What? Boundaries on what IndieGen.xyz will link to? But creators are free people who value freedom of expression and there’s no truly objective measure of art, right?
The honest answer lies somewhere between “not exactly” and “flat-out wrong.” In order to break out of the creator bubble and reach a wider audience, we have to change our perspective and approach.
This convention is not about the creators. It’s about the audience.
The vision for IndieGen.xyz is a family-friendly online convention that brings independent creators to the attention of ordinary, normal people in search of entertainment. This convention caters to normal, common tastes – the vast under-served central core of civilization.
If your work is meant to primarily entertain (which is a different goal than propagandize, educate, titillate, or degrade) and you maintain a high production value and reliable order fulfillment, your chances of getting a virtual booth are great.
Vendors come here to borrow (for free!) a space to be seen by my guests, the people who want entertainment that isn’t dominated by causes, kinks, agendas, literary pretensions, or anything else but quality and appeal. Given a level field to choose from, the audience can figure out what’s good on their own.
That is absolutely crucial to the way IndieGen.xyz functions. As the current fashion in publishing is about the creators and rewarding the furthest outliers with the most extreme viewpoints, the audience of non-creators who simply want quality entertainment is neglected. With modern culture’s focus on creators’ desires and the erosion of basic consideration of others, mainstream entertainment has become a haven for a host of perversions. Creators are praised and promoted for being different and extreme, and as a consequence, are so common that the normal range of entertainment that appeals to the majority of people is difficult to find.
Families and adults trying to avoid explicit material are neglected in favor of smaller but more lucrative niches. They stop visiting sites that feature that content and pretty soon that’s all that gets advertised and sells there. The site then becomes increasingly disreputable until it fails or entirely embraces its new identity. Therefore, it’s in the interest of IndieGen.xyz and the audience it intends to serve to refuse to link to explicit material or any sort of misleadingly represented merchandise. I refuse to bait and switch my guests visiting my site.
The Maturity search function helps shoppers self-select what range they are shopping for. Ratings are a mix of the old TV and video game guidelines and go from G (General audience), to TEEN (roughly 12 and up), to YA (tone and subject to appeal to late teens and up), to MA (mature audiences). Creators set what they believe to be the closest maturity levels for their work and I make the final judgment for consistency across the site.
If you’re a creator tired of fighting for a space not already occupied by major media companies, only to find your work drowning in genre categories overrun by trash, apply here.