alexandraerin

Self and trad pub'd author Diane Duane (Young Wizards series) has come down with a slight case of identity theft-related brokeness, so she's doing an e-book sale to help staunch the bleeding until her bank squares everything away. Here's her post on the subject.

...that I didn't include in my dream diary posts. In this dream, I was back at my old job. I wasn't dreaming about "those days", I was dreaming that I'd gone back to my old job that I quit what is now a couple of years ago. And everybody there knew that I'd quit it to go do "the internet writing" thing that nobody had thought would work, and that now I was back.

I was the person who had "used to write that demon lesbian story".

My subconscious is not very subtle.

That's in danger of happening, not because the fans have been fickle or the support isn't there. Oh, no. Far from it. (Thank you, by the way. All of you.) It's in danger of happening because I'm not doing what I need to do in my personal life to be able to do what I need to in my professional life. I know what I need to do, but I've always been too timid to do it. I'm afraid of hurting people. I feel obligated where I shouldn't. There's a reason why I write Mackenzie's voice so well, and it isn't because I have a tremendous ability to imagine people who are in no way like myself.

The way I live my life right now isn't healthy. It isn't sustainable. The more good things I get in my life... the more good people I surround myself with... the more reasons I find to feel good about myself... the less the way I'm living now even seems tolerable. Things have to change. No, I have to change things.

This post will be horribly oblique to most people and utterly transparent to my very patient friends (and lover) who have been trying to help me when I would not be helped. But I'm not making this post to explain anything to anybody else... it's to explain things to me, so what I see clearly right this minute doesn't evaporate overnight.

I have to change. Adapt or die.

---

Conversation We Won't Be Having: I can't really get into this in detail right now, so please refrain from trying to guess at my situation and give advice based on it. Thank you.

I had a post about Amanda Fucking-Palmer of the Boston Fucking-Palmers that I was working on the other day, which I accidentally closed out (and then bungled the "restore saved draft") thing. It was all about a blog post of hers that ephant tipped me to, where she reproduced an email she sent someone about her experiences using Twitter to interact directly with her fans... and how she's made more money doing this than she made off her celebrity-produced studio-backed album.

(Her blog post is here, but you have to scroll way down to find the relevant passage.)

I don't follow Amanda Palmer's career that closely... I'm only one state away from Neil Gaiman and I can hear him just fine from here. But it really is amazing what she's done for herself.

At the moment I'm writing this, she's answering randomly tweeted questions to kill time while in flight to the west coast. Warren Ellis, observing the goings-on, had this to say:

The level of determination @amandapalmer shows to engage directly with her audience is fascinating me. Post-Mystique Pop Life.

That's a brilliant phrase. "Post-Mystique Pop Life". It's been a while since I bothered to engage with anyone who really feels this way, but I used to argue with people who had what my dad called the "High Priest" mentality about the writing and publishing industry... they wanted the mystique, they wanted the separation between author and audience, because layers of insulation come with the barriers to entry they had to surmount and the golden gates they had to gain admittance through in order to get where they are today.

Amanda Palmer had this to say, possibly intended as a response to Warren's tweet (and working well as a response even if that wasn't her intent):

... it's safer to run into it. like turning and accelerating into a curve when drag-racing. your audience should be a friend, not a foe.

De-mystification puts a lot of high priests out of jobs. It opens a lot of doors. It doesn't mean that everybody gets to be famous and successful but it means that anybody can be... it means that nobodies could be.

Amanda F. Palmer is somebody. She was able to make a relative killing on Twitter in a few hours selling t-shirts spontaneously because she's got a huge following as a result of her music. That's not a feat that could be easily replicated. Not everyone could just jump on the internet and do the same thing... but then, neither could Amanda have done so. She had to put in the work to get to where she is.

But I think a lot of her career has been driven by the following she gains through the internet, via word-of-mouth and word-of-mouse. I don't believe it's necessarily true that you have to have the record deal (or the book deal, or whatever) first and then you can go on the internet and start using your fans to make magic happen. I think you can find your fans that way in the first place.

It's not necessarily easy and it's not necessarily instantaneous, but achieving success never is.

Found via @agletsmycat's Twitter: Malcolm Gladwell reviewing a Chris Anderson book.

That description should be enough to get half my family reading it. For everybody else, though, Chris Anderson is the author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, which is about a phenomenon I've referred to in my previous blogs. It's all about how there are necessarily only a few "big winners" in most any field, but the implications of the internet and changes in how people shop for content and products means it's possible for those living within the "long tail" of a chart of demand can still make a living for themselves.

