On Wednesday I wrote the article friends have told me to write for years. It tells how I suffered from depression between the ages of eleven and thirty-one, and the miraculous way I came out of it. I know a lot of people who struggle with depression, though not a lot of them talk about it openly. I know very few people—in fact, I can't think of any offhand—who have gone from deep depression to zero depression as I have. So I believe my story has value. I want people to read it. I want as many people as can be helped by it to read it.

You could be reading it right now, except that I haven't posted it here. Why not?

Answer: I don't know why not. Frankly, I'm wavering between the worlds of print and online publication. Come, waver with me a spell.

Print

Print publication has several advantages over online. If I publish my article in a magazine, for instance, they might pay me. Now with an article on depression, payment seems like a piddling issue—rather mercenary, really. If I were writing about trends in men's haberdashery over the past 50 years I would expect to be compensated. But writing an article about depression is a giving thing, a healing thing. I'm not above taking money for my work, but if money were the only obstacle it would be no obstacle at all.

Generally speaking, print magazines pay and websites don't (or do only through indirect means—more on that later). All other things being equal, payment is an advantage of print.

Clout is another big advantage. If you tell someone, "I just had an article published in Relevant magazine," they know you've achieved something special. If you tell someone, "I just posted an article on my blog," they say, "So'd my mother." Online "magazines"—with a few exceptions—don't fare much better than blogs in the Great Chain of Clout that society tacitly upholds. I've had a few articles on Relevant's site that didn't appear in the magazine. Appearing on their site is worth something, but not as much as appearing in the paper version. Print is your respectable older uncle—he's getting a bit past it, but he's got moneybags and he still talks the best game in town.

Print magazines and newspapers will continue to diminish in the face of online competition. Books, however, will remain unthreatened by their online variations for a long time. I want to publish books, and that means I have to impress book publishers. So I care about where my articles appear.

Circulation can be an advantage of print. Many magazines have tens or even hundreds of thousands of readers. Though not every reader is guaranteed to read every article, if you get an article into a magazine, you've got a shot at thousands of eyes. In my own experience, blog posts rarely receive as many as 1,000 readers. So all but the most popular blogs reach fewer people than magazines do.

I can't ignore print. The promise of payment, clout, and circulation make me want to keep trying to get my articles into magazines. But there's more to this story than meets the eye.

The Few, The Proud

Magazines sound great until you realize how few there are. Last spring I took a class in journalism. Our first assignment was to identify potential markets for our work. I had always believed there were hundreds of magazines that might publish my writing on Christian topics. In truth, there are somewhere between two and six.

That's because the vast majority of magazines are highly specialized. If I was a Seventh Day Adventist I could shoot for the Seventh Day Adventist magazine, but I'm not so I can't. If I was interested in writing sermons for busy pastors to copy and pass off as original to their hapless congregations, I could target one of several magazines that specialize in this racket, but I'm not so I won't. If I were a graduate of any of a number of universities or seminaries, I could get published in their magazines, but I'm not so I can't. If you take a list of all the Christian periodicals in existence, then scratch out the ones that are exclusive to certain group memberships, that feature highly specialized kinds of writing, that have very small circulations, or that are just plain weird, the resulting list consists of about ten magazines. But then each of these are specialized as well. I could write for Today's Christian Woman—I could! An article on depression, for instance—but normally my thoughts don't significantly cross paths with TCW's editors. Christianity Today is not highly specialized, but good luck getting published there. The CT editors have to actually watch you being circumcised in order to consider you for publication. By a certified freemason. It's in the masthead.

So for me that leaves Relevant—which is right down my alley, actually—New Man, Discipleship Journal, and uh... well, those.

If my mission in life were to see my articles in top-tier magazines, I would find a way. I would figure out what lower-tier magazines want and write that. Then once I had accumulated some under-clout I would cash it in to get the attention of top-tier magazines, figure out what they want and write that.

Here's the rub: I don't care. I am not a journalist. I am not even a writer. I'm a person who lives and thinks and stares and studies and teaches and thinks some more. My words are the polished poop of those activities. If I see a compatibility between what a magazine wants and what I like to think about, I'm happy to find a compromise there and write something suitable for the magazine. But I can't find the motivation to climb the writerly ladder, churning out whatever is needed in a broad area of interest just to see my articles in print every few months. I like to set my own agenda for what I think and write about.

