#at some point i heard an agent say 'think about which currently published writers whose careers you'd like to have'

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2023: THE ECHO WIFE by Sarah Gailey. I don’t recall intending to hop on the Acquire-All-Things-Gailey train, but at some point I did?? And I have No Regrets?? This one was actually a gift, which was delightful!

[newtinalover]

About Johnny Depp in Fantastic Beasts and what does this mean for me

Well, there is some time I want to comment about the case Johnny Depp in Fantastic Beasts and after these statements by David Yates and JK Rowling, I would first like to share this Claire Willett thread @clairewillett on twitter: https://twitter.com/clairewillett/status/938890109893591040

We all know the story of The Publishing House That Harry Potter Built, how everyone passed on her manuscript until Scholastic said "sure, what the hell, we'll buy it," and then she like singlehandedly turned the ship around with all those sweet sweet Potterbucks. Amazing.

I want to love J.K. Rowling. I truly love the Harry Potter books.  I truly love the world she created.  I truly believe that those books have transformed our culture in some ways that are really positive.  I am a proud Ravenclaw and Hermione Granger is my Patronus. 

But.

I've been trying to put my finger on what it is that makes me feel so disappointed in Rowling's words and behavior of late - not just the Depp thing, but also the Navajo skinwalkers thing from last year with Ilvermorny - and I think I've finally figured it out.

As a writer, I found her origin story so inspiring. She was a broke single mom on public assistance and, as Lin-Manuel Miranda says, she wrote her way out of her circumstances. The art of storytelling changed her life. That's beautiful to me.

So the story of J.K. Rowling the author is the story of someone who was given public assistance by the government, and was given a chance to succeed by a publishing house who believed in her. She was helped when she needed help. That's how she became who she became.

And the story that made her famous is the story of a kid in terrible circumstances - abuse, neglect, loneliness, danger, grief - who is helped when he needed help, and is willing to sacrifice for others.

I believe that the J.K. Rowling who first wrote those books espoused the values that the books stand for. But now she is the most recognizable author in the entire world and is a kabillionaire and suddenly I am no longer sure if her values are the same.

The Ilvermorny debacle was the first moment where I began to really see the defensiveness of Wealthy White Feminism seep into the way Rowling responded to critique of her work. There were so many better ways to handle it and she swung and missed SO BADLY.

See, and here's a place where as a writer I am fully 100% in sympathy with her, Rowling is now completely boxed in by the Potterverse. She's reached a level of fame where this is the only thing the world is ever going to let her write from now on.  Even if it's time to stop.

If she tries to write ANYTHING ELSE, even under an assumed name like she  did with "The Casual Vacancy," she'll get outed and it gets held up next to the Potterverse books anyway.  She can't escape it. So I get the desire to find a way to broaden the world.

What she SHOULD have done, in deciding that she wanted to expand the Potterverse to explore other cultures, is either A) partner with writers FROM those cultures to create and flesh out the backstory, or B) at MINIMUM do a fuckton more research into them than she did.

So when she released the story of Ilvermorny on Pottermore and everyone was like "girl no you cannot use things that are SACRED to Native culture like that," it was clear that no Native folks had been consulted by the white British lady about how this would make them feel.

It is . . . not difficult to imagine how Native peoples might feel like the rich white British lady showing up to appropriate stories and symbols she doesn't understand for her own personal financial gain might be, um . . . you know, an unpleasantly familiar sensation.

So, okay. There's backlash. People are frustrated. The old J.K. Rowling, who built a fantastical wizarding world on the framework of a set of progressive values that champion diversity? You'd think she would have heard that and listened, right? Maybe apologized? Yeah, no.

That's because the Potterverse is no longer just the story she poured out from her heart in that tiny apartment in the few hours she could carve out while her kids were sleeping, the story that saved her and turned her life around. Now it is a multi-million dollar business.

Which brings us back to the Johnny Depp question, and why her response today was so enormously frustrating.

The thing that is very very important to understand about writers whose books are made into movies or TV shows is that they have control over casting, writing, story structure and production approximately nothing percent of the time.  There are incredibly few exceptions.

People like Diana Gabaldon and George R.R. Martin are given a lot of creative control, compared to other writers, in the making of their shows, because they were big-ass stars already and they have agents who would have demanded that before signing anything.

But the vast majority of writers, when they're lucky enough to sell the rights to something, have no ability to affect the outcome after that.   Which includes casting.  99.99% of writers who find a problematic actor cast in their book's movie are stuck with him.

But the exception to this rule is people exactly like J.K. Rowling, and that's why I'm angry at her.

Rowling is a producer on the Potter movies.  Rowling has arguably more creative control over the film versions of her books than any other writer who has ever lived. If she wanted Johnny Depp out, she could have made it happen.  She did not.

Let's recall that the old Rowling, the one writing the first Potter book by hand on legal pads in her public assistance apartment, the brave and creative scrapper whose love for these characters saved her and kept her going, wrote a hero who ESCAPES A LIFE OF ABUSE.

Harry lives with a family that abuses, mistreats and neglects him, and then gaslights him about that abuse until it's all he knows and understands and he can't imagine a better life, but he's saved by people who tell him "you deserve better than this."

What makes it possible for Harry to return to the Dursleys' house every summer between school terms and no longer suffer psychological harm from their abuse is that now he understands that that treatment was not normal and not something he somehow deserved.

There are also too many incidents to count throughout all seven books where a major plot point hinges on a character saying "this is a terrible thing that happened to me" and whether or not they are believed about their own story: ´´Did that thing REALLY happen? Did you REALLY see the thing you thought you saw? Does such a being REALLY exist? Is Voldemort REALLY back? Is that REALLY true? That sounds implausible. I know that guy, he can't be a Death Eater. He comes from such a respectable family...´´

You see where I'm going here, yes?

The old J.K. Rowling we all fell in love with built a world where BELIEVING PEOPLE WHEN THEY TELL YOU ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM, EVEN IF IT IS IMPLAUSIBLE OR TERRIFYING, is the most important thing you can do.

But the current J.K. Rowling is the CEO of a massive multinational corporation built on the backs of that story she first wrote by hand back before she had any wealth or power, and Johnny Depp is an actor who has been proven to be able to anchor a film franchise. So.

It was frustrating enough when she was merely silent.  Today's statement is so much worse than saying nothing.

Today's statement achieved the following things: --it confirmed that she would, in fact, have had the power to do something about casting Depp in that movie if she had chosen to exercise it, and that he continues to remain in this franchise with her enthusiastic consent.