(See also what I've been saying about how the internet allows for more "modest successes" for authors than older models.)

His new book is intriguingly entitled Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

To quote Gladwell,

Anderson’s argument begins with a technological trend. The cost of the building blocks of all electronic activity—storage, processing, and bandwidth—has fallen so far that it is now approaching zero.

and

Anderson’s second point is that when prices hit zero extraordinary things happen.

The review goes on to cite some of the specific examples Anderson's book provided of the change in demand wrought by an offer of something free, but, really, that's one of the things that should be manifestly obvious. We've all experienced it. When something is free... especially when it's obviuosly well and truly free with no forms to fill out, no strings attached, and no requirements of personal information, we'll try things we'd never have otherwise given a second glance and pounce on things that would otherwise only have just barely piqued our curiosities.

I've spent so much time in the past few weeks talking to other authors (both directly and by proxy through my blog) and entreating them to be less miserly with free-ness, to be open and up front about any content they have that's free, to put it front and center and not hide it behind logins or anything else. As I put it to Matt Selznick in the comments on that io9 article, free can be the difference between a project that has legs and a project that has wings.

There is a colossal power in free product. You still have to figure out how to profit off it, but with the internet reducing overhead to an amount that approaches zero it doesn't have to be a huge profit, especially if you're a solo operator living in the long tail.

So, yeah, I will probably be checking this book out.

(And a tip o' the mitre to popelizbet for pointing me at the tweet.)

There's a nice mention of me in a piece on io9.com about the new trend, reproducing my advice to tim_pratt about patronage. As happy as I am to see my predictions coming to pass and as much as I just plain want to see other authors succeed, it feels good to get some recognition.

I've been a prophet shouting in the wilderness for a while... granted, it's mostly a wilderness of my own making as I'm fairly shy about talking to people and I'm more interested in writing than networking, but I've been working to change that.

I responded to some of the comments on the article. They haven't shown up yet... I guess they have moderation. But some of the responses boiled down to this:

1. Screw donations, these people should work for a living. If they're not making money at what they're doing, they should find a new job.

Despite the surly tone, the basic premise here is correct - there's a reason all my posts about money are tagged "what it takes to get along", and we've all got to do what it takes to get it.

But those who adopt this model are taking the essential core of the commenter's advice - taking a new approach when the old one doesn't work. If Cat and Tim fail to make money in the long run with their projects, I'll be surprised if they don't try something else.

As for the distinction between "donations" and "working for a living"... they produce work, people give them money. Everything else is details.

2. The reason people use the donation model is because people on the internet don't want to pay for things. Therefore they need to get used to the idea that they're working for free.

Again, part of the premise here is true - the internet, by and large, is about free content. People are reluctant to pay for even professional level slickly produced content. Company after company and creator after creator have tried and failed to convince audiences to stick around and pay in sufficient numbers to justify the hype this whole Brave New World has generated, even if some of them have managed to make enough to stick around.

And this is why the donation model can work. It plays to the strengths of the web. It uses how people already "shop" for content online. A serial or regularly updated short story site also plays into that, by giving people a comfortable chunk of content and getting them to come back.

3. The internet is a vast graveyard of sites that have tip jars and never make any money.

True! And the publishing industry is a vast graveyard of books that will never be published. And the TV and movie industry are full of careers that never take off and scripts that will never be produced. And even books that are published can fail to turn a profit for their publishers, just as TV shows can be shot and never picked up or unceremoniously canceled.

The strength of no other medium or genre is judged by the number of failures. The internet is only different in that those "failures" can stick around. I don't necessarily think of them as failures, myself. They're hobby sites. Maybe the creator is a dedicated amateur. Maybe the creator has a professional talent but lacks the drive to make anything happen. Either way, it's not like the web is robbing them of the success that would fall into their laps if they'd gone somewhere else with their work.

Making a living with your content online is work, and you have to work at it. You have to let people know it's out there. You have to let people know you're doing it for a living. You have to let people know that being compensated for your work makes a difference as to your ability to keep producing it. If you don't do those things... in particular if you think it's terribly uncouth to ask people for money... then you're not actually trying to make money off donations and you can hardly count your empty tip jar as a failure for the model.

4. Sure it can work, but why would an established author bother not charging? If they're a known quantity, won't people pay a subscription or charge to read?

