Richard Eoin Nash

• futureisnow
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• jr partel
| 
• caution
| 
• fetishization
| 
• slow web

richard said:
>  J .R.‘s critique was probably the sensitive,
>  most aware and most grounded in
>  actual experience (as opposed to
>  anticipatory anxiety) I’ve yet encountered.

really?

have you read the critiques i have written?

do i need to send ‘em to you in an e-mail?

so let me restate the major objection,
since it’s a point that j.r. doesn’t make:

communities don’t want to be monetized.

if you really build an empowered community,
the very first thing it will do is circumvent you.

(well, maybe it will be the third thing it does,
or the 33rd, but you will be disintermediated.)

but hey, don’t let me stop you…  or j.r. either…

-bowerbird

p.s.  you need to improve your captcha, so it
will accept “a multitude of colors” as an answer
for the question about the colors of violets…
otherwise you’re testing if the human is a robot.

    – bowerbird (10/26 02:43 PM)

only because it seems to have gotten some play elsewhere,
i will relate that the “fan-site” mentioned above was set up
by an antagonist who went against me head-to-head and
lost, badly; this misguided attempt at spin was his revenge.

this was so long ago that i’d forgotten about it completely,
but it’s nice to be reminded, since it is a great collection of
some very juicy quotes of mine, all of which i stand behind,
if you wanna hear the real context in which they were made.

otherwise, it’s water under the bridge (where us trolls live,
you know) in this very interesting life i’ve been blessed with.

-bowerbird

    – bowerbird (10/29 06:21 AM)

The internet/ebook is a device that turns a distribution problem into a publicity problem, and publicity is a much more intractable problem than distribution.

Journalism about celebrities is pretty much the only form of journalism that still prospers. WE are de-industrialized, our social patterns have been utterly disrupted, and we’re poorer than before. E-books are cheaper, plentiful (& e-readers mean you don’t need a U-Haul to move).

The obvious way to publicize/sell books and hope to survive economically (as either a publisher or writer), is to treat writers as celebrities/travelling shows/campaign candidates: book tours, readings, soirees, events, staged debates, lectures, conventions, cockfights.

There is predecessor to this in the Science Fiction Convention & fandom. There has been sad & bad fan behaviour (ask Harlan Ellison). I’m not sure it can be avoided, completely.

As for there being nothing apart from the hustle… If that does turn out to be the case the whole industry will implode. However cheaply, in whatever wide or narrow ways it sues, the book/ebook/elevated gossip trade is selling content.

No content, no trade, no industry.

    – MF (11/08 10:18 PM)

@ Mark

I think the message is that the shy/antisocial/introverted/uncharismatic authors can get lost.

    – MF (11/09 12:56 PM)

As I said, I am going to try to respond at greater length, but your exchange, Mark and MF, behooves me to say something, just that I don’t see what we’re doing as hostile to any given personality, or least no more hostile than the status quo ante. Certainly the goal will be to make it more generous, more about the writing. If the writing is here, for all to see and comment on, then it’s going to be ipso facto more about the writing than the media packaging of the writer…

    – Richard Eoin Nash (11/09 03:45 PM)

>  and publicity is a much more
>  intractable problem than distribution.

wrong.

shy/antisocial/introverted/uncharismatic
authors will have their work discovered
the exact same way as their opposites:
via collaborative filtering.

which, by the way, is why mechanisms
like cursor won’t really be necessary…

when the collaborative filtering system
can find the “community” around a work,
it’s superfluous to spend energy doing it.

marketing will soon prove to be ineffective
anyway.  there is no way that it could scale
in the same way publishing will be scaling.

but once collaborative filtering proves that
it can do the job in a superior way anyway,
marketing will be seen as “a kiss of death”.

that is, if you need to “market” something,
it must be because it cannot find any fans
in the collaborative filtering system, which
means that it must _really_ suck very badly.

-bowerbird

    – bowerbird (11/09 06:16 PM)

chris said:
>  Wrong?
>  Everyone hasa right to their own opinion,
>  Leslie (aka Bowerbird).

except some issues—like how readers will find books
to read in the future—aren’t really a matter of “opinion”.

collaborative filtering is _already_ proving its worth—
as the amazon recommendation engine, which informs
you that “people who bought this book also bought…”
—and it hasn’t even been implemented correctly there.
(i.e, the “buy” variable is not the important predictor here;
nope, it will prove to be the “enjoy” variable, but amazon
doesn’t measure that one, at least not yet, but they will.)

you might have a different “opinion”, to be sure.

and you might well be _wrong_.  my opinion is you _are_
already wrong, to some degree, if you disagree with me…

you might also be “right”, in the sense that your opinion
about how readers will find books turns out to accord with
some truth of the reality of the world at large.  in which case,
i will be happy to certify that your opinion was partially right.

for instance, i think we can all agree that word-of-mouth
will continue to exert an impact, and that such impact will
be even stronger when the word comes from trusted others.
it’d be pretty easy to certify that “opinion” as “right”.  right?

however, a notion that only authors who are “charismatic”
and are willing to “go on the road” and “press the flesh”
or act as “circus performers” will end up being successful
in the future is just ridiculous, even on the face of it, today.
and no, i don’t care if it’s jaron lanier saying it, or joe blow,
i’m gonna say that it’s wrong.

