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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 ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: community, HarperCollins, site seeing

Site Seeing: Mobile Read

August 25, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

While I’m on the subject of e-readers, you might want to take a look at MobileRead.com, including discussions in the forum. (It’s a site I stumbled across while reading in the WebFictionGuide.com forums, and if you follow that link you’ll see that several people almost immediately turn to the question of whether online fiction and e-readers are different animals. Such is life at the dawn of a new era.)

As you might expect, there are currently posts on the home page about Sony’s newly announced reader, but they also have a note up about nominations for the next Mobile Read Book Club selection, slated for September. Right now Agatha Christie and Charlie Chan are battling it out, but this is the kind of community-based activity that could also work for online fiction writers, unknown writers, etc. (At least until an astroturfing PR firm or publishing company starts gaming the system, which probably won’t take too long.)

The titanic two-front war currently being waged to control (read: own) electronic text and the devices that convey electronic text to users means that dedicated communities like Mobile Read will probably grow in importance as time goes on — at least until the battles are resolved. For individuals looking to write online or electronic fiction as a means of finding an audience, keeping abreast of the current (and coming) technology is an obligation made a little easier by sites and communities like Mobile Read.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: e-readers, site seeing

Site Seeing: WebFictionGuide.com

August 20, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

If ‘blog fiction’ is an obvious term for fiction on the internet, so is ‘web fiction’ — and that broader term is what I typed in the search bar yesterday for my first formal surfing safari. The top hit for that phrase turned out to be a site called Web Fiction Guide, which describes itself as a “community-run listing of online fiction”. (Sweet!)

As a first stop on an uncertain journey it seemed a welcoming place, and after taking a look around I think it would be worth your time to stop by as well. (Visiting the WFG Forums will give you a sense of the traffic on the site, as well as the vibe of the community.)  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: blog fiction, site seeing

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