io9 Interviews Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Interesting interview. A question I have--and feel oddly compelled to post here instead of there--would actually kind of zoom in the comment about free online pubs and blogs.

See, I in the midst of setting up a blog and place to post short fiction, but I've been torn over whether or not this is "giving up" on going for paid publishing for the stories, or if this is a good idea for exposure and as an excuse to just keep writing. Note: I am writing original fiction, not fanfics.

So, yeah, PNH, if you're reading, and so inclinded to answer, (and how many clauses can I nest!?), what are your thoughts on author sites that would have regularly released free short stories in addition to a blogging element? And, just to be well-rounded, in both the situation of a not-quite-yet-published writer and of an established author.

Thanks, and again, great interview [/buttering up]

I enjoyed the interview as well. On the topic of e-books, I've often wondered if publishers could enjoy the boost that record companies got when they moved to CD format. People replaced their entire LP collections with CDs.

I recently moved to Japan, and I had to get rid of hundreds and hundreds of books. It broke my heart (and gave me a two day migraine). If those books were available as ebooks, I could easily see myself dropping a few thousand bucks just to restore my library.

As a former marketing guy, that's one way I would position the move to e-books. I would stop trying to sell it as the technology of the future and sell it as an upgrade to your existing library. Basically, have every book you've ever owned and never have to move it.

@ssakamoto: You seem to have a certain charming naiveté concerning most of the publishing industry.

These are the people who insist that Fictionwise treat every separate e-book format as an entirely separate publication—so if you pay $10 for an e-book in encrypted eReader format, you have to pay another $10 for it if you want to download it for encrypted Mobipocket, too. (And that includes Tor, by the way. Certainly their books are sold separately in separate DRM-shackled formats just the way other DRM-using publishers' are!)

So, if you change e-book readers mid-stream and can no longer read the format you originally bought it in? "Never have to move it" my foot.

With the exception of reasonable-minded people like Baen (who sell every format in Webscriptions at once) and the publishers who allow Fictionwise to sell in "multiformat" (which does not include Tor, by the way), publishers are only too well-acquainted with "the boost that record companies got when they moved to CD format". In fact, they want to take it a step further and imagine the kind of boost they might have gotten if you had to buy an entirely new set of CDs if you switched from a Sony to a Magnavox CD player.

That interview was depressing. Sci-fi needs publishers championing eBooks, not sitting on the sidelines saying "It's all very interesting, but still needs a few decades before we'll really apply ourselves to it".