Orange Monster

Yesterday I posted my list of ideas on here, as I have done every other year, and then I posted the link on the PiBoIdMo facebook page. I got likes and then I got comments from people who are rightly warning me not to put my ideas on the web incase they get stolen or, worse still, in case it screws up a chance for me to be published.

This is lovely of them but it assumes that I haven’t thought this through; and I have. I decided after several catastrophic traditional publishing events that I would take a different route. When I attempted the normal route I found that my exciting ‘yeah I’ve got a publisher’ quickly disappeared into dispair as they ended up bankrupt, or they shelved the project, or they had a change of management and decided the MS was too long but wouldn’t work as something smaller and they all retained the copyright of the work I’d done but nothing happened with it, and I no longer had control of it, and it is gone. I can’t get it published else where. I can’t get those stories back, I can’t share them.

If I’d been more savvy I would have had a solicitor check contracts, but a lot of the pub companies wont let you have the sort of contract that I would now be happy with. To be fair I was only dealing with small and medium sized companies; I have no idea about the larger ones – maybe if I get some of the longer stories polished I will try that route. But for my picture books? Nah.

But that is the reason for self publishing, there were others as well – to do with the environment and my craft background and what not – which I posted right at the beginning here on this blog. So why do I put my ideas and even some of the writing and illustrations on line? Where everyone can see them, where (if people want) they can nick them?

I do have a little copyright statement on all my blogs but that has never stopped piracy. So surely it is dangerous to have my stuff out here? Not only could people nick it but they could take it to a publishing house as their own work.

Well if they did that then they would be idiots – I have the stuff on the blog which shows not only that it is mine but often the dates at which the concept came into being. If they did that my openness actually protects me. It is easier to steal a story few have seen. It is one of the big problems academia faces in that due to the way the funding works they often have issues with this so it has been looked into. That doesn’t stop people being protective of their stuff and the protectiveness doesn’t stop it being nicked

And as for people stealing my brilliant ideas? Even if they do – which has happened, then they will have a different take on things and in fact when I tried to show my stuff to a larger company I found they didn’t want my stuff but produced something inhouse that was similar but different enough that all the copyright and intellectual property right laws didn’t protect me, and yet they had stolen my concept and even some of the design work. The value of an idea is not so much in it itself, as what it becomes when you bring it to completion.

This is why I share ideas, I give them away, at workshops, on the net, to friends, to kids who talk to me at craft fayres. This doesn’t just extend to my kidlit, not even to just my writing or art. Me and my husband have had many great ideas that should be out in the world and we have neither the resources nor the time to manage even a fraction of them. We have put lists of things up saying ‘somebody please do this cool thing!’ we expected people to take the ideas and run and not tell us and the first we’d know of it was it’s announcement on the news but that is not what is happening – people tell us and keep us upto date. I’m sure there will be people out there who have taken the ideas and are claiming them as their own but the net effect negates that. The thing is, we are people of ideas, we are brimming with them I think if someone finds it hard to think of an idea or design or concept then it may be an entirely different ball game.

When I was thinking of trying to self publish I started to think about what writing and art and all the rest of it really were, especially with the electronics of the modern world. I found blogs meant I could share my ideas and memories and rants but they became something more: a platform.

A platform on which I could build, The Creative Penn has some great info on this sort of thing for authors. I have my art work, stories, poems, instructions on how to bake my bean hodgepodge, I insert audio, video and interact with people via the comments. I have a web empire. I discovered I had a fan base.

I found people started asking me to do things! Run workshops, come and read, please start a writing group. Please can we have your poem/story in our publication?

None of this would have happened if I’d hidden the work away. And that Piracy thing? Well the stats show it works as free advertising and you know what? Me and others I know going down these different paths have found that it is our family and friend who unwittingly plagiarise and pirate us! From nicking photos to pop on facebook to putting your poem in their wedding invite, to using your little character as their avatar on some social networking site. But we all agree that it is when this sort of thing starts happening that you know you are doing something right!

XKCD and Cory Doctorow have far more to say on this matter and both are excessively successful.

There are more videos of Cory exploring all the different aspects of this – just follow the youtube trail!

And that brings me back to the idea of what is a book? Does the internet really need more content? Does the world need all the self published stuff? Does it need physical books at all – what is the future of the book? Is a book a tome? A codex, a collection of words and pictures or an information sharing device or something else? I think I shall be exploring that is another blog post 🙂

And before people start telling me I spelt the title of the post wrong – it is an intentional play on words 😉

Posted: Saturday, November 3rd, 2012 @ 9:46 am
Categories: Film, PiBoIdMo, Publishing.
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