Cafe Press, the purveyors of
much merchandise via many websites, are making the logical jump into
POD publishing. Read about it in
this posting. Interestingly enough, they are also doing POD style
“retail ready” CDs, complete with booklets and jewel cases. I think
this kind of stuff is positive. As I’ve written over and over, the
vast majority of music I’ve listened to in the last year or three is
not major label stuff. Much of it has been self-produced by the
musicians or a small musician run label.

There is consensus received wisdom that says that such material
published this way is, of course, crap. Yes, it’s true that
self-publishing produces howlers such as The Pleistocene
Redemption and such. OK, let’s accept that as fact. Now, does
standard big publishing produce 100% high quality books? Of course
not. I see a lot of unreadable shite coming from the big companies
(some of it sells very well despite being unreadable by me). A lot of
people seem to be very upset by even the notion. There seems to a big
buy-in for the “big machine” style of media, at least for books and
music. In movies, people understand that the economics mean that the
major studios put out a lot of least-common-denominator stuff and the
independent films take a lot of the chances and not coincidentally
have some of the best work. Somehow, though, that seems to be unheard
of in other media.

One of the best books I’ve read in the last few years was Lois
Tilton’s Written in Venom. It came out from Wildside,
a small press. I don’t know the publishing history story behind it,
but it definitely is not from the safe, Robert Jordan/Terry Brooks
style generic medieval fantasy. It is the story of Norse mythology
told from the viewpoint of Loki and it is a fabulous read. It didn’t
sell well, partly because it is out of the mainstream and not safely
the “same old thing (TM)”. I recommend highly that anyone who is at
all a fan of Norse mythology read this book. You can get it at Fictionwise
if you are willing to read it electronically (that’s how I did.) This
is not a “big machine” book, but it is wonderful. If Wildside hadn’t
published it and Lois had published it herself, it would have been
equally wonderful but it would have had the stink of “self-published”
and thus been suspect. Some writers have the sig line something like
“Thanks to the internet everyone can be a slush reader.” I think that
implication is horseshit, that everything that runs through the big
machine is automatically better than everything that doesn’t. I can
tell you that the big machine hasn’t done much for me lately to get me
music I want to listen to, to fill the FM airwaves with things I want
to hear, or give me good books. I’m finding ever more stuff of
relevance to me outside the machine. The vast majority of the
bookshelves I see are filled with stuff I can’t read more than a
paragraph of. I don’t think the machine should go away, but neither
does that mean that being outside the machine is a mark of Cain. Good
is good, and it can come from anywhere. I’m glad their are
alternatives to the machine and I’m taking advantage of the wherever I
can.