Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-31010985-20190928203157/@comment-6032121-20191004233656

You keep acting as though your very narrow legalese definition of "self-publisher" is the be-all-end-all. But User:Borisashton's point that Merriam-Webster's defines it rather differently stands.

Moreover, I don't know what Arcbeatle Press is called in your lawyerspeak, but it is definitely a commercial entity of some sort. If, when a commercial entity, one that would be entitled to selling a work if it felt like it, instead chooses to release it for free on the Internet, it doesn't count as a commercial release for us, then there's rather a lot of BBC online content, webcasts and so on that would no longer count as officially released. (All webcasts released via the Doctor Who YouTube Channel were technically released by YouTube, not by the BBC themselves, and they were released for free. Hardly makes all the YouTube Prequels invalid.)

Speaking of the Beeb, they release contents in a variety of ways and through a variety of channels. The same appears to be true of Arcbeatle Press. They are both a ‘publisher’ of paperbacks (in the wide sense of the term, not your lawyerspeak one) whose books are released via Amazon, and an online publisher which releases original fiction on their website, www.jameswylder.com. I speak not just of the short stories but of the original serialized release of the original non-DWU 10,000 Dawns novel itself.

Finally, just checking: those objections are only for the original pdf releases, yes? What do you make of the short story collection? Because we need to be clear on whether this whole business is on the matter of "which release date do we go with", or of validity of any version of the story.

Mind you, I think it'd be an unfortunate and likely-ill-fated decision to ignore the way the medium of prose is evolving by discounting webnovels and other similar "online releases by author who owns the license, and may later collect them as a for-sale ebook" media as not being official releases. It is a major part of how literature works these days, doubly so in the case of small-profile sci-fi and fantasy literature, and I think that part will only grow as time goes on. But we need to be clear on whether this is the only issue you still find with the short stories, or if you'd also have objections to an Amazon-aided book release of them.