My desire to follow my own muse in writing combined with the small and specialized world of print magazine publishing means I'll only get published rarely, if at all. There are simply too many constraints. Thus the appeal of the online world, where constraints are all but missing.

Democratic News Aggregation

If I decided to publish my article on depression online, it would take me about ten minutes. That's quite a bit faster than the several months it typically takes with a print publication. I would post it to my blog, then advertise it via reddit and Digg. Even if the article was absolute rubbish, I could bank on at least twenty visitors reading it in the first hour. If those visitors liked it they would upvote/digg it, ensuring its propagation to more visitors. Potentially, tens of thousands of visitors could catch wind of the glory of my article and, within the space of a few hours, flood my site to read it.

The impact of democratic news aggregation services (like reddit and Digg) on publishing is nothing short of revolutionary. I've been with the web since NCSA Mosaic; I've seen lots of nifty fads come and go; I am not one to wax lyrical on the Power of the Internet. But democratic news aggregation (DNA) is really something special. The word "Gutenberg" wants to slip in here, but I'll avoid the cliche. Point is: DNA fundamentally improves the way idea-producers move their ideas to idea-consumers.

In the past, when an idea-producer (for instance, a writer of an article like myself) wanted to get his idea out into the world, he had to go through one of a relative few idea brokers: newspapers, magazines, book publishers, TV networks, record labels, art dealers, film studios, game publishers. These idea brokers did everything. They screened out "unsuitable" ideas (though their idea of "unsuitable" might not match yours). They picked out the "best" ideas. They packaged them up with other ideas as well as paid advertising, then marketed and sold the package to consumers.



This isn't such a bad system—after all, the world lived with it for 500 years—but it certainly had its problems. It put a great deal of power in the hands of a few to decide what the public should and shouldn't see. But speaking more sympathetically, it left brokers with an incredibly difficult job. In a world where thousands of great ideas are spawned every day amid millions of inferior siblings, idea brokers had to constantly pick through the muck to find the stars. I'm told book editors go through hundreds of book proposals per week, yet only publish a few a year. Record company A&R reps comb through dozens of CDs a day, most of them ear-splitting rubbish.

So consumers lost because idea brokers often made bad—sometimes pernicious—decisions. Idea brokers lost because they were constantly awash with crap. And idea-producers lost because they discovered they were Legion—each of them a single, tiny, humiliated voice among millions.

The arrival of sites like reddit and Digg announced the death—or at least the gradual marginalization—of this system. It's the old strategy of dumping the middleman. Actually, in this case the middlemen didn't entirely disappear. Rather, they were replaced by software that distributes the task of sorting through muck to hundreds of willing consumers, effectively promoting them to micro-editors. Now it's not the magazine editor that decides what gets published, but an ad-hoc focus group of readers momentarily formed to evaluate articles. If they like an article, the software shows it to a wider group, and so on and on. If they don't like it, it dies on the vine.



There are major societal advantages to this system (though risks as well—subject for another post, I think). When voters are the media, they can no longer complain about media bias. But as an idea producer I benefit from this system as well. Before DNA services came along, when I posted a blog article I could only hope that a search engine found it and popularized it. This almost never happened, at least to me. Now I can submit my articles to DNA services and receive an instant, fair assessment of the article's appeal to ordinary readers. If people like it, they come. The more people like it, the more come.

The Joy of DNA

Back in March I posted an article on Paul's use of the word skubala in his letter to the Philippians. I sent it to reddit on a whim, and within hours it had received over 200 votes and 20,000 visits. Reddit readers tend to be atheist Bible-bashers and they liked hearing that the Bible contains the word "shit." Many of them also liked the deeper message about legalism and grace. They upvoted and left comments. The article found its public.

How else would that article have gained a readership? A Christian magazine editor would have roasted me on a stake rather than published it. A secular editor simply wouldn't have cared. But readers wanted the article, and reddit helped them find it. That's the promise of DNA services in a nutshell.

