My book The Teddy Bear Conspiracy is in its final day of its giveaway contest on Goodreads.
Giveaway ends December 09, 2013.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
The book goes on sale everywhere starting tomorrow.
Unfortunately, it’s been predicted for some time that Barnes & Noble was going to distance itself from the Nook, and thus, the e-book market. So, it seems that moment is coming to pass. Speculators assume that Barnes & Noble will attempt to continue on as a brick and mortar (physical presence only) store and sell off all of its e-book stuff. Well, in case it’s not readily apparent, the problem with that is that without an actual device to continue to hype the market of products, the Nook is going to die out as people are going to see the Kindle as a continuing vehicle and the Nook as dead in the water. Sure, they can survive on apps for awhile, but eventually people are going to see the writing on the wall and choose to go with a platform that looks like it is going to survive the next wave of changes.
But the point of this post isn’t to talk about the future of Barnes & Noble, because to be honest, I have no idea what is going to happen to that company. However, what I can do is talk about what happened to the company, specifically as to why the Nook didn’t become the all-winning vehicle they were hoping it would be. To understand this, we have to use our little go back in time feature and see what was happening when the Nook launched with all intentions of challenging the new kid on the block, the Kindle.
Back then, Barnes & Noble was the big kid on the block. He’d already beat up every brick and mortar store that existed before him, and he was rearing to go after the next challenge. Only, the next challenge wasn’t another physical store, but an online one that promised to lower prices and produce a better shopping experience. Now, I wish to harp on the latter of those intentions because Barnes & Noble stupidly focused only on the first: Lower prices. And unfortunately, Barnes & Noble didn’t handle that one well either.
The Kindle offered books at lower prices than you could buy them at retail stores. This was huge. When the Nook launched, it attempted to “discount” prices as well, but if you held up both side by side (and I used to do this a lot), what you discovered was that most of the time the Kindle price was exactly the same as, or cheaper, than the Nook price for a book. And then you started to see more and more choices being offered on the Kindle, which made having a Nook kind of a stupid purchase because if you couldn’t find everything, and couldn’t find it cheaper, you bought a pretty stupid device.
But the second point is the one I want to talk about the most because that’s where I truly feel that Barnes & Noble failed with its Nook. What Amazon offered with its Kindle was not only lower prices, but it offered a better customer experience, meaning that if you were looking for something, the Kindle actually cared about helping you find it. This meant that as you bought more books, the algorithms that worked within Amazon served to make recommendations to help you find things that you might want in the future. The more you bought and searched, the more likely the device was going to serve to help you find exactly what you might want, even if you didn’t realize you wanted it.
The Nook, on the other hand, basically offered you whatever the publishers were selling, and it put its placement completely determined by the legacy model of the highest bidder (or largest publisher with more prestige). After a few purchases on a Nook, if you were looking for a new book, every new search was like starting out from the very beginning again. In other words, you were screwed. If you didn’t want only the most popular book out there, you had to figure out what you wanted on your own.
The problem B&N made was that it assumed that cheaper prices (less than you’d pay for the hard copy of the book) was more than enough to produce decent profit. But they didn’t take into account that they had to be cheaper than the competition, not just cheaper than their own posted price for the retail version of the hard copy. And then they made the customer experience as bad as an Internet search could be back before Google was invented. You basically had to do a search with the intention of hoping to get lucky in order to find the thing you were looking for. This was great if you were looking for a copy of 50 Shades of Gray, but it wasn’t so great if you were looking for new, independent writers who might be making a splash in an obscure genre, but a genre of which you often spent a lot of money. The Kindle, however, did this extraordinarily well.
So, it shouldn’t come as any surprise which device, and which company, won the battle. The war isn’t over, but quite a few of the initial battles were quite decisive, so the outcome seems somewhat conclusive.
Let’s face it. There are a lot of writers out there. And with Amazon and the Nook making it that much easier for anyone to hang out a shingle and say he or she is a writer, that means we’re going to see more and more of them out there, even if they’re still struggling to string two sentences together. But that’s not the focus of this post. The focus of this post is that because there are so many of us out there, there are also a lot of people out there who are quite willing to rip us off and separate us from our hard earned dollars.
Of course, it’s always been this way, except in the past it was a lot easier to spot the ones trying to take advantage of us. In the old days, a writer mainly had to worry about a couple of different entities, such as:
1. Vanity Publishers. These guys would tell you your book was great and that they wanted to publish it. Then they’d send you a bill for their trouble. They took advantage of the fact that young writers (meaning ones who haven’t been writing in the business for long…age is irrelevant) didn’t know that legitimate writers got paid by the publisher, not the other way around.
2. Charging Agents. When a writer was ready to get a “real” agent, he or she would query a whole bunch of them and hope something interested someone. Every now and then a lucky hit was made, except you’d then hear from some mid-level agent who you really didn’t know but figured they had to be legit to be in the Writer’s Digest Agent Book. And then they’d say that they’d either have to charge you to read your book (before becoming your agent) or charge you for their services (after becoming your agent). In the end, they’d never sell anything because they made their money fleecing young writers who didn’t know better.
