Write a Book--Together

In "Is This the Future of the Digital Book?" in yesterday's New York Times, Brad Stone reported on a couple of new developments in the publishing world. The one that caught my eye as useful for vegans and the animal rights community is:

WEBook, a venture-backed start-up in New York, allows people to collaborate on writing books and is working on new ways to let readers give writers real-time feedback on their work.

Check out WEBook's site, where you can read and vote on the writing of others, become a top reviewer like at Amazon, and submit a book to be published.

There could be a popularity-contest element that might make fantastic writing, no matter how fantastic, not as frequently-reviewed or highly-rated. Regardless, you can use it to find contributors for your book idea, and if it doesn't win, you can publish and distribute it yourself.

It's 2009, and publishing is changing and the way new creative ideas of all kinds get to the public has changed, as well. Artists have many new avenues for reaching their potential audience and the only thing that is often in their way of proceeding down one of those new avenues is the idea that it's not a "real" accomplishment, book, film, or whatever, unless it was produced and distributed to the public the old fashioned way (by a major publisher, a major studio, etc...).

Though vegan cookbooks certainly have been doing well, vegan nonfiction books don't traditionally do as well (of course there are exceptions, such as the "bible of animal rights" by the "father of animal rights"). Perhaps a new format will help. And perhaps different genres like fiction and poetry that are vegan and/or animal rights-based might be worth a shot (I'm not saying no one has done it).

Check out Vegancrowd for some existing vegan work and ideas for projects. For me, I think blogging is close to its threshold of utility (and that's putting it kindly--I probably should have cut back a long time ago), but I'm sure you all have lots of ideas in you. Maybe getting together a writing a book might be worthwhile for you!

Comments

[Dan]

The real issue in publishing and the Internet is that we’ve gone from a publishing oligopoly (domination by relatively few big, powerful publishers [including university presses]) to a state with a combination of the old oligopoly with relatively close to perfect competition (market saturation by tens of thousands of individuals and small collectives) on the Net. The old oligopoly still has a lot of influence over the Net due to past familiarity, but has lost significant market share to the masses (the “market” being people’s reading time).

Due to the nature of the market, it is always going to be difficult to stand out from the crowd, especially if you’re not writing anything sensational, lewd, or ridiculous that attracts attention for the wrong reasons. As such, I agree that blogging is of somewhat limited utility, but I don’t see self-publishing as that much better. They both suffer from the same economic and marketing forces (and when successful, from the same economic forces).

If I were motivated by traffic or number of readers, I would never have started Unpopular Vegan Essays in the first place. When I decided on the blog’s name, the word “unpopular” was chosen because I knew (and still know) that it will be always be unpopular largely due to its content, not just among non-vegans, but among most vegans, also. It is only abolitionists, those who sympathize with abolition, or those who feel threatened by abolition, who would or do have any interest in my blog. Yes, I do get a lot of google hits on “Kohlberg’s stages”, “Hoffman’s empathy theory”, and “anti-animal rights”, but most people are probably horrified when they read the essays and never come back. :-)

That said, blogging and self-publishing is probably the most cost-effective way for us nobodies, us members of the poor huddled masses, us who don't have access to university presses, to get our voices heard (it beats leafleting, for example, and probably public library presentations).

[Bea Elliott]

Dispite "market trends", I happen to like "Unpopular Vegan Essays" very much. (thanks for writing Dan)

The VeganCrowd site looks like it has potential. Just needs some fleshing out... It would be nice if the fictional stories on/about veganism had links to the works...

But I'm skeptical about sites whose pull down menu lists nothing about veganism, animal rights, or even activism... as WEBooks is set up like. Many similar sites also don't list the basic "animals" or "pets" catagories. I usually know I'm in the wrong place if they don't include any reference to these issues.

But, that's me... and I'm no brilliant (or aspiring) author. I suppose though, for those who are, and who's topics fit the listed genre subjects - it might be a helpful site.

[Leafy]

Thanks for the mention. WEBook looks interesting, and of course I hope people will use VeganCrowd as a resource for collaborations.

I think there is still a place for blogging, especially with the rise in popularity of Twitter and its potential to connect bloggers to each other and to other potential collaborators.