A web cartoon

H/T to http://ermurray.wordpress.com/tag/kirstin-zhang/

What writers are up against

Informative if somewhat depressing background piece on the publishing world in flux:

From bestseller to bust: is this the end of an author's life?  

(The Guardian) 

The credit crunch and the internet are making writing as a career harder than it has been for a generation. Robert McCrum talks to award-winning authors who are struggling to make ends meet.   

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/02/bestseller-novel-to-bust-author-life

Inasmuch as this site is an effort to look for solutions to problems of the sort, I thought the article worth linking here. The question behind this site: How can good writers put their tales before the public, with a good shot at making more than coffee money?

Of  course storytelling, the second oldest profession, is not going to die out, but it will need to adapt to a new and bizarre cultural landscape, where copyrights are not respected because 'information should be free,' where book publishing is turning into a legacy technology and, due to unrelated developments, people are not spending as freely as they did on luxuries like books.

Information, perhaps, should be free, but groceries are not, and that is the fork the writers are caught in. Anybody still unclear on why "may you live in interesting times" is a curse in Chinese?

To those who wait

The intended content hasn't shown up here yet, but it will. There is a difficulty. Posting short stories here vaporizes their first rights, and dilutes their value as reprints. Paper publishers, and e-book people too, are understandably not enthusiastic to try to sell stories that anyone can read on the Internet. Thus the question of whether to post any given story is a bit complicated. But, and it seems an inescapable question, how will I prove this site's concept without risking (win or lose) the royalties on what appears here?

Furthermore I have had only tepid responses lately when I have tried to drum up publicity for myself; too many people trying to do the same thing, I suppose. Still, I think my concept for this site is a good one. Check back in a while; I'll get it all worked out.

A positive development is getting this site excluded from archive engines, so that when a story is taken down from this site, it is (or should be) gone for good, so far as the Internet is concerned.  This is an important step toward preserving writers' stakes in the resale value of their work.

So we shall see what happens. The idea here is to offer high quality short fiction in a format that pays the writers and delights the readers, and ideally sparks a renaissance in short story fiction, a form now stifled by the shortage of good markets for good writers. Stay tuned.