When my article on skubala went large, I enjoyed some of the benefits of print. Twenty-thousand readers is good circulation, even by print standards. I gained a little advertising revenue, which meant I got paid (though very little). But there were other benefits that print couldn't have offered.

When visitors read my article they came to me. That meant I could watch their traffic patterns and statistics. My site, not a magazine, gained their praise: if they bookmarked my article, they bookmarked me. They read other articles I'd written. I was the publisher; I was the host; I gained direct contact with readers.

Best of all, visitors could comment on my article, giving me instant feedback on how it struck them, what they thought and liked and hated. With a print article I might get a few letters to the editor over the course of several months. With my blog post I got scores of comments in a matter of hours. For anyone who cares about how his writing impacts readers, comments are priceless, and print really can't compete in this area.

How Cool is Democracy?

None of my subsequent posts have done nearly as well as my article on skubala. In the last couple of months my articles have received between 60 and 400 views each.

I value those individuals who do read my site. But honestly, when you've had 20,000 visitors in a single day, 400 a month is a bit of a letdown. This is the downside to DNA services: they're too damned fair. You only get mind-blowing numbers of visitors when you blow visitors' minds.

That's OK. I'm not asking for people to read my stuff against their will. I expect myself to write well in order to be read. But there is a problem with DNA services that is interesting, and it's part of the reason I haven't completely dismissed print.

The problem with democratic news aggregation services is that they are democratic, and democracy sometimes sucks. Take reddit for instance. Although reddit is democratic, the "society" of reddit—the body of voters registered with the service—is highly idiosyncratic. Reddit users tend to be left-wing, technical, and anti-Christian. Articles with a rightward (or even centrist) slant tend to get hammered. Articles about Christianity tend to do badly (unless they're ridiculing it). The trick with my skubala article, though I didn't intend for it to come across this way, was that the article seemed at first glance to bash Christianity, but actually had a strongly Christian message.

I write about Christianity quite a bit, and what I've found is that the democracy of reddit, as well as Digg, doesn't care to read about Christianity. Articles on Christian topics generally do badly on DNA sites. If Christians use reddit and Digg, they don't use them to find Christian material.

My particular niche is Christianity, but anyone writing about niche topics will do poorly on DNA sites. The greatest writer in the world on the topic of quilting will never get a hearing on reddit even if thousands of reddit users love quilting. It's what you learned in Civics class: majority rules, minority rights. With DNA services, the majority rules. But there is no court system, no defense for the niche. The minority is crushed.

"So," you think, "why don't Christians, quilters, and other freaks open their own reddit/Digg-like sites to help them find good articles?"

Well, it turns out there are two such sites for Christians: GospelShout and blogs4god. I have two problems with these sites. First, although I often write about Christianity, I rarely write specifically for Christians. When I post to a Christian-only site, it feels like self-ghettoization of the worst kind, hiding my work from non-Christians and lite-Christians who would enjoy the work but would never visit such places.

Second, these sites are beyond lame. A front page story on Digg often receives more than 1,000 votes. Front page stories on GospelShout typically have three—you heard me—three votes. Blogs4god does slightly better, with leading stories gaining as many as six or seven votes. These sites get little traffic.

Welcome to My Pain

I began this article by inviting you to waver with me over the question of whether to send my article on depression to print magazines or to post it to my blog. Here's another data point: I actually sent the article to an editor at New Man on Thursday. He said he loved it, but turned it down because it was written from a first person rather than third person perspective. It's not in the style of his magazine. Hey, that's fine; I value stylistic consistency.

There's one other magazine that it would be great for: Relevant. Except that I've sent quite a few good ideas to Relevant over the last several months, and though I've published a few pieces through their online arm, their print arm has never even replied to my queries. Maybe they'd reply this time. In a month. Or three. Or when we see each other in heaven. Or I could just post the article and send it to the DNAs in minutes. I reckon it could get some traction on reddit, maybe. Unless it's deemed too spiritual. In which case it will stagnate on my site, blessing the occasional lonely wanderer who happens to run across it via a Google search for "depression miracle dark.crystal".

What do you think? Any advice? I'm all ears.

Labels: technology, writing