Blog-apallooza

The 2005 Triangle Bloggers Conference turned out to be both interesting and well-attended thanks to the efforts of Anton Zuiker, Paul Jones, and many others. The blogging world was well represented of course, with attendees including Dave Winer, Bigwig, and the young father who writes The Trixie Update (which appeared prominently in a recent NYT story), but so was the world of traditional media in the person of Dan Gillmor, the keynote speaker, as well as others in the audience like Phil Meyer, a journalism professor and columnist for USA Today.

If you've been to more than one blogging conference, you've probably heard the same topics covered ad nauseum, but one of the things I found interesting to hear was a debate over the various motivations for blogging in the first place, which are--not surprisingly--very much the same as debates over why to write at all, why to paint, why to create. Do you create a blog to be read? Do you do it for yourself? Are you motivated by altruism or ideology?

Of course you create a blog to be read by other people. It's disingenuous to pretend otherwise. You may counter that a true creator is by definition someone driven by a compulsion, but it is impossible to separate the desire for a reaction, for an audience (both of which equal status and affection), from the impulse itself. You are always writing for other people; writing itself is a form of communication, which is to say that it is directed outward, and not inward.

While I would be the first to volunteer that writing provides me with a way to think more clearly, which is of benefit primarily to me, the same could be said of talking. If I wanted clarity but didn't want to communicate with other people, I'd meditate quietly or scratch my thoughts in the sand.

When you write, you do so for other people. Not to take anything away from the diversity of motivations that informs all human (and publishing) endeavors, I would add that the desire for status--for power and respect and affection--stands squarely in the center of all our interactions with other people, like it or not. Of course you want your blog to be read, your novel to be read, your music to be heard. Many of the writers I see would perhaps do better work if they were more frank with themselves on this point. But there are those who steadfastly assert that they create for themselves alone. More power to them, I suppose.

I was very impressed with the intelligence on display at the conference, from a mini-discourse on the long tail theory and blogs by BigWig--whose eclectic Silflay Hraka includes a fascinating series of Holocaust photos called Unseen History--to an explanation by journalist Ed Cone of the pioneering adoption of blogs by the Greensboro News-Record.

BigWig made an offhand comment that those of us attending on from Lulu were perhaps in a unique position to appreciate. He noted that "blogs are the bleeding edge of vanity publishing." Indeed! [And I thought Lulu was the bleeding edge...but nevermind] That comment came back to me more than once during informal conversations between sessions as no less than two different individuals interrupted my attempt to explain Lulu by saying, with typical dismissiveness, "so it's just a vanity press, right?" Ummm, yesss . . . in the same way that Typepad or Blogger are vanity presses, or DreamWeaver, for that matter.

The Internet itself is the ultimate marketplace for vanity publishing, is it not? In that most of what drives the creation of blogs, personal web pages, etc. is in fact ego (see above). But leaving aside the complexity of ego-driven motivations, some part of all this publishing is -- as no one could credibly deny at this point -- useful. Which is also true of the 19,000 (and counting) titles published on Lulu.

It was ironic to hear bloggers of all people scoff at the idea of self-publishing, but there are always  those on whom irony is lost. Even as the conventional media slowly comes around to accepting the significance of blogs and other web publishing ventures, it is useful to remember how the emergence of the web was once treated. Newspapers, television, and their brethren were fairly slow to adapt to the web because they saw it as one enormous vanity press. If anyone can publish anything, protested pundits, all you will end up with is a sea of nonsense. They treated the web like a public pool. Many of them still feel that way about bloggers. And some bloggers, in turn, seem to react the same way to Lulu. But that will change.

On a related note, the UK Guardian ran a story today on the unprecedented accessibility of publishing that specifically mentions blogs being turned into books (including a note about Lulu-hosted LJBook): See "Cover Stories." [post script--the article is actually an old one, a fact I missed when I first blogged this]

After the conference I got to spend an afternoon drinking beer and shooting pool at the Cave (as we often did in days of old) with my old friend, Matt, who has been through quite a few of these exercises in blog-talking. He, too, has started to weary of the phenomenon of blogger triumphalism that inevitably arises when you get a bunch of bloggers together, particularly those of a political bent. The dangers of "Blog Overkill" were noted in a recent Slate.com article by Jack Shafer, who has suffered through the chanting of more than one set of would-be revolutionaries. More than one blogger at this conference described his work as research or investigative journalism, which suggests a frightening lack of perspective on the kind of work required by real investigations (given that most of these folks are just using Google). I was reminded of the ridiculous blog-fueled speculation about the box under George Bush's jacket. Newspapers get it right most of the time. Bloggers, in aggregate, get it right some of the time. Having both is better than having only one.

That said, the world is full of experts in all kinds of obscure areas, and they can publish a web page (or publish a book) as easily as the rest of us. And, poor editing and all, those people can offer something that is valuable to others. Shafer's article offers a cautionary note, too, to those of us promoting a revolulution in publishing. Nevertheless, I remain an unrepentant blog enthusiast. Blog on, comrades! And if they don't like it, let them read Slate.

Comments

[Anton Zuiker]

Stephen, great post here with nice linkages. Thanks for the insights.

[Lisa Spangenberg]

Stephen mentioned experiencing

no less than two different individuals interrupted my attempt to explain Lulu by saying, with typical dismissiveness, "so it's just a vanity press, right?"

I'm pretty Stephen knows this, but since I keep seeing people misuse "vanity press" incorrectly, failing to distinguish it from "self publishing" I though I'd point out that Lulu.com, among other services, acts as printer and binder for self-publishing authors. Lulu provides digital printing and binding services, they are not a vanity presse. Here are some definitions from author and author adovocate James D. Macdonald:

Digital Printing

• A technology
  
• Converts a digital file to a finished book one at a time using a machine such as a Xerox Docutech
  
• Low setup cost
  
• High per-unit cost
  
• No economy of scale
  

Self Publication

• A business model
  
• Author pays the cost of publication
  
• Author has title to the physical books on the day they're printed
  
• The author and the publisher are the same person; otherwise the same as commerical publication
  
• Often used for specialized non-fiction, niche fiction, and poetry

Vanity Press Book Publishing Company

• A business model
  
• Author pays the cost of publication plus a percentage to the publisher
  
• Publisher has title to the physical books on the day they're printed
  
• Primarily markets books to their own authors
  

Lulu has more in common with a printer than a publisher. They offer printing, binding, and shipping. They don't pretend to be a publisher. A vanity press pretends to be a publisher.

[Stephen]

Thanks for the comments!

Lisa, you offer a lucid and succinct set of definitions. I have made the same point in previous posts (in a less lucid and succinct fashion):
*"There's no such thing as a self-published book"
*"Washington Post Trashes PublishAmerica"

[Stephen]

Because I missed them in the original post, a couple of links worth adding:

* Links to live blogging from the conference
* Arse Poetica, another local lit blog

[SupaCop]

I found a couple of great books on LULU. I bought them both and have read them a couple of times because each time I read them I find something new that I have not caugt the first time. They are well worth the price and right now the author has temporarly dropped their Price so the best time to get them is now. If you want a great book at a low price check them out at www.lulu.com/rebeccaguptill