New digital ways of presenting a novel in 2011?

Question

The traditional way of presenting a novel is in a book. I know about e-books too.

Do you know another digital ways of presenting a novel?

For instance, a blog, a twitter novel or something like the mixture of a website and a novel.

Having links and images in some places or something like that? (Something that could have also a bit of web design).

Answer 1

There are many different ways of presenting books.

• Blogs have been used to present work. For example, The Orwell Diaries presented complete pages of George Orwell's work for each day in his diary.
• Twitter can present work one sentence at a time, or snippets with links to longer work elsewhere. See ReadWriteWeb for some info. For tips on how to write a Twitter novel, see this article.
• Blogs can also be used to create interactive books that allow individuals to comment on individual sections, chapters, sentences etc. For example, see CommentPress for Wordpress (examples here).
• MediaWiki (and other Wiki software) can be used for open collaborative works. At WikiBooks, for example, they're generating collaborative text books. We are Smarter than Me was written as a collaborative effort, too.
• The recent book, Visit from the Goon Squad, which won a Pulitzer Prize, had sections written as Power Point presentations.
• The classic Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy style of books have found a good place on-line, as it makes this style quite easy to follow. Here is a list of some of these.
• There is also The Sophie Project, which is specialist software for reading, writing, and distributing complex networked multimedia documents.

Answer 2

I'm a digital novelist myself, so I believe I can answer your question.

My opinion is that the best way of digitally presenting a novel is through the browser - browsers these days are becoming very competent, and one can create an entire site (with a little web design of course) devoted to a story, so that when a visitor visits the site, he is transported to a fictional world built by the author. In fact, strange that you should be asking about links and images - I talked about them in my blog because I am a believer of novels empowered by digital technology. Check them out, I'm sure you will find them enlightening in your search for answers/inspirations.

Also, a rather famous digital novel that you can check out: Inanimate Alice. It's a YA novel though, don't know if it's to your liking.

Answer 3

I know a couple of people who have decided to serialize their books. One has produced several novels as podcasts and releases a different chapter every week. He has thousands of subscribers to his sight. In fact, he started out with just the podcasts and then decided to self-publish his stories as e-books, and he is doing quite well with them.

Another guy is posting a different chapter each week on his blog. Visitors can come weekly to check out the next chapter to keep up with the story. Once he has posted about half the chapters, he will give site visitors the option of purchasing the e-book so that they can find out sooner how it all ends. Of course, he will also continue to post a new chapter each week until the entire book is online.