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Caught in the Middle

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I don’t know anything about Quartet Press other than the fact that they announced today that they’re closing. And I mean nothing.

Reading the post about their closure, however, made me think of a similar note I’d read only a few days ago. This one was about Manifesto Games, a site/biz run by a friend in the interactive industry. The owner, Greg Costikyan, closed up shop in June, saying:

We did not achieve the critical mass of support by independent developers that we had initially envisioned (some of whom, bizarrely, viewed us as a competitor), though we appreciate the strong and enduring support we received from some. We always knew that the essential problem we were trying to solve was a marketing one, but we never figured out how to crack the marketing nut, at least with the minimal financial resources we had available.

Now, Greg knows more about the business side of the games business than I ever will, but I’m not sure that what hurt Manifesto was a marketing problem. And while I know nothing about Quartet Press or the reason for its demise, I’m struck by one way in which the two companies are similar. They were both third parties to the relationship that exists between content provider and content consumer.  [ Read more ]

Taking Stock

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After three weeks of blogging and Site Seeing I definitely have a better handle on what’s happening out there, but I’ve also come to grips with the fact that I simply can’t keep track of it all. And that’s true even if I avail myself of all the latest tech, tech filters and social networks — which I would also have to spend a great deal of time reading about in order to achieve cutting-edge productivity.

(There’s a reason they call it the ‘cutting’ edge.)

In the end there’s too much to see and digest, let alone comment on, let alone act on. So it’s time to tighten the focus a bit, in anticipation of tightening it more in the future. Although this is an exclusionary process in some respects, I tend to think of it as irising in on something in the distance and pulling it into sharper focus. Simplification as zoom lens. Or sniper scope.

Traditional Publishing
I can’t really say the industry is dead, because it’s not dead. What I can say is that it’s broken, and I think everybody gets that. But I don’t think it’s simply broken relative to some newfangled process or advance (the internet), but rather that it’s inherently broken in ways that the internet is only now revealing.  [ Read more ]

Digging In

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Many of the better bloggers out there are thoughtful people who also have the ability to slap multiple short, pithy posts and quirky links onto their sites over the course of each day. Unfortunately, that’s not me. In fact, the last time I took a cursory look at something was in high school when I was supposed to be studying algebra.

What I’m interested in, and what I hope you’re interested in, is depth. And I don’t just mean intellectual depth, in which everything is erudite and sophisticated and an allusion to something else that’s erudite and sophisticated. I’m talking about understanding things, and in particular, understanding the techniques and craft knowledge which allow for successful storytelling (by whatever criteria) in any medium. I’m completely, totally interested in that, but it’s not the kind of thing you can talk about in short posts or 140-character blurbs.

So on days like this, when I barely get a post up before the clock ticks to a new day, I hope you’ll forgive me. I’ve been burning through a massive amount of information in the past couple of weeks, trying to get up to speed on what’s happening in so many different and interesting storytelling arenas. It’s an amazing time, but I clearly need to sharpen my focus if only to keep from being swamped. More soon.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Smashwords

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Visiting well-established e-book sites like Smashwords.com makes it clear that the possibilities inherent in the digital revolution are already being fully investigated. Here and on other sites I’m seeing every logical web-enabled expression of the middleman/publisher role in delivering content from creator to consumer. And in Smashwords I have to say that the clarity of this expression seems particularly good.

As someone who is interested in creating content that can be directly consumed by an audience, it’s still an open question whether I want to involve anyone else. If I was thinking about going that route, however, I would take a serious look at Smashwords because I think it gets a lot of things right. But you don’t have to take my word for it.  [ Read more ]

Site Seeing: Scribd

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I’m pretty much assuming I’m the last person on Earth to discover all these sites I’m looking at, but with Scribd I think that’s probably actually factually true.

Amazing. Prepare to lose a day, easy.

(On the off chance that I might be second to last, here’s the link.)

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: RNash.com

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Home to Richard Eoin Nash, RNash.com is one of those helpful sites with a high-speed shutter that freezes the blur of fast-moving cultural events. In a little more than an hour I was able to get my bearings on a host of issues, as well as place those issues in context.

For example, in a linked-to piece I found this quote from a front-line report on how the publishing industry is keeping pace with changes brought about by all things digital:

And that’s when moderator Deborah Schultz broke the news to us. We (the audience) were the ones who were supposed to provide the ideas.

“We’re here to learn about what you want.”

Without warning the panel discussion was turned into an impromptu focus group. A twist that was met alternately with skepticism, amusement, and open hostility.

Read the whole thing. I laughed myself silly.  [ Read more ]

My Take on the Google Books Case

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Following up on earlier posts about the Google Books case and the proposed settlement with the Authors Guild regarding past copyright infringement by Google, and after reading Scott Gant’s take on the case, I now feel like I have a handle on what’s going on.

1) Google broke the law by scanning and marketing a bunch of books it didn’t have the right to scan and market. They weren’t the copyright holders, but they went ahead and did it anyway, and that’s against the law.

2) The Authors Guild — which is also a corporation with its own self interests — sued Google for breaking the law, even though it may not have had standing to do so. It did so on behalf of its members, but it also did so on behalf of itself. If Google could break copyright laws with impunity, then the Authors Guild would be meaningless as an entity.  [ Read more ]

Site Seeing: The Hayfield Forever

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I was pointed to The Hayfield by a link in the comments, and I wrote in reply at that time that I wasn’t sure I really ‘got’ what the site was about. After taking another, longer look, I think I get it now, but I’m not sure that it’s having the intended effect on me. And it’s an open question whether that says something about me or something about the site.

To be fair, it’s all very well done, and I really don’t know the extent to which I’m supposed to actually care emotionally about any of the content. If it’s a gag, but for some reason I’m waiting to be shaken to the core, well, that’s a problem of expectations on my part, not execution. But the very fact that I’m not quite sure what’s going on means to me that I’m thinking more than I’m feeling, and that I’m studying more than I’m reacting.  [ Read more ]

The Blogfic Gap

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I’m not even sure how I landed on this BBC page, but as someone who’s been telling stories for twenty years, I can say with some confidence that I’ve never seen anything like this anywhere else:

Send us your script»

Send us your work. We read all unsolicited scripts for BBC Films,TV Drama, Children’s Drama,TV Comedy, Radio Entertainment and Radio Drama. We accept unsolicited scripts written for film, television, radio or stage.

I mean, even the scammers and con artists who are actively trying to sucker would-be writers don’t just throw the door wide open and say, “Come on in!” (They charge you for the privilege of being fleeced.)

Is this BBC invite a good thing? A bad thing? I have no idea.

But it reminds me that while I’ve been looking for good blog fiction on the web, I keep ending up on UK and European sites. I don’t know what that means, either, but it keeps happening. Is the U.S. badly lagging in blog fiction? Is there an EU government subsidy that’s giving them an edge? How do we close the blogfic gap?

— Mark Barrett

Five Years and Counting

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Here are a few quotes from an excited article about blog fiction:

The weblog has justifiably been celebrated as a new publishing platform. But writers are beginning to see that it also has the potential to be a new fictional form.

Now, the blog breathlessly referenced in the article had two things going for it. First, the blog’s author was a mystery at the time, giving people something to speculate about. Second, the blog was about sex, giving people something to salivate about. Put the two together in any medium and you’ve got enough juice to get yourself on Oprah, so it’s not surprising that it caught this writer’s attention.  [ Read more ]