3. Editors. Someone would invest in an ad in the back of Writer’s Digest, claiming to be an editor. They wouldn’t cheat you by not editing your work, but quite often you’d end up with an editor who knew less about grammar and spelling than you did.
So, fast forward a few years and now we’re in an era where writers are self-publishing their stuff, as the legacy publishers have practically imploded on themselves, trying to hold onto a business model that resembles the big music producers trying to hold onto the music industry. This has provided a whole bunch of new entrepreneurs to latch themselves onto the writing community. Here are some ones to keep in mind:
1. Book formatters. Formatting a book for an ebook venture is pretty easy. You just have to fail at it a few times first. These guys promise to do that work for you, and some of them are cheap enough to be worth it. But others charge hundreds of dollars and make it seem like your book will fail if you don’t use their services. Like I said, if you have done it a few times, you’re generally okay. For the lower charging ones, they might be completely worth it as it would save a writer a lot of time not having to worry about the packaging part of the paradigm.
2. Agents Who Pursue You. When you start to make it as a self-published writer, you start to experience these agents who claim they can do wonders for your sales. Yet, they know as much about sales as you do, or even less. Basically, they’re banking on you remembering that agents used to be important and hope you’ll buy into the fantasy that having an agent makes you somehow better off. An agent sells your work to a publisher. If you’ve already published it, chances are pretty good that they don’t have much to offer you. A marketing specialist might be worthwhile, but if that’s what you’re seeking and he calls himself an agent, chances are you’re wasting your time…and money.
3. Bad Cover Artists. I’m being very careful about how I address this one because there are some brilliant cover artists out there, and I have used a few of them because they’re just awesome. The ones to watch out for (and not use) are the ones who have just unwrapped their copy of Photoshop Professional (or Elements) and now thinks he or she can create great covers. A great cover artist works from concept, not from stock photos, which is how a lot of them operate. I use one cover creator who actually asks me a bunch of questions about the novel AND THEN starts to design concepts. She’s great at what she does. That’s what you seek, but they’re rare and hard to find.
4. People Who Claim to Know More Than They Know. This has been one of my pet peeves. There are some authors out there who attempt to gain sales by pretending to know information that they really don’t. A good example is the extremely best selling author Rob Eagar who wrote a book everyone kept recommending to me as “the book that will help you sell more books”. The book is titled, Sell Your Book Like Wildfire, and it is a great book if you write nonfiction. However, because of the realization that the larger market out there is the group of naïve people like me who are writers of fiction, he spends a great deal of time trying to give the impression that this book is JUST AS good for fiction writers. His premise is simple. You have to sell books that are worthwhile to people. In other words, that have value to them, so you have to find what makes your book valuable to them and sell that idea as your premise for your book. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work with fiction. As a matter of fact, the more I read of his book, the more I realized he hasn’t a clue about anything that deals with fiction. He’s a marketer who knows nonfiction, and that’s it. Unfortunately, he’s convinced a lot of writers of fiction out there that his book is worthy, and in MANY conversations I’ve had with other fiction writers, we’ve all pretty much come to the same conclusion. Fiction books are about stories and storytelling, not about finding something useful for a reader. Sure, you can spin that in some way that might pretend to work, but in reality, you aren’t going to interest readers of fiction unless you have a really good story to tell, and you have an engaging way to do it. You’d get a lot more value from someone teaching you how to create a flashy cover for your book than you would from this book. Again, I was fooled by the desire to find an easy way to success.
That’s a general idea of some of the things to watch for in today’s writing environment. Drop me a line (or add a comment) if you come up with any yourself.
When the Kindle first came out, I thought it was the greatest thing ever. Actually, that’s not completely true. I was apprehensive because I was a believer in having a hard-copy of the book with me while reading it, but eventually I started to see that this could be a good thing. I went out and bought an Amazon Kindle, and shortly after that I gave up my newspaper subscription and subscribed to an online version of the newspaper (delivered over the Kindle). Then I ended up with an Ipad 2, and with the Amazon Kindle app, I have been able to read the Washington Post every morning by paying for it with that subscription.
But for books, it hasn’t been as wonderful an experience. As a matter of fact, the e-reader experience has gone from “hopeful” to “dismal” and the fault of this situation rest solely on the backs of the publishing industry itself. You see, in the very beginning, Amazon was offering books at the rate of $9.99, which was probably the perfect point for paying for a brand new book on an e-reader. The publisher wasn’t losing out because the manufacturing costs were practically nil, and their books were getting to their readers almost instantaeously. But publishers didn’t like not having complete control over their market, so they forced Amazon to allow the publishers to set the price for books. Now, an entry price is anywhere from $14.99 to $25.00 on an e-reader. As expected, owners of e-readers have practically discontinued buying books as e-books.
So, you’d get the impression that publishers won. Not really. What actually has happened is that two markets have opened up, and this was an occurrence that a smart publisher probably should have seen coming, but like the music industry before, this is an industry populated by egos who are convinced that they are infallible, and that their product is so great that it cannot be replaced or done without. Well, they were wrong.
