Rocket Bomber

“And I advised them to consolidate their brands into a single web shop. Because when you sell average products for average people, it’s practically impossible to achieve any usable conversion rates for each brand on their own, but combined you can create scale.”
…
“Note: The opposite of this, of course, is to be a niche channel from the start, during which you use your uniqueness to make people feel special, which in turn allows you to connect and leverage your market. But you can’t do this with without cool products.”

Thomas Baekdal (whom you all should be reading anyway) said this as part of a much larger discussion of how digital adoption (and the lack thereof by older folks) is creating a generation gap — Not a new point, mind you, but Baekdal expresses it well and we all need a reminder anyway. If you spend all your time online, sometimes you forget that even though Grandma is on Facebook she uses the web, and technology generally in a way that is very different. Grandpa uses his iPhone to make phone calls (can you imagine) and there’s the old saw about how neither of them can program the VCR, which is kinda true but also a joke made obsolescent by things like Tivo-style DVRs and Netflix.

…which is all beside the point – or at least the point I’d like to make.

The reason I pulled those 4 sentences out of Baekdal’s article and presented them out of context is because I think he’s saying something important about writing, too.

Book authors and bloggers need to think about what the product is, and who’s “buying” (literally buying or just reading). “Average products for average people” describes many, many blogs on the internet, no matter what the subject or focus is. What we write about can be the most amazing thing you guys, really the best but the writing itself is merely average. Informational. Journalistically bland, short because it needs to be short and not boring, but boring in its own way because too much style-for-its-own-sake obscures the meaning and makes your blog unreadable.

“And I advised them to consolidate their brands into a single web shop. Because when you sell average products for average people, it’s practically impossible to achieve any usable conversion rates for each brand on their own, but combined you can create scale.”

I think this is why we see blogs staffing up and why someone ever thought “platisher” was a term that had to be coined. [aside: No. – longer aside: A so called platisher is just another publisher, though one that is smarter about how readers read and prefer to interact with their content. The blogging platform is nice but has as much to do the with bones-and-bolts of writing and publishing as glossy magazine paper.]

The new publishing companies that are attempting to settle in the unpopulated space between blog and magazine are consolidating brands and voices to produce usable scale.

Keep that in mind. Now go read Baekdal’s post, “The Generational Divide” because I know you passed over the link the first time. Good, thought provoking stuff there.

I’ve gotten into the habit of sharing music documentaries on my Twitter account on Sunday mornings — a youtube-version of the “long read”, or perhaps more like the magazine insert in the Sunday paper. In my never-ending quest to find suitable blog content, I thought I’d repurpose the material to post here — and no doubt, some of my readers might prefer the convenience of a single bookmark (for later listening) even if they’ve already seen the links in my twitter feed.

This week I was inspired by the TR-808. Roland is bringing the legendary box back, after a fashion, as part of their new ‘Aria’ line. If you haven’t heard of the TR-808, that’s fine, just give a listen below:

“Roland’s genre-defining trio of sound boxes”, BBC Radio 1 feature (1hr), the TR-808, TR-909, and TB-303. (If you only have an hour today, I’d queue up this one.)

Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer gear demo (6.6min)

Roland TB-303 Documentary – Bassline Baseline (19.8min)

The 808 and 303 were not initially successful upon their release. Roland made about 12,000 or so 808s from 1980 to 1983. The technology was quickly “superceded” by other, newer units from various manufacturers, and the 808 was priced about a third as much so in some ways meant the Rolands were seen as ‘cheap’. The initial unpopularity and quick obsolescence actually built the ground for later success: The 808, 909, and 303 were sold used, and (while still hundreds of dollars) were much more affordable for struggling musicians.

