I could post about Labor Day, except that all that comes to mind when I think Labor Day is the Red Army passing in front of the Politburo on Red Square.
Yes, I do realize that was the First of May – when Labor Day is celebrated in the rest of the world – not in the US.
In fact, the uncoupling of Labor Day from the rest of the world has always been, in my opinion, part of the genius of the US. That way Americans don’t need to associate Labor with the Politburo. They don’t even need to associate Labor Day with Organized Labor. And by and large, as time goes by, while making nods towards the achievements of organized labor, most Americans don’t.
More importantly, the US got to miss on the “joy” of labor day for the rest of us, which came in two parts. One was watching the organized parades to figure out who was in and who was out at the Kremlin. Okay, I suspect this was not a part of it for, say, the British. For the French? Probably, at least to some extent, because they had a large communist contingent who openly took orders from Moscow, and a massive socialist contingent, some of whom more or less openly took orders from Moscow. Who was in power in Moscow meant how likely you were to have the trains, the mail or the garbage collection strike on you. (No, you say? Portuguese went on strike against Reagan’s development of the neutron bomb, a Moscow objective, not a labor one.)
The second was waiting to see whether there were any shenanigans planned for the day. Things like attacks on the police/military headquarters were not out of consideration. Nor were riots and general “demonstrations” of Labor’s power. What power, you ask? The power to scare other people. That was about it. It was enough.
I’ll say right up front that I’m leery of unions because in the late twentieth century, in western countries, they were Moscow’s stooges in the cold war dynamic. However, I must qualify that by pointing out that I’m leery of all organized groups and that in Eastern countries the unions proved they were double edged weapons. Where would Poland be – or the whole Eastern block, or even us – without Lech Walesa?
But even their behavior in the west, in the cold war, does not stop me from honoring their achievements in dealing with the labor situation as it existed at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.
I could tell you – it is true, as far as I can tell from research (which is always iffy) – that the life even in most grimy industrial towns, with around the clock labor was better than life in rural hamlets. Why can I tell you that? Two reasons: people immigrated to the cities to do that labor. (Still do in countries stuck at that level.) And famines became rarer and rarer and eventually stopped altogether.
This does not mean that organized labor was unnecessary. In an era when laborers were unskilled, easily replaceable and after a while wholly dependent on their employer (farming is a skill. People born and raised in the city could not just go back and become tenant farmers, even if they wanted to. Not without learning first, and most of them had no resources to.) employers had all the choices. They could have pressured governments and kept their dominance over a labor force that became little more than feudal serfs. Individual workers could do nothing against employers. So it took organization and a group. The equation went something like this: each one of us is powerless against you. But all of us, together, are powerful.
Unfortunately people tend to take these lessons, and then try to apply them to everything. Kind of like the tale of the man with the hammer.
Lately, some science fiction fans, on being told all the things writers don’t have any control over, came up with the idea that it was time for a general strike or something.
Which brings me to my people and their situation.
First of all, let’s dispense with arguments over what we do and whether it is labor or not. I don’t know about you Tovarish (Yes, I’ve been reading The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress again, why?) but writing my books is closely akin to giving birth and I have it on good medical authority THAT was labor.
However, if we are labor, we are, at best, unorganized labor. And no, organizing us won’t work. To evoke TMIAHM again, this is no time for shoulder to shoulder.
While we don’t have to deal with air locks, etc, we do have to deal with other realities.
1- We’re as different from coal miners or steel workers as is possible to be. No? How not? If each of us labors for ten hours a day, our output will not be more or less the same quantity of usable product for more or less the same purpose.
This comes from the fact that we’re all educated – differently educated, mind you – and each of us writes differently. Our personality influences not just the quantity but the type of output.
