Genre will likely continue to dominate e-fiction, with romance leading fantasy, horror, and thriller. Romance writers tend to be frighteningly prolific, some producing a novel every trimester. Is the market—especially for erotica—reaching a saturation point? Penguin/Random House surely hopes not, but its editors know better than anyone how the pendulum swings and populace cycles play out.
The extraordinary thing about Fifty Shades of Grey is that a good percentage of its 65 million readers were not regular readers. The wave of E.L. James “Mommy Porn” made readers out of nonreaders—formerly a publisher’s pipe dream. More astounding still, 30 percent were men—otherwise the largest nonreader demographic. Fifty Shades weaned many off ESPN, if only briefly, to find out what their wives or lovers were orgasming over. True, some women gave their lesser half a dog-eared copy for Valentine’s or an anniversary. James received piles of fan mail from wives thanking her for “saving” their marriages. “I get so many people telling me, ‘My God, this book has empowered me, and I can really explore my sexuality now,’” she told Marlo Thomas in a Huffington Post interview.
So, as the pendulum swings to another fiction or FanFiction groundswell, publishers hope that a new James will pop out of cyberspace to draw men. If the new title is romance, the envelope must be pushed. Smashword recently released former women’s magazine editor A.J. Hamilton’s erotica Billionaire Series with Breed Me … While My Husband Watches Us, and her Monster Breeding Series, Forced to Breed with the Dungeon Beasts.
A few years ago, most publishers would have laughed at a prediction that BDSM erotica would become an industry lifeline. Who would have dreamed that billionaire-on-bobby-sox bondage and sadomasochism would electrify self-identified feminists?
The successful e-novels of the future are likely to be romance/fantasy/YA/ horror hybrids, and many, even those released by traditional publishers, could be free. Random House is now developing movies from their popular titles. Like TV shows, they could be paid for by means of between-chapter pop-ups or podcasts for products the novel’s characters themselves use. Romances could be sponsored by Cialis, AndroGel, or ChristianMingle. Horror by Prilosec or Lunestra. Literature could be underwritten by NoDoz, antidepressants, or Phillips Colon Health probiotics for gas and bloating. Each ad e-novel posted on a publisher site might be linked to the author’s own website which, like a TV station itself, would broadcast 24/7 teasers and trailers for her other work.
The future of e may be IF—Interactive Fiction. IF turns the novel into a computer game. By following hyperlinks embedded in the text, the reader can manipulate the characters and plot. Penguin, Simon & Schuster, and Scholastic have recently introduced books with video so the reader can also play with images.
In 1997, John Updike announced his decision to partner with Amazon and “stick my head into the mouth of the electronic lion.” But, lest things go south on him, Rabbit’s creator, like Siegfried and Roy, charged for his services. According to his publisher Knopf’s PR director, Paul Bogaards, Amazon paid him a five-figure sum to write the first and last paragraphs of its Greatest Story Ever Told IF murder mystery. Michael Chabon, Christopher Buckley, and thirty-seven other authors filled in the middle over the course of forty-four days. Expressing a common reaction to the experiment, Deborah Treisman (then fiction editor for Grand Street, now The New Yorker), said that, while the story showed promise in the first three paragraphs, it “descended into a kind of schizophrenic bedlam.”1 The criticism of course pertained to the collaborative nature of the project, not the digital format. Moreover, it wasn’t hypertext or video driven. Still, Updike himself was underwhelmed. “Books haven’t really been totally ousted yet,” he told Time magazine with no small relief.2
The IF Mayflower had set sail two decades earlier with The Adventures of You gamebook for children. Author Edward Packard used the second person to make the reader the hero who could choose his role and plot developments from an option menu. After being rejected by nine publishers, the Vermont Crossroads Press released the title and quickly sold 8,000 copies. Pocket Books then took it on and sold far more. Finally, Bantam moved in, retitled it Choose Your Own Adventure, and unloaded more than 250 million copies between 1979 and 1998.
In 1996, Robert Arellano, a founder of the Literary Advisory Board of the Electronic Literature Organization, introduced to the Internet the first hypertext IF, Sunshine ’69. Navigable maps, scene calendars, and a multiple point-of-view selector “suitcase” were among the novel’s digital bells and whistles.
