4 ms·

This is an article about rejections though, and my point is the slush pile is a very low quality source of rejection. It tells you very little about why you wer

This is an article about rejections though, and my point is the slush pile is a very low quality source of rejection. It tells you very little about why you were rejected and what you can do to improve. If you succeed via the slush, that's great, but if you don't, you're likely not getting much, if any, actionable feedback. This is where self-publishing shines, because you can get substantive and immediate feedback from a real audience, even if that audience is small.

projectramo 10y ago
Interesting. You know it strikes me that the idea of having one review and pushing out an unchanging copy is a pre-digital idea. We should be able to indefinitely change the works we have out. In the future we will have arguments like: "Did you enjoy Snow Crash?" "I liked the 1998 version, it was so well written." "Nah, I liked the 2016 version when he updated it so it reflected cell phones." "You're both wrong, the 2005 version was the sweet spot!"
- verisimilidude 10y ago
  This already happens to some extent with textbooks, movies, and especially video games. So it's not a huge stretch to imagine the same iterative trends more broadly in written works. I think it's fine as long as all released revisions remain available.
  - projectramo 10y ago
    I think you would have to have a company hold the IP instead of the author in the first place. I'm thinking of shared world books like Forgotten Realms where various authors write in the same world. Now if they didn't retain the rights to the work itself, you could have other people rewrite it too.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Since you use Snow Crash as an example, I'd suggest Neuromancer as an example instead, because of its first line: > The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. It's a fascinating question if Gibson would update it if he could. Particularly in light of experiments like Agrippa [1] It's a fascinating line because of the combination of how quick the change was and how it hasn't become outdated on the surface (yet), but is more insidiously changing the interpretation. (P.S., nobody suggest this to George Lucas...) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_(A_Book_of_the_Dead) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_(A_Book_of_the_Dead)
  - projectramo 10y ago
    Are you aware that Neil Gaiman, in Neverwhere, used the line: "The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." In response to Gibson, of course. But it is also interesting that the author themselves needn't be the one to revise the work. We already do this in a lighter sense when various editors produce various editions of a book by a writer. It would be interesting if we, essentially, exploded IP claims on characters and let people publish their fan fiction.

projectramo 10y ago

Interesting. You know it strikes me that the idea of having one review and pushing out an unchanging copy is a pre-digital idea. We should be able to indefinitely change the works we have out. In the future we will have arguments like: "Did you enjoy Snow Crash?" "I liked the 1998 version, it was so well written." "Nah, I liked the 2016 version when he updated it so it reflected cell phones." "You're both wrong, the 2005 version was the sweet spot!"

verisimilidude 10y ago
This already happens to some extent with textbooks, movies, and especially video games. So it's not a huge stretch to imagine the same iterative trends more broadly in written works. I think it's fine as long as all released revisions remain available.
- projectramo 10y ago
  I think you would have to have a company hold the IP instead of the author in the first place. I'm thinking of shared world books like Forgotten Realms where various authors write in the same world. Now if they didn't retain the rights to the work itself, you could have other people rewrite it too.
vidarh 10y ago
Since you use Snow Crash as an example, I'd suggest Neuromancer as an example instead, because of its first line: > The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. It's a fascinating question if Gibson would update it if he could. Particularly in light of experiments like Agrippa [1] It's a fascinating line because of the combination of how quick the change was and how it hasn't become outdated on the surface (yet), but is more insidiously changing the interpretation. (P.S., nobody suggest this to George Lucas...) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_(A_Book_of_the_Dead) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_(A_Book_of_the_Dead)
- projectramo 10y ago
  Are you aware that Neil Gaiman, in Neverwhere, used the line: "The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." In response to Gibson, of course. But it is also interesting that the author themselves needn't be the one to revise the work. We already do this in a lighter sense when various editors produce various editions of a book by a writer. It would be interesting if we, essentially, exploded IP claims on characters and let people publish their fan fiction.