Nick Name is a tech-absurdist from Poland. His ironic short stories show how deeply our lives depend on technology. Runs litexperimental projects including Twitter’s #hashtagstory and Google-translated fiction. Guest writer at TeleRead, Publetariat and Fiction Matters. Believes in mobile e-books. They can bring the joy of reading to those, who don’t feel like consuming books the old-fashioned way. His dream is to be a default fiction author for any mobile device with eReading capabilities.

Hello Nick Name, you write both in Polish and in English. How hard is it for an author to write in two languages ?

My mother tongue is Polish. Beautiful, rich, melodious language. On the other side I don’t think I’ll ever feel good enough to write stories in English. But web 2.0 opens so many doors for a writer, that I decided to spend some money on a professional English translation of my stories. This was after I discovered Feedbooks and all the great things an author can benefit from. So now I have two versions of the same book – in Polish and in English. This gives me one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to compare chances of reaching readers at home and abroad.

What’s the current status of the e-book market in Poland ?

We are months behind the leading countries. Existing e-book stores offer publications in pdf format. Polish readers are not ready for e-books as they haven’t actually seen e-books in action and there are few people who feel obliged to explain e-benefits. Publishers aren’t rushing into e-publishing, because they are afraid of piracy.

In general in our country there is a strong, traditional approach to selling and reading books.

But currently there are two factors, which can bring e-books closer to tipping point. A first one is an International Kindle. Polish opinion leaders already have them. Words spread. More people get interested. Less people feel reluctant.

The second factor is much more important. It’s the launch of the Polish e-book platform, which in many aspects is similar to Interead’s Cool-er. The project is called eClicto and officially starts on 10th of December. This is surely going to redefine our e-book market. It will upgrade it to the “ePub phase”.

You define your works as “tech absurd”, could you explain why ?

A first beauty of publishing 2.0 is that a niche writer has bigger chances to succeed than the one, who tries to join an army of Dan Brown’s followers. That’s why I don’t describe my stories as sci-fi or speculative fiction. Yes, those tags say more, but they are actually not so to the point. People compare my writing to Topor, Vian or Keret, and it makes a lot of sense – I love that kind of literature. And I hope I’m bringing some fresh air with my focus on technology, which was always an absurduum-mobile.

For many people “absurd” is something wrong and unpleasant, something to avoid. But there is another point of view. Alfred Hitchcock once said: “absurdity can be only overcome with humor”. This is exactly my world. I don’t want the reader to escape from reality into a fictional world. I want the reader to recover from stress, to turn into laughter those little absurdly ridiculous things, which don’t deserve to be stressful.

So, I call myself a tech-absurdist and my stories are tech-absurd. If I use “tech-fiction”, that means that in this particular moment I just have lost faith. It’s very rare – as there is a second beauty of publishing 2.0.

The second beauty of self-publishing is that you can find your readers in any place in the world. Being niche in one country usually means no readers. Thanks to Feedbooks, “Password Incorrect” was being read by almost 10 000 readers from all over the world! I was never expecting that much!

How do you reach out to this niche and help them to discover your book ?

I’m using social media to get to the potential readers. My favourite network is Twitter. It’s informal and simple, what allows to combine a large variety of messages/tools. For a non-English writer it’s also the least stressful place to write. And actually it’s a great place for inspiration. The paradox is that 140-character limit has caused an explosion of creativity. In case of literature it’s twitter fiction. I am glad, that I can be a part of it – with my own #vss stories, as well as an original #hashtagstory project. The idea behind the latter one is very simple – I put together the stories from current Twitter hashtags. A crazy way to write fiction in English without actually writing it.

At Twitter I share my fiction tweets, but also promote a new approach to reading, which is involving all advances of technology. I’m sharing news about e-books, eReaders and everything, which helps to switch from a mobility of a paper book directly to a mobility of a new generation e-book – just jumping over the old computer screen e-book.

