Internet Fear (by sarah)
I keep finding myself in the strange position of having to explain internet publishing, blogs and author popularity.
This is what I get for trying to get the lituary world to get their heads out of Edwardian Britian and into the real world with real market pressures and heaven forbid real people and concepts (though weather a concept is real is something that I am not going to tackle).
Last night I found myself definding the exictance of blogs, some of the people hadn't even known there were such things as blogs before I started and then onto stupidly innane comments about - but people could just copy it!
Well yes and they could just copy things from books too! I explained I would make all the copy write stuff obvious on the site etc... and therefore it would exactly like if the people were copying it from a book - 'but we wouldn't know if they copied it would we if its on the internet?' I pointed out that you wouldn't know if they copied it from a book and that they would still be breaching it.
Then to the fact some don't want to have their work on the internet as their collegues and family could find it - in which case as someone else pointed out it should go under a psudonim (I personally think if thats the case it probably shouldn't be published in a book!).
The I find myself arguing about things I know very little about really - I suppose that becuase of my science back ground I'm used to the concept that you write a paper to get academic aclaim or for people to notice you, your project or the institution in the hope that a) what ever it is you are doing will be furthured by this, b) new collaborations will be formed and c) you will at some unspecified date (being hopeful here) get funding to continue.
For me writing is about sharing information so that ideas perculate and grow and form new ideas, or purelly as self expression and craftmanship which I want people to read - I want views and feed back - I need that to keep writing the creative stuff other wise it stagnates and without an audience I think whats the point - now obviouslly I mix all the things up but I'm trying to make things simple here - maybe so that I can understand what I've just been arguing about.
For people who want to get their writing careers off the ground I found these attitudes peculiar - why should I put something up for people to read without getting anything for it - erm.... to get yourself known and read and maybe just maybe then people will want to read more of your stuff?
Now I did a bit of research into this for myself - being as I am also trying to launch a writing career (hence I've ended up making websites and starting blogs for writers) and all the reports say that peoples sales went up when they put free stuff, sometime the entire book they were selling, on their website.
We ourselves have copies of such books becuase we like reading books (and I get headaches trying to read bulk txt on screen), we have Tom Reynolds book and look how well thats done and you can just down load for free!
If people know your name they are far more likely to actually buy a book by you. Even in the 'paper' publishing world you are advised to get your name out there even if some of the early stuff is for peanuts or for free (ok thats not entirely true as there appears to be two schools of thought on this but from my personal noising, getting yourself noticed seems far more important than being anal about pennies).
The poor lady who wanted the site - it was such a good idea - but the negativity about the internet in general from the group was horrendous. I live immersed in a world of information sharing and computers so it was a bit sobering to see what middle aged, middle class britian actually thinks!
Sigh - rocks were so much more straight forward :/
Fri 13th Jul 2007 9:36 am 
Subscribe
By @ndy, Fri 13th Jul 2007 @ 2:05 pm
Hi,
I've seen this happen before (but in a different context). People will do anything to avoid saying "no" to something just because "they don't like it" or "don't understand it". The will invent a whole host of reasons why it's inferior and "wrong". Mostly their arguments are complete tripe and just serve to illustrate a lack of understanding of what they are arguing about.
Why can't people just say "I don't want to do it like that; there's no reason I just don't want to"?
By sarah, Fri 13th Jul 2007 @ 7:39 pm
I think also that part of the problem was that I am young and made them feel stupid - I'm being arrogant or anything but there were comments about being a compute boffin which were a bit snide in nature - also felt that some people weren't taking this coming from a 'girl' with the shrek backpack too well 🙁
They were definatly not liking it becuase its not conventionaly as well, not traditional, not what they know.
I think your right things would be a lot simpler if they were just honest.