Dave Eggers, author of “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” will issue his second novel himself and “sell it only through the McSweeney’s Web site and 100 or so independent bookstores. Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and other giant retailers are to be cut out of the action.” The WSJournal adds:

“Mr. Eggers seems to have taken as his playbook Jason Epstein’s ‘Book Business.’ Published last year, it ought to be required reading for serious writers everywhere. Mr. Epstein, a former editor at Random House and co-founder of the New York Review of Books, argues that the trend toward centralization in book publishing and retailing is coming to an end. In an environment where competition for bestsellers and name-brand authors has sent advances and marketing budgets soaring, profit margins among the mainstream houses are wafer thin. Chain bookstores, saddled with pricey real estate and high labor costs, must themselves bank on an ever-increasing supply of bestsellers; this reliance on quick turnover marginalizes serious, slower-selling books. But the chains are finding it ever more difficult to compete with the ruthless price slashing of Amazon, which will, at no extra cost, deliver to your doorstep. The whole middle-man apparatus of corporate publishing, argues Mr. Epstein, will totter toward obsolescence as e-book and print-on-demand technologies gain traction, reducing the need for costly warehousing and shipping. Someday, he maintains, writers will contract directly with independent editors and publicists, and the trade will revert to its roots as a cottage industry of like-minded souls banding together in fluid groupings around projects of mutual interest.”

: “I can’t stress enough just how simple it was to set up my adstrip for [url=http://www.weirdfiles.com]Weird Files. I’ve sold two ads this week and am running another two free ads — for my hosting service and the crazy Fortean Times magazine.” Next up, Blogads on KENLAYNE.com and LAEXAMINER.

Internet marketeer Tim Ireland offers a number of services, including “Weblog Seeding.” Here’s the description: “No doubt you’ve watched a movie or two where some mad scientist, intent on wiping out every human being on the planet with a killer virus, does so by releasing it in multiple strategic locations. The same approach needs to be taken with online viral agents. Web users are creatures of habit, and rarely venture out of a set group of communities and websites. For this reason, a multiple seeding approach is required to give your virus the best chance of wide exposure and exponential growth. Weblog seeding is by far the most effective technique of getting your viral agent in front of as many eyeballs as possible.”

Congratulations to Emmanuelle Richard and Matt Welch, the first double Blogad family. Emmanuelle scores another first: a French blogad. Be sure to click and contribute the cause of blogging a la mode francaise. Finally, I’m excited that Emmanuelle pushes the envelope so nicely with her house ads, especially the one for Dot.con.

Ken Layne writes: “The cost-cutting, personality-hating newspaper chains have done everything possible to do away with popular columnists. The most successful tactic has been to let the popular columnists die off and quickly kill all discussion of replacements by issuing the standard ‘he/she could never be replaced.'”

To the folks who think great writers won’t ever make a living from blogging, I can only say: what are you gonna read if they don’t?

Professional journalism is being crushed by lead-coated, 19th-century overheads. Although a few true-believers fight back, each year, another 5% of the newspaper heap gets amalgamated or liquidated. Eighty percent of newspaper revenue funds executive parking garages, ad rep bonuses, printing presses, phone bills, delivery trucks, and 3-martini-lunches.

The fires of competition will boil off these impurities and slag. Wordsmiths and other idea entrepreneurs will thrive; the advertiser will get five times more bang for her buck; readers will get more and better commercial information.

Reviewing the newest Matt Welch and Tony Pierce note that no LA bloggers are quoted, although more than 200 are now listed at LAblogs.

This omission may be because quoting an LA blogger would have meant publicizing the neonetwork of Kaus, Volokh, Johnson, Havrilesky, Roderick, Simberg, Moxie, Pierce, Salisbury, Layne, Welch and the LAEXAMINER — all of whom comprise a Cabel of LAT Critics.

But I don’t think the exclusion of LA Bloggers was (just) cynical self-protection. A more subtle rule also applied. The article only quoted people who write for a newspaper (Safire), teach graduate students (Halavais, Grabowicz, Pryor), publish a book (Weinberger), or attend J-School (Milios).

Here’s what the LAT was thinking: “The rest of you aren’t worth quoting. You aren’t authorities. We can’t rely on you because nobody ‘official’ says you are OK. You haven’t been vetted. And if we quoted people who aren’t authorities, we’d lose our status as an authority.”

Of course, it is self-evident that nobody is better qualified to talk about blogging than members of the LA blogging community. They are authorities by right of their own experience posting millions of words and creating 100s of thousands of links. And they are authorities because they have, by daily inspection and ongoing dialog, vetted each other.

So, by clinging to its outmoded definition of authority, the LATimes abdicates its own claim to authority. The LA Times, like a plastic surgeon with a giant wart on the end of his nose, convinces us, but not in the way intended. The real story: bloggers can create powerful networks of mutually validated authorities, networks that exceed the vision and authority of traditional media.

Blind to its own blindness, the LAT is slouching towards irrelevance. (To paraphrase Tony.)

PS: Don’t miss Matt’s closing paragraph, which recounts his previous bad experiences as a “subject” of the LAT. And don’t miss Tony’s point-by-point deconstruction of the article.

Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit did more than 100,000 page views yesterday.

