"There’s more music to hear now than ever before, but how do you find it? Where do you go? To whom do you speak and get recommendations from?"
I know I'll likely get dog-piled for saying it, but this applies equally to book publishing. It used to be said that 80 percent of the population firmly believed they had one in them to write, and thanks to Amazon et al. they're all now doing it. And publishing it. And a whole lot of it is either terrible, or (worse, in my educated opinion) desperately in need of a good professional editor. I know. I review them for a digital review magazine. And as you know but your followers likely don't, I've been editing and publishing books for 25 years.
I sometimes refer to it as "creative free-market libertarianism"—the firm belief, eagerly fostered by services like Kindle and the thousands of "support services" that have sprung up to feed off the gravy train, that everyone has the right to throw their work into the ring and let the reader/listener/art lover decide whether it's good or not. And now we have the AI services eagerly marketing themselves to those too lazy to do even that much.
Call me a crotchety curmudgeon, but it's frustrating. I have no objection whatever to self-publishing. Heck, when I first started my company I was accused of being a vanity publisher by no less a personage as Victoria Strauss. AFAIK, she still thinks so. This despite my spending hours editing and polishing and designing and formatting and marketing as much as I had time for, for each and every book I published. But the fact is thousands of potentially good writers are being ripped off because they have no clue what they're doing.
Okay, that's my rant for this week. I spend way too much time ranting these days when I should be editing chapters. 😉
You go right ahead complaining about the publishing industry. It needs a real overhaul. And it could stand to be broken back up into a bunch of smaller presses, not located in the most expensive city in America.
I blame the Internet for the lack of old-time culture less than I blame the marketing majors who constantly insinuate that anything more than 5 years old might as well be from the Ordovician. It really struck me a few years back while waiting for a movie to start: the theater was running one of those prepackaged slides that look more and more like overproduced Powerpoint decks, complete with music and movie trivia, and NOTHING in the whole thing was older than two years. I know they were just trying to package the latest things, but how the hell do you have a movie trivia game that assumes its audience has never seen a movie older than their underwear?
That incessant market of youth culture makes me nuts. Especially since these kids today, by and large, are happy to drink the Kool-Aid and are happy to be incurious and complacent.
Well, they’ve always been like that…until they’re given a reason to care. The marketing scum, though, WANT to keep them at that level. (I used to work in the same office building as the marketing firm The Richards Group, and while the phrase “So stupid that they trip on the carpet pattern” is usually a euphemism, it wasn’t with this group. Every damn day, they were the ones shoving to be the first on the elevator, then pushing to get off long before everyone else, and watching Richards Group drones then trip and fall as the elevator doors closed was one of my only workplace joys at that time, because it happened NEARLY EVERY DAMN DAY.)
"There’s more music to hear now than ever before, but how do you find it? Where do you go? To whom do you speak and get recommendations from?"
I know I'll likely get dog-piled for saying it, but this applies equally to book publishing. It used to be said that 80 percent of the population firmly believed they had one in them to write, and thanks to Amazon et al. they're all now doing it. And publishing it. And a whole lot of it is either terrible, or (worse, in my educated opinion) desperately in need of a good professional editor. I know. I review them for a digital review magazine. And as you know but your followers likely don't, I've been editing and publishing books for 25 years.
I sometimes refer to it as "creative free-market libertarianism"—the firm belief, eagerly fostered by services like Kindle and the thousands of "support services" that have sprung up to feed off the gravy train, that everyone has the right to throw their work into the ring and let the reader/listener/art lover decide whether it's good or not. And now we have the AI services eagerly marketing themselves to those too lazy to do even that much.
Call me a crotchety curmudgeon, but it's frustrating. I have no objection whatever to self-publishing. Heck, when I first started my company I was accused of being a vanity publisher by no less a personage as Victoria Strauss. AFAIK, she still thinks so. This despite my spending hours editing and polishing and designing and formatting and marketing as much as I had time for, for each and every book I published. But the fact is thousands of potentially good writers are being ripped off because they have no clue what they're doing.
Okay, that's my rant for this week. I spend way too much time ranting these days when I should be editing chapters. 😉
You go right ahead complaining about the publishing industry. It needs a real overhaul. And it could stand to be broken back up into a bunch of smaller presses, not located in the most expensive city in America.
I blame the Internet for the lack of old-time culture less than I blame the marketing majors who constantly insinuate that anything more than 5 years old might as well be from the Ordovician. It really struck me a few years back while waiting for a movie to start: the theater was running one of those prepackaged slides that look more and more like overproduced Powerpoint decks, complete with music and movie trivia, and NOTHING in the whole thing was older than two years. I know they were just trying to package the latest things, but how the hell do you have a movie trivia game that assumes its audience has never seen a movie older than their underwear?
That incessant market of youth culture makes me nuts. Especially since these kids today, by and large, are happy to drink the Kool-Aid and are happy to be incurious and complacent.
Well, they’ve always been like that…until they’re given a reason to care. The marketing scum, though, WANT to keep them at that level. (I used to work in the same office building as the marketing firm The Richards Group, and while the phrase “So stupid that they trip on the carpet pattern” is usually a euphemism, it wasn’t with this group. Every damn day, they were the ones shoving to be the first on the elevator, then pushing to get off long before everyone else, and watching Richards Group drones then trip and fall as the elevator doors closed was one of my only workplace joys at that time, because it happened NEARLY EVERY DAMN DAY.)