I’ve always been one part anarchist, one part egalitarian, so nothing fills me with greater glee than seeing the manifestations and symbols of corporatism and authoritarianism come crashing down. This is a exciting time for folks like me because the Internet is rewriting all of the rules of all of the games, replacing corporate and governmental control with an unrestrained democracy and freedom. As the music industry and the publishing industry stumble and come crashing down, you might imagine the anarchist in me sitting on the sidelines with a big tub of popcorn, laughing and smiling and enjoying the show, while the egalitarian in me cheers for the new opportunities everyone has to express themselves creatively.

The music and publishing industries are fighting for their lives. If they can get their acts together and change their business models, they might survive. What won’t survive, though, is the newspaper industry. Already, newspapers such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News are things of the past, and there are hundreds of other American newspapers in line to follow them. My own local newspaper has already announced some layoffs, cutbacks in the content that is offered, and subscription rate increases. They claim they’re doing all right financially, but any newspaper that has to raise rates and cut content is hardly doing OK. Even the really big newspapers like the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times are in deep trouble. I’ve predicted before that almost every American newspaper in print today will no longer be printing physical newspapers in five years, and I’m sticking to that prediction.

Over the weekend, I read a great little article by Sonia Arrison titled “Why It’s OK for Newspapers to Die.” In her article, Arrison borrowed the term “creative destruction” to describe what’s happening in the world of journalism today. With the threat of so many newspapers collapsing, the sensationalist response is to ask, “But what will happen to journalism if newspapers die?!?!” The sober answer, however, is “Nothing.” It’s important to separate the concept of “journalism” from the medium of “newspapers.” It’s not that the medium is no longer the message, but that the message is switching to a new medium. The same thing has happened as “music” has jumped from physical CDs to digitial MP3s and as “literature” is jumping from physical books to digital ebooks. So fear not: journalism will continue to exist — it just won’t exist in newspaper form.

And that’s where the creative destruction comes in. The newspaper industry is being destroyed, and as it’s destroyed it will leave a vacuum of news and information — especially at the local level. No one yet knows what will fill that vacuum, but you can be sure that we’ll see a number of very creative and innovative attempts to provide people and communities with the news and information that they were accustomed to receiving through their newspapers. Ultimately, the new medium that takes over will be better, more efficient, less superficial, and more environmentally friendly, than the newspapers of today. There is also, for the first time in decades, the chance for competing voices and opinions to be heard. For example, my local newspaper has a very politically conservative editorial board (advocating a straight Republican ticket in the elections last November), but when that newspaper, too, finally shuts down, there will at last be an opportunity for the politically liberal perspective to have a voice in my community and gain a foothold in the production and distribution of news and information.

And this concept of creative destruction is coming to the publishing industry as well. As the big publishing houses struggle to maintain relevance and as their business models collapse, the opportunities for innovation arise. Products and services like the Kindle, Lulu, Critters, and Smashwords will take “literature” in new directions and make it possible for more people than ever before to express themselves creatively through language.

I’ve taken a lot of heat from certain quarters for wishing for the destruction of the publishing industry. It’s the anarchist in me that longs for the chaos that a half dozen bankrupted corporations will bring, but the egalitarian in me anticipates the freedom and innovation of ordinary people that will fill the void. When I call for the big publishing houses to burn to the ground, it’s because I expect a phoenix will rise from the ashes.

Some background: In the 20th century, before Napster, if you wanted to purchase new music, you had to leave your home and visit your local record store. When I started buying music as a teenager, the big chain record stores no longer sold “records” (LPs), they just sold CDs and cassettes, although some of the smaller, independently owned stores still sold vinyl. In a record store, you could browse the shelves and in some stores you could even sample some of the music before you bought it.

But then Napster (and later peer-to-peer file trading and, ultimately, iTunes) came along and everything changed. Suddenly, record stores were obsolete because the Internet not only made it possible to acquire new music without leaving the comfort of one’s home, but it also made it much easier to try out new music and search for new bands that weren’t being broadcast on the radio or MTV (back when MTV still played videos, that is). As a result, record stores began going out of business in the first decade of the new century. Today, one is hard pressed even to find a record store. Some independent retailers and used record stores still exist, but for how much longer?

So will the same thing happen to bookstores? Will they become obsolete if ebooks take off and start to replace pbooks (physical books) as the reading material of choice?

Bookstores (and libraries, let’s not forget them) allow for moments of serendipity. You might come in looking for one book, but as you browse the shelves, you find something else — something equally interesting that you didn’t even know existed two minutes earlier. And because books invite you to pick them up and browse through them (something that you can’t do with a CD in a record store) it’s easier to make a decision about whether to buy a book that you’ve just found. I, myself, have found many books and authors this way — and I’ll bet you have too. It’s difficult to recreate that serendipity online, but it’s not impossible.