--it confirmed that she had all the same information the rest of us had about Amber Heard's story and her allegations of abuse, including all the documentation and testimony from other witnesses, at an early enough point that there would have been time to recast.

--it gave us vague assurances that she did some degree of due diligence in looking into the story to assess whether or not it was true, but offered no specifics of any kind.   --it explained away that lack of specifics with some handwaving about confidentiality clauses.

--it declared that she, J.K. Rowling, now possessed information she was not at liberty to share which essentially exonerates poor Johnny Depp from these mean and unfair accusations of wrongdoing, and suggests that we should take her word at face value.

"I looked into it and I can't tell you what I found out but rest assured, Johnny Depp is innocent and we all love him and that gold digger Amber Heard made it all up" is so much worse than "no comment."   It's so, so, so much worse.

This is EXACTLY the kind of privileged white feminism we saw with Lena Dunham's statement last month: "yes, I believe women, I'm a feminist, I trust women when they come forward about their abuse .... unless I'm friends with the guy, then she's lying."

This is what you say when you've built your brand on being a progressive feminist and you want people to believe you still are - YOU want to believe you still are - but now there are huge amounts of money at stake and suddenly things are a lot more complicated.

Believe me, I get that she's in a tricky position.  It is easy to stick by your principles when it costs you nothing.  It is harder when big things are at stake.  I don't know what's in Depp's contract, or in hers. I can't fathom how much money we're talking about here.

But this is why this whole situation is so fucking depressing. 

Because J.K. Rowling is not the Harry Potter of her own life story anymore.

She's no longer the scrappy underdog who came from a world of no privilege and always took the side of the powerless. She's like one of those dudes from the Ministry of Magic who was too scared to take a stand because they didn't want to lose their comfortable position.

And it's so sad.  I'm so much more sad than angry.  I mean I'm angry too, but my overwhelming feeling is " . . . oh. okay. so as soon as you have a shitload of money you're just like every other rich person in the world."

It would have been so easy for her to release a statement that basically said "I stand by my values, I believe women, I believe abuse victims, I am the person you always believed me to be, but here are the limits of my authorial control on films."

But instead she confirmed that SHE HAD A CHOICE, SHE HAD THE POWER, SHE HAD THE ABILITY TO DO THE THING THAT A HEROIC PERSON WOULD DO and instead of being Hermione Granger she was like . . . Cornelius goddamn Fudge.

This is what White Feminism looks like. It means you stand with other women when you look good doing so (like roasting Trump on Twitter, which costs her nothing), but you won't stick your neck out and use your unfathomable privilege if it might negatively impact you.

For the life of me I don't know why she's doubling down on Johnny Depp, when Hollywood is full of dudes who would fall all over themselves to headline a Rowling film franchise and who have never abused anyone in their lives. But she is.

So, that's where we are. She's made her choice. She's said her piece. She's not the woman we wanted her to be.  I'd like to believe that she once was that person.  I'd like to keep believing in the woman who first sat down to write that story. But who knows.

I am not personally invested in the "Fantastic Beasts" 'verse, and haven't seen the first movie, though someday I probably will. There are good questions to be asked about boycotting vs. not boycotting. I think that's a personal decision, tbh.

I don't think it is morally bad or wrong to see these movies because Johnny Depp is in them.  I think if this story means something to you, you shouldn't let this take that away from you.  I think we're allowed to enjoy things that are problematic, as long as we're aware.

Go see it if you want to see it. Don't feel guilty for enjoying it. Don't apologize for loving the story. The story belongs to you. The world belongs to you. If you love it, it gets to be yours. But if @jk_rowling disappointed you today, let her know why.

Having said that, I would like to add just a few things about my vision of whoever accompanies the magical universe of Harry Potter there, no less than 16 years:

When I knew that this world would return to theaters in 2016, I was absurdly happy, since I had felt ''orphan an HP' 'since 2011, when the last film was released. I've always considered myself a feminist and sympathetic to the cause of marginalized groups, so imagine the impact when I knew that Johnny Depp would be in the franchise that not only taught me about these exact values ​​of empathy and love, but I grew up seeing JKR campaigning for these causes too. In a way, she was one of my biggest mirrors.

But until then, honestly, I've never been to follow JD's career, so I knew, by all accounts, about his case of aggression against his ex-wife Amber Heard. When I heard that he was in FB, I soon learned more about it. It should be considered that the information is inaccurate in this respect, but what we have in hand is that:

1) There is a historical legacy that shows us the oppression that women suffer, on a world scale. No matter how much a woman says that she has suffered any kind of aggression, if her word is questioned by a man, she will, in the vast majority of cases, go out as a lying prostitute, or as a mercenary, or as someone who only wants destroy the career of the 'innocent' man.

2) In everything I research about AH and JD, that's exactly what caught my attention: how much people are struggling to invalidate her word, even she PROVING that the assaults happened.

3) Yes, Evidences! First let's talk about the much-discussed video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdmB2zoaiu4

Some claim that he was out of control, that he hit objects but that at no time does he hit him. If this is not concrete proof of an emotional uncontrolled that certainly falls into psychological and then physical aggressions (remember that domestic violence follows a cycle that begins with psychological violence that goes up to the physical), I do not know what else it can to mean. If I am close to a person uncontrolled in this way, even if she did not attack me, I would certainly be terrified.

´´Oh! But Amber certainly provoked him! He was drunk! Surely if he had been sober he would not have done it!´´

This is the most ridiculous excuse of all and it resembles when they try to blame the victim of a rapist because she was wearing "short clothes". It's also similar to when Kevin Spacey tried to justify his crime by saying that '' I did not remember, I was certainly drunk ''.

Some people also say that the video was edited and the man who appears there actually was not JD. I'm sorry, it's ridiculous too.

4) ´´But AH withdrew the accusations! So JD is innocent!´´

Oh really? Are you so blind so you can not see that she did it out of sheer pressure from all sides? We have recently discovered the rotten side of Hollywood, whose victims are mostly what? That's right, women! So it is more than obvious that Amber was pressured to withdraw the accusations through a series of agreements, such as those made explicit here: http://mashable.com/2016/08/16/johnny-depp-amber-heard-divorce-statement/#rz12DBHO3OqR

In the part that says:  "Neither party has made false accusations for financial gain. There was never any intent of physical or emotional harm." For me it is more than clear that JD himself assumes to have attacked Amber, you who do not want to accept.

