We’re rapidly moving away from our old linear form of writing and reading, in which ideas and narratives wended their way across many pages, to a much more compressed, nonlinear form. What we’ve learned about digital media is that, even as they promote the transmission of writing, they shatter writing into little, utilitarian fragments. They turn stories into snippets. They transform prose and poetry into quick, scattered bursts of text.

Writing will survive, but it will survive in a debased form. It will lose its richness. We will no longer read and write words. We will merely process them, the way our computers do. [more...]

I responded thusly:

Nick, there’s no doubt that our relationship with text is changing with the medium, but I wonder what exactly you mean by “debased”?

We may be moving away from a form of writing and reading *continuous* text by *one author*. Yes, we’re now reading more nonlinear text, but is it true to say this is compressed, exactly? Perhaps expanded is a better way to look at it.

Take the news business. Previously you read one author’s longish thoughts on a particular subject. It was the author’s job to add contextual information, and give a complete article with multiple viewpoints and more or less what you needed to know.

But I’ve noticed in my news consumption these days that I’m getting my context and multiple viewpoints from all sorts of different sources all the time. All those snippets floating around. I no longer have the same needs from a news article, because I no longer expect to get all my information from one source. I feel that I’ve started to process information very differently – and I think more richly – than I could before.

I’m a big fan of long, continuous texts of course, but I’ve started to think about what digital is doing to my reading and thinking habits as a kind of intellectual pointillism, where my own thoughts and those of many others are forming a kind of continuum. That all these little bits of text, and twitters, and posts, combine to allow me to form an opinion, in a way that a single source (say a NYT editorial) may have done in the past.

So again it looks less like a single text getting compressed, and more like the concepts behind that text living in a wider intellectual space where many texts (both long and short) are helping form my thoughts/conclusions.

Are all these fragments utilitarian? No more so than their longer counterparts. But the story … that is the thing that emerges from all the fragments.

Finally, what do you mean by saying that we will “process text the way our computers do?” My bet is that humans will do exactly what they have always done: exist as humans in their environment. Our generation could tell you what humans are like – a lot like humans of our generation. But 100 years ago, the list would look different. 100 years from now, it’ll look different.

But we’ll still be human, no matter how our text is flowing around. And to say that will be debased … well I’m not sure that means anything very important, except that you might not like what humans are like in 100 years; and they will be equally puzzled by you and your preoccupations.

It’s a time of creativity, chaos, angst, nerves, procrastination, excitement, and sheer folly, a colossal celebration of passion for the written word.

It’s also a time, let’s face it, of some text in dire need of copy editing.

Of course, when you have to pump out 1,700 words every day, there’s no time for copy editing: much like Lot’s wife, Nanowrimoers are counseled against looking back; to think of the next sentence, not the one before.

That’s where Book Oven and Bite-Size Edits come in. Because, chances are, your Nanowrimo novel will need a bit of work when you are done. But what if some of your friends could help you clean up your novel as you go? A team of cheerleaders / proofreaders, who edit just a few sentences every day to make sure your howlers get cleaned. The beauty of it is: they don’t have to read the whole chapter or the whole book! Just random sentences. If you have 15 people helping you, they just need to edit 10 sentences a day; 10 people just need to edit 15 sentences. So you don’t need to be (too) embarrassed by your unpolished prose.

Here is how it works:

1. Go to http://bookoven.com and register for an account
2. Create a new project, and tag it “nanowrimo” (you can make your project public or private)
3. Invite a group of friends, or fellow writers to be proofreaders
4. Every day, post your finished Nanowrimo text into a new chapter
5. Turn on Bite-Size Edits
6. Send a message to your team of proofreaders, letting them know a new text is ready for editing (be sure to include the URL to Bite-Size Edits for the project)
7. When Nanowrimo is done, you can accept/reject/modify the edits made by your team
8. And then, when you’re ready to look at the novel again, you’ll have a clean copy of your text ready to polish into something wonderful (or to make you shudder with shame!)

If you’d like to try out Bite-Size Edits, you can play around with Andrew Dobbs’ book, “Traveler”:
http://bookoven.com/projects/225/bitesizeedit/

Or David Nygren’s book, “Boy/Girl” (probably rated R):
http://bookoven.com/projects/233/bitesizeedit/

We’ve always had abridged versions and “selected-essays-from” and audio versions and made-for-TV adaptations. But in a more open rights schema (say, Creative Commons licensing), there is something thrilling about the idea that dedicated readers – the most engaged of all stakeholders, beyond the original writer & editor – might legitimately improve texts for certain audiences. (This is exactly what happened with LibriVox – passionate readers transforming texts they love so that others can enjoy them).