It seems that Amazon now has two lists of bestsellers, and they are becoming completely exclusive of each other. In the old days, bookselling lists usually listed the highest selling books (physical copies) but because the legacy publishers refused to budge, Amazon has discovered that its bestsellers are actually e-books that have never been published as hard copy books. As a matter of fact, in 2011, only 3 of the top sellers actually were originally published as “normal” books. The rest were dedicated e-books only. What this means is that more and more books are being sold without ever crossing the desk of publishers at all.
Let’s unpack that. What that really means is that more and more publishers are losing out on their own marketplace because they decided they were too elite to participate in it. Instead of working with Amazon and other such e-book companies, they acted with hostility and marginalized their own market. Readers have gone out and started buying books that other readers recommend, and quite often those recommendations have no affiliations with legacy publishers whatsoever.
What this means, or could mean, is that the future for publishers is even worse than if they had participated with e-readers in the first place. Like the music industry, major publishing companies are being seen as in the way and as leeches rather than as particpants and designers of the industry. An example is the simple mathematics of a publishing contract that attempts to give a writer about 2% of the sales for a book, whereas a deal with Amazon gives the writer either 35% or 70% of the sales (depending upon which publishing deal the writer chooses for charging for books). The selling point of using an established publisher was that you got their name behind your book and their marketing team, but with most publishing contracts these days, a writer is usually left to fend for himself/herself after publication because a publisher will spend most of its resources on already established names rather than someone who is up and coming. So, essentially, you end up with a crappy contract, and you end up with a publisher that doesn’t actually do anything for you other than potentially get books into bookstores (which, in my experience, doesn’t always happen). A further example is the publishing company that handled one of my earlier books. It keeps “offering” to make my book into an e-book, and then offers me that same crappy publishing rate royalty as if it was a hard copy book. What they don’t want to reveal to me is that our contract with each other indicates that they don’t own the e-publishing rights, meaning they’re trying to get me to sign with them for e-publishing when in fact I can actually do that myself and get a 70% royalty without ever asking for their help in the first place. The dishonesty factor is the reason I’m mostly pissed at them, because they’re doing everything possible to make it seem like they’re on “my” side, even though they KNOW they can’t publish the book as an e-book without me signing over MORE of my rights that they don’t physically have right now. Again, another publisher doing everything possible to piss off a client in hopes of gaining short term gains in profit.
So, how can publishers regain the upper hand? Well, first they have to realize they lost it in the first place. If they don’t, we’re going to start to see more and more publishers go under in the next few years because they won’t have the money to keep operating. Right now, all they have is their reputations, but they’re being beaten badly by unknown writers who are making names for themselves without actual publishing companies. Once publishers become irrelevant, they’ll disappear.
But publishing companies are probably not going to go down without kicking and screaming. Realizing that they’re not going to do the smart thing, like announce that they’ll adopt the $9.99 model that Amazon first put forth (which would have probably ushered a new age in publishing), they’ll probably respond with legal action, using whatever clout they have left to hire attorneys who will submit confusing lawsuits that will bog down the system for years, further eroding their success in the industry. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a direct legal assault on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble by the publishing companies, as those are the two entities making the largest impact against them. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see it fall into some kind of patent war over technology, where some publishing company gets smart and buys up a patent that allows them to claim ownership over a certain “idea” of e-readers, even though patents were originally designed to NOT be used for that purpose. We’re seeing a lot of this kind of action on the behalf of software companies and the social networking sites, so it would not surprise me to see some enterprising legal maneuver like this.
Because they’re not going to win by going after the hearts and minds of writers and readers. They’ve already demonstrated they don’t have our interets at heart. It’s all about profit and maintaining a dinosaur of a publishing model. Therefore, expect trench warfare and years of interesting battles that lead to an industry that collapses on itself.
I’m reading a lot of blogging that is exactly this subject: Will the Amazon Kindle Fire defeat the powerful Apple Ipad 2? I’m going to go out on a limb and just say no. It won’t. But instead of treating this as an either/or situation, I’m going to talk about why the question shouldn’t be asked in the first place.
You see, the Apple Ipad is in a class of its own, a class to which no tablet has come close yet. The Motorola Xoom was released as the potential “Ipad killer” but it did no such thing. As a matter of fact, shortly after releasing the Motorola Xoom, the Motorola Xoom became the Motorola Xoom killer. It was decently constructed, had no apps made for it and relied on an app market that is woefully inadequate. To this day, I have a Xoom but I don’t use it for anything other than checking email at night (while my Ipad charges). Even when you found an app that might work for it, quite often it didn’t, and instead you ended up having to uninstall something you paid for (and couldn’t get paid back for if it didn’t work).
For months now, the talk has been all about the new tablet that was going to be released by Amazon. And it looks like it’s about to be released. Here are some of the particulars:
It has only wifi, it’s in color, and it has some apps it can run but they come mainly from Amazon’s online app store. It only has 8 gigs of RAM, and they’re not planning to up that on this particular model (although they might on subsequent versions of the model to be released later). Like I said, it has wifi only, so there’s no 3G, like you get for the main Kindle. And it will cost about $199.
