Shut The Hell Up
July 24, 2010
Okay. I'm reading on a Kindle, I've got an iPad in the house, I've self-published on the Kindle. There's all this hurly-burly going on (yeah, I read the first page of my son's copy of Macbeth, go sue me) about an agent, Wylie, publishing some of his clients' work on the Kindle DTP platform, and the usual suspects have weighed in on it with the same old attitudes, which I'm starting to view as Often Wrong, But Never In Doubt, and the entire thing reminds me more and more of both the talk of the end of publication as we know it that occurred when iUniverse came on the scene and of the late-1990s just before the Internet Bubble burst and companies like Pets.com disappeared.
I also suspect that the only people that give a damn about it at all are writers (most especially unpublished writers who think the whole universe has opened up to them), agents, editors, and other publishing professionals. The average reader or person-on-the-street really doesn't give a damn one way or the other and probably some of them haven't even heard of a Kindle, let alone a Nook, and if they were going to pay $500+ for an iPad their top priority wouldn't be to use it as an e-reader, but as a laptop for surfing, games, video, and email. As my brother once described the Republican Party, "They're like bees buzzing in a glass jar."
So today, despite the following links, I can't but feel that everybody should just shut the hell up.
Paul Levine (all profits from the Kindle sale of To Speak For The Dead--a really excellent book, by the way, by a really excellent writer--go toward The Four Diamonds Fund at Penn State Children's Hospital)
That's really just the tip of the iceberg and ... what? I can't hear you, there's a buzzing in my ears...
posted by Mark Terry at 8:32 AM
6 Comments:
Your title says it all. My problem is to get myself writing more. All this other stuff really isn't my problem, unless I think about, which stops me from writing.
Yeah, I was momentarily exasperated (well, maybe longer than a moment) with yet another series of blogs indicating the writer knows what's going to happen to the publishing industry over the next couple years.
And I should write a blog about how I'm battling distractions and how my attention span seems to be about 30 seconds ... what was I saying?
Pets.com is gone?
My first priority is to finish my damn manuscript, and then perhaps think about doing the agent query mambo. If I immerse myself in the buzz of the day I might get stung, and the only object (of my desire) allowed to do that to me is Sting.
Have a beer, kick back and breathe. Cheers!
Oh gosh, at the beginning of this year I wrote a blog post, which I deleted, ranting about how very sick I was of seeing people claim to know the future. It's not that I mind predictions, it's just that some people get so worked up and angry if someone else's predictions don't match theirs.
I just read a great article about attention spans. I can't find it, but I'm blogging about it tonight.
Natasha,
That may be it. I don't have problems with predictions either, except there's clearly some people that have a lot invested in their predictions being correct--and getting rather testy if anyone questions them.
Excellent points! It is a lot of bustle and noise when no one knows exactly how things will shake out. I mentioned the Wylie situation to a friend at my day job and she blinked at me. It goes to show that regular people just don't care about it.
Still, I think it's an exciting time for writers because of the new opportunities!
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