Chekhov’s Mistess

Ana Maria post on Free Books

I’m really liking this topic of giving stuff away for free. Ana Maria quotes a Neil Gaiman interview:

“‘It’s much more about gaining an audience than about some one-to-one correlation,’ he said. ‘It’s a question of how do you find new writers.’ People often come to new authors in a library, on a friend’s bookshelves, or by a personal recommendation, he explained. It ‘doesn’t always begin with a financial transaction. I very much doubt that I discovered a single one of my favourite authors by buying a book.’ […]”

So, right. What a writer wants most is to be read (and to get paid so they can keep on writing, at least on a hierarchal level). It’s all moot otherwise. I’m sure I’m getting in over my head, but I can say that on a much smaller scale, I’ve sometimes thought about trying to find some professional outlet for the longer essays I’ve written here on Chekhov’s Mistress (or intend to write, I don’t claim the quality here that good). Truth is, the only reason I’d want a professional outlet for my writing is to get read by a wider audience (and perhaps the forced discipline of thought that comes along with that). Getting paid, particularly such as it is that writerly pay is low anyway, is not a big part of my desire to do so. Getting paid, at this level, is only an enabling factor such that if you’re getting paid for your writing you can spend time doing it instead of slaving away at making a living doing other things. But history is full of writers who did ‘other things’ while writing, even before writers all became university teachers.

Anyway, I’d like to write more about this topic right now, but I have to work.

comments

I hope you find the answer to your heart’s desire. I read a Philip Pullman interview and his advice to aspiring writers was “be patient” among other things. Slaving away at doing both will someday pay off, perhaps in the form of slaving away only as a professional writer.

    – Gene (03/05  at  05:57 PM)

The thing I find is that I think the general trend seems to be that more is available online, anyway; there’s sometimes little difference between any particular magazine’s print edition and its online content.  It’s not just books, either; a recent issue of -Wired- postulated about how various media could work free.

I’m also personally no longer certain, especially nowadays, the “professional” publication necessarily guarantees a wider audience.

I’m in a writing program at USC, where I’ve been working with a lot of teachers who have been pretty awesome and reading and writing in a terrific environment, but when it came time to consider what “literary magazines” I might want to submit stories to, I looked at them and then decided to do it myself, via Lulu, and give away most of it, because, seriously, who reads literary magazines besides the small cadre of writers who hope to get published in them?

    – Will Entrekin (03/11  at  10:41 PM)

A lot of people are grappling with this idea, Will. Look at Salon.com - nice magazine, but financially a terrible failure. They’ve gone back and forth between subscription models and ad models and neither entirely work for them. Ultimately people want to get paid, or have to get paid. I didn’t read the Wired article, which I think is the preface of Anderson’s next book, but I think one critical element is that people give stuff away so that they can sell something else as value added or in a different package. So that’s not “really” free.

You’re right about the lit journals, although that’s something of a different topic. Lit journals are part of a literary hierarchy, which may or may not be a good thing, but presumably (a big presumably) if you’ve gotten through those editors then you’ve earned your chops and move on. There’s nothing wrong with self-publishing, but in reality it’s - at least for the moment - lower in the pecking order than other outlets. Still, I admire you for going that route, because when people start to do that it breaks the hierarchy down a bit even though the hierarchy is there for a purpose - it’s a filter. Can we get by without the filter of editors? Sure. Do we want to? Hmmmm.

    – Bud Parr (03/12  at  05:11 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: March 03, 2008
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

Tags: Everything For Free

• Comments:3
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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