heliopausa: (Default)
[personal profile] heliopausa
For the Athena's Daughters 2 Kickstarter.      It's been really interesting watching from a distance how it works.  (The video, for starters!  Amazing!)

And only a week or so back I was reading an essay  by [personal profile] sartorias about how she and [personal profile] rachelmanija went the self-publishing route for their latest book, Hostage, and the reasons for a shift from publishing through the big companies.
It occurred to me that what's going on is actually a rolling back of a publishing model which began more or less with the Industrial Revolution.  Before that (very open to correction on this - this is idle thought, not actual research speaking!) poets and theorists self-published slim pamphlets, or else publishers asked for a list of subscribers before they'd take a risk on setting up larger books, or else writers could find one major patron (who then might renege on the deal, as in described in Samuel Johnson's famous letter to Lord Chesterfield )  but then, round about Jane Austen, authors found themselves not waiting on subscribers or patrons, but on approval from publishers, before the works hit the presses.

I guess it was to do with technology?  As printing presses became larger, the industry became more capital-intensive, and the decisions were made more deliberately in terms of the return on capital alone, by those whose capital was tied up in the presses?   Wiser insights gladly welcomed.


*I tried to make the links using <username=  >, but it didn't work.  :(  Insights welcomed there, too, as to what I'm doing wrong.

late addition: thanks to wise advice over on LJ, I have now conquered how to do neat links, though I still don't exactly know what I'm doing.

Date: 2015-01-15 01:15 am (UTC)
rthstewart: (Default)
From: [personal profile] rthstewart
Thank you for your kind support! I really appreciate it. I find what happened with 50 Shades of Gray really interesting from a business publishing model. EL James wrote the fan fic, got zillions of readers and then, I believe took it down from the Pit of Voles and put it behind a paywall and then changed the names, cleaned it up a little and self-published and then was eventually picked up by a publisher. It's a very interesting turn on how someone took control of her own story.

Date: 2015-01-15 01:33 am (UTC)
pulchritude: (2)
From: [personal profile] pulchritude
Try <user name="">?
Edited Date: 2015-01-15 01:34 am (UTC)

Date: 2015-01-15 01:42 am (UTC)
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
From: [personal profile] edenfalling
<user name="namegoeshere"> The space is important!

Also, if the person is on another site, you can do <user name="namegoeshere" site="site.com"> -- again, the spaces are important, and you'd use .com or .org or whatever the actual address of the site in question is. No www is necessary. (This won't work for all sites, but I know LJ, Tumblr, AO3, Twitter, and probably also Facebook and Deviantart are supported that way. There may be a FAQ somewhere with a complete list.)
Edited Date: 2015-01-15 01:44 am (UTC)

Date: 2015-01-15 01:54 am (UTC)
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
From: [personal profile] edenfalling
Hmm.

[personal profile] sartorias [livejournal.com profile] sartorias

[personal profile] rachelmanija [livejournal.com profile] rachelmanija

It's working for me, so... are you using rich text or basic html as your posting interface? That might have something to do with it.

Date: 2015-01-15 03:01 am (UTC)
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
From: [personal profile] edenfalling
Alas, I don't know remotely enough about programming to say. :-(

Date: 2015-01-15 02:26 am (UTC)
transposable_element: (Default)
From: [personal profile] transposable_element
So, on the topic of publishers, I suspect the phenomenon you're describing has to do with the rise of the novel, or perhaps the rise of literacy, an increase in the number of people writing as well as reading. Presumably this would be intertwined with technological developments as well. I'm just talking out of my hat, here, mind you!

Date: 2015-01-18 12:11 am (UTC)
kerrypolka: Contemporary Lois Lane with cellphone (Default)
From: [personal profile] kerrypolka
I know very little about the history of publishing and its changes, but I do remember the first time I heard about subscription-based publishing (on a historical pub tour of London a year or two ago) and thinking "Gosh, that sounds like Kickstarter!"

Date: 2015-01-24 10:30 am (UTC)
sally_maria: Dreamsheep with Luthien's badge (Dreamsheep Luthien)
From: [personal profile] sally_maria
Sorry to butt in, but I was having a look at your recent entries and hoped I might be able to help.

When ever I'm not sure about the DW and LJ codes for links, I've found this page which lists the codes to be a very useful reference.

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