Listening to the output of the 808 actually send me down a research-rabbit-hole than ended up with sampling culture and vinyl collectors — which I’ll post next weekend. On another tangent, though, I was inspired to learn more about the analog synth technology of the 70s and 80s:

The Shape of Things That Hum first aired by Channel 4 in the UK during 2001. (1hr22min)

The Museum of Synthesizer Technology (51.7min)

Moby’s Drum Machine & Synth Collection (12min)

Adrian Utley (Portishead)’s Synth Collection Tour (12.1min)

The last couple of links are from Future Music Magazine. They have a fantastic YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/FutureMusicMagazine and if you’re still interested in the topic, I’d watch of few of their’s and start following links in youtube’s right sidebar

Memetune Studios in London, UK (13.8min)

“Watch as Benge creates modular magic using his amazing stash of vintage and rare, modular synthesizers” (22.6min)

[blockquote]

“Writing Doesn’t Pay?

“This is a story that has been sensed by many. The clues are all around us, but the full picture proves elusive. It is being told in anecdotes on online forums, in private Facebook groups, at publishing conventions, and in the comment sections of industry articles. Authors are claiming to be making more money now with self-publishing than they made in decades with traditional publishers, often with the same books. I’ve personally heard from nearly a thousand authors who are making hundreds of dollars a month with their self-published works. I know many who are making thousands a month, even a few who are making hundreds of thousands a month. But these extreme outliers interest me far less than the mid-list authors who are now paying a bill or two from their writing.

“My interest in this story began the moment I became an outlier. When major media outlets began asking for interviews, my first thought was that they were burying the lead. My life had truly changed months prior, when I’d first started making dribs and drabs here and there. And I knew this was happening for more and more writers every day. But that inspiring story was being buried by headlines about those whose luck was especially outsized (as mine has been).

“Before we reveal the next results of our study, keep in mind that self-publishing is not a gold rush. It isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. There are no short cuts, just a lot of effort and a lot of luck. Those who do well often work ludicrous hours in order to publish several books a year. They do this while working day jobs until they no longer need day jobs. This is also true of the writers earning hundreds or even thousands a month. Please keep this in mind. The beauty of self-publishing is the ownership and control of one’s work. You can price it right, hire the editor and cover artist you want to work with, release as often and in as many genres as you want, give books away, and enjoy a direct relationship with your reader. It isn’t for everyone, but you’re about to see a good reason why more authors might want to consider this as an option.”

Hugh and Company have used web spiders to pull data from Amazon’s listings (why has no one thought of doing that before?) and then used that data to figure out some odds and ends about self publishing using Amazon’s Kindle ebook platform.

Several important items to consider:

• The data from the Author Earnings report is restricted to just three genres: Mystery/Thriller, Science Fiction/Fantasy, and Romance.
• The Author Earnings report is only for ebooks
• “Again, daily unit sales are estimated by sales ranking” – the Sales Ranking is pulled right from item listings on Amazon, but the ‘sales’ ascribed are estimates only. How good is the estimate? I don’t know. Good enough?
• However, that fact that “The Report” is based on a snapshot of a single day on Amazon is worrysome.

Howey and the Author Earnings website gave us the data, though, and practically begged us to use it.

The Long, Long Tail.

The y-axis, unit sales, are the estimates provided by “The Report” – could be anything, really, but these were the numbers chosen by Howey and associates and the same numbers they used to prove their points.

The x-axis is as labeled: Amazon Sales Rank. This is direct from the data provided. Sadly, in a graph like the one above there is no way to account for the 916 books that tied for their Amazon Sales Rank (458 pairs; first for #14, then #30, then #58 …and so on, go look). My guess would be that these pairs are a result of the collection method: Amazon updates at least hourly and the web scrapers obviously took more time than that.

SO… my “long tail” chart omits 458 books that tied. We’re looking at 5585 data points, and that’s fine — honestly, with the way LibreOffice Calc draws the chart, the teeny tiny blips on my graph are still plenty big enough to cover even a five- or 20-way tie. If anything, the line still looks too solid.

Anyway, that’s the data. Unit sales vs Sales Rank.

And we all already know about the Long Tail, from the Chris Anderson book, or from math classes about power law probability distribution.

