Found a funny New Yorker piece on Twitter yesterday. Good for a laugh all the way through, but this (small spoiler/tease) was priceless:
We can send you a list of bookstores in your area once you fill out the My Local Bookstores list on your Author’s Questionnaire.
Worthy of Heller.
— Mark Barrett
By Mark 10 Comments
This post is in response to a recent series of Huffington Post editorials about the future of publishing. Each voice in these editorials, like each voice in the larger ongoing conversation, has a valid point of view. Ignoring how we got where we are, however, or the realities of this moment, fails to address the future that is hurtling toward us.
On Thursday, October 7, Mark Coker, CEO of Smashwords, posted an editorial titled, Why We Need $4.00 Books. As the head of a company devoted to servicing the e-book market, it’s not surprising that Coker touted the functional and distribution advantages of e-books over published texts, or that he focused on the crushing costs associated with maintaining the traditional publishing model while ignoring e-book costs and the threat of digital piracy. Coker also took notice of the publishing industry’s recent decision to withhold e-book versions of frontlist titles as a defense against cannibalizing book sales:
Many publishers view ebooks with a skeptical eye. After all, won’t cheap ebooks cannibalize expensive print books?
This is the wrong way to examine the situation. Lower cost ebooks help publishers retain customers who might otherwise abandon books altogether in favor of lower cost alternative media options.
Ebooks also hold the promise to expand the worldwide market for books. Hundreds of millions of new middle class and literate consumers have come online outside the US, especially in developing countries.
In Coker’s view e-books equal a larger market share for an industry facing intense competition for eyeballs. This larger market share would in turn compensate authors and publishers for a lower per-copy price. [ Read more ]
By Mark 2 Comments
When you’re digging into a subject on the internet, there comes a point at which the site links you’re following become known paths, and those paths start doubling back on each other with increasing frequency. It’s at this stage that you confront two possibilities:
It seems counterintuitive that this could happen in an information age defined by search-engine and browser arms races, but it happens to me all the time. I search on a given subject, I follow the links, I seem to run out of fresh links, then I sit there, wondering: is there another system of links out there just like this? Am I missing it? Am I not searching for the correct keyword, variable or wildcard?
Maddeningly, there is no way to verify either possibility without actually searching for something that may not be there, and even then the best you is call off the dogs when the sun goes down and tell everybody back at the camp that you did your best. I mean, in the spy business this is why CIA operatives go funny in the head looking for moles. You can’t prove a negative.
I say this as preamble to frame my experience of stumbling onto April L. Hamilton and her various online incarnations. It’s also a lesson in doing due diligence as a researcher, which means digging into web sites, following links, reading comments, following links in comments, and generally being exhaustive in the way that you would be if you thought a big pile of money was waiting for you to find it. [ Read more ]
When I was writing screenplays I watched a lot of movies. Binges of them. Blackout binges.
When I’m working on interactive titles I tend to play games obsessively and read up on the latest failed attempts at interactive storytelling.
What’s been really enjoyable about turning toward the publishing industry over the past few months is that I’ve re-established a long-lost love affair with the New Books shelf at the local library. In doing so I’ve worked my way through a surprising number of books, and I’d like to pass along* the titles** of the ones that stuck with me. [ Read more ]
By Mark 3 Comments
I ran across a short note on Mashable yesterday announcing that Yahoo will be closing GeoCities this month. While the post rightly notes that GeoCities was one of the first social networking sites, that’s not what I first thought about when I read the news.
What I thought of was this:
In January 1999, near the peak of the dot-com bubble, Geocities was purchased by Yahoo! for $3.57 billion in stock, with Yahoo! taking control on May 28. The acquisition proved extremely unpopular; users began to leave en masse in protest at the new terms of service put out by Yahoo! for GeoCities. The terms stated that the company owned all rights and content, including media such as pictures.
