“

RN: As soon as you say, “In the world there are writers and there are readers,” what else is there? There’s a whole bunch of things that start becoming clear, one of which is that the writer and reader is in fact the same fucking person. When we start to think that through, we realize, “Ah, look at the slush pile.” I look at the names and subjects of the cover letters, and I realize these people are the best customers.

We hear all the complaining that goes on in the world of poetry: “The only people who buy poetry are the poets.” Well no one complains about the fact that the only people who buy wool are knitters and the only people who buy oil paints are oil painters. And you know effectively because the Industrial Revolution method of reproducing media required volume and scale, there was a certain real critical aspect to it which is that you have as few writers as possible and as many readers as possible. The most profitable publisher is one who can print one book and have everybody read it. And so you kind of want to get as close to that as possible—of course recognizing that you can’t in fact get there, because you can actually lead horses to water but you can’t make them drink. Now the reality was that horses like to drink. So if you kept the number of pools relatively small, horses are going to have to go to the pools and drink, so people are going to read your books—as long as there aren’t too many of them.

“It has been a fascinating phenomenon in the discussion around publishing how adversarial people get around other people’s choices. So if someone says “I like an ebook,” a person will respond “Ohhh, I can’t believe—how can you do that?” It’s like that obnoxious person who you don’t want to go out to dinner with anymore because they can’t just order what they want, they have to comment on what you’re eating as well. What’s been epidemic in this discussion is that when both camps talk about their own preferences, they have to malign other people’s preferences too, and make grandiose extrapolations about the consequences of other people’s preferences for their own. If they like printed books, they should be buying the damn things instead of whining about other people’s preferred mode of reading. So I’m tremendously optimistic about the future of the book as an object. I think the worst years of the book as an object have been the last 50 years.
…
f you’ve got a manufacturing supply chain, then the dictates of manufacturing are going to be the ones that drive the business. And there’s certainly going to be some ad hoc occasional efforts not to do that: certain independent publishers will try to focus on quality, and certain individual books from other publishers might be tarted up for one reason or another, for marketing purposes. But those are the exceptions. Basically, when you’ve got an industry that is pushing out $25 billion worth of physical products into a supply chain, the vast majority of businesses are going to try to cut costs and increase revenues. And the simplest way to cut costs is going to be on the production side. So if the core of the business is no longer a supply chain, but rather the orchestration of writing and reading communities, the book is freed of its obligation to be the sole means for the broad mass dissemination of the word, and instead become a thing where the intrinsic qualities of the book itself can be explored.”

- Richard Nash always interesting when talking about publishing

[GUEST REVIEW] Jenn Brissett on ‘The Bleeding Man and Other Science Fiction Stories’ by Craig Strete - SF Signal – A Speculative Fiction Blog

Book Boroughing | A New York City Literary Event Calendar

Things I Know?

‘Why Write Novels at All?’:

The roots of this question, in its contemporary incarnation, can be traced back to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who at the dawn of the ’80s promulgated the notion of “cultural capital”: the idea that aesthetic choices are an artifact of socioeconomic position. Bourdieu documented a correlation between taste and class position: The scarcer or more difficult to access an aesthetic experience is — the novel very much included — the greater its ability to set us apart from those further down the social ladder. This kind of value is, in his analysis, the only real value that “refined” tastes have.

Some things that were true about publishing for decades aren’t true anymore – The Shatzkin Files

predicting the present:

Science fiction survives on its metaphors, catching an echo from the human context then rifling current science for an image or chain of images to act as a correlative. The rationales behind this project (including the rationale that it’s all rational, the claim that the project has, or should have, more in common with scientific discourse than poetic or political discourse) are less important to the general reader than the excitement of the found image. Science fiction is not read as a form of peer-reviewed publication.

justsayins: This needs to stop...and let me tell you why!:

justsayins:

Okay. Guys. Guys. Two things.

1) I’m a martial artist. I’ve been studying since I was seven. I wouldn’t even hesitate to say that I’m good at it. I have done work as a fight choreographer for film, and I am trained in stage combat as well.

2) I’m a contortionist. Yes. Again, since…

Gerber and Colan’s Phantom Zone – What If Marvel Had Bought DC | The Beat

Slow for a while...:

Forgive me if the site is slow for a little while (barring whatever JF Quackenbush or EL Borgnine might have cooking up in their demented brains). I’m finishing a novel.

But there will be another…

“See, but now things have come to a head. It turned out that not only was Go Daddy happy to put their names supporting SOPA, which is a hell of a restricting, dangerous, and censoring law, but they’d helped to write some of it and, even more offensively, were exempted from it. In other words, they’d found a way to be as legally and liberty-crushing offensive as their ads and their posts and declarations were liberty-defending. In other words, hypocrites.”

- ASCII by Jason Scott / GODADDY SOPA BLAH

Interview with Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson:

Recently ran into Dr. Tyson at a holiday party and recorded this interview with him with my cell phone. All apologies about the quality.

Dr. Tyson graciously answers some questions about…

Doctor Who: Worlds in Time - Home

kppearl:

So I don’t Normally post stuff like this but both of these were brought to my attention recently and I find them both ridiculous. So rather than post them individually I’m posting them together. Enjoy.

“

According to a press release from the National Science Foundation:

New research published today in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It’s the kind of thing seen in Hollywood’s “Matrix” franchise.

Experiments conducted at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, recently demonstrated that through a person’s visual cortex, researchers could use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance on visual tasks.

Think of a person watching a computer screen and having his or her brain patterns modified to match those of a high-performing athlete or modified to recuperate from an accident or disease. Though preliminary, researchers say such possibilities may exist in the future.

But here’s the bit that’s really interesting (and also pretty creepy): the researchers found that this novel learning approach worked even when test subjects weren’t aware of what they were learning:

NaNoWriMo is a Cult of Pedophiles:

I normally wouldn’t comment but it remains amazing to me that Eric’s attack on NaNoWriMo from 6 years ago still gets a bunch of angry upset comments. This sort of reaction really only happens when…

Prospecting for Gold and Gems on the Sidewalks of New York City

Neil Gaiman's Journal: Audiobooks: A Cautionary Tale:

And I don’t want to turn this into a big plug for Swordspoint, or a rant against publishers wasting or not using audio rights. I think what I want to say mostly is, if you are an author, Get Involved in Your Audiobooks Early. Get your agent involved and interested. Talk about them at contract stage. Find out if you’re selling the rights, and if you are selling them then find out what control you have or whether you are going to be consulted or not about who the narrator is and how the audiobook is done.

“It’s quite common for future-oriented SF stories to loot historical backgrounds and settings. I think this is in general a huge mistake unless there’s an explicit reason for our future society to have suppressed a raft of useful technologies and social trends. Suppression of the modern does happen (look at Iran, 1979-84, or the abandonment of firearms within the Tokugawa Shogunate) but it usually seems to follow some kind of massive social trauma (like 200 years of civil war, in the case of Japan) and requires draconian enforcement, because people don’t like giving up the triple-ply quilted toilet paper and bittorrent downloads.”

- World building 201: Heuristics - Charlie’s Diary