How To Succeed after you have dusted...

Ok, I missed my usual blog day post...sorry...School holidays got in the way and also dusting.

Yes I am dusting...well orgy of cleaning anyway...this is in an attempt to finally make sense of the clutter on my desk so I can sit down at it and work this coming week. That’s the plan.

But as soon as I shifted some clutter I exposed more clutter and then there was the dust which not only could you write your name in but a short novel as well... get out the buckets etc and two days go by very quickly.

At least I’m feeling virtuous (dusty tho)

Two things have caught my eye recently. One was Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog.
Joe was commenting on the cover article of Fast Company magazine about Amazon head Jeff Bezos plans for the future of publishing.
Joe is a publisher with O’Reilly Media Inc so he has an interest in the changing face of publishing...The italics are quotes from the article in Fast Company.

Here is a snippit.

Jeff Bezos is trying to do to book publishers what Steve Jobs of Apple did to the music industry. With its iPod and iTunes Store, Apple carved out a largely virgin market so fast that it was able to wrest control of the digital-music distribution system and thus dictate what the record labels could do.

I've occasionally been concerned about this but I'm not sure there's much to fear after all. I'm seeing more and more e-storefronts popping up every week and even though the Kindle is pretty popular it hasn't been the runaway success the original iPod was. Even the iPhone itself is a worthy competitor to the Kindle. Ironically enough, I think it's when Amazon fully opens the Kindle platform that we'll have to worry the most about this. That will probably have to happen at some point, but Amazon doesn't seem to be in any hurry, so relax...for now.

Should that happen, book publishers would have more to fear than just being squeezed. Amazon could phase them out completely, treating them as the ultimate middlemen orphaned by a new technology.

Forget about Amazon. Any publisher that isn't already worried about this in general is asleep at the wheel. With all the great self-publishing services out there and the ever-growing importance of social media and author platform it's crucial for all publishers to determine the value they add to the ecosystem.

In some ways, book publishing operates like one of Joseph Stalin's five-year plans.

This statement made me laugh out loud. Literally. It's painful to admit but true that some publishers still try to lay out 3- and 5-year financial plans. This, in an industry where most have had a hard time coming close to their latest annual and even quarterly forecasts. Ugh.

Read the whole article...it’s interesting...thought provoking and will give you a heads up to the future....which with the speed of the digital revolution will be here next year....after all blogs are more than five years old...twitter has just had its third birthday...
Joe is optimistic and thinks there will be great benefits for authors... coming soon....

The other thing to catch my eye is a comment by Seth Godin on Social Media. Do you need twitter and face book etc? And before you think oh sure, yeah, I know what he will say....watch the one minute video...he doesn’t think they are all that useful but something else is...



As the great Jane says

"the strength of your relationships is essential to getting ahead, which means having a network of people who like you and/or trust you."

Go out there and enable each other...

maureen

pic is from http://www.mybigcareer.com/?p=22

1000 reasons to read this post.....

This week having pushed the kids out the door back to school...I tried to turn my attention back to the WIP. Which one tho...well both...also conference fine tuning is happening as well, so as usual the hours fly by.

For the revision of Craic I came across a great little list, The best checklist around on revision. posted on Agent Nathan Bransford’s blog. Nathan works out of the San Francisco office of Curtis Brown, Fiona Inglis from Curtis Brown, Australia will be our guest at Spinning Gold.

Some of the list Nathan has posted

- Does the main plot arc initiate close enough to the beginning that you won't lose the reader?- Does your protagonist alternate between up and down moments, with the most intense towards the end?- Are you able to trace the major plot arcs throughout the book? Do they have up and down moments?- Do you have enough conflict- Does the reader see both the best and worst characteristics of your main characters?

So after cogitating on the list and thinking about Craic, My thoughts turned to Mars and what’s happening up there.

Poor Spirit has been stuck in a sand dune since May. There is a movement on Earth called Free Spirit following the tribulations and talking about how to free the little guy. NASA has created a website called Free Spirit where you can follow the team on Earth recreate the problem on Earth and work to fix it.

I have also come across a website called alltop.com which does a search by subject for the latest research on any subject. Absolutely brilliant if you want to become an instant expert on any topic for research purposes.

This week I came across one of the most thought provoking posts I have come across in a long time, 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly.

Kevin says that the true creative needs only 1000 True Fans to make a living...he sees it as a better fit than The Long Tail by Chris Anderson.

Here is a small taste of what Kevin is talking about but I really recommend that you go and read the whole post...It gives such food for thought to a creative in business...and isn’t that what we all are?

Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?
One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans. While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize. The gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply:
A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.
A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

and from the 'Yeah Right' Box, the following video....
enjoy
maureen