The So-Called Publishing Revolution: Is It Independence Day For Authors?
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Man, that’s a clumsy way to make this article topical. I feel like I’m cramming a square peg into a circle hole. Too late! Is what it is. It’s out there. Let’s just move past it.
And now, let’s talk about the –
*drum roll, crash of thunder, thunderous hoofbeats*
FUTURE OF PUBLISHING.
I write this post because I just came from reading a thoughtful, incisive post over at John Horner’s Hornor’s Bastardized Version about publishing and e-books (“I Sing The Book Electric“), and there I posted a comment and it feels like, instead of dumping a fat back of blubbering word count in his comment box, I’d be better coming over here and jabbering into the void. So, prepare to get a little bit on you.
To give the gist of John’s post (though please, go read it, he says things far more intelligently than I can paraphrase), it’s this: right now, we as authors are facing a potential transitional period whose value is not known. Yes, blah blah blah, e-books are ascendant, except we don’t really know how true that is. It’s the Wild West in terms of both electronic and traditional publishing, as old laws are slow to catch up into new territory. What is likely (and this is John’s main point) is that the ease of publishing will lead to a wider diversity of published material, but this diversity has the potential to be paralyzing rather than empowering (at least, from the audience’s perspective).
As authors, this is both totally exciting and deeply fucking terrifying, because we don’t know if this trip is going to lead to a mighty gold rush, or to us breaking down in the middle of nowhere, forced to cannibalize one another. Mmm. Sweet meats. Long pork. Pass me the fork?
I am equal part e-book Luddite and wild, frothing futurist in my thought response to not just John’s post, but to any future scenario regarding the “publishing revolution.” At the outset, I’m pretty much in John’s camp in this one: traditional publishing has handed to me a wealth of wonderful books. The gatekeeper model has worked — at least, it’s worked to put good books into my hands.
What it hasn’t done yet is worked to put my books into the hands of others (nor has it necessarily worked to put my friends books — like John’s — out there). Maybe my books suck, and that’s a good thing. I dunno.
The reality, I’m afraid to say, is this: the world is home to a lot of bad fucking writers. Wretched wordsmiths, clumsy and fumbling. The fear is, the FUTURE OF PUBLISHING will kick down the doors and allow all these awful writers to come flooding onto our shelves and into our e-readers, a tumbling horde of zombie book-monkeys whose vast hunger for brains is present simply because they themselves possess none to begin with.
The signal-to-noise ratio will wobble wildly, and next thing you know, it’s going to be all noise and no signal. That’s the fear. It’s a fear I myself possess. It’s good for bad writers, and bad for a good audience.
Except, like with all things, the truth isn’t really at the margins. The truth can’t be that simple. It never is. The truth seems to forever lurk in the mushy middle, in the mire of moderate thinking.
(Mmm. Alliteration.)
In no particular order, here’s some added thoughts.
That Awful Buzzing Vuvuzela Noise Has Always Been Here
It’s easy to submit to the fear that the sudden e-book revolution will produce greater difficulty in separating wheat from chaff once we strung up our gatekeepers from the streetlights. But the truth is, the noise has been present since Caveman Thag learned to scratch pictures of Two Stags Fucking on the cave wall. The ability to write — and, later, the ability to print — has essentially granted the ability to make books and tell stories since the dawn of time. This is wildly simplified, since different barriers — like, say, the inability to read or the Black Goddamn Plague — prevented this, but my point is that in general this publishing industry model isn’t that old, and in its most currently refined form is only a couple decades into its life cycle.
Further, I cannot speak to your experience, but I can damn sure speak to mine: when I walk into a bookstore or I flit on over to Amazon-dot-com, I am already paralyzed by diversity. The shelves are full, and so are the databases, and it’s all spines and bright colors and ISBN number and –
You know what’s missing?
Filter.
I find no filter. My method of finding new books to read is, at present, one of two.
One: I take recommendations from people I know, or I read reviews, then I find those books.
Two: I wade into the septic morass and reach through the fetid glurge to see if my searching fingers can find a bauble or three hiding underneath all that goddamn poop.
