Techdirt Podcast Episode 129: Rob Reid On Writing & Publishing A SciFi Novel In 2017

from the book-club dept

Tue, Jul 11th 2017 1:30pm — Leigh Beadon

If you read our post yesterday, you know that Techdirt friend Rob Reid is releasing his latest novel, After On by publishing the first near-half of the book for free on Medium. As promised, today we're joined by Rob on the podcast for a discussion about the book, the launch, and what it's like to publish science fiction in 2017. And don't forget to get your copy of the book!

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

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Filed Under: after on, books, podcast, publishing, rob reid, science fiction, year zero

3 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 11 Jul 2017 @ 1:39pm

So, basically what Baen's been doing with TheFifthImperium for 10+ years with dozens of books?
Probably more informative than one guy with one book.
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- PaulT (profile), 12 Jul 2017 @ 4:32am
  
  Re:
  ...or, a completely different approach to a similar idea, potentially with lots of great insight for people preferring to go alone rather than tie themselves to a publisher. But, yeah, just trash the whole thing without doing anything than read a one sentence description, it's easier that way.
  
  Also, why would the experiences of a publisher be more informative to potential authors than the experiences of an author? Are you just assuming that you and your own situation are the only market for the podcast?
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Jul 2017 @ 9:29am

A nice interview and nice to know about Rob Reid, an author I had not heard about before. However, Rob states some incorrect factual information that Mike Masnick fails to call out on. He says that with independent blogging, you can't keep track of and get notified when an author posts something new after a long time. Of course you can! Just use some of the several feed aggregators available out there and any new posts to the feeds you follow will show up on your timeline. It seems that after Google shot down Reader, a lot of people just assumed that RSS should die along with it just because.

I myself, if I had to choose between just one of the paid services, would rather sign up for a feed aggregator software like NewsBlur than for Medium. It is also free to use with a few limitations and there are other free feed aggregators out there.

If you support a decentralized web you absolutely should support not only independent blogging but also RSS and feed aggregators. A lot of people who are younger, not tech savvy or just jumped late into the bandwagon do not even know that RSS is a thing and mentioning it on the podcast at any sensible opportunity is important.
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