You can’t negotiate a collective contract for product with such different audiences as Science Fiction and Romance. We won’t even go into non-fiction. How much should sex manual writers be paid in comparison to erotica? Is a two thousand word sex-tale the equivalent of a ten thousand word novella? Yeah…
2 – Not only would we continue writing for fun – while I’ve never heard of a coal miner or steel worker going to work for fun on their days off, or doing it obsessively after their paying job – but other people, now unpublished, would and do write for fun. So, if every published writer went on strike… Yes, you see it as well as I do. Publishers could buy from a bunch of newbies.
3 – Even supposing you could get every one to strike – and to have power, this would mean the bestsellers would need to strike, as well as the beginners – how are you going to enforce it? We’re not all in the same geographic area. Which of us is going to go tell Stephen King he’s being a fink, if he breaks strike? Who is going to travel to England and tell J. K. Rowling to down keyboard? More importantly, how do you know if someone broke it? Manuscripts in various stages are always in the pipe line. HOW can you tell who broke it and how?
4- aha! You say. We’ll do what the screen writers do. You can’t sell to the publishing industry without being a member of the union. Yeah? You and whose army? WHY would the publishers agree to this? See above. How are you going to make them? Strike? Right. Hollywood has the advantage over us of being geographically concentrated, not just as to management (which publishing still is) but as to labor. Also, producing movies is VISIBLE. Editing manuscripts is done in privacy.
5 – How are you going to eat while you strike? Writers organizations? Dears, they can’t even organize enough to get us health insurance. Most of them – even the largest – refuse to defend writers against such abuses as publishers bringing out in ebooks books first published in the seventies, when those rights weren’t even in the contract.
6-if publishers kicked us over, they could replace us wholesale. And I don’t even mean from the anglosphere. I’m living proof they could hire from all over the world. Need I remind you that in many countries 4k a year IS more than living wage? And people will be happy to get that for sit-down work?
Fortunately for us, there are other methods. We can be what we are – the ultimate loners – and work as unorganized labor to fight for our rights.
There is technology that allows us to tell the publishers, “Scr*w you guys, I’m going Indie.” Yeah, it’s in its infancy, it won’t support most of us, yet, but it’s already having an impact. And that means that for the first time we have some power on our side as well.
Every writer who can should at least have one or two Indie books, just to strengthen that transition, and to dip his/her toe in the pool and see what it’s like. Every writer should inform himself of this transition. (Most of us are. We’ve added three hours of intensive blog reading to our daily work, from what I heard at Worldcon.)
If you’re a writer and you’re not reading Kris Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith, The Passive Voice and a bunch of others, you should be.
Think of it this way: Organized labor worked, back in the day. But today, most industries are moving to become more like us – not cohesive; dispersed; employing highly skilled workers; many of them labors of love.
These are good things, but they also allow for a lot of abuses from those who hire said workers. Abuses that not only can’t be corrected, but in some cases will be made worse by old-style Organized Labor.
So, it’s up to us to show other industries how to work through this.
Unorganized Creators of Content – on the count of three, stand up and do your thing!
The Future Is Ours.
According To Hoyt 
One author (not saying who) talked about wanting to be paid based on the amount of work they did on their book (things like research, etc).
Even *if* it was a good idea, I wondered how the publishers would know how much work the author did.
Imagine the “paperwork” involved. [Wink]
Have a good Labor Day!
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Sarah, brilliant! Another brilliant essay! Now, for those of us who live under rocks (of which fact I’m daily, if not hourly reminded) would you consider posting a list of “Essential Blogs (with links) for the Aspiring Writer”? Please?
If dedicated reading of them takes several hours a day, how much more times would be taken by attempts to track them down (with no knowledge of names of authors or blogs, just a general, “they’re out there, find them” impetus).
Thanks!
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I move we adopt this in toto as the manifesto of the People’s Writer’s Liberation Front!!
Long live the revolution!!
Seriously, fantastic post. Linking it.
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Just put an “o” on the end of that “in toto” up there and I will claim I have stubby and spastic fingers.
And with that, I obviously need to proof my novel again.
