Sounds Like Weird
30 March 2014
This is a really great report of a panel at a Supernatural con.
Sebastian Roché has the attention span of a fruit fly on meth[…].
And, about a prior con:
Misha comes on stage with a small pig, because why not?
28 March 2014
Remember that awesome Air Tahiti Nui video? (If not, you really should watch it. Amazing stuff.)
The guy who did the techno soundtrack, Edmond Huszar aka OVERWERK, is a Canadian who’s up for a 10k music prize. He’s currently leading in voting, but others have been pulling in their fans. Voting closes in two days. Here’s the link if you’re so inclined.
Most of his work is at this link on Soundcloud. My favo(u)rites are: Daybreak (used in the Air Tahiti Nui video), Conquer, and his remixes of Werk Me and Space Junk.
Because of the video and his music, when Rick and I rented a car for the day in Tahiti, we spent the whole day listening to Overwerk.
28 March 2014
I haven’t updated the spreadsheet I pulled a few weeks ago, but here are the numbers from the last I pulled.
There are some data quality problems here. The low end of people who say they’re making a living writing? I don’t think $450 is a likely real response. Likewise, some of the higher numbers from people who say they’re not making a living writing would be perfectly respectable incomes for many. I’m not judging people’s responses here, just pointing out that there may have been some incorrect yes/no responses.
And, as always, this is self-reported data, so take it with a grain of salt.
| Type | # | 25% | 50% | 75% | 90% | 95% | 100% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Self | 160 | 25,000 | 51,000 | 140,000 | 305,000 | 500,000 | 13,000,000 | |
| Hybrid | 103 | 55,000 | 103,000 | 235,000 | 540,000 | 1,025,000 | 3,663,000 | |
| Trad | 27 | 18,300 | 55,000 | 100,000 | 215,000 | 250,000 | 450,000 |
| Type | # | 25% | 50% | 75% | 90% | 95% | 100% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Self | 571 | 150 | 800 | 5000 | 15,000 | 24,000 | 113,000 | |
| Hybrid | 78 | 2,300 | 10,200 | 20,000 | 40,008 | 50,000 | 89,150 | |
| Trad | 54 | 500 | 4,000 | 17,500 | 35,000 | 50,000 | 60,000 |
26 March 2014
I’ve been kicking this post idea around in my head almost a year, ever since I sat in front of a computer working on a fan site wondering if I’d gone mental. Adding to the surreality was working at a glass desk over the shallows of the Indian ocean — hardly normal for me.
Backing up a bit, several of us were fans of a particular actor and role on a particular show that was, as is often the case, canceled. It was obvious the actor in question hadn’t found additional work in the US and would return home to Australia soon. One night, a Twitter direct message conversation spawned between myself and another fan, and I up and registered a fan site domain on the spur of the moment.
The following morning, I was scheduled to leave for Tokyo.
No worries, I thought, it’s a few bucks. If I still think it’s a good idea in when I arrive in Tokyo, I can do something about it.
Or, you know, not.
Honestly, I almost didn’t. It’s putting one’s self out there a lot and it’s a lot of work, not to mention an implied ongoing commitment. Making a fan site is adopting someone as “your people,” only they don’t really get a say the other way.
Plus, back when I was a teen, a friend of mine and I were singing at Disneyland in the annual Christmas Hallelujah Chorus thing, and Jimmy Stewart was the big actor there that night. My friend was a total fan. Just loved him. Unfortunately, he was a total jerk that night, and it broke her fannish little heart. Sometimes, we’d rather keep our fannish things to ourselves.
From the other end of things, I remember the first time I saw a positive review for one of my pieces. I was stoked. This person probably will never understand why I think they are so totally awesome—even if they never feel the same about anything else I ever do.
Back to the site…I got to Tokyo. Kinda freaked out. Emailed someone who ran a different fan site:
I’ve just bought a domain for a Ryan Johnson fan site, but it’s the morning after and I’m having cold feet, so please tell me that you’ve had some positive feedback from someone other than me. 🙂
This is where people you don’t know from Adam will leap to help you.
Most people in the limelight are happy with a fansite, as long as it goes easy on the gushing, treats them as human beings without objectifying them and respects their private lives.
Which is really good advice for dealing with anyone, and not different than I’d planned. I can’t handle the fan sites that are populated by stalkerazzi photos. I hope that fan site runner gets some happy feedback from their person eventually.
However, it was a couple more weeks before I told Rick about the fan site, though that was partly because I was in the Maldives and he was not….
I’ve always thought of myself an audio person rather than a visual person. In high school, I was in band, marching band, orchestra, dance band, and choir at the same time. I studied sound recording (audio and film) in college. I’m generally more interested in how someone sounds than how they look.
