Late to the dance, as always

[barbarienne]

All the SF/F writers on lj know what I'm talking about. Everyone else will just have to try to keep up from context...

So the whole "To give it away or not to give it away" palaver. All the discussion of Gresham's Law and what-all. The non-fungible-ness of books. Let's try to sum it up quickly:

Comments

[shadefell]

Scott Lynch, Elizabeth Bear, and Cherie Priest all have blogs where they write about writing and post stuff they're working on and write about their lives. It's an awful lot of free writing, and it's an awful lot of fun for me to read. And I started reading their blogs before I ever read their books. And now I've spent quite a bit of money on their books. Granted, they aren't posting the entirety of their books online for free, but they are posting a fair bit of content.

[coolmajaka]

Right on!

And hey, my babelfish is sick -- it keeps translating everything into the pig latin version of Attic Greek. Any suggestions?

[duskpeterson]

"They do not want to wade through piles and piles of crap writing."

If I had to read every book published by every press, this would be my sentiment too. :) But of course I don't; book reviews exist that point me to the good stuff. Likewise, reviews and recommendations exist for online fiction that weed out the good writings from the poor.

I think that we're in a very early stage of transition, and it's just too early to say how things will go. I agree with you that the best-case and worst-case scenarios are unlikely to occur. One factor that might be added into the equation is reader loyalty. I've seen cases where online-only authors went into print, and their online readers went mad rushing out to buy the novel. Even in cases where the novel was already available online. This may simply be due to people liking to read things in printed form - I think that's a very big factor - but I think it may also be a modern form of the patronage system . . . only in this case, the patrons are the readers.