But Twitter is not the only social network I use. With my addiction to web 2.0 and technology, I’m just chasing for any new tool possible, and If I find one, I grab a username, start a profile and get pinged from Twitter. What I’m doing sounds like a semi-bot , and I sometimes feel like that. Currently I ping messages to 18 services. All of them are linked back to my blog and a 10k-download book at Feedbooks.

Another thing is Google Translate. English writers don’t need it. Writers should avoid using it professionally. But I’m a tech-absurdist, and this gives me some kind of license to do weird things. Google-translated fiction, as you might guess is a litexperimental project, where I involve translation script into writing process. My latest idea is to write a short story in such a way, that it could be easily translated by Google Translate. Just imagine: one story, written in a single language, available without any costs to 40 foreign language speakers!

So, you’re not only writing about the absurdity of technology but use it too to turn your writing into something different ? Would it still be tech absurd if you distributed your book on paper rather than as an e-book ?

This is exactly what I’m trying to do. We live in such times, that writing about them is just not enough. Technology is giving us so many tools to get involved, that writing no longer is a remote kind of activity. Especially if you are writing about how technology affects our lives.

When it comes to the form of a book, I’m already on the “e” side with no need for an emergency escape to paper. Because paper is not good for a book any more. It’s the books, which brought human civilization so far. I just don’t understand why we should keep them in a form, which is 600 years old.

The book has to change. Comparing to other forms of spending free time, reading seems to be less and less attractive. I believe that enriching the content with interactive elements, which engage you to watch, hear and share is the best way to evolve.

So probably instead of paper I’ll go for nano technology or in-the-eye reading component to have my book published. This would be the essence of tech-absurd.

And the last question. Why did you choose “Nick Name” as your pen name?

At first I wanted to have a universal name with a hook. Nick Name was a perfect choice to suggest a technology issue. Another thing is that nowadays every single person has many identities, and actually the one in ID card is not the most important. The web presence of a person means in many cases different nicknames for different purposes. Such a web-based personality split is a common denominator for our times and I wanted to grab it for myself.

When I started to self-publish, “Nick Name” received another meaning – you just need to register (for example to Feedbooks) and you can have your book published. There are lots of fantastic authors, who don’t have big chances to be spotted by big publishers. Now we can self-publish, and this is the best possible way to be spotted by people far more important – the readers.

In other words: you don’t need to have a big name to have your book published. A decent nickname is enough.

Find Nick Name on the Web: http://www.passwordincorrect.com/

For our second interview, we’re glad to talk to Small Stories who recently published the first Wave fiction on Feedbooks (Bathrobe Guru),  but also two collections of nanofiction (Small Stories, Uncollected Stories) and Twitter novels (Eating Grass, What It Means).

I write microfiction using the tag ‘Small Stories’. I have always conceived of my work existing within the digital domain. I have championed short form writing and mobile reading / writing on digital devices such as ereaders and mobile phones.

Hello Small Stories, you’ve published collections of nanofiction, wrote several novels on Twitter and you’re now experimenting with Wave. Do you believe that each medium requires a unique approach to fiction ?

Hello, Hadrien. I think the essentials of storytelling never change – the need to hook people with a compelling scenario that requires an outcome, empathy with a character, all that stuff – but yes, each format does require a particular approach or mindset. With Twitter novels like What It Means, for example, it’s more about emotion. With microfiction such as Uncollected Stories it’s very stream of consciousness. And with Google Wave Fiction it’s about the participation of other wave members. Although each format has it’s own particular quality they all require an open mind and passion to make them succeed.

Most fiction on Twitter seems to focus on very short fiction. With your twovels (Twitter + Novels), you had to create a plot with very short sentences (140 characters). How did you handled this task and do you have any recommendations for other authors using this format ?

The Twitter novels (twovels or tovels) are a real buzz. You’re right, they do need a plot to work over a number of consecutive tweets. My twitter novels have between 2,000 to 3,000 words in total spanning hundreds of tweets.