Amazon was one of the pioneers in effective product search. Amazon’s website keeps track of customers as they browse the site. It remembers what products you look at and it offers suggestions for products that, based on your previous browsing history, you might be interested in. But as useful as Amazon’s product search may be, it isn’t the most effective way to find new books. You still have the sense, as you browse Amazon, that there are vast collections of books waiting for you, but you can’t access them because you don’t know where to look, you don’t know what to search. In a real-world bookstore or a library, the entire collection is right there in front of you, but online, you can only visit one product page at a time. It is this advantage that keeps bookstores relevant and keeps them in business.

You can use Amazon to search for music in this way, too, but as with books, it is inefficient and mostly ineffective. However, over the last few years, other options for finding new music have sprung up, sealing the fate of the record stores. For example, some sites, like Last FM and MySpace take advantage of social networks. You can find new music recommendations based on what your online friends in your network are listening to at any given moment. It’s effective because you’re more likely to be interested in what your friends are interested in.

But perhaps the most effective way to find new music is Pandora, which asks you to enter the name of one or more artists that you like and which will then play songs by other, similar artists — and give you the ability to decide whether you like or dislike the new songs, which leads to further selections. The genius of Pandora is that it creates a unique, personalized experience for every visitor of the site. I consider Pandora the most dangerous site on the net, because every time I visit, I come away with two or three new artists whose work I have to buy immediately.

So all of these new tools for finding music, combined with the convenience of downloading, have sealed the fate for record stores. Right now, though, bookstores must only contend with one of these factors: the convenience of online shopping, which has become even easier with the rise of ebooks. Now, you can get a book instantly, just like you can get a song instantly.

But what we don’t have yet is a Pandora for books — an efficient, effective, and highly personalized way of getting recommendations for new books and authors. This won’t always be the case though; at some point, someone will invent a new way of searching for books that will change the game.

In the meantime, it’s interesting to see some bookstores move to try to ward off this impending threat. Recently, Barnes & Noble, which is planning to launch its own e-reader, announced it was going to offer free WiFi in its stores. This will allow people to come into the store, browse for books, and when they find one they want, they can either purchase the physical copy or purchase and download the ebook verson (if there is one) of the book right there in the aisles. It’s a clever idea which should keep B&N in business for a few more years, at least, but like record stores, the time will probably come when leaving your home to go to a store is no longer necessary for books, just as it’s no longer necessary for music.

Had it been up to Larbalestier, she writes that she would have preferred that the book did not feature a picture of any girl, white or black:

I never wanted a girl’s face on the cover. Micah’s identity is unstable. I wanted readers to be free to imagine her as they wanted.

At best, then, placing a picture of white girl on the cover of Liar seems like a case of false advertising likely to cause confusion for readers when they realize the difference between how the main character is described in the book and the picture of the girl on the cover.

At worst, however, it suggests that there are some disturbing racial stereotypes and assumptions behind the Bloomsbury USA’s sales and design departments’ choice of a front cover. Later in her blog entry, Larbalestier reveals:

Editors have told me that their sales departments say [covers with black people on them] don’t sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won’t take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can’t give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA — they’re exiled to the Urban Fiction section — and many bookshops simply don’t stock them at all.

Naturally, most of the comments that followed Larbalesteir’s post expressed outrage at the explicit racism on the part of Bloomsbury USA. Certainly, this incident raises questions that all of us: publishers, authors, artists, marketers, booksellers, and readers need to ask ourselves. Would a book with a white face on it sell better than a book with a black face? Do white readers not want to read books by black authors or about black characters?

But what struck me just as much as the racial controversy was the insight that Larbalesteir’s post revealed about how many publishers go about designing book covers. Apparently,

Authors do not get final say on covers. Often they get no say at all.

That shocks me. It’s one thing not to let authors do the work of designing their books themselves — that’s why publishers employ graphic artists. But to not let authors have any input, or to ignore that input when it is offered, is baffling. Why wouldn’t you want to hear the author’s ideas about what the cover of the book should look like?

The front cover is an integral part of the experience of reading a book. Some readers even make decisions about whether to read a book based on the image on the front cover. An author, who has spent months, if not years, working on the story, probably has lots of ideas about what the front cover should look like. To ignore an author’s wishes, to not even bother to ask that author what her wishes are, just seems incredibly stupid.

I self-publish, so I must design the covers of my book whether I want to or not. For some writers, that might seem like a chore, but I enjoy it. I like designing a cover that reflects my vision of what the book is, and it allows me to take responsibility for what’s on the outside of the book as well as what’s on the inside. But authors shouldn’t have to self-publish to have that option. Corporate publishers ought to let authors have a voice in designing a cover. If the author’s vision will harm the marketing a of a novel, then that’s one thing, but let the author in on that discussion!

For me, this violates two of the most important rules of research writing. First, and most obviously, Anderson’s plagiarism is inexcusable. He’s a magazine editor. He of all people should be familiar with the rules associated with quoting and documenting sources, and so I have a very hard time believing that his repeated instances of plagiarism were honest mistakes. Writers do know the difference between their words and someone else’s words, so when he read one of the long, undocumented passages that he copied straight from Wikipedia, he should have seen the error. One wonders if Anderson even proofread his own book!

