Bits of ephemera
Jan. 18th, 2012 03:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinSo, I'm in favor of authors owning their digital rights to new works, and of taking charge of one's back catalogue of things where the rights have lapsed to them. Digital publishing lets you turn those works into a revenue stream and keep them accessible to new readers.
But what about those "odd" pieces that don't really fit in anywhere? Maybe you write poetry but not frequently enough to sell a collection. Maybe you like to write vignettes or character studies or short-short fiction, but again, without enough works with the same medium or motif to form a collection.
I have some thoughts in this area, and I'm interested in hearing what others think.
One of my first impulses is to say that these make good freebies... things to give away to maybe snag on passersby and get them interested in your work, get your name in their head. If you have enough pieces that don't fit anywhere else you could make them into omnibus that's unified only by the author, try to curate them into some sort of shape or order. If you produce a steady enough stream of odds and ends, they could be "syndicated" as a blog. Fantasy In Miniature is something of an attempt to do this, with varying levels of success.
But talking about this with others has led me to another thought: the chapbook. This term gets used in a few overlapping ways in modern publishing, but the basic idea is a small, inexpensive booklet. The original chapbooks were "ephemera" - the category of media that is assumed to be used and disposed of, like periodicals. (For this reason, they can also be serious collectors' items.) My friend Google tells me that there are several print-on-demand companies that specialize in producing latter-day chapbooks, but that strikes me as somewhat wasteful and inefficient. In a digital age, it seems like ephemera should be digital.
As I write this, it strikes me that "bits of ephemera" is not a bad way to describe the odds and ends of an author's output, the things that never found a permanent place to land.
Anyway, those are some of my thoughts. Anyone else have any to share, or any relevant experiences?
But what about those "odd" pieces that don't really fit in anywhere? Maybe you write poetry but not frequently enough to sell a collection. Maybe you like to write vignettes or character studies or short-short fiction, but again, without enough works with the same medium or motif to form a collection.
I have some thoughts in this area, and I'm interested in hearing what others think.
One of my first impulses is to say that these make good freebies... things to give away to maybe snag on passersby and get them interested in your work, get your name in their head. If you have enough pieces that don't fit anywhere else you could make them into omnibus that's unified only by the author, try to curate them into some sort of shape or order. If you produce a steady enough stream of odds and ends, they could be "syndicated" as a blog. Fantasy In Miniature is something of an attempt to do this, with varying levels of success.
But talking about this with others has led me to another thought: the chapbook. This term gets used in a few overlapping ways in modern publishing, but the basic idea is a small, inexpensive booklet. The original chapbooks were "ephemera" - the category of media that is assumed to be used and disposed of, like periodicals. (For this reason, they can also be serious collectors' items.) My friend Google tells me that there are several print-on-demand companies that specialize in producing latter-day chapbooks, but that strikes me as somewhat wasteful and inefficient. In a digital age, it seems like ephemera should be digital.
As I write this, it strikes me that "bits of ephemera" is not a bad way to describe the odds and ends of an author's output, the things that never found a permanent place to land.
Anyway, those are some of my thoughts. Anyone else have any to share, or any relevant experiences?