Thoughts? The price is great. It serves as a great replacement for a Kindle if you already have one. It will do a few more things than a Kindle can do, like check email, and maybe play some music and videos (not sure on that last one yet, although details seem to point in that direction). What I really like about it is that now I can read books on a Kindle that has color (whereas I was reading my Kindle books on a Kindle app on my Ipad, because it was the only way to see color on a Kindle-bought book).
It’s not a replacement for the Ipad because it’s not as powerful as an Ipad, doesn’t do as much as an Ipad, and well, it’s just not an Ipad. It’s another Kindle, which will do what normal Kindles do, but be more like a Barnes & Noble Nook Color but not as dysfunctional as that product.
I’ll probably buy one. Do I need one? No. Not really. But I have a Kindle, and I like my Kindle. This will be a Kindle capable of doing more things than my current day Kindle, and I sort of like that. But it won’t replace my Ipad, which is still the one device I carry with me everywhere.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on my self-publishing tasks. I can’t even begin to tell you how much work this has entailed. I know most people don’t really care, but as a writer, I’m finding myself with very little time to write because most of my time is spent preparing manuscripts, designing and redesigning covers, and trying to conduct social networking in order to somehow constitute a tiny bit of a writing career. I never realized how much work this would actually be.
Not surprisingly, a lot of DIY writers are learning this exact same thing themselves because the publishing industry has pretty much abandoned the average writer, mainly going after well known entities (who don’t really need the publishing industry because they’ve already made it) or celebrities who shouldn’t be writing books in the first place. The rest of us are struggling just to see if we can somehow make a connection that gets someone to read something we have to write.
Which, as I’ve hinted, makes it that much harder to sit down and write. Recently, I released Destiny on Kindle and the Nook. It’s an interesting book that I created a decade and a half ago, yet it started a series of stories that have been very much a part of my continuous writing career. While the book takes place around the Year 3000, the series of books and stories that follow it actually take place around the time of the Roman Empire, slowly moving their way to the Year 3000. It’s kind of an interesting arc that tells an epic adventure of the planet Reagul, where a transplanted group of Romans live out their future. It also tells the story of the sorceror Sarbonn, who you might realize, has been a part of my writing for a very long time now. That character sets the tone for the story that takes place on Reagul long after his death, as he spent most of his life fortelling the future events of the planet, including setting the stage for what would eventually happen in the novel Destiny.
I’ve probably published 20 short stories that are all about the land of Reagul, even though most of the editors at that time probably had no idea they were publishing something that was part of a series of related, connected adventures. So, it’s somewhat interesting and fascinating for me to be able to keep revisiting this world with future writings. Now, if I just had more time to sit down and write.
Anyway, not much more to report, but wanted to at least let you all know I’m still chugging along, trying to get the volumes of stuff out there. Why? Not sure. But seems like the right thing to do.
There’s a great article on Nathan Bransford’s site about e-book publishing. For clarification, I received this article following a link from an article by Elijah Rising’s blog (I give credit where credit is due). But what I wanted to talk about is something this article brought up as an issue for me, and it’s one that I think more writers are probably thinking about themselves, and an issue that really needs some kind of attention as we move forward.
The issue is simple. How does a writer who is unknown, independent, and did I mention unknown?, get any attention in the first place so that an e-book isn’t just seen as yet another announcement in the ether that disappears like a Twitter post on, oh, say my Twitter feed with its awesome 38 followers (that tend to be ready to drop me at a moment’s notice if I post a topic that displeases them in any way…I’m just saying)? As one of those writers myself, who has been trying to build an audience for himself for about as long as he’s been writing, I am constantly left wondering if somehow I missed the boat, and that a writing career just isn’t possible.
How does the independent writer create an audience, or at least set up marketing so that it’s productive and leads to sales (and, obviously, readers)? It seems like there’s a variable missing in the game, and that so many of us are trying to figure out what it is while so many others are easily making it through life without any effort, like a teenage girl who makes a Youtube video about a horrible song that ends up getting endless play because of how horrible it is (and then a record deal). I mean, what planet are we living on when this sort of thing happens in such Bizarro style?
It’s almost as if you need to be famous already in order to make it as a writer, and that basically writing isn’t the thing people are looking for in the things they read. I know it sounds ridiculous, but what am I missing here? When Snooki can write (if you call it that) a novel and it becomes somewhat of a bestseller, and a dedicated writer can’t sell more than two copies of a novel in a month, I’m left wondering what’s wrong. It would be one thing if I knew my writing sucked, but it doesn’t, and fortunately I’m way past the self-incriminating stage of my writing career. But it is so easy to be sniped at by other people when someone with very little writing talent gains a writing career when someone else can spend his or her entire life trying to do the same thing, and the only difference is I didn’t first get famous by having sex in a hot tub with social misfits first.