Second, I have an issue with his frequent use of Wikipedia. Now, I’m not one of those people who say that Wikipedia sucks or it’s unreliable or full of errors, etc. No, even if everything in Wikipedia were 100% accurate, I would still take Anderson to task for using Wikipedia. The reason is because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and all encyclopedias, even Wikipedia, are ultimately superficial. An encyclopedia isn’t supposed to examine a subject in detail; it simply offers an easy-to-read overview of the subject. What Anderson’s use of Wikipedia tells me, as a reader, is that he didn’t go quite as in depth into some of his subject matter as he could have.

(Plus, there’s also the issue that a lot of the material in Wikipedia articles have been copied and pasted from other online sources. It’s possible that Anderson plagiarized text that was already plagiarized from some place else!)

It’s a real shame that this scandal has erupted because it threatens to obscure the central argument of his book, an argument that I think is very important for anyone creating content or trying to sell stuff online. Anderson’s argument is that the realities of the digital marketplace, a marketplace that is as close to a true “free market” as anything humankind has ever seen, drives the costs and prices of certain goods (but not all goods) towards free. In the digital realm, free isn’t just a marketing gimmick, it is a necessary part of doing business.

Free applies best to intellectual content: music, film, images, and books. This is content that can be easily reproduced, stored, and distributed online at virtually no cost at all. Free comes in to play when the products distributed are made of “bits” instead of “atoms.” So for example, an ebook can be “sold” for free, but the physical copy of that book that you might find at the corner bookstore, still has a price attached to it. The intellectual content in the book and the ebook may be the same, but the packaging of that content is very different, and the nature of ebooks is such that it is possible to distribute millions upon millions of them for free.

The point that I thought was the most interesting, though, a point that Anderson makes a few times but doesn’t quite emphasize as much as I think he could have, is that “free,” in the digital realm, isn’t one-sided. “Selling something for free” doesn’t mean, as a lot of worried corporate executives think, that you are simply giving something away and not getting anything in return. If that’s what’s happening — if that’s what you’re doing — then you’re doing it wrong!

Selling for free means transforming the currency of exchange. We’re so used to thinking that “currency” means “money,” that if you don’t have money in your pocket, then you can’t make an exchange. But money is only one form of exchange. Those companies and entrepreneurs who have been successful with selling products for free have figured out ways to exchange their product for something other than money — in some cases something that is more valuable than whatever money they might receive from a traditional exchange.

One example that Anderson cites is GOOG411, a telephone directory assistance service that Google set up, ostensibly, to complete against “411″ services offered by telephone service providers. GOOG411, like most of Google’s other products and services, was free, but Google’s motive in setting up GOOG411 wasn’t to simply undercut the phone companies’ profits, nor was GOOG411 simply another way for Google to dispense the vast information resources that they have access to. Instead, GOOG411 was a way for Google to test and refine voice recognition software that they has been developing. Every time someone calls requesting information, Google collects data on speech patterns. Google is betting that the data they are collecting will be valuable (far more valuable than their current costs for operating GOOG411) for voice recognition technology that they will sell to companies in the future. So Google is happy to make its directory assistance service available for next to nothing — and the only currency that you need to exchange for this service is to allow Google to listen to you speak.

So “free” isn’t about giving something away and not receiving anything in return. Instead, in order for “free” to be effective, you have to decide what it is that you really want in exchange — what is going to be worth more to you than money? It could be any number of things, both tangible and intangible.

I’ve already begun putting Anderson’s ideas into effect. For a few months now, I’ve been giving away the ebook versions of my novels for free. I’m still doing that, but now I’m asking readers who download one of my novels to take a few minutes to write a review of that novel (at Amazon or Goodreads or Borders or wherever) when they finish reading it. It takes the reviewer just a few minutes to write a review, but a positive review (assuming it’s a positive review!) is worth more to me than the few dollars I would have made from a sale. That’s my currency of exchange: I’ll give you a story to read if you will write a review of that story when you’re done.  That’s how I plan to use free to work for me.

Platforms have always been around in one form or another, I suppose. Basically, a platform is your base — your network of readers and fans that you have developed, especially the network you’ve developed on your own. Creating a platform used to mean publishing short stories or articles or poems or whatever else you could get into print. It was the list of publication credits that one included in one’s query letters to agents and publishers.

But just because you had amassed a long list of publication credits before you wrote your first novel didn’t necessarily mean you had a fan base. This was especially true if most of one’s credits were from literary journals. Often, the only people who bother to read literary journals are other writers trying to figure out how they, too, can get published in that same journal.

For the most part, building a fan base came after a book was published. Book readings and book signings were the most effective ways to interact with large numbers of your audience or expand the size of that audience. If your publisher offered enough support, you might even have opportunities for radio and television interviews. That was pretty much it.

Today, though, building a fan base — your platform — before you get published is much easier to do thanks to online social networking tools like blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and so on. It may take time and dedication to build those platforms into something substantial, something that would interest an agent or a publisher, but it can be done.

