I sent my latest story to an online mag known as The Nautilus Engine, and I was surprised to find that it was not going onto their website, but their Facebook feed linked above. I'm torn on this one. On the off chance the NE people are reading, I'm still grateful for the opportunity to show some of my work, and I like the market well enough.
On the one hand, it's interesting to see how the world around us moves forward and change with trends and how old things can be changed with new technology. The age of print is withering and giving rise to things like online publications and e-readers and so forth. There's no denying that and there's no helping it. Aside from two college publications (and another story that will be coming out next year) every last story I've written has been, or will be, published online.
But is Facebook is the right medium for fiction? On the one hand, Facebook is an enormously powerful social media site right now and offers a lot of opportunity for exposure. One the other hand it worries me to see something I've written slowly slinking its way down the page. There's a real sense of impermanence to it. Whereas something on a website somewhere seems a little more solid, having a url that feels like a private space.
I think there's just a bit of paranoia in the sense that, on Facebook, posts get older and older and slowly sink to the bottom of the page. It feels like they're becoming less and less relevant. This is true of any work, of course, but the visual reminders are less subtle. It'll be interesting to see how a market like this turns out.
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