This week, something a bit different: an interview with Andrew Hickey. Andrew has his own blog at Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! and has just joined the group blog Mindless Ones. He has self-published (as both ebooks and print-on-demand) books about various combinations of music, science, liberalism, comics and Doctor Who, as well as a collection of short stories. You can find his work at:

• Lulu.com
• Amazon.com
• Amazon.co.uk

Andrew’s latest book, An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers, will be released soon, and to celebrate he’s doing a blog tour. Yesterday he was interviewed at Deep Space Transmissions, and today I have an interview with him about self-publishing and ebooks, which I hope will be interesting for digital history people. For a list of the rest of the tour, see here. And now, the interview itself…

So you’ve written a new book. What’s it about?

Oh, just start with the hard ones, why don’t you?

It’s about the comic Seven Soldiers Of Victory, which was a series of superhero comics written by the author Grant Morrison and drawn by various artists in 2005 and 2006.

But it’s actually about much more than that. Seven Soldiers is as dense a work as, say, The Waste Land or Ulysses (that’s not hyperbole, just a fact), and as laden with references. The difference is, Eliot and Joyce were writing for an audience that could be presumed to have pretty much the same reference points. Morrison, on the other hand, is writing for an audience who can’t be expected to pick up on his references (and I am sure I’m missing as many as I’m getting myself), so a lot of the things he’s drawing on get missed. So I’m pointing out the roots of his work in things like 17th century Puritan literature, or Julian Jaynes’ hypotheses of the origin of consciousness and language.

You tend to publish your books as series of blog posts first then edit them into books. What advantages and disadvantages do ebooks have compared to blogs?

Well, the main advantages of a blog post come down to immediacy and audience. If I post something to my blog, people *know* it’s just a first draft, that it may not be thought out, there’s a comments section (and the comments I get to my blog posts are absolutely fascinating) for people to correct it in – it’s the start of a discussion rather than something handed down from above on tablets of stone.

On the other hand, though, there’s an immense satisfaction in correctly *structuring* something, which you simply can’t do with blog posts. Introducing a whole series of ideas, referring back to something you did earlier, planting seeds in early chapters which pay off in later ones, even just the juxtaposition of two pieces next to each other – that’s something that I not only enjoy, but like to think I’m good at. Some of the individual pieces in my books aren’t necessarily my best writing by themselves, but in the way they comment on and are commented upon by other pieces, they add to the whole.

Plus, and it sounds terribly mercenary to say it, people will pay for ebooks and won’t pay for blogs, and while by posting things to my blog I am giving them away for free, I do prefer getting paid than not getting paid for work that takes a great deal of time and energy.

How would you respond to people who say that ebooks and ereaders are ‘filmed plays’ which try too hard to imitate printed books and close down some of the more radical possibilities of digital texts?

It’s probably an entirely fair criticism at this point – the vast majority of ebooks are still books that have been conceived first and foremost as printed books, and that goes for my books too, to an extent.

However, I don’t think that’s *necessarily* a bad thing – quite a lot of my favourite pieces of visual drama are filmed plays, whether it be David Lean’s version of Blithe Spirit or Spike Lee’s version of Passing Strange or much of the BBC’s classic output. And the very act of filming a play, even just pointing a camera at the stage, causes you to view it in a different way and turns the play into something fundamentally different.

In the same way, just the act of formatting the text for an ereader causes different things to be emphasised – I use a lot of footnotes in my books, for example, and the formatting process turns those into hyperlinks to the end of the document, rather than being on the same page, which then causes me to question if they could be better integrated in other ways.

And the electronic nature of the text allows it to be manipulated in a variety of ways (assuming the author doesn’t go out of hir way to disallow this). On the simplest level, having an electronic copy of a text allows text-to-speech programs, which can make the difference to a visually impaired person between having any access to the text at all or having none.

And I think that as more people become primarily ebook authors, we will see more experimenting with form.

Are there any ways that the practice of reading ebooks differs from traditional print reading?

I’m probably not the best person to ask that. While I’ve been publishing ebooks for a little while, I only got an ereader two months ago, and mostly use it for reading academic papers and public domain texts. While I publish my books in a variety of DRM-free format, most popular authors insist on applying Digital Restrictions Management to their books, which I both object to on moral grounds and am unable to access even if I wished to as I use the GNU/Linux system on my computer.

Hopefully this will change, much as it has with music, and I will be able to access more recent ebooks.

In my experience professional/academic peer reviewers, editors, copy-editors, typesetters and proofreaders can cause as many problems as they solve. Are you happier without them?

I’m not sure, as I’ve had very little experience of them. I’ve sold one short story to an editor whose suggested changes improved it, and the rest of my traditionally-published work has been done with co-authors who have dealt with those people.