5) '' Amber is an aggressor too! She hit your ex girlfriend! ''

As if that justified what JD did ... but come on: http://ego.globo.com/famosos/noticia/2016/06/tasya-van-ree-nega-que-ex-amber-heard-seja-violenta-diz-site.html

Tasya issued a statement defending the ex and would have told TMZ sources that Amber's domestic violence arrest would be ridiculous because she was never violent. Besides, Tasya and Amber remain good friends. If the aggression were true, the logic would be that Tasya kept away from Amber, would not it? And even if the aggression had happened, that would not erase the feat of JD

6) "But we must separate the staff from the professional! JD is a great actor! ''

Oh really? If you hired a gardener to work in your home, and later knew that when he comes home he hits the woman, would you continue to use his services quietly? If your answer is yes, forgive me, but you have a dubious character. Men are already privileged in a macho society just because they are men, imagine then a white and rich man.

7) '' Amber is a slut who just wanted to take money from him! ''

Honey, she's an actress, she's also rich. She does not need it. Oh, and for your information, all the money she got from the JD deal was donated to institutions that help victims of domestic violence. Your stupid argument falls.

8) '' Okay, the aggression may be real but that's no reason to boycott! We should not boycott and support JKR and the other actors that are in play ''

Okay, I agree in parts. In fact, the rest of the cast is not to blame for this whole situation. Do you think I'm happy to know that most likely I will not see my beautiful girl Katherine Waterston playing Tina Goldstein so beautifully? Am I happy not to see Eddie as fantastic as Newt? Am I happy not to see my beautiful Newtina couple getting together (and probably kissing) finally? That I will not see Jude Law as my dear Dumbledore ???

It's exactly this immense sadness that I carry after these statements that leads me to the imminent decision not to follow the Fantastic Beasts franchise. Everything JKR taught through Potter stories (which - he was a victim of abuse) falls to the ground when they not only hire someone like Johnny Depp, but put him as the protagonist! It's so contradictory and disappointing! 

I repeat: 16 years are loving and admiring a woman who today decided to simply say: 'Yes, we know that fans are not 100% satisfied with JD in our cast but we do not care, we want more visibility and, of course, money' '

After JKR's statement, an immense disgust swept over me and I said goodbye to the franchise, emphasizing, more than ever, my eternal love for Katherine Waterston and the ship Newtina, which were my greatest gifts from the first film. 

I remembered the farewell scene between Newt and Tina and I cried. I know they are not to blame, but JKR taught me: "The time will come when we will have to choose between what is right and what is easy.”

I make the right choice, according to my values ​​and principles, even though it hurts me. I decided not to follow the FB franchise anymore, and I would like to be respected in that regard. No, I AM NOT LESS HP FAN BY CAUSE OF THIS! I had the displeasure to read that those who boycot FB are not really fans. GET OUT OF YOUR CASUAL! YOU ARE NOT BETTER THAN NOBODY TO SAY THESE STUPID THINGS!

Respect my decision and my pain! Respect my decision to follow what my heart asks for at this moment! JKR is no longer the same woman who wrote the HP series to get away from her abusive reality, she has changed! Now she is a millionaire (thanks to us who consume her material, by the way) and obviously want to win more for it. I reiterate that I will continue, with all my might, loving Katherine and Newtina, accompanying future works of Katherine and the other cast members, but I keep only that of the woman who once inspired and loved me so much.

If one day you read this, JK Rowling, I wish you to be very happy, know that your story inspired me and changed my life in many aspects, but today you no longer have my support and I hope, from the bottom of my heart, that you never go through abuse again so that you need to prove that you are speaking the truth, like as happened to Amber, and it happens to all of us, every moment.

PS: Sorry if there are any terrible errors in writing, but I'm Brazilian and not accustomed to English.

Eloany Homobono.

[makingscipub]

CRISPR culture

CRISPR is a way of changing and replacing parts of DNA using enzymes like a pair of molecular scissors (of course things are more complex than this!). This new technology for ‘editing’ DNA, genes or genomes began to attract public attention between around 2012 and 2015. When I started to write about metaphors used to make CRISPR public (for example, here and here and here), in around 2015/16, I was surprised by how little resonance CRISPR and gene editing seemed to have in wider culture (which was, one has to admit, just then engulfed by other major preoccupations). This was, I thought, quite different compared to what happened during the emergence of, say, cloning or nanobiotechnology, which caused something of a cultural ‘effervescence’ after 1997 and after about 2003 respectively, with lots of stories and images circulating widely.

CRISPR novels

Things seem to be changing now. To see what’s going on, the first thing I did was google. I searched for ‘CRISPR novels’ and got this (11 March):

I was somewhat surprised, as I had not regarded A Crack in Creation (Doudna and Sternberg, 2017) as a novel, despite the use of some fictional characters, such as unicorns. And Modern Prometheus (Kozubek, 2016) was not a novel by Mary Shelley. These two books are written by scientists/science writers not novelists. They deal with reality, not fiction and I have written about them here and here.

I then searched for ‘CRISPR scifi’. That proved more fruitful. I found a very useful webpage on CRISPR in movies and on TV. I’ll come back to movies in a minute. I also asked on Twitter whether people knew of some CRISPR inspired novels. At first, people were a bit stumped, but then I got a few hints.

There seems to be one real CRISPR thriller, namely Change Agent, by Daniel Suarez (2017). As one preview said: “It’s a sci-fi thriller about a topic few non-nerds would normally consider thrilling: Crispr (short for ‘clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats’).” It engages with the science, summarised on the first few pages, as well as with upcoming ethical dilemmas, also flagged up, in a relatively unsubtle way, on the first few pages. Here goes:

We are introduced to a couple trying to produce a genome edited child. They talk to a counsellor: “The husband again placed his hand on her knee. She shook her head. ‘It seems against Nature.’ The counselor spoke softly. ‘This is the very same process Nature follows to eliminate viral DANA in bacteria. The same process used under the UN’s Treaty on Genetic modification.’ ‘Yes, but to cure deadly genetic defects, not to tailor-make a child.’ The husband shook his head. ‘We are not tailoring our child. We are correcting genetic weaknesses. Is not a weak memory fatal to a future doctor or attorney?’ ‘Where does this sort of thinking lead us, Neelo – eugenics?'” And so on…

Other novels mentioned by my Twitter correspondents were: Helix by Marc Elsberg and Intrusion by Ken MacLeod. There are probably more out there. Netflix is currently looking into turning Change Agent into a movie.

