Like you, I’ve had a fair amount (several books, and lots of contributions in magazines and things) published in the past, so I’ve not many illusions about either making a living from non-fiction, nor the “magic” of having a book in print. We are at a strange turning point in history, and the Internet has changed everything.

I write a little music, too, and with that I have absolutely no desire to try and interest a “proper” record label. Netlabels are becoming the chief means of distributing (often under Creative Commons) experimental music. A couple of my pieces have been used, under CC, in soundtracks to videos whose producers could never have afforded to use them had they been distributed by a record label. This gives me far more satisfaction than a few pounds in royalties, even supposing anyone were prepared to pay to use my work!

Am I arguing myself out of paper publication altogether, and into online distribution? Certainly the argument from ecology looks promising, though what is the carbon footprint of a server farm compared with that of a printing press? I don’t know…

As far as girlwhocriedepiphany’s point about the enduring quality of books is concerned, I wonder if an individual title, in a print run of a few hundred, is all that enduring. Surely in the long run James Bond is more likely to survive than Brother Ramon, just because Fleming’s print runs were so much longer, and so it would be hard for all his books to be lost. The Internet (saving some global EMP catastrophe) is perhaps as likely to preserve material in the long term as print.

The tactile quality of books? I’ve never been impressed by the tactile quality of mass-market paperbacks – and the “look and feel” of a good website is quite tactile in a virtual kind of way!

I don’t know. Swings and roundabouts. Let’s keep talking – and praying!

Wishing you a happy New Year.

Trust me: it is extremely difficult to make a living as an author. I’ll grant that a small number of novelists can make a go of it, but without exception every nonfiction author I’ve ever met has had some other source of income: a trust fund, a teaching or therapy gig, a spouse with a successful career. When I teach “how to get published” seminars, I always drive home two facts: 1. Don’t quit your day job, and 2. Try to build an income stream through teaching or speaking. From where I sit, Darrell, since books don’t make that much money and blogs are more fun to write, I have to weigh all the factors. And yes, the “thingyness” of books is a factor in their favor.

As for the archiving issue, certainly blog archives are more accessible than magazine back issues or out of print books. Granted, as we move more into a print on demand model of publishing, “out of print” will cease to be an issue. But a book sitting on a shelf gathering dust serves the same function as a blog archive (only the blog archive remains searchable).

As for my Pagan-to-Catholic writing, it’s all still on my LiveJournal blog, but I’ve removed the public settings on them because I got tired of the flames from fundamentalist-minded Pagans. It’s on my to-do list to import them into the Website of Unknowing, at which time they’ll be public and Googlable again. Like you, I also hope some of what I wrote in 2004-2005 will make it into a book someday.

Also, a book is an object that exists. Blogs exist only in cyberspace. I’ve written some wonderful blogposts that very few people are going to ever read again unless they go trolling through my archives of 300+ blog entries. And some of your best writing, Carl (written during your transition from Pagan to Christian), is no longer available online. I hope it shows up in one of your books.

Not that I don’t love online! I loves it, I loves it, I loves it. I just don’t think it’s gonna replace books (but then again, who knows what is gonna happen in the future?)

Books R Us.

Please write this, Carl. I promise to buy a copy! And you can tell your editors.

Love, Peter

And that is the thing about books, as much as an individual volume is unspeakably fragile, the concept that is bound pages seems destined to endure. I think this is especially true when one is writing about mysticism. As much as the Christian mystical tradition is one that dances beyond language into pure experience, it is inextricably rooted in the text of Bible and in the writings of saints who have passed their wisdom on to us. Very soon, I expect things like “Web Hosting for Dummies” will only be a memory on the shelves of Barnes and Noble, but a book such as yours still has a place in the tactile world. It is yet to be seen whether we can establish a relationship with the digitized text on a Sony Reader, but for now there are more than enough of us who need to learn of something as life altering as the Dark Night of the Soul by way of a more familiar vehicle.

Write on!