December 6th, 2012 / 4:16 am
Snippets
Snippets
Brooks Sterritt—
Let’s get this out in the open: what are your thoughts on the recent Duotrope Debacle?
(crickets)
cricket cricket
By debacle do you mean the switch to subscriber only? Because disappointed though I am about having to pay for something that was once free, I don’t really blame them. I’m (probably) willing to shell out five bucks a month for it provided I maintain the output to justify that.
Bigger question is whether or not it’s a sustainable model for them I suppose, and that’s not something I have any idea about.
Yes, exactly that. I’m wondering if they should have considered running ads instead of charging.
Wikipedia is the #5 site on the web and serves 450 million different people every month – with billions of page views.
Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn’t belong here. Not in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others.
When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but I decided to do something different. We’ve worked hard over the years to keep it lean and tight. We fulfill our mission efficiently.
If everyone reading this donated $5, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. But not everyone can or will donate. And that’s fine. Each year just enough people decide to give.
This year, please consider making a donation of $5, $20, $50 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch
I figured it out / ya’ll HTMLG commenters ain’t as big as your mouth / my street value well it won’t even fit in your couch
it’s probably bad form to comment so much on your own imploded duotrope snippet but i think this would have gotten more comments if i had gone ALL OUT and made a full post being the VILLAGE EXPLAINER and posting a series of PROVOCATIVE QUESTIONS but maybe no one cares. i’d be happy if no one cared (about duotrope that is). Salman Rushdie should change his name to Salon.com Rushdie and become a patsy of the regime.
longtime / firsttime: i feel sad for the duotrope people because they don’t understand the nature of their service — people benefitting most being new to literary publications. like everything else ‘serving writers’ they seem hellbent on getting that twenty bucks out of those of us naive enough and desperate enough to give it up. moves like this validate self publishing.
I think it is being very poorly handled by Duotrope. Is over priced for most short fiction writers who are not yet famous (me), unless they roll out some improvements may not be worth the price. A lot of authors are being poor hating assholes about it. And I’m going to be paying for it when my next paycheck arrives. Right after I pay my rent.
I’m not interested enough, I think?
Also eff form. Why not start a whole new lit blog in this thread? Eff it. Eff
Duotrope either came out or got popular a couple years after I started sending stuff out, and by then New Pages and Google pretty much did everything Duotrope does now. In some ways D-trope is kind of the Facebook of emerging writers. It poses as a service, but really it’s what people spend time doing instead of, you know, writing.
It’s a bummer that they’re charging because it will make their service seem a lot more useful than it really is (unless they’re making some major improvements I don’t know anything about). Don’t get me wrong, they do what they do fine. But as a resource/tool, I think many people rely on it more than they should. When it was free, it had the feeling of a community data-gathering project, like that new Tumblr: http://whopays.tumblr.com. It was interesting, encouraging, but not all that productive, at least for me. I used Duotrope all the time when I was first looking to publish, but it didn’t do much for me at all because it encouraged me to submit to journals I knew nothing about (other than their Duotrope stats). Good publications started coming when I started reading journals and submitting to the ones that I actually knew something about, more than just their submission/payment policies and response time. I feel like there’s a certain amount that you have to invest into journals in order for them to invest in you. And I don’t mean a financial investment. I mean putting thought and care into what you’re submitting where, and knowing firsthand why you’re submitting where you are.
Couldn’t agree more.
I saw the post and didn’t know what the debacle was. I meant to google it and then I didn’t.
I may very well be wrong, but I always thought of Duotrope as being useful primarily for people trying to make a living from publishing stories. It’s a relic of an older time, when one needed a service to know what was out there. But I’ve always had more luck myself just asking my friends and professors and writers I admire which journals they’re reading/submitting to, as well as going to a bookstore like Quimby’s and glancing through what’s there (and before I lived in Chicago, I went to the library). But I also haven’t really been looking for paying publications, just journals I like and would like to publish in.
If Duotrope can explain the rules of cricket to me, I’d gladly give them $20.
I heard about it on Facebook and nobody cared there, either.
That’ll be at least $50 (for one year’s worth of cricket explanations)