I know I have read texts where I thought: the information in that book was great; pity it was so dry, or so poorly-written. As books go digital, the ability to work on them and adapt them for different needs becomes a simple matter of opening up a text editor, importing a file (in theory) and getting to work. In the academic market, and certain sectors of serious non-fiction, something like this could be extremely valuable to readers, and to writers as well (increased markets).

For such creative engagement to happen, it will require writers and publishers to look differently on their works than they might have done to date – to view their “finished” books as something more open-ended, and available. The tools are here already; what remains to be seen is whether our culture of authorship has room for such a radical change in perspective.

We’re seeing hints that in some quarters, we may be ready. Cory Doctorow has legions of fans who translate his works and make audio versions of his books. But for some reason this struck me as a bigger jump. Kevin Kelly reports as follows:

The other day I got a note from a Dutch guy who is a fan of my book OUT OF CONTROL. He found my ideas great but my presentation “frustrating.” But unlike my other “frustrated” readers, Andreas Lloyd decided to do something about it: he remixed my book!

I think the result is quite amazing. Remixing is perhaps too strong a word because he mostly simply dropped entire chapters, with a little re-arranging here and there. It is a very sharp but intelligent edit. But the effect is striking. [more...]

Writes Andreas Lloyd about his work on Kelly’s book:

Kevin Kelly’s book Out of Control is a fascinating book full of fascinating ideas reaching across the board from artificial intelligence, evolution, biology, ecology, robotics and more to explore complexity, cybernetics and self-organising systems in an accessible and engaging way.

But in reading Out of Control, I found it suffering from a number of frustrating flaws: Not only is it way too long-winded, it is also almost completely void of meta-text to help the reader understand what Kelly is trying to do with his book (having read the book, I’m still wondering)…

I would have preferred a much shorter book, more narrowly focused on the idea of self-organising systems. The whole text of the original book is easily available online at Kelly’s own website, so I thought: Why not remix the online text to make such a book? [more...]

Why not, indeed?

You can get a copy of Kelly’s original book here (free on the web, or to purchase from Amazon).

And a copy of Lloyd’s remixed version here (free on the web, free pdf).

I should add, this is one of the things at the back of our minds as we build Book Oven. We hope that good digital publishing platforms mean that writers and readers will start to get the sense that a book might live on, and grow after the writer or publisher press “publish” … that engagement, annotations, commentary, and generally the life around a book might become as culturally important in our eyes as the original itself.

But key to making that work is finding good ways to bring the right kinds of skills together so that good books come out the other end.

So tell me, if you are a writer, what would you want to know about an editor you are working with?

If you are an editor, what would you want to know about a writer you are working with?

If you are a publisher, what would you want to know about the writers, or editors you’d be working with?

The stuff that’s happening and going to happen on the finished product/reader side is exciting, but it pales, I think, in comparison to the changes that will come on the creation side. I posted the following comment on Mark’s site:

For obvious reasons, I think the cloud looks most promising as a publishing enabler, rather than as a reading enabler. Cloud-publishing for me means:
a) a text can be instantaneously published at zero-cost to the world
b) a text can be worked on by an editorial team distributed across the globe, yet the text will still be in “one place” in the cloud

The implications are huge for the structures of the publishing business (or at least, we at Book Oven are betting they are). The two things that have given shape to the “modern” publishing industry are:

a) the cost of distribution of books
b) the need for centralization of workers-on-books

But a) goes to zero, and, as you suggest, b) has been going towards decentralization for some time now. But b) is going to fragment massively now.

So really the two main forces that have shaped the book business have essentially disappeared – or at least, should disappear within the next 5 years.

The changes on the production side will, I think, be far more significant than the changes for readers.

Before the Internet, when a writer could not find a publisher to print and sell a manuscript, he could take matters into his own hands, head to the print shop, and hawk the book himself.
Rejected auteurs today have it easier, with a handful of websites that let them write, edit and print books bound like the pros.