I’ll often identify actors by voice long before I recognize their face (due to lighting, makeup, and the general chameleon-like nature of actors in their profession).
However, suddenly having (way) more than a thousand pictures of an actor’s career in front of me and having to pick and choose which made the cut and which didn’t — things started to click.
I’ve never really liked animated movies. Sure, I can enjoy them, but I never deeply bond with them. If you asked me why, I’d have said: the limited facial expressiveness doesn’t bridge my suspension of disbelief.
And that’s true, as far as that answer goes, but the real answer runs far more deeply than that, and I really had never put two and two together.
People’s facial expressiveness mattered to me far more than I realized. I tend to take people at face value, and I realized that I was getting far more of that “face value” from facial expression than I’d been aware of.
I started thinking about people I liked—the colleague you joke with, the person who sticks out at an event you attend—and realized that many of them had more expressive faces than average.
And, unfortunately, people whose faces are less expressive than average are generally people whose faces aren’t as memorable for me unless they say something that’s particularly memorable.
As I sorted through the pictures and tried to get good screen captures for the fan site I was building, I finally understood a whole lot more about why I hated YouTube so much, why I preferred Vimeo, why I liked BluRay and hated standard def, and why I generally loathed streaming media. The lossiness of video, particularly streaming formats, cuts a lot of the facial expression detail. I kept feeling like I was watching Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine when his face was melting—not because of any issue with the acting or production, but because of the quality of the video I was viewing.
So while the fan site wasn’t a project I undertook to understand more about myself—it really was “Dude, I love your work”—it helped anyway.
I was nervous and strung out about announcing it, but he was very kind. It’s hard to pick a favorite out of all the pictures, but this one’s on my short list.
26 March 2014
Several people have said to me, “Yes, Deirdre, we all know romance sells well.”
I think, in trying to let the data speak, I gave too little context about what surprised me.
It doesn’t surprise me that some bestselling self-pub titles are romance. It does surprise me that so many of them are. There were, for example, zero science fiction titles.
So, just to point out the difference, here’s the NY Times list (I used a single week, but you’ll get what I mean):
Names, titles, and genres I used at the bottom.
By comparison, here’s the Smashwords chart from before, using the same color coding per genre:
See how many more titles there are in other genres on the NY Times list? Also, the NY Times list has quite a few more titles written by men. (Still mostly women, though.)
NIGHT BROKEN, by Patricia Briggs. (Ace.) Fantasy
AFTERSHOCK, by Sylvia Day. (Harlequin.) Romance
POWER PLAY, by Danielle Steel. (Delacorte.) Fiction
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, by Jeffrey Archer. (St. Martin’s.) Mystery/Thriller/Suspense
STONE COLD, by C. J. Box. (Putnam.) Mystery/Thriller/Suspense
THE GOLDFINCH, by Donna Tartt. (Little, Brown.) Fiction
THE INVENTION OF WINGS, by Sue Monk Kidd. (Viking.) Historical Fiction
THE HUSBAND’S SECRET, by Liane Moriarty. (Amy Einhorn/Putnam.) Fiction
ORPHAN TRAIN, by Christina Baker Kline. (Morrow/HarperCollins.) Historical Fiction
SYCAMORE ROW, by John Grisham. (Doubleday.) Mystery/Thriller/Suspense
WORDS OF RADIANCE, by Brandon Sanderson. (Tor/Tom Doherty.) Fantasy
PRIVATE L.A., by James Patterson and Mark Sullivan. (Little, Brown.) Mystery/Thriller/Suspense
THE ALCHEMIST, by Paulo Coelho. (HarperCollins.) Fiction
THE CHASE, by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg. (Bantam.) Mystery/Thriller/Suspense
THE BOOTLEGGER, by Clive Cussler and Justin Scott. (Putnam.) Mystery/Thriller/Suspense
AMERICAN GODS, by Neil Gaiman (Morrow) Fantasy
THE CHANCE, by Robyn Carr (Harlequin Mira) Romance
STILL LIFE WITH BREAD CRUMBS, by Anna Quindlen (Random House) Fiction
FATED MATES, THE ALPHA SHIFTER BOXED SET, by Skye Eagleday (Excessica) Paranormal Romance
CONCEALED IN DEATH, by J. D. Robb (Putnam) Mystery/Thriller/Suspense
KILLER, by Jonathan Kellerman (Ballantine) Mystery/Thriller/Suspense
GONE GIRL, by Gillian Flynn (Crown) Mystery/Thriller/Suspense
ME BEFORE YOU, by Jojo Moyes (Penguin) Romance
WILD HEAT, by Bella Andre (Dell) Mystery/Thriller/Suspense
FALLING FOR A STRANGER, by Barbara Freethy (Fog City) Romance
25 March 2014
Publishers Weekly has been publishing the top 25 bestselling self-published works on Smashwords each month. Here’s February’s list.