Constructing a platform, in and of itself, is a good strategy which makes sense, but the problem that I have is how publishing corporations are relying more and more on writers themselves to build their platforms. One of the arguments for teaming up with a publishing house is that the publishing house has marketing and distribution resources that are unavailable to the individual authors. Sure, a published author still must shoulder some of the marketing responsibility — he can’t just sit back and expect the publishing house to do all the work for him — but the author’s job was made easier because of those resources. Now, though, in this age of the platform, authors are being required to take on more and more of the marketing responsibility. There are a couple of reasons for this.

The first reason has to do with the nature of social networking. Whenever corporations try to get involved in social networks, the result is awkward and inauthentic. It is the individual who has the power in social networking. Thus, readers on Twitter, for example, don’t want to hear from an author’s publisher, they want to hear from the author! It’s not unlike a book signing. The “magic moment” at a book signing comes at the instant where the reader gets to meet and talk to the author. At a book signing where there are lots of readers in attendance, the author doesn’t have time to talk for very long with very many people. But when a reader “friends” an author on a social network, there is an opportunity for much deeper interaction. In that respect, the traditional marketing strategies that were once used to build platforms are no longer effective. They were superficial; they aimed at bringing as many people as possible into a bookstore — it didn’t really matter who those people were. Relationships weren’t important. Today, they are.

The other reason has to do with the decline of the publishing industry generally. Publishing corporations are losing money and downsizing operations, leaving them with fewer and fewer resources to devote to marketing new, unknown authors. Indeed, it seems that most of the money and attention is going to well-known, established authors and celebrity authors. It’s a superficial strategy that may bring in money in the short run, but doesn’t solve publishing’s long-term problems.

So whenever I hear agents and publishers prattle on about “platforms,” I feel a bit suspicious. Are they advocating platforms because they recognize how fundamentally book marketing has changed? Or are they advocating platforms because it helps them save money to have authors do all the work?

And if it is up to new authors to do all of the marketing work themselves, just what do they need publishers for?

my guess is that in 2-5 years we’ll see a publishing industry that looks like the music business does today: Super-downsized major companies selling a product line aimed at an older demographic and a jillion new companies creating the next generation of publishers, retailers, and readers. Just like in the music business, some in publishing will be mourning the death of the business while others will be wildly excited because all they see is opportunity.

The problem, of course, is that those running the big publishing corporations, instead of accepting and adapting to this future, will try everything they can to fight it. Right now, we see the same sort of physical vs. digital tension in publishing that existed a decade ago when Napster burst onto the scene. The recording industry had it’s business model, one that involved selling physical CDs and CD singles in physical music stores and marketing that product on the radio and TV outlets like MTV. The Internet offered a completely different business model, one that did away with those physical items and places, one where, thanks to websites like Pandora, anyone could create their own “radio station”. But this was so completely different from how the music industry had always been run that executives resisted, even though digital distribution was cheaper and much more convenient for customers. Music fans wanted to go digital, and since music companies — and many artists — didn’t want to go there, fans began turning to “piracy.”

The rest is history. The fans have won, and the music industry has been dragged kicking and screaming into the future. Now it’s publishing’s turn. As ebooks take off, as the quality of ebooks and ebook readers improves, and as more and more readers discover the convenience and lower cost of ebooks, publishing corporations will face their own moment of truth.

But as optimistic as Pavin is about what she hopes publishing’s response will be, all the evidence so far is that it will follow down the trail that’s been blazed by the music industry. One sees publishing execs freaking out over the spectre of “piracy.” Right now, their attempt to stop unauthorized copies of ebooks getting loose in the wild involves the use of DRM — that’s right, DRM, which the music industry tried for a few years and gave up on, after they realized that every form of DRM can be cracked, and that it does nothing but frustrate honest consumers.

Eventually (and it will probably take a couple of years) publishing corporations will give up on DRM. But will they then learn their lesson and begin embracing the new technologies and adapt their business models? I doubt it. I think it’s just a matter of time before publishers borrow another failed tactic of the music industry: suing their customers. Once ebooks start taking off in schools and colleges, that is, once textbooks start going digital and students began sharing them on P2P and bittorrent networks, we’ll start to see companies suing students, professors, and schools. Never mind that the music industry’s lawsuit campaign has been a disaster in terms of bad publicity and has completely failed to stop file sharing.

I guess the problem is that the best way forward for the publishing industry, the way that will allow publishing corporations to survive this technological shift in the way people tell stories and read, isn’t the easiest way forward. It requires hard decisions. It requires restructuring companies and changing business models. These are the kinds of decisions that corporate executives are loathe to make unless it’s the very last option available to them. And so it will be the last option. They’ll try everything else first, even if their corporate cousins in the music industry have failed in these tactics before.

