Annalee Newitz 🍜Dec 10, 2022
Internet evolution:
Usenet: find your people! there are a few dozen of them on rec.arts.funny!
Listservs: find your people! there are 100 of them on this obscure list devoted to Marxist cultural criticism!
Blogs: find your people! each time one of them visits your site, your counter will increment! look! it has reached four digits!
Social media: find your people! there are several million strangers who are calling you names!
Post-social media: find your people! there are several dozen of them!
Show threadDan HonDec 10, 2022
@annaleen who needs more than a dunbar's worth of their people anyway
Show threadDerek Powazek 🐐Dec 10, 2022
@danhon @annaleen Anyone with anything to sell, for a start.
Show threadAnnalee Newitz 🍜Dec 10, 2022
@fraying @danhon it's true. the loss of social media is very tough for me as an author. Twitter was a reliable way to get the word out about new books. TikTok is nice, but unless you go viral it's unhelpful. And even if you DO go viral, it may not help get the word out to people who care about nerdy scifi books. :)
Show threadDoc Edward Morbius ⭕​Dec 10, 2022

@annaleen The history of book marketing (and financing and production) is its own fascinating little story.

Many of the popular magazines of the ~1880s -- 1950s were effectively book catalogues / showrooms, many offered by publishers themselves.

With the rise of radio and television, magazines became market-segmentation tools for identifying market segments (news, business/management, various hobbies and later fandoms, homemakers / families, etc.), roughly 1960s -- 1990s.

The rise of the Internet killed both models pretty effectively.

Hamilton Holt's "Commercialism and Journalism" (1909) is a fave of mine, covering part of this story (mostly news journalism, dailies, weeklies, and monthlies): https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft

@fraying @danhon

Commercialism and journalism : Holt, Hamilton, 1872-1951 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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Internet Archive
Show threadDerek Powazek 🐐
@dredmorbius @annaleen @danhon I love this - thank you. We think of community as somehow separate from commerce, but that's ahistorical and idealistic. The two have always been intertwined.
Dec 10, 2022 at 4:32pmWeb
Show threadDoc Edward Morbius ⭕​Dec 11, 2022

@fraying And there's nothing authors talk about so much amongst themselves as the writing bizness itself.

There's a collection of letters I'm vaguely aware of involving Leo Tolstoy talking of Charles Dickens's apparently novel practice of serialising his novels in magazines. That's part of the financing / production bit I was alluding to above, though I left it out of that toot.

(I'm not sure where this appears, though if it rings a bell with anyone I'd hugely appreciate a pointer.)

And of course the Golden Age of the American Short Story existed mostly to sell cigarettes and booze. Which were also consumed by the authors themselves, as an early instance of the circular economy ....

@annaleen @danhon

#LeoTolstoy #CharlesDickens #writing #authors #serialisatiion

Show threadJeri DanskyDec 11, 2022

@fraying @annaleen Community & commerce have long been intertwined in my mind: both physical & online communities.

I bought Annalee's Four Lost Cities after she came to Quarantine Book Club; that's one community. I've recommended Milk Barn products because you're part of my online community & I trust you.

Now Mastodon is becoming one of my communities, too. And while I don't buy much, I've already made 3 purchases from folks here.

I hope Mastodon can evolve to support all sorts of creators.