Grasping for straws in the wired world

I was perusing Schlock Mercenary this morning when a pop-up ad appeared touting a site called Pages Unbound . The site purports to be a home for freely available novel-length fiction on the web. Interested, I clicked through.

What I found is that Pages Unbound is actually a link page that goes to where people are mostly posting "web serializations", i.e. novels on the fly, via things like blogs or independent web pages.

Technically, I find nothing wrong with either having a link page to novels being written on the fly or the people who choose to publicly display their creations via the web. That's a choice that people are free to make.

That being said, welcome to the next generation of vanity press. On the up side, least it cuts out the immoral predator "publishers" like Publish America and Authorhouse. However, a quick browse of the linked pages show pretty much exactly what you'd expect: a bunch of first-draft quality beginner tracks of questionable value. Basically a Greek chorus of people desperate to be appreciated for what they've created.

It hurts, in a way, because I know that feeling. With only four short stories in the wild, the odds of meeting anyone outside of my editors, friends, and family who've actually read my works is vanishingly small.

There's so many facets to this that I'm boggled a bit at where to begin. You can weigh the existence of the Pages Unbound site against the all the other attempts to exploit the power of the web to leverage the death grip big publishing has on the throats of writers. Alternately, you can commune with the misery of those who create and desperately want to be read, even though so many of them need so much work to be readable.

Oh, lord, do they need work.

Regardless, every writer starts somewhere and then learns or doesn't. Those that learn move on and forward in the business, those that don't find other things to do with their time. If something like Pages Unbound helps promising writers move forward from the teeming masses of "wannabes" into the prose producing ranks of "writer", so be it. It's not bad, just an avenue that's open to question.

Still, I do have a problem with the whole concept. These people are posting their work in blogs and other socially interactive web environs, but there's no central location for mentoring and nurturing. You have to go to each individual location and read and then comment there, if facilities are provided. Plus it's hard to gauge if the Pages Unbound contributors are even open to feedback. Do they want to move out of casting their tales into the void or not? Or are they amongst those poor deluded fools who have convinced themselves that their words are like golden baubles for the benighted masses simply because the words are the "author's"?

Hard to tell.

All in all, I can't support an effort like Pages Unbound unless it's tied to an uber-community that supports its contributors by providing an independent venue to exchange and discuss craft, business, and the place of prose on the web.