Even before the movie, many bookstores were cross-shelving the Pullman trilogy, helped by the fact that the publisher reissued them in mass market editions with more "adult"-looking covers. (Well, they took Lyra and the polar bear off the cover.) There are a few other titles where this has been done, but for the most part, YA is hidden away in its own little section.

And to echo what Cory says about YA - yeah, YA fiction rules. To use Pullman again, he once said something along the lines of, "Children's books are the last bastion of plot," and he's right. Outside genre sections like F/SF and Mystery, much of "literary" fiction has fallen in love with poetic turns of phrase and interior struggle at the expense of things actually HAPPENING in the stories.

The thing about books for young readers: great YA books are good from the word go, otherwise kids will put them down and find something else to entertain them. No kid has ever read a book because of the great review it got in the New York Times, or said, "You know, this book is really slow, but I'm going to give it another hundred pages and see if it picks up." Hence, YA often makes for fantastic (and often brisk!) reading. And they call this audience "young adult" for a reason: there's stuff in there to appeal to the young kids in them, but also stuff to appeal to the developing, mature, adult sides of them as well.

Don't be afraid of the YA/Teen section! There's amazing stuff there.

Full disclosure: I, um, make my living writing books for young adults, so I'm kind of biased.

Congrats on the book release, Cory--I'll pick up a copy next time I'm in the YA section.

Not so "forthcoming" - I discovered this gem in Asheville's Malaprop's Books and Cafe this past Wednesday and snapped it up. It's absolutely gorgeous--and the essays and stories withing ain't too shabby either.

Dude, if Iron Man's suit was open source, EVERYBODY would have one. "Proprietary software" is this generation's "secret identity."

You know, in my nitpicky criticism, I failed to mention how totally awesome this is. Thanks for posting it, and kudos to the mind behind it.

I think I would have made Linus the Nite Owl. Both characters seem so sad to me, so meek and second-rate. Pig Pen would have made a nice Comedian too - they're both down and dirty.

And when the government accepts a bid from a French computer company, congress will have a hissy-fit.

Fabulous. Awesome.

As a writer, the immediately problem I have with this math is that I don't produce $100 worth of stuff a year. I'm lucky if I have two hardback books come out in one year, which, being young adult novels, are priced at less than twenty dollars each. Yes, I will have paperback editions of each down the road, and perhaps a "true fan" will buy those as well as the hardback--but I'm what I would consider a "true fan" of other authors, and I don't collect both. Beyond that, there don't seem to be a lot of logical extensions to my business. I'm interested in this idea, and my wife, who is a crafter, will be very interested, but I'm skeptical that it's an effective model for all media.

Or should I be producing t-shirts and limited edition, hand-printed short stories for people to buy and collect?

I think the avalanche was probably caused by a Martian Yeti.

Just one question - is West Virginia still "open for business?"

I haven't read this book or blog (although I'll now seek both out) but what this put me in the mind of first was YouTube versus broadcast/cable television. I'm sure I'm not saying anything new here, but it's interesting to me to consider YouTube as web power amateur hour, to borrow a couple of Kelly's own terms, and thus see it as a prototypical emergent bottom-up system.

Would I want YouTube to be my only entertainment option? No. It can be very entertaining and diverting, but I sometimes want something more, something the bottom-up system cannot provide. I sometimes want the total package of great writing, great directing, great acting, and great production values. For that, I must rely on top-down providers. I've yet to see anything as good on YouTube, in toto, as the new Battlestar Galactica, for example.

At the same time, we can already see the effects of the bottom-up system on the top-down system. The Flight of the Conchords--whose songs are arguably no more than very smart YouTube shorts, which is in fact where I first heard them--break down the wall between viral media and mainstream distribution. As has internets posterboy Andy Samberg, who was plucked out of the great online comedy miasma to try to resuscitate the beached whale that is Saturday Night Live.

