nekokami said:
> Um, HarryT, I think bowerbird is talking about self-publishing. (I think.)
of course i was. but some people see a criminal behind every corner.
it's an interesting rorschach-blot that tells you a lot about those people.
> Which is usually also self-edited, self illustrated (if cover art is provided),
> self-typeset, self-marketed, etc.
let's start with the last-point -- self-marketing. marketing will be _unnecessary_
in a world where people use collaborative filtering to find needles in the haystack.
in fact, it will be a sign of weakness, something only a truly bad author would do.
next, self-illustrated. lots and lots of stories work just fine without illustrations.
(indeed, some people think stories work _better_ without illustrations, since that
allows each reader to use their own imagination to picture the story as they wish.)
but if a person does want illustrations, it's simple as pie -- in the age of flickr and
photobucket and creative commons licenses -- to find free pictures for your story.
self-typeset: the right tools can now turn a plain-text file into a nicely-typeset book.
>
http://z-m-l.com/go/vl3.pl
self-edited: any writer worth their salt knows they need to have their work reviewed
by someone who has editorial skills, from the overview down to the fine copy-editing.
maybe you hire an editor, maybe you find a friend with the skills to do it for nothing,
maybe you put stuff up on a blog and let your earliest readers help you fine-tune it...
however you get the job done is fine. it's not as if the publishers own all the editors.
just like writers will write for free, because that's what they do, _editors_must_edit_.
heck, i did a bunch of copy-editing on a book before it was put into project gutenberg,
for free, just because i thought it was neat that an 80-year-old man (mike moldeven)
wanted to share his story with the world before he passed over into the next plane...
he was willing to give away his book for free, and i was willing to copy-edit it for free.
-bowerbird