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Fixed it for you. You do realize wireless keyboards do this? they particularly eat the second in double letters. I’ve started seing Al for All in trad published books…
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http://kriswrites.com/2011/08/31/the-business-rusch-unexpected-gold-in-self-help-books/
Lin, start here, or rather, having read MGC, go on to here.
Today’s situation brings back thoughts of “cottage labor” and “piece work.” Just not the same as a factory full of workers, but with the internet, we’re in much closer contact than our early counterparts, and we can create our own markets. From small, like Naked Reader Press, to Amazon.com. Or for the other sort of Art-and-crafters, Etsy.
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Try finding a reasonably priced copy of “A Worker in a Worker’s State” by Miklos Haraszti and Michael Wright (Amazon wants $70 for a new HB, but used can be gotten for $5) for an interesting exploration of how “piece works” (incidentally, that was the Czech title of the book) operate. Workers are forced to game the system and compete against co-workers to eke out a decent wage. I can imagine no reason it would be different for writers than it is for industrial machinists.
I was about to quote from the (single) review Amazon offers, but I discovered I wrote the review, so use the link: http://www.amazon.com/Worker-Workers-State-Miklos-Haraszti/dp/0876633076/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1315295192&sr=8-1
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That should be “on the count of ‘n’.” Your way is too oppressively lockstep. :)
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yep. You are correct!
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I’m commenting here because I was too lazy to blog about Labor Day. It is fascinating to see Labor from the point of view of someone raised in a more socialist society. I have a great respect for unions, and know all the stories about The Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the miners, the child labor practices, etc. Despite the Jimmy Hoffas of the lore.
But, I also know the world history that the wealthy and powerful will always try to find a way to enslave others. Most of the wealthy and powerful got that way because they’re greedy and selfish (even if they hang the Socialist or Community labels on themselves). Studies even show that the more a person acquires, the harder it is for them to give it away (why is that? I don’t know, I’m too busy giving stuff away faster than I earn it :-)
I agree with you that unions are a foolish idea for writers. We each sign a contract with our publisher, and we have the power to negotiate that contract (something that typical industrial laborers would not be able to do without a union). People who want a writer’s union don’t want to deal with the fact that the more powerful a publisher is, the worse the deal will be for the writer (they can not only replace most of us, then can do so ten times over, in the blink of an eye).
I just recently looked over one of my contracts and realized I signed away something I hadn’t meant to sign away. I was extremely annoyed (but at myself, not my publisher). I’ll never accidentally sign that right away again, though. Thankfully, epublishing now allows me to make a living at my writing without having to do so (yet, who knows what Amazon, Apple and B&N will add into their “agreements” when I’m not looking :-).
History says there will come a time when Apple, Amazon and B&N will look for a way to squeeze more profit out of my work for less effort on their part and more effort on mine. And, unless human beings evolve significantly before then, they will look at me as if I’m a leech when I protest. Such is the way of art and commerce.
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Kelly,
You’ve got to be young. And naive. I’d recommend you find some histories written more than about 60 years ago: you’ll find a very different perspective in them. In some cases it’s a lot more accurate.
Here’s how it actually worked historically. Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates did what every other corporate magnate before them did: they put their time, work, and money when they had it into something they believed in. In all three cases, they built companies on the strength of their product, and poured and immense amount of time and work into them. We know their names because other people wanted what they were making and selling.
Apple, Amazon and Microsoft became corporate behemoths because they sold things people wanted to buy.
Of course, they weren’t doing this out of the goodness of their hearts: everyone is greedy, and greed for money is the cleanest sort. I’ll take someone who wants my money over someone who claims to want something for “the good of the people” any day – that’s invariably a polite way of saying they want power.
The industrial barons of the late 19th century became immensely wealthy – but they improved the conditions of life for millions of people by making the stuff of luxury affordable. Coal and gas magnates brought much cleaner light to millions of homes. Railway magnates made it possible for anyone to travel what used to be impossible distances.
