Futurology of Romance

Folks:

I prepared a post that was to go up Tuesday June 3 and it didn't, so I found it in blogger's listing and posted it -- but as Rowena Cherry once noted to me, when you do that blogger posts it on the date you saved it to the que, NOT the date you clicked POST.

So there is now a short (!!!) post from me inserted below on Tuesday June 3 -- and I didn't post on Tuesday June 10 because it was Shavuoth - a holiday.

So today's post is about the Futurology of Romance -- and no, it's not about computer error messages exchanged by AI's in love or inserted by AI's jealous of one another.

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Jean Lorrah found the following online article about the effects of the writer's strike on Hollywood and "The" Industry.

http://www.storylink.com/article/225

Essentially, that article describes what my techie-son-in-law Ernest was showing me on the web when he was here -- Phil Foglio is doing an online comic that's blowing the hit stats out of the park. Others are doing stills and animateds that are capturing the young audience. Ernest knows tons of URLS -- his interest is mainly in humor.

The problem those new writer-producers will all have though is the same as with the e-book -- no editors, no "gatekeepers" to vet the work and direct it to people want that particular thing done at that particular skill level. The whole internet system will re-invent the wheel pretty soon.

People don't have TIME to hunt for the good stuff they want to spend an hour before bedtime on. They need Underwriters Laboratory for fiction. A guarantee it won't blow up on you!

There could be a product there that's sellable -- the 'zine or reviews or imprint or logo or colophon -- that guarantees the product has a certain skill level behind it, and the genre-label sorter that indicates what type of entertainment it delivers.

Do you think people would pay a monthly or annual fee to be sure that what they click on will meet their needs and not waste their time? Or would they stick with the current method of hearing about it on social networks from friends or on Lists etc?

Do you enjoy flawed fanfic more than tightly crafted pro-fic? Because that's what such independent productions often are -- fanfic in animated clothing.

How will large, international audiences respond to a flood of amateur productions online? Would such productions tend to be worse than Little Theater?

In Star Trek fanzines, the commercial forces that forged Manhattan Publishing also shaped and energized ST fanfic. Star Trek 'zines became enormously expensive to produce and someone had to upfront the printing costs and warehouse them in their basement, tote them to cons, etc. So publishers (who were often also the editors) would consider a submitted story in terms of whether they could make their investment back in time to print the next issue of the 'zine. Would this story enhance their reputation with readers who would pay for the next issue?

Readers objected to some content, others adored that content. Publishers split off whole 'zines to handle specialized content -- and re-invented genre. 'Zine buyers LOVED that guarantee of content at a certain editorial skill (readers hate typos and continuity blunders -- 'zine readers were just as picky about plot-resolution as pro-fic buyers) and 'zine buyers LOVED being able to buy the subject matter they wanted without it being polluted by stuff they didn't want.

I think the Wild-Wild-West goldrush this article describes will result in the same market forces reasserting themselves but in another way.

Video production DOES cost, especially if you want to do it well. The voracious market my son-in-law has found will demand ever increasing production values -- and actors, animators, artists, videographers, etc will want to be paid for their skills. So the most popular online fiction will bea small percentage of the BEST produced stuff.

Bandwidth does cost. Even though it's cheaper now, hard drive space on a server COSTS. YouTube is providing small spaces by selling advertising. So once more, fiction availability comes back to commercial market forces.

Amazon will already let you post whatever self-published shlock you want -- for a fee. If your stuff is not valued, or if you fail in self-promotion -- you will not make back that cost. Soon you'll be hiring an independent editor to edit your stuff before posting. Another new profession -- and I've run into a lot of them already -- independent editors.

Have you seen that commercial where, at a tennis match, everyone rushes onto the field from the stands and the announcer says if you let everyone play, you don't get anywhere?

It's a commercial for a website which posts only high paying jobs.

We hate the gatekeepers who reject us, and blame "gatekeeping" for keeping our valuable output from the hands of our audience.

Do we really need gatekeepers in the worlds of Art?

Isn't every romance that pours out of a writer's heart something you, yourself would want to read as desperately as the writer wants you to?

As artists, portraying the intricacies of Relationship, passion and love melded into something higher, how can we tell if what we produce is of any value to anyone but ourselves?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/