“While businesses based on the sale of paper may or may not be in crisis, those of us with a wider responsibility for ensuring our literary culture thrives have wonderful new tools with which to encourage participation and communication.
The curse of vanity presses can be replaced with free online opportunities to put your words in the public realm and means for the best to be spotted.
Collaborative writing and book sharing sites are democratising the way we share ideas and stories.
“Running small creative teams dealing with quality communications, working across different media platforms; social entrepreneurs finding cost effective means to change lives; experimenters with words and audiences using an art form which has been personalised for centuries, creating a virtual world in the user’s imagination – we are ahead of the game.”
This is an extract from AND YES I SAID YES I WILL YES, a white paper by the FLO consortium of ‘Friendly Literature Organisations’ in the UK, which was launched recently at the London Book Fair. I put up a link here to the first draft, but it’s now been revised so do take a look.
I’d be interested to know if literature organisations in the USA face similar challenges and how they are tackling them.