Communist dogma preaches what you’re talking about. Communist dogma also conveniently ignores that in the process Apple, Amazon and B&N have made your life better – AND they’ve improved the lives of any number of readers by giving them access to books they wouldn’t have been able to read before.
Hell, even the early strongmen got that way because they provided something other people wanted – they provided protection from the rest of a hostile world. If the rest of the group hadn’t wanted or needed that they’d never have accepted a strongman/chief (proof of which can be found in the tribal cultures with no chief, like the Australian aboriginal tribes. They were led, more or less, by the elders. They mostly didn’t have any pressure from external enemies, so they didn’t need protection from them. So no chiefs).
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Based on the content of your response, I *believe you* when you say you found Sarah’s experience with unions and socialism fascinating. Since you seem to have entirely missed the point of those experiences, I imagine you’ll continue to find them fascinating in the future. Someone who is considerably more optimistic than me, however, might hope that you’ll eventually go beyond staring at them in uncomprehending wonderment and graduate to considering them common-sense, instead.
Kate already covered much of this, but this sentence of yours is especially unnerving:
“Most of the wealthy and powerful got that way because they’re greedy and selfish”
I notice that you use the phrase “wealthy and powerful” in a single block, as though they are inseparable. It’s inarguable that you tried to use it as an automatic moral indictment. This usage misses two important points.
1) As noted by others, a lust for money and a lust for power are very different things. In point of fact, only a person with a lust for power is seeking to enslave others, since influence over others is usually how power is expressed. This has everything to do with why Communists, in Mao’s China, Lenin and later Stalin’s Russia, Che Guevara’s Cuba, and a dozen other places around the world, have caused far more enslavement and death than Capitalist societies ever have. (Recall that capitalism’s major involvement with slavery was merely fed by Africa, where rival tribes were fighting and enslaving each other long before the arrival of Europeans. It should be noted that these conflicts were ALSO primarily over power, not money.) If you wish to discuss the relative conditions of being a metaphorical slave… a wage-slave… under capitalism, and a member of the proletariat under communism, I advise you to take it up with the Ukrainians who starved to death under Stalin. Did communist figures eventually become wealthy, through redistributing wealth to themselves? Yes, but that was a side benefit, as far as they were concerned. It became a consideration once their lust for power had lead them high enough to do so.
2) “Greedy” and “selfish” is a totally nonsensical assessment of a person whose company produces, and shares, the kind of vast wealth that the corporate giants you mentioned do. You can haggle as much as you like over the price and conditions associated with the labor for a corporation’s products, but without the capitalist entrepreneurship that drove those corporations, people would have instead received the fruits of communism… an equal share in nothing. Though you may find this difficult to believe, for all the horror stories that came out of industrial America, the price paid for work is often better understood in the context of the overall price of the products produced, and the upper limits on the prices people were willing to pay for those products, than through ethos-soaked but myopic accounts of people living in corporate-owned housing furnished from the company store. Scoff all you like, but a skill, or a service, is still worth only as much as someone is willing to pay for it, regardless of how much prettier the world would be if it was worth more. The violation of that simple rule, through minimum wage laws and, yes, through years of rigorous union haggling, has destroyed potential jobs that were cheaper to simply automate and made American products more expensive.
This is not even getting into the ultimate transformation of unions into the job-destroying mobsters they eventually become. For evidence of that, I advise you to look at the way hundreds of high-paying technician’s jobs are actively being stonewalled… in this economy, no less… because unions have decided to throw a temper-tantrum over Boeing opening a plant in a right-to-work state (not an isolated case, by any means, but a topical one). Arguably, the US economy, the development and sale of products, and therefore ultimately the standard of living for the average American would have improved a great deal faster had not the unions and their political allies been elbow deep in the US economy, trying to “improve” it. Recall the cardinal rule of that counterbalances any corporation’s ability to squeeze people: the worse your working conditions, the easier it is for someone else to hire away workers, or at least (depending on the length of your contracts) utterly destroy your ability to expand, by finding places besides wages to cut costs. Bottom line, the industrial revolution, traditionally claimed as the ultimate justification for organized labor, was a bubble of corporate power that would almost certainly have popped whether unions existed or not. I note this as an argument against not only unions but the ideas behind unions, lest we agree that they are not a practical model for writers, yet continue to use these organizations as an example for our own behavior.