I either plan them out in my head or use Outliner, an iPhone app. The writer needs to think about the plot in advance because you can’t edit tweets once they’re posted. If you delete a tweet you are effectively cutting out a chunk of the story and you can’t insert that back retrospectively.

It’s also notoriously difficult to read fiction on Twitter because you have to read it back to front. That’s why it makes total sense to produce a Feedbooks edition afterwards, so that your readers can get it the right way around.

It’s also remarkably easy to get lost and forget where you are while writing a story. I would recommend using something like the Birdhouse app, which allows the writer to edit tweets offline or try and get momentum going using something like Tweetdeck on a desktop computer.

Altering the pace or creating a change the tone is challenging. For many writers it will feel like driving a Formula 1 car on a normal road. The chances are you’ll stall before you hit 200 miles per hour.

I’m most proud of What It Means – which is written from the point of view of an eighteen year old. The format, the text message type style, the emotion and mood all seem to come together to convey this guy’s world. I have some more Twitter novels in the pipeline!

Finally, it’s a lot of fun creating Twitter versions of your own longer form writing. It’s a great learning exercise. The golden rule is to rework the whole story from the ground up because converting a novel directly into Tweets doesn’t work well. Eating Grass, for example, was based on an 80,000 word novel I wrote (which took me seven years to write). Ironically, I prefer the 2,700 word Twitter version!

Traditionally, it’s been much harder to publish short fiction than novels, do you think that the balance will change with e-books and digital distribution ?

I’ve always championed shorter formats. To my mind there’s something powerful about expressing a story with simplicity and brevity – each word seems more important and imbued with magic. So yes, I would love to see this happen.

The Internet has changed so many things without us being aware. People often see it in a negative context and talk about falling concentration spans but I see it as something positive. People expect a story (information if you like) to be presented in a more vivid and clearly set out way.

We live in a culture of headlines and bulletpoints and yet we all still demand that our content is both engaging and fascinating – we expect it to be presented – packaged – more efficiently. This, I believe, is influencing the way we expect stories to be presented as well.

Getting short fiction published is tricky. It’s really difficult to market a novel with one story let alone market a book with twenty stories! The fiction market is a strange beast.

The truth is that no one really knows what’s going to happen in the future. Some things change some things remain the same. I use an iPhone but I still walk around in handmade leather shoes.

Your collections of short stories are very popular at Feedbooks, I guess that this is a good sign ! Do you use social networks to promote your work or do you believe that most of your readership somehow stumble upon your work (in our most popular or new releases lists) ?

Social networks have their place but it’s easy to spend too much time promoting your work online and not write anything new. There comes a point when you have to refocus on the creative process. It’s all about the quality of the stories.

I believe my writing appeals to a particular audience but I can’t say I know how to reach them. I’ve tried to reach that audience through blogging but it’s a lot more hit and miss than people care to admit. It’s not just about numbers, it’s about the quality of the people you can attract. When I posted a short story (which I thought was great) I might only get 100 readers or so for it, but a random novelty photo could get me thousands of hits.

Feedbooks is by far the most useful way I know of attracting people to my work. Having your ebook on the front page and at the top of Feedbooks lists does help! Feedbooks is a great place to share and discover new writing because it attracts a quality readership.

You’ve been experimenting with Google Wave very recently and decided to include other writers/readers while working on Bathrobe Guru: they provide feedback and suggestions about the plot mostly. Are you happy with this experiment ? How do you find the right balance between writing as a live performance and the need to create a story that someone can appreciate outside of a Wave ? Will you try something new for your next Wave fiction (co-editing for example, rather than involving the other participants in the decisions about the plot) ?

Once again it’s a case of focusing on the unique strength of the particular format. Google Wave is a collaboration tool so it makes perfect sense to use that feature and encourage other wave participants to take a lead in deciding what is going to happen.

Writing Bathrobe Guru has been fascinating and exciting. I only hope the resulting story is as enjoyable for the readers as my experience was writing it. Google Wave Fiction hints at a whole new world of storytelling possibility and blurs the line between author and audience.

