It’s a programmer’s mentality to reinvent the wheel, to boldly go and fail again where everyone has failed before. It’s akin to the belief of 99.9% of writers that they’re in the 0.1%.

Unfortunately, I don’t see it changing, either: so long as you continue to have people in love with technology, you’ll always have people figuring that they’ll bypass the human element of any transaction. What’s funny is that these people are almost otherwise viciously libertarian, which suggests that they’re all for freedom from oppression from humans, but have no problems with becoming slaves to a database.

When you can get a computer to understand the following sentence, then we will have true artificial intelligence:

Time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana.

The sad thing is that publishing DOES work. Books that people want to pay money for get published. Any opinion on quality is irrelevent.

I think Mr. Betterment is a slush-puppy who is envious of the big dogs.

They’re useless.

Any decent web designer will tell you that hits are meaningless. It just means someone opens your site. I look at hundreds of sites in a given week… doesn’t mean I go back, have any affect on them, buy something from them, whatever. considering my rounds often come from http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com – this isn’t a good thing.

Hits mean people look at your site. It doesn’t mean you’re “reaching” them. It doesn’t mean that you’re changing anything, or spreading your message. Just means random joe-blow computer user clicked on a link.

Hits mean something when you get buyers on an e-commerce site, etc.

Sorry for wasting everyone’s time with this hypocritical fscktard.

Now we see the backpedalling.

aBw, your comment “I agree 100% with you that computers cannot do the job of the slushpile”, above, doesn’t mesh with:

Weeding out the basic flaws – spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization – are tasks so easy that a computer could do it…. Tens of thousands of people across the planet are employed to perform a task that a computer could do far faster and more efficiently.

This is absolutely wrong, and trying to back out of owning the remark doesn’t make it less stupid. A writer who loves words would never think this is a good idea.

If you argue that publishers should do market research, and your substantiation is a quote that they are already doing market research, what are you contributing? Most of that quote refers to new methods being used to connect existing readers with existing product, which is marketing.

How about you describe exactly what kind of market research would yield more useful information than the last fify years of actual sales numbers, and how a publisher could apply this to a new book by a new author?

I have never said there are no problems in publishing, but an unpublished writer recycling old and unworkable ideas doesn’t contribute to any productive discussion.

Now, granted, using too many buzzwords like “Web 2.0″ is probably a violation of some axiom or law or other pithy, cynical observation disguised as the very fundamental truths on which this very universe was conceived, designed, and constructed. But then, that is the sort of thing this blog is founded on, so what the hell?

But aside from the smug abuse of the latest in media catchphrases, there is certainly no harm in suggesting alternatives to the way Things Are Done. In case you hadn’t noticed, both the motion picture and recording industries are trying very hard to find another tune to hop to right now, because they’ve realized (belatedly) that this intertubes thingy is changing the way things are done. Maybe publishing will change, last of all and at the sage direction of the Powers, but I don’t doubt that it will change.

Letting people decide for themselves what is interesting and entertaining and useful of the “unedited and unfiltered” masses, while offensive to a certain sense of sophistication and refinement, is one of the waves of the future, like as not. And, again, I doubt very much that fiction publishing is exempt.

Anything so easily translatable to I’ve been writing for ten years and haven’t managed to get published, not even once sets its own standards of credibility.

Betterment and Meika, the 101 Reasons twins. At least you’re reaching your core audience, Seanie. Now all you have to do is persuade them to stop

From someone who’s done both, thank you thank you thank you.

Sean, you are awesome!