I read a story recently (here’s a link to it) about a blogger who has stirred up quite a bit of controversy because she lied about the events she was blogging about. Her name is Becca Beushausen and her blog documented her pregnancy and the birth of her daughter, April Rose — who then died suddenly a few days after she was born. The only problem: Becca wasn’t pregnant and she didn’t have a baby. She made up the whole series of events. This might not have been a big deal if Becca’s blog had attracted only a handful of followers (like most blogs do), but apparently, Becca’s blog quickly attracted thousands of loyal followers and well-wishers.

Apparently, suspicion that she wasn’t being completely truthful began when she posted pictures of her new baby, which some followers of her blog thought looked more like a doll. In fact, that’s exactly what it was.

When the full truth finally came out, followers of her blog were furious, and people began speculating about her motives and state of mind. It wasn’t enough to call her a liar — is she also a malevolent hoaxer?  Is she a con-artist? Is she a sociopath? Does she have some kind of mental or emotional disorder? Surely, there must be something very wrong with this woman. The reaction has been so harsh that she has deleted her blog and in its place posted an apology.

My thought? Maybe she’s just a fiction writer. (Beushausen: “I’ve always liked writing. It was addictive to find out I had a voice that people wanted to hear.”)

It is baffling to me, though, why her former readers are so angry. Some of them, after the baby was supposedly born, sent Beushausen gifts and donations. Those people have a right to feel upset and have a right to demand their gifts returned. All of the other followers — those who simply enjoyed Beushausen’s blog and the story she was telling — in my opinion, ought to write to Beushausen and thank her for entertaining them with such a compelling story.

I once had a professor who described fiction writers as liars. Even when they gave interviews or wrote about their work, he claimed, they were predisposed to lie. Novelists are professional liars, he said; that’s just what they do. I tend to agree. When one writes a story, one is creating a world that may resemble this one (or in other cases doesn’t resemble this world at all) but which isn’t this world. One writes about characters that seem to be real, but who don’t really exist. No one gets upset, after reading Harry Potter, to learn that the story never really happened. Why are those readers of Beushausen’s blog, even those who feel like they were tricked, so upset to have learned that the whole story was fiction?

Is there an expectation that the content of blogs should be exclusively non-fiction? If there is, I don’t think there should be. A blog is simply a platform; it’s simply a tool for writing. It shouldn’t dictate what the content of the blog ought to be. Blogs are like those journals you can buy at office supply stores: the nice, leather-bound books filled with empty pages. The owner of such a journal is free to fill the book with stories that are true, or stories that are made up. There isn’t any sort of requirement that a journal writer only write “the truth,” nor should there be any sort of requirement that all bloggers only write “the truth.”

Indeed, I’m always skeptical when I read any sort of autobiographical writing that what I’m reading is the honest and objective truth. Reality itself is not an objective thing. Events are subject to our different perspectives, colored by our different experiences and beliefs. An event might occur, about which we can gather facts and objective data, but that event — and the facts and data surrounding it — may still be interpreted in any number of different ways according to the perspectives of the people observing the event (see, for example, reality television). So I don’t believe there is such a thing as a blog — even a “non-fiction” blog — that always tells the truth.

My other blog is a creative writing blog. Readers of that blog may or may not be surprised to learn that I have told lies in that blog. In fact, I have told many lies. Some of these lies have been big lies, some of them small lies. Some of my lies should have been obvious to readers, while other lies were carefully disguised (carefully disguised lies are always the best lies, of course). Even when I tell the truth, I don’t necessarily tell the whole truth. I may only tell part of the truth and leave the rest out — lies by omission.

In fact, lies are essential to that blog. It just wouldn’t be the same if it weren’t wrapped in a web of lies. I’m not just documenting my process of creation, but I’m using that blog as one of the sources of that same creative process.

I don’t think I’m alone in my deception. I would wager that every creative writing blogger out there has also told some lies in his or her blog, too. And why not? We writers of fiction tell stories. We make things up. Lying is fundamental to what we do.

So let Becca Beushausen be. She is a fiction writer. Let her tell her lies.

Today, I want to revisit an objection to self-publishing that I hear quite often: that only losers and quitters (I myself have been called both those names) self-publish or start their own publishing companies. If I had any talent at all, the argument goes, I’d be able to find an agent to represent me and a real publisher to publish my work. Oh yes, it may take years to find both an agent and a publisher, but if I really think that my work is worth reading, then I should keep at it and not quit (i.e. don’t self-publish). This is an objection that has been refuted a number of times elsewhere on the web, but there’s an underlying assumption in this objection that is often overlooked, and it’s that assumption that I want to address in this post.

I’ve seen arguments that flippantly declare that 99% of self-published titles are crap, and that only the books that are actually worth publishing and reading are those that are published by the big NY publishing corporations. These arguments are built upon the premise that writing talent is rare — that most stories written are of very poor quality. The really good books, then, are like precious diamonds that must be extracted from the filthy pit of so much awful writing. But today, I’d like to propose just the opposite: that instead of a scarcity of writing talent there is an abundance of it in the world. There is so much talent, in fact, that Old Publishing is hopelessly overwhelmed by it all.

