The Dystopian Community Ate Itself
I feel like I’m getting dejavu from analyzing the fight between Comicsgate and Mainstream comics. It is reminding me of my experience deciding to pursue self-publishing rather than trade publishing, right after I was dealing with the issues from surviving the cult that was Absolute Writers Water Cooler. Simply put, the real reason official publishers go after self-publishers as being part of a hate group, is because independent authors are the few people in our current reality that can really challenge the establishment. It’s why both Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler went after the poets and artists.
But there is a flip side, Amazon saw how much money could be made by nurturing the self-publishing market, and basically used the power vacuum that was present in the early self-publishing community, to create a largely unregulated free market of ideas, where an algorithm decides what gets the sales. You have people trying to please this algorithm, a bit like how a victim of a narcissist tries to prevent their abuser from abusing them.
In practice, Amazon became just another corporate publisher by swallowing independent talent. And this is why I feel like Mainstream Comics is really going after users of Kickstarter and Indiegogo: it’s not the individual creators they are scared of, but Kickstarter becoming for comics what Amazon would eventually become in the book selling world.
The self-published creator is just the messenger, and yet lo and behold the mainstream comics industry goes after the messenger ( the creator ), rather than the actual enemy of both mainstream comics, and indie publishers: the crowd-funding market. Kickstarter is truly an unregulated free market of ideas for the most part, but with limitations in that it is a corporate enterprise. Unlike Liberapay. And I don’t believe the situation can be improved with a bartering / attention economy.
I just don’t want to see happen in Dystopian Indie Comics, what happened with creators of dystopian fiction in the YA Novel community on Twitter. We need to stop artificially dividing each other, and start going after the real systems of power in publisher: by creating an actual alternative system, which can not happen when creators publish more than themselves. That acts as a centralizing publishing influence.
I could be a published dystopian author.
But the YA dystopian community ate itself. I don’t want this to happen with the comics community as well.