What's "established"? A year ago I'd never heard of Cat Valente. Six months ago I'd never read her. I've heard of Tim Pratt, but I've never read him. Cat's well-known in certain circles, but a virtual unknown outside of them. That's why I make a point of mentioning her so often. An awful lot of my readers have never heard of her.

I'm not saying I should be the benchmark of who's "established". I'm just saying that there are no authors out there who are universally known. Even the biggest of big names will have people who've never chanced to open up a book of theirs.

And if you are "established", are all your fans following your every move? Do they all read your blog? Do they all follow whatever trade or genre zines and sites are going to report your new online venture? A comfortable percentage of every author's following only follows them in the loosest sense... they look for the familiar name on the bookstore shelves. How do you reach them?

Free content will get people who've never heard of you. It will get people who've heard of you but never read you. It will get people who've heard of and read you but are suspicious of paying for something online, where there's no physical product they can examine in advance and keep when they're done.

And... especially if it's the sort of content that keeps people coming back... they'll tell their friends. They'll blog about it. They'll link to it. It can go viral. It can become a meme.

If you make it clear that you have done work and you need some form of compensation for it, some of those people will pay you. If you look at the percentage, it might seem like a colossal failure, but it isn't as though all those "freeloaders" would have paid if you charged up front, and it's not as though all the people who paid would have ever heard about this work without the "freeloaders" to tell them.

I say this not as a slight against Cat... seriously, if I ever want to annoy you folks some day I'll make a twenty paragraph ramble explaining exactly why and how I love her work... but I don't believe she could begin to make a decent income if her ...Fairyland... project was depending on people who already know her work AND heard about the project AND are enthusiastic about paying for non-physical books on the internet buying into it and convincing a bunch of other people to buy into it. I think it would be a non-starter. Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis would get a bunch of people to look at it, and go, "Huh. That sounds kind of cool." and move on. Fewer of her existing fans would feel comfortable enthusiastically link-spreading because they'd effectively be telling their friends and family to go buy something instead of telling them to go check out something groovy.

I just can't see that working.

Similarly, while the initial rush of publicity (and, one presumes, donations) came from people who heard of the dire straits that precipitated the project, I think the site will really gain legs as more and more people talk about it for its own merit... a hundred people who would never be interested in helping an author they've never heard of will still show up to read a free story that their friend told them about and one of them will donate. Lather, rinse, repeat.

...I take advice from people.

Not only have I added a comment system back onto my story sites, but I've decided to split up the ad boxes. Ever since I unified the layouts on my story sites, I've also shared the ad boxes among them. It seemed like a good way to give advertisers a little extra value for their money.

But now that the "little" stories are getting updated more often, it seems like they might be worth their own slots, and while I love the people who read every single thing I put out, the individual stories are different enough that they may attract different audiences as they come into their own.

Also, the stories have varying levels of "safe-for-workness". As was pointed out to me, having a graphic gay fantasy comic at the top of 3 Seas might turn some people off from it. Actually, I'm not sure I want that particular ad even running on Tales of MU. As un-work-safe as TOMU can be, text is fairly innocuous to a casual glance, whereas graphics are... graphic. I'll be thinking about it. It's not the comic being advertised that's the problem... it's the fact that the ad includes things that require a censor dot.

Anyway, if you're one of the people reading this blog who has a crafty site or a comic site or a serial site, you can get yourself some deep discount advertising by being one of the first people to place ads on Star Harbor Nights or The 3 Seas. Note that 3 Seas in particular is getting a lot of extra hits as I'm advertising it in a few places. I've also removed the Google ads from those sites... I keep flirting with Google, but I'm never happy with the results and I'd rather that my Project Wonderful advertisers get more prominent placement.

I'll be doing the same to Void Dogs and Tribe: Fantasy In Miniature tomorrow or Saturday.

So, my last laptop (may it rest in peace) was a big sucker that only had about an hour and a half of battery life under optimal conditions... more like 45-50 minutes with wireless surfing and music going and stuff. It's got a mostly white case.

My very awesome new one can be used pretty much for a whole work day if it's got a good charge, and it keeps its charge pretty well on standby. It's also small and a sleek and glossy black.

