how the marketing of content is supplanting content itself and pretty much determining what gets read. I’m not exactly sure what this augurs for either our intellectual level or the democracy we are supposed to thrive in.
All I know is that it’s gotten much harder to find good content, and I don’t just mean of the literary kind. Copywriting is in the boondocks too. Businesses consider attracting and nurturing copywriting talent passé. Writers and editors used to be the stuff of the book industry, but many publishers feel the same about them nowadays.
As a professional ghostwriter and freelance editor, I don’t feel that any of this has necessarily worked to my disadvantage. I try to maintain a healthy balance between quality and affordability with my offerings to clients. What I find regrettable is how fast the old process, which went from idea to copy to market, has shrunk to a shadow of its former self. Online publishers prefer to plunge straight from idea into market, assuming there’s an idea to begin with.
In circumstances like these writing risks becoming a lost art.
Still, there’s a silver lining to this never-ending story. Mediocre e-books at least don’t eat up whole the forests, as mediocre paperbacks once did. If only Dan Brown could switch to virtual publishing! In principle, poor content should leave no carbon fingerprint. But hold on! Nothing is for free.
What if we could calculate the fossil-fuel input of “e-content”? Computers permanently on, a download here, a click there…it adds up, you know? Have you ever considered the carbon footprint of your finger-tapping?
Maybe the answer is simply to make a better effort at thinking more deeply about what we