Q: Who are you?
A: I go by the name of OddWritings online, and offline I am known as George Pestana. If we ever chat online, feel free to call me Odd - I don't mind, and it's faster to write. I like oddly-written things, and have a particular fondness for word-unit palindrome poetry and word etymologies. I am the T2 administrator for the LogoPhiles territory.
Q: Share a bit about yourself. Are you a writer, reader, artist, or technologist? What draws you to the world of publishing and creativity?
A: I am primarily a poet, though ever since joining T2 I have been writing more articles and essays. I was a software developer for around 25 years, but I don't do much of that anymore - poetry writing and experimenting with creating poetry NFTs replaced that activity with a vengeance starting in 2020, though I had been writing poetry ever since the dark ages (i.e. high school), but only in a haphazard fashion. I stopped developing software partly due to burn out and partly because, after being more-or-less forced out of the corporate software development community and then launching my own independent software programming ventures, I realized that selling software is something I am quite bad at, and the thought of returning to a corporate atmosphere filled me with a mixture of ennui, angst, and nausea. I am not very good at selling poetry either; but I am a little better at it than software, and so although the monetary payout is much less I feel quite happy in this role. I was also in a band for over 20 years, playing the drums, but some damage to my back has put an end to that endeavor.
Q: What solutions do you hope to see in the publishing industry?
A: I would love to have the ability to publish poems which get republished in periodicals, without my having to send poems to those periodicals first. Currently, most print periodicals will not accept poems which have already appeared elsewhere, such as in social media posts, self-published books, or (dare I say it) as NFTs. This means that to get published in those magazines I have to 'hide' these poems for months at a time, before finally receiving either an acceptance or a rejection from the periodical - only then can I share the poem with others in a public way. Not only is this highly inefficient, but it undoes one of the primary benefits of NFTs - the ability to demonstrate that you are the true author of the work, with an immutable timestamp on a blockchain proving (in an ideal world where every written work first appears as an NFT) that no-one wrote the poem before you did. Not only do NFTs provide that ability - they also make it easy for periodicals to pay the authors of republished works, since the creator of the NFT is represented by a unique wallet address under the control of that individual.
Q: Discuss any challenges you've encountered or observed in traditional publishing. What changes or innovations would you like to see implemented?
A: The answer to the previous question describes one of the challenges I have faced, as well as an NFT-based innovation to it. There are many other challenges however. One is the way that online reviews influence which books get bought. People tend to want to know that the money they put down for a book will be well-spent, and most do that by using positive reviews as well as an author's name recognition to guide them in making purchasing decisions. There is a chicken-and-egg problem here though. An unknown writer finds it difficult to receive reviews of any sort, because those reviews depend on someone reading his book - yet to read the book, someone has to buy the book, which does not have any reviews. I would like to see an innovation which rewards readers for "taking a chance" on an unknown writer by purchasing his book, reading it, and then leaving a review. This could perhaps be done again using NFTs which the reader could then use to burnish his own reputation in some way. Another innovation could perhaps be a way of enhancing the author's name recognition without the need for reviews.
Q: What issues do you believe exist for writers, readers, and creatives today? Highlight specific obstacles or concerns faced by creatives in the current landscape. This could include topics like intellectual property rights, fair compensation, censorship, or community engagement.
A: One big issue is the difficulty of standing out from the crowd. By this I mean either allowing one to gain name recognition as an author (see previous answer) or allowing an author to appear in very specific search results. At the current time, artificial intelligence queries on specific books can be quite good at winnowing down a list of authors (for example, type "who is an author who has written a book of poems at least one of which has to do with christmas" into google search); however those authors already have name recognition. The challenge would be to have UNKNOWN authors be included in those results. For example, modify the above query with the word "unsuccessful" before the word author, and as of the current date the AI will come up with a general description of an unsuccessful author, but no actual names. To achieve the desired result, AI could again come to the rescue, IF it had a training data set which were updated every day with the contents of every newly published book, together with an indication of how many of those books had been sold. To keep the "number of books sold" value up-to-date, the AI would need to re-scan the sales data of all authors on a periodic basis. If such an AI existed, i.e. one devoted to using its general intelligence to catalogue the topics covered within newly published books together with sales data on an on-going basis, then reading platforms or publishers could integrate with that AI to inform it of new data to ingest.