So, I've already found one way in which the old one was a better "fit" for me... it was impossible to lose. It's bad enough that I tend to lose my phone two or three times a week (incidentally, now that I'm not writing on it anymore, I'm not sure where it's gone to... maybe I should be looking into Skype instead?), now I have to worry about losing my computer. Fortunately my apartment is not that large, but unfortunately a lot of the furnishings are dark colored and I tend to run the place in "low light mode" most of the time.

I'm finding the trick is not to shut the lid when I go to set the lappy down somewhere or walk away from it... it's a lot more colorful and visible and bright that way. I always had to shut the other one so it would go straight to standby and save its battery, but that's far less important with this one. I'll adjust. It's such a minor thing, compared to how handy the thing is. I am seriously indebted to tzadkiel for providing it... I hope you don't mind, but I plan on paying off my debt in stories. ;)

And of course, by that measurement... the fact that I was able to mention a need and have someone step up and take care of it... well, I can count that as a victory. I don't want to diminish that. But other than that, I've had a very lukewarm response to my attempts to boost my sponsorship lately. I'm an analytical sort, so naturally I've got some thoughts about why this would be. Obviously the fact that I've been directing my own readership to other creative causes lately might be coming into play, but the fact is things have been at a plateau ever since my first huge sponsorship push peaked. My readership has remained steady since then.

So I think what this tells me is that I'm at or near the capacity of my current readership. Feel free to prove me wrong by having a bunch of people rush to sign up, but really, of the people reading my work on a regular basis, nearly 1% have chosen to sponsor my writing.

It might not sound like it, but that's actually a fairly impressive benchmark, especially as it's not including irregular and one time contributors and people who send money every month by hand. There may be a few more people who'll be willing to contribute if they can send a check instead of using PayPal, and I've actually got a PO Box set up for that now, which I'll have listed for those who want it under a cut at the end of this post. Tomorrow I'll be adding that to my payment page, along with a sponsorship option for people who want their contribution marked down as supporting my work in general instead of a specific story. That's something I overlooked but I've had a couple of people ask for it.

So, those few things... along with my continued productivity, timeliness of updates, and engagement with the readership... might boost things a little, but as I've said before to survive the long term, I need to raise my income, and to do that, I need to raise my audience, as well. Any support that people can give me in raising my profile, in publicizing my stories... if you feel self-conscious about promoting Tales of MU, remember that I do write other stuff and that 3 Seas and Tribe are entirely non-sexual and suitable for younger audiences... anything helps.

My laptop's taken care of, but I've got a tiny chip in my glasses... it's practically invisible to me when I'm wearing them but when I take them off and look at it it's a pretty vivid reminder of the sorts of unexpected expenses that can sneak up on you. Again, the point is not to go "oh poor me, I need the internet to buy me new glasses". Actually, after the last time I replaced my glasses... shortly after I left my day job... I've got some really great resources on getting them cheap. But the point is that unexpected expenses can be expected to continue, and the answer to that is me writing, people enjoying it, people sharing their enjoyment, and a few of those people... under one percent of them's just fine, if there are enough people in total... deciding to give some value back for the value they've received.

So, you know, spread the word on your own journal. Tell your friends. Start conversations. Blog your reactions to the stories, if you feel the urge. Tweet and ReTweet links to your favored stories. If you've got a friend who blogs or writes or podcasts about internet culture or writing or fantasy or spanking or carnivorous mermaids or superheroes or whatever, drop them a link.

I need more exposure to grow. I need to grow to survive. I need help.

(Also, if you emailed me with promotion ideas or business prospects like back in April or so and I never responded or else dropped out mid-conversation... I've got some big gaps in my memory right around the time I started to notice my email acting up. Feel free to email me another poke.)

( Mailing address for checks. )

Probably because it's stuff that's worth supporting... I had the thought yesterday about whether or not I would have pushed Cat's ventures so much if I'd known my laptop was going to give up the ghost so completely a day after ...Fairyland... launched, and I came to the conclusion that yes, I would have.

Anyway, River's Daughter, a novella-length ebook, is now available. This is the first book produced by verb_noire, an independent press started up to encourage visible presence of frequently invisible minorities in genre fiction, or as they put it,

To celebrate the works of talented, underrepresented authors and deliver them to a readership that demands more.

Emphasis mine. Because this is what I keep saying: these audiences are out there and they are hungry and they have been ignored so often and for so long, and since the internet gives us so many tools to find each other and so many ways to connect with each other and benefit each other (and the exchange of enjoyable art for money is, at its core, people helping each other... a mutually beneficial transaction)...

