[Xenophon]

Moejoe:

That's a well-written and obviously carefully considered post! It's a breath of fresh air in an otherwise overly-heated thread. I'll send the "Conga-Rats" your way

That said, however, I don't entirely agree with you (what a shock!).

Originally Posted by Moejoe

I think what we're seeing here is a cultural rift between European ideas of subsidisation and a more American idea of individual liberty.
<<SNIP>>

It sure seems like that to me. As you can probably tell from my other posts, I fall much more on the individual liberty side of things. As such, I consider your position well argued, carefully thought through... and dead wrong.

Originally Posted by Moejoe

In an industry with such razor thin margins quality and individual expression are never high on the agenda. The fabled editors of yore who would mould and cultivate a young writer are all but gone. This is a bottom-line industry and the only aim now is to find and market a product.

<<SNIP>>

Actually, those editors are still around. Jim Baen of Baen Books was one such, and Toni Weisskopf is following in his footsteps. The folks over at Tor do much the same. I admit, however, that these days it is exceptional rather than common.

Originally Posted by Moejoe

And then we come sharply to the inequity that is built into the publishing industry. When we see the top 1% of writers taking in the majority of the profit, how can we not wish for a more equal relationship to occur? How can we not wish for more individual voices to be allowed a moment in the sun, maybe even enough moments to grow into something fulfilling and worthwhile. Advances for the new writer are laughable, profits, if any, are measured in the low percentile. In this atmosphere any writer has to be a Patterson, King or Rowling to be worthwhile to the industry.

<<SNIP>

Surely this same 'inequity' is build into nearly all other industries as well. After all, only the top 1% (or less!) of writers are ever published in the first place! But then, what percentage of football players make it to the NFL? Or to a top club league like Manchester United or the All Blacks (for those of you to whom 'football' involves a round ball and feet).

And far fewer than 1% of musicians are ever recorded. For which relief we should be duly grateful. Consider your typical elementary school talent show, if you doubt me on this one.

(Are you done wincing yet? OK, I'll go on...)

Only the top 1% of actors get any significant amount of work. The rest are waiters. Or carpenters. Or house-cleaners. Or...

In my own industry (software), there are solid studies showing that productivity and quality varies by two orders of magnitude between the best and worst professional programmers. (Yes, that really does mean a 100-times difference between best and worst -- not 100%, 100X!) And that doesn't count amateurs and students! But with the exception of the occasional winner at the "startup company casino" we don't see the top 1% of programmers making the majority of the money... unless, of course, we count all the people who program on the side while doing something else for a living. In which case, we can say with some confidence that the top 10% of programmers make 99% of the (programming) money. Is that a problem?

I assert that the prior examples are essentially similar to the programming example. I see no reason to believe that the distribution of income represents a significant problem.

My response to "How can we not wish for more individual voices to be allowed a moment in the sun, maybe even enough moments to grow into something fulfilling and worthwhile." is this: They can certainly write as much as they like. They can put their writing up on the Web; they can join writer's groups and get critiqued; they can pay to have their work printed at a vanity publisher. They can even submit to magazines, book publishers, etc., and be published in their turn if they are good enough (and, I suppose, lucky enough). But why should they have any call on my (or anyone's) tax dollars? Should we subsidize starving musicians? Football players? Basket-weavers? Investment bankers? Where does it stop?

Originally Posted by Moejoe

Where does that leave us and the publishing industry in the face of modern technologies? Well, for the writer, there is no better time to go it alone. Subsidisation may not be the end-all panacea the writer is looking for, but in coutnries that are favourable to taxtation for the arts, it maybe one method for the writer to survive. On the other hand, digital publishing by the sole author is more viable now than ever before. And it is this the lone author that will finally kill the publishing industry.

A writer does not have to set any fixed price, he has no major overheads to consider apart from hosting a website and the tools with which to produce the original work. Translations, as we've seen with Cory Doctorow's work, can be undertaken by eager and willing fans of the work. Editing can be done by the writer if he's so inclined, shared amongst 'alpha-testers' or outsourced to a more critical eye. The argument of quality derived from the series of hurdles a writer must go through in the traditional publishing industry is almost laughable when we look at the 'quality' of what is released by that same industry every day. The writer, alone, setting his own price, working at whatever pace he may wish, and in direct contact with the readers becomes his own publishing industry. This writer, savvy with P2P distribution, excited by what technology offers and working under his own profit incentives, cannot be beat by an industry that is still trying to fit an old business model into into the connected world. This new writer is free to write whatever fancy he likes without worry or fear of the bottom-line, he gives his writing away free and asks in return only the kindness of strangers to keep him going.

The future may not be subsidized, but it is more than likely to be gifted from reader to writer and back again. Maybe, in that future we'll see more rubbish, but we'll also discover diamonds and those diamonds, for us the readers, will cost less and less. In this model individual liberty and collective sharing becomes part and parcel of the way things are.

For me, the publishing industry is a dinosaur looking up into the sky as the comet approaches, a puzzled look upon its face.

This last chunk is true as far as it goes. But I note that even authors who have successfully used the "internet tip jar" are thrilled to place their work with a real publisher. (Anecdote: Sharon Lee & Steven Miller wrote two of their recent novels on-line for tip-jar payment while they were between publishers. It helped to keep a roof over their heads, and was a generally good thing. But they're still thrilled to have placed the books with Baen -- publication expected in 2010 sometime. And they'll make LOTS more money from the published versions than they did through the tip-jar. But I digress...)

Anyway, it's a lovely vision. I fear, however, that it will be a very long time before we see major authors "published" this way rather than through traditional publishing houses (or even semi-traditional ones like Baen). Fortunately, a free market leaves lots of room for lots of different business models. If the on-line, self-"published", crowd-sourced model really is better -- it'll win. And that will be just fine. If it isn't, it won't win. And that will be just fine too.

Thanks again for a well-written and well-argued post!

Xenophon

P.S. You wrote: "The argument of quality derived from the series of hurdles a writer must go through in the traditional publishing industry is almost laughable when we look at the 'quality' of what is released by that same industry every day."

Actually, if you dig into the slush-pile (at any publisher that still has one) you'll see that the argument of quality is, if anything, understated. The "quality" of writing demonstrated by the average submission really is that much worse than even the published dreck we see "released by that same industry every day." Metaphorically speaking, the average slush-pile submission makes the beginning musicians of my notional elementary-school talent show sound like the New York Philharmonic!