In any case, I’d consider it far more greedy and selfish, by that yardstick, for a person to refuse to develop their abilities enough to generate any substantial wealth over the course of their life. By allowing their talents to atrophy… and all too often, by becoming permanent wards of the state… they spend their entire lives living off of other people’s work. That they do this with a self-satisfied air is not enough to constitute moral defensibility, in my book, though perhaps your mileage varies.
As to your studies, without reading them I cannot, of course, know the validity of your claim. As a simplified counterargument, however, I will note that Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills discussed a subject I strongly suspect is related in one of the foundational papers of psychological science: the effect of severity of initiation on the perceived value of membership in a group. In brief, the paper demonstrates that people who work harder to gain admission to a group value the group more highly than people who do not. (this is one of the major hypotheses for explaining the popularity of hazing, by the way) Naturally, the group to which people were trying to gain membership was controlled for in this experiment. I would not feel it ungrounded, however, to postulate that since acquiring more pretty much universally requires *doing* more, that the additional work necessary to gain additional resources contributes to an added unwillingness to let it go. There is also this to consider… Bill Gates, because of the immense wealth his company has generated, will do far more giving away 0.1% of what he takes in, annually, then you or I will do giving away 100% of what we take in. Measuring charity only in terms of proportions is therefore a fool’s game, if a popular one among socialist politicians and envious citizens. By the way, giving away things faster than you earn them is no unique claim… the US government is run by like-minded individuals, and so far it’s lead to record unemployment and a credit downgrade. Infer from this my attitude towards that boast.
Moving on in your response, I’d like to point out that it is not, in fact, a natural law that ” the more powerful a publisher is, the worse the deal will be for the writer”. You note awareness of the fact that they can replace us but fail to observe its full significance. The important thing is that the people they would replace us with need not be either equally talented or equally experienced. As Sarah has noted repeatedly, publishers view the writing field as a marketing game rather than a writing game… they pick winners and losers based on ideology and brownnosing, not on merit. To return to our theme of a lust for power, publishers maneuver authors as interchangeable pawns… dehumanizing them as a matter of course. In the process of this power trip, as the blogs she referenced have demonstrated repeatedly, they have also come by the means to a great deal of money, which has not at all discouraged their addiction. The field is rife enough with this that e-publishing has become a referendum on crony capitalism (which, it must be underscored, has more in common with aristocracy than true capitalism) in publishing. It is the re-establishment of capitalistic principles, allowing writers the opportunity, limited though it may be, to translate their hard-earned experience and talent into money rather than subjecting themselves to selection pressures that are, at their very best, arbitrary.
As for what companies might add to their agreements to make our lives more difficult… the answer is, as little as possible, if they’re smart. Your dystopian view of how companies that enable e-publishing will act with the contracts demonstrates that, thankfully, they have a much clearer view of economy of scale than either you or traditional publishers. It makes no sense to institute the same kind of despotic regulations that the current publishers do when the whole reason that e-publishing companies make money off of indie publishers is that the deals are simple and relatively guileless. Their clients form a very wide pool of people from which to draw a few pennies each, all at a relatively small cost for management because, again, the rules are simple. More squeezing equals more management costs, a more limited pool of potential clients because the process will be more restrictive, and between these two factors, almost certainly a smaller profit. Combine that with the fact that the market has traditionally responded badly to DRM and to works published exclusively in proprietary reader formats, and you have the makings of an ongoing competition to attract more writers, not to squeeze the few you have harder.