But I’m not making this post to complain about that. Such things are always going to happen, and we know it. What I’m trying to do is work out, in my writing, or my head, what it takes for the average, yet decent, writer to make it as a writer in today’s atmospheric dynamic. Part of me still clings onto the belief that a traditional publishing company is the way to go, but when that doesn’t seem to be working out, you have to keep trying something or you give up. And I’m not ready to give up.
Yet.
I guess it’s time for another update on what’s going on, what’s on my mind, and where I think things are going.
1. My Readership. I suspect I really don’t have anyone reading this blog (my main one). It gets printed also on Open Salon, which might grant me a few readers there, but even there it’s a crap shoot as to whether or not anyone actually reads (or cares about) anything I have to say. I also import my blogs to my Facebook profile, and even though I have a bunch of “friends” there, I suspect practically no one reads anything I have to say there either.
It’s a real problem for a writer who wants to be taken seriously when no one reads anything he has to say. It gets really frustrating. I mean, Snooki can write a book and it becomes a bestseller based on her outrageous behavior alone, but a consistent writer generally has to kill someone in order to get anyone to read his stuff. And they wonder why so many literary types kill themselves before they ever become famous, often discovered after they blew their brains out over the frustration of trying to actually make it as a writer or an artist.
This means when I post my blog, I get tons of traffic, but I suspect it’s a bunch of bots that are trying to get people to buy their shit rather than actual people reading my blog. My spam filter logs dozens of spam messages a day, which are all the type that say something like: “Read your posting, and I completely agree with you. You should try out this new version of sex medication which can be found at….” Yeah, it gets really annoying and frustrating.
But just because I suspect one of my stuffed animals might be reading this by tapping into my wifi at home, I’ll continue….
2. Snow. I really hate it. I do. I’m not from Michigan, even though I live here. I’m from California, and if I could afford to live there or could have ever found a job there, I would be there right now. I hate the snow. I hate the cold. I turned on my heater two nights ago for the first time (been using an electrical set of heaters all Winter long), and it was so much nicer than just being able to heat up one small room, and not very well either. Even though my electrical heater could get the room up to about 70 or so, it felt like it was 45. I’m now using my real heater, even though it’s expensive as hell. But I can’t take the cold any more. I really hate it here.
3. The Whole Nook vs. Kindle Debate. I’ve written a few articles on this because I bought both a Nook Color and the $189 Kindle 3G + Wifi. I’ve completely given up on the Nook. I had two subscriptions to magazines with the Nook Color (Consumer Reports and the New York Times Book Review). I gave up trying to get the Nook to download Consumer Reports. It would start to download and then just stop. I would check the wifi signal, and it would register as fine. After three days of trying to download a magazine I already paid for, I gave up, cancelled my subscriptions and I will never use the Nook again. Contest over. The Kindle wins. It might not look as nice, but at least I can actually get content onto it. The Nook Color is a piece of shit that should never have been sold to people. I will never recommend it to anyone ever again.
4. Egypt. Things are probably going to get really interesting now that Mubarak went on the air and basically told the protesters: “I hear you, but I just wanted to say go fuck yourselves. Have a nice day.” He’s decided that even though people are out in the streets risking their lives, he’s not leaving. The Army has now backed him, which means that one of two things are probably going to happen. They’ll crack down on the protesters, and this will be one of those sorry moments in human history that people try to forget when talking about how great a people we are, or the people are going to end up going the way of the French Revolution, overthrowing the government and killing Mubarak if he doesn’t escape out of the country first. If you’re a dictator, and you pretty much give the finger to your people when they demand you step down, you really don’t have a lot of options that can play out from that moment on. I mean, all sorts of things can happen, but right now, it’s going to be a slaughter of people unless a whole lot of people back down, and when people are backed into a corner, they usually strike back instead of back down. Unless they’re Americans. Then they either sue you or back down and say that they want to spend more time with their families.
5. Relationships. I don’t know anything about this subject. I’m not in one. I don’t recognize one when I am in one. I don’t even know what women are, although I see movies with them in it, so I do believe they might exist, although I can’t verify it in person.
6. Politics in the USA. We’re going to be heading towards another presidential election with no electable people in the Republican Party, a current president who has done nothing to be reelected, other than make arousing speeches that don’t translate to actual action, and a whole lot of self-important politicians who think they deserve to be the next leaders of the free (in theory, at least) world. Right now, the front runners for the Republican Party seem to be Sarah Palin (the joke that keeps giving), Newt Gingrich (a pompous airbag that comes installed as standard equipment), a just-announced “I’m seriously considering it” Donald Trump (another rich buffoon who thinks that being rich translates to leadership potential), and a bunch of other people no one knows, has ever heard of, or cares one iota about whatsoever. So, right now, I’m calling it a boring presidential election where we reelect Jimmy Carter, um, Obama.
7. The Academy Awards. A bunch of movies I didn’t see, don’t want to see, and don’t care about, are competing for the top honors this year. As you can guess, I’m holding my breath in anticipation.