Well, if you're reading my blog, you've heard all this before.

The point is, new book out from Verb Noire.

---

Note: According to karnythia, they're still working out some technical issues with their first product launch, so as of right now they're having to email purchased copies to folks. That's why there's no download link when you finish paying. Mine arrived ten minutes after the PayPal timestamp, though I'm sure that will vary with time of day and such.

I promise that at some point in the near future I'll start posting a bunch of inane rambling reviews of Dungeons & Dragons products again, but in the mean time: yet another post about Cat Valente.

Actually, this one's not entirely about her. I mean, this whole thing isn't entirely about her... she's the crux, the fulcrum, of the matter, but it's about the publishing industry, it's about authors and artists and performers, it's about new technology, it's about our ability to create and control our creations and to interface with our audience and to reach audiences without a filter in between us.

She's started to receive a bit of a backlash: people telling her to suck it and up get a "real job", people telling her she's selfish, people telling her that what she's doing isn't "grown-up behavior".

And what is she doing?

She's creating something of value and expecting people who benefit from it to compensate her for her work.

That's basic grown-up behavior right there.

It doesn't look like grown-up behavior because it doesn't involve putting on a hideous uniform or wearing a name tag or signing away any rights, literally or metaphorically... it doesn't look like grown-up behavior because instead of putting a price tag and a bar code on the output of her soul, she's asking people to pay what they can and what they will for it.

You know, I had a day job, a year and a half ago. I quit it to do this, to produce reader-supported, cyber-funded stories when I was sure that I could support myself this way... and I almost fucked that up, in no small part because I let myself be insecure about the fact that I do deserve compensation for what I do and so I went through a period of being shy about reminding people that I do know money to get by. Other than that hiccup, it's gone pretty dang well.

And you know what? In the time since I quit, my day job was downsized. The department was shrunk in half and then folded into another one. If I had been there, I would have been another body fighting for a chair... which means I would have been out of work or somebody else would have been.

Why do I need to be a body in a chair? What benefit would I provide to society by doing that? Here, I'm not taking anybody's place. I've made my own. It's uniquely suited to my strengths and weaknesses. I create things for the enjoyment of thousands of people, and some of those people are able to pay me a dollar when they can or five dollars a month or fifty dollars one time or whatever they can give me, whatever value they feel I've provided them.

Is this a rip-off? My actual output varies with my circumstances, but people just pay what they think I'm worth, with no obligation to keep paying. How could that be a rip-off? My dad once told me I should tell people to pay me half what they think I'm worth, so they feel like they're getting a deal and they'll keep coming back for more... if anybody's worried about being ripped off, they're welcome to do that. Treat yourself to a 50% off coupon. Treat yourself to a 75% off coupon if that's what it takes for it to be "worth it". You pay what you feel like. That's how it works.

I mean, if everybody who read my work paid me a dollar for every novel's worth of material they read, I'd be rich and they'd all be getting a huge discount compared to any other book out there. Think about that. And most people aren't even paying a dollar. They're paying nothing.

Who's getting ripped off?

What Cat's doing is the action of a mature mind. She's taking responsibility for her situation and she's doing something about it. Her plight is not her fault, but like everybody else, it's her responsibility to support herself and her family, and that's what she's doing. It's easy to miss this fact, with the initial frenzy that was whipped up on the twittosphere... the somewhat desperate tone of which she had very little to do with... but what she's doing is taking control, of her talents and her rights and her resources.

And it's going to work. That's the thing.

It. Is. Going. To. Fucking. Work.

What she's doing is a proven moneymaker: taking a talent and a unique vision and going online with it. It works. All the naysayers miss the point... they probably look at the internet and they see the one trillion amateur animators that don't make any money, the one quadrillion little webcomics, the googol of hobby sites and blogs that don't go anywhere and they say "There's no money on the web." But the same things that let anyone succeed offline work online as well: talent, dedication, hard work, willpower.

It doesn't matter how many folks are doing it at the amateur-level. They don't take money away from the successful ones, and the qualities that bring success shine... and Cat Valente possesses all of these in spades.

I'm not going to compare our talents... we're way too different. We both have a fairly complicated relationship with the concept of "plot" and nontraditional approaches to structure, but she is at heart a poet and I primarily write dialogue and monologue. Okay, well, I am obviously comparing our talents, so let's do it:

I started Tales of MU with nothing but a name, "MU Tales", which I changed quickly because my mind wanted to read it as faux Spanish "mutales". I made it up as I went along, just to see what I could do, and I published it as is.

