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The Writer of the Future

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Re: The Writer of the Future

#11

Post by sixtypoundhound »

The problem is the reader world is bifurcating. It is no longer viable to write "for the middle" of the audience.

The two profitable price-quality points are:

- Cheap content for the masses (lowest common denominator, ad supported)

- Deep content for the vested (at a high price point)

"The middle" graces you with:

- High cost to produce (research, depth, diction)

- Limited audience

- Zero willingness to pay

A writer demanding the world take them seriously is the last step on the way down.... performance begets entitlement, not the reverse. There are critical writers in the business world: those who write landing pages, build core content, drive desirable activity. They are often very well paid and - in the event they aren't - are frequently positioned to go out on their own as an independent publisher. It's the ones that write what in retrospect was the filler who tend to complain....

Re: The Writer of the Future

#12

Post by BookPost »

sixtypoundhound wrote: post #11

The problem is the reader world is bifurcating. It is no longer viable to write "for the middle" of the audience. The two profitable price-quality points are: - Cheap content for the masses (lowest common denominator, ad supported) - Deep content for the vested (at a high price point) "The middle" graces you with: - High cost to produce (research, depth, diction) - Limited audience - Zero willingness to pay A writer…

Book Post here. Thanks for giving us some thought! Agree, $45 subscription is a lift. Upside: Overhead is low & I don’t need a mass readership to make it work. The New York Review of Books and the New Yorker were built on an “aspirational” audience of people not necessarily seriously into books but wanting to keep up with culture in an approachable/manageable way. Would love to have enough readers to charge less. Isn’t there something between business reporting and “filler” that is a social good? Like, just because teachers don’t have the market leverage to earn millions, doesn’t mean we don’t want their salaries set at a level that attracts qualified people and makes the profession sustainable...

Re: The Writer of the Future

#13

Post by BookPost »

mirimir wrote: post #2

Interesting. But they want $45 for a one-year subscription to get book reviews. I have a hard time parsing that. Maybe if I were seriously into literary matters. Also, I can't see what forms of payment they accept, unless I provide an email address. Probably not Bitcoin, I'm guessing.

Book Post here! We need an email address because we're a newsletter. Process payments through Stripe. Thanks for having a look!

Re: The Writer of the Future

#14

Post by BookPost »

sramsay wrote: post #5
mirimir wrote: post #2

Interesting. But they want $45 for a one-year subscription to get book reviews. I have a hard time parsing that. Maybe if I were seriously into literary matters. Also, I can't see what forms of payment they accept, unless I provide an email address. Probably not Bitcoin, I'm guessing.

> Maybe if I were seriously into literary matters. Like the subscribers to the London Review of Books ($49 US / year), the New York Review of Books ($89 US / year), or the LA Review of Books? ($100 US / year for a quarterly , if I'm not mistaken). There are lots of people who are serious enough about books to pay these kinds of prices, and the price they're asking is around market (though maybe a little high for digi…

Book post here! I worked at the NY Review of Bks for 30 years. One thing we heard over & over is that the issues pile up and no one has time to read them. Trying to develop a model that fits into modern life, makes people feel plugged in, not guilty. Looking not to compete with the old lions but offer something different.

Re: The Writer of the Future

#15

Post by BookPost »

mirimir wrote: post #10
shantly wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah my point is just that 1) "information wants to be free" is an observation more than a statement of purpose, and 2) I don't think fighting against dirty ol' authors who are trying to charge for their work was on anyone's mind, more or less, when designing the technologies under the modern Web. The way things shook out was some combination of an accident and inevitable . I doubt many or any of them thought chargin…

Well, as an old-school "ideological informational-freedom anarchist", "information wants to be free" for me was always mostly about the Internet as a workaround against censorship, and domination via propaganda.

Book Post here! If you listen to the Lanier interview, or read his recent books, he spells out the connection between free internet and the advertising model. I’m not a tech person, but it was my experience that in the 90s there was very little support for building revenue models into how people receive digital information. Those who were betting on the digital economy and building the monopolies we have now understood that their earnings would come from monetizing user information. “Advertising” is a shorthand for this. If fighting against authors wasn’t on people’s mind when they were building the web, they weren’t thinking ahead. The outcome has been that there is no solid mechanism hitching revenue to those who generate intellectual property.