And we look at the graph and we see a bog-standard long tail distro (it’s Amazon, after all) and we shrug and a select few in the reading audience are wondering what in the hell I could be on about with this.

Note again, the x-axis: in the picture above we’re creeping up towards 3500 and yes, it’s obvious where this is going, blah blah blah.

3500? Fine, but the data provided — 5585 books, from #1 to Amazon Sales Rank #99873 — means that we’re only about 3.5% done. Tippy toes in the water. In fact, if one were to extend the graph above, instead of taking up most of the width of your computer monitor, it’d be 25 feet long.

At least, it is on my computer: The pic I posted above is just a screenshot.

If I compress it down a bit to fit (sort of) on your computer screen, instead of a nice ski-slope leading into the long tail, we can see just how dire a drop off it is:

This isn’t even All Of It – there’s one more thing to consider. “The Report” went to great pains to find the top 7000-ish bestselling genre Kindle titles — And of those, 6042 had an Amazon Sales Rank under 100,000. An additional 845 books are listed in the .xls file available from Author Earnings — and these slide quickly further down the ranks, from Amazon Sales Rank #100054 for the book that didn’t quite make the cut-off to #752309 for the last, 6887th book to appear in their spreadsheet. 752,309th place sounds bad enough, but just how many ebooks are on Amazon, anyway?

2.4 Million. A very long tail, indeed. Amazon has absolutely no problem with this, by the way: The files themselves are small and only use bandwidth when downloaded. If the Number One Ebook sells a million copies, that more than pays for the lot — and the whole point of Anderson’s Long Tail is that sales are made along the whole length, not just the bestsellers on the far left end.

My first pic, the graph out to 3500, is about one-tenth of one percent of all Kindle ebooks. The odds may be slightly better with ebooks, as opposed to traditional publishing, and the payout better, but we’re still talking about lottery tickets. So, bright and shiny First Time Author, where do you think your book is going to end up on this graph? In that very slim top 0.1% way on the left, or somewhere in the long flat bottom with the rest of us?

Forbes just put up Amazon Vs. Book Publishers, By The Numbers – claiming at least on the face to “ignore the overheated rhetoric for the moment and focus on the raw data.”

Fine. But can you hire someone who can do math?

Forbes: “$5.25 billion: Amazon’s current annual revenue from book sales, according to one of Packer’s sources. That means books account for 7% of the company’s $75 billion in total yearly revenue.”

I’d take that one further. Books, at least as has been self-reported by the members of the Association of American Publishers, is a $27 Billion a year industry. To be fair, trade books (publishing minus the textbook market) is only (only) $15 Billion. Amazon is the big, ugly, 500lb. gorilla of the market but two-thirds of books are still being sold elsewhere.

Putting that $5.25 Billion in context and knowing the publisher’s side is at least as important: one could argue that Amazon is only 7% invested in books and the Amazon-Publisher relationship, while publishers are at least 30% invested and growing increasingly worried as that fraction keeps getting bigger. This is the wrong way to think about the numbers (note my use of the phrase “one could argue”) but knowing the relevant percentages is more important than throwing around billions — and does a better job of putting the original New Yorker piece in context.

* Forbes: “19.5%: Amazon’s share of the e-books market. E-books now make up around 30% of all book sales, and Amazon has a 65% share within that category, with Apple and Barnes & Noble accounting for most of the balance.”

edit 14:59 12 Feb 2014: I’m not totally mean spirited. On review, Forbes poster Bercovici did go back and post a correction. The quote above now reads “19.5%: The proportion of all books sold in the U.S. that are Kindle titles. E-books now make up around 30% of all book sales, and Amazon has a 65% share within that category, with Apple and Barnes & Noble accounting for most of the balance.” — I still feel that this is a misreading of the 30%/65% data as Amazon’s Kindle Direct Program operates independently of AAP/mainstream publishing. My other points below are still valid. —M.

Thank you, Jeff Bercovici, Forbes Staff — you have successfully demonstrated you can multiply the integer 30 by 65%.