Call it Self-publishing 2.0. And it’s one of the fastest-growing sectors of the book world, which is itself enjoying a nice growth period despite the recession and the glut of competing media choices.
“Like in any other media, when you the make tools of publishing easy, people will take advantage of it,” said Hugh McGuire, founder of Montreal self-publishing start-up Book Oven. “It’s just now coming into public consciousness.”

McGuire is one of the leaders of the movement toward digital empowerment in books. When it officially launches (it’s in beta testing now), Book Oven will let people collaborate in the writing, editing and proofreading of a book, all through online tools. When it’s ready, book lovers will be able to buy a copy on the website, either in electronic or paper format. [more...]

Tomorrow I’ll be posting a long-winded manifesto about the term “self-publishing.”

Self-Publishing Review: So how’s the site work? What do people do once they create a project and how can writers contribute to other writers’ projects?

Hugh McGuire: Firstly, we’ve just launched and we have lots of work to do yet. In fact, one of the reasons we decided to open things up before we were finished is that we want to build something that writers, editors, proofreaders, designers and readers will love using. We are trying to create a new kind of model for publishing, and in order to do that we need to have the active input of the people who share our vision of something new.

After that intro, what you can do now:

1. Proofread texts that are in the system using Bite-Size Edits (it’s fun, if you can believe it)
2. Upload your own text, and: a) proofread it yourself using Bite-Size; b) get a private group of people you select to proofread it using Bite-Size Edits c) open it to the world to be proofread
3. Accept/reject/modify all Bite-Size Edits, so you retain control of your book.
4. Invite reviewers/editors/colleagues to an online reviewing/annotation/editing tool, built especially for long-form texts, which helps you collect editorial feedback in one place; and gives an easy way to implement that feedback.
5. Publish your book as ebook/epub, or html
6. Eventually you’ll be able to do some other things:
7. sell your finished book as an ebook, or as a print-on-demand book (in the Book Oven store, and in partner retailers)
8. find editors/proofreaders/designers/collaborators to help work on your book

SPR: What’s in it for readers?

HM: In the coming years, I expect we’ll see readers and writers getting much closer together. And one of the ideas behind Book Oven has always been to introduce new ways that they might interact. For instance, what if, prior to publication, you invited your potential readers to help you proofread your text using Bite-Size Edits? Or, what if you opened your novel to a select group to comment on, annotate, before you published? What if you held a cover design contest for your next book of non-fiction? What if you took one of your existing books, and opened it up for annotation – and subsequently published a second edition, with the annotations?

These are all possible now, and these are the kinds of things we would like to see happen.

But really the answer, for readers, is that Book Oven, we hope, will help spawn a new movement of grassroots, indie writing and publishing. We’ll make it easier for people who wish to publish to do so, but we’ll be giving the tools to allow the collaboration that will make those published books better.

So, what do readers get? More ways to connect with books and writers and writing; more books; more quality in indie publishing; we hope: a vibrant new of grassroots of writing.

I guess in some sense I look at the coming digital revolution in books as similar to the indie revolution that came to music with digital and the web. As a music listener, I now have access to a more wonderful and varied assortment of music than ever before in history, because music is no longer constrained by the physical/economic limitations that existed in the era of radio & record labels. We still have radio and labels, of course, but now we also have a vibrant, thriving music culture enable by the cheap production tools and the infinite global distribution enabled by the web.

The results haven’t been great for labels. For music fans, it’s been wonderful.

I expect we’ll see the same with books, and we’d like Book Oven to be a driving force behind that change.

SPR: What I first notice on the site is that the writing is good. In the Bite-Size Edits section you’ve got Ford Maddox Ford and Tolstoy – which is incredibly fun to edit. A couple of writers that have uploaded stuff are MCM and Barbara Jean Walsh – both good writers. The old problem with self-publishing is the quality of the writing. How do you exert quality control at the Book Oven – or do you see this as anti-free expression. But supposing in a worst case scenario you’ve got a lot of people uploading poorly thought-out work and users have to sift through all of that. What will Book Oven do to exert a little quality control?

HM: Book Oven is built for anyone who wants to use it, and we won’t put restrictions on what writing goes in & what doesn’t. For non-writers, however, the quality control will come from helping readers/editors etc find the kind of text they want to find. The internet is very good at allowing people to sort through mountains of information; helping people sift will be important for us.

But I’d like to address the underlying question about quality.