8. SyFy Becomes Shark Attack Channel. I don’t know when this happened, but my favorite channel (I remember actually asking a television station provider if they carried the SyFy Channel and not caring about any others) went from being a station with original science fiction programming with shows like Stargate SG1. Atlantis, Warehouse 13, Eureka, Battlestar Galactica (then Caprica), some variation of Star Trek, and lots of that sort of stuff. Now, it’s Man-Killing Shark and really bizarre movie of the week crap that stars Erik Estrada as a small town sheriff who is fighting a shark that has grown feet and chases people on the beach, but Estrada, who plays Skip William, is afraid of sharks because a shark killed his family in a drive-by shooting in Compton. Okay, that’s not a real show, but it should be. Who stole my SyFy Channel?
9. The Federal Budget is Out of Control. Um, when has it ever not been? We’re approaching the debt ceiling in February, when they told us that if we didn’t do things right, we’d be hitting that debt ceiling by September. Um, it’s FEBRUARY and we’re already arguing for having to increase the limit. And this is the government that’s trying to FIX the economy? Really?
10. Facebook Went Public. I laughed my ass off when I heard it was going to happen. If ever there was a bubble corporation that has absolutely no value whatsoever being sold for so many billions, I couldn’t find one. At least GM makes cars. At least Microsoft puts out a browser or operating system every now and then. But what does Facebook actually produce? Your content. Your friends. Your information. In other words, not a damn thing. Yet, they’re bad boy of leadership is now a multi-billionaire, and they’ve been launched as a fake IPO (a real one wasn’t done because the SEC would have hit them with all sorts of legal injunctions, which should automatically tell everyone something’s not on the up and up, but even that doesn’t cause people to take notice). Yeah, I use Facebook, but it’s such a non-entity in the grand scheme of things and is really only as important as it is at any one moment, knowing that it can go the way of Myspace in a second. Or like AOL, which still tries to regain some importance. Or sadly, like Blockbuster, that sad commentary of a video rental store that hasn’t realized it was obsolete ten years ago.
11. Verizon’s iPhone. Finally. Not that I want an iPhone on Verizon, but now I don’t have to read 10,000 stories manufactured by CNN about how great it would be to have the iPhone on Verizon. It’s there now. Leave me alone and stop hyping the stupid thing on your news site. Nobody really cares, as we discovered when no one lined up at the early Verizon Store openings that day, letting the event come and go without much fanfare. Nobody really cared.
12. Groupon’s Super Bowl Ad. All of the people who are upset about this incident don’t want to even deal with the ramifications of what really happened. First off, they all got upset at the ad where Groupon poked fun at itself by using the controversy of China and Tibet as its canvas. Well, here’s what they’re not getting, won’t get, and especially won’t ever own up to. The humor went over their heads. Not that they didn’t get it. It went OVER their heads, meaning they had to be smart enough to realize what was going on. Consider the source. It came from the direction of Christopher Guest, who is well known for creating comedy that not everyone gets, mainly because it pokes fun at people who are on stage and represents entire groups of people who when they watch it don’t always realize they’re being seen as the morons they really are because they’re so locked into their own little worlds that they are incapable of realizing the rest of the world sees them as ridiculous. It was the exact same humor used with Groupon, and of course, the people watching it were not Christopher Guest fans. They were Super Bowl fans, which I’m going to go out on a limb here and say we’re talking about two completely different intellectual mindsets here. Fill in the blanks to figure out which one I’m probably insulting here. I don’t really care. I’m not selling ads. Those people just didn’t get it and went nuts against Groupon. Why am I not surprised? I’m also not surprised that no one else is either.
13. Lindsay Lohan’s Theft Charge. Okay, I’ll admit it. I enjoy reading about the many demises of Lindsay Lohan. I don’t know her, I’m not a fan, and I probably shouldn’t care. But it’s like watching a train wreck happen in front of me. I probably should call 911 for help, but I can’t stop watching. I don’t get the same trill out of Charlie Sheen. Nothing about him fascinates me, nor does his drama. Lohan’s, on the other hand, completely fascinates me because I keep thinking that ir probably won’t get any worse, and then it does. I don’t even think she stole the thing, but that’s not even what keeps me interested. What keeps me interested is how someone can take her fame and continue to destroy her career, her future and any support from the community that she might ever have. Just the other day, her legal team says that it’s not going to deal with the allegations in public; they’ll deal with it in court. Then the first day of the trial, Lohan tweets her whole ordeal to the public, trying it out in the public again, even though that’s exactly what they said they wouldn’t do.
I can’t stop watching.
14. Writing. I’m taking a break from my current novel and working on a screenplay. Then I’ll be working on a word text game app that I’m designing for the android platform. I realized recently that there aren’t a whole lot of word text games out there any more, and I think it would be fun to create a new one. I remember how fun they were to create back when we were first designing computer games for the early systems, before graphics took over the industry.
That’s really it for now. If you’re actually reading this, let me know. I’d really like to know that there are people actually reading the blog.
