Last blog post I talked about the special features that are included with your purchase of Falling. This time, because so many people are asking for it (no, nobody's asked for it), I'm going to explain why I decided to include them.
Bonus features for a book isn't as weird as it sounds, and I'm certainly not the first author to do it. In fact the idea got a (small) flurry of attention when the notion of adding videos, maps or other interactive features reached a tipping point in the conversation about ebooks a handful of years back.
The potential for extras had actually been talked about in ebooks since they first started to appear around 2000. Then, around 2010 or so when sales started to really take off and make ebooks a legitimate industry, some people in publishing, device marketing and other industries that had a stake in their success started talking about how the technology allowed for all sorts of stuff besides just plain text.
It never really caught on and you don't hear much about it anymore. I'm not sure why, but one theory I've heard (which makes sense if you ask me) is that we consume different media in different ways and mindsets, and when we read a novel all we want is black text on a white page, expecting and looking forward to our imaginations to do the rest.
But I tend to think budding discussion about extra features in ebooks was a bit too narrow – or at least, not quite in the right direction. Having a link to a map any time there's a mention of Mordor or Platform 9 3/4 is a fun distraction but does it really add to the experience? It might in an article on a website, but according to the above theory, we're adopting a different mental stance while we're in a book.
Of course, that might all be complete rubbish. I'm well over 40 now (older than present-day Dale – when I started writing Falling I was the age of past-tense Dale and 38 years old seemed just... ancient) so I have no idea how kids are consuming media. Are they even still reading books, electronic or otherwise?
No, I think the extra features that accompany books should do the same job as those that accompany movies on DVD in giving you an insight into how something you love was made.
When I read a story or watch a movie I really like, it makes me want to hear about all the trials, tribulations and triumphs that went into its creation.
In the case of movies, there are a lot more voices to help you peek behind the curtain than there are in books – not just the directors and actors but producers, effects and animation people, prop builders, set builders, etc. Those oral histories of classic movies you see online where the creative principals get together to reminisce on how it all came together are particularly priceless.
Why don't we do the same thing in books? Well, some writers do. One of the best parts of any short story anthology by Stephen King is his little note at the end of each tale giving you some tidbit about the genesis and execution of the idea.
Sometimes he's seen some evocative place or object that sticks with him for years until he thinks of a character or situation that suits it perfectly, sometimes he dreams something horrible. Inspiration can come from anywhere – one such note explained how he couldn't sleep because of jetlag so he sat up writing a story on hotel stationery to pass the time in just a few hours.
Well, the extra features/bonus material/call them what you will that follow are that same thing, albeit writ a little larger to be more in line with Falling's size. And as you'd imagine, spoilers abound.
The last best effort
I wanted to include extra features firstly because I hope you might be as interested in where Falling came from as I am, but secondly because of something I once read on some forum somewhere. I was feeling despondent because I wasn't a bestselling author and there seemed to be so many writers around who were far more talented than me, when one day I saw the axiom 'don't compare your first draft to someone else's showreel', and it really stuck with me.
All the material you can find about beloved movies means we learn about everything that goes wrong despite the end result being so good. They're a way of seeing the first draft, an exercise that was fraught with creative disasters yet still produced something that seems so perfect.
Most of us know the story of how Steven Spielberg's Jaws laid down a very particular template so successfully so long ago. It wasn't effective narrative mechanics that gave us only teasing glimpses of the shark until the climax, but the fact that Bruce the mechanical shark model didn't work until they were almost finished filming.
You might not know about the genesis of Mad Max, the Ozploitation film that broke out across the world and became the progenitor of a genre all its own within the action firmament. To this day you might think the rusty machinery, jerry-rigged infrastructure, deserts and larger-than-life characters in Max's post apocalyptic world was all brilliant design on the part of director George Miller or his art director Jon Dowding.
In fact Miller's budget was so low the only locations they could secure around Melbourne and Port Phillip Bay were broken down motor mechanics and disused warehouses, lending the film the ruined, post-apocalyptic look that's still launching franchises to this day.
Ghostbusters was going to be set in the far future in outer space but the budget wouldn't allow for it. James Cameron had already cast Lance Henriksen as the Terminator before meeting Arnold Schwarzenegger. Brandon Lee still had scenes to shoot after his untimely death on the set of The Crow, digital effects painting his visage onto body doubles. Because they were a bit crude by today's standards, the early era CGI of The Crow meant they could only be done in scenes of relative stillness and darkness, many of which are the most striking visuals in the film.
Constraints, mistakes, unforseen happy accidents and desperate last-minute workarounds have contributed to movies we love just as much as creative authorship, and any writer will tell you (if they're being honest) that a book is exactly the same.
After all the shuffling of scenes back and forth in rewrites, you might have killed a minor character off and then have them enter a scene later on, alive and well. You might change someone's name and forget to track down every instance of the old one. You might realise you've mistakenly put the exact same scene in two different places in the book. Falling fell victim to the above creative and mechanical catastrophes as well as countless others.