It is my belief that the act of creation is the most satisfying and valuable act a person can perform. Whether that is building a bookcase, or building a company, or writing a song, or writing a novel, I don’t think there is anything more valuable to a person. An act of creation — the vision it requires, the dedication, the discipline, the belief, the stubbornness, the time, and the passion — is more meaningful to a person than just about anything else I can think of.

Now, the next question that’s asked is: well, is it any good? Will anyone like what you’ve created? That’s an important question, and certainly it’s more deeply satisfying to create something that people like than it is to create something that people don’t like.

Whether other people will like what you’ve created is an important question, but it is far less important than the question: have you created something?

With LibriVox (the volunteer, public domain audiobook project I started in 2005), I had this insight at some point: That what we were really doing was providing a platform to allow people who wished to create audiobooks of texts they love, to create them and give them away for free to the universe. That the world gets a huge library of free public domain audiobooks is a wonderful and important fringe benefit. But the main thing we do is enable people to create things they are passionate about.

And it turns out that LibriVox volunteers make some extraordinary recordings; it turns out that millions of people love many of the recordings we make; it turns out that some of the recordings are less good; and that some people find it offensive when they fall upon LibriVox recordings that they don’t like. And it turns out there is a simple solution for that last problem: listen to something else.

We never ask whether people who don’t talk as well as Obama should be able to talk; it never occurs to us to tell our kids that if they can’t hit like Babe Ruth, that they should not play baseball; we would never tell our mothers (or fathers) that they can’t cook as well as Gordon Ramsay, so they should stop trying.

Instead we say: try to do the things you love, try to do them as well as you can.

Whether other people will like what you do is a whole other matter, but if you are driven to do something you love, you should work hard to do it.

And if that is publishing a book, so much the better for you and the universe.

If it’s publishing a great book, even better again.

SPR: The stigma about self-publishing is definitely fading. What’s your feeling on self-publishing in general? Do you think it’s totally legitimate, worthy of some of the scorn, the future? All of the above?

HM: To me the only thing that is relevant is the text. Is it good? Do I like it? Would I read it? If it is a great book, I couldn’t care less what particular publishing model was used to get it to me.

Does more people writing books mean that there will be more bad books? You bet. But that’s a good thing; it means more people are writing books. And more people writing books — especially if they are writing from passion — means we’re likely to have more extraordinary books.

And as above, the question is: how do I as a reader sift through the mountains of books to find the extraordinary texts that I want to read? And the answer will come from the web.

There are hundreds of millions of blogs on the web. Many of them are terrible and I would never want to read them. (I could say the same of the vast majority of traditionally-published books).

However blogging means that I now have access to so much wonderful writing, about topics that are of particular interest to me. The economic/physical constraints of pre-internet writing meant that I had a smallish choice of content that was deemed commercially viable by companies who distributed content near me; the web means that I have an unlimited choice of content, some of it deemed commercially viable; much of it just interesting to the writer; and lots of it interesting to me. And the key thing about blogging was that it got going because bloggers were reading each others’ work. There was a distributed network of writers connected by the link and by shared interests in the things they were writing about and reading about. The link-connections between bloggers is what allowed people to find more interesting stuff, and encouraged more people to read and write and blog.

So, turning to self-publishing, (specifically talking about fiction) I think what has to happen is a more connected network of independent writers and small presses, who are actually working on/ reading each others work. And if that happens successfully, the stigma that’s now attached to self-publishing doesn’t matter anymore.

Especially if the text is good.

SPR: I think I know the answer, but what’s so refreshing about your site is that you talk about print on demand and don’t offer a caveat. Of course print on demand is amazing: anyone can make a book. But still there are detractors. I guess I’m asking for you to explore the caveat and any pitfalls there might be to starting a service like this.

HM: Yes, I still read the odd article about how dumb “bloggers” are, how bad their grammar is, how they are all opinionated jerks etc etc. You might as well complain about how dumb “talkers” are. I heard someone talking on the bus, and he was an idiot, ergo talkers are idiots.

It turns out that some of the best writing in the world about whatever topic you care to mention is happening on blogs, written by “bloggers.”

What is blogging? Loosely, a mechanism to get written text from a writer to a reader. The quality of that written text has *nothing* to do with the mechanism of transmission. And bloggers are just people who write text and publish it on the web.

What is print-on-demand? Same as above. Just a mechanism.

SPR: How about a few words about LibriVox, for those who don’t know about it.