I just write as I always write and ignore the fact that people are watching. And yet I do feel different somehow because the audience is there. It’s actually a nice feeling. The collaboration is a fun challenge and the ‘live’ aspect a bonus but I hope the writing works as a finished story – that’s the most important thing for me.

Being able to co-edit a story is what originally attracted me to Google Wave. Hotel Kaiser, for example, is a collaboration which was created using Google Docs. I’m certain it would have worked better with Google Wave. Collaborations are huge fun but both writers need to be on the same level and it can be frustrating waiting for then to finish the next section. It is amazing when they take your ideas places you never imagined!

You pay a lot of attention to the covers of your book: for most of your publications on Feedbooks, you tweaked them several times and a graphic designer created the cover for “What It Means“. Do you believe that in a digital world, a cover is still as important ? An author might not have the right skills to design a cover, what would you recommend in this case ?

I enjoy the challenge of trying to create a visually arresting graphic to stimulate interest in the text. My wife is a graphic designer and thinks that ‘tweaking’ is the sign of an amateur! That’s probably true because I don’t plan the covers like a professional, I just play with them.

Publishers use many devices to attract interest in the text from elaborate book covers and special editions to author book signings, TV and radio appearances, posters, competitions and adverts. It’s all about attracting potential readers. If you can get people to talk about your work this also stimulates interest. This is especially true if there is a debate or controversy surrounding the writer or story.

I think the visual look of things is just as important in the digital domain as elsewhere, if not more so. It’s only a matter of time before screen technology overtakes print. I remember when digital cameras had maximum resolutions of 320 x 240 pixels and people said they would never be as good as a 35mm film camera. Now of course we know that’s nonsense but many people still believe screen technology will never be as readable as paper. It’s just a matter of time…

For my most recent Twitter novel, What It Means, it just so happened that a graphic designer, Ryan Price, was reading the story while I was posting it to Twitter and he enjoyed it so much he offered to do a cover. I was delighted with the result.

If a writer doesn’t have artistic flair I’d suggest they get in touch with friends or family and try to find someone to help – perhaps someone knows someone at art college or through Facebook or Twitter?

Find Small Stories on the Web: http://sites.google.com/site/smallstoriesproject/

On Feedbooks: http://www.feedbooks.com/userbooks/recent?user=15148

Last week, a fifth self-published book passed the 10.000 downloads mark (see top books). To celebrate this, we’ll be conducting interviews with various authors published on Feedbooks for a few weeks.

Our first interview will be with L. Lee Lowe, author of “Mortal Ghost” and currently serializing “Corvus” on Feedbooks.

Lee is an online writer who was born in New York and educated in the United States, France, and Germany. She spent eighteen years living and working in Zimbabwe, where her five children were also born. Now she lives in the hills above the Rhine near Cologne, Germany. When she’s not busy trying to restrain her dog Gypsy, a border-collie mix, from herding the local cows, horses, and vociferous crows, she can be found at her desk with her router disconnected while she writes.

Hello Lee, you were one of the first authors to self-publish on Feedbooks and “Mortal Ghost” was downloaded over 10.000 times. How did you discovered the service and how does it fit in your distribution/marketing strategy ?

I can’t remember how I first learned of Feedbooks, and now it feels as if the service has always been available – a bit like Google, you can no longer imagine a world without it! It must have been one of those website lists of e-book sources, possibly from Lifehacker, which I studied when I first began to publish online.

My distribution/marketing strategy is, sadly, very haphazard, though I do try to list my work with all the e-book and podcasting sites. There are online writers who spend a fair amount of energy promoting their work, often in quite innovative ways, but aside from the occasional email and/or comment at relevant blogs/websites, I tend to do less and less of this sort of thing, because it’s time stolen from writing and reading, time I can ill afford. There is so much I want to learn, so much I want to read, so much I want to try! And I’ve withdrawn from all social websites and communities, because they’re unhelpful, providing me with few readers and generally worthless criticism. In any case, I measure success against the very best writing, not in terms of numbers or sales. Readers will have to look after themselves.

