Tag Archives: self-publishing

Indie Publishing is Free Market Publishing

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Professional publishing is fiat publishing, while indie publishing is free market publishing. The professional publishing industry, which consists of the “Big 5” book publishers (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Hachette Book Group, and Simon & Schuster) and literary agencies, are like central banks in the economy: they manipulate the market and create artificial scarcity by limiting which authors and books can be published. Indie publishing (self-publishing and small independent presses) is the free market for books, as it has a more natural flow of supply and demand. Everyone has the same opportunity, and success is more closely correlated with merit—or how much readers actually enjoy a book.

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Algorithmic Fiction is Not For Me

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Welcome to the age of algorithmic fiction. Thanks to tools like GPT-4, a human writer with a library of previously written books can simply write a one-page outline for a new novel, and AI can write an entire novel in their style. In many cases the book will be good enough to pass as if it was written by the human authors themselves, allowing writers to publish more frequently. However, GPT fiction will only work with formulaic writers whose books are all similar. In other words, those writers who were already writing algorithmic fiction before the aid of AI.

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Content Creation in the Coming Attention-Based Economy

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Writers have always struggled to get adequately paid for their work. Before the internet, publishing companies (for books, newspapers, and magazines) had the power as gatekeepers to take advantage of writers who had no other means to get their writing to the public. Publishers would take a large percentage of the pay—because they could. Today, the internet provides a way around traditional gatekeepers, but some writers still struggle to get paid. This could change in the future with the development of currently existing technology.

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Work for Idle Hands: A Novella

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Smith has been working on the assembly line at Ovivo for seventeen years, building the same steel triangles 720 times per day. He never knew what the parts were for—that was classified information—but he assumed the triangles were one small cog of a larger machine, something important and meaningful to the world in some way.

At least Smith thought so, until mistakenly entering the wrong production room one day. Inside, he would discover the workers next door disassembling the same parts he and his team put together. All his hard work, immediately undone. Why?

The revelation sets Smith on an investigative journey throughout the Ovivo factory, up the chain of corporate hierarchy, in search of what he and his co-workers are supposed to be building there and why.

The truth about Smith’s job may turn his entire world upside down—that is if he can uncover the company’s secrets without being fired… or worse.

Work for Idle Hands — a Kafkaesque science fiction mystery novella by T.Z. Barry

How to Learn How to Write Fiction

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Writing fiction is not something that can be taught with a simple “how-to” book. A creative artistic endeavor like fiction writing is something you have to learn by doing yourself. Each writer is different—at least the good ones are—therefore their method to write fiction is different. So this post is not “how to write fiction like others” but “how to teach yourself to write fiction your own way.”

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