I do find it important to have my books read over by as many eyes as possible before publication – on my first book, I was arrogant enough not to do this, and two people immediately made the same suggestion which would have improved it immensely. Even on that one, though, the first draft was published on my blog and read by several thousand people before publication.

So I have a small number of people I ask to read through the final manuscript of each of my books, including my wife who’s as good a copy-editor and proof-reader as any, but I get to make the ultimate decisions myself.

I have heard horror stories – from yourself and others of my acquaintance – of academic publishers completely changing the sense of a text without consulting the author. I am very, very glad not to have to deal with that.

There is a downside though, which is that I have to trust my own judgement, because nobody whose opinion I am asking has a financial stake in the work, and they all like me personally. There is quite a large community of self-published authors, and a lot of them spend a lot of the time ‘critiquing’ each other’s books – by which they mean praising them and building each other’s confidence. Many of them are publishing sub-literate dreck, and need to be told this if they ever want to improve. I’d like to think I’m not doing that, but it’s a trap that’s easier for the self-published author to fall into.

As for typesetting, I compose my books in LyX, which outputs perfectly-formed LaTeX, so have no need of professional typesetting and don’t miss it.

What I *do* wish someone would do is go through the arduous business of reformatting for me. Making my books available as print-on-demand and PDF is easy – those are created directly from my working copy. To publish on Kindle requires a bit more effort – I have to generate an RTF document from the LaTeX and then edit it slightly. But I feel obliged to cater to other ereading platforms (especially the open-standard ePub), and this takes many failed attempts and hours of work, even though those formats sell few or no copies.

How do your sales for ebooks compare to print on demand books?

I sell about twenty times as many Kindle books as I do POD books, and about as many PDF copies as print copies. I think I’ve sold one ePub book – no-one’s buying those.

The Kindle sales have, to an extent, cannibalised the print books – the sales of print books are now about a fifth of what they were before I made the books available on the Kindle. But people seem far more willing to take a chance on a Kindle book than on a physical one. That might be very different for someone whose primary sales were not over the internet, though.

You write about an eclectic range of topics and often make unexpected connections. Does this make it easier or harder to market your work?

Oh, much harder. I essentially have two audiences – I have a largish audience for my music books, which are relatively straightforward analyses of popular musicians, and then I have a very small audience for the more eclectic works – but that audience likes what I’m doing a *lot*, and are far more enthusiastic about it. There’s a natural limit to the number of people who are interested in reading something like my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! (which deals with cybernetics, Liberal politics, superhero comics, Doctor Who and information theory) – the number of people who are interested in all those things is vanishingly small. But the upside of that is there’s no competition – if you want to read about why Ashby’s Law Of Requisite Variety suggests Liberalism is the most effective ideology *and* a parody of Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument from the point of view of a character in a superhero comic, all in one book, then you’re not going to get that anywhere else.

You write a lot about comics, among other things. Are comics themselves available on ereaders, and if so, how successful are they?

Not on ereaders, as far as I know – I certainly wouldn’t want to read a comic on that small screen. But a lot of people read comics on tablet devices.

It’s difficult to gauge the success of comics on tablets, as the major comic companies have been ludicrously slow in making their work available digitally, and for a *long* time people have been trading illicit digital copies in .cbr or .cbz form. That’s slowly starting to change, mostly down to a company called Comixology which more or less has the monopoly on digital delivery of what we laughingly call ‘mainstream’comics (through their sadly-proprietary application). Even so, while you can get many older titles legally online now, they still only release a selected few on publication date (and those for the same price as a print copy).

That said, DC Comics (the publishers of Batman, Superman, Green Lantern and so on) are going to start releasing digital comics on the same day as their physical release from September, so we may have a better idea then what the market for online comics reading is really like.

Have you found the same depth in any webcomics that you’ve found in Seven Soldiers?

No, but then I’ve found very few works in *any* medium of that depth, so it’s an unfair question. Most of the great people working in webcomics aren’t trying for anything like Seven Soldiers, and Morrison was a writer with twenty-five years’ experience when he wrote it (I realise I’m talking about him to the exclusion of the artists he worked with, but Seven Soldiers was very much a ‘writer’s comic’), which no-one in webcomics has.

It may also be partly my own taste in webcomics – I tend to gravitate towards gag-a-day stuff like Dinosaur Comics or Wondermark, or one-off things like Hark! A Vagrant, rather than longer, narrative works, when reading webcomics.

That said, Chris Onstad’s Achewood is a work which is on a par with all but the very best comics, and while it’s not trying to do the same kind of thing as Seven Soldiers (and Onstad’s ‘thing’ is less amenable to the type of analysis I do), it has a quite astonishing depth and sophistication to it.

