/lit/ - Literature

>>18145767
social media was a mistake

>>15681778
Give consumers a better service than pirates do. It's the only way you can convince people to pay for something that they can otherwise get for free.
The only way the legal market can compete with piracy is to have a single, centralized distribution company that doesn't impose any restrictions. But then there's a few problems.
1) you need to convince all companies to join forces. Just look at how every major studio is creating their own streaming service. On the other hand, piracy is a collaborative effort, people are inclined to share by principle.
2) even if they agree, you have to make sure content just doesn't get pulled off because licensing agreements expired. Happens all the time on Spotify, and I've heard it happened to Steam too. With piracy, as long as there's one seed, torrents don't die.
3) it would essentially be a monopoly, with all the disadvantages that come with it. Pay artists peanuts, and enforce invasive DRM on customers. At the same time, there's always the chance of anti-trust laws being used against them. Piracy is highly decentralized, no one has any power.
It's pretty much impossible to beat piracy with traditional methods.
The most appropriate method for the internet age is self-publishing, and directly supporting the artist, with services like Patreon and crowdfunding in general. Digital distribution is dirt cheap, the only value a traditional publisher can offer is advertising. But even then, I've read that people don't care for ads, they care for recommendations by other people.
Bandcamp is an interesting example, you can let people name their own price when buying music (which is DRM-free, and offered in a variety of formats), and they say that most of the time, people pay more than the suggested price:
>However, in all cases, leaving “let fans pay more if they want” checked is key: fans pay more than the minimum a whopping 40% of the time, driving up the average price paid by nearly 50%
https://get.bandcamp.help/hc/en-us/articles/360007802534-What-pricing-performs-best-
Also, they only take 15% of the profits on digital sales, and 10% if you make more than 5k. I don't know much about publishing, but I've heard figures for the publisher's cut being 30%+.
>https://bandcamp.com/pricing

>Deke's girls were probably grown in a vat in his capacious basement. I imagine one of Deke's shriveled silent mama-sans hunched in the green glow of a wombtank, watching swollen blatocysts cannibalize each other. Maybe she snaps on rubber gloves and hauls a particularly vicious mutant from the cloying murk, inspects its for defects as it twitches, then deposits it in the next tank along. In my dreams the line of tanks stretches on into the damp darkness. I glimpse smooth forms drifting behind distant glass, the kink of an elbow in a swirl of pallid unflesh. I think of shark embryos pickled in formaldehye.

>>15648819
Run-on sentence runs on too long. Three items or less, please.

>>15649232
Action needs to be snappier? Cut everything that's not absolutely necessary, e.g "...and above the wrist...", "amid strips of torn skin", etc.

"And then I twisted, and his arm..." this should be two sentences

"I detached his severed arm from my shoulder..." - where does this come from? What the fuck? Why is his arm on her shoulder? Needs more setup or something