Preserving Your Literary Legacy In The Digital Age

[Steven Lake]

Here's a recent entry I made in my blog that I thought you guys would find most interesting and useful.

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Preserving Your Literary Legacy In The Digital Age

One of the things that authors fail to remember or think about in today's digital world is what will happen to their literary creations should the worst happen? (ie, fire, computer crash, flood, riots, war, end of the world, cats and dogs living together, etc) Or even something as simple as a single bad keystroke or mouse click. Since all of your works (or a large percentage these days) exist in the ether in digital binary form, it's highly important to always remember two things: 1. Keep a regular and consistent backup of everything. 2. Make sure that at least one of your backups is in hard copy form.

Yes, you heard right. In today's digital word, dead tree backups are still highly important. So what are some of the methods you can use to create these backups? Well, there are several. But typically the methods you use will depend a lot on what the current state of your works are. So here are a few of the suggestions I have for backing up your work so that it's not lost to time.

Types of Writing

1. Already Published Books

If your book is already published and out in the wild, with it's own copyright protection and ISBN, then you're pretty much safe these days. But you still need a backup. With published books you have a nice little advantage that you don't have with other works in your collection. If you still sell print copies of your novels (if you don't, you really should have at least a few, even if you only do a limited edition print run) then simply take one copy of each printed book you've published and store them. (methods for storage are listed below)

The advantage of storing the professionally printed copy is that it tends to be more durable than one created by a computer printer, or even a place like Staples that does print on demand copying. Since stability is important for the survivability of your physical backups, and professionally printed books are by far the preferred method for long term hard copy storage.

2. Works In Progress

Works in progress tend to be a bit more problematic. Actually, a lot more problematic. Some of the reasons include the fact that you have multiple revisions, notes, drawings, concept art, writing aids, and any number of other things in any number of combinations. So what do you do with these? What I've found that works best is to prioritize your stories and your support items.

Support items are things like character profiles, notes, drawings, writing aids, etc. But always remember that writing aids are, and should never be, considered number one on the priority list. That place is reserved for your manuscript exclusively. Notes without a manuscript is worthless. But a manuscript without notes is still usable. So always set your manuscript aside as the first item. Second, go for your notes. I typically recommend those second, as they have all of your critical story and character information in them.

Items that would be third on the list and down then depend entirely on you. Now as for what revision of your manuscript you should store, I recommend obviously keeping your latest revision at the time you make the backup. If you make a sizable number of changes to the notes and/or the manuscript at any point, then simply replace the copies you have in storage with the newer stuff.

3. Concept Work

Concept work, or "early draft" versions of any story are a rather strange animal. This can typically be something that is nothing more than a pile of notes, and maybe even a few test scenes where no real heavy work has been done on the story. It's just mostly tinkering to see if you have a viable idea to write or create a story from. Typically it's a good idea to store these, but you don't have to. As they're only concepts, given the typical level of creativity most authors have, unless you have a really strong attachment to the concept, it's preservation or backup is entirely your choice. You don't have to, but you can if you want, as it's value at this point is fairly low.

4. Audiobooks

Audio books are a rather interesting medium when it comes to long term storage. Since formats change regularly, and the books themselves are highly dependent on technology for their use, they're typically not something I recommend keeping in long term storage. In fact, I discourage it to some degree for the above reasons. Also, audiobooks are a derivative work. In other words, their creation and existence is entirely dependent on the original manuscript. Therefore, if something were to happen to all your audiobook copies, they can be recreated again fairly easily. Yes, it'd be a big pain, but as long as you have the original manuscript, recreating these isn't much of a problem.

5. Ebooks and Digital Files

Given that the purpose of this article is to advise you on ways to protect your digital documents should something happen, it seems a bit moot to advise you on ways to backup your digital files. But really it's not. If you can somehow store a digital copy of your files, it'll make getting back up to speed faster after a disaster than paper backups will. The paper or "hard copy" backups are for those extreme situations when digital backups become unavailable or unusable.

For the more common and more practical situations, such as fire, flood, computer crash, etc, your digital backups are going to be your first go-to source when getting your books back online and available. So I recommend regularly backing up all your digital writing files onto flash cards and storing them in a safe place in case you need them in the future for any reason.

But even so, the paper copies are still extremely valuable, because should something drastic happens and your digital copies are lost, or unusable, your hard copies will still be there to help you pick up where you left off, or even to put your books back out into the public eye once things settle down.