Given time, will individual creators out there in the great bottom-up system of YouTube create something as good and complete as Battlestar Galactica? Sure--why not? But how long would it take? That's just what Kelly seems to be saying--a system that relies solely on bottom-up innovation can't move as quickly or as efficiently as a top-down system with organization and means. What is needed is a synthesis of both--something that brings the uncontrollable knowledge and discovery of the hive-mind together with the almost instantaneous implementation system of the establishment.

Thanks for posting this--a thought-provoking way to start my flu-addled morning.

The art in this book caused the opposite reaction in me - I thought it was ugly. Perhaps it was purposefully so, but I disliked it - and the story - so much that I abandoned this book part way through.

"We can't afford to let the human remain a free thinker. We've got to . . . OPERATE."

Terrific stuff.

All authors - whether scum-sucking propagandists or otherwise - should be wary of the terms in many boilerplate writing contracts that mandate significant reductions in royalty percentages for "special sales." Special sales can include books sold at deep discounts at discount retailers like Wal-Mart and Costco, as well as books sold at full price in "specialty stores" as varied as museum gift shops and pet supply stores. In a phone seminar on book marketing I took from The Authors Guild, the instructor went so far as to discourage us from doing book signing events at specialty stores because we probably wouldn't earn enough from the royalties on the sales to pay for our gas mileage.

As for the books being given away by the publisher or sold at a loss to subsidiaries, well, maybe these guys can call up John Kerry and ask him how to ease the pain of getting screwed.

I grew up in Knoxville, and every Halloween some teenagers would decide to go find the body farm and take a look. As you can see from the pictures, they've gotten way better about security.

Cory mentioned podcasting as a way of generating interest in printmags, but Escape Pod deserves a shout out here as a viable, standalone, paying distribution model for short SF fiction. I can't remember the exact stats Steve quoted on his podcast, but at some point, when compared to the SF print magazines, he had something like the second or third highest number of subscribers of any media featuring SF short stories. Seems pretty clear to me that while the print magazine itself may be on its way out as a vehicle, the short story itself is not dead--just reformatted. Escape Pod is quite simply can't miss short fiction--much of which is reaching a far wider audience now, via Steve's podcast, than it did when it was originally printed in SF magazines.

One last thought - Cory has said before that one of the reasons treeware survives in the digital age is because many of us have a fetish, of sorts, for books and magazines. I think this is true. It certainly is for me--I own far more books than I have read, possibly more than I can ever read, (though I am trying,) and I still read Asimov's in print form in part because the crinkle of the cover and the feel of the pages has a nostalgia for me that is part of the overall experience. Reading stories on my desktop computer or my laptop has yet to come anywhere close to replacing that. Will the next generation, raised on handheld computers in ways those of us even in our thirties weren't, finally be able to break the "fetish" and embrace ebooks?

"Is this a test, Mr. Durden, sir?"

It seems to me the real point of the piece is that what we think of as the "typical American" has changed radically over the years. Many people may still wish to believe that America is made up of "yeoman farmers," to borrow a Jeffersonian description, but the reality is far different. I think the author is right when he says that it's not just Hollywood-types who don't understand farmers. MOST of us don't understand farmers because most of us are so far removed from that life that we couldn't grow the tomato plants they sell pre-grown at Home Depot. While we can debate whether that's a good or bad thing, the truth of the matter is that when a news program or Harper's Weekly or any other media seeks out the "average American," he's not likely to be found on a farm in Iowa, but in the suburb of a major city. We just need to stop pretending that small-town America IS America anymore.

Good point, Cpt. Tim - Dalek Sec didn't have the traditional Dalek synthesized voice once he'd become the abomination above.

And I agree - "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Blink" have been the two best episodes by far. Both were written, it should be noted, by the same person: Stephen Moffat. Rumor has it he would be likely be tapped to replace Russell T Davies should he decide to leave the show.

I LOVE the new Doctor Who, but the two Daleks in Manhattan episodes were absolute stinkers. Still, great mask.

And now tonight's (Sept. 14, 2007) Doctor Who episode on the Sci-Fi Channel is sponsored by "The People of the United Methodist Church!"

It's a conspiracy!