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The Medium is the Model

October 7, 2009 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 ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: ESPN, medium, PCMag

Site Seeing: Guy Gonzalez | Loud Poet

October 6, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

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 ]

Filed Under: Fiction, Publishing Tagged With: Guy Gonzalez, Publishing

Making Irony Pay

October 6, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

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

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: irony

Walking the Ditchwalk

October 5, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

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 ]

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com Tagged With: money, time, tools, Wordpress

Site Seeing: IFB

October 5, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

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 ]

Filed Under: Publishing, Writing Tagged With: books

Publishing Parasites

October 4, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

I’ve been working on a post lately about what I call publishing parasites. Rather than bringing focus to the post, however, my initial attempts only led me off on wonderful rants about various injustices.

Last night, however, I came across this hilarious tweet from Guy Gonzalez —

Red Room sends me an email saying I’m “one of [their] self-published authors” and thinks their site is worth $30/mo? Seriously? #fail

— and a follow-up tweet pointing me to this post of his from July:

These are the three fundamental steps to building yourself an author platform, no matter what kind of writing you’re doing, and precede any discussions of SEO, Freemiums, URLs, etc.

As to his post, I think he’s right and you should read the whole thing. As to my fixation on publishing parasites, I now have my focus. Money.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: Guy Gonzalez, money

Ghostwriting the Ghosts

October 4, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

Early Friday morning, a reader dropped this comment in a thread about ghostwriting:

Second, I don’t know how concerned the publishing industry really is about the sanctity of authorship. There are new Jason Bourne and Hitchhiker’s Guide books coming out and the original authors are dead.

I honestly wasn’t surprised to hear that these authors and their works were being recycled by their respective estates. Whatever loyalty an author’s relatives or heirs might have to the author’s original material, and whatever reverence they might have for an author’s original voice, it’s awfully hard to leave a vein of gold in the ground. And particularly so if the person you might be insulting is already dead.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: ghostwriting

Publishing: The New Math

October 3, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

Here’s a quote from a piece on e-publishing, titled (provocatively) Why Ebooks Must Fail:

And therein lies the dilemma… how does the publishing industry fund the creation, editing, design, production, marketing, e-warehousing, and sales of ebooks, if the income isn’t there? How do ebooks cover the huge advances needed to buy books if we cannot generate the cash, especially at their extremely low, discounted prices, cover the advances that an entire industry has come to require? The answer is that ebooks, alone, cannot.

Given the assumptions, I can’t really disagree. But the assumptions aren’t a given.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: costs, e-books, price, Publishing

Ghostwriting Is Not Benign

October 2, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

As a reader reminded me yesterday in a comment to my post on ghostwriting, ghostwriters were widely used by the drug company Wyeth to promote hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women. While the resulting fraud succeeded in creating a market into which Wyeth and other companies were able to market their drugs, the long-term consequences were not benign:

But the seeming consensus fell apart in 2002 when a huge federal study on hormone therapy was stopped after researchers found that menopausal women who took certain hormones had an increased risk of invasive breast cancer, heart disease and stroke. A later study found that hormones increased the risk of dementia in older patients.

The drug companies wanted a scientific image for their products, so they created one by paying ghostwriters to create the appearance of broad-based research support for their drugs. As a result, they ended up killing human beings who would not otherwise have died.

Because ghostwritten celebrity bios don’t usually lead to death, and because the effect of such authorial fraud is difficult to detect, there’s a tendency to believe that the hiring of a ghostwriter is benign and that an example like the Wyeth case is an outlier. But lying about authorship in order to create a brand image for a drug and lying about authorship to create an image for a performer or politician involves exactly the same intent and execution. While there is clearly a range of possible negative outcomes in these examples, the frauds themselves are identical.

Looking at the outcome of a particular fraud also fails to reveal another kind of damage done by ghostwriting. Less apparent, but more widespread, is the erosion of confidence that ghostwriting creates:

“It’s almost like steroids and baseball,” said Dr. Joseph S. Ross, an assistant professor of geriatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, who has conducted research on ghostwriting. “You don’t know who was using and who wasn’t; you don’t know which articles are tainted and which aren’t.”

And that really goes to the heart of the post I put up yesterday. I understand that everybody does it. I understand that politicians on both sides of the aisle are liars. I get it. Believe me.

If celebrity ghostwriting doesn’t cause physical cancer it’s still a social cancer which erodes our confidence in the things we read and the things that experts and culturally-prominent people tell us. My specific concern on this blog is that it erodes confidence in the idea of authorship, which means it erodes your confidence in me.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: fraud, ghostwriting

Firestorm

October 2, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Having only recently joined the publishing conversation, I’ve been trying to go back in time and do my homework using the trusty WABAC Machine we all call the internet. While I already (perhaps erroneously) feel as if I have my mind around the major issues, I was not prepared to run across something like this:

At a panel of authors speaking mainly to independent booksellers, Sherman Alexie, the National Book Award-winning author of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” said he refused to allow his novels to be made available in digital form. He called the expensive reading devices “elitist” and declared that when he saw a woman sitting on the plane with a Kindle on his flight to New York, “I wanted to hit her.”

Whatever passions the elitism of the Kindle might have aroused in Mr. Alexie, it’s fair to say that confessing a desire to hit a woman aroused a fair bit of passion in others as well. Given that there has been a general social prohibition (far too weakly enforced) against hitting women for a much greater slice of history than the Kindle has been infuriating writers of noble purpose, I have to say that I think Mr. Alexie probably got his fair due.

(You can read a clarification of Mr. Alexie’s position on the Kindle here.)

What caught my attention, however, was not so much Mr. Alexie’s theatrics (and here I assume he is not a misogynist), but the fact that the quote in question came from a New York Times article that was published only six months ago. Because unless I’m badly misreading the tea leaves today, nobody is talking about the Kindle dominating any market any time soon. In fact, I seem to be reading articles today which speculate that the Kindle’s e-content price of $9.99 is too high. And in a world that rapidly seems to be embracing a floor price of FREE it’s hard to argue against such claims.

Six months!

Whether driven by hype or substance — which only time will tell — the evolution in the publishing industry is clearly a firestorm. I had no idea things were moving this fast.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: Kindle

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