I have written about this issue many times on my blog and will link to your insightful words. I agree that the publishing industry, like the auto industry, wasn't looking ahead. However, there is also, among many readers, a nostalgic clinging to the "bookstore model." I enjoy books too, but I think it's time to accept that for those of us who prefer pages between covers, POD is the only cost-effective model.
As for literary journals, I have long believed that online publications saved short fiction and poetry and created an interest among younger readers. However, it has brought up the issue of pay. Many new writers today also have a day job, everything from teaching writing to law to engineering. But I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. Often this adds a dimension missing in the work of those more cloistered writers who write all day and sometimes, I feel, lose their sense of what the rest of world finds interesting.
I'm new to Narrative, but so appreciate what you are doing to help writers' works get read. I also understand that times are different and require new imagination and creativity to know how to best get the written art to readers . . . so go ahead on.
I think we will always need stories, or narratives, to enlighten, divert, and even soothe us in difficult, changing times; so kudos for making those stories more available in such variety. For those who don't read to obtain narratives, there are movies, and movies are frequently built on text narratives. Even if movies distort the original text (Benjamin Button, Brokeback Mountain) they often convert viewers into book purchasers (which helps publishing), and even if they don't, they make the economics of literature more viable. Movie-going is up, just as it was in the Depression, which means there will be a ongoing need for narratives to be filmed.
I'm taking your Editors' Note out into the community when I talk about the importance of literature and publishing. It is a gracious telling of the truth of change and is as inspiring to read as the poems and stories within Narrative.
Here I am, a professional writer with more than thirty years experience in print journalism (Good Housekeeping, San Francisco Chronicle, Oakland Tribune), and I'm well into what I call early late middle age. I should be throwing up my hands in despair at this fast-paced e-world we find ourselves in. I should retire. I should take up golf. I should forget about getting my voice heard in this noisy, confusing new literary marketplace.
Instead -- I'm starting a blog. And I’m finding out that it's a blast. It's a kick. It is totally fun. I can take a photo sitting at my desk, upload it into my computer and have it on my blog in minutes. I can read something over breakfast that Laurie Goodstein has written about Muslim women in the New York Times, and I can write a post and link it to Laurie's article before my tea has cooled.
Best of all, I can write, really write on this blog of mine. I find I am not second-guessing what an editor might think of my writing, or what an editor thinks a reader might think of my writing. I can write directly to my readers, in my own voice.
Of course, I’m giving it all away free for the time being. And that worries me. Artists and writers have the right to be paid for their work. Just how this will happen now that Gutenberg has been superseded by Silicon Valley – well, I’m counting on you, Tom and Carol, to lead the way.
I have written about this issue many times on my blog and will link to your insightful words. I agree that the publishing industry, like the auto industry, wasn't looking ahead. However, there is also, among many readers, a nostalgic clinging to the "bookstore model." I enjoy books too, but I think it's time to accept that for those of us who prefer pages between covers, POD is the only cost-effective model.
As for literary journals, I have long believed that online publications saved short fiction and poetry and created an interest among younger readers. However, it has brought up the issue of pay. Many new writers today also have a day job, everything from teaching writing to law to engineering. But I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. Often this adds a dimension missing in the work of those more cloistered writers who write all day and sometimes, I feel, lose their sense of what the rest of world finds interesting.
I'm new to Narrative, but so appreciate what you are doing to help writers' works get read. I also understand that times are different and require new imagination and creativity to know how to best get the written art to readers . . . so go ahead on.
I think we will always need stories, or narratives, to enlighten, divert, and even soothe us in difficult, changing times; so kudos for making those stories more available in such variety. For those who don't read to obtain narratives, there are movies, and movies are frequently built on text narratives. Even if movies distort the original text (Benjamin Button, Brokeback Mountain) they often convert viewers into book purchasers (which helps publishing), and even if they don't, they make the economics of literature more viable. Movie-going is up, just as it was in the Depression, which means there will be a ongoing need for narratives to be filmed.
I'm taking your Editors' Note out into the community when I talk about the importance of literature and publishing. It is a gracious telling of the truth of change and is as inspiring to read as the poems and stories within Narrative.
Here I am, a professional writer with more than thirty years experience in print journalism (Good Housekeeping, San Francisco Chronicle, Oakland Tribune), and I'm well into what I call early late middle age. I should be throwing up my hands in despair at this fast-paced e-world we find ourselves in. I should retire. I should take up golf. I should forget about getting my voice heard in this noisy, confusing new literary marketplace.
Instead -- I'm starting a blog. And I’m finding out that it's a blast. It's a kick. It is totally fun. I can take a photo sitting at my desk, upload it into my computer and have it on my blog in minutes. I can read something over breakfast that Laurie Goodstein has written about Muslim women in the New York Times, and I can write a post and link it to Laurie's article before my tea has cooled.
Best of all, I can write, really write on this blog of mine. I find I am not second-guessing what an editor might think of my writing, or what an editor thinks a reader might think of my writing. I can write directly to my readers, in my own voice.
Of course, I’m giving it all away free for the time being. And that worries me. Artists and writers have the right to be paid for their work. Just how this will happen now that Gutenberg has been superseded by Silicon Valley – well, I’m counting on you, Tom and Carol, to lead the way.