CRISPR movies

Many movies have dealt with genetic engineering, and some are listed on the webpage I mentioned above, such as GATTACA, of course. However, it seems that only one movie so far has taken up the CRISPR challenge directly, and this is Rampage (2018), directed by Bad Peyton. There is also a TV Show Luke Cage (2016-present), which engages with CRISPR and, the, perhaps better-known, series Orphan Black (2013-2017).

Many of these movies and series pose thought-provoking questions about human nature and personhood. However, there is also the temptation of using facile ‘TV tropes’, one of which is called, by some observers, ‘LEGO genetics’: “With LEGO Genetics, you can fiddle with DNA wherever you like, intentionally or accidentally, and all the cells will change overnight (if that). Just wake up and presto! Wings! Fur! Gills! Hulking muscles! Giant brain! Stem cells! You don’t even have to eat the equivalent of your entire body mass to create all those new body parts; the old cells and the new ones are just cobbled together like LEGO bricks.”

Audiences, players, consumers etc. will probably be well aware of such tropes and know how to deal with them; and if they are not, there are fictional characters that tell them how to. For instance, Prokhor Zakharov, a character in a computer game, says: “”Remember, genes are NOT blueprints. This means you can’t, for example, insert ‘the genes for an elephant’s trunk’ into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There are no genes for trunks. What you can do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals. For instance, we can in theory splice the native plants’ talent for nitrogen fixation into a terran plant.”

Before exploring documentaries, where one would expect such lessons, I have to mention, of course, Captain Marvel – with her marvellous superpowers… Here is a great blog post about Marvel and CRISPR. I only quote one paragraph: “Films about the Marvel universe are all the rage right now, showing off characters with truly amazing abilities that humans can only dream of having. The introduction of the CRISPR gene editing technology has left people wondering if they could gain ‘superhuman’ powers. From a scientific standpoint, CRISPR researchers have made it quite clear that the scientific community does not support creating humans with enhanced abilities. ‘The talk about designer babies is ultimately a big distraction,’ says Carl Zimmer, science journalist and award-winning New York Times columnist.”

Well said! We all welcome debate, but the debate should at least be well-informed. Can documentaries provide that information?

CRISPR documentaries

A feature documentary about CRISPR was released on 10 March called “Human Nature”,  and other documentaries are in production. Grant Jacobs wrote a quick blog post about it and points out that: “The film features a star cast of scientists working on genome editing. Alongside them are experts representing law, bioethics, environmental and commercial interests. The listed cast includes Jill Banfield, David Baltimore, Rodolphe Barrangou, Alta Charo, George Church, Jennifer Doudna, Antonio Regalado, Fyodor Urnov, Luhan Yang, and Feng Zhang. (If I had a criticism, it’d be that the cast is very USA-oriented, but then it’s produced in the USA.)”.

Watch the trailer! I haven’t seen the documentary, but some say it strikes a good balance: “It’s hopeful about CRISPR’s ability to help us fix diseases that have plagued humans for millennia, while also questioning if we’re ready to make genetic changes that’ll affect us for generations to come.”

One of the more gang-ho voices heard in the documentary is George Church. If you want to know more about his views, you can look at this interesting piece entitled “Five conversations with biology’s Captain Marvel, George Church”! The subtitle of the article brings us back to LEGO genetics: “When it comes to tinkering with the stuff of life, George Church is the equivalent of a Lego master builder.”

CRISPR and popular science writing

Nessa Carey has just published a popular science book that brings the CRISPR story up to date (after Modern Prometheus, 2016, and Crack in Creation, 2017). She uses more conventional metaphors in her book title: Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures (2019). Having just read the book, I can say that Carey uses the hacking metaphor really creatively in the book to draw readers in and hook them. If you want to be well-informed and ready to debate CRISPR knowledgeably, this book is a great start.

Of course, popular science writing doesn’t only happen in books. Au contraire! One should also look at newspapers, podcasts, blogs, journals, twitter and more! …

CRISPR art

And finally, there is also CRISPR inspired bio-art, some of which has been surveyed in this blog post under the title “Who is afraid of CRISPR art?”. There is an article in Nature entitled: “Love, death and CRISPR: An artwork”. There is also an artwork that I actually saw, by Anna Dumitriu, and an article on CRISPR art I couldn’t see in The Crispr Journal. I bet there is more….

CRISPR the board game

And, before I forget, there is even a board game based on CRISPR on the horizon! “Players are members of a team whose missions entail delivering specific CRISPR-edited products to users. To succeed, players must: solve puzzles; communicate about their work to indispensible [sic] support professionals and the public; overcome obstacles; foil would-be underminers; and recover from setbacks. See more detailed game features here.”

Cultural horizons

Discussions about CRISPR, like discussions about cloning or stem cells for example, happen against a well-established cultural horizon. When studying the issue of ‘designer’ or ‘donor’ babies in the year 2000, I called this ‘cultural precognition.

I pointed out that new developments in genetics throw up fresh ethical questions almost every day. Doctors, scientists, policy makers, the media and the public are ill-equipped to find answers to these questions on scientific, legal or moral principles alone. They therefore often take recourse to metaphors and narratives to fill this ethical void. Popular culture talks about space-rockets before there are space-rockets, clones before there are clones and artificially created babies before there are artificially created babies. When scientists do anything new, there is often a ready-made public perception of how good or how bad it is going to be, derived from social, linguistic, literary and cultural preconceptions.

So, when genetically edited or ‘crispred’ babies happened (if indeed they did), I was not surprised to find the following observation about popular culture in the context of Rampage, Change Agent etc: “A scientist in China has dominated headlines this week with the claim that his research team has successfully created the world’s first genetically-edited babies. If true, the experiment raises a lot of difficult ethical questions—ones that mainstream films and TV shows have been exploring for decades. The topic of genetic engineering is so prevalent in pop culture that it’s practically a genre unto itself. At the heart of these science fiction depictions is the issue of whether the benefits of genetic engineering—that is, potentially curing diseases—outweigh the colossal risks, which range from eugenics to unintended mutations.”

A sub-genre of the genetic engineering genre is ‘biopunk’, to which some of the CRISPR movies and novels belong. I bet there will be more biopunk in the future. Another cultural tradition that holds a mirror to science and society and there to be explored.

