community

Site Seeing: Authonomy

August 31, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

Imagine for a moment that you’re a publishing house. You’ve been putting book deals together for decades the old-fashioned way. You have agents you know and trust doing the heavy sifting for you, plowing through countless query letters from eager new authors. You have in-house editors working with a stable of developing and established authors, packaging titles for developing and established niches, and leveraging copyrighted content across developing and established mediums. You know, down to the last penny, what it costs to print a page, change a typo, or put a book on a shelf in any bookstore in the world.

And then the internet comes to town.

What do you do? Well, after a good bit of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, you would probably come up with something very much like Authonomy. (If you haven’t seen the site before, click over and take a look. You’ll ‘get it’ in about five seconds.) You might not do it as well as HarperCollins has done it, but you’d recognize the obviousness of the solution, and you would seize the opportunity.

By establishing an online community under the auspices of HarperCollins, and by promising members of that community a chance to get their work in front of editors at HarperCollins, Authonomy solves two persistent publishing problems in one fell swoop. First, it offloads part of the arduous and rarely-rewarding process of sifting through submissions — which is currently undertaken by agents around the world — onto an even less-demanding community. Second, it gives HarperCollins the appearance of being forward-looking, tech-savvy and internet-aware, when in fact they are simply replacing one system of mining writers with another system of mining writers. [ Read more ]

Why Communities Matter: Support

August 27, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

There are a lot of people writing online fiction these days. And why not? Until recently anyone with the desire to write fiction had to suffer with a drawer full of unread manuscripts or a social network dotted with unreliable (if not patronizing) readers. Today you can easily find a writing community that shares your specific interests, and if you’re not a total jerk you can usually find someone who will give you honest and useful feedback.

But online communities — at least some of them — also provide another important resource for fiction writers, and that’s emotional support. Whatever you want to say about any given writer’s skill level, or the average skill level of all fiction writing on the web, the fact is that putting your work out there for others to see is a risk — and it should be a risk.

Unless you’re a pure artist — meaning someone who is creating without concern for audience reaction (which is doubly hard to do when you’re using the written word, which was literally invented for communication) — you intend the people who read your fiction to have a particular experience. And at some point you want to know if you created that experience or not. So you need other people to validate your work when it’s finished, and that certainly involves risk. [ Read more ]

Why Communities Matter: Education

August 27, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

I almost pity people who are growing up now with no knowledge of what life was like before the internet came along. What still seems a miracle to me — on days when I’m not getting bombarded with spam, or some punk isn’t trying to destroy my computer with malware — is a boring norm to more people every year.

True story: a couple of decades ago I asked my grandmother, who was born in 1910, to pick the most amazing technological advance of her life. I figured maybe it was the airplane, or even the computer, although computers were just getting out of the gate at that time. She thought about it a while, then said, “Electricity.”

What she meant was that until sometime in the 1930’s, electricity was not a given in daily life for a lot of people (and for some it would take much longer). When electricity finally got wired up to your house, and you weren’t using lanterns to see after dark, it changed everything. [ Read more ]