Behind the curtain
But as much as we love books, there's almost no such mechanism with which to share the stories about the work that went into them. Mostly that's because the journey a book goes through is far less visual (which is why it's hard to make creatively compelling movies about writers, computer programmers, etc).
And because writing is such an isolated pursuit, authors don't tend to keep every version of a story and all the changes they made in a form that's digestible and makes sense to an audience. Even if they do, they don't often intend to share them.
To get everything straight in my head during the last major rewrite, I did actually make a lot of notes in a digestible form, so to show you more than just the completed showreel version of Falling, I wanted to show you the proverbial first draft (in fact literally so, you can download it right here) and tell you something about how it evolved through a huge amount of trial and error over a very long time.
And because the act of writing and rewriting and all those creative disasters that come with the territory are pretty opaque behind the publishing process, there's always a sense about a book (a sense of fear, if you're an aspiring writer) that the author just vomited it out onto the page on the first try, fully formed and as brilliantly constructed as the version you're reading.
It couldn't be further from the truth, and just like directors take credit for every aspect of a movie, it's the author's name on the cover even though other people have usually contributed, from various forms of editors and researchers on down. In fact the bigger the author's name, the more people are involved.
The big sell
But there's another reason to include all this extra stuff that's more to do with economics.
It's no secret book publishing is suffering. In fact it's echoing the movie industry where mid-list releases are being edged out, leaving us with a select number of gigantic blockbusters that get the lion's share of resources from the big publishers while small armies of individual, boutique or self publishers take advantage of the accessibility of digital technologies to publish their own book.
The latter is usually done with almost no backing or marketing, and they're released into a field that's flooded with more competition all the time as the barriers continue to fall.
Back when I started writing Falling in the early 1990s, book publishing wasn't any more vibrant or glitzy than it is now. Every rejection letter I received contained a variation on 'don't feel down, it's very hard in publishing right now' (to which I always wanted to respond 'tell me when it was really easy to get a book published and I'll build a time machine and go back there').
But what's frustrating is that in response to the decline of old world media, book publishing seems to have grown even more stuffy and timid when it should be screaming louder than ever for attention. In my day job as a journalist I spent several years reviewing books and interviewing authors, but I think I saw the endtimes where it stopped being a viable option. Work on that beat had almost completely dried up for me by about 2012.
And in perusing the marketing catalogues of publishers looking for titles I might be able to get a commission about, it was the same insipid collection every time – cookbooks, fusty sepia-toned love stories set during the First World War, dramas about families with secrets revealed by a disappearance or murder, sports memoirs and military thrillers that all looked and sounded like the last one.
There were always one or two blockbuster novels like Harry Potter, The Passage, The Girl on the Train or The Da Vinci Code, written by the handful of lucky authors the big London or New York publishers cherry picked to throw their lot in with, marketing the proverbial shit out of a title in the hope of making it a hit through brute force (often grasping for the sought-after movie adaptation so Hollywood could pay for all the marketing instead).
But for all the similarities between the economics of publishing and Hollywood, at least the latter knows how to sell. Modern book marketing is like an elderly neighbour offering you a finger bun and a cup of tea whilst apologising for taking up your time. Modern movie marketing is like a gang of brawling MMA fighters, topless lingerie models and ninjas staging a heavy metal concert on your front porch with a banner overhead that reads 'Goddammit you're going to fucking LOVE this movie!'
Give books some sizzle, pizzazz and sex appeal. All that conversation about movies and their formation on blogs, in magazines and on podcasts is marketing as much as it is shared love of movies, and there's no reason the same thing isn't applicable to the books we love.
The stories to be found in printed/electronic pages are as cool, dangerous, edgy, sexy, thrilling, dramatic and evocative as many of the ones you can see on screens – in fact, in the age of increasingly safe bets on existing IP executed with such familiar styles at the movies, books are often better. But you'd never know it from the way the crossroads between media and pop culture presents them to you.
We should let the conversations about the making of books out into the wild just like the blogs, interviews, dissertations and reexaminations of movies, and one of the most effective ways of doing that is the bonus material.
The platform to deliver that stuff for movies is getting trickier in the streaming age because DVD sales plateaued a few years back and they show no signs of recovering as services like Netflix and Amazon Prime continue to ascend.
Maybe some enterprising video-on-demand executive will think of a way of packaging bonus material to be streamed along with the movie, but in the book world we already have the perfect vehicle for it – right here at the back of the book itself.
It's as digestible as the actual story because it's just more text (it is in Falling's case, anyway – I did think about links to the locations on Google maps and other stuff like that but again, would they really add anything?), and hopefully it gives you a glimpse into the process as I've hacked my way through this over the last quarter of a century.
I hope you enjoyed the showreel. Now, with the extras, you get the chance to enjoy/endure the first draft.