1. That the current model of publishing hasn’t killed the publishing industry yet, so there must not be anything wrong with it. While Eric Flint is good at recognizing a lot of the potential of computers and the web for the publishing industry, he is completely missing the boat here. In fact, his argument sounds very much like what the Detroit Auto Companies were arguing back in the 1960s… He even lays out the problems with the current model. We essentially have to pay the cost of printing two books for every book we buy because publishers over print books; the book stores often ignore the majority of their stock for the current best sellers (The most annoying thing in books is going into a book store and finding a book in a series where the earlier books are not on the shelf). Its 2009, any other industry that had such waste built into the system and such poor inventory control would have gone bankrupt years ago. Now it is killing many book stores… why go to Borders where I might find the book I want when I can go to Amazon where I know it will be.

2. Electronic Reading is growing slowly. I think it is easy to see that it is in fact growing quite rapidly. The numbers are currently still small, but if they continue growing at this pace for a decade I wouldn’t be surprised if by then most people who actually read didn’t read at least some of their books in electronic format.

3. Flint attacks the notion of the pyramid where only a select few will be published on paper by the big publishing houses and that few will read the unwashed, unedited mass of of material that is available from self/web published authors. To a certain extent, this I think might be true, but is it so different than the current model? Lets face it, 90% of what gets published stinks. The current publishing houses are not terribly good at guaging the tastes of the reading public (if they were better, most books would earn back their royalties). At most we are extending the pyramid further down than it already is. In some respects it could save the publishing industry a bundle; they can wait until an author starts to build buzz on the internet and then sweep in and give him or her a contract.

After reading, I realized that everything depended on Flint’s definition of success. If success is defined as producing a significant monetary return within 6 months, then yes, then Flint’s advice against self-publishing makes sense.

But many writers don’t define success that way. And younger writers don’t have time to wait for that “lucky break.”

The hidden assumption behind Flint’s point is that the time spent waiting on publication and a literary agent is a worthwhile investment. If a writer has to wait for a year or two, then yes, perhaps that investment will bring dividends. But I certainly don’t have confidence that the current publishing market would respond so quickly. I remember in the 1990s it sometimes took literary magazines 6 months to reject a short story!

So then the writer is faced with a choice: do you self-publish (and hope that smaller dividends will lead to larger dividends eventually) or withdraw from publishing altogether until a publisher is sagacious enough to want to publish your work?

The problem is that self-publishing doesn’t receive enough critical attention, but I expect that will change.

With regard to fan fiction and the Lev Grossman piece, I wrote about that elsewhere.