The number is completely meaningless, but you’ve certainly nailed the arithmetic. What in the hell am I supposed to do with 19.5%? I suppose, if it were described as the percentage of the Total Book Market that Amazon Happens to Sell as Ebooks Rather Than Physical Books, there might be some point in knowing about 19.5% — but this isn’t what the data means.

19.5% is NOT “Amazon’s share of the ebooks market” – a point directly disproved in the very next sentence of the Forbes article, where Amazon’s [estimated] share of the ebook market is listed as 65%.

Also, ebooks are only “around 30% of all book sales” when we restrict ourselves to sales self-reported by the 1200 or so publishers participating in AAP industry reporting, and again, that would be 30% of the $15 Billion in trade books, excluding the other $12 Billion in publishing annually from textbooks, which are still resistant to the widespread ebook adoption we’ve seen in other publishing categories. Of course, Amazon’s books sales would also include their Kindle-exclusive ebooks — a number not reported anywhere and also not part of the AAP’s estimates (the 30%-ebook number we all like to throw around). The stronger one assumes KDP to be, the smaller Amazon’s share of the trade book business—including the AAP’s publishers’ ebooks—but, if anything, a thriving Kindle program is even more worrisome to a publisher.

Just how much of Amazon’s [estimated] $5.25 Billion is ebooks? – more than 30%, I’d bet, since the publishers report 30% and Amazon sells at least as many ebooks as print books, by their own reporting. (or is that bragging?)

Just how much of Amazon’s [estimated] $5.25 Billion in book sales is Amazon’s? – This is a big ol’ question mark, because Amazon isn’t saying. Kindle Direct Publishing and the menagerie of imprints are, if nothing else, a growing fraction of Amazon’s book sales, and could be a significant fraction. How we parse it can make a big difference. If Kindle ebooks, CreateSpace print-on-demand, and Amazon Publishing account for exactly zero of Amazon’s [estimated] $5.25 Billion, that means Amazon really is selling 35% of all adult and juvenile trade books. I’d say the combined-Amazon-book-cheetah is getting close to a billion dollars, though, because the fraction I keep hearing for Amazon’s share is closer to 30%.

Ebook cheerleaders and Amazon partisans keep sharing anecdotal stories about just how great things are on their side of the dome. How much of Amazon’s ebook sales are Kindle native?

I might read the Forbes article and think 19.5%, but now I’m just rubbing it in.

How about used books, also available from Amazon – Are sales on Amazon’s marketplace figured into that $5.25 Billion? They shouldn’t be, as Amazon only collects fees on these transactions and the sales are actually banked by the seller-of-record. While used book sales wouldn’t impact the reported sales from the AAP, they certainly affect the public perception of Amazon as an online “book store” and that means Amazon’s mindshare for books is bigger than $5.25 Billion and the estimated dollar figure for “book” sales is almost certainly off.

George Packer did an excellent job describing how many publishers feel about Amazon. Forbes, in reporting on the article, pulls out some numbers from his article (in a mildly condescending way) for their puff-piece-listicle but adds nothing to the original, or the conversation.

##

I’m not done.

Forbes: “>50%: The decrease in the number of independent bookstores over the past 20 years. There used to be about 4,000 in the U.S.; now there are fewer than 2,000. Amazon’s arrival on the scene is only part of the story here, of course; the decline of the indies started with the debut of big-box stores like B&N and Borders.”

Do you want to go there, Mr. Bercovici? Amazon, Big Boxes, indie bookstores, wow things have changed but from the tone of the Forbes author we get the impression that Amazon’s “part of the story” is supposed to be the largest part. Let me show you how we provide context for a story:

[blockquote]