Taking the FUTURE OF PUBLISHING to its most apocalyptic destination, what happens if all the gatekeepers are eradicated and the aforementioned doors are kicked down?
For the audience, it basically defaults to the same thing. They still have to wade through the feculent froth. They still have to listen to the recommendations of peers and reviewers.
What’s the difference if I’m weeding out a novel about glittery vampires or some bullshit self-pub with a rat’s nest of spelling errors and grammatical fol-de-rol?
John quotes a Salon-dot-com article (“When Anyone Can Be A Published Author“) –
Furthermore, as observers like Chris Anderson (in “The Long Tail”) and social scientists like Sheena Iyengar (in her new book “The Art of Choosing”) have pointed out, when confronted with an overwhelming array of choices, most people do not graze more widely. Instead, if they aren’t utterly paralyzed by the prospect, their decisions become even more conservative, zeroing in on what everyone else is buying and grabbing for recognizable brands because making a fully informed decision is just too difficult and time-consuming. As a result, introducing massive amounts of consumer choice leads to situations in which the 10 most popular items command the vast majority of the market share, while thousands of lesser alternatives must divide the leftovers into many tiny portions.
…except, to me, that doesn’t sound like what will happen when the FUTURE OF PUBLISHING is made manifest. It sounds like what happens right bloody now.
Do You Trust Those Who Keep The Gate?
John says:
I am an author. For now, I’ve bought in to the traditional manner of publication. Get agent, submit books to publishers, get rejected, hopefully get accepted, go through another revision and editing process, have book cover designed and typeset by professionals, have PR and marketing people do whatever it is they do (even if it’s not as much as it was before this age of the internet).
And, finally, know that when my first book comes out, it’ll have run the gauntlet and be absolutely the best product it can be. A product produced by a team of people. I want to be the recognized brand.
And, again, I’m inclined to agree. Obviously, this is the method and the manner I’ve chosen for my book and for future books. The process is the process, and I think that the people in place who groom such books for birth do a good job. Once again, this process has put a lot of lovely books into my hands. What has not put lovely books into my hands is the self-publishing masses. Not yet.
But, once more, I’m forced to look to (cover your ears) THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING and wonder aloud if it’ll really change the model all that much. Agents and editors will probably still exist, but probably with an “unfettered” contingent — meaning, those who are not bound to any one model. The gauntlet may remain: to get a book to stand out, it’ll still have to have That Special Something (even if That Special Something isn’t quality, since even now bestselling books are not necessarily the books of the uttermost quality). You’ll still need a flashy cover, or a good blurb, or a well-read book. Those who accomplish this will likely still submit to the same symbiotic relationships that exist presently: the editor, the graphic designer, and so on. Some of those roles may drop away. I dunno. But you ask me, authors will always need editors. Agents, too, in some form.
Thing is, I think it’s important here to create a a separation between trust in the people and trust in the system. I trust the people. I trust my agent. If I get an editor, I trust that editor. And I hope to even trust the publishing companies themselves, but the entire system is one that could maybe use a little oil for its joints. This system produces bestselling novels of dubious quality. This system produces minimal support for good authors. This is an ecology with an uncertain life cycle — books get returned, books get lost on shelves, authors find themselves frozen out, robust advances can be a curse instead of a gift, and so on.
Good authors will sometimes fail to get into the system despite having a great book and an amazing voice. Could be a luck factor. Could be a sales factor. Original material is often lost beneath tides of rehashes and gross facsimiles: that is not ideal for us as an audience, and it’s certainly not ideal for the art and the power of good storytelling. For instance, John is a great author. I’ve read his stuff. And I hope to Jeebus that the traditional model and the system that’s in place is one that would support him and get him published.
But it might not be.
And that’s where (ahem, cough cough) THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING may have some benefit — it gives authors and creators a new avenue toward publication. It’s one more road toward an audience. See, right now, a book has to earn a fairly big audience to be considered a hit and make anybody any money. But something published on a smaller scale can reach a micro-audience and can still do very well for the author — but only if that story is not yoked to the slow, groggy ox of the old system. Can’t have it both ways.