1. The Assassination Attempt in Arizona. Okay, there’s really no way of walking around this topic without having to address it head-on. It’s pretty much the main story of what’s going on in the country, and like most current events, it’s yet another one of those that seems to be so out of context practically everywhere it gets reported. What everyone can agree on is that it was a tragic event, and most of us wish such a thing had never happened. However, I suspect that it’s only been a matter of time because there are a lot of crazy people out there, and if John Lennon’s death wasn’t a warning decades ago, we really should have been paying a lot more attention.
You see, there are a lot of people who are not playing with a full deck out there. We run across them each and every day. If you live in a big city, you can’t step over enough of them without running into another. Some are homeless, who stand on the street corners and do all sorts of bizarre behavioral activities, like yell at you, try to pee on you, beg from you, and pretty much anything else you can and cannot imagine. We had to be nuts ourselves if we honestly thought that they’d stick to their little corners and not start to bother the rest of us. I teach at a community college, and in the years that I’ve been teaching, you run across a lot of people who sometimes don’t seem like they’re all there. And you get really worried and concerned. But for the most part, no one really cares, because as long as it doesn’t affect them, why should they care?
The event turned into a bit of a surreal experience when suddenly people thought it was supposed to be a wake-up moment for the problems that have been occurring in our society. There’s a lot of anger and hate speech going back and forth between the different sides of the political spectrum, and for some bizarre reason people actually thought that this event might lead people to talk about these problems and do something about it. Not going to happen because no one wants to admit there’s anything wrong. Well, at least not with themselves. They’ll point fingers and say something’s wrong with YOU or someone else, but never with themselves. But that’s been the problem from the start, and as long as we’re never going to engage that, we’re never going to change the hostile discourse happening in this country.
Sure, it’s easy to blame Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck or (pick any politician or pundit), but the odds of actually opening up a real dialogue so that people actually listen to each other is practically impossible. It’s a nice pipe dream, but pipe dreams are just that. Dreams.
2. Verizon is Getting an Iphone. Good for them. I had one with AT&T and I’ve been very upset with AT&T and Apple for awhile now because of the fact that I can’t stop people from calling me, especially when they’re people I don’t want calling me. Neither Apple nor AT&T were very helpful here. So I left and joined Sprint, adding on a Samsung Epic phone instead. Pretty happy with it. Be happier if it had a battery life like the iPhone, but you take what you can get. Now that Verizon has an iPhone, I don’t really care. It’s still a phone from Apple, and Apple requires that it maintain control over its walled garden. Not a selling point for me.
3. Golden voice Ted Williams. I saw this coming a million miles away. The media jumped on this rags to riches to rags to riches story and thought he was the next best thing to sliced butter. Well, I kept wondering, “when is the other shoe going to drop” meaning when is the media going to turn against him? Well, now he’s kind of gone of the deep end because of personal problems, which no one could have ever expected would happen with a guy who has been living on the streets after throwing away his previous life. I mean, who would have thought something like that could happen? Anyway, sarcasm aside, he’s now heading to rehab and was arrested in Los Angeles. We’ll see how this story plays out, but I’m not expecting a lot of happy endings.
4. Unemployment has gone up again. Of course it has. And last month, it went down. The month before, I think it went up. We need to stop reporting these numbers and then providing commentary after it. Each time they do it, some pundit makes an argument that fits his world view of what he thinks should happen, rather than what is really happening. We’re in a recession right now. The market is going to be flying all over the place on a month to month basis. Stop trying to figure out long term strategies based off of short term notifications. It never works. Which brings me to my next one:
5. The Stock Market Fluxuates. Yes, it does. But one thing that needs to be constantly brought up, and it never is, is that the stock market really has very little connection to what’s really going on. It’s the Las Vegas for rich people. People buy based on speculation, and they think they have an idea of how the market is going to change in the short term. NONE OF THESE FIGURES has anything to do with what’s really going on. Companies are selling products, people are working for these companies and get paid whatever wage they normally get paid, and then some people buy some of these products. But because the stock market price of a company went up or down does not always reflect what’s going on in the real world of that particular company. Quite often, these fluxuations come because some executive did something stupid, like embezzled money, or had dinner with a celebrity. If the stock market goes south over the span of a week, it may not really mean anything to the real world as an implication. It may just mean a whole bunch of people panicked because they stopped living in the real world and see the market as the real world. Man, I hate the stock market.
6. Middle East Talks Aren’t Going Well. They never are. The two sides of that conflict are probably NEVER going to get along. Each new administration comes to the table convinced it’s going to make a difference but rarely ever does. That’s because the two sides hate each other. They have no incentive to be friendly to each other. Each side wants the other dead. That’s their international policy towards the other side. And it’s been that way for so long now that generations of their people grow up hating people they may never have met. If you want to fix the problems there, you have to do it generationally, and you have to do it by a completely different set of characteristics than our current process of diplomacy allows. Tit for tat and carrot diplomacy does not work on countries that live their entire lives to kill each other as their one foundational value. I could go at length on what would work, but NO ONE CARES OR LISTENS, so I’m going to stop caring, too.
