Well... bye.

Big Publishing is dying a long-deserved death, close on the heels of its younger siblings in music and movies.

Welcome to th' Fool's Gold Saloon, boys! The RIAA and MPAA is both over inna dark corner booth a-cryin' in their fancy-assed cham-pag-nee. They 'llowed as how you should go join 'em once't ya got here.

Sarah Hoyt:

I realized around the early nineties that my reading life had changed. It had changed because I rarely found a book I wanted to read. Reading remained my main form of entertainment, but in the mid nineties I turned to fanfic on line, because I couldn’t find anything to read in the stores.

The problem was this: most of the books on the shelves, whether at our large indie store, or Barnes and Noble, or Borders (all then within easy distance from my house) completely failed to interest me. And I read Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery and both popular history and historical novels. However, with very few exceptions, no matter what I got from the shelves in SF/F it always turned out to be a lament about oppression, a glorification of victimhood or a “Humanity is vermin on the Earth” book. So I stayed home and re-read my Heinleins until they became part of my thought process.

Then Amazon opened the market to self-publishing, and people could find things that they wanted to read that insulted neither their intelligence nor their political beliefs.

Thereby precipitating whining, denial and outright illegal price-fixing from the publishers.

They did it to themselves, of course, but that won't stop them pissing and moaning about how unfair is the universe. Like Mrs Hoyt, I got tired of the lefty slant creeping into scifi a few years ago and started seeking out newbie authors on Amazon. Not everything is worth reading, but nearly everything offers a sample, so you can decide for yourself. It's pretty obvious that some of this stuff never would have made it past a junior editor in Big Leftist Publishing House -- which means I find it delightful.

I've personal experience with it, by the way. Someday I'll get off my ass and self-publish all those stories I wrote that were turned down by Publishing Snobs with either no explanation or an "inappropriate content" rejection. I eventually found one guy who would go so far as to explain to me that while a particular story of mine was well-written with good pacing and believable characters, the central theme -- questioning the moral validity of Islam -- rendered it unpublishable.

No more, my little Lefty Pubbie friend, no more. Very soon now, that will double as a description of your job.