I don’t intend on publishing online

‘check’

No, I do not think it will manufacture an audience. Not what I am saying at all. I am saying it takes a group of people to put a good book together. Whether this is a publishing house, a dedicated writers group or the web it is this conversation that is important. Look at the quotes I use in .before Country for the tells. There the reason why I decided to publish it. Artsy-crafty pre-Raphaelite william morris-y reasons.

You’re comparing apples (of conversations about, say, writing,) with oranges (of the published book industry) and saying the apples don’t even taste like any citrus you know.

I agree with various entries (I do see you have replied to these thoughts) at Working Towards the Betterment of Publishing. Spot on. And has good enough punctuation not to scare the bejeesus out of people. I like the idea of wikifying slushpiles. Similar to my reclaim the slushpile comments quoted out of context at the rejector.

I am publishing my juevenilia intermixed with recent writing for some very good artistic reasons that I want to share, ie for reasons that have nothing to do with the “conversations” described by this site on the Myth of Publishing and for which your reasons to stop writing are very good advice. I don’t think I am that good (even if child rajer in .before Country was previously published in a poetry e-zine ten years ago).

Now I don’t buy that Myth and so your well thought out advice does not necessarily apply. They would then be crud if misapplied. Trouble with incoming tech is that the new rules don’t yet exist so its hard to learn them ahead of breaking them. Some rules are transferable only where the end product is the same, if it is not (i.e. where perhaps its more about the conversation than the polishing of a fetishistic but edifying end-product) then the rules will have to be found through experimentation. Or at least through mix-and-match and metaphoric use of other usages…

.punctuating sentences this this could be compare to the Unix protocol for hidden files in directories .or perhaps the URL shorthand when starting a (sub)domain more.crud.dotcom .maybe this is a protocol for an unspoken thought, while this is spoken aloud

I am not necessarily trying to do what you enjoy and obviously love, and the old nag was a mighty fast filly in her day.

BTW
None of these comments will be wasted time because I will use them to write an Artist/Writer’s Statement for my site and/or backblurb for the book.

Happy New Year.

But then I too remember …

Why then would you post a quote and link to it, when you knew I knew the quote and had discussed it?

No, don’t answer. It’s the same reason you think I would’ve read your entire book.

You’re not making your point any clearer. I really don’t know if you have one.

If you think that Web 2.0 is somehow going to manufacture an audience for you, bon chance. But if the feedback you’ve already gotten from others is any indication, you’re preaching to the wrong choir, and you’re wasting time here that you could be wasting on rewrites.

I said, “But then I too remember what Theodore Sturgeon said when asked why 90% of SF was crud, he replied that 90% of everything is crud.:

I said, “But then I too…”

I said “too”.

Hope I haven’t belaboured the point ‘too’ much but I won’t let you get away with that one. It suggests you are a lazy reader (something my .before country is all about, the main conflict in the book is about the one with the reader. Can’t think why you haven’t worked that out.)

What we really need is a blog called 101reasontostopscanningand
toreadwhatisbeforeoureyesbecause
itwillmakeus
allbetterwriters.blog.com

Here’s one reason why yours is crud. You use a technology which will change what people will be able to do (have more conversations unmediated by publishing houses, this will lead to better writing [this lead includes reading and posting at your site]).

It’s the conversation silly!

We will be better writers and self-publishers because (when we converse on blogs and other web 2.0 places) (so long as we get out of our comfort zones and learn something and not just sit back and war blog forth on our pet hates or ‘too’ cute pets) we discuss stuff. Talking makes things happen.

You don’t believe that’s possible, and that’s fine. In fact you want talking to stop something. Well good luck. Far be it from me to say you shouldn’t blog that view point. I do suggest you read stuff though.

I think the scarcity currently lies in the scarcity of readers to not be anything other than passive recipients of publishing houses edification programs (what does that mean? read those four links at the head of my last comment above).

A scarcity of people who do not want to engage in conversation but simply be passive buckets, or wannabe producers of pap to pour into said buckets. Great writers or what not. Great artists who are ‘published’.

I am not so damn precious about it.

But then why should ‘i’ change.

Centuries ago ‘anyone’ could self-publish by scraping away at vellum and write/paint illuminated manuscripts. How many did? How many could?

For these manuscripts to reach their height of glory it took a group of people in close conversation to support small scriptorums (and even then they only focussed on certain religious texts, bit like a large glorified Flinstones photocopier whose moving parts were little monks and nuns rather than rollers, scanners and lasers).

It took the printing press to make novels but the first printed book were still said religious texts, the printing press was a fast way to ‘copy’ a lot faster than monks. But eventually the copying became ‘printing’ and then ‘printing’ in the long term became ‘publishing’ and it changed the means of production. It is now the beginning of the end of that era.

It had turned ‘letters’ that people passed around, (more word of hand than word of mouth) and printed and bound, ‘published’ them as ‘novels’ fictions and such for a market that wanted more than the religious pap so worthy of scriptorums’ time past.

But it didn’t happened all at once because it took a conversation, a comparitively active readership, to produce a market that the tech could then support. Before that even the writers were not active, they just mindlessly, devotedly, and barely capapble of agency, copied the word of god.

So go on, you’ve moved from the pulpit into the streets with your pamphlets decrying the rise of the printing press and go on about how no one knows how to properly copy anything anymore.

But you’ve joined the conversation even as you damn it. You even use it as a reason to stop writing, or do you mean copying?

That’s the main reason most of what you write is crud. But I can sympathize about the crud, that’s for sure.

(Maybe the verb for what we do now has not been invented yet? And unnamed it cannot be defended?)

But it will get better in conversation. I have. You will, even if you reject what I am saying for i am not that important, but the conversation is.

The medium is the message because in the age of web 2.0, and more importantly, peer-to-peer filesharing, the advert is the product. Good writing might still be scarce but distributing makes its production (of the conversation) easier and not just restricted in-house to publishing houses complaining about the slushpile… because its been outsourced to everyone… (even, as I said above, if we use the new tech at first to just pamphleteer our religious views at first, you know, war blog on our pet hates and our cute pets).

(You should also remember conditioning technologies are overhyped at first by boosters but in the middle term permeate unnoticed until they have completely change the means of production in the long term. You’re deep in the middle and have not noticed.)

Oh, that “the advert is the product” is a snowclone by the way.

Its equally true to say “the product is an advert” but we’ll leave explanations of P2P for another day.

Self-publishing is not new. Nothing these links discuss is radical or revolutionary, they’re just fluctuations in the supply chain. The “scarcity” in the economic model of publishing is not the opportunity to publish, it’s quality work.

Writers do not need to wrest control of the slushpile away from the New York publishing behemoth. The option to self-publish has always been there.

What writers need to do is strive to produce better work. Or stop writing.