“The Wasserman piece [“The Amazon Empire: How the Online Colossus Snuffed Out Competitors and Their Next Battle for Publishing” : Steve Wasserman, 3 June 2012, The Nation article reposted at Alternet.org] is a long read, but a good one. Please note that in 1994, if the figures/fractions quoted are correct, then in the year Amazon launched 55% of the total book market was selling outside of bookstores! – we have short memories, it seems, and a long list of assumptions to work through when it comes to book retail. If Amazon were merely displacing book-of-the-month clubs and hoovering up the book retail that (in the 1980s) was happening in grocery stores and newsstands (newsstands! remember those?) then their stratospheric growth has a ready explanation that doesn’t involve the death of book stores. In 1994 the big-box-bookstores were just getting started: Borders & Waldenbooks were still owned by K-Mart (yes) and hadn’t been spun-off yet, that division consisted of 1,102 mall stores and just 75 Big Boxes; B&N had 268 stores alongside 698 (B. Dalton) mall locations. (Remember mall bookstores? I used to buy books there every weekend. The local mall had two bookstores in it. Good times, good times.)”

In the last 20 years, two multi-billion-dollar bookstore chains rose — and one fell. A hell of a lot has changed in 20 years.

In 1994, Viacom owned Simon & Schuster and was buying Macmillan USA; now in 2014 Macmillan (via the original UK root) is back in the US book business – but under the imprimatur of privately-held German firm Holzbrinck. Viacom spun off S&S, as the publishing arm of CBS. Hachette Book Group USA (Hachette Livre being the bookish face of French multimedia conglomerate Lagardère) was born in 2006 with the French purchase of Time Warner Books — and more recently Hachette has also added on Disney’s Hyperion. (Hyperion, I’ll remind you, was built by Disney from scratch in 1990.)

Rounding out “The [old] Big Six” – HarperCollins is only 25 years old, assembled from parts by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation over the course of the 1990s. And everyone is shadowed by the Randy Penguin merger: the imprints of Random House already read like a directory of 1947 New York publishing houses; added to Penguin’s haul the new Penguin Random House is set to publish half of all adult trade books (or more). That merger isn’t even a year old yet.

Publishing has gone on, of course: the day-to-day of editors and booksellers is of more immediate import than the boardroom maneuvers and empire building going on behind the scenes, but the corporate shenanigans still matter. It’s not that the publishing world suddenly changed in November of 2007 — a monolithic seeming industry that was already beset by supervolcanoes, tsunamis, and major tectonic shifts also got hit by an asteroid. (If a few bookselling dinosaurs are wandering around looking confused, I think they can be forgiven.)

The way people read has changed; the things people read have changed. Your options in the 1980s consisted of newspapers, magazines, mass market paperbacks, or maybe, rarely, an amateur newsletter or ‘zine — now people read more than ever but we’re staring at a screen, and occasionally it’s the screen we keep in our pocket. You can start your day reading an news aggregation site, follow up with a few expert blogs, churn through email, go back to the blogs (the funny ones), check your email again, waste time on tumblr, twitter, reddit, and then finish up by reading fan fiction in bed before falling asleep. You don’t even need to fire up your old-school-desktop-PC to do any of it, and seemingly, amateurs are in control of all of it. You can spend 14 or 15 hours of every day staring at a screen, reading.

Reading Demand has not changed. In fact, given all the new options, it may be increasing. The ways we meet that demand have adapted to the new tools — primarily the web, which is still the best part of the internet. Like the internal combustion engine revolutionized agriculture and oh-by-the-way also could be used for personal transport, the concoction of url-html-http that we call the web has revolutionized publishing (“the act of making something public”) and we’re still in the very earliest days trying to figure out what the ‘oh-by-the-way’ impact is going to be — on society as a whole, and on our personal lives. In 1914, whether we were riding in a horse-pulled omnibus, a steam-cable trolley, electric street car, or driving ourselves in a horseless carriage — we were still just going about our day. Motels, drive-ins, drive-thrus, the Interstate Highway system, and suburban cul-de-sacs came later.

