The Halflife of Entertainment
March 9, 2001
7:29 a.m.
Brigid spent the night with her school up at the Indianpolis Zoo last night, so Lisa and I did what any self-righteous adults would do ... we reverted to our teen aged years and had ice cream and pop corn for dinner and dessert, and went to see The Mexican. What an opening sentence, eh? It was an interesting movie. We saw Oh Brother, Where Art Thou a few days before, which I thought was a far better film (and whose music is just about incredible). And so this morning I'm thinking about staying power of art and stories and film and whatnot. I'm thinking about it because I get an e-mailed report of the day from a news service, and in that release is usually a blurb about what movies are at the top of the money making chart. It almost never fails that a different film sits at #1 every week. I'm thinking that it wasn't really like that twenty years ago. When I was a kid, I remember films came to a theater and stayed for months. This was great if it was something I was interested in. Not so great if it was something like Love Story. (Hey, I don't care if Al Gore was the lead. I was still pretty much a kid, you know? As far as I was concerned, Love Story could have been made much better by the inclusion of another thirty or forty minutes of hockey action ... and I don't really like hockey). Things are different now. Movies seem to come out, and make their money and go directly to second run houses, where they either prosper or painfully fade away. Or they come out and then the slip into the video racks where they find a stead source or viewers for possibly years and years. Books seem to have a similar life as a fresh release. Authors and editors complain incessantly about shelf life. The back-list is essentially gone--a fact that can be ascertained by going to a book store and looking for multiple books by most authors. A quick scan will tell you that if you're not names Lackey or Brooks or such, you're lucky to have much more than your current book available to the general reader. The problem, it seems, for us is that books and short fiction have noting to fill the niche of the video store or the second run houses. Yes, there are reprints. But those are different beasts. Yes, the Internet might end up being something akin to the video store. Groups like Fictionwise are trying to make that happen. But the jury is still out on this approach. Fictionwise is making this happen, but their author list is primarily established writers--whose backlist they provide pretty cheaply (which makes sense since their overhead is relatively low in relation to a paper operation). It's not really an open venue, yet. Lisa Silverthorne and I were speaking recently, and we discussed the ramification of E-publishing in today's world that is rarely touched upon. That is that many e-publishing places discuss their advantage being that they can make their material available for eternity. If an author elects to publish in these venues, they will always be able to answer the question of "where can I find your work?" by saying "Oh, just go to ezine.com." This sounds great from the perspective of a generic reader. How can you argue against reader choice? Eternal availability give the reader eternal choice. This can be true, Lisa and I agreed. But having seen the type of work that's in some of these magazines, I ponder whether the author really wants that to be the case. Think about this. You sell "Joe's Dumpster" and see it on line. It's your fist sale and you're justifiably proud. Ten years from now, you're selling books--or trying to. Do you really want "Joe's Dumpster" to be the first thing that comes up when a new fan does an Internet search? It's a strange world. I want my cake and to eat it, too. But instead, all I can do is turn back to the screen and get to writing this book.   Have at least an okay day, all right?  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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"The old days, when publishers would stuff stores with thousands of decorative copies of a book, are gone." Donald Maass |
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