Day: December 8, 2008

Monday various

  • Last week saw a rough couple of days in the publishing world. Thankfully, we haven’t been quite so hard hit where I work, but the troubled economy has made things tough all over. I encourage you all to take John Scalzi‘s advice: buy more books! Or, y’know, zines… Every little bit helps.

  • Now probably isn’t a good time for publishers to start moving out of New York en masse. But generally speaking, I don’t know that it’s such a bad idea. Rents are probably much cheaper outside Manhattan, and there’s few reasons beyond tradition for New York to be the publishing capital of the United States. Then again, maybe that’s coming from the part of me that’s still not convinced this is where I want to live and work. But if you want to work in publishing, this is sort of the only town in game.

  • It’s nice to see someone is optimistic, if not necessarily about publishing or bookselling, then certainly about the future of books in general:

    But I don’t see it that way. I think, on the contrary, we’ve reached a shining moment for this ancient technology. Publishers may or may not figure out how to make money again (it was never a good way to get rich), but their product has a chance for new life: as a physical object, and as an idea, and as a set of literary forms.

    This is something I’ve heard before — namely that the publishing industry’s woes stem largely from its abandonment of the midlist in favor of the blockbuster model, i.e. the occasional Harry Potter in favor of the 90+% of the list where the real money and good books come from.

  • An interesting take on why John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids is still relevant. Although I take issue with the BBC’s contention that “Horrorphiles may trace the zombie lineage back to Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend…” — given that the creatures in the book are vampires, not zombies, and that zombie lineage goes back considerably further. [via]

  • I didn’t think it needed to be said, but: Amanda Palmer is not fat. And hey, so what if she was?

  • “It’s quite hard to get embarrassed with art as you let people see whatever you want them to see.” – Dave Gibbons

Dollhouse of cards

There is so much wrong with this Sci-Fi Wire article that it’s not even funny. Are they seriously quoting anonymous and random YouTube users as a credible source of information? But that sort of thing is pretty much par for the course with Sci-Fi Wire lately. What used to be a halfway decent (if not exactly cutting-edge) source for genre news is turning into another annoying io9-like blog. Which is not to rag unduly on io9, which has its share of good points and good posts. I just think Neil Gaiman wasn’t wrong when he said that each of its articles read “like someone was assigned it, and sort of blogged it out in a bit of a hurry without any research or real thought.” That might be the popular model right now, but it’s not really a good model to use.

I also think it’s maybe worth noting that the last Whedon project to be hyped as much as Dollhouse was Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and that succeeded like gangbusters. And before that, Wonder Woman — which Joss had in development for a long while, and which internet hype had pegged as the second coming — fizzled out.

So don’t believe the hype. I don’t know if the new show will succeed, or even if it will deserve to. But it’s better to wait and see than trust to the judgment of anonymous YouTube users. (Who saw the same trailer as the rest of us.) Whedon and company have earned that much, don’t you think?