7. Tablets Are the New In Thing. I’ve said this before, but it requires repeating. Tablets aren’t new. When the iPad was announced, suddenly a whole bunch of people who never wanted a tablet suddenly thought they needed one. We were like Eskimos being told we needed freezers and refrigerators by Don Draper and whatever fictional agency he might be working at. But shortly before this announcement, tablets were already out there trying to get us to buy them. And we didn’t. Why not? Because we didn’t need them, and they seemed kind of stupid to have. Well, now we all need them because Don Draper Steve Jobs told us we needed one. So now every other company under the sun is now releasing their tablet computer to compete with the Ipad. And I won’t be surprised if we start buying them this time around. We’re such sheep.
8. Myspace laid off half its staff. So what? Myspace has been irrelevant for years now. It used to be the “in” thing, and then Facebook came along and turned Myspace into an ugly sister of the hot cheerleader. Ever since Facebook, Myspace has been struggling to appear relevant. But its not. There’s nothing about Myspace that causes people to care. When it was told to sit at the kiddie table of technology, they tried to appear relevant again by pretending that it was the place to go for music. But Facebook was already there doing that, so Myspace continued to become even more irrelevant. At one point, I thought I might use it to hype my writing, but then realized that they were really only interested in doing so if I was already big time famous, which I wasn’t. So it wasn’t useful to me. And then I figured that if I was already big time famous, I probably wouldn’t need them. I’d just have a million facebook friends instead. Then, add to the mix that no one seems to be using Myspace anymore, and you realize why it’s probably going to be sold one of these days to someone like Murdoch who keeps buying up properties that are already irrelvant and trying to somehow make it seem like he bought a very relevant purchase.
9. Seth Rogen is Upset About the Hate Towards his Green Hornet Movie. So what? It’s a movie, not anything relevant. Make a really good movie that causes people to take notice, and maybe it won’t get the hate. Just saying. Then again, no one’s actually seen the movie, so perhaps the condemnations are a bit early.
10. Two of my novels are now on Kindle and the Nook. Innocent Until Proven Guilty, my first novel, is available on the Kindle. Thompson’s Bounty, which is a science fiction, time-travel novel I wrote involving pirates, is available on the Barnes and Noble Nook, and it is available on the Kindle as well. I would not be very upset if you chose to read my novels. Really.
11. The people of Haiti still seem to be suffering, even though most of the world has left this area because it’s not a photo op any more. Just saying. Some people gave up on it because they don’t like how the Haitians are continuing to follow corrupt leaders who continue to cheat them out of international aid. Some people gave up on it because they only have the capacity to handle concern for a certain amount of time (usually the time between football season and American Idol finalist run-offs). And then some people just don’t care.
That’s all I have for today. My stuffed animal Brucoe thinks people should do more to care about other people, but he’s just a stuffed animal, and what does he know?
Barnes & Noble just announced that their Nook is selling the best of any product of theirs in 40 years. On the surface, that sounds great. Just like the story that Amazon keeps telling us that their Kindle has sold more than any of its products. But what exactly is this telling us? Is it any surprise that a book reader would be selling better than any one product that a company that sells books would be selling? Think about that for a second. Barnes & Noble sells books. They’re not telling us that they’ve sold more Nooks than they’ve sold books. They’ve sold more Nooks than any particular product, which would mean specific books. So, they’ve sold more Nooks than they’ve sold of any one book by Stephen King.
Big deal. That’s really not that astonishing. Neither Barnes & Noble nor Amazon are really stretching the limits here when they tell us that their e-readers are their biggest selling item ever. I’d hope that would be the case. Or their e-readers would seriously suck.
What’s probably more significant is to think about the implications of these two announcements. Both companies, that sell books, are indicating that they now suck at selling regular copies of books. They’re much better at selling book readers. But not books. Because they’ve told us nothing about how many books they’ve sold on any of these readers. For all we know, lots of people bought e-readers and then went out and downloaded free copies of Crime and Punishment, because classics are free on e-readers. I find it highly significant that BOTH companies refuse to actually give ACTUAL numbers, but just big announcements that they’re selling more than ever. If we go with that strategy, I would like to admit that I’m boffing Playboy playmates more these days than I’ve ever boffed before in my life. The numbers are just ASTOUNDING. Yeah, that doesn’t really tell you very much, does it? Nor do I think you’re suddenly going to be hanging out my door, waiting to take pictures of all the Playboy playmates who are leaving at ungodly hours.
What’s interesting is that no one seems to be interested in telling us what’s really going on. Even Apple doesn’t tell us how it’s doing with its bookstore. Steve Jobs tells us how many iPads they’ve sold, but that doesn’t mean anything either. The iPad is used for lots of different reasons. Someone with one may NEVER buy a book for it. Again, we get no numbers of any significance, but veiled statements of “we’re doing great” and we’re dating lots of Playboy playmate supermodels.
So, I’ll leave you with this, a picture of a supermodel. Because even though I’m not dating her, and she won’t return any of my phone calls, at least you got something substantive from this post (a picture of a hot supermodel who won’t date either one of us).