Book retail, like all non-food retail, will suffer as we make the online & digital shift. The “major book publishers” may stall out as a ‘forgotten’ $15 Billion a year industry — no longer growing but instead, just serving the same niche for decades as we re-align our lives around the new technology. That doesn’t sound that bad to me. I know, ‘If you’re not growing you may as well be dying’ but if there were ever an industry that was readymade for a caretaker role, the stereotype of the quirky local bookshop supplied by small, early 20th century publishers fits perfectly — direct from central casting; a cliché right out of the gate.

Amazon isn’t the only thing to impact publishing and bookselling.

[blockquote]

“Let’s go through that again: In November of 1998, B&N had their own website, 15% of the book market, was looking to buy Ingram — the company supplying Amazon with more than half of their inventory at that point — and was being run by a driven, ruthless bastard whose modus operandi was buying up companies to either consolidate operations or just get bigger. Can I remind you that at that point Riggio had also bought Babbages, Software Etc., and GameStop and had built up this sideline into a chain of 500+ stores?

“This raised all-kinds of antitrust flags, apparently, so it’s no wonder the B&N/Ingram merger didn’t go through. I think when the deal went sour, Riggio took a step back to reappraise strategy. GameStop was spun-off into its own company and Barnes refocused on books. B&N built a massive warehouse of their own, and took up in-house distribution and logistics like a new religion. This quiet and behind-the-scenes stuff isn’t as flashy as mergers or new store openings, but the efficiencies B&N built over the 2000s are part of the reason they’re still open today, after 4 years of recession and shrinking consumer demand.

“Amazon borrowed a billion dollars (no exaggeration: they were carrying $1.4 Billion in debt by 1999) to build up the infrastructure they needed following this close call — 15 years ago the market changed, more distribution and warehousing was brought in-house and verticals were built. You might also be forgiven if you pointed to 1999 as the year Amazon changed strategic focus: from building a website and sales portal to building a business.

“I find it amazing that in 1999, the owner of a physical, brick-and-mortar bookstore chain was precluded from purchasing a book distributor (even when neither was the only player in their individual markets, and on the cusp of market changes already in motion and being trumpeted by both online-sales advocates and voices in the business press) — and the same sort of monopoly-building in 2012 is not just condoned by the state, but is being actively supported so long as some Justice Department lawyer can buy his ebooks for $9.99 instead of $14.

“It is said Amazon has 30% of physical book sales and 60-70% of all e-book sales. 15 years ago, Barnes & Noble was blocked on anti-trust grounds when they had only 15% of the book market. I find this fascinating.“

I wrote that longish piece last year, and George Packer did all my research and a hell of a lot more to write the 12,000 word article that inspired an ongoing, and very relevant conversation about books.

That’s how you cite “raw data” and put things into context, Forbes. It’s fine to pretend that you’re the ‘serious’ one in the room, and that publishers and book partisans are the ones engaging in “overheated rhetoric”. But if you’re going to present to all the world as a business publication: at least do us a favor and learn about the business.

(And get the math right, too, while you’re at it.)

This isn’t a new thought (even for this blog; I’ve lamented on occasion in the past about how blogging is a mostly solitary pursuit with little feedback — even when people like what I’m writing) and the links presented below are actually from over 16 months ago.

“There’s a cancer spreading through the indie tech blogger community: the blockquote + link post.”
The Linkblog Cancer : Marcelo Somers, 8 August 2012, Behind Companies behindcompanies.com

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong at all with link-lists… but each link has to be deliberate. It must serve a purpose. There’s no reason to link to something unless it’s something readers probably haven’t come across already or you can provide a unique perspective on it. Only link to something when you’re adding some value.”
Telling a Story With Each Link : Kyle Baxter, 8 August 2012, TightWind tightwind.net

“Blaming the format itself for link-blog overload is like blaming Canon for the deluge of mediocre SLR photography over the last decade. The tools are now available to everyone, which is great. Most people won’t become world-class users of these tools, but the surplus of mediocre output doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for more people who can be truly great at it — it just means that most people’s link blogs aren’t worth following.”
Don’t blame the link blog : Marco Arment, 9 August 2012, Marco.org

