Monday, we got to meet Nathan Shumate of the accurately named LousyBookCovers. It’s a fascinating insight into the man, the project, and the . . . less than ideal covers that occasionally appear in self-publishing.
He mentioned one thing that struck a truth with me; that some people get drunk on the power that modern technology, print on demand, distribution, etc. presents. I wanted to explore that a bit because it’s rather personal, and very telling for us MuseHackers.
There’s plenty of power modern technology gives us. In many ways modern technology is all about empowering because power sells and people want to do their own thing. People want to make videos and books and music and games; many of them can now live the dreams that years ago would have stayed dreams except for a few. We have sheer ability now.
However, as we’ve seen power may not be misused but . . . well it can result in products of questionable value. Oh we’ve all done it. We all have that fanfic we don’t want to mention, that bad book cover we’re not proud of, that AMV that was kind of awful, or the company brochure that proved there’s a reason we’re shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near desktop publishing. We wonder how we missed how . . . not that great we were.
We miss it because we get drunk on the power.