Avram@70:
...self-publishing is actually pretty common in the comics world, and doesn't have the same stigma that it does in the prose world.
This gets us into apples and oranges territory. The speculator market collapse of the late 90s gutted the comics publishing industry. An estimated half of all publishers went out of business, Marvel declared bankruptcy and several of the smaller indie publishers like Fantagraphics are around today only because the owners decided to put love of their art before business. Dark Horse nearly went under and was saved by its lucrative licensing deal with LucusArts. Comparing this to the publishing industry just doesn't fit.
I certainly hope the prose publishing industry doesn't follow the comics industry, as it would be catastrophic for thousands of people, both small press employees and the middling authors just scraping by. If it did, then yes, self publishing would loose the stigma. I'd like to see self-publishing loose the stigma (being a self-published prose author myself) but I wouldn't want it to happen at the cost of half the publishing industry walking off a cliff.
Avram @48:
What percentage of professionally published writers make that kind of money?
A practically infinitesimal percentage. But the popular delusion among many of the self publishing crowd* is that if they can just harness the power of the Internets, they'll become the next Neil Gaiman or John Scalzi and do it all without having to be digested in the gut of the publishing industry. Which is of course absurd.
If there are prose writers who'd be better off being their own publishers -- and I think there probably are some, though not many -- they're probably going to be the ones who aren't doing well under the current system.
There are a few. Wil Wheaton comes to mind. Also, Warren Ellis' recent flirtation with POD collections of his internet rantings. But both have a sizable geek cred and cultural presence due to other factors, such as their celebrity, and in Ellis' case, his long standing work in traditional publishing endeavors, which makes them outliers. They can successfully self publish because people already know who they are. Average schmoes without such celebrity don't have the edge of being able to ride our own coattails into the annals of self publishing success stories. That's not to say it couldn't be done,** it's just highly unlikely and not a stable path to success.
* At least here in the US where this delusion that one is mere minutes away form becoming rich and famous due to absolutely nothing but sheer entitlement is a disturbingly common phenomenon. Perhaps this is common in other parts of the world but it seems to make up a significant part of the American myth.
** Ape Lad's Laugh Out Loud Cats started out as an internet meme, which he then self published on Lulu, which then led to a traditional book of his cartoons being published.
dsr @ 13:
There's nothing wrong with it, if it's your hobby. It starts to enter the realms of the unreal when you think you can scale homebrew book making up to the level of a full time job that pays the bills, buys you health care, sends your kids to college and provides you a pony.
Having dabbled in the artisanalcheesebook market, I'm finding new depths of appreciation for the traditional industry. I think the "self publishing rules because the corporations are evil!" mindset is related to the "let's privatize everything including firefighters and cops" mindset. It appeals to the overenthusiastic amateur in all of us but is ever so slightly divorced form reality.
Lee@47:
Hadn't heard of Seeing the Leopard before, that's fascinating. Of course in humans, it leads to Crying Wolf.
Steve C.@35:
Idly wondering -- could it be that some Conservative elements miss the Communists as an enemy? And the reason that they wish to elevate Islamic radicals to supervillainy is to give them something worthy of hatred?
I think there's something to this. The staunch anticommunist Conservatives were denied their Last Battle. They spent most of their lives preparing for all out nuclear heck with the Soviets, only to have that promised heroic death snatched away. What's worse, Communism just sort of rolled over and died nonviolently and without any say on their part. They've never quite gotten over that. They won, but it was hallow victory because it was passive from their point of view.
So they've been looking for something to fill the void left by the death of Teh Commies and decided that Terrorists would do nicely. They're scary, dark skinned and have a completely different culture. It reaches back to grab that racial fear and loathing that was propagandized during WWII (which was their father's Good War, the one they've been looking to fight their whole life) and fills the void left by the end of the Cold War.
That they have to puff up the villainy of their new Big Bad is almost beside the point. That's mere detail. The point is, they have a new reason to get out of bed in the morning, because today might be the day they get to start World War III, and prove to the ghosts of their fathers that they are real men.
Abi @ 173/4:
That was an incomplete sarcasm attempt.
remember kids, don't attempt sarcasm before your morning cup of tea.
And I don't think free [down]loaders are serious readers.
Of course not. Anyone who can mistake reading text on a screen for the tactile sensation of holding a book in your hands and reading printed words on paper isn't doing either enough to matter. They're just shouty people on the Internet expressing an opinion for the sake of having one.
Yeah, I hate barley formatting as well. All that kerning ruins the flavor.
As a self published author, I enjoy the freedom to design the layout and cover of my own books. I enjoy fiddling with type, putting my graphic design skills to use and getting my artist friends to collaborate on cover designs. I'm clearly an oddball, as most POD authors make books out of stock art and barley formatted word files, which I find appalling beyond description.