##

My own style (which has evolved over the past couple of years, and is still evolving) is obviously a little different than the ‘blockquote + link post’ that is so prevalent — and not just in tech reporting anymore. My preference is to stack several related links, or even to write a long rambling narrative that threads many quotes and links throughout. My own writing can be minimal, depending on the strength of quoted material. I also like to think my readers can make up their own minds about which sources are insightful, which might be biased, and what facts have to be weighed and considered before being accepted in whole or in part. I provide the editorial, and some context, but the reason I rely so very heavily on links is that I want the reader to go back and double-check me. I want you to read the same sources I did — then you can read my take on the issue (ebooks, or Amazon, or bookstores) and figure out if I’m full of crap or not. I also lean very heavily on Wikipedia links, because I like background, and history, and if I can’t find a handy blog post that gives a topic the context I think it needs, I will teach you until you know enough to make up your mind on a topic.

I have biases. I might even be accused of having an agenda. Also (and Obviously): by making choices on what to link to, and which quotes to pull, I am attempting to guide the reader down a path. This is called curation these days, especially after ‘curation’ is paired with ‘content’ — it’s practically a whole industry at this point. But not every blogger is going to take the time to discuss early 20th century department stores and the 1912 Sears & Roebuck catalog in a piece on 21st century online retail.

What I do is “link blogging” without a doubt. My favourite writing trick is to start a blog post with a fairly long pull quote from someone else — not just to frame the topic and set the tone, but also to spur my own writing. As lonely as this job is, the internet fosters conversation, and my best work is when I’m writing in response to someone else, even if and perhaps especially if the other party doesn’t even realize I’m out here.

Once again, though: I try not to do a single blurb+link because first, everybody and I mean everybody else is doing it, and second, hell that’s what my twitter is for. If you want an idea of what kind of link blog I would write if I devoted a couple hours of every day to blogging just for the cool links, go follow me at @ProfessorBlind.

When I sit down at the keyboard, even for a short post (this is a short post) I want to bring more to the proverbial table. For a site like Boing Boing or Laughing Squid they get away [note: please put “get away” in “air quotes”. —M.] with just blogging links because over time the nature, quality, tenor, and topics of the links themselves become the Voice of the blog; the occasional longer, feature article (in the case of Boing Boing) just supports that. The headlines and in-jokes (how the links are pitched at you) also contribute heavily to this Voice; in the case of Fark the in-jokes are (arguably) The Whole Site. There is nothing to Fark except for joke headlines — and an active community – though the community is there for the jokes.

On the one hand, I’m worried that I trust too much in links. Sure, I provide the links (attribution is good, proper attribution of ideas is even better) but I’m also concerned that the reader’s eye kind of glides over anything in quotation marks and the links themselves—especially when presented in bulk—go unclicked. Still, this is how I write these days. If anything, I write so very little that actually gets posted, I should embrace any trick that gets me to the keyboard — even one-sided conversations with other bloggers who don’t know that I disagree with (or agree, and am building on) their own posts.

##

This one is titled “Loose ends”, mostly because I Have So Many Loose Ends, a dozen or so drafts and hundreds of links, ideas half-baked that really need to be worked on.

I’m also at loose ends myself. The job search is draining me.

“Successful personal bloggers gain followers based on how they present themselves, and their readers stick around because of the close relationship that is established through those personal touches. On the other hand, building a staff of writers might be the only viable option to continue to grow and develop on the scale that is required once a personal blog reaches a certain level of success.
“For Joanna Goddard, hiring on more writers to A Cup of Jo was the necessary next step in order to expand and take on more projects related to the blog. ‘For the past seven years, I’ve written every post, which has been wonderful, but I started having bigger ideas for posts and series that I simply didn’t have time to pull off on my own,’ Goddard told Racked. “As your blog gets bigger, the workload naturally grows, too. You have more advertising meetings, you have more reader emails, you have more of everything. So it can get overwhelming for one person.’”

