And the clock ticks down....
Jan. 15th, 2015 10:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
heliopausaFor 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 bysartorias about how she and 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.
And only a week or so back I was reading an essay by
sartorias about how she and 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.