I’ve spent the last six years selling sites to traditional publishers and have met print publishers with costly sites who (still) don’t manage that traffic in a year. Seriously. Bloggers do not realize just how vigorously their part-time efforts thrash the bang-for-buck achieved by most traditional publishers online.

Instapundit illustrates a perverse law of web traffic. We all know about Metcalfe’s law, which

Of course quality, focus, information-density and presentation are essential. But all else being equal, a site that links religiously will attract orders-of-magnitude more traffic than a site that ignores the rest of the web.

This law upsets traditional publishers, who are born and bred to grab eyeballs and hold ’em. Glenn made nearly 100 links yesterday — some narcissistic publishers haven’t made that many in five years online.

In pushing readers to visit other sites, Instapundit constructs a new network. Some linked sites link back. Many visitors return to see the freshest postings; some e-mail reax and news. Previously linked bloggers check back to examine their new peers.

Enabling a network, Instapundit’s utility far outstrips that of another site that might simply “publish” an unlinked digest of the same information. Instapundit [url=http://sm6.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=stats&site=s11instapundit&report=36]traffic has grown from 500,000 page views in June to 1 million in August. September seems to be on track for 1.2 million plus.

(9/13/02 In a parallel post yesterday, Jeff Jarvis rightly takes issue with Clay Shirky’s statement that “most weblogs are much more broadcast than intercast”. Jarvis says “what has fascinated me about this world of weblogs is that as a group, they are a community. There is, to use the jargon, ‘intercast’ communications between and among webloggers: I link to and comment on somebody, publicly; they do likewise; others join in; zap: community.” 9/16/02 Like Sassafrass in the comments to this post, Doc notes that while he is Instapundit’s equal in the myelin ecosystem, he has just 10% of the traffic. All links are not created equal. 9/20/02
Rick Bruner points out that he articulated the linking implications of Metcalfe’s law in his 1998 book Net Results. Rick’s 1998 formula needs one more variable: links work far better when made to sites/content capable of linking back. That’s what turns a jumble of blogs into a network and really makes the traffic dynamo hum.)

Greg Beato writes: “Tools like Bloggingnetwork.com, which makes it easier to support independent content, and blogads.com, which actually gives you something in return for supporting independent content, are a valuable addition to the blogosphere. Will they survive? Who knows? But I think it’s great that they’re here, and hope to see an increasing number of similar efforts.” And Neil Dodds writes: Blogads “represent a form of micro-targeting similar to classified ads in a local newspaper or fan ads in a zine. In many cases, but by no means all, audiences will be smaller than those of big media, but this is offset by the ads’ reach and low costs.”

I’m fascinated by “thin media” — news sites staffed by 0.25 to 1.5 writers.

Matt Drudge was the first thin media mogul. He eschewed reporting and sought to distill, popularize, accelerate and aggregate other sites’ stories.

Drudge was expected to ride Clinton’s coattails into obscurity. Instead, he’s stronger than ever and has spawned 100s of other thin media link-peddlers, each finding a progressively tighter niche to itch.

Cougars in South Wales, animal sacrifice rituals, an orange orb, Berkeley weirdos… Weird Files is a fascinating front for Ken Layne’s print syndication business. Gizmodo‘s doing its thing with million-color printers, combadges, camera phones, portable hard drives for photogs and 1cm thick mini-disk players. Romenesko’s MediaNews links a FOIA about FOIAs, Bradlee on Neuharth, and Trudeau on Doonesbury. Rough & Tumble links Orange County crime, Davis signs law against burglary tool, and Santa Cruz officials fume over medical pot club bust. And ScienceBlog touts Dust-sized chips, electronic cars, and synthetic diamond film.

Although all are blogs, each eschews personal anecdote, agenda or banter and sticks to the new.

Style books differ. Rough & Tumble knocks out one to four straight sentences. Gizmodo holds the line at two sentences, with an occasional Economistic twist. ScienceBlog and WeirdFiles introduce adjectives and storytelling. MediaNews adds quotations and reax. Meanwhile, Drudge cooks on with his griddle of hot headlines.

Other great examples: Obscure Store, LAExaminer,Arts & Letters Daily…

Editorializing: Why is it worth writing about thin media at 5.50 AM EST? Because there will be 100s of thousands more of these things in just a couple years. The sooner the model is perfected, the sooner it can MIRV. And (cue commercial) Blogads [url=http://www.blogads.com:8080/BlogadzPreview2/order_html]classifieds will power their cash registers.

(In theory, other layers of thin media should materialize as traditional publishing constructs dematerialize, right? BlogCMS is already well-populated. Sekimori is carving out a design reputation. Nothing Special and Hostmatters have nice hosting practices. Sitemeter and Extreme Tracking keep score. Will ambitious bloggers ever hire elite editors to probe for excellence? Itinerant blog copy editors? What else are we missing?)

Doc Searles writes: “Blogging for me is a way to leverage time in the extreme. For worthwhile-ness per unit of effort (say, per keystroke), blogging kicks ass more than anything else I’ve ever done.” I agree. Blogging is somehow the virtuous twin of spam — cheap, text, mass communication that is (nonetheless) non-obtrusive, personalized, contextualized and pursuasive.