Book vs. Web on Dance composer's Books I recommend both. -- Print and web.
If you really want your dances called, you might mail your book gratis, to the fifty or one hundred callers you know or want to know better in the US, Canada, United Kingdom, and perhaps Europe and Australia. And to give it to people you meet in person, and to future callers and so on. A book will make you get it right. It is good editorial practice, since you can't change those damn books one they're out, until you print more. No need to print a thousand. Even making a hundred or two hundred go out into the world will be an effort and expense. You're not going to make money on those books, by the way. Books cause publicity to the composer and the dances. You want the dances called, and you want to talk to callers and composers, right? Newsletter mentions, and catalogue mentions help via the numerous dance associations own humble newsletters. Sales Catalogues and Newsletter: One USA Example: Country Dance and Song Society for their store and catalog and newsletter mentions: www.cdss.org CDSS's affiliates sometimes review books via their newsletters. A commercial example: Elderly Instruments sells some dance composer books, but not many, probably out of their retail walk-in store: http://www.elderly.com/books/books.htm WEB & BOOK efforts: - Cary Ravitz updates his book of dances regularly, and also puts it on the web. some of us keep track of the dances he drops and changes by buying his book now and again. See: http://ravitz.us/dance/ - Michael Dyke's index to published dances, mostly relies on dead -ree publications. See: http://www.ibiblio.org/contradance/index/index.html A book can travel to a dance, a camp, onto a bus, car, plane and to another caller or future caller, and it can be studied to see what that particular composer's angle is. I know of one prominent New England caller that brings books to the dance, and calls straight from the book. Web locations change and die, and how are you going to get a caller to find your dance anyhow. On a 100 year perspective, the web page will be gone. Books allow you to get the dance, minimally into a dead tree archive, plus all of the caller's dead tree archives, and into the hands of folks not near a web site. Think summer dance camp or weekend festival. Archives: New Hampshire Library - Milne Special Collections. New Hampshire Library of Traditional Music & Dance --> http://www.izaak.unh.edu/nhltmd/ Lloyd Shaw Foundation: apparently their archive is at the University of Denver; see both: - http://www.lloydshaw.org/Resources/Periodicals.htm and at Univ. of Denver: - http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-577270/Denver-University-s-Carson-Brierly.html In the UK: English Folk Dance and Song Society: http://www.efdss.org/library.htm There are a couple of other dance archives, non-profit dance associations. Other folks that have done a book might be persuaded because of my humble answer to send their book for posterity to these places too. I'm sure a couple of people will speak up on any "other" archives there are. And then there's the archive of mind, for those of of living and thinking about the current tradition. Tell us what you decide. (And get a graphic artist to do your cover.) ~Mark Jones On 6/11/07, Chris Page <[email protected]> wrote:
A question about publishing new dances. (Let's assume for this argument that the dances are good, and a significant number of other callers would be interested in them. Publishing bad dances is a whole other issue.) Is it better to publish them in a web site, or in book format? (This is two sub-questions -- which is better for the person publishing the dances, and which is better for the contra dance community.) Advantages of a web site: -You don't lose money, or storage space with boxes of unsold books. (I don't see anyone ever making money by published a contra dance book.) -It takes much less time to produce. -It's not permanent, so you can update or fix it over time. -It's free, supporting more the folk aspect of transmission. Advantages of a book: -It's permanent. -It's more exclusive (you need to pay and order), so hence it must be more valuable. -There are fewer of them, so they stand out more. -Hence, it's more prestigious. (note that if they're a bad or lackluster collection of dances, these advantages quickly become disadvantages) Are there other reasons? I've run across web sites (like Gene Hubert's or Rick Mohr's) that rival the best of the individual printed books. Then again, you can probably name books that have fallen far short of expectations. Thoughts? This is more than a theoretical question for me. -Chris Page San Diego _______________________________________________ Callers mailing list [email protected] http://www.sharedweight.net/mailman/listinfo/callers