Once More, We Return To The Formless, Gooshy Middle
And that’s really where I keep coming with all of this. The old model isn’t dead, and the new model didn’t kill it, and the so-called FUTURE OF PUBLISHING is really just the PUBLISHING PRESENT ALBEIT MODIFIED BY A NUMBER OF FACTORS. There will be no e-book revolution.
The new models are not a magic bullet, nor are they an ax to the back of the head.
In a perfect world, we’ll see books in more hands, and we’ll see authors have a few new paths and tunnels toward some manner of publication. But the crap is already out there. The Internet has already made it very easy for shitty writing to find a home — and, as it turns out, shitty writing is still shitty. It’s still misspelled and poorly-conceived and it still gets its tiny crowd of back-scratching Yes Men, but it also doesn’t find its way to a real audience.
The paralyzing diversity exists. The noise already overwhelms the signal.
I don’t know that any so-called publishing revolution can change that.
About The Author
ChuckWendig
Chuck Wendig is a novelist, a screenwriter, and a freelance penmonkey. He's written too much. He should probably stop. Give him a wide berth, as he might be drunk and untrustworthy. He currently lives in the wilds of Pennsyltucky with a wonderful wife and two very stupid dogs. He is represented by Stacia Decker of the Donald Maass Literary Agency.
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36 Responses and Counting...
Well written post, and I have to agree. The internet has done a lot of good things. It has given a lot of people a way to get their work out there and be seen. For money, for free, for a donation based service. Can you imagine something like web comics without the internet?
The problem is (is it really a problem?) that much like American Idol showed us year after year, there are a lot of people out there who are convinced they’re among the best that really aren’t. There are a number of people out there that try to subsist on talent alone, and don’t realize that ‘polish’ is not something that comes with talent, it comes with hard work and mind numbing tedium.
So now you have all those people screaming and clamoring for attention, thrusting their work under your nose. Meanwhile the people who are putting in the hard work, are generally (it seems) the quieter ones hoping to get noticed and word spread about them by people who like it. They’re hard to find even when they do go loud.
Guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s not like the ratio between Bad and Good has gotten further skewed in Bad’s favor. Just that the size of the arena is so much larger that you can get lost in the bad a whole lot easier. Even if proportionally the amount of stuff worth reading/consuming is still the same.
Chuck says: “I take recommendations from people I know.”
Fun publishing fact that Publishing doesn’t particularly like to talk about: 85% of all book sales occur as a result of word-of-mouth recommendations – you’re buddy says, or someone on Twitter said, or whatever.
10% of a book’s sales come as a result of the cover art/design.
The remaining 5% of a books sales come as a result of *all the other shit* — end-cap placement and all that bulllllllllllll shit that the publishing industry puts SO high a value on.
Anyway. Good piece. Good musing.
@Doyce:
Thanks!
Those semi-official figures? Because I like those figures, and might quote them often.
– c.
I have to disagree with you that the gatekeeper model has worked and handed me wonderful books. There’s a lot of crap out there. A LOT. And more and more I find myself extremely reluctant to pay dead-tree book prices for a book I can open and find poor editing in. (Unfortunately, that’s happening far too often now with dead-tree books.)
Traditional publishing has repeatedly shot itself in the foot (outrageous returns policies, overblown advances, etc.) that has caused a self-perpetuating implosion. They can’t afford to take chances on new authors, so mid-list authors get shoved to the side. Meaning they don’t sell well. So A-listers (crap or not) get pimped. Meaning less money and sales for mid-listers…etc.
Traditional publishing has done this to themselves. Instead of embracing the e-publishing model as a value-added service, they’ve fought it tooth and nail. And the agency pricing fiasco has really pissed off a LOT of readers. (Just troll through the Amazon.com forums and make sure to wear your flame-retardant jammies when you do.)
I now take my Kindle (or my nook) into a bookstore with me. I will first see if a book is available in e-format. I download the sample. If it’s not, I whip out my BlackBerry and if I really want the book, I check for it on PaperbackSwap.com Or I make a note of it and look for it in used bookstores or the library.