What Flickr Can Teach Us

And it isn’t just in the field of writing where one finds an abundance of creative talent. For example, open up a new tab in your browser and head to Flickr. There’s a section within Flickr called “Interestingness.” I know you won’t be able to resist browsing the photographs, so go ahead and do that for a while. I’ll wait.

Was this taken by an "amateur"?

“Interestingness” is Flickr’s attempt to filter through the thousands of photos uploaded every hour and pick out just a few of the many impressive, inspiring, and interesting photos that people are sharing and then offer those photos for viewing in one convenient place. As you explore the photos in this corner of the website, you’ll find that all of them are truly beautiful and extraordinary. Of course, Flickr doesn’t pretend that these are the only quality photos being uploaded; “Interestingness” just offers visitors a small sample.

Was this taken by a "professional"?

And if you dig deeper and visit the profiles of the photographers who took these pictures, you’ll discover something just as interesting as the photos themselves. While many of the photographs tagged as “interesting” were taken by “professional” photographers (that is, people who regularly make money from selling their photographs), just as many of these photos were taken by “amateurs” (that is, people who simply love to take pictures and love to use their cameras to creatively engage the world around them). Flickr’s algorithm for selecting photographs for the “interestingness” section doesn’t distinguish whether the photographer is a professional or not. There isn’t any sort of artificial division between “real” photographers and “hobbyists.” The qualifications are based more upon the Flickr community’s reaction to a photograph.

Tell me: Does it even matter?

In fact, when it comes to the art of photography, the distinction between a “professional” and an “amateur” is a distinction that is becoming less and less recognizable each day. Right now, there are over a dozen stock photo websites where any photographer can put his or her best photographs up for sale. Individuals and businesses looking for compelling pictures to use in websites, brochures, or promotional material — even book covers — can purchase the rights to use these photos. Customers never ask, “Was this photo taken by a ‘real‘ photographer or an ‘amateur’?” because such a question is essentially irrelevant. If it’s a good photograph, and if it’s the kind of image that you’re looking for, then that’s the only thing that matters. The quality of the work itself is what’s important — not the credentials and resume of the photographer.

So just as Flickr proves that even “amateur photographers” can take interesting pictures, so too, I believe, is it the case that even self-published authors are capable of writing stories that are worth reading. Writing talent isn’t rare; it’s all around us.

Nathan Bransford’s Experiment

Today, literary agents are drowning in a sea of manuscripts. Every day, a typical agent will receive dozens of query letters and emails from writers who have either completed a manuscript or who have a book proposal they wish to market. Recently, Nathan Bransford, literary agent and blogging celebrity, conducted an experiment designed to show his readers — wannabe authors, mostly — just how difficult the job of an agent can be. He called it the “Be An Agent For A Day Contest.” For this contest, he posted a series of 50 query letters (including many letters penned by readers of his blog) and asked his audience to pass judgment on the queries. Each participant in the contest could only select 5 letters out of the 50 to let pass through the gate — 5 queries whose authors would receive requests for complete manuscripts (Bransford explained: “because hey, you’re not going to have time for your clients if you request more than five manuscripts for every 50 queries”). Sprinkled among the 50 letters were three letters written by “real” authors whose work described in the queries was already published. The winner(s) of the contest would be the participant(s) who could identify all 3 of the published authors’ letters in the 5 queries they picked.

I didn’t take part in the contest, but I did take time to browse through the queries. What struck me was how few of them seemed to me like obvious rejections. Sure, not all of the queries described books that I, personally, would be interested in reading, but I couldn’t think of a reason why most of them wouldn’t deserve to be published at all. (Of course, I’ve always been skeptical of the proposition that anyone can tell anything worthwhile from a query letter. Query letters and novels are two very different forms of writing. It’s like asking me to decide whether an author is worth reading by consulting his obituary.)

Apparently, many of Bransford’s readers also had trouble deciding which queries deserved call-backs and which ones did not. At the end of the contest period, Bransford reported that “out of the 300+ people who participated, only two people guessed all three published authors with their five choices.”

Now wait — let’s stop and think about that for a minute. Less than 1% of the participants “correctly” identified the queries of books that had been published. Or to put it another way: over 99% of the participants — writers and authors themselves — disagreed with the selections made by literary agents and publishers. If ever there was an illustration of just how subjective the gatekeeping process in publishing really is, I think this is it. What Bransford was trying to do was demonstrate how difficult the job of literary agents is. Instead (and quite unintentionally), I think what he really did was prove just how obsolete agents are. Because when you imagine just how many manuscripts are out there being sent to (and rejected by) agents compared to the tiny number of manuscripts that make their way through the logjam of corporate filters and reach publication, it becomes clear that there are more deserving and worthwhile books not being published under the old system than are being published. Before the Internet, the limitations of physical space made these corporate filters and their many rejections a necessity. Now, though, online storage and distribution means that there is no limit to how many written works can be published and made instantly available to the reading public.

