m. c. de marco

I found my way from Dean Wesley Smith’s twitter feed to L. M. May’s posts on learned helplessness and Barry Eisler going indie. I read Barry Eisler’s long two part dialogue with Joe Konrath about self-publishing.

Via HTLit: in Paul Graham’s essay from last month on Post-Medium Publishing, he made the economic argument that people have never paid for content, only for paper.

Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.

Via a mailing list: HarperCollins has launched a website for aspiring authors, Authonomy.

We want to flush out the brightest, freshest new literature around - we’re glad you stopped by.

If you’re a writer, authonomy is the place to show your face – and show off your work on the web.

Walter Jon Williams blogs some brief words of doom and gloom for the publishing industry during this live reenactment of 1929:

[P]ublishing runs on credit. The money that is paid to authors is borrowed from banks. Banks aren’t even lending to other banks right now, let alone businesses with the tiny profit margins we see in publishing.

Bruce Baugh at Tor.com has a couple of interviews about ransoming: holding your work hostage until the audience ponies up sufficient donations, as seen on PBS. The post itself is about role-playing games, but the application to writing and other art is obvious.

[… C]opyright is hard to enforce in a lot of situations, and seems likely to get harder to enforce without huge resources to devote to the hunt, or even with them. After looking at some often-proposed ways of making that enforcement work and explaining why they disbelieve in them, the authors suggest instead a sort of fund-and-release system.

Language Log’s Bill Poser posts about Salmon Rushdie, the definition of censorship, and The Jewel of Medina:

While it is true that Random House’s decision not to publish is not censorship, it is ridiculous to say that its decision in this case “has nothing whatsoever to do” with freedom of speech. By its own statement, Random House was not exercising its own judgment as to the literary or commercial value of The Jewel of Medina. Rather, Random House chose to give in to the threat of reprisal by Muslims.

SFScope reports that Pyr Books is expanding its line to about 30 books a year.