with the fact that Wattpad wants to be able to display your story in whatever format they want, as long as you still grant them the license to do so. I suppose they want to avoid lawsuits if they change their site or app design and someone flips their lid. I have contacted them to ask about the clause. We'll see if they respond.
One other thing I dislike about the Wattpad grant of license is that it doesn't contain a term of license. It doesn't say "forever," or the like, which is nice, but it also doesn't specify how you can revoke the grant. There's some wishy-washy language in there about removing or deleting content that I suppose has something to do with it, but it makes me nervous nonetheless.
Which brings me to what I think makes Wattpad stand apart from Book Country and Authonomy, and why I'm willing to sign up with Wattpad and not Book Country even though both have grants of license that make me nervous. I know that Book Country authors have been published by Penguin, the company that owns Book Country, but not that they've been published by anyone else. This is problematic to me because even if the Book Country contract grants it crazy rights, it's no sweat for Penguin to put out the book. Book Country will not compete with them, because they own it. Authonomy (run by HarperCollins) suffers from the same issue.
But a Wattpad author got a contract from Simon and Schuster for a novel she had posted on Wattpad. Three other publishers bid on the same book. That tells me that Wattpad's terms are pretty safe. Four different publishers were willing to buy the right to put the book out, regardless of the grants that had previously been made to Wattpad.
So I trust Wattpad. Maybe that's a bad decision, but at least I'm making it in conjunction with several large publishing houses.
The rest of the terms are pretty standard. Your account can be canceled for breaking the terms, which includes posting anything containing "hate crimes, pornography, obscene or defamatory material, or excessive length." You provide a pretty standard set of indemnifications (if you post something and they get sued, you're liable). The contract can also be transferred to someone else on their end, but not on yours
After reading the terms of service, I clicked through to the privacy policy. It's pretty standard for a website, at least in my experience. They share anonymous, aggregrated information about you ("We have X number of users between the ages of 13 and 21"), and they share your personal information in order to protect themselves or their users and to operate the site. They also promise to inform users (hooray!) if they go through a "business transition" (i.e. they're acquired by another company) and their use of personal information will change as a result.
Finally, the content guidelines. You can't post copyrighted works (again), pornography, or graphic depictions of serious drug use, prostitution, suicide, and all types of abuse. They also ban (again) "any material that is unlawful, obscene, defamatory, libelous, threatening, pornographic, harassing, hateful, racially offensive, or is otherwise inappropriate." More interestingly, they rate content G-R. Content that includes but does not graphically depict "serious drug use, prostitution, suicide, and all types of abuse," must be rated R and is not eligible for promotion by Wattpad.
So that's that! To me, Wattpad is interesting in comparison to Book Country and Authonomy for two reasons: First, it's clearly aimed at a teen audience. Second, it's independent of any publisher. I like it for both reasons.
I'm planning to post the first chapter of Soulwoven on Wattpad this week, although I have some questions about where it fits within their content guidelines. More on that, however, as I deal with it.
*As promised, the grant of license: "For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting User Submissions to Wattpad.com, you hereby grant Wattpad.com a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the Wattpad.com Website and its affiliates. You also hereby waive any moral rights you may have in your User Submissions and grant each user of the Wattpad.com Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website. You understand and agree, however, that Wattpad.com may retain, but not display, distribute, or perform, server copies of User Submissions that have been removed or deleted."
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
The Grand Experiment: Registering on Book Country
(Standard disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. You should not act on anything I
say when it comes to legal agreements. If you care about your rights,
get any legal agreement, including website terms, explained to you by a lawyer before you sign).
Book Country didn't last very long in The Grand Experiment. In fact, I didn't even register for it. I'll go into why at the bottom of the post, but we'll start with a description of the registration process.
It was a lot easier to find Book Country's "Join Now" button than Authonomy's. It's big, red, and in the upper-right-hand corner of the site, where I've been trained to look for such things. Once you click on it, you get a page that's very similar to Authonomy's registration form. Book Country asks for a display name, an e-mail address, and a password. Its Terms and Conditions are displayed in another tiny, hard-to-read box.
The terms open with pretty standard language, but refer specifically to the site being a place where people can self-publish (I remembered later that Book Country offers a variety of self-publishing services that have been panned by prominent self-published authors). The terms also discuss a focus on genre fiction and possible expansion plans, mention that Book Country "may" provide notice of changes to its terms (an improvement over Authonomy, at least), and discuss what users can and cannot do on the site before registering
All submissions to the site are deemed to be nonconfidential information. I'm not sure what that means in practical terms.
The third subheader of the agreement covers content. From the get-go, its terms are not as clear as Authonomy's ("Except as set forth herein, you will retain all rights in your Content"). By the end of the grant of license, they get murky enough that I've decided I don't want to be involved with them.
Grant of license quoted here:
"By posting or uploading any Content on the Website: (i) you understand that if your Work is in a genre included on the Book Country Website, and complies with these General Terms of Use, your Work may be made accessible to users of the Website and members will be able to review, comment on it and rate it; (ii) you represent and warrant that you own or control all rights in your Content, that such Content is original and does not, and will not, infringe the copyright, trademark or any other right of any person or entity, and that any “moral rights” in the Content have been waived; and (iii) you grant to us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, transferable right and license (A) to display the Content on the Website, and (B) with respect to Content other than your Work, to use, display, reproduce, distribute, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, perform, make, sell and export such Content, in whole and in part, on the Website or in any formats and through any media, as we see fit, and you shall have no claims against Book Country for such use or non-use. Although Book Country may maintain copies of your Content, we are not required to do so and we may delete or destroy any such Content at any time."