Traditional publishers will have to wake up and compete with indie publishers who are LISTENING to their readers because they can’t afford not to listen. They aren’t trying to do the square peg/round hole job on them like traditional publishers are. (Yes, that was intentional. LOL) Indies can be competitive because they have evolved or emerged in this new digital age and their streamlined budgets and production methods reflect the newest technology. They are the Bugatti versus the Model T of traditional publishers.
And if traditional publishers think enlightened readers are buying their dead-tree print bullshit when same said readers have already made it over to “the dark side” (and since we have cookies they’re happy to stay), they need a serious wake-up call if their declining profit margins aren’t enough to scare the daylights out of them.
E-books are here to stay. Will print die? No, not totally, but it will have to adapt or traditional publishers will die as indie and progressive publishers who embrace new business models take the lead and run with it.
I’m going to talk here as a former bookseller.
I left Borders in 2003.
When I was hired as a manager at one of their stores we had pride in what we were offering. I know folks who were bigger fans of smaller, independent stores thought we were The Big Bad, but at least back in 1999 a person still had to have knowledge and enthusiasm for the product to get hired at all. WHAT we offered was the ability to walk into any of our stores, crammed with shelf after shelf, and browse to your heart’s content and make surprising discoveries (I can’t believe you have this! and the sort). We were not Walden, which we owned and which was more of a one stop shop for best sellers and popular titles. We had a Catalog.
Capital C intended.
We had mandatory merchandising plans every month, but we were encouraged as staff to create our own endcaps to feature books that WE thought were great and let the general public have a peek at things they might not otherwise notice.
And then ALL of that went away.
The first thing they did was yank our ability to feature suggestions. And then they started removing the shelves and turning each enormous, monster store into an oversized Walden.
Books that were smaller were no longer given a shot. They figured they could devote space to 400 thousand copies of whatever Oprah said to read and end the experience of a person’s fingers thrilling upon the discovery of something fresh and new.
And then each and every one of us started mouthing the words, “No, we don’t have that in stock, but I can order it for you” in our sleep.
All of this was a rant to say, I agree with this totally:
“It sounds like what happens right bloody now.”
Yep. And it’s been happening for about a decade if not longer.
Oh, and as for the word of mouth issue, the Amazon.com forums, e-mail lists, and blogs are where I usually find those. Still online and digital. In fact, it’s easier, with keywords and discussion threads, to find books I might like versus the word of a single friend who says they loved it.
Love this post man – as soon as this is typed, I am off to John’s space to read what he has to say also. Talking about the new frontier, I think the web that forms by linking posts and trains of thought precisely like this is where the real goldmine is (albeit, not monetarily).
For obvious reasons, the FUTURE OF PUBLISHING is of insane concern to me. I may fall into the camp of crappy writer, but I don’t want to get in based off of the opening of the floodgates. I need that process that exists now to make me get better, to hit those bars. It’s a lot of work, and I think the only way to truly get there is to do that work.
I think it comes down to this; good will always be good. That doesn’t necessarily mean good is what will get attention, just that if it is good, it will get talked about. Sleeper-hits work that way, and when they hit, they hit big. It just takes a while.
I don’t know where it is all going, but I remain optimistic. Hopefully, the digital age will just be an extension of the paper-age.
I, like you, trust people over the system. No matter what direction THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING might end up being, sitting down with or sending work to someone you trust and having a rapport with them will never be replaced with dumping a few thousand words into a soulless corporate system to have it churn out something slick and pulpy that’s sure to sell.
I don’t want to publish myself. I don’t want my work to appear unfiltered in the hands of strangers. Because when it first emerges, it’s not great. It might be good, and in fact I hope it is, but it won’t be great. And I refuse to put anything out there for full-blown public consumption unless it’s great.
One thing I think will come out of the changes in publishing will be a growing level of power for editors over publishers.
Yes, any hack will have the ability to put their work out there. A good editor will be able to read it and know if it has that special something, if it can be salvaged into a salable story. That editor can then work with the author to craft the work and, when it is done, find the right publisher (or agent for same).
