Quote:
Originally Posted by astra
I don't know what indie music or indie publishing is.
Does it mean that their origin is from India?
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Silly rabbit... "indie" is just short for "independent."
I think the real question is: Why is it that independent music went from disrespected to respected (and successful in digital form) over the last decade (roughly), when digital literature has been around longer, and is still considered disrespected?
There may be too many factors to enumerate here. A 3-minute piece of music may be similar to a poem, but not to an extended piece of literature, so it's very hard to make a direct comparison. The audience is very different, their demands on the media is very different, and the intellectual and emotional (and rhythmic) response to the media is very different.
But there is also a different strategy employed by the literature publishers, which emphasizes their contribution to the literature perhaps more than music publishers are perceived to contribute: Music pubs actually want you to believe their bands are great, even if they're playing in a garage with unplugged equipment; whereas lit publishers work hard to convince the public that most writers are crap without their help to clean them up and package them. That's one of the reasons there are so many garage bands, who believe they are as good as the pros without all of the stuff; whereas authors trust their definition of "good" to be handed down to them by a publisher.
I think the publishers' ongoing efforts to promote themselves by declaring all un-published authors as "bad" have simply sunk so deeply into the public and professional consciousness that it is a hard message to forget. But as self-publishing through e-books grows, I suspect the message to lose its validity and acceptance.