Re: The Writer of the Future

#16

Post by shantly »

BookPost wrote: post #15
mirimir wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, as an old-school "ideological informational-freedom anarchist", "information wants to be free" for me was always mostly about the Internet as a workaround against censorship, and domination via propaganda.

Book Post here! If you listen to the Lanier interview, or read his recent books, he spells out the connection between free internet and the advertising model. I’m not a tech person, but it was my experience that in the 90s there was very little support for building revenue models into how people receive digital information. Those who were betting on the digital economy and building the monopolies we have now understo…

> The outcome has been that there is no solid mechanism hitching revenue to those who generate intellectual property.

But how could there be? With 1985-2000 tech, and remembering how pretty much every DRM scheme so far's either failed miserably or been so invasive and flakey that it'd never have been accepted for mass media, and that even the failures have made "legitimate" products worse than their pirated counterparts. We have subscriptions—that hasn't helped much. We can very effectively gate off pages from those we don't want to see them.

It's not Information Freedom folks trying to stick it to those who want to charge money for writing any more than the record industry was trying to weaken the social value of semi-skilled music-playing family and friends. Both happened but that wasn't the point, it's just how things shook out.

I'm very open to arguments that either of those was bad and maybe even that their harm isn't made up for by the benefits the two technologies provide, but to whatever extent the Web is anti-author or anti-creator it's not some conspiracy (in the usual sense—I don't mean that as a slight) but just what it is. The printing press hurt some people. Recorded music hurt some people. Film and talkies hurt some people. I don't think anyone developing film audio recording & sync technology, or even those involved in its use, were much interested in harming a bunch of silent film actors per se, right? But how would you even develop that tech without doing so? You'd make it way different and much worse somehow, I guess, if it could be done at all. Same here.

Re: The Writer of the Future

#17

Post by BookPost »

shantly wrote: post #16
BookPost wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Book Post here! If you listen to the Lanier interview, or read his recent books, he spells out the connection between free internet and the advertising model. I’m not a tech person, but it was my experience that in the 90s there was very little support for building revenue models into how people receive digital information. Those who were betting on the digital economy and building the monopolies we have now understo…

> The outcome has been that there is no solid mechanism hitching revenue to those who generate intellectual property. But how could there be? With 1985-2000 tech, and remembering how pretty much every DRM scheme so far's either failed miserably or been so invasive and flakey that it'd never have been accepted for mass media, and that even the failures have made "legitimate" products worse than their pirated counterpa…

Thank you for your reply! I don’t mean to point fingers, just trying to look at the structure. The built-in incentives and pace of technological advance pushed digital communication toward consolidation and estrangement of revenues from creators. It looks from this side like, had Google and Facebook not developed an overwhelming advantage in the acquisition of user data, advertising would still be generating value for newsrooms and that would be going to writers. Had Amazon not used predatory pricing to undermine competition (bookstores) and merchants (publishers), Bezos might be less rich but we might have a competitive online retail market that returned more value to the source. It seems possible that an idealistic vision of the benefit of open communications might have clouded from view the dangers posed by hinging revenue to the collection of user data (the ease of spreading disinformation, the decoupling of revenue from content creation). Funding businesses and technologies that collected revenue (easily, unobtrusively) from users might have led to a more healthy, democratic, transparent digital environment. Not trying to look back and place blame, just understand causes and imagine a constructive future. Welcome a more informed understanding!

Re: The Writer of the Future

#18

Post by BookPost »

BookPost wrote: post #17
shantly wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The outcome has been that there is no solid mechanism hitching revenue to those who generate intellectual property. But how could there be? With 1985-2000 tech, and remembering how pretty much every DRM scheme so far's either failed miserably or been so invasive and flakey that it'd never have been accepted for mass media, and that even the failures have made "legitimate" products worse than their pirated counterpa…

Thank you for your reply! I don’t mean to point fingers, just trying to look at the structure. The built-in incentives and pace of technological advance pushed digital communication toward consolidation and estrangement of revenues from creators. It looks from this side like, had Google and Facebook not developed an overwhelming advantage in the acquisition of user data, advertising would still be generating value fo…

P. S. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/15/opinion/book-piracy.html
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