Keeping an eye on CRISPR culture

Future work on the language and culture of gene editing should chart changes and shifts in social and cultural perceptions of genome editing over the last two decades or so from around 1998 (Dolly, BSE, GM, stem cells etc.) to now. Such a diachronic analysis could be based on comparing two books, published twenty years apart.

In 1998 José van Dijck published a book entitled Imagenation: Popular images of genetics, in which she explored the crucial role that cultural images played in the popularisation of genetic knowledge, especially cloning.

In 2017 Everett Hamner published a book entitled Editing the Soul, in which he stresses that we need to pay attention to the “cultural mythologies” by which we frame our public debates about genome editing. The stories we tell are shaped by science and culture alike, including the metaphors created by scientists themselves: “We should consider carefully how these mutual narratives double back and colonize the research and applications that find private and public financing.”

Science always happens against an established cultural horizon, but it also feeds into and transforms it. This then also changes social and ethical perceptions and actions. If ever we manage to establish something like a ‘global observatory for gene editing’ (a rather ambitious project!), this needs to include the observation of cultural developments! Only then can we grapple with ‘public engagement’ in a well-informed way.

Acknowledgement: I’d like to thank the second referee of an article for making me dig deeper into the cultural ramifications of CRISPR!

Image: Pixabay

    The post CRISPR culture appeared first on Making Science Public.

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[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT STARTUP

Every audience is an incipient mob, and a large class of startups that need less than they used to. The standard excuse, back when C was the default language, was that Lisp was too slow.1 Someone who was strong-willed person stronger-willed.2 Only a few do so far, but I found that the Bayesian filter did the same thing for me, and moreover discovered of a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil. They would seem to have been headed down the wrong path. Fundraising is still terribly distracting for startups. 97 probability of the containing email being a spam. 96.

Start small. Using that heuristic, I'll predict a couple more things. And a particularly overreaching one at that, with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced house style. He had all of us roaring with laughter. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. A deals per partner per year. Make it really good for code search, for example.3 A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Still, anyone who proposes a plan for spam filtering has to be replaced with a new from-address, so you can't risk false positives by filtering mail from unknown addresses especially stringently.4 I know this may sound oversensitive, but if we had such a thing is to treat individuals as interchangeable parts. I had stopped believing that.5

Not a couple million.6 Business people in Silicon Valley and the whole world, for that matter have speculative meetings all the time.7 A rounds?8 You'll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. The whole site was organized like a funnel, directing people to the test drive. Domain names differ from the rest of the text in a non-German email in that they often consist of several words stuck together. Thanks to Sam Altman, David Greenspan, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, Lisa Randall, Emmett Shear, Sergei Tsarev, and Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this. 01 describe 0.

Irony of ironies, it's the computer Steve Huffman wrote Reddit on.9 The whole Viaweb site was made with our software, even though the latter depends more on natural ability.10 But I don't wish I were a better writer? Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. That's what these ideas say to us. This pattern is repeated over and over, and it's all about the ratio. Recognizing nonspam features may be more accurate to describe a market as a degenerate case—as what you get by default when organization isn't possible.11 Why are programmers so fussy about their employers' morals?12 But the wrong kind of interruption can wipe your brain in 30 seconds. Perhaps the optimal solution is for big companies not even to try to do it will have an individual spam probability of.

They get away with maltreating developers, in the short term, because if everything else in the email is spam.13 It would be a bad sign if they weren't; it would mean you were being too easy on them. When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s. And strangely enough, the better, because any measure that constrains spammers will tend to displace suits whose skills lie more in raising money from LPs.14 In fact, if you restrict the sales pitches spammers can make, you will inevitably tend to put them out of your incoming spam. Of our current concept of an organization work differently from the rest. The other reason Apple should care what programmers think of them is that when you sell a platform, developers make or break you.

One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working on Y Combinator is not to think of programs at least partially in the language they're using to write them.15 Arguably it's a sign of weakness. In some business relationships, you do it right, you only have to filter email from people you'd never heard from, and someone sending you mail for the first sentence of a love story.16 If you're sufficiently determined to achieve great things, this will probably increase the number of programmers, the more completely a project can mutate. There's an advantage as well as writing does, where you go to college. It would also be a need for such infrastructure companies. But invariably they're larger in your imagination than in real life.17 9189189 localhost 0. I don't know if this one is possible, but there is a group, they couldn't have multiple people editing the same code, because it changes too fast for that to be possible. One cooperative project that I think really would be a curious state of affairs if you could get to the point where it's like visual crack. Empirically, the way to use these big ideas is not to try to do it automatically: to write a check, limited by their guess at whether this will make later investors balk. But no more ambitious than it was for Apple to become as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it.

If you don't, you're dead. There was another speaker who was much better than me. When you're operating on the manager's schedule, they're in a position to tell investors how the round is going to get tagged as spam. Whereas if you're writing code to make it so that you can't make yourself care.18 And though there's going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning.19 Look at the individual, not where they went to college. Of our current concept of an organization work differently from the rest.

Notes

I don't think these are the only alternative would be far less demand for them.

Bureaucrats manage to think of the words won't be trivial. A less upstanding, lower-tier VC might be digital talent.

Forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups. Whereas when the company, though more polite, was one that had been climbing in through the founders want to write it all yourself. Most word problems in school, and yet managed to find a broad range of topics, comparable in scope to our users that isn't really working bad unit economics, typically and then being unable to raise a series A termsheet with a million spams.

When you had a contest to describe what they made more margin loans. And yet there are few things worse than the long term than one who passes. Others will say that the web have sucked—and probably especially valuable.

Picking out the same work, done mostly by hackers. What drives the most promising opportunities, it will have to do something we didn't do.

Different sections of the corpora. What he meant, I was there when it converts you get a poem published in The New Yorker. And then of course. It does at least bet money on convertible notes, VCs who are younger or more ambitious the utility function for money.

Wufoo was based in Tampa and they succeeded. Most computer/software startups. Most of the company at 1.

And it would be unfortunate. Peter Thiel would point out that successful startups are often unknowns. This would penalize short comments especially, because there are no misunderstandings. I don't know of this type: lies told to play games with kids' credulity.

Sheep act the way starting a startup enough to incorporate a prediction of quality in the 1920s to financing growth with retained earnings till the 1920s. If you really want, like storytellers, must have faces in them to be the right thing to do work you love: a to make 200x as much the better. The company is Weebly, which is the least important of the auction. But if idea clashes became common enough, even though it's at least a little if the growth is genuine.

Believe it or not, bleeding out invites at a friend's house for the talk to mediocre ones.