So a particular work may start as an electronic work and then get edited and presented to a paper publisher. Or maybe just left in the electronic work, but now with greater polish and salability.
The answer to this, in certain circles, is that reviews can ultimately take the YouTube model to let the cream rise to the top naturally. The problem being, of course, that reviewing a work of fiction the size of a novel is a big commitment; it doesn’t scale.
I agree with you on gatekeeping, but I’m not as confident that the publishing model as it stands will hold up. (It bears noting that as recently as March, I felt exactly the same way as you.)
As I wrote on mah blog a couple of months back, there’s a significant chance that the actual form of long text fiction will shift, instead, so that crowdsourced quality control can take place — probably selling fiction a chapter at a time, with the first chapter free, or some such thing. There’s nothing special about the form of the novel as we know it today. …How many epic poems have YOU listened to lately?
There’ll still be a lot of crap out there, as anyone knows who has ever visited Fanfiction.net. But if you chop long fiction into bite-sized morsels, it’s much easier to measure the opinion of the masses, less commitment to write, more easily marketable. Basically the novel shapeshifting to accommodate the market pressures trying to kill it.
You shouldn’t say such mean things. Even us crappy writers need love and a place to call our own. How will I get better if I don’t get all this crap out of my system. It’s toxic. I need to purge.
I think the main thing here to remember, as noted at the end of the post, despite all the noise ePublishing or the various free methods (blog, podcast) has enabled a few overlooked writers find their way into traditional publishing. Trust in the public garnered them a backdoor into their goals. It’s like becoming President by popular vote on a write in. It takes a lot of write ins though, and if you’re not a good writer you’re not building on your career, you’re just adding to the noise.
I’ve bought several books by writers who got in that back door. Nearly 100% of the time the republished novel after being vetted and edited turned out better than what they had given away for free. So the editing process in the system is clearly necessary to produce the best product.
Wow. You obviously thought about my post far more than I did, even while I was writing it.
Glad I could be grist for the mill. You’ll receive my invoice soon.
John HornOr Jacobs
So when you say “Independence Day for authors” you mean like the one where the aliens land and start blowing shit up, right?
Excellent post! As you said, the crap is already out there and the noise is already overwhelming. Yet it’s still extremely difficult for someone (like myself) to get published. There is a disconnect in the system. The way I see it, many ebooks and self-published efforts fall into one of two categories: authors who are struggling to break into the old system who strive for quality to build their brand and authors who are too lazy or whatever to polish their craft or bother with the hurdles of the traditional system.
As it is now, when I browse a bookstore, I check out reviews on my iPhone and use the power of the internet (almost as strong as the power of Grayskull) to sift through the noise. I also find sites such as goodreads.com helpful since my friends list there is stocked with people who I trust (in this area) that are there just to share their knowledge and preferences. People like Maggie, Julie and Guy.
@Julie- I’ve often wondered why I’m so disappointed in Borders lately.
A-and:
Oprah: I notice there aren’t a lot of women in your books…
Cormac McCarthy: Well, I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman that I really understand.
O: Huh…
CM: *shrug*
It’s an illuminating journey into the mind of one our greatest living writers.
What’s distressing to me is that an author pretty much has to go it alone to ensure success of his material. That is if your name doesn’t happen to be Glen Beck and you don’t warrant a team of people trying to schlock together your Neo-Rand fanfic.
You think Hemmingway would’ve blogged about the industry? You think Orwell would’ve bought keywords on Google AdWords? Fuck no. They wrote and anguished and loved and seethed. They wrote all that glorious shit down and sent it to an editor who made sure people knew there were brilliant men left in the world. Tolstoy’s eyeballs would’ve exploded if he read some of the shit that goes on in the NaNoWriMo forums.
Our motivations as writers have changed from writing on a daring edge that motivates emotion to writing a bestseller that will make us rich and famous. Pretty much as documented in Palanihuk’s Haunted. “How much do I have to suffer or how loud do I have to be to get a little time on Good Morning America to hock my book?” I’m not interested in reading that shit.
