Reflections by Mary Anne Graham
Well, the cover that Mary Anne wanted for one of her serialized e-books is done; I have finally completed it. Behold, the first man-titty cover from Quacking Alone Romances - click the thumbnail, look upon it, and despair:
I feel soooooooooo dirty. I think I need to loofah my entire body with a Black & Decker belt sander now.
It's a buyer's market for almost everything, right?
So, lets say you are better off than most of us (me, especially) and you decide that this is the time to buy a house. You hire a realtor and she drives you out to Neighborhood A to see a traditional ranch. It turns out to be too traditional for you, but on your way to Neighborhood B to see the next house on the realtor's list you pass a cunning little craftsman with a "For Sale" sign in the yard. It has charm and character and doesn't look turned out of a cookie cutter.
So you draw your realtor's attention to it and tell her you want to see that house. She hems and haws and tries to evade but when you insist, the realtor finally gives you an answer. "No," the realtor says, "you can't see that house. " She's already met with the committee at the office. They reviewed who you were and what you would like and dislike and composed a list of acceptable houses. The craftsman wasn't on the list so it's not for you.
In reality, that scenario may not have happened to you on a house hunt, but in the past it happened every single time a reader walked into a bookstore. All of the books on the shelves had been screened for the readers by the publishing royals - agents, editors and publishing companies. The royals decided what readers should want and only put the acceptable books out there for the bookstores to stock and sell. So if a reader wanted a book, he or she had to buy one of those in the store. And when the sale was made, the royals patted each other on the shoulder and said, "See, we were right again."
...continue reading "What The Indie Revolution Means To Readers"
Hi. That Angry Guy here. Feeling better, hence more angry.
If you haven't heard about it yet, there is a huge price war going on among companies that sell e-reader devices. It seems that the Apple cart (via the iPad) has upset a bunch of people, mainly those people who thought they had the e-book and e-reader device market cornered.
I knew that the $400 price tags on Kindles wouldn't last long, because even though it put many different technologies together in a synergistic fashion, it was still a device with a singular purpose (as are its immediate competitors like the Nook) - in essence, a digital book.
The iPad, like the Amazon Kindle, didn't introduce any radical new technology; it assembled existing technologies into a neat little package that ends up being greater than the sum of its parts.
Tablet computers were conceptualized back in the days before GUIs were even invented, so Apple didn't invent the idea of a tablet computer.
Tablet computers, with varying degrees of interaction, had been manufactured by other companies since the early 1990s, so Apple didn't invent the form of a tablet computer.
But Apple did make a computer that utilized a number of robust interdependent technologies, and that computer had the right form and was introduced at the right time to break the collective inertia of the buying public.
And even though the competing devices may someday add other functions besides downloading and displaying e-books, the public perception of them is already set. The perception is that the Kindle, Nook, etc., are one-trick ponies whereas the iPad has no boundaries.
And, fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, perception is reality.
For the upcoming anniversary of Michael Jackson's passing, I repost the following which originally appeared on the blog shortly after his death.
Okay, get your mind off of all the weirdness of MJ's latter years. As for the criminal charges, don't go there. Think about the music and the performances. Get yourself in that mind space. Maybe it'll help if you squeal "Ooh" and "I'm Bad" three or four times. Okay, focused now?
His death was tragic. Having a creative force like his snuffed out so quickly, so needlessly has deprived the world of years of music and magic. So while it's certainly his tragedy, his family's tragedy, it's also a loss for everyone who ever turned on a radio or downloaded music. In the wake of the sudden loss there were many retrospectives and tributes.
As one of those tributes Fox re-broadcast the first American Idol finalist show of this season featuring the top 13 performing Michael Jackson songs. I watch American Idol and enjoy seeing the group working and growing into music professionals. It's always fun to see someone working to make their dream come true. But I'd forgotten about that MJ show because, at the time, it was just another show. Too bad it wasn't done later in the season with the gloved one giving the finalists performance critiques and suggestions.
...continue reading "If Michael Jackson Wrote Romance Novels…"
God knows, I understand that even in good times people need weekends to stay sane. In my world of today, which is the polar opposite of "good times," sanity is mostly a fond memory, but I still need my weekends. My family and that little two-day break from work are the only things keeping me from jumping.
So I rarely hope anybody else has their tailhook at their desk over a weekend, especially a holiday weekend. Rarely. But this weekend is an exception. This weekend every darned programmer and web guru in the Amazonian Kingdom best be chained to their desks - including the fathers in the group. At least one of 'em deserves to be chained, and with a big new system change-over coming at the end of June where the whole staff is most likely working on bits and pieces of the new system, someone supervising the chain-deserving code monkey didn't do his or her job. Somebody screwed up royally.
Amazon's DTP Platform publishes Kindle pieces from indie authors and includes a dashboard to monitor sales. The numbers don't go backwards unless there was a return or two OR unless a code monkey didn't do his job right. Early Thursday evening (June 17th) over about a two hour span, the DTP numbers of indie authors went backwards without any returns. Sales disappeared.
...continue reading "Amazon’s FUBAR Agitates The Already Agitated"
Mary Anne and I weren't always married, though it seems like it after 20+ years. I still had a lot to learn about women when she and I first got married. One of those things I had to learn was how women had an entirely different methodology for shopping than men.