HM: LibriVox.org is a volunteer-driven project to make public domain audiobooks and give them away to the universe. It’s a totally decentralized project that runs completely on the web. Our objective is:

To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.

SPR: What sorts of books have been read aloud, and how many?

As of today, our catalog contains 2,547 works, in 26 languages. Our range of books is constrained only by copyright law and the curious passions of our volunteer readers. We’ve got Austen, Nietzsche, Twain, Sun Tzu, Einstein, Descartes, Thucydides, Sayers, Phaedrus, Machiavelli, Barrie, Goethe, Cervantes, Dante, Dickens, Voltaire, Belloc, Wells, Dumas, Joyce, Trollope, and on and on and on.

SPR: Is this a place for self-publishers to store readings of their own texts? So if I release something free to read on Scribd, can I read the audio book on LibriVox?

HM: No. Our requirements for inclusion in the LibriVox catalog are:

1. text must be in the public domain (ie. out of copyright) in the USA
2. text must be published (or in certain cases, “notable”)

We send self-publishers to our great friends at http://podiobooks.com.

SPR: How does the success of LibriVox fit into your vision for Book Oven?

HM: The key insight I had from watching LibriVox evolve is this: with the right kind of space and tools on the web, people will organize themselves to do the most extraordinary (and complex) things together. I also learned that many people, given the chance to *help* in the creation process, are very happy to do so, if they believe in what is being created. And by providing a vision about what we were trying to do at LibriVox, and the tools/platform, some wonderful things happened.
So this is what we would like to do with Book Oven:

• articulate a vision for a new model of publishing books, that is totally native to the web
• provide a platform for people to organize how they wish around the creation of books
• enable a grassroots community of bookmakers and booklovers to come together with the purpose of: making & distributing/selling & reading books

SPR: The difference with an audio book and the written word is significant – it’s just not as obvious if the writing isn’t up to par, and sometimes doesn’t even matter. It’s just a different process listening to or reading a book. I just keep coming back to the concept of “bad” writing that could end up on the site and how to deal with that.

HM: It’s easy: don’t read it, and instead read some of the great stuff.

SPR: There’s just a lot of writing where even intensive collaboration isn’t going to make it a readable novel.

HM: I totally agree. In fact, I’d bet that intensive collaboration might make some novels worse.
Book Oven is not about forcing everyone to open up their manuscripts to mass collaboration.
What we are trying to do is build an online space where groups of people can work on a book and easily publish it.

This is how traditional books are published: groups of people work together on them (writer, editor, proofreader, designer, cover designer, printer, distributor, retailer, marketer, publicity).
What we are doing is putting a basic toolset on the web, that allows much of that to happen easily.

SPR: Is it the case that those books will likely not find collaborators and better books will find more interest? I suspect that’s the case. If so, how is that sort of collaboration system going to work?

HM: We see two kinds of streams of activity:

• open collaborations where people are helping each other make books out of interest, kindred spirit etc.
• a simple marketplace exchange where writers/editors/proofreaders/designers can find each other & get work done.

SPR: So this is going to be a marketplace?

HM: Yes, though we want to be careful to make sure that the marketplace does not drown out the more spontaneous — and less commercial — collaborations. That is a challenge we are very much aware of, and we’ll work hard to make sure that Book Oven is not *just* classifieds for bookish people. And we’d love some help thinking about that, if any of your readers are interested in helping us work through it.

SPR: When designers come to collaborate on projects, for example, are they going to be advertising their services?

HM: I think we’ll have to have some kind of reputation system, so we’re taking suggestions on how to work that out! Early days yet.

SPR: How is money going to change hands, or is it more a place for designers or editors to pad their resumes. What do participants get besides the satisfaction of collaborating?

Again, I think it’s a bit early to make any final statements. I imagine there might be three models: collaborate out of interest/shared sense of purpose, collaborate for a fee, or collaborate for a % of sales.

But again, this part of things is complex and we want to make sure we develop the marketplace with lots of input from an engaged community.

SPR: The site says you’ll be adding more features in the coming months. What’s to come?

Well, just imagine everything you would want from a cloud-based publishing platform. What would the ideal look like from your perspective? We’d like to build that.

And that’s not meant to be facetious – it’s just that much of our decision-making will be driven by the needs & desires of our community, so we don’t want to make any promises about features until we’re certain it’s something people want.

