Fiction by the Pound (Quality vs. Quantity)

[cassiphone]

Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.

I’ve really been enjoying Rachel Swirsky’s guest posts over at Ecstatic Days, Jeff VanderMeer’s blog. Her latest piece is a review of Cat Rambo’s collection Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Midnight (Paper Golem Press, 2009) which engages directly with another review of the collection

Comments

[benpayne]

Interesting post, there are heaps of things in here I'd like to comment on.

In general I think maybe the world will slowly shift toward quality over quantity, largely because of the internet. More and more people (it seems to me) are time-poor more than resource-poor when it comes to consumption of art. I could be wrong. Perhaps it's just people I know.

I don't think the "favourite ten" would work out quite as neatly as you though. Maybe we should run that experiment at LSS this year. See if we cut, say, half of the stories in every market we read, how much agreement we'd have on which ones they'd be?

[cassiphone]

That's a good point. When J says 'more people buy big books than small books' he's talking about people who walk into bookshops and see the books on the shelves. That's still the predominant business model in publishing, but it will change and soon. I agree that the more people buy and read over the internet, the more likely time-poverty is to be a factor, and the important thing will be the filters that pull out the quantity.

There's also absolutely a truth in 'just people I know' though. I find it too easy to get comfy in this bubble of highly literate, outspoken, frantically-busy, creative people in my life in person and online, and forget that we're not in fact the majority.

I'd love to try that! Of course... I don't think we could publicise the results, could we?