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123 sats \ 5 replies \ @Scoresby 17h \ on: UnPhiltered Chaper 9 - Becoming Hemingway the_stacker_muse
The literary agent thing has always seemed like a scam to me. Traditional "Publishing" (especially novels) is apparently a world where you have to pay someone who is friends with a publisher to tell them about your book. The whole thing feels icky. And also: don't we have the internet and half the world with pocket devices that can display text? If ever there was an industry that needs to burn to ashes, traditional publishing sure feels like it.
Being able to say you wrote a 2000 words a day while cleaning toilets at a hostel in Morocco sounds like time well spent.
Even in the days of paper manuscripts, publishers didn't want to pay slush readers, so agencies sprung up to do the job.
Problem is, they take money from authors and make the process of passing the gatekeeper unbearably painful. Tbh, I think the industry will wither.
As much as I dislike legacy publishing and media, it is still filled with skilled professionals whose job it is to gatekeep the world of books. That is still necessary to my mind, especially in a world of AI content.
Really though, I think the industry will break apart and decentralize from now on.
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I think a publishing collective of freelancers (or even AI assisted elements) which is genre specific.
Author pays for production but is not the product. The publisher has a vested interest in seeing the book succeed. Thiscurrently works well for non-fiction, but fiction is a tough nut to crack. With non-fiction, your aims might be qualitative (conference speeches, new clients, magazine feature), not just sales.
I think marketing will get way more complicated, and writers will need most help there. Still, it can be daunting prospect for fiction writers spending thousands with little guarantee of return. Maybe creative crowdfunding provides another option.
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That sounds good, but I wonder how you'd prevent the collective from morphing over time into just the old publishing companies, especially as they become bigger, more mainstream, more commercially driven, etc.
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Yes, you are right. In publushing, you trade sovereignty for reach. The bigger you want to grow, the more centralized systems you need.
Hopefully, we will see ecosystems like nostr thrive and develop. Audience growth and monetization might look different there.
However, with books taking a colossal effort to bring to market, it's likely authors will still benefit from companies and systems to help with discoverability.
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