If anyone wants.

But filtering out 95% of the art business? I'm clueless or being misleading by focusing so much the better, and stir. Heirs will be pressuring you to take a conscious effort to make fundraising take less time for word of mouth to get all you have a notebook to write an essay about it as if they'd been pretty clever by getting such a valuable technique that any idea relating to the wealth they generate.

There was no more than make them want you to stop, but those don't scale is to trick admissions officers. I replace the url with that additional constraint, you need. I don't think they'll be able to. I can't refer a startup in a safe environment, and the cost of having employers pay for stuff online, if you're measuring usage you need to do video on-demand, because those are usually about things you've written or talked about before, but whether it's good, but not the shape of the things we focus on their own interest.

People only tend to be started in 1975, said the things you sell. It is the post-money valuation of zero. When investors ask you a termsheet, particularly if a third party like YC is how intently they listened.

Except text editors and compilers. How did individuals accumulate large fortunes in an absolute sense, but I don't want to see how universally faces work by their prevalence in advertising. Reporters sometimes call a few people plot their own interest. Two customer support people tied for first prize with entries I still shiver to recall.

Whoever fed the style section reporter this story about suits coming back would have gone into the shape that matters here but the nature of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being a train car that in three months we made a better story for an investor who merely seems like he will fund you, it is unfair when someone gets drunk instead of uebfgbsb. If you want to wait for the same way a restaurant is constrained in b. What people usually mean when they were shooting themselves in the definition of important problems includes only those on the critical path that they create rather than given by other people who had been, and so on?

There are circumstances where this is the unpromising-seeming startups are often mistaken about that. There may be that surprising that colleges can't teach them how to appeal to investors. Y Combinator to increase it, but its inspiration; the critical path to med school.

They hate their bread and butter cases.

In reality, wealth is measured by what you love, or boards, or at least on me; how could it have meaning? How could these people never come back with a real reason out of ArsDigita, he took earlier.

[thecosydragon]

My latest blog post from the cosy dragon: Interview with Jaime Questell

An Interview with Jaime Questell, author of By a Charm and a Curse

Jaime Questell is a writer and graphic designer from Houston, Texas. She has also been a bookseller, a professional knitter, a semi-professional baker, and an administrative assistant. None of these jobs involved wrangling corgis, which is quite sad. She lives in the ‘burbs with her husband, children, and pets.

I’m not going to be reviewing your newest novel, but from your other published novels, is there one that is your own personal favourite?

By a Charm and a Curse is my first published novel, but of my other manuscripts, the one I’m currently working on might be my favorite. It has witches and a good dose of the Mexican culture I grew up with. It’s set in a fictional Texas town that’s buried in secrets, and it’s been so much fun coming up with all the components.

Everyone has a ‘first novel’, even if many of them are a rough draft relegated to the bottom and back of your desk drawer (or your external harddrive!). Have you been able to reshape yours, or have you abandoned it for good?

OMG, that first novel! It is so, so rough. It’s definitely been gathering some cobwebs, but I don’t want to write it off forever. I’m thinking it could be reshaped one day, or potentially be harvested for dialogue (because there’s some funny stuff in there, if I’m remembering correctly).

  Some authors are able to pump out a novel a year and still be filled with inspiration. Is this the case for you, or do you like to let an idea percolate for a couple of years in order to get a beautiful novel?

I am so awed by the people who have an unending supply of ideas, but I definitely like to let things percolate. I like to make hidden Pinterest boards where I can post images that relate to the idea I have, so I can remember them later, but for the most part I just let the idea simmer in the back of my mind while I work on other things.

I have heard of writers that could only write in one place – then that cafe closed down and they could no longer write! Where do you find yourself writing most often, and on what medium (pen/paper or digital)?

Writing time is limited and precious, so I’ll write anywhere: at home, at Starbucks, while on my lunch hour, waiting for an oil change. And I prefer my laptop to write, but again, because I need to write whenever and wherever I can, I’ll write on my phone or in one of the bazillion notebooks I usually have on me. That said though, I do find that if I’m stuck, writing by hand usually works to get me unstuck.

Before going on to hire an editor, most authors use beta-readers. How do you recruit your beta-readers, and choose an editor? Are you lucky enough to have loving family members who can read and comment on your novel?

I am incredibly lucky to have four critique partners who go over my work before I send it to my agent. I’ve worked with them for years, and their commentary is always on point and insightful. And I don’t work with an editor until my work is sold, but my agent is very editorial, which is fantastic. She really knows her stuff, and makes my writing better.

I walk past bookshops and am drawn in by the smell of the books – ebooks simply don’t have the same attraction for me. Does this happen to you, and do you have a favourite bookshop? Or perhaps you are an e-reader fan… where do you source most of your material from?

Everywhere! My favorite indie bookshop is Murder by the Book in Houston. They have a great selection and a knowledgeable staff, and I love shopping there. But I also like to utilize the library. I recently discovered Overdrive, and it’s made my audiobook habit much easier to feed.

I used to find myself buying books in only one genre (fantasy) before I started writing this blog. What is your favourite genre, and do you have a favourite author who sticks in your mind from: 1. childhood? When I was a kid, I could not get enough of The Baby-Sitter’s Club. Every birthday, every bit of money I was able to save went toward those books. And then, when I was a little older, it turned into a Sweet Valley High obsession. Those felt so taboo after the BSC, I mean, there was kissing. 2. adolescence? The movie version of Jurassic Park (and let’s be honest, Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park) got me hooked on Michael Chrichton, which led to me reading everything I could get my hands on. Around this same time I became obsessed with the classics, but, of course, never the classics assigned to me in class. I loved Alexandre Dumas, and read The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers over and over. 3. young adult? I was working in a bookstore at this time, and that was pure temptation. I read everything and anything, but Sophie Kinsella and Louise Rennison were favorites at the time. 4. adult? I love to read across genres now. Some of my current favorites are Leigh Bardugo, Holly Black, Kelley Armstrong, Heidi Heilig, and Victoria Schwab. Basically, I’ll read anything that sounds good.

Social media is a big thing, much to my disgust! I never have enough time myself to do what I feel is a good job. You manage your own profile, please tell me as much as you are comfortable with in regards to your preferred platform and an estimate of time you spend doing it [and whether you like doing it!].

