Time magazine has an interesting article on publishing that can be viewed here at their website. It looks at some of the challenges facing modern publishing, such as bad and out dated business models, and the new wave of self-publishing and other sources of stories that can be found.
While we would all dream to emulate their first example, of an author who in twelve months went from selling her book from the boot of her car to having a half-million dollar contract, I think most of us are more destined for what is mentioned later in the article, to be part of the great content that is available on the ‘net.
The following part I did find interesting;
And what will that fiction look like? Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer–electronic books aren’t bound by physical constraints–and they’ll be patchable and updatable, like software. We’ll see more novels doled out episodically, on the model of TV series or, for that matter, the serial novels of the 19th century. We can expect a literary culture of pleasure and immediate gratification. Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don’t linger on the language; you just click through. We’ll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life.
Given Cara’s Choice is written in a serial format, it is good to see that my idea for it has been, hopefully, agreed with.
Mist and Shadows 