Methods For Storage

There are numerous ways you can safely store your hard copies, and places to keep them where they will be safe. One of the first and greatest methods of storing documents is by using a vacuum sealer. They are the invention of all inventions when it comes to keeping out bugs, rodents, water, mold, and other unwanted elements. They're not the end all of storage, but they are an important part of it. So are metal cans. If combined with a vacuum sealed book or manuscript, your chances of seeing your works preserved through even the worst disasters goes way up.

This is because vacuum sealing does several things. One, it creates a moisture free environment. Moisture in any great quantity will destroy paper by encouraging deterioration, mold, and other similar things. The lack of oxygen within the package will also prevent bugs from getting to it, as well as many rodents. There's also the added benefit that the heavy plastic cover will eliminate wear and tear on the paper. Inserting it in a metal tin or box adds to the protective value of the vacuum bag by providing a rodent and bug free barrier that can also withstand a fair amount of abuse should something happen.

Another thing to remember when storing your physical copies, always be sure to use the triplicate method of backup. This is where you have three copies of whatever you intend to store. Once you have these, you will need to separate them to increase the chances that at least one of them will survive. To do that, keep one copy in your house, and then store the other two off site at separate locations, such as your parent's house, your business, or any other secure location. If one of the copies becomes damaged or destroyed, replace it if you can (if you can't, then that's where the other two copies display their value) so that you always have three available.

Never have any of your backup locations close to each other either. So for example, if backup copy one is stored in your home (which it should), then copies two and threes should be stored elsewhere, each at a different location, and both at least 15-30 miles away. Yes, that far. In other words, don't store it at your next door neighbor's house. Store it elsewhere, maybe at your mom's in the next state over for example.

The reason being, if a tornado or flood comes rampaging through your area and it flattens your home, anyone else within the damage path is likely to have their house destroyed, which also likely means that any backup copies in that area are also going to get destroyed. But since disasters tend to be regional, it's unlikely that your other copies, if they're stored properly and a safe distance away, will be harmed.

Conclusion

As much as people might think that the days of the dead tree press are gone, printed copies are still important. When and if all or a large swath of our technology should fail, they will be the one thing that will make the difference between preserving your legacy, or leaving you with nothing at all.

[mr ploppy]

I email the latest version to myself at a Google address each time I change something, and keep a copy on a keyring memory stick that goes with me when I go out. There's also a copy on the external hard disk that keeps all my other backups, that's never more than a couple of days old. I think I'd be very unlucky if all of those failed at the same time.

For anything that's already finished and published I don't really see the point. If you had to you could just buy a new copy, whether it's an ebook or a real book.

[Steven Lake]

Very true. But I'm still one who likes to be extra cautious. I've seen some pretty crazy stuff happen to things before, even things deemed impossible to destroy, so having even a copy of your published works in physical form is a good idea from my viewpoint. As for creating hard copies of your works in progress, you probably only need to do that every couple of months for active projects. If an unfinished project becomes inactive for any reason, and will remain so for some time, it's usually a good idea to do a hard copy snapshot and stuff it away somewhere, and then more or less forget about it until you start working on it again.

[Nancy Fulda]

I confess, I shudder at the thought of working novelists printing out a hard copy of their manuscript every few months. It sounds like a huge amount of paper usage to me, and a significant burden on the environment.

Also, it takes a lot of space to store.

I have a hard time imaginining a catastrophe that would eradicate my electronic backups (including hard drive backups, copies mailed to yahoo, and kindle documents) yet leave paper printouts unscathed. In any case, my primary creative capital is my brain, not my manuscript. If the worst happens, I can rebuild.

[Penforhire]

I like the added idea of vacuum packing plus a metal container for the most valuable paper texts. I admit I have a few pages from my school days which are surviving in hanging file folders over the last 30-odd years. So far, so good. But I recognize the weaknesses (fire, flood, theft).

Now I stick with digital-only backups, duplicate DVD's kept at home and work. Text formats dating back to ASCII are still readable so I'm more concerned about the changes in storage media. I've got nothing on hand that'll read 3.5 or 5.25" floppies, much less 8" floppies. But on the other hand, all the text I've ever written fits onto a DVD so I'll just have to copy a few discs worth of data to the "next" format (I'm currently skipping Blu-Ray writables).

Now, just kidding here, a stone tablet takes this to the next level...