It’s now four years since I started blogging. Last year I said I might stop today, but I’m not going to now. I need a blog to promote my forthcoming book, I’m not ready to do anything completely different yet, and blogging is still a useful way of trying out new ideas and keeping in touch with people. I’ve somehow gone for nearly three months without posting anything because I’ve been so busy. Before I can even start writing the book I have to work on a chapter for an edited collection and also finish building a roof. And there’s an article which is probably going to get revise and resubmit soon. Posts should get more regular from now on, but in the meantime, here are some links and news:

• Bench Grass is a new military history blog, with some great posts on armoured warfare. One of the few people who really gets cavalry.
• At Airminded Brett Holman has finished (for now) post-blogging the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. One of the many surprises thrown up by his experiment is that there wasn’t a clear division between the two at the time. The press seem to have been more optimistic than the present myth of The Few would suggest (and it was a big shock to discover that Churchill was mostly talking about bombers in that speech), and some people wanted the Germans to try and invade Britain because they knew it would fail. Despite knowing that German bombs wouldn’t defeat them, the British seem to have massively over-estimated the effectiveness of their own bombing of Germany. Meanwhile Daily Mail readers, then as now obsessed with impractical and morally dubious solutions to exaggerated problems, demanded more reprisal bombings of German civilians.
• The Institute of Historical Research has launched a digital consultancy service and announced a digital editing system called ReScript.
• PhDork at The Pursuit of Harpyness looks at “An Anti-Suffrage Monologue”, in which American suffragette Marie Jenney Howe mercilessly exposed anti-feminist hypocrisy by putting contradictory arguments against equal voting rights next to each other, ostensibly so that readers could pick the one they preferred. This kind of hypocrisy hasn’t gone away. Early-modern women’s historians are faced with Lawrence Stone’s objection that elite women are not worth studying because they’re not typical, and David Starkey’s objection that ordinary women are not worth studying because they had no power. Opponents of women serving in combat roles say that a woman wouldn’t be strong enough to drag her wounded male comrades to safety, and that male soldiers would spend too much time looking after their female comrades instead of fighting.
• Pink Parts is a webcomic set in a strip club and written by Katherine Skipper, who used to work as a stripper. It’s intelligent, honest, funny and really has something to say. Good to see a stripper’s point of view being put across in a medium which is far too dominated by privileged white men. It ties in well with Catherine M. Roach’s book about stripping, which I reviewed last year.
• Comic genius Kate Beaton gives her own interpretations of courtly love and King Lear.
• PEP! is a magazine about comics, music, politics, Doctor Who and other things, edited by my friend Andrew Hickey. It even includes some articles by me. I tried to push myself do something different from my blogging and academic writing, which wasn’t entirely successful but I’m all about failing better. In issue 1 (available as free PDF download or expensive print on demand) I gave an argument in favour of political extremism (from a feminist and postmodern angle) which made some good points and one bad point which went up a blind alley to do with Zeno’s paradoxes, but since it provoked a rebuttal from the editor I must have done something right. In issue 2 (PDF; print version available soon) I took a long and exhausting (but nowhere near exhaustive) look at lazy journalism, bad science and gender ideology relating to spatial reasoning abilities. Since I wrote it in March it’s been superseded by some other things (especially Cordelia Fine’s new book Delusions of Gender, and a new report which disproves gender differences in maths ability) but I’m still pleased that I managed to write something outside my comfort zone.
• Andrew has also written a book about the Beatles. I found the blog posts that this grew out of really interesting, even though I don’t like the Beatles.
• And finally, you can have minutes of fun looking for film and TV locations on Google Streetview. Here are Baywatch headquarters near Santa Monica and Baywatch Hawaii headquarters at Haleiwa.

Chris Onstad is a genius, but this week I think he might have underestimated how rude 17th-century cheap print could be. For example, see Early Modern Whale on 17th century porn, or the effects of coffee (even I was surprised by the mention of dildos there!). At Mercurius Politicus there’s a pamphlet war involving woodcuts of she-devil toilet sex, while Ovid’s Ars Amatoria was one of the things guranteed to irritate a puritan. In Agnes Bowker’s Cat David Cressy dated the first picture of an erect penis in English popular print to 1641. And here are some breasts (illustrating the story of a very promiscuous woman) from LOL Manuscripts. Also in this old post (more popular with Google searchers than anything else I’ve ever written) I looked at how the Old Bailey Proceedings described two bestiality cases in more detail than was strictly necessary. The kind of prudishness parodied in Achewood is more often associated with the Victorians (and that might well be a myth that annoys 19th century specialists), but it could occur in 17th century print too. At LOL Manuscripts there’s a really bizarre example where a pamphlet has an uncensored picture of ass kissing but refuses to spell out the word “arse”!

So yes, people in the 17th century had sex, looked at porn, and used dildos. These are just some of the things that didn’t get mentioned in traditional historiography because they weren’t “proper” history.