Yes, you’re reading that right. Yahoo paid 3.5 billion dollars for an online community, then one of the first things they told every user in the GeoCities community was that Yahoo now owned all of the content on each and every GeoCities web site. In the business world this type of decision is known as the dumbest thing anyone has ever done. [ Read more ]
By Mark 4 Comments
I took a long ride yesterday on Metaphor (my imaginary horse), trying to clear my head. There are so many cross-currents in the issues facing publishing that it’s easy to become overwhelmed, confused and convinced that each new issue needs to be attacked or defended on the merits. Riding aimlessly under a blue sky filled with nothing but wispy clouds and narrative dreams tends to diminish the immediacies of any online debate. The names of individual plants, birds and butterflies fade into the landscape, becoming part of a vital evolving whole that can be observed and understood in no other way.
Take the theory of The Long Tail, as put forward by Chris Anderson. I’ve read about it before, and heard about it for years, but lately there have been studies published that question the validity of the theory. Being a conscientious sort I started reading up on the issue and thinking it through myself, and even started several posts on the subject — all of which derailed due to subsequent articles I ran across while trying to nail down my thoughts.
In the end I had more questions than answers. If history is any guide, that meant there was nothing in the Long Tail that was going to help me solve the issues I’m confronting as an independent author. So I officially have no opinion on the theory. I’m opting out, again. [ Read more ]
If I have a weakness for anything it’s simplicity. Where a lot of people like to dress things up or add detail, I like to strip things down and emphasize what’s essential. Neither approach is right, really, unless of course you’re trying to figure out how something works. In that case, ignoring the noise and focusing on the mechanics is not simply a subjective choice, it’s objectively necessary.
Guy Gonzalez at LoudPoet.com seems to have that same approach, and it’s one of the reasons I keep learning something every time I visit his site. In the hive-mind world of social networks Gonzalez often sounds like an old hand, and that’s not easy to do in a medium still in its infancy. [ Read more ]
Vanity Fair has an article out about Rupert Murdoch taking on the idea of free content on the internet. The upshot is that he’s not doing this because he cares about content, but because he’s hemorrhaging money.
When I got to this, however, I laughed myself out of my chair:
Murdoch’s abiding love of newspapers has turned into a personal antipathy to the Internet: for him it’s a place for porn, thievery, and hackers. In 2005, not long after News Corp. bought MySpace, when it still seemed like a brilliant purchase—before its fortunes sank under News Corp.’s inability to keep pace with advances in social-network technology—I congratulated him on the acquisition. “Now,” he said, “we’re in the stalking business.”
As the quote notes, Murdoch bought MySpace, and lustily so. What the quote leaves out is that MySpace was created by people who thieved, hacked and sold porn. In the entire MySpace story there are no heroes: only people purposefully walking the line between legal and illegal, moral and immoral.
That Rupert Murdoch — Rupert Murdoch! — is now offended by these types, is riotously funny and richly ironic.
— Mark Barrett
In my parasites post I advocated spending money only when you absolutely have to, and only when you know you’re getting something of equal or greater value in return. As an independent author I followed my own advice in putting up this site, and in this post I’d like to walk you though the process I followed in considering blog software options, blog theme options, and a number of graphics options.
For blog software I was fairly sure I would go with WordPress, because it’s free and because I had a positive experience with it several years ago. What I got for my effort then was pretty impressive. The functionality you get with WordPress now is almost absurd, and I couldn’t recommend the application more. (I use the self-hosted version, but WordPress.com is also available if you prefer something hosted and less technical.) [ Read more ]
IFB is my acronym for The Institute for the Future of the Book. If that sounds like an academic title to you, give yourself ten points and a big salty pretzel.
My personal experience with academic interest in newly-emerging media is that it’s just that: academic. I’m always interested in the research and the sifting and the critical analysis, and I’m always thankful that someone is documenting everything and poking around in the less-commercial corners. I’m also usually left wanting for something concrete. [ Read more ]
