Over the weekend, I listened to an MP3 conversion of a talk at Google by Christopher Bonanos.
He wrote Instant: The Story of Polaroid.
It’s difficult to imagine such a massive company hitting the rocks and sinking so quickly.
But consumer videotape was the rock that sunk Polaroid like a corporate Titanic.
Filed under Apple: The Company, Books To Check, Digital Overthrow, Google, Reference, Video, Writer
One of those weird things that pop up on the Internet that I would otherwise never know about.
Liberace was a huge fan of the Claude M. Bristol book, The Magic of Believing. He claimed it was responsible for his success.
So imagine my surprise when this popped up on YouTube …
I bought a cheeeeeeap MP3 player recently. This one:
It was US$5.00 for 2GBs of storage. Even though I have tons of MP3 files, I’ve yet to fill the 2GBs. I listen to stuff, then shuttle them off, add new stuff, listen, repeat.
I had no damn idea:
1) It was originally self-published
2) It was originally a serial
3) It was once free
Andy Weir and his book ‘The Martian’ may have saved NASA and the entire space program
The story unfolded as a serial over the course of several years. At the request of fans, Weir repackaged it in an e-reader version. Some readers struggled with the downloading process, so Weir then put it on sale at Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing, charging the required minimum of 99 cents per copy. More people downloaded it at that price than had ever downloaded it for free. They gave it positive reviews.
Not a single damn person in my bookish Twitterstream ever mentioned it to me.
And you would think Amazon would have pimped the shit out of it. They fell down on this job!
Podcast page: How Andy Weir Took ‘The Martian’ From Blog to Bestseller to Blockbuster Movie (Starring Matt Damon)
— thanks to @JulietaLionetti
Filed under Digital Overthrow, eBooks: General, Marketing, Writer, Writing
I will start with this at the top: Is writer Alan Glynn getting paid at all for being the father of this series?
The money thing part 1: there is none in writing about comics
This stands in stark contrast to a piece that ran a few days ago on the Atlantic by Olga Khazan called Can Mommy Bloggers Still Make a Living? that showed CPMs circling the drain at an alarming rate. One mommy blogger who once made enough to support three people and pay for an assistant has now all but moved on[.]
And:
I know I’ve said this before — just a few days ago in fact — but without my own Patreon campaign I couldn’t even keep this site running. For some insane reason, I live in NYC, where working two jobs 14 hours a day to pay for a room in an apartment with three other people living in it is pretty common. A 260-sq. foot apartment built from Legos in the middle of a park full of homeless people across the street from a mental hospital rents for $2000 a month here. (This is a block from Stately Beat Manor, BTW.)
Brutal.
Filed under Collapse, Pottersville, Writer, Writers, Writing
Mike Cane’s xBlog 