Roll your own
2007-12-28 | Filed under Published |
In the Long, Long Ago, in the Before Time—otherwise known as the late 80s—I was in a music store and saw a sign offering a brilliant service. You could choose a set of individual songs and they would sell you that album: as good as a mix tape, without the expense and hassle of buying a dozen albums. I though this was particularly brilliant because I was not sufficiently into music to spend large portions of my allowance on its procurement. I was more of a tape-it-off-the-radio sort of girl; that left more money for books. But in any case, I thought it was a great idea.
I still like the à la carte option, and as fun new technologies emerge it becomes even easier. As a fan of short fiction, I like webzines and Fictionwise. The other day I came across a site, AnthologyBuilder, that lets you roll your own anthology.
The site is still in beta, though I gather the full release will be ready soon. I’ve added three of my stories to the database (”Summer by the Ocean,” “Mr. Balloon Man,” and “The Demon in the Storehouse”) and will probably add others as well. I am unreasonably pleased that Tony Pi’s Shred story is also available; I felt a similar thrill when I saw Stephen D. Rogers had offered some of his stories for sale at Fictionwise. Somehow a reprint just reinforces the validity of the first publication, I guess.
This sort of thing is not going to be a cash cow for anyone involved, but I think it’s a neat idea and I hope it takes off. It keeps short stories in circulation and provides options for short fiction fans. Yes, it’s fun to dig through used bookstores, scoop up old copies of magazines, google titles and phrases you think you remember from that cool story you read years ago, or poke around with the Wayback Machine because you remember about when you read a good story in a webzine that folded before the dot com bubble burst. I love doing that. I feel so satisfied when I succeed, as if I’d slain a peckish mythological beast and dragged its corpse (or a portion thereof) back home. But sometimes it’s just nice to have the thing. Certainly that’s a good idea if you want to share it with someone else.
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I looked into this once a few years ago but didn’t have the programming chops to make it happen (at that time!). I have also wondered why Amazon.com doesn’t do something like this with their Amazon Shorts store. They could publish something like celebrity “playlists”. Wouldn’t you like to read an anthology selected by, say, Michael Connelly?
I sure hope AnthologyBuilder does well, it’s a cool idea.
I don’t know how well short fiction’s ever going to do, in any format…but this is certainly a niche. And since I gather it’s been a spare-time, for-the-love project, the bar for doing well may be comfortably low.
My company’s been bundling PDFs of technical material for years, but I never really thought of doing the same thing with fiction until I saw this site, and then it was obvious. Very Web 2.0.