Whatever history you happen to be referencing, the history you SHOULD be referencing is the track record of Zazzle and Cafepress. They take a little off the top of each sale, and allow anyone to try their luck selling a product on the open market. They could raise their prices or require minimum amounts for orders to increase the money made per customer, certainly, but that would make them less competitive. Instead, they turn a profit by making a few pennies off thousands of attempts at success and thousands of pennies off a few actual successes. That’s what adds up to maximal profit at minimal effort. Your projections more closely resemble the way the companies would act if their goal was to get maximal opportunity for mustache twirling with the minimum morality… a common fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless.
With that in mind, I grant that it’s entirely possible that the enablers of e-publishing will take no more than a distant interest in writers. But after decades of traditional publishers making a mockery of both, I daresay art and commerce will still fare far better with the e-publishers.
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Bill Gates and John Huntsman, Sr., both give away more money in a day than I have made my entire life, this doesn’t quite square with being greed, grasping parasites who want to hold a man down.
In point of fact, you’ve bought into the typical liberal logical fallacy — that if someone makes money they’re taking it away from someone else.
The reality is, there is no finite resource called “wealth.”
Wealth, in fact, is self multiplying. I noted this once before, elsewhere. There a few billionaires, as in I think four or five, at Microsoft, Gates included. Those men have a few dozen millionaires working for them. Those few dozen have hundreds of people making comfortable 6 figure salaries working for them. Those hundreds have thousands of people making decent 5 figure incomes working for THEM.
The uber-wealthy are in fact, a boon to us all, because through them, we all have jobs.
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Sarah,
Um, hate to say it, but you blew it this time. The ‘Americans‘ didn’t come up with the idea, and the original idea had nothing to do with the communists.
Labour Day is a Canadian Invention. It was borrowed by the Americans, who borrowed just about everything that they ever did that was any good. To quote:
It wasn’t a response to the Communists. Hell, in those days no one knew who the Communists were. Karl Marx was a little known, and very little respected political theorist, who most respectable people ignored.
Regards
Wayne
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I was talking about MY experience with labor day. In Europe it ABSOLUTELY had to do with communists. Sorry.
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Only after 1917. Before that it didn’t :)
Wayne
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Wayne,
While I’m older than dirt, I don’t remember labor day before the late 1970s MUCH LESS 1917. Now, I’m not saying my kids aren’t working on a time machine. I’m just saying it ain’t ready yet. And since this blog is about my FEELINGS about Labor Day and why I find it difficult to write about it, a fact complicated by a fan’s idea we should march on publishers shoulder to shoulder (sheesh, do you guys know what traffic is like in NYC publishing district) I fail to comprehend what the historical retrospective has to do with it. Honestly, if you say it started in Canada, I believe you. (Shrug.) Why not. Canada has done much sillier things. (I’ve heard rumors of maple beer, for instance.) Since I don’t intend to write about Labor Day as a subject, I really don’t care to fact check you. At any rate that has nothing to do with what it had become in Europe, in the seventies, as the cold war was rolling roughshod over people.
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Wasn’t that your kids on last night’s Doctor Who?
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Wayne,
Did you read for content? She’s not discussing Labor Day, per se, but using it as a metaphor for the idea of organized labor in the publishing industry — an idea about as stupid as arguing over the origin of labor day as it relates to communism.
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Patrick,
Didn’t you read for sarcasm? Didn’t you get the impression that I’m a flat our Canadian Nationalist, who thinks that George Washington should have been hung for the traitor he was, and that the U.S.A. should make up the southern ten Canadian provinces?
I mentioned that concept when I was in some meetings in Washington about seven-eight years ago. The sputters around the table were amusing. I suspect at least one laptop keyboard ended up getting replaced.
Funny thing was that I made sales out of that meeting. Every single attendee remembered me, and all of them talked to me for years after that. I’m still in touch with some of them, even though I’m no longer working in the industry.
That’s me.