I’m not the least bit surprised that Romance is the top-selling category in terms of those top 25. What does surprise me, though, is the overwhelming percentage of those titles that are romance: 2/3 if you include the related genres of YA Romance and Paranormal Romance. I’m also surprised that Fantasy does as poorly as it has been.
25 March 2014
In listening to a lot of people talk about the missing Malaysian Airlines MH370, I sometimes wonder if some of them truly have a sense of how remote some places in the world are, or how much it’d cost to monitor all that.
This article featuring a video with Mary Kirby talks about connectivity being the key. I don’t disagree.
However, a little over two months ago, I was on a ship sailing about 2,500 miles (4,000 km) almost due west from Valparaiso Chile to Easter Island. While it’s a remote place, it does have an international airport, cell service, most of that modern stuff.
What it doesn’t have? Satellite coverage in many bands for three of those five days of travel.
There’s something amazingly humbling (and somewhat terrifying) about being out of satellite range on what’s surely a cargo shipping route, especially when you’re sailing over water that is 13,000 feet (4,000 m) deep.
There are very few flights in the southern quarter of the world (by which I mean at least latitude 45° south). Here’s the entire list of settlements (where there’s at least 1000 people) south of 45°. That’s incredibly sparsely populated. Compare the latitudes with the northernmost settlements here.
So far as I know, there aren’t any southern polar air traffic routes the way there are so many northern polar routes. So probably the very last part of the earth that would get coverage is the kind of place where MH370 is believed to have been lost. I still think it’s too early to know that that’s the wreckage for certain, and I really feel for the people out there in the bad weather and rough seas doing that duty. Thank you.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t do something more in the future to make these search and rescue (where “rescue” is more about confirmation of what happened and the opportunity to not do it again) efforts less costly. For me, the turned-off transponder is the single weirdest thing: that, combined with the believed wreckage position, doesn’t make sense absent the information we now lack.
25 March 2014
Just for the record, the amount of time it takes from the time someone decides to to use a new pseudonym to:
…eight hours have passed. And $35 or so ($15 for domain, $12 for landing page template, $8 for art).
Just in case you’re ever inspired to, you know, do the same.
I can has nap nao?
24 March 2014
Most of you reading this will have no idea who Jackie Barbosa is. Nor who her son is.
Jackie’s a romance writer. Last week, her teenage son was driving to school and struck by an oncoming car. Dear Author mention is here, including link to a fundraiser.
I don’t know Jackie, but I do know what it’s like to have a husband suddenly die, and it really and truly sucks.
So, what I’m asking: here’s her booklist. If any of those are your cuppa, consider reading a sample and see if it’s something you want to buy and read the rest of. If you know other people who might like her work, consider telling them about her stuff.
She has a blog about publishing matters (she is a hybrid author, meaning both published traditionally and self-published). You might wish to read that. Like, for example, this post about metadata ownership concerns in publishing contracts. So, even if you don’t care about the romance genre, if you write, there may be something of interest to you in there. Maybe even if you don’t write.
From my own experience and that of others I’ve known in grief support groups since my first husband’s death, it’s going to take 1-1/2 to 2-1/2 years to be fully productive again. I don’t know how many of you read the linked Esquire article in my recent MH 370 blog post, but part of what was disturbing about it for me was how the article really communicated how differently people grieve and how that can drive a wedge between family members when someone dies. And in the case of that article, between parents who’d lost a child.
I wish her (and her family) the best.
Update: Kensington has put one of her books on sale until 4/1. Link has details.
23 March 2014
I’ve been writing so much the last couple of days I’d almost forgotten about my little demo project to show how to produce different e-books by vendor. (Why? So your Amazon version has Amazon-specific links, etc.) I should have that done this week.
Jacey Bedford has an awesome tip about keeping character viewpoints in order. Which now makes me want to add that tip into the sample project.
Diane Patterson has an awesome tip about how to easily keep track of new characters or add new information to existing characters’ sheets. This will save you a ton of time later and will help your copy editor (if your copy editor is doing your consistency editing). If you’re writing a series, it’ll not only help your copy editor, it’ll help save your sanity.
Jacey and I posted because of Jaine Fenn, who’s recently joined us on the Scrivener side. Also, Jaine’s book, Queen of Nowhere is Hugo-eligible this year. Which, I’ve been catching up with Jaine, so perhaps I should resort to reading out of order at this point.