When Underland Press introduced the Web novel, or “Wovel,” in 2008, one thousand readers immediately signed on. Author Kealan Patrick Burke wrote an episode of The Living, waited for readers to vote on how they wanted the plot to develop, then wrote another along these guidelines. The novel is ongoing and renews every Monday.
Meanwhile, HarperCollins had released Heather McElhatton’s second-person “Do-Over” novel, Pretty Little Mistakes, in paperback. The reader can choose between 150 endings such as becoming a Denny’s waitress, a feminist jeweler, or an African relief worker blown up by a pipe bomb. Before then, one is given countless other fateful options such as becoming a meth head, a monkey molester, or the mother of a motel manager’s baby. The IF title is in its fifteenth printing. A Warren Wilson College MFA, Ms. McElhatton is a Pushcart Nominee for a story in the Ontario Review. A Million Little Mistakes, her 2010 sequel to Pretty Little Mistakes, gives the reader a $22 million lottery jackpot and many decisions about what to do with it—half of them leading to a happily-ever-after, the other half to disaster.
A digital, Web-based Wovel such as The Living offers readers far greater interactive capability than paperbacks like Pretty Little Mistakes. Nearly limitless prefab character types, plots, and settings are available. Profiling apps such as O.P.R.A.H.—Online Passive Reader’s Algorithmic Helpers—can also lead a reader to specific titles in any given genre most likely to appeal to his or her unique taste. Type in your Desert Island Top 10 books, and Amazon will soon be able to recommend your future favorite title with remarkable accuracy.
Pioneers in digital literature such as Jane Friedman have yet to introduce interactive versions of classics for literary FanFiction fans, but they are surely soon to come. How many of us have longed to see Laertes run Hamlet through in Act 1 before another intolerable soliloquy? Or for Vronsky to break his back in the steeplechase instead of his mare, Frou Frou? Or for Holden Caulfield to beat up Maurice the pimp and run off with Sunny, the nuns, or Mr. Antolini?
Philip M. Parker calls himself “the most published author in the history of the planet.” Professor of International Strategy and Economics at the University of California (and, formerly, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford), Parker does not exaggerate. To date, he has authored over 200,000 titles, and his company, ICON Group International, nearly 800,000. Ninety-five percent are digital; the rest are POD. With his patented computer algorithm, the professor can complete a one-hundred-page book on a tech or business-related subject in twenty minutes.3
Having made his mark in digital nonfiction, Parker has set his sights on fiction, romance in particular. If IBM’s Watson can beat Jeopardy’s greatest contestants, Ken and Brad, with two terabytes tied behind its back, why can’t his own machine, with fifty shades of silicone, take on the E.L. James sorority? wonders Parker. “I have already set it [the romance algorithm] up,” he told The New York Times. “There are only so many body parts.”4
Romance fans cried foul over the remark. They insisted that a hot Harlequin Temptation or Kensington Aphrodesia is far more than sex, which the most published author in history would know had he read a single one. The professor has apparently realized this since his computer-generated robo romance has yet to be released by Penguin or even Smashword. Though he may already have his binary big bangs in Hal’s ram, he has yet to put his digital ducks in a row on character quirks, nuanced dialogue, and plot MacGuffins. Elements such as these come naturally to carbon-based creatures, but to silicones they are still puzzles. So Parker won’t be trying to tackle horror, fantasy, sci-fi, or any other more challenging genres anytime soon with his machine already equipped with NewNovelist, WritersBlock, and WhiteSmoke software. Still, in the end, Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the Wright Brothers prevailed after many setbacks and seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
Is anyone willing to bet that by 2050, even without Steve Jobs, we won’t have a SuperMac that can mass-produce IF Pattersons, Jameses, and Danielle Steels tailor-made to each reader’s taste? After all, on the Net nobody knows if you’re human. And what modern man would care anyway?
1 Matthew Mirapaul, “The Greatest Tale Ever Told, A Column Becomes a Collaboration,” The New York Times, August 28, 1997. http://theater.nytimes.com/library/cyber/mirapaul/082897mirapaul.html
2 Linton Weeks, “Cyberprose and Cons,” Washington Post, October 12, 1998.
3 Victor Wishna, “Why Computers Can’t Write Novels…. Yet,” BookRiot, February 4, 2013. http://bookriot.com/2013/02/04/why-computers-cant-write-novels-yet/#!/exjun_
4 Noam Cohen, “He Wrote 200,000 Books (But Computers Did Some of the Work),” The New York Times, April 14, 2010. www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0