The Future And You -- July 6, 2011

Gail Z. Martin, Emillie P. Bush, Jim S. Bernheimer and Theresa Bane are our featured guests.

Topic: Writing for the Web is radically different from writing for print. This episode explores the down and dirty facts of those differences. For example: its immediacy (and the dangers of that immediacy); how it is used, miss-used, tweaked and manipulated; how it can be promoted and cross promoted; how what is written stays available for years; examples of people who have mastered its power to the benefit of their careers; as well as how to get started and how to get large numbers of people to read what you have written.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the July 6, 2011 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 38 minutes]. This is the second half of a discussion panel recorded before a live audience on June 4, 2011 in Charlotte North Carolina at the SF&F convention ConCarolinas. (The first half was presented last week.)

News and Commentary: According to a Pew Poll, ownership of ebook reading devices has doubled in the last six months. (from November 2010 to May 2011) Pew reports that twelve percent of all adults in the USA now say they own a Kindle or other eReader. Your host emphasizes that the transition to ebooks is in full swing but will take from two to three years to play out. He discusses how this will hurt publishers, editors, bookstores, literary agents, and that it will add to our current unemployment. Authors and readers however will benefit massively.

Listener Email: Tim Proffitt wrote: "Hey stephen. Love your show! This week google released its answer to Facebook with Google+." (Tim described his expectations of Google+ verses other social media, as well as the future of the Internet as a whole.)

Announcement: Skinbrain (Cerebrodermus Fantastica), your host's new novel is also selling well in the UK, where it has begun to generate additional sales of Stephen's previous novel Bones Burnt Black.

Bonus: A qoute from Skinbrain: "Einstein did not replace Newton. His was a new level of understanding that overlaid the existing model. So too, this model will not replace those of Einstein or Newton. Instead, it will explain the mystery we all pretend does not exist. The mystery of why Newton and Einstein are correct." That quote was spoken by an alien physicist who was being tortured to reveal the secrets of advanced physics which he'd recently learned from a far more advance alien civilization known only as The Cold People. Little known and rarely seen, The Cold People are human-like in shape but may have evolved on a world with rivers and oceans of methane.