Phronk

Comment Threads

• jsburbidge commented on Baboon Fart Odyssey
  There seems to be s widespread belief that once a good book is on the market its quality will speak for itself with resulting sales. The problem with that is that there's a long history of very good books on the market in the traditional way which achieve, at best, no more than a succes d'estime, and never have the sales to which their quality ought to lead. There's no obvious reason to believe that this will be any better for self-published books, and good reason to believe that with a weaker gatekeeper function and a higher ratio of drek...
• robotech.master commented on Baboon Fart Odyssey
  There's just the little thing that Hugh Howey's numbers suggest it is happening for a lot of people. Consistently, across both of his surveys so far. Granted that the surveys are from narrow periods of time, and they're basically estimates based on derived information, so you can argue about the margin of error. But even with the greatest possible margin of error, those numbers show that lots of people are buying lots of self-published books. At least on those two days they were, and it doesn't seem like there ought to be anything special about those particular days. Does this...
• rhialto [falu.nl] commented on Baboon Fart Odyssey
  This "repetition-of-fart" thing isn't really new. I just today read in a newspaper (yesterday's (I think) De Volkskrant) about a play which was critiqued. Its text was only repetition of a single word (which I ought to have copied down, but I didn't) which was based on a 40-year old book by a Swiss (I think) person. The play was called something like "Mumble mumble" (except that wasn't the word). (I wish I had remembered the details better... then I could also have double-checked them)....
• rhialto [falu.nl] commented on Baboon Fart Odyssey
  Ah, here it is: http://www.visitberlin.de/en/event/02-24-2014/murmel-murmel and http://www.volksbuehne-berlin.de/praxis/murmel/. "Murmel Murmel" by Dieter Roth. Not to be confused with "Murmel, Murmel, Murmel" by Robert Munsch....
• zakueins commented on Baboon Fart Odyssey
  I agree we need gatekeepers. At the very least, to keep some of the horribly written stuff you see in fan-fiction out of the way(1). Good grammar, a plot that makes sense, isn't outright plagiarism with the serial numbers (poorly) filed off, that's a good thing. And, that's the job of gatekeepers. The issue is that many of the gatekeepers have become moral guardians. If it doesn't fit in their worldview (a very New York/Blue/Democrat-to-socialist one if you're in the US), it's Bad Writing and shouldn't be published. Bad doggie. No biscuit. And, since they won't publish it, there clearly...