Is Staffing Up the Only Way Personal Blogs Will Survive? : Racked, 28 January 2014

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of note. for reasons.

see also : The newsonomics of why everyone seems to be starting a news site : Ken Doctor, 29 January 2014, Nieman Journalism Lab

Let me start with a link:
Kickstarter Lesson #77: The 10 Reasons I’ll Back a Kickstarter Project : Jamey Stegmaier, 28 January 2014, Stonemaier Games stonemaiergames.com

click it click it click it click it

…and I’m fairly adamant that you really need to read it because I’m about to shamelessly rip off most of the content of that post

Not all of it, and once again — go read the original for context — but damn if Jamey didn’t nail it and I find little to add to his list.

##

Here’s the edited version:

1. & 2. Art and Design
3. Value: “…make me an offer I can’t refuse”
4. Engagement: “I need to know that you are an active participant in your own project.”
5. Uniqueness
6. Competence: “I need to trust that you know how to deliver on your offer.”
7. Passion: “I need to believe in you, the project creator.”
8. Generosity: “I need to see that this isn’t all about you. You can show me this by backing other projects, by not constantly asking backers to do things for you, and by demonstrating on blogs and podcasts that you’re not there to promote your product, but rather to add value to other people’s lives.” [note: wanted to quote that one verbatim. —M.]
9. Quality: “I need to see that you have a quality product by hearing what third-party reviewers have to say… In fact, I even just need to see that you had the foresight and courage to put your product in a third-party reviewer’s hands—they don’t have to love it for me to want it.”
10. Pliability: “I need to see that you are somewhere between 90 and 99% percent finished designing your product…but not 100%. 100% to me is [just] a pre-order system.”

##

Damn fine list. Put me down as a co-signer.

[blockquote]

“As long as there have been cities, these are the kind of places people have met in,” said Don Mitchell, a professor of urban geography at Syracuse University and the author of “The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space.” “Whether they have been private property, public property or something in between,” he said, “taking up space is a way to claim a right to be, a right to be visible, to say, ‘We’re part of the city too.’ ”

from the same:
“Climate controlled public places where the elderly, cost-conscious and indigent are welcome to spend a few hours are hard to find.”
(In the absence of big box bookstores, our homeless have to flee to McDonald’s like refugees from some conflict?)

##

The need for a “Third Place” predates the term, but it was first (and best) articulated by Prof. Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place, which I first encountered in a 1997 reprint edition back when my professional focus was on bars, pubs and hospitality — not my later (starting ~2001) career as a bookseller. What do really great pubs and bookstores have in common? (besides me?) These business often engender a Sense of Community, of belonging—and often, a sense of ownership—in their customers, a feeling that has nothing to do with the storefront or the economic activity. A stage where the props matter more than the script, and the cast constantly changes, but while on that stage everyone does in fact feel like they are part of an ensemble, a company. [sorry, that was perhaps a shade too poetic]

In the context of bookselling, I blogged about Third Places back in 2009. The internet has changed so much of our daily lives, and revolutionized social interaction (or at least, has claimed to change everything) but when it comes down to it: not a whole hell of a lot has really changed since 1989, when Prof. Oldenburg wrote his book. If anything, we still desperately need social space (now more than ever?) — a need so pressing that we will co-opt a fast food burger joint to serve the cause if necessary.

— but they have to have free wifi. Social is fine and all but the internet trumps everything.

Don Mitchell’s book, The Right to the City, is isbn 9781572308473; the isbn y’all should be popping into Google for Oldenburg is 9781569246818 — from there you can select your merchant-of-choice;

for the lazy you can avail yourselves of these Amazon links from which I will receive a remuneration.

[At the moment there isn’t an ebook version of The Great Good Place; I note a small, smug satisfaction in that fact given the subject matter but I decline further comment]

Saw the video on the right over on Tested – thought it could use a soundtrack, played around a little bit with YouTube Doubler and so.

Here’s a link to share:
http://youtubedoubler.com/by1o

(one blogger was harmed in the making of this post following multiple exposures to Celine Dion without proper auditory precautions.)