Quote:
Originally Posted by davidfor
@AngryD: I nearly didn't reply because, honestly, I think you made my point better than I could.
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I generally find that whenever someone says "You make my point," the precise opposite is true.
Some people preferred New Coke to Classic, too. It was still a financial and marketing failure. There's always one or two weirdos out there that are the exception to the rule, but when we're talking about commercial success, depending on one out of every ten writers to successfully leap into authorhood is production suicide. We have a small subset of fiction that will be well-done, engaging a tiny subset of the Kindle owning public, which is itself a subset of the eBook reader owning population, which is a marginal part of the book reading consumer population... these are not good odds for commercial viability.
Bookselling is ultimately a business. When, not if, the largest bookseller in the world can't make serialized print fiction work profitably, a few tiny websites on which 90% of the content is abandoned after a few months most likely won't be a factor. I mean, to be perfectly frank, those sites have existed for years and yet serialized print is not sweeping the world by storm.
As I stated, sales are already flagging on the world's largest print retailer. Vella is on life support and it's not even a year old-- a year in which a fabricated pandemic meant Americans consumed more electronic entertainment media than in the last five years COMBINED.
So... shrug. I made my points. Serialized print isn't going to completely disappear. There are going to be blogging sites as long as there are high school kids listening to "Cure" albums, Moms sharing their meatloaf recipes, and morons blaming the MMR vaccine for their son's ADD. Someone will write a serialized print story. Someone else will read it. Someone might even pay for it.
But it won't be me. And I honestly don't think it's going to be the majority of the eBook-reading population. I look forward to being proven wrong, but when we look back on this in five years, Amazon still won't have a damn clue how to organize eBooks on a Kindle, and electronic print serial fiction will be mostly a memory.
It'll be interesting to look back in a few years and see.