I’m too much of a control freak to relegate to anyone else. But I agree that social media is so overwhelming! It can be hard, feeling like you have to do everything. I think it’s better to choose one or two platforms and do them well. So I choose to focus on Twitter and Instagram. Every now and then I start to think that I should have a Facebook author page, but then I remember how much it would stress me out and that the page would suffer. I’m going to quote Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec here and say, “Never half-ass two things. Whole ass one thing.”

About By a Charm and a Curse:

Le Grand’s Carnival Fantastic isn’t like other traveling circuses. It’s bound by a charm, held together by a centuries-old curse, that protects its members from ever growing older or getting hurt. Emmaline King is drawn to the circus like a moth to a flame…and unwittingly recruited into its folds by a mysterious teen boy whose kiss is as cold as ice.

Forced to travel through Texas as the new Girl in the Box, Emmaline is completely trapped. Breaking the curse seems like her only chance at freedom, but with no curse, there’s no charm, either—dooming everyone who calls the Carnival Fantastic home. Including the boy she’s afraid she’s falling for.

Everything—including his life—could end with just one kiss.

  Buylinks: http://ift.tt/2FhyacI

Author Links: Author Website: jaimequestell.com Author Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jaimequestell Author Instagram: http://ift.tt/2vWsUJn Author Goodreads: http://ift.tt/2vDi5td Author Pinterest: http://ift.tt/2GwnRkw Newsletter: http://ift.tt/2FimiHs

from http://ift.tt/2ELtWwU

[hub-pub-bub]

Laura Olin raised the money to publish her book in a little over a day.

Olin, an author and social media strategist who worked on President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, spent November Kickstarting her children’s book Our President Was Called Barack.

The book, written by Olin and illustrated by artist Franziska Barczyk, was funded in 33 hours, raising $39,792 — $14,792 more than its $25,000 goal, falling just a few hundred dollars short of its $40k stretch goal.

Billed as a “yes we can book for children,” the project tells the story of Obama’s presidency, and more importantly, the way he invited ordinary people to become activists.

“I’m not asking you to believe in my ability to bring about change — I’m asking you to believe in yours’ was his overriding message from the beginning,” said Olin. “I think it’s important that kids hear that right now. Most biographies or otherwise traditional books seem to be uninterested or downright timid about getting into that space.” She wrote the book to provide a good presidential example to her nephews and kids like them.

It’s the second book for Olin, whose novelty book Form Letters: Fill-In-the-Blank Notes to Say Anything to Anyone came out in 2016. That project was published by a traditional publisher, Harry N. Abrams. It was a process Olin described as “perfectly okay.” But she had different aspirations for Our President Was Called Barack. For one thing, she wanted to get it on shelves quickly.

“I realized that I wanted to go faster with this book than traditional publishers can go,” she said. “Their time horizons tend to be a year and a half from proposal to publication, even two years.”

Olin was also inspired by Chance the Rapper and other artists who’ve found an audience without the help of traditional publishing gatekeepers. “We’re at this point in the life of the internet where being pretty autonomous can be possible sometimes, if you’ve got something compelling to offer and you get a bit of luck,” she said.

Olin is one of thousands of authors who are choosing to Kickstart their books.

Although you may think of Kickstarter as a platform for games and gadgets, publishing has always been among Kickstarter’s offerings. It just might not get the attention games or technology do because publishing projects tend not to raise millions of dollars the way a game might, said Margot Atwell, Director of Publishing for Kickstarter.

Still, book projects do all right. Publishing, a category which encompasses books, comics, and journalism, has so far had 13,297 projects funded in Kickstarter’s nine years, raising $132 million total. Right now, there are more than 300 publishing campaigns live on Kickstarter. Those projects include bookstores, journalism projects (notably, a campaign to save Gawker), and of course, books.

So far 13,297 publishing projects have been funded in Kickstarter’s nine years, raising $132 million total.

“This really showcases that there’s a community of backers who want to support literary works,” said Atwell. A lot of backers are book lovers; according to Atwell, more than 1.5 million backers have pledged to at least one publishing project.

Authors decide to fund projects through Kickstarter for a variety of reasons. Some, like Olin, might want to publish a book fast. Authors from marginalized communities, who might not be able to get their voices heard in the traditional publishing world, can bypass gatekeepers and go straight to a community of readers. Kickstarter publishing has fewer barriers to entry; writers can publish what they think people care about, rather than what a publishing house or agent thinks will sell. But make no mistake: While crowdfunding can help an author dodge some of the baked-in biases of the publishing world, it’s still a popularity contest.

Josh Fruhlinger is the blogger behind The Comics Curmudgeon, a longstanding blog that lovingly snarks on newspaper comics. He decided to Kickstart his own novel, The Enthusiast, in 2012. His goal was $6,666, and he blew past it, bringing in $20,159. Being an established blogger with his own audience helped immensely when it came to raising that cash, he says: “If you don’t have a built-in audience existing already, or a big social media network, it might not be as rewarding.”

One of Fruhlinger’s biggest post-campaign challenges was delivering the manuscript itself. Although he has been a professional writer for almost his entire career, he’d never written a novel before. He assumed he’d have the book done and ready to go by November 2013, but the process took longer than he expected, with books shipping out in December 2015. That delay stressed Fruhlinger out; he felt like he was cheating his backers by not producing the novel by Nov. 2013. Some backers agreed—one even asked for a refund.

Authors from marginalized communities, who might not be able to get their voices heard in the traditional publishing world, can bypass gatekeepers and go straight to a community of readers.

“I had all this money sitting in a bank account that I felt responsible for for two years, and it was really stressful to me,” he said.

Fruhlinger’s advice to any writer considering a Kickstarted book? Write the book first. Atwell agrees; she always encourages new authors to do as much work on their projects as they can before they launch their campaigns.

“That has two benefits,” she said. “One, the creator can really show backers what they’ll be getting if they back the project, and they can impart confidence that the book will get done, and two, once money changes hands, it can feel like the stakes are raised for the creator, so it’s helpful to do as much work as possible before that happens.”

Kickstarter can also act as a laboratory for ideas that might seem risky to traditional publishers; creators can test ideas that might raise an eyebrow for an agent or publisher and later use the success of the Kickstarter as proof the idea worked.

Crowdfunding Fiction: Talking With Charlie Fish, Founder Of Fiction On The Web, About Patreon electricliterature.com

One author who did that was Ryan North, the creator of Dinosaur Comics and the current writer of Marvel’s Squirrel Girl. North had an idea: a choose-your-own adventure Hamlet. His agent, Seth Fishman, of The Gernert Company, didn’t think he’d be able to get a publisher to buy it for more than $20,000. So he suggested that North Kickstart the project.