The Past and Future of Literacy, or The Kids Are All Right

We are living in a Golden Age of Literacy. Never before in human history have so many people been able to read and write. Statistics provided by UNESCO show that the percentage of illiterate people in the world has been cut in half since 1970.

UNESCO: World Literacy Rate

In America, the younger generation, in particular, is reading and writing to an extent never seen before. How is this possible? The same Internet that makes ebooks viable, that has made self-publishing more than a pointless vanity option, and that today threatens the business models of Old Publishing — that same Internet is guaranteeing that new generations of readers and authors will continue to enter the world.

When I was growing up in the 1980s, my friends didn’t have cell phones. If I wanted to hang out with friends on a Friday night, I called them on the family telephone plugged into the wall. Some families had personal computers, but almost no one had Internet access (the world wide web did not yet exist). If I needed to do research for a school essay, I went to the library. When I wanted to share some songs with a friend, I recorded them to a cassette tape. No one heard of “email” — there was just the mail. My classmates and I lived in a purely physical world, not a digital world.

Back then, illiteracy among youth was a real problem, in part because it was possible for teens to get by without ever reading or writing anything. Certainly, literacy was not a requirement for an active social life. I mean, what kind of loser writes messages to his friends?! — you’re supposed to pick up the phone and call them! Duh!

Oh, how times have changed! Today, if you’re a teenager and you can’t read and write, then you’re the loser who doesn’t have a social life. Literacy has become crucial: blogs, instant messaging, Facebook — even YouTube requires some degree of literacy. And the Internet isn’t just a place to connect with friends or make new friends, it’s also, of course, a platform for self-expression and creativity, which is of course importance when you’re young and the whole world doesn’t understand you. Young people today engage in an amount of reading and writing that was absolutely unheard of when I was growing up.

But — but — wait! cry the self-appointed Grammar Police and the sheepish followers of Strunk & White. Kids today aren’t spelling their words correctly! They don’t use punctuation properly! They write “TTYL” when they’re supposed to write “talk to you later”! To those people, I say, Who cares? “Literacy” does not mean conforming to dictionary spellings or a particular (and possibly anachronistic) set of rules concerning punctuation and grammar established by generations past. Literacy means actively engaging in reading and writing as a living and ever-evolving form of communication. Text messaging has its own rules and customs, BTW, and just because a written utterance breaks one set of rules does not mean that it isn’t operating under its own complex set of rules. Trying to set up one set of rules as necessarily better than another set is at best pointless, and at worst elitist, classist, or racist. And really, can anyone seriously argue that writing “you” makes more sense than writing “u”? Maybe we should start writing “Igh” instead of “I” — LOL!

Do The Math

In this century, I predict we’ll see a rapid increase in the amount of literature that human beings produce. More new writing will be published in this century than in all of the previous centuries of human history combined because all of the old barriers to publication are collapsing. Anyone can do it now — and everyone will.

The number of potential authors is astonishing. For just one limited example, let’s take the United States. Right now, there are over 300 million people living in the US. If only 2% of those people have literary ambitions — that is, if only 2% of them wish to write a volume of non-fiction or a novel or a book of poetry or a screenplay — that’s still 6 million people. And let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that of those 6 million writers, about 90% would produce work that just isn’t very good — or maybe it really is complete crap. That still leaves 600,000 writers who are capable of producing work that is worth reading and is worth publishing. That number is far too large for Old Publishing to absorb, especially now when the big publishing corporations are in financial decline and are downsizing their operations, making it harder than ever for wannabe authors to pass through the gates to the promised land of publication.

And if you disagree with the idea that 90% of writing done by would-be authors is crap (I disagree with that), and if you disagree that only 2% of the US population harbors dreams of becoming a published author (I think that percentage is much too small), and if you assume that people in countries outside of the US are also interested in writing (obviously!), and that many of those writers (especially those from English-speaking countries) would like to publish work in the US as well as in their home countries, then you MUST admit that the supply of talented writers far exceeds the capacity of the publishing industry to publish them all. No army of literary agents can ever fairly evaluate all of that work. No nationwide chain of brick-and-mortar bookstores or libraries could ever contain all of those books.

But they can be contained digitally. Already, the Internet has the capacity to store as many books as might be produced in a year, and the Internet makes on-demand distribution not only possible, but easy. Now, not only can anyone publish their work, but that work can find an audience.

The myth that talent is scarce is just that — a myth. The reality is that there is too much talent in the world. It’s a tsunami that threatens to sweep away the old system of publishing once and for all because the old system is completely inadequate to deal with it. Digital storage and distribution can, however. In fact, the Internet is the only thing that can contain the entirety of human creative endeavor. Professional or amateur, self-published or not, those artificial distinctions don’t matter anymore.

Even though there were more self-published books published in the past year than traditionally published books, it’s the traditional publishing industry that still commands most of the attention. After all, they are the ones with the big marketing budgets. They are the ones with the distribution contacts with the big retail bookstore chains. They are the ones who get their books reviewed in major publications. And they are the ones who draw the biggest crowds at book expos and industry conferences. Self-publishers may have the advantage of being able to focus their marketing attention on just one or two books — their own — but their budgets are very limited and they don’t have access to the same distribution and marketing contacts as the big boys.