Why do you self-publish? Have you ever considered conventional publication?

Despite its stigma, self-publishing has respectable and even venerable antecedents — Marcel Proust, for example — though undoubtedly a much larger number of truly deplorable ones.

Publishing is essentially a means to an end: a technology for distributing a writer’s words to readers. Once this was only practicable via a printing press. Obviously, this is no longer the case. Writers are now able to take charge of their own work, a thoroughly enabling process once they relinquish their prejudices and refuse to play the ‘insider game’, yearning to become one of the elect, one of the chosen; anointed by publisher’s ink. This places the burden of responsibility for writing well precisely where it belongs: on the writers themselves.

This doesn’t mean that I would refuse to publish my work conventionally, though I don’t actively seek to do so. After all, I still buy and collect, read and cherish printed books. However, I’m a fervent advocate of ‘open culture’ – perhaps because of my many years in Zimbabwe – and would always insist on free online and electronic access to my fiction.

Is the serialization simply a good way to distribute your book or do you gather feedback from it ?

Aside from applications such as Stanza on the iPhone and Aldiko on Android, several services use our API to search and import e-books.

Bookworm and Bookglutton are both web-based services designed to read EPUB files. Bookworm provides both a normal and mobile version of its service, while Bookglutton is based around the idea of a social reading experience with support for shared annotations.

With it latest update, Bookworm displays a list of most popular books from Feedbooks, while Bookglutton can perform a search on Feedbooks to import books. With both services, you can also use the URL of an EPUB book on Feedbooks to import your book.

Looking for a quick read ? You’ll find plenty of short fiction on our Original Books section. Among the new releases you’ll find:

• Three new short stories from P.J. Lyon
• The first twovel (twitter + novel) from Small Stories, who also published an excellent collection of microfiction
• Horror short stories from Alwyne Ashwethe

I’ve been talking about a full redesign on both Twitter and Facebook lately, and even published the first screenshots of the new design.

It’s time to explain why we’re working on a new design: to make Feedbooks easier to use through a simple and consistent layout.

The first thing that you’ll notice about our new global navigation is that we renamed the sections. “Discover” is renamed into “Public Domain” and “Share” into “Original Books”. While the books published in the “Public Domain” section are author-centric (points to a specific page with various metadata), the books published in “Original Books” are user-centric, and will point out directly to the profile of the user.

We’ll gradually introduce new interactions between readers and authors to make the promotion of a book much easier. You’ll notice that compared to the current design, comments, favorites and downloads are now highlighted a lot more to serve this purpose and new links to automatically post a book on Twitter/Facebook are now available.

What is Aldiko?

Aldiko is an ebook reading application that runs on any Android phone and which enables you to easily download and read thousands of books right on your smartphone.

We’re glad to announce that this new EPUB reading system, capable of downloading content directly from Feedbooks is now available. We’ve worked with our friends at Aldiko to make this experience as seamless as possible: it is actually based on the same Atom catalog format that we’re using for Stanza. I’m glad that we finally have a second reading system commited to implement the future OPDS standard, and Aldiko actually implements some of the recommendations that we recently submitted.

Once again, Feedbooks is the first platform available on a new reading system. We’ve been very successful with Stanza (Neelan recently announced that 8 million EPUB files have been distributed on Stanza. 75% of these files came from Feedbooks) and hope to have a similar success with any new reading system on the market. The Android platform is very attractive and with 18 new Android-based devices in 2009, it should get some significant share of the smartphone market.

Update: In-depth review at the Gadgeteer

With blogging, the Atom feed entry ought to include either a content child — containing the full blog post or a link to it (and the link relationship identified as ‘alternate’) — or a summary child whose content is an extract, abstract or short summary of one of the three types above.

If OPDS is a catalog of books, then there’s a mismatch between the blog model and the catalog model. The content in the catalog is material about a book, and the feed therefore ought to have the full material in content or a summary of it. A link child of contentshould take the feed’s consumer to that “full material.”