The grant is pretty vanilla until partway through (ii), when it starts talking about "moral rights," which I have only ever heard discussed in the context of authors/artists/musicians/others who signed bad contracts (They're explained in somewhat clearer terms here). (ii) may be talking about moral rights in the work possessed by people other than the user, but it makes me uncomfortable in its ambiguity.
(iii), however, caused me a serious headache. "Work" is defined in the agreement as "excerpts from your writing," so writing uploaded to Book Country seems to be excepted from the massive rights-grab-forever in (iii). "Content" in the agreement is defined as "Any information, proposals, requests, manuscripts, creative works, pictures, photographs, letters, documents, demos, ideas, suggestions, concepts, methods, systems, designs, plans, techniques or other materials submitted, posted, uploaded, sent or otherwise transmitted to us on or through the Website in any manner, or by email."
I have no interest in providing a perpetual, transferable, and irrevocable right and license to display and/or pimp my book to Book Country. I am reasonably certain that this contract does not actually grant that ("Content other than your Work" in (iii) (B) seeming to mean everything I put up on the site except for my writing). Based upon the rest of the agreement, I think that (iii) is in there to let Book Country do whatever they want with user comments and reviews, which I'm fine with.
But it took me a lot of reading, re-reading, and reasoning to get to that point. And that process left me with a very queasy feeling in my stomach about Book Country.
Some contracts feel like agreements between friends signed for mutual benefit. Other contracts feel like someone trying to take advantage of you. This contract has the latter feel, and I have learned through painful experience to trust my instincts on that.
So, at least for now, I will not be participating in Book Country, and The Grand Experiment has grown slightly smaller.
Book Country didn't last very long in The Grand Experiment. In fact, I didn't even register for it. I'll go into why at the bottom of the post, but we'll start with a description of the registration process.
It was a lot easier to find Book Country's "Join Now" button than Authonomy's. It's big, red, and in the upper-right-hand corner of the site, where I've been trained to look for such things. Once you click on it, you get a page that's very similar to Authonomy's registration form. Book Country asks for a display name, an e-mail address, and a password. Its Terms and Conditions are displayed in another tiny, hard-to-read box.
The terms open with pretty standard language, but refer specifically to the site being a place where people can self-publish (I remembered later that Book Country offers a variety of self-publishing services that have been panned by prominent self-published authors). The terms also discuss a focus on genre fiction and possible expansion plans, mention that Book Country "may" provide notice of changes to its terms (an improvement over Authonomy, at least), and discuss what users can and cannot do on the site before registering
All submissions to the site are deemed to be nonconfidential information. I'm not sure what that means in practical terms.
The third subheader of the agreement covers content. From the get-go, its terms are not as clear as Authonomy's ("Except as set forth herein, you will retain all rights in your Content"). By the end of the grant of license, they get murky enough that I've decided I don't want to be involved with them.
Grant of license quoted here:
"By posting or uploading any Content on the Website: (i) you understand that if your Work is in a genre included on the Book Country Website, and complies with these General Terms of Use, your Work may be made accessible to users of the Website and members will be able to review, comment on it and rate it; (ii) you represent and warrant that you own or control all rights in your Content, that such Content is original and does not, and will not, infringe the copyright, trademark or any other right of any person or entity, and that any “moral rights” in the Content have been waived; and (iii) you grant to us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, transferable right and license (A) to display the Content on the Website, and (B) with respect to Content other than your Work, to use, display, reproduce, distribute, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, perform, make, sell and export such Content, in whole and in part, on the Website or in any formats and through any media, as we see fit, and you shall have no claims against Book Country for such use or non-use. Although Book Country may maintain copies of your Content, we are not required to do so and we may delete or destroy any such Content at any time."
The grant is pretty vanilla until partway through (ii), when it starts talking about "moral rights," which I have only ever heard discussed in the context of authors/artists/musicians/others who signed bad contracts (They're explained in somewhat clearer terms here). (ii) may be talking about moral rights in the work possessed by people other than the user, but it makes me uncomfortable in its ambiguity.
(iii), however, caused me a serious headache. "Work" is defined in the agreement as "excerpts from your writing," so writing uploaded to Book Country seems to be excepted from the massive rights-grab-forever in (iii). "Content" in the agreement is defined as "Any information, proposals, requests, manuscripts, creative works, pictures, photographs, letters, documents, demos, ideas, suggestions, concepts, methods, systems, designs, plans, techniques or other materials submitted, posted, uploaded, sent or otherwise transmitted to us on or through the Website in any manner, or by email."
I have no interest in providing a perpetual, transferable, and irrevocable right and license to display and/or pimp my book to Book Country. I am reasonably certain that this contract does not actually grant that ("Content other than your Work" in (iii) (B) seeming to mean everything I put up on the site except for my writing). Based upon the rest of the agreement, I think that (iii) is in there to let Book Country do whatever they want with user comments and reviews, which I'm fine with.
But it took me a lot of reading, re-reading, and reasoning to get to that point. And that process left me with a very queasy feeling in my stomach about Book Country.
Some contracts feel like agreements between friends signed for mutual benefit. Other contracts feel like someone trying to take advantage of you. This contract has the latter feel, and I have learned through painful experience to trust my instincts on that.
So, at least for now, I will not be participating in Book Country, and The Grand Experiment has grown slightly smaller.
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