They Took Our Myths

But to Gibson's credit, many of his inventions were ill defined and had a chance to mutate just like Herbert's terminology and tech. I won't get into the details because I am sure that you already know the obvious ones.

Anyways, I am really interested in checking out Dune now. I heard the first book is fantastic, but almost unreadable because Frank's writing style was atrocious and it got better over the years ... is this true?

By the way, why was this post down voted? Valid insight IMO.

The fundamentally borken part of the indie ecosystem is marketing/discovery. Publishers still act as gatekeepers for the reading public. Most people don't read and what they do read is almost entirely determined by the amount of marketing done for it, and while marketing is a learnable skill (I've run my own consulting shop, so done a lot of it) it is difficult to do on the kind of budget most indie authors have available for what amounts to a hobby.

The indie music industry has done a better job of discovery but that's in part because music is consumable in much smaller pieces than novels. The solution to this in writing has been--to some extent--to return to serialization, but while that has worked a bit in non-fiction (people write blogs they turn into books) it has so far seen only one or two successes in fiction, and they have been... not notable for the quality of writing, for the most part.

I've experimented with a couple of alternative forms to see if this can be overcome, but no luck so far. One was an illustrated serial prose format (finished version here: http://www.siduri.net/songsofalbion/songs_of_albion.html), the other an somewhat informal poemed illustrations format (http://www.siduri.net/cindylooyou/index.html) that appeared on the artist's blog and developed as a kind of jazz work as we tossed themes back and forth. The latter actually got a bigger following, although we promoted the former a lot more heavily. Go figure.

So far it looks like conventional serial narratives--probably pod-cast--are the best bet for the indie author. Some kind of serial pod-cast will likely be my next move, more in the spirit of exploration than anything else. I'm fortunate to have some training as a voice actor, but the number conditions on an idie author to be successful are many, and the difficulty for readers in discovering work they might enjoy is considerable.

Most artists who were successful at the DIY thing got fame with a major label at some point (Trent Reznor, Radiohead, etc). So as long as artists depend on labels to get their music heard, labels are going to dictate copyrights and licensing to a degree.

No fantasy author in their right mind would think "Wow, my work will stop being censored only 90 years from now, even though I will be dead! I will refrain from writing it because my ancestors will make less money."

Stross (edit: guest poster Hugh Hancock) and zillions of others are complaining about the outcome of this dynamic, not proposing any way to change it. I like your critique (don't complain, go outside system personally) but as a personal recommendation it will be rejected almost always (see above). To have a real crack at changing the dynamic, 'people' need to figure out how to peer produce cultural relevance independent of the system and compete on policy in a way that furthers peer production rather than merely mitigates excesses. Demanding public domain for public funding is one policy item to push on, currently outre for cultural funding/subsidy.

The system is set up in a way that ensures that individual creators (or, rather, their rightsholders) can profit, at the expense of the public domain that no powerful entities can profitably defend.

Basically, copyright is now a one-way street, when it was supposed to be a two-way bargain.

For that matter, how much money has gone into making any of the retellings of traditional fables and myth that has been bread and butter for Disney's animated features since 'Snow White'? (And into relentlessly policing the unauthorized use of the Disney rendition of these characters?)

There is a lot of creative accounting going on in Hollywood, but there is an entire industry built on making these movies that are the only lawyer-approved way of working with these characters. It has its pitfalls but if you can get into it, you can have a fairly comfortable middle-class lifestyle, if you don't mind regular periods of unemployment when one feature/tv show/etc ends and you haven't found a new one yet. And occasionally having some creative accounting fail to pay the last few bills of the subcontracted effects company you working for.

We are even beginning to get better about rewarding the people who work down in the comic-book trenches creating these characters. Creators reaching their prime learnt from the miserable treatment Marvel and DC gave folks like Siegel & Shuster (Superman's creators) or Jack Kirby (co-creator of pretty much the entire fucking Marvel Universe), and became more canny about not signing all their rights away - Eastman and Laird (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) are a great example.

It's not a magic unicorn world that automatically reward what's important.

First when the company was founded, and then when they started selling music via iTunes.