Features

On Facebook, Writer Beware linked to this thought-provoking, and pretty depressing, article about ereaders.

The New York Times recently calculated that the environmental impact of a single e-reader—factoring in the use of minerals, water, and fossil fuels along the manufacturing process—is roughly the same as fifty books. At first that sounds encouraging; after all, even the smallest personal library contains fifty volumes. But the real problems come in lifespan. At present, the average e-reader is used less than two years before it is replaced. That means that the nearly ten million e-readers expected to be in use by next

Dan Holloway wrote a very interesting piece questioning the ‘success’ of indie authors. I have a lot of respect and affection for Dan’s work, but he left me scratching my head at one point. For a start, I’m not really sure what ‘indie’ writer means. Nor am I convinced by his distinction between ‘mainstream’ and ‘edgy’.

The concepts of ‘underground’ or ‘counter culture’ or even ‘alternative’ don’t really apply today – there are just various levels of distribution. To quote from Mark Fisher – ‘alternative and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather they are styles, in fact […]

I’ve held off on writing about the Jacqueline Howett discussion because I didn’t want to add to the pile-on.  She didn’t really need the extra attention.  But with Neil Gaiman also getting into the act, what’s another blog entry?  If you don’t know the story – book reviewer posts courteous, but not entirely positive, review of a book.  Author flips out.  Post and comments go extremely viral.

There’s no doubt that her behavior is frustrating.  She makes self-publishers look bad because people can point and say: Look, self-publishers write terrible books!  They’re unhinged! Actually, this reaction doesn’t make much […]

Remember the excitement of 2009? It was land-grab time, frontier-building, territory-staking. It was the year of a thousand disturbingly colonial metaphors. The indies were coming. It was “our” time.

Fast forward to 2011 and already the stories are hitting the news. Indie authors are on the bestsellers lists, indies are crossing over from self-published ebooks to mainstream deals. The digital war has been fought, the armistice signed, and we won.

But hang on. “We” won? Who’s we?

It’s my contention that what we have here is a classic semantic slippage, and it’s one we should have seen coming (no one […]