And while it’s true that in many ways the power relations are no different than the old gatekeeper model, I still think it’s worth point out because:

1) People forget this a lot. There really is a sense that blogging into the void and maybe making a few friends will get you where you want to be as long as you’re good . . . but it won’t.

2) To me it really does feel like new media devalues creative effort in a genuinely new way, and that this top/bottom pressure is part of that and a genuine problem.

Let me clear that I’m not poo-poohing the entire project of free stuff or transmedia stuff at all. But there’s a teachable moment here. Previously, it’s been easy to say that these problems are Big Content’s fault, or the guy is doing it wrong, etc. etc. (not saying you’re saying this, but I read it every time a musician says “Shit, I’m actually losing money guys,” and gets a UR DOIN IT WRONG from the assembled Internets) But this is a situation where full faith in doing it differently and real effort to back it up didn’t work. I think it’s time to engage this a bit more vigorously, is all.

M.

Might definitely be the case. I’d love to see numbers — do trilogies sell? Do series sell?

Hrm.

– c.

In my opinion, you’re spot on about a lot of things. Talent isn’t enough. Talent, drive and discipline only get you so far. They’re necessary components, but not the only components. Relationships, for instance, matter. If you don’t have relationships, you don’t have much. A lot of this success gets built off of relationships.

Further, I like the idea that creators could be partly responsible for being the foundation of technologies instead of the clients of technology — though, I don’t know how realistic that is, either. Some level of partnership with tech creators (those relationships, poking their head in) is a component there.

All that being said, while your comment regards creators and new media, you could just as easily take “new media” out of that discussion. Creators partaking in the old way suffer the same slings and arrows. Successful artists and writers — truly, truly successful ones — are outliers. The creators in the old models remains the last person to get the money. Old models work more for the apparatus than the creator just as new models do. (Makes sense when you think about it. The new models, frankly, are just the old models given new skin. At least, at present.)

So, I agree that talent cannot be the only precondition. But I also don’t want to deviate towards cynicism and suggest that those who are successful are only successful either because they were graciously advantaged by external forces (or that they were so fringe that they must be discounted).

– c.

That’s precisely why I didn’t feel *that* disheartened about the issue. It seems to me that what he’s trying to sell here simply doesn’t really belong to the realm of traditional publishing. But we won’t know unless he manages to put these sequels out for himself.

Generally speaking, monetizing portable content is something that uses crowd sourcing with some propaganda on the side based on what outliers can get out of it. You make a little money, but really the guy aggregating you and everyone like you makes worthwhile money.

Outliers like Cory Doctorow are easy to point at as evidence that it can work, but there are reasons these guys are outliers. A significant chunk of that “it factor” is not reproducible. In Cory’s case, he had an extraordinary level of freedom to make connections to set up his career. This isn’t to discount his talent and work, but it shook hands with these preconditions in a way that you can’t do for yourself. Other successful outliers include guys who were successful in the old model and knew how to get grandfathered to the top of the queue. All respect to them for doing what they did — it wasn’t easy — but it doesn’t follow that their plans are right for everyone.

And frankly, the idea that there’s a blueprint that doesn’t require preconditions beyond talent drives exploitation from above and below. From below, you have a growing contingent of people who won’t buy anything, and won’t do anything that ultimately monetizes the content. From above, you have corporations like Google who will make money of of quality and crap alike in big enough chunks, but to maintain that stream they need to make content as cheap and easy to acquire as possible. (In discussions I’m amazed at how many look at Google as a charity — it ain’t.) So far from being revolutionary, new media models seem to work reliably for the apparatus around the creator, but not so much for the creator.

Here we have a situation where we have a talented guy who obviously has the mix of ability and discipline where if it really were about a bare formula that can be reproduced, he would probably reproduce it. He didn’t. That means something’s gotta change, and it will require something more than finding the right twist to apply to our own situations. It means we’ll probably need to change the status quo from something we sympathize with (free! social!) and we’re trained to think of as inevitable (partly by people who profit from the concept taking root in a way the individual creative cannot) by direct education and activism, and possibly by developing the base technologies at the grassroots instead of just being clients of technologies served to use by the crowd-o-crap, bit-o-cream corporate free content exploitation model. I think this *will* happen and in that future model there will be lots of opportunities — but I don’t know what it is.

But I’d be a damn liar if I said I only have started this phase of my life to make money. Sure, like Sally Struthers told us years ago, we all want to make more money. But I make a pretty good living in my day job and I enjoy what I do in my “night job,” so to speak. If I can end up creating even that micro-audience, then the project will succeed according to the admittedly low bar I want to clear.

In the meantime, as somebody who primarily reads and “consumes content” (God I hate those two words), I feel like we (writers, readers, industry) haven’t figured out the best way to push stuff out and get attention. That’s easier than it used to be, sure, but we don’t know the real answer yet. We need it, though, for everybody involved.