Better Worlds
I've done a bit of soul-searching, spent a lot of time looking up information on the subject. I'm a writer (and a sketcher, but that's a different topic), a good deal of my creative energy goes towards that end. Now recently, as in the past few months, I haven't posted much of anything new. It didn't mean I haven't been working, just that I was intent on getting something published. This prevented me from posting my material online due to a concept known as 'First Rights'. Basically, as author of my own work, I get to decide how to initially disseminate it. This decision, however, will greatly impact my prospects of ever getting that work published.
If I chose to post my material on a publicly accessible location online, I could kiss my chances of getting published goodbye. No reasonable publisher would want to touch my work, go through the effort of printing and advertising it, when anyone with an internet connection and the ability to hit ctrl-c ctrl-v could get it and reproduce it for free. So for the longest time I kept my most recent material completely offline, hoping to be able to catch a publisher's eye when I completed something, and possibly even make a profit from it.
Recently I've been re-thinking this strategy. First off, publishing's a rather competitive field, the chances of me actually getting my work accepted by a reputable label and getting it into bookstores is slim to none. The chances of doing so without having my work mildly to heavily altered by editors to better fit their target markets are absolutely zero. So if I were going into this with the aim of making a profit, I'm being kind of retarded about it.
Then I wondered, why am I going into this? Sure, I love writing, and I'll continue to do that no matter what happens with my work, but why am I so intent on getting it mass-produced? And on top of that, why am I going through the gambling route of seeking traditional publishing when much better and more assured (if less profitable) routes exist? I finally came to the conclusion that I don't have a good reason. Profit is a tertiary motive behind my writing, at the very best. So why do I want it to be mass produced?
Because I'm a huge attention whore, that's why.
Because I want complete strangers to be reading my stuff, I want to get notifications and comments out of the blue about how people love my stuff, or hate my stuff, about how it saved their marriage, accidentally summoned demons in their foyer, or somehow gave them cancer. Ideally, I'd love to be able to go to a bookstore and see my stuff on the shelves, but that's unlikely to happen even under the best of circumstances, and I'd have better luck just printing the stuff out myself sneaking it into the local Barnes & Noble.
I've decided, fuck it. My goal is to be seen by as many people as possible, so I'm going to do that. I'm once again putting all of my stuff online, I'm setting up a new wiki to collect everything together, and even inviting similarly minded people to join up and post their own stuff. I'll spam it all over the internet, and if fate and luck decide it, I'll become absurdly popular that way, rather than by jumping through publishing hoops. Profit was never my motive in the first place, after all. And if I (or others) really, desperately want to have a printed version of my stuff, I'll just throw together some cover art, go through a vanity publisher... and maybe get a few copies to secretly stick in bookstores while I'm at it.
If I chose to post my material on a publicly accessible location online, I could kiss my chances of getting published goodbye. No reasonable publisher would want to touch my work, go through the effort of printing and advertising it, when anyone with an internet connection and the ability to hit ctrl-c ctrl-v could get it and reproduce it for free. So for the longest time I kept my most recent material completely offline, hoping to be able to catch a publisher's eye when I completed something, and possibly even make a profit from it.
Recently I've been re-thinking this strategy. First off, publishing's a rather competitive field, the chances of me actually getting my work accepted by a reputable label and getting it into bookstores is slim to none. The chances of doing so without having my work mildly to heavily altered by editors to better fit their target markets are absolutely zero. So if I were going into this with the aim of making a profit, I'm being kind of retarded about it.
Then I wondered, why am I going into this? Sure, I love writing, and I'll continue to do that no matter what happens with my work, but why am I so intent on getting it mass-produced? And on top of that, why am I going through the gambling route of seeking traditional publishing when much better and more assured (if less profitable) routes exist? I finally came to the conclusion that I don't have a good reason. Profit is a tertiary motive behind my writing, at the very best. So why do I want it to be mass produced?
Because I'm a huge attention whore, that's why.
Because I want complete strangers to be reading my stuff, I want to get notifications and comments out of the blue about how people love my stuff, or hate my stuff, about how it saved their marriage, accidentally summoned demons in their foyer, or somehow gave them cancer. Ideally, I'd love to be able to go to a bookstore and see my stuff on the shelves, but that's unlikely to happen even under the best of circumstances, and I'd have better luck just printing the stuff out myself sneaking it into the local Barnes & Noble.
I've decided, fuck it. My goal is to be seen by as many people as possible, so I'm going to do that. I'm once again putting all of my stuff online, I'm setting up a new wiki to collect everything together, and even inviting similarly minded people to join up and post their own stuff. I'll spam it all over the internet, and if fate and luck decide it, I'll become absurdly popular that way, rather than by jumping through publishing hoops. Profit was never my motive in the first place, after all. And if I (or others) really, desperately want to have a printed version of my stuff, I'll just throw together some cover art, go through a vanity publisher... and maybe get a few copies to secretly stick in bookstores while I'm at it.