Comments on: Growing Pains for the Litblog

By: Mike French

Mike French — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:18:08 +0000

Interesting article – I’ve just launched an on-line literary magazine which works with a blog framework to try and get a community talking around the articles on the magazine.

It seems I’m launching it into interesting waters. I hope we stay true to our vision and don’t end up selling up or being swallowed up. I want to maintain the indie but professional format.

I’ve also been surprised by the amount of well known authors that have agreed to interviews for me – which seems to bear out the stats in your article. So plenty of space to carve out a space amongst the big players – more fool them for not doing more interviews!

By: Hans Dekker

Hans Dekker — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 11:40:14 +0000

The idea of a community of independents is exactly the reason I started Wordsy.com. I’d like to invite any and all to submit their work to our site.

If it’s true though that, as you say, Lit Bloggers want to keep everything on their own site – well that doesn’t really do justice to the power of the web. Moverover, bloggers who feel like that are in the end doomed to obscurity. The community is the power!

By: Bookdwarf » RIP LBC

Bookdwarf » RIP LBC — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 20:42:13 +0000

[...] that I enjoyed, but we all lead busy lives and it took a lot more work than you’d think. Here are Ed’s thoughts about the whole [...]

By: W O T - W H A T » Blog Archive » one to see, one to read, one to grow on

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:58:58 +0000

[...] Ed Champion on the state of the Litblog. [...]

By: Adam S.

Adam S. — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 02:27:23 +0000

Indeed! Indeed, Ed! Indeed!

Bloggers should continue to link to one another so we can have a sticky community; literary types have to stick together in this century. We only do ourselves in if we don’t.

I am very upset that the LBC is dying. I had a lot of RSS feeds from there. But from where one organization dies; another one will spring up.

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:38:18 +0000

I think community still exists, but it’s dispersed. In the early days, well before I started my own blog, you could almost say that all the litbloggers “knew” each other, and were thus “the” community of litbloggers. But there are so many of them now, that such a thing is impossible. However, mini-communities exist here and there (some even perhaps larger than the original total community). There are bloggers with whom I feel a certain affinity–with whom, I think, I help form a community of sorts. And then there are other blogs I check in on occasionally and I notice many comments there, consistently by the same people, with what I gather is a sense of camaraderie.

The sense of ambition is different, but the communal element is still there.

By: Dan Green

Dan Green — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:35:30 +0000

I really think that as long as litbloggers continue to link to other litbloggers–either through shout-outs or through the kind of “roundup” you used to do or through links that are intended to spark or continue discussion about a particular subject–that something of the “communal” element we both rather miss from the early days will remain. It may be that the fragmentation you’ve noted is just an inevitable development as the literary blogosphere expands.

By: Bud Parr

Bud Parr — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:54:54 +0000

I’m glad to hear your candor Ed and thanks for mentioning MetaxuCafe. Admittedly I’ve let MetaxuCafe go asea over the last year, partly because of personal reasons (two new babies, paying for them) and partly because I haven’t known exactly what to do with the now 800 members it and was also disappointed with the lack of true involvement by the likes of the litbloggers I like the best.

Some parts of it have been an experiment (the roundtables) that I still hold hope for (what better place to bring a bunch of bloggers than a neutral central place and one where the comments are on par with the posts) and others who knows – because it’s difficult to aggregate nearly 800 feeds, but MetaxuCafe is still alive and I’m even gearing up to do a redesign to make it better and hopefully breath new life into it – I hope to get this in place before our coverage of the Pen World Voices Festival.

But it requires community involvement, and frustratingly, the community seems to like to keep everything on their own site, surely assuring that many readers will likely miss what’s happening. Don’t get me wrong – a big part of MetaxuCafe’s mission is to promote individual writers, but that purpose is not served if all it does is point to other Websites. It has long been my contention that for litblogs to succeed as a medium they need to be accessible to those who don’t have one, probably in once central location. I just realized I’m going way too much into this here, so I’ll close saying that despite the LBC’s closing, it was indeed a great thing but perhaps just something on the way to even greater ways for literature to live.