Literary Media in Germany

Herzfassen

The major publishing houses are considering how best to make Web 2.0 (also known as the 'social web') work for them, with its many formats and possibilities. Too late: large numbers of writers are already having fun experimenting with forums and blogs. The latest thing is a literature podcast that anyone can download free of charge.

Anyone who wants to become a writer needs a lot of time, a lot of money and a lot of staying power. After all, it is very rare for someone to be 'discovered' by a publisher, immediately enter a best-seller list and start earning millions. No – in most cases budding writers have to send off lots of manuscript copies at great expense to the publishers' editorial departments, where they will sit in a huge pile on a desk and turn yellow – or be sent back unread.

Vanity publishing

There are precisely two alternatives to this fate: You can try to get taken on by a literary agency, which may one day find a publisher for you. However, by that time you will definitely be poor. Or you can turn to a 'vanity publisher'. These are the ones with small advertisements everywhere saying things like "We will publish your book!". However, with these you will have to pay a considerable contribution towards printing costs. This is another approach that will make you poor.

Christian Heinke

So if there is no money to be made from literature, at least it should be fun and accessible to anyone interested. That is presumably what Christian Heinke thought. The Bochum-based radio journalist offered the manuscript of his radio thriller Die Haut ('The Skin') to the WDR radio station at the beginning of 2005. It was rejected. "Something else to be put away in the drawer, I thought. But soon afterwards I heard about these new 'podcasts' and went and found out about them. It occurred to me that lots of the podcasters were trying to do radio, but so far no one had come up with the idea of telling a story", explains Heinke. He spotted his market niche and put Die Haut on the internet as a podcast.

Overnight success

Success: "Soon afterwards Apple included the podcast subscription with its iTunes software. I put my podcast on there more for a laugh than anything else, and soon forgot about the whole thing. But then I suddenly started getting emails from people who had heard my podcast and wanted to know when the next one would be out. So I had a look at iTunes... and discovered that I was in the top ten, between the news and Schlaflos in München. I have never managed to get such a good reaction with my readings!" says Heinke, commenting on his Web 2.0 success story.

Tim Cortinovis

And he finds it better than a traditional audio book, because "every month my listeners are waiting to see how the story about my heroine Katherine Williams will continue. I think it's nice that the tradition of the serialised novel as practised by Dickens, Dumas and Doyle is being revived in this way." This opinion is shared by Tim Cortinovis of the authors collective Tippgemeinschaft, which runs a podcast from Hamburg with its novel Herzfassen: "After all, literature is not bound by the printed word and should make use of other formats as well. I like the fact that a text does not have to be read on the screen or printed out. People can listen to stories on their computer or put them on their MP3 players and take them on the underground or go jogging with them. And you don't have to listen to several hours at a time, as you do with the traditional audio book."

Speed is a good argument

Heinke did then find a publisher for his thriller independently of the podcast, but believes the podcast "certainly didn't do any harm". Cortinovis is still hoping his podcast will help him find a publisher, because "several hundred or even thousand listeners per week are a strong selling argument." But are people not selling themselves too cheaply if everything has already been available free of charge on the internet? Heinke disagrees – he does not put complete texts on the web. Besides, he is convinced that publishers have little capacity, if any, to look for new talent on the internet. Cortinovis sees the appeal and the challenge in combining lively literary forms like poetry slams and club readings with podcasts. Publishers are inevitably slower than the Web: "Most of the impetus will probably start with the users and writers themselves. On the other hand, the podcast cannot replace the printed book."

At the moment, however, the publishers are trying to gain access to the 'social web'. Bertelsmann, Germany's largest publishing house, is working on its own internet platform based on the MySpace idea, with the aim of reaching new young target groups – groups which, the publishers now believe, no longer spend their money on teenage magazines like Bravo and on trips to the cinema, but instead spend it on internet offers. Weblogs, Wikis and podcasts were an important topic at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair in October, with eight events and a blog dedicated to the book fair.

The new Dresden publishing house Voland & Quist set up its own blog a month ago to enable it to "get closer to its readers." Voland & Quist also has its own account with a photo stream on the photo site flickr. The publishing house has evidently understood the character of Web 2.0: all things to all people. It's the network, stupid! At least Christian Heinke can now almost live from his writing, thanks to the internet. And Herzfassen was in sixth place on the podcast culture charts on iTunes in September, with 2500 listeners. So in future the new generation of writers would be better off investing in a fast internet connection than in postage.