The biggest problem for anti-ebook folks like myself is libraries and impulse buys. I like bookstores and I’ll take a chance on something that looks cool if I happen upon it with no prior knowledge of its content. Otherwise, I’m a library freak. How, if the entirety of the medium is electronic or POD am I gonna get material from the library.
But, such is life. Leave it to the internet to sully the last good thing on earth.
Great comments. Will address them all more completely later where appropriate, but some quick thoughts on this last one –
@TNT –
Ehh, I dunno. First, libraries are great with ebooks — our local library has a whole ebook, well, library. Free downloads of books. Same way libraries handled audiobooks, they can handle ebooks. It’s not really that weird.
Second, I’d be careful about painting broadly in terms of “writer motivations.” Writers want to get paid and feed their families, and while we’d love a bestseller, most writers write because they like to write or because they can do no differently. Further, writers have always wanted to get paid. It’s a bit silly to say that Hemingway wouldn’t have blogged about the industry, because Hemingway did not exist now. It’s no different than saying, “You think Hemingway would ride a jetski? No way!” Who the hell knows? He’s not here now. He was here then. Game over.
– c.
@Darren
You know, the reason I love Goodreads so much is that it almost feels like being back on the job when the job was still good.
I think the big result of the “revolution” will be the same democratization of content that you’re seeing in music — a sharp increase in the number of creators who are able to “make it”, because the metrics of “making it” are now far more realistic and far more easily attainable.
Writers will not need massive multi-book contracts from big houses, co-op shelving, ads in the NYT Sunday book section, etc. In fact, an author with a modicum of social networking ability will be able to cultivate a core fan group which will fairly easily be able to sustain a nice living for that author, at far less levels of exposure. (Standard Long Tail stuff, really)
Think about this: Amazon’s Kindle royalty on books priced $2.99 to $9.99 is now 70%. At that level, they don’t need to reach many readers to make the same amount of money they’d make via a traditional royalty-advance contract.
I think *that’s* the real Revolution. More people able to make a living writing.
@Gareth
Very good point. There’s an essay out there called “1,000 True Fans” that expands on that. If, as an artist, you have 1k people that will buy everything you put out you’re easily making more than enough to live on. So if you can develop a relatively small, rabid fan-base (or a larger one that’s not quite so rabid), you can live without having to fight the dog for food.
The cool thing for readers is that this may very well mean more of the kinds of things they like to read. Sure, the “bestseller” lists will still be there, but a lot of work that was inspired and moving and wonderful but would sell maybe 100 units and so didn’t get the author a contract will now be out there, somewhere. It may be hard to find, but it won’t be stuck in some starving genius’ sock drawer.
@Peter —
Absolutely. Kevin Kelly’s essay is a cornerstone of where I’m taking my business.
The amazing thing is, it’s not really that hard to get those 1000 True Fans — just stumbling through as I’ve done, without really making a concerted effort at audience-building, Adamant Entertainment is sitting somewhere in the 400 True Fan range.
Taking more of a direct hand in planned marketing and audience building might sound scary — I often see it cited in author’s counter-arguments about what they’d be losing without the big Houses behind them — but most authors are pretty much positioned to do it anyway, with their blogs, Twitter, etc. They just don’t think of it in those terms since “marketing” seems like an arcane thing that someone else handles.
@Gareth –
Absolutely. And the marketing falls to the Big House authors anyway — at least, to a degree, and doubly true for new authors. Authors have to be their own best advocates.
– c.
(“1000 True Fans” essay)
(And a slight rebuttal by Scalzi.)
– c.
Great post Chuck.
I like to say that self publishing’s biggest benefit to writers is leverage. When enough big name writers decide to self publish and when enough newbies self publish successfully, the publishing industry will have to rouse itself from the current catatonic state and make some changes. Royalty rates, returns policies, time to market, time to payments; it will all be on the table if the industry wants to attract writers again.
As publishing gets wider and easier, prices for consumers go down. Good thing. Chances are, so will pay for writers. Bad thing. Formless middle ahoy. As a fan, I’m aided, as a writer, I’m impeded. Maybe I just have to keep buying more than I’m writing and I’ll make out, yeah?