(at the same time, i can recognize that the _concern_
with which the _question_ was introduced on this blog
indicates the questioner has a heart in the right place.
it’s just that there’s nothing to worry about, because
this opinion, whether from lanier or blow, is _wrong_…

go prove it to yourself.  read joe konrath’s blog, especially
the comments, where a number of authors recount how
they’re making big money selling kindle-books on amazon.

some of these authors had _never_ been published before,
thus had no name recognition, but they’re paying rent and
all their expenses because people are buying their books.

already they’re making big money, and e-books are still
just a toddler learning how to walk out in the big world…

these authors aren’t out on tour, or auctioning their pajamas.
they just put their e-book up, and are now making money.

heck, konrath has recently sworn off his 10-year habit of
being on the road doing constant hype, precisely because
he figures he’ll make more money now staying home writing.

imagine that!

he called off his marketing regime so he can _write_ instead!
do you know how many writers have prayed for that option?

so all these people telling authors that they have to go out
and promote themselves do the world a big disservice…

if you’re a writer, you should stay home and write and make
darn sure that what you write is high-quality, so that when
you put your book in the amazon kindle bookstore, people
who buy it will then come back for more and bring friends.

and again, back to the matter of opinions, mr. kubica.
you seem to have the opinion that my name is “leslie”.
you are wrong.  that’s my girlfriend’s name.  i am male.
and i’d appreciate it if you left my girlfriend out of this.
do you understand?

there are places where no opinion is the “right” opinion.
in the matter of ice-cream flavors, for instance, a judge
would be hard-pressed to pick out the “correct” option.

but it’s wrong to think such relativity exists across-the-board.

-bowerbird

    – bowerbird (11/10 05:52 AM)

Twain started his own publishing house in 1885 and put his nephew Charles Webster in charge. The first books: Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant and the Adventures of Huck Finn sold more than well but then in 1888 Webster sold the house, bankrupt if memory serves me…

Then there’s the story of Leaves of Grass and Whitman hauling his books about door to door after self publishing them on Long Island.

The Kinko’s publishing revolution took place further back with Twain, Whitman, and I would hazard before that again with the first novel, in oral tradition. It would seem that oral (youtube, blogging) has just come back, communal and viral.

Would it not be that the individual/producer has to want to sell like Whitman and Twain and even Homer, whether that means hawking books door to door or singing them aloud like some Yougoslavian gushlar?

My point? I have a friend here in France too, who has his own record label, indie also, and he makes his money DJing all over the world. He would say the same thing. If you want to sell product you have to get out there. The net is amazing, but one cannot function by net alone. You still have to get your producer out there into the market to sell product. Community is but a mirror of the product, the producer being ancillary if they are not at least trying to flog the product and we all know what 4 walls do to writers. Community generally scares them. Theirs is not the stage, third wall scenario where they have to interact with an audience, or a DJ with the same or indeed nearly any other creative individual.

I see this all the time. Trying to get a writer to get themselves out there is very difficult. Painters, visual artists, playwrights, even screenwriters are already out there, and are always willing to get themselves ie their product, out there. But writers, novelists especially? They just want to write the next book, unless of course they’re Twain or Whitman and produce then flog their product…

You have to have motivated musicians (most are because they’re social artists) to sell records. I’m thinking your friend would respond the same way. The same applies to writers like Bob above, but you’re generally dealing with a producer who a lot of the time only wants to produce leaving the selling to others to do and who is unable to accept “the inevitability of change” Bob writes about.

Good luck with it all. Hopefully Cursor will help the producers in the shadows shift product because I’m thinking they’ll be using Bob’s argument “The experience is the book, not the writer” and staying inside their 4 walls while someone else does everything else…

    – JF (03/06 04:10 AM)

Hey MF,

I completely relate to what you’re saying but there has to be a via media.

Of course selling your stuff door to door is retarded. Whitman didn’t have Internet, never mind Homer…

I agree with you, it is demanding and anything but facile, like any business and it’s marketing. But whether you want to label the novelist/writer the “shy/antisocial/introverted/uncharismatic authors” or the “staying inside their 4 walls while someone else does everything else” authors makes no difference.

This is a business question. For example, I always give writers this silly example: if you spent two years designing, creating and producing a pair of red shoes then you’d spend at least 2 months trying to sell the product? No? To which they nearly always respond yes.

Why then does this have to be any different for a writer and his product? She/he takes 2 years of their life (generally) to get a book done and then won’t even build a wordpress or blogger site?

The amount of writers, intelligent, talented hard working people, I meet who don’t even have a site, never mind an optimized one still amazes me. Hey, maybe I’m wrong. I’m only relating my direct experience. 

However, again, from a business perspective, whether you’re a shoe designer designing your shoes after your day job or a novelist writing your books after your day job the same truth applies: if nobody knows about your product - shoes, books, etc. - then they don’t sell.

If the modern day equivalent of knocking on doors is getting online or up onto Amazon or Cursor then so be it, but there has to be some effort on the part of the producer. It’s respect for the product you have created, albeit shoes or books, and that means flogging it, at least for 10% (any percent) of the time it took to create it. Hey, this is just a suggestion, but don’t you think the product deserves as much enthusiasm and inspiration for its marketing time as it did for its other creative time? If it doesn’t then aren’t we falling into the trap of what you so aptly phrased what - used to be called a publishing house?

    – JF (03/06 06:25 PM)