I Can Imagine Someone Beating Me Over The Head With This Tomorrow

Seth Godin beats on many of the preconceptions of the publishing industry trying to deal with many of the same issues with which I'm flailing about right now in light of the deepening recession. I agree with a lot of what Godin suggests: that a market doesn't care about your industry, that issues like pricing in new technologies are determined by people trying to protect an industry rather than serve a customer, that it looks like there will be more of an art form rather than less.

I would disagree with Godin in general (or at least how I'm reading him) and with this kind of ethos being applied to comics publishing in a few ways. The biggest one: unlike prose, I don't think the issue in comics is going to be an industry pricing things at $15 rather than $1 to protect itself. I think it will be an industry pricing the part where the creators receive the most benefit at $0 or damn close to it because the part where the industry profits (media rights, licensing) stays intact and benefits from the boost. There are others: I don't think that future consumer habits are as inevitable and set in stone as many new media thinkers seem to think they are (for one thing, in comics you always seem to get these arguments about subscription vs. free, and those are from the the only models), I think some of where you see profit now is playing the old against the new which isn't going to work when the full conversion takes place, and I think the issue in a lot of cases is bigger than a judgment of who profits and how we best secure that for that person.

But anyway: worth reading.
 
posted 6:30 pm PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
 
Full Archives