When: April 15th from 4:10 to 5:30

Where: 320B Pardee Hall

Roxane Gay has a fairly extensive post about self-publishing. I agree with many of her points, but I want to discuss her assessment of how writers should value their writing because I’ve been doing some qualitative research in this area lately.

Gay mentions that she bought a number of self-published books from Amazon, and that only one of them was “excellent.” Some of them, according to Gay, were terrible and error-ridden. Fair enough. More on this point later.

Then she moves on to talk about some contemporary trends in self-published ebook pricing:

“There is also the matter of price which seems a little out of control for self publishers. Particularly where e-books are concerned, many self published writers are basically giving their writing away for $.99-$2.99. Lincoln Michel wrote a really great article for the Faster Times about e-book pricing. The $.99 price point is a terrible, terrible idea and it sets a terrible, terrible precedent. It makes no sense to sell a 300 page book for the same price as a three minute song. If we as writers don’t value our craft enough to price our work appropriately, how can we expect readers to want to pay appropriate prices? If you have to basically give your writing away, what does that tell you?”

What I see here is part of a general trend in discussion of self-publishers: tacit assumptions that self-publishers want to be professional writers, or that they are aspiring professional writers who want their writing valued in monetary terms. That may be the case with many. But in the dozens of interviews I have conducted with independent authors, many have told me they write for fun, for recreation. For these writers, who can now compete with professional writers for the attention of readers, it makes lots of sense to sell their writing for $.99 or even give it away for free.  In fact many recreational writers I have interviewed distribute their work for free under the same ethic of sharing that pervades the open-access software movement. They care far more about being read than making money. They care about the feedback and the social solidarity that comes with publishing into online communities. The value these writers extract from their books does not come from money. Being read is more important than being published for them.

I think in the long run self-publishing might de-professionalize mid-list writers, especially those without entrepreneurial savvy. (Actually, economic analysis from the twentieth century shows most mid-list American authors weren’t full time writers anyway). At the very least, easy publishing puts a burden on would-be professionals to compete with writers who don’t particularly care about making money as writers. Many will give their writing away to anyone who will read it, and with good cause.

Let’s keep this in mind as we return to Gay’s article and her point that she found an “excellent” self-published book on Amazon. The point is not that Gay found ONLY one excellent self-published book among those she bought. The point is that Gay managed to FIND one excellent book among those she bought. That is enormously important. If only 1% of self-published fiction books are good, that still leaves readers with thousands upon thousands of good, cheap, self-published books to choose from. That number will probably only grow.  It’s a consequence of authorship no longer being scarce.

I will post a full review soon, but I will say that I am struggling with the text. The issues of commons-based peer production that Cummings confronts have barely been broached in our field, and Cummings is already trying to develop a full FYC pedagogy from it. In writing studies at least, we have barely had a conversation about it, and I don’t see why it should start at pedagogy, given the very little we know about how writers outside the academy work with CBPP.

I began reading this book while grading papers for an FYC class I am teaching, the focus of which is writing in digital environments. We spent three weeks talking about the web and collaboration, and we talked about Wikipedia too. I did not take the same approach as Cummings, though. Rather than have my students write for Wikipedia, we used it as a primary data source to understand how writers collaboratively work through issues of writing and knowledge production. We spent three weeks on it, and the assignment I gave the students was difficult. They had to conduct original research using the talk pages of Wikipedia and the revision histories to understand how writing on wikis works.

The students mostly did a superb job. Because so few articles have been published about Wikipedia from a writing studies standpoint, in almost every class I have students raise questions that could lead to a publishable paper, and this is coming from first-year composition. Some of the questions students have addressed: How do wiki awards influence the dynamics of revision? How do Wikipedians negotiate international language standards? And how does the language used to represent people change in response to media converge? (Someone looked at the introduction to Michael Jackson’s entry at crucial times across the past decade, and unsurprisingly, the tone grew much more laudatory after his death).

So in contrast to Cummings advocating that students write on Wikipedia, I am having success getting students to do original research about Wikipedia. I suspect having students write on Wikipedia definitely has value, but it pigeonholes students into working in a single genre. There’s the rub with exploiting CBPP for composition classes: it requires finding sustainable locations with participation robust enough to produce the rhetorical dynamics in multiple genres that produce feedback for students, dynamics that aren’t homophobic, misogynistic, or racist because, after all, we are talking about students writing on the internets. And the internets, as we know, are serious business

Students can improve their papers and receive extra feedback. That is the most obvious reason. But there are other benefits:

• Students learn to share their writing in their drafting stage.
• Students write for an audience that extends beyond the professor.
• Students receive practice talking about writing and learning to review. Both of these are important when learning how to write.
• Students have the opportunity to teach a practice, and teaching a practice is a powerful way of learning it.

II. Questions and Decisions for Structuring Your Peer Review

• Do you want full-class workshops or small-group peer review?
• Do you want face to face response or written response that enables anonymity?
• How can you write a feedback form that harmonizes with your learning goals for the exercise?
• Do you want to keep response groups consistent throughout the semester?

III. Tips for Successful Peer Review

• Model good response by using a short student paper for a full class workshop.
• Provide students with feedback forms to structure their response. Feedback forms should be specific to the assignment.
• Have students create actionable revision plans based on the response they received from peers.
• Ask students to submit a cover letter detailing what peer feedback they used for revisions and why.
• Conduct a debriefing session so the class can assess peer responses that were produced during the exercise.
• Integrate peer response into your class multiple times across the semester, as you are giving students the opportunity to improve as reviewers. Just as students improve as writers, so too do they improve as reviewers.
• Remember that collaborative writing projects build peer response into the fabric of the assignment.

IV. Peer Review Technologies

• My students seemed to have a good experience with Digress.IT to workshop papers.
• The WIDE research center at Michigan State is developing web-based peer review software that my class beta-tested. I am eagerly awaiting the launch.

V. Peer Review Resources

• The University of Hawaii has a list of feedback forms for a number of different writing assignments.
• The University of Colorado has a useful teaching guide to peer review.
• The Dartmouth Writing Program provides a useful way to classify texts here.