I found it best to think about it in terms of our hunter-gatherer ancestry. Men were the hunters; the first thing we saw that could provide the necessary meat for the tribe was the first thing we stabbed to death and brought home. We knew the general locations where those meals on legs could be found, so we just went there, waited for them to show up, go Stone Age on their asses, and then, VOILA, lunchtime.
Men today shop the same way, except huge discount stores make it so much easier to spot that button-down oxford shirt, sneak up on it, spear it, and drag it back to our caves.
Women? That's a whole different game. One that men will never understand, except to note it somehow evolved from jabbering at each other while wandering among groves of fruit trees.
As an example of what happens when these worlds collide, I present an account of my first married shopping trip with Mary Anne:
Is having breakfast for supper a Southern thing?
Last night I decided that I wanted breakfast for supper. Okay, maybe recalling that IHOP has those cheesecake stacker pancakes right now had something to do with it. The other factor - if one needs more than the idea of cheesecake as an incentive - was that at suppertime we could get into IHOP. You've got to remember that the family Graham resides in Myrtle Beach which is a tourist town.
Tourists, God love 'em, come down on vacation talking a good game. You'll hear them in line at the grocery store or passing by at the mall talking about how stupid folks are to travel to somewhere different and still eat at the chain restaurants. Like I said, they talk a good game. Anybody who lives in Myrtle and has tried to get into an Olive Garden for supper or an IHOP for breakfast knows that it's all talk. Locals will drive up to those places, see the throngs crowding around, and leave and go somewhere else.
So there was a stroke of genius in my madness last night. It occurred to me that maybe breakfast for supper was a Southern thing and maybe IHOP wouldn't be crowded. And EUREKA!! Once in a great while - I'm right. It was so not crowded that my kids, seeing the nearly empty parking lot, wondered if it was open. But it was and not only did I get my cheesecake stackers (strawberry), but we were seated in a nearly empty section that allowed the family to have a loud and raucous debate. (Apologies to the one smart diner - a single man - who decided to leave and likely swore off the ideas of marriage and children for life.)
Mr. Quack brought up a debate we'd been having at home as he is in the throes of designing the man tittie cover for the serialization of my WIP, a regency historical. He doesn't get my reference to "Eden Without The Apple." He's also convinced that readers wouldn't get it either and would be confused by theological implications. I replied that women drawn in by man titties wouldn't be thinking about the Bible at the time.
AOFM here, not feeling too well. Bad lifestyle choices + piles of stress = world of hurt. We're going to have to make this one short.
As you know, Mary Anne wrote on June 6th about serialized books and how they could open up new (but actually very old) ways of making electronic distribution a little more interesting for the reader and more educational and fun for the writer.
Well, the very same day a bigwig in the e-publishing industry wrote about the very same thing, listing a subset of the same authors my wife listed in her blog post.
Same-said bigwig posted on the same topic on the bigwig's site the next day. That same day, the bigwig wrote about it on a bigwig political & news site.
Wow, that's an unbelievable coincidence, isn' t it? Predicting on the very day the very topic and even the very list of authors that the bigwig was going to write about, before he did so!
It's like my wife is psycho psychic or something!
Many famous novels have appeared in serial form but, perhaps the most famous serial wasn't a novel at all. In 1914 the motion picture serial, The Perils of Pauline, was shown in installments. The title character is the archetype for "damsels in distress" as each episode featured her getting embroiled in various life-threatening situations - like being tied to the railroad tracks. The heroine, of course, was inevitably rescued or escaped certain death - only to get herself into trouble again next time.
Pauline aside, a host of acclaimed books have been serialized. One of the first was One Thousand And One Nights which introduced famous characters like Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin. One of the most famous serial authors was Charles Dickens who published each chapter as a serialized piece. That's why most of his work is so long - more chapters equal more money. Dickens' left off each piece with a cliffhanger. Famously, for his chase story The Old Curiosity Shop, American fans waiting at the docks to meet the ships bringing in the next installment shouted at the ships' crew demanding to be told whether Little Nell was dead.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created his Sherlock Holmes tales as serial pieces for a magazine. Thomas Hardy created many pieces via serialization, including Tess Of The D'Urbervilles. More recent writers have also returned to the format. Stephen King has dabbled in the genre. King began offering "The Plant" in serial form on his website, charging $1.00 for each of the 6 chapters that he'd written. However, in late 2000 he abruptly halted the project, leaving readers without an ending. Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities was serialized by Rolling Stone magazine, and Douglas Clegg got a 5 figure advance for serialization of his novel, Nightmare House. ...continue reading "The Perils of Quacking Alone"
AOFM here.
As an old guy who has followed technology since cell phones resembled my BFF, I was more than a little shocked when the news broke that Apple had become bigger than Microsoft.
I really shouldn't have been all that surprised.
The three big things that Apple always did while Steve Jobs was in charge was innovate, innovate, and innovate. While Jobs has had failures both inside (Lisa, Newton) and outside Apple (NeXT), he always manages to learn things from them and, most importantly, to keep the good stuff. In other words, Apple doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Since Microsoft inherited its 800-pound gorilla status from IBM back in the late 80's/early 90's, it hasn't innovated as much as it has... ahem... "borrowed". Which isn't necessarily a bad business model - hell, it's how Apple got a little kick-start from Xerox. But innovation wasn't the most important component of Microsoft that got Bill Gates his billions upon billions. What was important was making sure Windows and other Microsoft products were an indispensable part of affordable computers.
...continue reading "AOFM-MWU – The Apple Cart Upsets Microsoft"