GRAVITY EIGHT -- Wednesday, September 23, 1992

Last April I wrote eight pages of self-indulgent rambling called "Letter
to Jack Kerouac" (coming soon to a journal of the liberal arts near you).

I took a course over the summer called Writing for Publication and the
instructor, Ed Schuster, urged me to submit it to several "little"
magazines. I sent it off to eleven of them, and except for one nice
handwritten punt letter, and one Return To Sender -- Address Unknown, I haven't heard from any of these magazines. Such is life...

Now, I wouldn't make any money from getting published by any of these magazines. At best I'd get a few copies to show my parents and various girlfriends. And I'd be able to tell people I've Been Published.

What a lot of rot, this, and me here with the simple intention of wanting
to have it read by people. That's the point, pure and selfless (no kidding). We're back again to one of my three fears (real fears, mind you) that I mentioned a few G-notes back: self-congratulation. I don't much care for getting credit for the thing. In fact it makes me uneasy as hell, and I'll have lots to say about this later on.

The magazines didn't respond. Big deal. So I published it anyway. I
posted it to a Usenet newsgroup called TALK.BIZARRE two nights
ago. You can access this newsgroup from the program you're using right now. All you have to do is type TALK.BIZARRE where you normally would type READ and after reading a brief Lehigh disclaimer, and pressing Enter, a list of TALK.BIZARRE messages will appear. Use F7 to scroll back to message number 45340, then use the arrow keys to put the cursor over "Letter to Jack Kerouac", and press Enter. Voila... my soul in digital form.

Usenet has an estimated audience of 3 million people around the world. Many think this estimate is very low. There are many many newsgroups on Usenet besides TALK.BIZARRE, and I don't know how many people will happen to come across my piece of writing, but I'd say it's probably more than would come across any article in any one of those little magazines. Easily.

Yesterday morning (about four hours after publishing it) I got a response. A few hours after that I received another.

My intent is not to blow my own horn here, but to demonstrate a point. I've been published, and gotten two responses, in just eight hours. Some of you are saying so what, but think very clearly about the implications of this. I've just bypassed the middleman. I've sidestepped the editorial process and reached out to my audience directly, author to reader.

This is all free. You can do it right now. Many of you are aware of
this electronic "global village" we're living in. Some of you are not.

Make No Mistake: This sort of electronic interaction will become a very large part of all of our lives in the next decade. It will change our
society enormously. More than anything else, Gravity is my attempt to
head-off this impending social revolution. As I've said many times
before to many people: the tidal wave is coming. Gravity is the surfboard I've been waxing for the last five years.

Tomorrow I'll tell you how electronic self-publishing could become a means for creative people to support themselves financially.

From: Frank Harvey , Joe Lucia