My latest Locus column, “Why Should Anyone Care?” looks at a hard question that many people interested in self-publishing ignore: “Why should anyone care that you’ve got a book out?”

I get a lot of e-mail from writers starting out who want to know whether it’s worth trying to get published by major houses. The odds are poor – only a small fraction of books find a home in mainstream publishing – and the process can be slow and frustrating. We’ve all heard horror stories, both legit (‘‘Why is there a white girl on the cover of my book about a black girl?’’) and suspect (‘‘My editor was a philistine who simply didn’t understand the nuances of my work’’). And we’ve all heard about writers who’ve met with modest – or stellar – success with self-publishing. So why not cut out the middleman and go direct to readers?

There’s not a thing wrong with that plan, provided that it is a plan. Mainstream publishers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over decades learning and re-learning how to get people to care about the existence of books. They often do so very well, and sometimes they screw it up, but at least they’re methodically attempting to understand and improve the process by which large masses of people decide to read a book (even better, decide to buy and read a book).

I firmly believe that there are writers out there today who have valuable insights and native talent that would make them natural successes at marketing their own work. If you are one of those writers – if you have a firm theory that fits available evidence about how to get people to love your work – then by all means, experiment! Provided, of course, that you are pleased and challenged by doing this commercial stuff that has almost nothing in common with imagining stories and writing them down. Provided that you find it rewarding and satisfying.

Cory Doctorow: Why Should Anyone Care?

Available for pre-order from today: The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, a PM Press “Outspoken Authors” chapbook, including my novella “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life,” an essay, a transcript of my U of T iSchool talk on general purpose computing and regulation, and an exclusive interview with Terry Bisson. The paper book comes out on Nov 1, the PDF is available today, and other ebook formats will be available in about three weeks. I’ll be putting up a download site for the whole thing in November.

Here’s a two-part video interview that Ken MacLeod conducted with me earlier this week at the Edinburgh Book Festival for the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum. We chatted gold farming, post-industrial manufacturing, For the Win, UK riots and social media censorship.

My latest Guardian column, “Why CCTV has failed to deter criminals,” looks at the London riots and the way that rioters were willing to commit their crimes in full view of CCTV cameras, and what that says about CCTVs as deterrence. I think that we need to draw a distinction between having cameras on all the time in case someone commits a crime, and using cameras at the time that crimes are being committed — for example, hooking up a CCTV to a glass-break sensor (possibly configured so the CCTV buffers and discards video continuously, but only saves the few seconds before the breakage).

There’s a tiny one-way street on the way to my daughter’s daycare that parallels an often crowded main road, and from time to time, local drivers will get the idea of using it as a high-speed shortcut. There are two schools in this street, and a lot of bicycle traffic, and I’ve lost track of the number of times that I’ve seen near accidents as impatient drivers roared down the street.

But the local council haven’t installed a CCTV camera there full time. Instead, when the problem flares up, they stick one of those creepy CCTV cars at the top of the street and hand out gigantic speeding tickets for a day or two, until everyone gets the message and the street falls quiet again. That is, they locate a camera where there is a problem, use it until the problem is over, and relocate it. They don’t watch everyone all the time in case someone does the wrong thing.

After all, that’s how we were sold on CCTV – not mere forensics after the fact, but deterrence. And although study after study has concluded that CCTVs don’t deter most crime (a famous San Francisco study showed that, at best, street crime shifted a few metres down the pavement when the CCTV went up), we’ve been told for years that we must all submit to being photographed all the time because it would keep the people around us from beating us, robbing us, burning our buildings and burglarising our homes.

A year before the Vancouver Winter Olympics, a reporter from a one of the local papers called me to ask whether I thought an aggressive plan to use CCTVs in the Gastown neighbourhood would help pacify the notorious high-crime heroin district. I said that the deterrence theory of CCTV relied on the idea that the deterred were making smart choices about their futures and would avoid crime if the consequences might catch up with them.

Then I recounted my last trip through Gastown, where the pavements were thronged with groaning and unconscious emaciated addicts, filthy and covered in weeping sores, and asked if those people could be reasonably characterised as “making smart choices about their future.”

Why CCTV has failed to deter criminals

(Image: Riots in Hackney, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from ssoosay’s photostream and CCTV: Church Square, Bedford IMG_3569, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from fotdmike’s photostream)