The downside of self publishing is obvious: no professional-grade copy editing, editorial or marketing assistance that would differentiate me from the mass of slush pile rejects and spread my name far and wide.
But on the other hand, I don't have the headaches of having to deal with this sort of ebook snafu either, as my ebook model is pretty simple: you can download for free, a PDF from my website. No DRM and it's generated straight from the InDesign files, so it looks exactly like the interior of the printed book. If PDF isn't your thing, you can email me and ask politely for a copy of the text in whatever format you'd prefer and I'll send it along (within reason-- .doc and .rtf are easy but inscribed on clay tablets might take a while).
This clearly is not the method for saving the publishing industry or revolutionizing the digital paradigm of the hoozywhatsit or whatever the buzzwords are this month for selling stuff online. It's got some pluses and some minuses.
So, other than the prospect of upending centuries of entrenched habit and vast economic models, why can't we find a hybridized method for publishing? A sort of co-op model of book production, that uses the already existing marketing and distribution apparatus to make the book selling transaction (printed or electronic) as transparent and easy to navigate as possible, with everyone involved along the path to production getting a piece of the action?
I know, I'm only asking for the world.
This round of Amazonfail has sorely tempted me to pull my two books off of CreateSpace (Amazon's POD service) and move over to Lulu. Not that my meager sales would effect them in any way but it would at least send a symbolic message. For whatever that's worth.
Doctor Science @26:
Yes, the university library I work at is an affiliate with Better World books. We ship them a ton of material every year, usually donations we don't add to the collection. I'd be happy to answer questions, to the best of my ability.
Luckily in Oregon we have a million alternatives. Trader Joe's, New Season's -- heck, even the Fred Meyer's, Winco and Albertson's sell organic meat and produce, a lot of it locally farmed.
My wife has turned our spare bathroom into a dark room. She does gum prints, a sort of cross between photography and watercolor, where the negative is printed onto watercolor paper and washes of watercolor paint bring out the image. Lovely stuff.
Turns out he'd been at a place where a lot of fireworks had been set off.
Nice. The irony in that: anyone flying after attending a 4th of July BBQ could be flagged.
It wouldn't even take buying exotic chemistry to do this. A little sulfer and some graphite shavings would do.
The main problem with Against The Day isn't the writing, which is fun and weird as most of Pynchon's prose, it's that it's really 4 loosely connected novels all mashed together, with no chapter headers, in an unwieldy omnibus volume that could collapse your chest, were you to fall asleep reading it in bed.
Break it into 4 volumes and you have a wonderful quartet of novels that would be like John Crowley's Aegypt books, only with more adventure and dirtier jokes.
John Mark Ockerbloom @210:
Librarians generally don't like it when books with wrong information (but that aren't fiction, as defined above) get moved by patrons into the fiction section. That's not where they're cataloged, so it makes them hard for patrons to find.
It's even more complicated than that when we take into consideration the consolidation of catalogs into consortial allied systems (basically, one catalog that serves multiple libraries, in different states, even) and the near monopoly on MARC data by OCLC. Our patrons aren't just the students, faculty and staff of our university, but 39 other universities in three states. And we're trying to make all those catalogs agree. So if one joker moves Going Rogue into the fiction section, it makes things... complicated.
Johnofjack @207:
I'm thinking there must be some level of error which most libraries would accept (e.g. simple and very infrequent typos: "aslo" for "also") and some level which most libraries wouldn't ("considering wind resistance in your model of aerodynamic flight is completely optional"), and I'm very interested in where each library might draw the line between the two.
It really depends on the library. Specifically, the scope of their collection and the amount of time the librarian/librarians in charge of collection development have to assess and weed.
I work at an academic library for a university, so we have a fairly wide general collection with several program-specific collections.[1] We let a lot of oddities slide int he general collection, under the general principle (and ALA commandment) that we provide access to information, regardless of its veracity, provenance or flaws (as always, caveat emptor). Some obviously junk material gets culled, (unlike at the last academic library I worked at, where we had three copies of Paris Hilton's "auto"biography) but generally we don't worry about typos. Nothing like getting rid of all books that mention Pluto as a planet, say. Those have historical significance now anyway.
Being in charge of the collection, I get to throw a little weight around, and so draw the line at pseudoscience getting added to the collection. We receive several large donations a year, mostly retiring professors donating their collections or local folk cleaning out their basements. I think I've tossed out three copies of The Secret and a half dozen New age books in the last year. What was really sad was a retiring language professor who gave us a bunch of really beautiful but hopelessly out of date Spanish language textbooks (30+ years old).
________
1. The majority of our budget is spent on the Health Professions graduate programs, and these days, more and more of that is allocated to electronic resources, which is another kettle of fish. Angry, angry fish...
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2010 | 22 |
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| 2008 | 85 |
| 2007 | 71 |
| 2006 | 30 |
| 2005 | 125 |
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