Friday, October 3, 2008

New Rope (No Money Needed)

Here's my proactive suggestion to presses, reviewers, and magazines in response to NetGalley's $400 per title idea.

Let's get Devin Emke to adapt his Submissions Manager for galley submission purposes. Magazines would be able to use it for reviews, just as journals now use it for submissions. This would help everyone out (presses, reviewers, magazines) without ending up adding several thousand dollars to the operating budget of presses - money that, if it exists, could be spent on promotion and/or publishing more works.

We can and need to reduce costs and save trees by having more electronic galleys; we can also make galleys more accessible to reviewers by going to an electronic model which would allow them to access the galley anywhere, any time.

However, and it's a big however, there is simply no need for it to cost $400 a title; Rosetta, who are behind NetGalley, would be making money off presses for doing very little themselves.

It seems crucial to me that we don't as an independent publishing community divert our money into the profit margins of corporations. We can do this in better ways.

1 comment:

John Gallaher said...

I wish I knew more about all this. I was completely unknowing of the whole amazon.com/ publisher problem that you talked about a while back, and now this.

I think (not to sound like a cliche) there should be an informative session at AWP on these issues for writers. You really should propose one for next year.