Cory Doctorow: “Why Should I Care?”

Posted by Maximum Fun on 5th September 2011

If you’re involved in independent media making of any kind, this piece by Cory Doctorow is worth your time. It’s about books – Doctorow, if you don’t know, is a writer by trade – but it’s also about what independent media really means for the creator.

Doctorow asks writers considering self-publishing to ask themselves the question “why should anyone care?” It’s an important one, and one that’s not asked enough. So often, we get so tied up in our own passions, the ones that drove us to create in the first place, that we forget to consider what our audience might want.

That should be an essential question when you create: how will this excite people enough that they will want it? Want it so much that they’ll pay for it, or seek it out when it’s inconvenient? Am I, as a creator, willing to pave that road?

So yeah: worth your time.