Reader Bette emailed me and asked:
wondering: have you seen London Spy via BBC… if so, what do you think?
I just watched it and I’m blown away. sexy… mysterious… dangerous? I’ll be watching. you?
This is a mini-series of five episodes that have already run on the BBC in England.
I told her I hadn’t watched it.
My reason for avoiding it now seems very foolish. Because it was!
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.
You think record execs are bad, publishers are much worse, kinda like movie executives on steroids, people who believe they’re better than us. And I’m not going to laud the uneducated, but the publishing world is everything I hate about New York, where your pedigree rules and it’s all about keeping everybody else down. Come on, have you seen Donald Trump’s act?
Books are so passe it’s laughable. And so many are written by graduates of writing workshops where the standard is unreadability. It’s like they pack their tomes with words you have to look up to make them feel better about themselves. Whereas the first criterion of a book is readability.
Boldfaced emphasis added by me.
Another opportunity for me to link to this: A Reader’s Manifesto.
It’s not you. It’s the book. That book you have to wrestle with is shit.
Previously here:
Filed under Books: General, Writers, Writing
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?
Moneyball, the movie:
Billy Beane: It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball. This kind of thing, it’s fun for the fans. It sells tickets and hot dogs. Doesn’t mean anything.
Fuck baseball. How can you not be romantic about book publishing?
Everyone was in on the auction last week. The proposal went out to fifteen hundred fucking people. Matt Damon got one. On Mars.
This post is for my fellow writers. No one else would understand.
Filed under Books: General, Writers, Writing
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 