Recently in Publishing Category

If I were doing Inkblots again, the community aspects of Movable Type 4.2 and the publishing aspects of MagCloud would make it an entirely different animal. The industry has caught up with a bunch of the stuff I was struggling to do, what? Five years ago now?

I'm just sayin'. I don't know if I'll ever revisit Inkblots again because I desperately need to work on publishing my work elsewhere, as opposed to simply self-publishing everything, but... Well, I'm just sayin'.

Congratulations to Aurelia's brother Matt, who just sold his first novel!

Amy Einhorn preempted world rights to Matthew Flaming's first novel, The Kingdom of Ohio, for her imprint at Putnam; Stephanie Cabot at the Gernert Company made the sale. Set in New York City in 1901, the book revolves around a young workman on the first subway lines beneath the city and a beautiful mathematical prodigy, as the two are drawn into a tangle of overlapping intrigues involving Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and J.P. Morgan. Tentative pub date is 2009, with Berkley to follow in paperback.

Sounds like one part Neverwhere and one part The Prestige. I'm sold!

For multiple reasons lately, I've been thinking about online magazines. As many of you have noticed, Inkblots went down a while ago. It hadn't been updated since 2002-2003, aside from the blogs of Ken and I, but a perfect storm of catastrophes first brought the site down and then prevented me from bringing it back online. (Perfect storm = server dying + stolen laptop + corrupted archive + grad school.) Finally tonight I posted a simple "Inkblots is on hiatus" note. This makes me extremely sad, but I'm not sure what else there is to be done. Perhaps next year I'll have the time to resuscitate it, but for now I have things like my thesis to worry about.

That said, I've still been thinking a lot about webzines, in part because I'm looking for places to publish my work. What I've noticed is that the webzine as a format has grown ridiculously stagnant. What has arisen in their place is the blog – weblog empires like those that have flourished around Engadget are one thing, but it seems to me like there's an enormous void left in the world for honest-to-God zines that integrate new tools and tech. Derek's JPG is one of the few examples of new Web 2.0 zines doing it right.

A bunch of the zines to which I'd planned to submit are now dead and gone. Fuzzynet, Haypenny, 28MM, The Black Table, SerialText, Punchline, 3rd Bed, Cutbank, Blaze, Koi, Meomore, Galactica, Dirt, all have dissipated – and weirdly, Iron Circus has, I think, somehow transmogrified into a webcomic I just recently discovered and fell in love with, Templar, Arizona. I am, however, delighted to find a new crop springing up in their place, including the delightful Potion. I'd always known that the literary zine scene was ephemeral, but having edited one of these now-ghostly publications it makes me a little sad.

I need to take a closer look at the scene, that's for sure, but I'm not wholly positive that the game hasn't completely changed since I was an undergrad. What it's changed to I'm not sure, which is both exciting and unsettling, but that's life for you. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Or something like that.

So my friend Derek just started offering subscriptions to his new JPG Magazine, and I'm helping to shill for it. Keep reloading the page, and you'll get me eventually. I mean what I say in my soundbite – as a magazine editor/publisher myself, I can honestly say that what Derek's doing with 8020 Publishing is changing the way magazines are produced – and it's inspiring as hell. It's easy to imagine how other magazines could be produced on a similar model, and it's exciting to think about. Go, D, go!

I came across this while dong my morning webcomics tour – a sharp interview with Scott "Understanding Comics" McCloud. I can't wait to read his new book, Making Comics, which is due to hit in September. I'm still trying to figure out a way to wrangle a visit from McCloud to MIT this fall, but, as always, money is tight. Hmm. I guess we could sell tickets?

Interesting piece in today's New York Times (free subscription required, yadda yadda yadda): Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry's Rules. Nothing too terribly astonishing here, except for perhaps the exclusion of the otherwise ubiquitous Cory Doctorow – but there are some funny bits:

Mr. Chandra, a former computer programmer who already reads e-books downloaded to his pocket personal computer, said he saw no point in resisting technology. "I think circling the wagons and defending the fortress metaphors are a little misplaced," he said. "The barbarians at the gate are usually willing to negotiate a little, and the guys in the fort usually end up yelling that 'we are the only good things in the world and you guys don't understand it,' at which point the barbarians shrug, knock down your walls with their amazingly powerful weapons, and put a parking lot over your sacred grounds. "If they are in a really good mood," he added, "they put up a pyramid of skulls."

I have well passed the stage in my academic career (in which I am inexplicably scoring better grades at MIT than Kenyon) where I read something like this and instantly think, White Paperrrr...

There's a fascinating article in the January MIT Technology Review called "A New Idea for Publishing", in which John Battelle suggests a system by which publishers can pick and choose from an array of advertisers. Definitely worth future research.

If you're a friend of mine who reads this weblog and has some time and initiative, I'm rapidly coming to realize that I simply can't run the new Inkblots as a one-person shop. If you want to join our new rapidly-forming editorial board, email me with a pitch – your would-be job title and description. Positions are unpaid, since this is a labor of love, but it looks good on a resume nevertheless. (That, and it's a cool project.)

I'm really quite open at this point. If there's something that you think we should add to the mix, something we should do differently, or something (or someone) that you think we should publish/interview/draft, etc., let me know!

From the MIT Technology Review: Physics Model Predicts Book Sales. This is a little bizarre, but it makes perfect sense, considering things like The Virtual Book Tour, which had its sixth outing while I was away. Hey, Kevin – jump on this.

I'm a little disappointed that Inkblots didn't make the list, but given our current erratic publishing schedule, maybe people think we're dead, and thus didn't mention us on this thread about web magazines at kottke.org. Posted more for my own reference in the future, but there's a bunch of possibilities on that list.