Thursday, February 4, 2010

The Heavy Lifting

http://mizkit.livejournal.com/541066.html


basically - getting your audience to pay you directly -- something only really viable over the internet.

Here's the most interesting quote for me

Right now is where somebody says “Ye gods, cut out the middleman!” Not a chance. I will never give up my traditional publishers and I dearly hope they will never give up me. For one, Jay Lake details just what a publisher does for a writer, and frankly, it’s most of the heavy lifting. I do the creative work. They do everything else. Critically, they introduce me to an audience willing to pay for my work–and some of those people find me online, become blog readers, and may even become patrons in the direct funding sense. I could not *accomplish* a patronage model without my traditional publishers; my friends, generous as they are, aren’t generally wealthy enough to actually support me.

And - that's the thing.

Which is one reason I don't get particularly excited about e-book readers, Print on Demand or patronage projects. Yeah - they're nifty. They're fun and new - and its interesting to speculate what effect having anew conduit is going to have. Are any of them going to be a cornucopia of opportunity for unknown creative people?

Case in point -- Some of the enthusiasm that I've heard some writers and RPG types express about the iPad and Kindle has the same starry-eyed quality as the Singularity crowd. Yeah, it's potentially cool.

But...
I wouldn't bet the farm on it is. The basic problem of drawing an audience is still there (and if you're doing table-top RPGs? Yeah, the problem is getting a little worse every day as your audience shrinks or decides to go play MMOs.)

It's like the old 1000 True Fans idea. You still need to find those 1000 people. And people are very distracted today. At the end of the day -- you still have to sell it to enough people for it to be viable. Does the internet or whatever shiny new technology of the day we're excited about today actually give you new ways to draw that crowd?


Yes - kind of. There's still only so much money and mindspace to go around. You've got to compete for it. 


And let's talk about the competition on that new toy everyone's talking - the iPad. Tthe kind of stuff I'm doing or interested in doing  (novels, stories, RPG books) aren't mp3s, iPhone apps or even youtube videos. On something like the iPad, you're directly competing with shit a lot louder and shinier.

(Having said that - it might be the perfect medium for digital comics. Once it's price point enters the realm of sanity. That bears thinking about.)

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