"Follow the Money"

Back about two million years ago (as July, 2003 feels in blogtime), Teresa Nielsen Hayden posted to her blog a piece about self-publishing, vanity publishing, and the ways in which confidence artists prey on desparate unpublished writers.

It got a lot of comments.

Surprisingly, it is still receiving comments, including a recent recommendation of Jim Fisher's Ten Percent of Nothing, a forthcoming study of an agent who stole over $1 million from her "clients" over the course of the 1990s. (Link is to Amazon, who I hate, because B&N doesn't have the book listed yet.

If you've ever been tempted to self-publish, you should read the blog entry; if you're interested in publishing, you probably want to read the book when it comes out. There are excellent reasons to self-publish. There are also many, many reasons to take care before doing so.

More about Livejournal chronology

Following up from a comment from sarah_ovenall on my earlier post, dashing my sense of history:

I graduated from Duke in Dec. 86. Epworth was the most interesting dorm at Duke, where most of the bohemians lived. I formally lived off-campus for almost all of my tenure there, either in apartments run by Duke or in a room in, effectively, a boarding house a mile due east of Epworth, off of Duke's East Campus. For the last few years I was around Duke, I treated Epworth as my adopted dorm, and that's where I met Sarah.

I know that I met nellorat and supergee before my final semester at Duke. In fact, even though I lived only half a mile from them (they also lived east of East Campus), I deliberately avoided visiting them that semester, because I had a tendency to go to their house and discover that eight or nine hours had gone by, and I couldn't afford the time. I had three literature courses and a creative writing class to complete that semester, and often spent entire days holed up in my bedroom reading. One week, I read Ulysses in its entirety between Monday afternoon and Wednesday morning, and I'm not a particularly fast reader and it's not a particularly quick book. I think I read the entirety of the "Circe" chapter without getting up from my bed. Ness. Yo.

So that makes Sarah officially #6 on my LJ friends seniority list.