K
@Mayowa –
It’s a good point. I wonder if authorship will get its RADIOHEAD / NIN moment where a Major Writer comes out and self-publishes something.
– c.
Oh, that Salon.com article…I blogged about that. Apparently the writer reads the first page of every book in the bookstore before choosing. (well, probably not, but she suggests that somehow that’s what people will have to do to find good stuff.)
I find that I rely less on my friends now than I did to find good reads. If I’m interested in a book, I go to Amazon and check out the publisher’s blurb, the best and worst reviews, and maybe the first page. And if I decide I want to read it, I trot to my library website and reserve it. If I decide I want to own it–I run over to Powells.com.
Google-Fu is the most critical lifeskill of this Brave New World.
@KD:
If I can, ahem, pimp my own article — over at The Escapist I talk about circles of trust and word of mouth (and hive minds!), and one of the conclusions I made is that, for me, something like Google is less valuable these days. Google has no filter; it’s just a dumptruck full of possibilities dumped on my head. But social media — Twitter, or here in these comments — we get more personalized, filtered answers to our questions, and that’s of great value.
– c.
I realize libraries have ebooks. How am I suuposed to read them? Don’t say ipad because I’ll turn into a slobbering mess of epithets. I like books. If I can’t check out books, the library is useless to me.
As far as writer motivations go, I know what the goals of my writing group peers are, and they’re less than pure. I’m constantly criticized for not being mainstream and for using vocabulary that the average consumer would shun.
i’m just saying if the business changes, it changes the basic role of the writer entirely. We cease to become solely the creative backdrop and become the marketing department. That’s not something that appeals to me. I’m not necessarely likeable, as is clear from my comments and responses thereto.
TNT:
Writers should never be a creative backdrop. Further, the notion that “a writer writes” is a myth — the term writer is actually pretty inaccurate. Author is good, but even that doesn’t encompass all that a successful author must do. Even to get published *by* a big company requires you to market yourself by writing a query letter and by pitching the book. Writers also have to be good editors. Writers who are unwilling to learn those skills won’t make it very far, I’m afraid.
– c.
Funny:
Almost 20 years after saying it, Egon (Ghostbuster) is STILL wrong:
“Print is dead”
I think you misunderstood my point. Or I misunderstood yours. Either way it’s irrelevant like the old saying goes, Arguing on the internet is like running the special olympics, rven if you win you’re still retarded.
When Stephanie Meyers decides to self publish, two groups will benefit tremendously.
Writers will get the leverage I mentioned in my earlier comment. Laundromats all over NY will be flooded with new business, all bearing crapped in pants.
I see no difference between the traditional system and the emerging system so far as my buying/reading habits go. I get recommendations from friends, I am aware of what is vastly popular at the moment, I have my favorite authors, I read reviews, and these things mentioned leave me with more than I can keep up with.
Where does the fear of crap drowning out quality come from? It is being nurtured by the existing power system and it is complete and utter nonsense. What drives the traditional market is sales, so in the emerging self-publishing electronic market just sort by the number of downloads/purchases and you have what is very likely to be much of the cream.
The fear of an emerging self-publishing model is hogwash that the traditional power structure fears greatly and perhaps for good reason. If we move from tyranny to true and fair free-market capitalism then I cheer enthusiastically from my arm chair. I am confident that I can find enough cream in the new system to keep me satisfied.
@Jim:
I’m not comfortable calling it nonsense, not at this point — the reason it’s a legit fear (though one I don’t think will hold water in the end) is because at present, self-publishing is and has been pretty much full of garbage. The signal to noise ratio is very imbalanced — but, out of the books in the bookstore, the signal to noise ratio is much more in sync. I pick up a book in a store, I may not *like* it, but its quality isn’t dubious. Pick up a self-published book today (or worse, five years ago), and you’re far likelier to get something that isn’t just “not your style,” but something that is objectively bad.
– c.
In that you responded to the previous post, I have thusly responded to your post with a post of my own (you’re quoted therein). What a beautiful web we weave, no? I suppose now I should go and read the one prior.
You leave off with a bunch of questions; I feel confident about the answers. http://bit.ly/9iOpDe
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