So maybe the catalog copy shouldn’t be likened to blog posts.

Then content could contain a link to the epub, and the catalog description would go into summary. Of course, the full descriptions in the catalog might be too long to use as intended in this type of feed.

In that case, just create a new type of relationship link, as was done in the examples for cover image and thumbnail, that describes whether this longer content is a synopsis, review or just longer description.

I agree with most of this comment. It makes more sense to use content for the EPUB file and summary for the description. We should also extend Atom rather than describe everything in XHTML: using DublinCore to describe the language, copyright status, publication date and other metadata.

Partial entry/Full entry

The current draft is full of new rel values, a design choice that we should avoid as much as possible (most of the time, a type and a rel value registered at the IANA link registry would be enough).

To support entries with longer content, as recommended by Roger Sperberg, we don’t need a new relationship link. In AtomPub:

Clients MUST NOT assume that an Atom Entry returned in the Feed is a full representation of an Entry Resource and SHOULD perform a GET on the URI of the Member Entry before editing it.

In the same RFC5023 for AtomPub, the “type” parameter was defined:

This specification defines a new “type” parameter for use with the “application/atom+xml” media type. The “type” parameter has a value of “entry” or “feed”.
Neither the parameter name nor its value are case sensitive.
The value “entry” indicates that the media type identifies an Atom Entry Document. The root element of the document MUST be atom:entry.
The value “feed” indicates that the media type identifies an Atom Feed Document. The root element of the document MUST be atom:feed.
If not specified, the type is assumed to be unspecified, requiring Atom processors to examine the root element to determine the type of Atom document.

Thanks to this type parameter, it’s fairly easy to point from a partial entry to a full entry using a link@rel="alternate"

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml;type=entry" href="..." />

For sources with a RDF document available (such as O’Reilly, and Feedbooks in the upcoming weeks), the same link@rel="alternate" could be used with application/rdf+xml.

Controlled vocabularies

The publication metadata required and allowed in OPF, should have the same status in OPDS.

Once the goals for OPDS are clearly defined (oops), we might extend this.

Any provider should be allowed to use additional extensions in their full entries.

Relationship to AtomPub

To allow such things as comments/reviews, OPDS could also support AtomPub.  With both the Atom Threading Extension and the current work on Collection Discovery, it should be fairly simple to support.

Re-order elements

You can now switch to the Table of Contents (ToC) of your book while editing, to drag & drop parts/chapters/sections and re-order them the way that you want. Nested ToC re-ordering is supported, which means that you could create a new chapter, move to the ToC and drag & drop several sections into this chapter.

You can also change the type of an element, for example if you don’t need a chapter header anymore, you can turn a chapter into a section.

Sub-sections

Sections can have several levels of sub-sections now. With sections & sub-sections it should be very easy to create any structure that you’d like for your book.

Nikunj R. Mehta & Colm Divilly recently released 2 Internet-Drafts: one about collection discovery and the other one about hierarchy.

Internet-Drafts are still works in progress, but since the behavior for collection discovery was already described in a previous RFC, and the rel values used in the hierarchy draft are consistent with those registered at the IANA link registry, we decided to implement both of these drafts.

Collection discovery

Collections can be discovered in our feeds now (for example /book/id/contents.atom), and they’re not limited to the service document anymore. In the feed for a book you’ll find the following code:

<app:collection href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/id/contents.atom">
  <app:accept>application/atom+xml;type=entry</app:accept>
  <title>Add new entries</title>
  <app:categories fixed="yes">
    <category term="Part"/>
    <category term="Chapter"/>
    <category term="Section"/>
    <category term="Text"/>
  </app:categories>
</app:collection>

Hierarchy

Hierarchy is supported through:

<link rel="down" ah:count="2" href="..."/>

ah:count is used to count the number of entries in the child feed, and in the child feed you’ll get a new collection to add new entries.