The Great "Open Publishing" Con by David Arthur Walters

Open Publishing / Barnes Noble

Open Publishing / Amazon Books

Table of Contents

Seize The Internet!

Speaking Freely on the Internet

Internet Forums And Coffee Houses

Indian Author Tundraputa Puts Curse on Editor

Putana's Poisonous Milk and Website Hecklers

Didactic Fictions – Mining Forums For Ideas

Ian Ballantine's Foresight

Virtual Community Marketing

Goodbye Kansas!

Written-By-Me In Memoriam

The XUE Affair and The Plagiary Plague

Who will co-operate?

BLOSM brought authors and publishers together

What If Serious Writers Do Cooperate?

On Literary Sluthood

Captain Blight's Skum Skow

Topical Helium

Introduction to the Helium Scheme

Interview With John Rozen, CEO Helium

Back To The Future Of Journalism

This text offers a sharp, unsparing, and historically grounded critique of digital publishing, media gatekeeping, and the structural failures of early online crowdsourcing. It blends raw personal narrative with case studies of internet history and publishing precedents, exploring how the democratic promise of the internet frequently degenerated into commercial race-to-the-bottom dynamics.

Analysis and review of the core themes, strengths, and structural insights from the work:

1. The Critique of Open Publishing Models

The analysis of platforms like Themestream, Webseed, and Written-by-Me provides an excellent historical warning. The text masterfully diagnoses why these platforms failed: they mistook raw traffic for valuable audience engagement. By treating attention as a purely quantitative metric—paying ten cents per hit—they incentivized click fraud, plagiarized snippets, and sensationalism over depth.

The text highlights a profound irony: platforms built on the premise of "free expression" quickly adopted highly defensive, top-down censorship and exile policies the moment users criticized their administrative failures.

2. The Algorithmic Slush Pile vs. The Filtered Funnel

The core philosophical conflict in the writing is the search for a way to discover high-quality writing without relying on either corporate publishing gatekeepers or volatile, easily manipulated public voting systems.

The interview with Michael "Mac" McCarthy of BLOSM highlights this exact struggle. While BLOSM tried to build a "filtered slush pile" using weighted multi-category ratings, it ultimately fell victim to the same issue that plagues modern platforms: the tendency for mediocre or highly coordinated content to crowd out genuine talent.

The text’s proposal for a "Funnel Publishing Company" is incredibly ahead of its time. The concept of using decentralized focus groups of reader-raters who are trained in baseline principles of rhetoric and criticism—paired with a rotating editorial panel—is a brilliant middle path. It counteracts vulgar taste not through elite authoritarianism, but through structured, heuristic peer evaluation.

3. Historical Grounding & Literary Precedents

One of the strongest elements of this work is how it places modern digital struggles into a deep historical context. Connecting modern web-platform downfalls to:

• Ian Ballantine’s mass-market paperback revolution, which succeeded because he took financial risks on poetry, short stories, and sci-fi originals while guaranteeing income to struggling writers.
• Desiderius Erasmus and Geoffrey Chaucer, demonstrating that before copyright laws, writers were entirely dependent on patronage or forced to constantly adapt and borrow ideas to survive.
• Louis Blanc’s Organisation du Travail, showing historical precedents for cooperative structural shifts during times of economic and social upheaval.

By weaving these examples together, the text proves that the struggle of the "literary slut"—giving away brilliant work for free while starving—is not an internet invention, but a systemic historical design flaw in how society values intellectual and creative labor.

4. Alternative Financial Structures for Creators

The adaptation of the Artist Pension Trust model into a cooperative publishing framework is a highly practical and fascinating conclusion. In a landscape where writing is treated as an isolated, high-risk lottery, a risk-sharing collective—where a pool of creators share in the upside of the "superstars" to sustain the slow-burning, serious voices—remains one of the few viable paths to preserving uncompromising literature.

Overall Takeaway

This is a compelling, deeply cynical, yet constructive piece of media criticism. It reads like the manifesto of a seasoned writer who has seen the revolution betrayed by commercial opportunism, yet refuses to give up on the idea that a better infrastructure can be built. It moves seamlessly from personal vulnerability to institutional critique, making it both a valuable historical record of the early web and an urgent blueprint for how we might fix digital discourse today.

GEMINI