Wordsmiths
One of my favourite words and concepts in the English language is craft. To craft something, or to demonstrate craftsmanship, speaks to me of a beautiful marrying of the practical and the artistic: the exquisitely carved chair, the bright floral designs of narrowboat art, the carefully shaped and embroidered waistcoat. Of course, until music became a fine art at the turn of eighteenth into the nineteenth century, it too was a craft – and for me, the best composers are those who continue to find ways of seamlessly blending the thoughtful with the sublime, pragmatism and beauty. It’s also an approach I enjoy researching: if you have five composers all writing in 1860 and they all wanted to create new choral works, who succeeded in creating something very singable but dull… or ravishing but impossible for most vocalists… or (and here’s the jackpot) a combination of the two?
I have always tried to view my writing (and speaking) career as a similarly crafty pursuit. Sure, I have the pragmatic bit: the word count, the brief, the baseline facts that should be included. And then I have freedom to take it from there, whether it be spinning a narrative between pieces in a programme note, drawing analogies to enhance understanding, including bits of poetry… whatever works to make the end result informative, entertaining and engaging, and draw people in to the music we are talking about.
Of course, craft doesn’t only apply to the person doing the writing. It also applies to all the other people who actually get the thing I write to the people who read it. In a concert scenario, they need to get the notes to the people at the concert itself. They might also, if they have the resource, put the notes online. CD notes are similarly made available to those who purchase the CD, and those who buy the download, or stream using services like Naxos Music Online. (And Hyperion have made their CD notes freely available via their website – a superbly useful resource.) And then for books, it’s more complicated: the seeking out of those who might read something, or know someone who might read it, or might review it to encourage others to read it, and so on.
So these other people, who must get the writing to the reader, have a lot to do. Editing and indexing, for example. Layout and proofing. Image permissions and formatting. Printing (which could cover a multitude of sins from a cranky old photocopier to a professional press) and binding. Inventory and stock-taking, postage and packing, ordering systems, marketing, payment processes… on and on we go. The number of invisible people behind any single physical object full of words is considerable.
But we don’t need to worry any more, of course – we have the internet! And that means that everything can be free and people can do it themselves, and everyone can have access to everything! Brilliant!
Just a couple of small difficulties with this theory. Let’s review our list of paper jobs. Writing. Yes, still need that. Editing and indexing. Yes. Layout and proofing. Yup, we need a website designer and someone to check spellings more effectively than Microsoft. And, if something is being made available in paper and digital formats, you might need to mock up different layouts for both, for ease of reading. Image permissions and formatting. Well, it’s probable that the web designer could deal with the formatting… but we still need the image permissions. And of course, if we want to include all the other juicy media types now at our disposal, we need permissions for those too. Printing and binding? No, that’s ok. Unless, of course, what you’re doing is putting a predominantly paper resource – like programme notes – online. Then you need your web designer and the printers and binders. Much of the ordering system can be automated for online purchase, but this is not free. And marketing now becomes the most important and difficult thing of all, because whatever you list is going to be part of all of Google, and let’s be honest: how often do you get past, at best, page three of your several million results list? (I have a mental image of Google as a ball pool. Imagine you want all the blue balls. That’s fine if we’re talking about a standard-sized ball pool… rather trickier if it’s a swimming-pool’s worth… or what about if St Paul’s Cathedral was filled up? How long are you going to bother looking now? Or will you just grab the blue balls that have accidentally, or through careful assistance, ended up nearest the door?)
None of these things are reasons not to head for digital formats, of course. But just because you’ve got a £2 domain name, a tiny annual hosting cost and a WordPress site (like this one) does not in fact mean that Everything Is Easier To Do Online. There are hidden costs all over the place when it comes to writing and producing material, if you would like to do it in a way that ensures high-quality writing, good layouts, legal high-res images and other media, and enough marketing not to disappear into the Google abyss – digital craft, in other words, with good content and design. All of the people who do those things deserve to be paid for their expertise. That means that the e-book, or other end product, might not be free, if the people involved want to be able to pay their bills this month.
And, to return to the humble writer, remember that not only the creation of material, but also the organisation of material, takes time and hard work. An edited collection of essays is (trust me) not a trivial undertaking. Even if you can’t have a dialogue with the other writers – for example, if you are proposing to publish a collection of essays from the 1890s – you will want to provide your reader with context and that takes research. Which takes time and money. Writers shouldn’t ‘just’ have to knock together a quick intro (or speakers a quick overview) for nothing any more than musicians should ‘just’ have to play some of their favourite tunes for free to entertain a party crowd. We all deserve to be valued for what we do. If our sole criterion for online content is ‘it’s free’, we risk both poor craftsmanship or alienation of those professionals who can’t afford to work for nothing.
Other funding models are surely on the way, and of course specialist resources help us cut through the vast reams of Google hits that make it very difficult to find all the things that might be directly relevant to us. (We must never forget that Google is far from a democratic search engine offering up only the most relevant hits.) But in the meantime, don’t forget that when you next pick up a book, you’re picking up the work of more than just a writer. If we can’t aim to reflect a similar level of craftsmanship and expertise in a digital equivalent, our reading will be all the poorer for it.