Wayne
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Sarcasm or not — and I have another word for it — it still didn’t address the content of the original post. Yay for you being Canadian and proud of it. I’m a proud Texan and all that means and figure we’re only letting Washington think we’re part of the Union. And no, I don’t mean THAT kind of union.
Maybe instead of trying to show how clever you are, you could address the actual post. It would certainly lead the rest of us to take you more seriously than you telling Sarah she “blew it this time”.
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And I’m a proud Kansan who thinks half of Colorado including Denver should still belong to us. Yay for you, what do you want? A cookie?
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What’s to address? Sarah is 100% right. One of Hollywood’s biggest problems is what I call ‘Production by Committee’. Look at how horribly they’ve butchered Conan every time they’ve tried to do it. Look at what they did to the fantastic British TV series Life on Mars. Look at what they did to ‘The Prisoner’.
Or if you value your sanity, don’t look. They wanted to make a horse, and ended up with a cross between an elephant, a camel, and a killer whale. And then they wonder why crowds stay away in droves.
Mind they do produce some good stuff, usually when a strong personality like James Cameron manages to take hold. But that is all too rare.
This is why our video collection is heavily biased towards Canadian and British productions. You get a hell of a lot better quality because it isn’t made by committee.
Wayne
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Patrick – before you gripe over much about Kansas losing Colorado, recall that the original land grants for Virginia and NC (and I suspect the majority of the original colonies/states) extended to the Pacific ocean, so to this Tarheel (and native born Hillbilly West Virginian,) y’all in Kansas are occupying stolen property.
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About unions: as noted above, I am a native of West Virginia and know the sordid history of “company towns” and the role of unions in fighting that evil. I also recall the corruption of the U.M.W. and their murders of dissidents in the 70’s (Joseph Yablonski, e.g.) and since. I am also beneficiary of the “selfishness and greed” of a grandfather who risked life and safety packing goods into those mining camps because he could undersell the coal companies and still make a good profit.
Anybody who thinks “greed & selfishness” can be eliminated from human affairs has been reading too much fantasy.
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Wayne, if Sarah is 100% right, why in the world did you feel — sarcasm or not — that you needed to tell her she “blew it this time”? And don’t get me started on the “good” and “bad” that comes from Canada and the U.K. v. what comes out of Hollywood. Or we might start having to discuss things like the government telling publishers what companies they “ought” to sell their e-books through, etc., and, since this is Sarah’s blog and not mine, I won’t go there.
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Another datapoint
Even if you are not a portal fan, you have to admit, that is impressive for a fan film.
If ordinary joes are producing stuff of this quality, how long before the first true genuine indie blockbuster hits? (And I mean REAL blockbuster, not just gimmicky found-footage shaky cam stuff.)
At that point, EVERYONE will get in the game, and that’s the end of Hollywood.
Well, as writers, we don’t even have to do Special FX or costume designs! It’s just words and we have the perfect medium for words. I’m already looking into embedded flash illustrations for e-books. We have MORE versatility. Not less.
Our breakthrough should be even easier.
Someone, right now, is writing the next HP and it will be indie and online.
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Oh, and for the moment, I’ll admit, this feels more like an audition tape than a true indie movement.
But at some time, the indie artist will have someone slide a check across the table to him/her, and they will just slide it back.
THAT will be the moment we know it has truly arrived.
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Forget embedded Flash illustrations, no matter what Adobe would like you to believe Flash is on the way out, HTML 5 has way more power and flexibility and I’ve seen some interesting things that can be done with it.
(Plus, Apple and Google both would like to break Adobe’s strangle hold on content creation. As a guy who was forced to go from QuarkXPress which did one thing, newspaper design, very very well, to Adobe InDesign which has some neat features but in which common tasks I used to do with a key stroke now take two key strokes and three mouse button pushes, I’d love to see them succeed. Everyone’s moving to Adobe CS because they’ve got a lock on most of the markets, rather like the publishers?)
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