SPR: Thanks a lot, Hugh. Best of luck with the site. Keep us informed.
Follow Book Oven on Twitter. Visit and sign up at the site.

On July 9, Ian Shapira, Staff Writer for the Washington Post wrote a 1,500 word fluff piece about consultant Anne Loehr, who explains GenY to their cohabitants in the workplace. Then Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan blogged the story, reprinting some of Anne Loehr quotations from the Post piece.

Ian Shapira was initially happy: apparently even in mainstream media, getting a nod from one of the big blogs is now a coup to be celebrated (how times have changed).

The Outrage

But, his editor wasn’t so happy. He responded: “They stole your story. Where’s your outrage, man?” Where indeed?

So Shapira changed his tune, and now he is outraged (sort of). He spent about two days investigating and writing that 1,500 word story, only to get ripped off by some blogger.

Writes Shapira:

With all the pontificating about the future of newspapers both in the media and in Capitol Hill hearings, I began wondering if most readers know exactly what is required to assemble a feature story for a publication such as The Post.

When You Are Drowning, How Much Is a Glass of Water Worth?

A more pertinent question might be:

I wonder what most readers would think if they knew how much time & money the Washington Post decided to spend on this story?

All this points to some big problems in the news business – and the problem isn’t bloggers “stealing” stories. The problem is measuring the value of content. (See the cost breakdown & analysis of the controversy at the Neiman Lab).

Pre-web, written content was relatively scarce, and people wanted to read fluff. So newspapers paid writers to write lots of fluff, which filled a demand for a valuable commodity. The fluff was used that to sell newspapers & ads, and subsidize hard news.

But in the world of the web, we are swimming in a sea of written content. Much of it fluff. The overwhelming majority of it produced without a cent getting exchanged – by bloggers. Some of it is produced by professional blog outfits like Gawker, who produce it much cheaper than a newspaper does.

So, when other people are providing for free some of the kinds of content you used to sell, then you can’t keep selling it. And the “free” is on both ends: free for readers, and free from producers.

Put another way, can you imagine a Gawker blogger spending a *DAY* writing that post?

A quick investigation shows that the Gawker writer of the article, Hamilton Nolan, writes about 10 articles a day, I expect without an editor spending any time on his copy.

So: how can Washington Post compete against Gawker’s 10x content output advantage, and probably 40x cost advantage? Answer: they can’t, if they compete in creating the same kinds of content. Question: do you think the Washington Post piece was worth 10 times more to you as a reader than the Gawker piece was? Was it worth 40 times more to you as a reader?

Wikipedia vs. Britannica

See, for instance, Britannica’s original response to Wikipedia. Wikipedia offered basic general information, easily, for free, usually with links out to more substantial info. Whether or not Wikipedia is “as good as” Britannica matters not a whit to its millions of readers: it is “good enough” for them, meaning that the sale value of “just providing basic general information” got a lot closer to zero, all of a sudden. I’m not sure how Britannica is doing these days, but if it is to survive, it has to innovate in ways that deliver more value than “just providing basic general information.” And its in that added value where the new business opportunities lie (and I don’t claim to know the answers for Britannica).

In the same way, newspapers have to come to terms with an info marketplace where the value of fluff is approaching zero, while unique, good reporting has a value greater than zero.

Building a Media Business Around Value

So, again, my question is: why would newspapers pay a staff writer to spend a full day investigating & writing a 1,500 word fluff piece when there are a million fluff pieces all over the web getting published every day? What value are they adding to the info marketplace, and is that value worth the money/time they’ve spent on it?

One answer might be: why not strike a deal with some of the better fluff-piece content providers on the web (say, BoingBoing, Gawker, etc etc), and just republish those pieces (perhaps with a copyedit for style etc). In that way, newspapers could still provide the horizontal content that keeps people reading the serious stuff & ads; but could probably cut the costs of the junk they publish in half, or more.

They already licence lots of content from wire services, maybe its time to start licensing content from bloggers too.

And then they could focus on their strengths:

• aggregating eyeballs
• selecting a good mix of stories

and most importantly:

• investigating & writing about stories that other people won’t or can’t write about

This week, international crime. From Italy, Gianrico Carofiglio; from Sweden, Asa Larsson; from Scotland, Louise Welsh; and from Canada, Giles Blunt – talk about mystery writing.

> Listen here.