Political ePublishing: A Frontier To Consider

We talk about publishing here a lot at Muse Hack. That’s because a lot of us are writers professional or otherwise. Also its because in an age of technology that has made self-publishing easy, there’s a lot to talk about.

Oh and some of us want to sell books. Hint.

But when we talk about self-publishing and its implications we usually talk quality, or technology, or market saturation. We don’t talk politics a lot because its not usually a subject that comes up.

It probably should have.

Before his son’s trial, the father of George Zimmerman has released an ebook on the case. Frankly it’s sounding like it’s filled with dog whistles about racism in the black community and kinda missing the point.  I don’t think this is going to help his son and may look exploitative.

Before I go on let me note that:

1) I consider Zimmerman’s shooting of Martin to be suspicious to say the least, but that’s what a trial is for.

2) I hate the show trial mentality.

3) Our political pundit culture hasn’t helped.

This is one of the last things I imagined coming out of the Zimmerman case. I figured after the trial there’d be the usual round of books by people capitalizing on it. I also realize I was foolish in this day and age for thinking of that.

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Salon Talks Self-Publishing: From A Positive View

It’s no secret a lot of recent Salon articles have been negative towards self publishing.  Hugh Howey takes a broader view on why it’s great.  He notes it may not be perfect, but it’s one where you hone your craft as you earn and that the old model had it’s problems

– Steve

Thoughts on Amazon and Fanfic, Part Two, Electric Boogaloo

So now that Amazon is going to try and publish fanfic, now that I’ve done my anal-retentive analysis, what do I think it means? What’s going to happen? What are the repercussions?

Now it may surprise you that I’m not going to make definite predictions. I’m going to look at probabilities/possibilities with a little bit of how we can make this positive.

Now, before I go on let me state that in general I am for this idea. I like the idea of less restrictive, more supportive approach to fanfics. I do support help getting people published. I would like to see more engagement in publishing. I can think of plenty of things that are bad and that can go wrong (which I’ll address later), but I am in general, for this idea.

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