"Incunabula" is the term for, among other things, a book printed in the infancy of the printing press. It is perhaps most well known to readers of the late great Dorothy Sayers, whose hero Lord Peter was a collector of incunabulae. The word is fascinating to me: it implies a birth, an incubation, a step from the restriction of knowledge in enclosed communities to its expansion into the wider world. Books are power, and incunabulae symbolize a transfer of power to the masses.
In the summer of 2008 I was playing with the concept of the "next incunabulae," the process of free dissemination of information on the internet. I was writing a story in which several characters are dropped into a super-library in the fifty-first century -- courtesy of Doctor Who, the show which invented The Library. One of the characters was about to go exploring and, being a lover of books, he wanted to look at new turning-points for literature:
"Fine," Nicholas says. "If you need me I'll be in Extribuli."
"Exwhat?" Donna asks.
"Look it up!" Nicholas calls over his shoulder, wondering actually how many volumes the OED now runs to. Extribulum -- ex, out from; tribulum, a machine. The opposite of the incunabula. Works that exist in electrical form, at the cusp of the rise of the e-published book.
At the time I was just messing around, not to mention using some truly terrible dog-Latin, but it did seem useful. It became a handy term and acquired a definition, as new words so often do. Extribuli, singular extribulum, are books published first on the internet -- not books created on a computer, as so many are now, but books whose first printing was entirely digital and which were only afterwards printed in hardcopy -- as some put it, "dead tree" -- version.
About eight months after the term extribulum came into being, I dusted off an old fiction manuscript I'd written years before, gave it a brush-up, and decided to post it for public critique with the intent to eventually self-publish. I have some unique advantages over the average online talking-head in that I have a wide readership: according to my stats, about 2500 people read my online journal regularly, which means I am capable of asking for the view of a fairly diverse reading public without the fetters placed on a professional published writer. A professional, especially an established one, usually trusts an editor or a very small group of readers, and only gets to hear criticism from a wide and self-selecting readership after the book has been printed. Which must be very frustrating, really.
Giving literature away for free and then expecting and embracing reader-criticism is not a tradition of any kind. It is not something that is systematic. It is not something that is done in the literary world. Why should it be? Most people who sell literature for a living can't afford to give it away for free. And to be honest it's not like I planned what happened when I began posting Nameless -- I just stumbled into it, but there it was. I wanted to share a story and see what everyone thought of it, and instead I opened up a dialogue with a conscious readership about structure and interpretation and the author-reader relationship, about how to rewrite a book based on the thoughts and feelings of readers. Throughout the process, people have said to me, isn't this weird? Have you ever seen anything like this? and I haven't.
What we did when Nameless first went up wouldn't even have been possible before the internet, or if it was possible would have been heinously expensive. I don't know that a published writer has ever tried putting a "finished" work in front of the public and saying, "Tell me what's wrong." Very few writers have ever even attempted to overhaul a published work because of public criticism. Stephen King released an extended-cut of The Stand which unfortunately resulted in several bizarre anachronisms when he changed the dates in the book, and Marion Zimmer Bradley rewrote a book she published twenty years before, but those are exceptions and not quite the same. George Lucas may have revamped Star Wars, but I'm pretty sure he did it over the protest of his fans, not in response to them.
With Nameless, I said from the start that this was a book I intended to publish, a completed book that I wanted feedback on. This gave people a mindset with which to approach it: they treated the story as a "real" book they wanted to discuss and pick apart as if they were reading it at a book club. They pulled no punches, and this is a better book because of it. I know I'm a measurably better writer than I was at the start.
Chapter by chapter, people told me what was wrong -- sometimes something as small as a mis-spelled word, sometimes a major structural issue. I learned what I was doing right, of course, which is a heady sensation, but more importantly I learned where my weak points were. My dialogue to action ratio was off; my characterization sometimes suffered from a lack of depth, and my cryptic arcs weren't always sharp enough to draw a reader in at the start. The ultimate importance of the first chapter in a book has never been lost on me, but now I understand better how to build something immediate: not everyone is going to trust a writer long enough to get to the good stuff, and a relationship with the reader has to be forged very early.
Criticism is not something you can accept wholesale, of course. You have to pick and choose, but your readers tend to know which way the wind is blowing. If a dozen people notice a single flaw, then it's not a single flaw, it's a problem that needs to be fixed. There is some give and take, and it's a wise child who knows when to listen, but overwhelmingly the advice has been good advice because it's readers giving it. Readers know what throws them out of a book or why they don't trust a character or theme.
It takes a great deal of self-possession to undergo something like this. Even if they like your book, you are never going to please all of the people all of the time and if you try you will end up with a very bad book. Still, you still need to appreciate all viewpoints. You might not act on to what someone says, but you need to take it into account, process it, and thank them for it. They are offering you their honest opinion, which is a precious thing to a writer. Or should be.
All of this requires control on the part of the writer: controlling a knee-jerk "but you don't get it!" reaction, controlling impulses brought on by reader-response, controlling the direction of the book and learning how to direct and manipulate a readership that is responding in real-time. I don't mean manipulation in a negative sense at all, but rather in the sense of guiding your readers along the path you've chosen, improvising and accounting for their unexpected reactions as you go. Every night I read over the notes I'd been given that day and prepped the next day's chapter of Nameless for "publication". Most nights I found myself rewriting significant portions of the new chapter or adding portions that had not been there before, because the story needed them. The readers needed them in order to follow where I was leading.