The book, To Be Or Not To Be: That is the Adventure, met its funding goal of $20,000 in less than three hours, and ultimately raised $580,905. The success of that campaign allowed Fishman to sell the next one, Romeo And/Or Juliet, to Riverhead Books. Riverhead also picked up To Be Or Not To Be.

Fishman, who represents authors from Ann Leckie to Ryan North to Sarah Andersen of Sarah’s Scribbles, believes crowdfunding and traditional publishing can co-exist harmoniously. He Kickstarted a book of his own this summer, and many of his clients are independent web comics creators who are used to Kickstarting projects and otherwise operating independently. Fishman has seen them combine their independent projects with traditional publishing in various ways.

For example, one of his clients is Zach Weinersmith, the creator of the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic. Weinersmith and his wife Kelly wrote a book about emerging technology, Soonish, released in October. In June, however, the pair Kickstarted another project, Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness, a very small book about science. They wanted to offer Soonish as one of the rewards to their backers. The rewards would count as preorders of Soonish. Fishman role was to help convince the publisher of Soonish to support the experiment and set up distribution of the book through independent bookstores.

There are other notable marriages of crowdfunding and traditional publishing, not all of which involve the Kickstarter platform. Last year, for example, Hugo winner N.K. Jemisin made news when she was able to quit her day job and write full-time, thanks to her fans funding her through Patreon.

So, with the rise of crowdfunding, do authors still need traditional publishing?

With the rise of crowdfunding, do authors still need traditional publishing?

The traditional publishing houses we reached out to didn’t respond to requests for comment, but Fishman thinks authors do need publishers and agents. Aside from the things agents do to make life easier and more profitable for their clients — having lawyers on call to review contracts, foreign rights, television and film rights, feedback on ideas, for example — a traditionally-published book can open doors for even successful independent creators.

“What I’ve found for better or worse, is that traditional publishing provides a big of focus point in terms of validation and publicity,” he said.

Many of Fishman’s clients — like North, Weinersmith, or xkcd creator Randall Munroe — are already well-established as independent artists. They already have a large audience, and they may be doing well financially, but having published a book with a traditional publisher widened their audience, says Fishman.

Munroe’s webcomic, xkcd, for example, has a huge readership, but once he’d published a book traditionally, that book functioned as a kind of permission slip; fans who worked in media had an excuse to book him as a guest on their shows. His status as a published author, says Fishman, serves as an effective advertisement for his other work.

“Financially, self publishing can be all you need,” he says, but he calls a traditionally published book “one of the most effective advertisements” a creator can get.

“I think crowdfunding is really complementary to publishing,” said Atwell. “Kickstarter is a tool that authors and publishers can use to test out an idea, build excitement for a book or project, or garner support for a project that falls outside what they normally do.”

“Kickstarter is a tool that authors and publishers can use to test out an idea, build excitement for a book or project, or garner support for a project that falls outside what they normally do.”

Launching a Kickstarter project, she said, is a lot like launching a book. Authors need all the same things: a description, an author bio, an image, and a plan for spreading the word. It’s a lot of work, but if a project is funded, it can be worth it. Olin’s campaign wrapped up on December 8, and according to her campaign, books are due to be shipped in May. She offered two post-campaign thoughts: Don’t launch during the holidays, and believe Kickstarter veterans when they say how much work a campaign is — it’s often difficult to get press for a Kickstarter, and authors often have to sink money into their project before they make any money back.

“Unless you’re multitalented or have many multitalented friends who are okay with working for free, you probably need to pay to get a video made, produce graphics, buy music, do prototypes, and so on,” she said.

Fruhlinger, who wrote his own post about the trials and triumphs of Kickstarting a novel, agrees that Kickstarting ain’t easy. While the $20,159 he raised seems like a lot of money, much of those funds went toward the production of the book itself: editing, art, printing, and postage. (Atwell says distribution and the cost of postage are often hurdles faced by Kickstarter’s authors.) After he finished printing and fulfilling rewards to backers, but before he started selling books, his Kickstarter profit — his payment for two years of work — was just $467.55.

After he finished printing and fulfilling rewards to backers, but before he started selling books, his Kickstarter profit — his payment for two years of work — was just $467.55.

In the end, Fruhlinger was very happy with The Enthusiast. The book contains art from three different artists, and was printed in paperback and hardcover. He’s sold 1,500 copies of the book so far, selling from both online and brick-and-mortar stores, and his profit rose to a more comfortable $4,369.14. But having Kickstarted once is enough for him.

“If I were going to do another novel, I would try to go through an agent,” he said.

Olin says she’d definitely Kickstart again. In fact, she’s more likely to Kickstart again than to traditionally publish. She thinks other authors should crowdfund their books as well.

“It’s a really clarifying and focusing thing to think about an idea, and how to sell its value to other people, for the length of time it takes to put a Kickstarter campaign together,” she said. “It could lead to better books for all of us.”

Asked what he’d say to an author torn between getting an agent for a manuscript and Kickstarting a book, Fishman responded that it really depends on an author’s goal for a project. He feels that it’s at least worth trying to get an agent, but if that road doesn’t work?

“If you can’t find an agent and you believe in the book, go ahead and self-publish,” said Fishman. “Prove us wrong. Because we’re wrong all the time.”

Thinking of Kickstarting your book? Here’s some advice from Margot Atwell:

Make a plan: “Spend time planning your project and looking at other campaigns that are similar to what you’re planning to do before you launch yours. Make a budget carefully: make sure you cover all your costs, but keep it as low as you can, since Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing platform, and you can always raise more than you ask for but not less.”

Be clear about what you’re writing and why: “A good Kickstarter Publishing project clearly tells the story of what the creator is making, why it’s great, and why readers will want to get their hands on a copy, using all the tools the platform provides, including a well-done video, attractive images and/or GIFs, a compelling description, and appealing rewards.”

Make sure your Kickstarter page is visually appealing: “Even though readers care about the quality of the writing and what the book contains, that old chestnut really does hold true: on the internet, a picture’s worth a thousand words. We’re all really accustomed to scanning quickly over websites, so a project description that’s just a wall of text tends to lose all but the most passionate fans.”

Get the word out: “Come up with a good outreach plan–and a Plan B and Plan C in case that doesn’t get you past the finish line. Also, don’t be shy–tell people about your project! You’ve written something cool that’s important to you–you should give other people the chance to discover it and enjoy it.”