And since self-publishers are, in a sense, in competition with the traditional publishing industry (execs may dismiss self-published books as “cluttering up” the marketplace, but that “clutter” is also a direct threat to their business models), no one in the traditional publishing industry is going to stick up for self-published authors and represent our interests — we’re on our own. Or to put it another way: we are not only representatives for our own work and reputations, but we also must represent each other, too. Most of what ordinary readers know about self-published books and their authors comes from their personal contacts and first-hand experiences with us. Each encounter is important, no matter how slight or how brief it may be, and each encounter is an opportunity to make a strong positive impression. We want readers to walk away from their encounters with us with the impression that self-published authors are knowledgeable, professional, and worth a chance the next time the reader goes to buy a book. But if we’re not careful, a reader might walk away with exactly the opposite impression — and whether the reader takes away a positive or negative impression, you can be sure that it will last.

Or, when a reader opens a self-published book and finds a text improperly formatted or riddled with spelling and punctuation errors, there’s a good chance the reader will jump to the conclusion that all self-published books are that way. When a reader picks up a book and finds a cover that looks like it was designed in the space of about five minutes, the reader may well conclude that the inside of the book isn’t very good either. When a reader opens an ebook file and finds it sloppily formatted and impossible to read, that reader may close the file and swear never to try another self-published book again.

No, judgments like those aren’t fair, because there are self-published authors who put a lot of time and effort into their work, but such judgments do happen.

So I want to suggest to all self-published authors that you have a set of responsibilities to try to maintain. When you publish a piece of writing, you are not only putting forth your words and ideas, but you are also putting forth yourself as a representative — a spokesperson — for the larger self-published community. In this ambassadorial role, you have certain responsibilities that you must try to uphold.

[In presenting this list of responsibilities, let me clear: I'm not setting myself up as some paragon of virtue and ethics. I'm a human being, which I means I'm prone to make mistakes. I've made mistakes in the past, and I'm sure I'll make them in the future. But to live and behave ethically means to engage in a struggle to make yourself a better person than you already are. Whether we are writers, or just human beings, self-improvement should always be our goal.]

1. If you are a self-published writer, you have a responsibility to produce the best work you can. No one expects you to write like James Joyce, and no one expects you to find and correct every single typo in a piece of writing (even the editors working for the big NY publishing corporations don’t find every little error before a work is published), but every time you publish something, whether it’s a blog post or novel, you should feel confident that you have put forth the best work you can. Take your time! Publishing through traditional channels takes so much longer than self-publishing, so self-publishers can afford to take an extra month or two to continue to revise and edit their work. So do it right, polish your work, and make sure the writing you publish is worth reading.

And it’s not just the content of the work, but the form it takes which should be the best it can be. If you are producing a physical copy of your writing, such as a book, it is incumbent upon you to to pay attention to how that book is formatted. Are the page numbers in the right order, are the margins consistent on every page? Is the font the same size and style on each page? These may seem like obvious details to many of us, but whenever just one self-published author doesn’t put forth the best work that he or she is capable of, it hurts us all.

2. If you are a self-published writer, you have a responsibility to conduct yourself as a professional. Don’t get all in a huff if a book review blogger chooses not to review your book. Even if the reviewer writes to you and puts down self-published works generally. Just stay polite and pursue another reviewer. There are hundreds, if not thousands of reviewers out there, and sooner or later you’ll find someone who is willing to give your well-written, carefully edited book a chance.

Also, be a troll. Don’t waste your time searching forums and blogs and websites trying to pick fights with people just because they happen to voice a negative attitude towards self-published works and authors. If you must offer an opinion, do it respectfully, politely, gracefully. If those people still aren’t convinced, move on. Ranting and screaming across the Internet not only makes you look like a lunatic, but it also harms reputation of every other self-published author out there, too.

3. Finally, if you are a self-published writer, you have a responsibility to read and support other self-published writers. There’s a lot of good stuff out there being produced by writers who have chosen to operate outside of the traditional publishing channels. It may take some effort to seek it out, but it’s there! And because it exists outside of traditional channels, there’s a good chance that you’ll find something truly new and unique, and not just the same old pulp that you can get in any bookstore.

If you are a self-published writer, when was the last time you read a work by another self-published writer? Have you ever read a work by another self-published writer? If not, why would you expect others to read your work when you won’t read theirs?

In a way, it’s karmic: everything we do and however we behave will be visited back upon us eventually. When you do something that harms your reputation, you are also hurting my reputation. And when I do something that harms my reputation, I am also hurting your reputation. Keep this in mind next time you prepare a novel for publication, or post a comment to someone else’s blog, or attend a book reading or book signing. Your responsible behavior goes a long way toward helping all self-publishers, including yourself.

Comments? What kind of behavior do you think is appropriate or inappropriate for self-publishers?