Publishing a protocol under the name Atom that tries to capture all of the prior art in this stage and might provide a good basis for winding down the syndication wars.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
One of the great joys of launching your idea on the web is that it's a meritocracy. The good stuff will rise to the top and find an audience, and you don't have to impress one idiosyncratic commissioning editor.
For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature.
The goal is to become the central hub of publishing, where we have all the written material - user-generated and professional. We want to be the place where people can publish instantly to their audiences... and to get there, it's just about doing things step by step.
Hugh Howey and Amanda Hocking come to mind immediately as authors who managed to build a successful following without the initial support of a large publisher.
At first my publisher had reservations about publishing it in the form you are familiar with.
Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.
The trick was really finding the appropriate publisher for each of the projects I'd devised.
No agent/publisher is in a position to create across a spectrum of media and distribution what major publishers can accomplish for authors.
Agents and publishers only want one thing - good writing.
We like to engage in a normal publishing effort, which is to act in a responsible manner and make sure the material is not likely to harm anyone, that it is properly investigated by quality news organizations, and by lawyers and human rights groups and so on.