And I made it work.

As is.

Because, ladies and gentlemen, I am that fucking good.

That's my talent. I can sit down and I can write and people will read it, rough. Even people who hate what I write about will sit there and tell me that they wish I would write about more sensible things because they love reading it. It comes easily, naturally. For me, the hard part of why I do isn't writing, it's keeping my shit together, keeping my life together even when the parts of my brain that don't write aren't talking to each other, keeping track of the plot of day-to-day life the same as I do with my stories.

But Cat Valente is the hardest working person I know. I only met her briefly but that was obvious. She researches. She plans. She workshops. She vises and she revises and she retrovises. All those little foreign language puns I scatter in character's names are just things I have bouncing around in my brain, but she translates things.

And the results...

Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to tell you she is that fucking good, too.

The talent is there. The drive is there. The willpower is there. Everything it takes to succeed, she has... and she's proven it offline. A dozen books. A deal with Tor, I think, though I might be making that up. Of course, the reality is that "success" as an author in traditional publishing is nothing like money in the bank.

But online... she pays bandwidth and hosting, maybe hires out webmastery and graphical artistry if she can't get it donated... but the pie is only split one way. If she sells 20,000 books the Olde Way at $20 a pop, she ain't getting anywhere near $400,000. It doesn't work like that. But if she sells a hundred ebooks at $10 a pop, she is walking away with something that's within a phone rebate of $1,000 even after PayPal takes their fees.

Do you haters and doubters not realize how huge that is? What a profound cosmic shift that is for authors?

Anyone else just starting out... someone like me... would have to do something to become a proven quality before they could hope to make a living. Free samples. Heck, if I hadn't twisted Cat's ear as much as I have already, I'd tell her to increase the excerpt size of ebooks. Give a whole chapter's worth. Or forget about arbitrary breaks and give 'em as long as you think it takes to get them hooked. Give a whole first section of each book. She probably won't have to do that because she is a known quantity with even greater known quantities vouching for her, but it's a viable strategy.

(It's also a viable strategy to give all the books away for free to begin with, but people who don't understand what she's doing will never grasp that.)

This was going to happen sooner or later, that a traditionally published author would go this route and attract a lot of attention. I'm so sorry for the circumstances that forced her into it, but I'm glad it's Cat because I love her work so much and because the conditions are perfect - she's a cult author with wide but non-"mainsteam" appeal as defined by the industry that decides what to market to the mainstream, she's got the support of notable literary lights with large web presences, she's friends with an author who's explored this path before and who won't fucking shut up about it.

So this is going to work for her. Okay, there are no guarantees in life... but that's true about "real jobs", too. This could fail just as jobs can be downsized and companies can fold. But she has everything she needs to succeed, everything that's essential.

Why should she take a spot at a Starbucks that somebody else could fill? Why should she occupy a spot in a phone queue? Who would ultimately benefit from that?

The fact that she gets to do what she loves for a living might gall some people, but it's not a failing on her part. The fact that she's found a way to for herself instead of doing for seventeen layers of middlemen and then waiting in line every second Friday to hold out her hands in hopes that they'll do for her might threaten the composure of everybody who's still sucking it up and swallowing their pride every time they get out of bed in the morning. The fact that she's proving that you don't need to wend your way through the apparatus of The Industry to get paid for your art might be offensive to the sensibilities of those who are in the process of making compromises they hate in pursuit of a brass ring that they're terrified might turn out to not even be real brass is not ultimately her problem.

And, y'know, when Fairyland is a going concern, some of the naysayers and the doubters will say that she couldn't have done it if she hadn't already been a published author, if she hadn't had the support of folks like Neil Gaiman... never mind that some scatter-brained nobody living smack dab in the middle of flyover country already did the same thing... but a lot of the naysayers and doubters will just ignore her success and keep saying it won't work no matter how long it does.

We know this happens, because we see it all the time: "nobody makes money in webcomics", they say, and what s00j has done with her music for the past five, six years is clearly impossible.

Gah.

It works.

It has worked, it is working, it will continue to work.

The print industry's not going to go away... people like books, and I don't think Cat's doing this because she's pissed off at the world of paper or anything... but the publishers are going to have wake up soon and notice that authors now have another serious option to explore when it comes to paying the bills.

They need to notice it, because I can guarantee that more and more authors will.