Rocket Bomber - site news

Computer crash frakked my data for last weeks charts. Again, I find myself apologizing. On the one hand, that’s bad — I hate missing a week. I was running something like 80%, but now not only is my average going to go down, I look unprofessional.

Well… I am unprofessional; this blog runs on the Three B’s — books, balls, and beer — and I’m fine with that. I have pretentions, and I’d love to do this more-than-part-time but the beer is likely a deal-breaker for anyone who’d entertain hiring me as a blogger, no matter how well I can write while [mildly] inebriated. [too many is always too many — and Don’t Drink and Drive, kids: do your serious drinking at home]

Anyway, as a make-up exam I’ll try to scrape together something special for the rankings-fans this weekend (that teaser has been up for two weeks now; ‘spose I could actually back up that threat)

…but on the other hand, a short vacation from the grind may be a good thing, and I’ve got the ball rolling on a different feature, so let’s go with that for a couple of days.

I mentioned in an email to my Mom that I was busy with all kinds of stuff, work, the web site, etc. and she replied:

“I didn’t realize that you are working on a web site. What site is it?”

and then I look at the last couple of posts, and some of the current topics that we’ve been debating and discussing on the web recently, and thought, “oh s#!t.”

Mom, I am a mature adult, as are most (I think all?) of my readers. I know I’m going to catch hell for one or two of the things I’ve posted, but I’m hoping you’ll look at some of my better work first, before you judge me too harshly.

I’d like to point you to the following articles:

Rethinking the Box: A series I started four months ago as an analysis of retailing trends and how a new-model bookstore might look (and work) in the future. — here’s links to Part One, Part Two, and Part Two & a half — this is an ongoing column and I hope to have new write-ups soon, but since it is a ‘thought’ piece it takes a while to outline and draft each one.

I also dabble a bit in what might be (if you’re feeling charitable) called journalism: Borders: the crystal ball report, Borders Redux, 2006 and 2007 Industry Year-in-review Posts,

And I’m using some of the fancy math I learned at Tech to run my own bestseller charts. I’m trying to post weekly, just like the New York Times. It is work, but I derive a great deal of satisfation from it.

http://www.rocketbomber.com/category/rankings/

I also like to point people to odd and interesting books, either that I see in the store or that I discover online.

http://www.rocketbomber.com/category/found/

These two regular features account for most of my web traffic, though the most popular posts are the analytical articles, like the ones I linked to above. (they just take too long to write, so I can only manage one a month — when I’m lucky)

Yes. I’m writing about comics. You know the stacks and stacks of stuff all over the floor of my apartment when you come visit? Those comics.

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My website is not a secret, and I think I’ve mentioned it in passing at least a couple of times. I’ve been writing on comics now for 2 1/2 years; I’ve owned the rocketbomber.com domain name for a full year, and ‘officially’ launched at the end of June ’08.

And I do it for free (it costs a little, actually, averages out to $20 a month or so) but as hobbies go, it’s fun, and I’ve met a lot of great people because of the site.

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I’d like to invite my other readers to say ‘hi’ in the comments. (please note, given the primary intended audience — Mom — I’ll be moderating these comments exceedingly, excessively closely. She’s my mom, be polite.)

…charts to follow soon.

aww, sh*t, Crunchyroll has Eyeshield 21 episodes.

If you guys expected me to be productive any time soon, you are *so* screwed.

[I kid, I kid. I’ve tomorrow off, so I should be able to finish up the charts by ~2pm. Might have been sooner, but tonight is going to be a total wash: we here at RB are going to be bandwidth-deep in full-on Anime Football Madness! If Crunchyroll had been this good a year ago I might never have started this blog.]

I had the idea on Wednesday — I finished up the last set on Friday (and yes I know it’s not really finished as I only posted the core charts without any of the secondary reports)

I said (but did not promise) that I’d have a new chart for you on Monday, “if it kills me”

It Killed Me.

Ow.

Oh, Wow, this is a big chunk to chew off and process.

The Ghost of Matt (who was killed) will try to post RocketBomber’s first Comics 500 on Monday, but not only does he have to go in for a 7am manager’s meeting, he’s the Lucky manager this week who has to turn around and come back to close the store. I know all of our customers and customer-like-objects (I’m looking at you, Manga Cows) appreciate that the Bookstore is open 14 hours a day, but I wonder if you’ve ever thought of what that means to the fine folks who work there.

Strike that. I know the thought has never crossed your mind. Especially when you just leave your books and magazines on whatever available surface on the way out the door…

Hell, this deserves it’s very own rant but I’m on a roll and this will only take an extra minute:

You walk into my store. You ask Questions. You are looking for someone who is not only knowledgeable about the Product but who is conversant with at least two computer systems, who can game a search with minimal information (because you never have but the barest scraps of information), who is studied in history, philosophy, literature, classics, and current events; who can spell mis-pronounced titles in English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Latin, or even Japanese; who watches TV and listens to radio compulsively and knows off the top of his or her head exactly the book you saw/heard on whatever programme five weeks ago even though now the only cogent detail you can come up with is the colour of the cover (which you have misremembered so even that detail is wrong)

…and you want it all at 10:55, five minutes before we close.

Or, alternately: You want it all, but you also expect this same person (intelligent, well-spoken and well-read, with multiple degrees and an outgoing personality) to also bus your table, clean up your messes and spilled coffee, to throw out your used tissues, and to thank you for the opportunity. After thirty minutes with a knowledgeable bookseller you ask for a print-out so you can go order it online.

And after all this, you ask me if we have a photocopier

[libraries are what they are, and for a reason, and you shouldn’t treat a bookstore like a library even if so many many details seem the same. I. Want. To. Slap. You…]

You want to know why your bookstore is going out of business? Look in the mirror.

It’s Your Fault.

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A late posting of the charts is my fault, but I’ve been dealing with customers [sic] [op cit.] all week and we’ve had to cut payroll with the decrease in sales this year and I’m running full-out just to keep up.

You people are draining me.

—double down, try again: I hope beyond hope that I can get something up tomorrow noonish.

Edit 25 March 2009, 1:30pm:

I keep missing deadlines. I keep promising columns and features and analysis. I hate posting excuses.

I’m still knuckle-deep in data entry (kind of like knee-deep, but with a computer keyboard. eh, it’s a forced metaphor) and likely won’t have numbers until this evening. On top of that, its week 13 (end of winter quarter) so I need to compile the quarterly charts and all that fun stuff with pie charts and line graphs and me reading *way* too much into my little constructs.

Here’s what’s doin’:

• I will post the next weeks’ charts (this weeks, actually: week ending 29 March) by 8am on Monday if it kills me.

• That post for 8am Monday will be the Comics 500. Note the not-so-subtle change there.

• I will continue to break out and post Manga charts, ‘cause that is the point of the exercise, but now we can place online sales of manga within the larger context.

• This is going to require some retooling of the ‘sheets and under-the-hood, behind-the-scenes work. By ‘some’ I mean ‘lots’. It also means abandoning some historical data, and I really should have thought of this with the change of the calendar year since a lot of folks jones for that round-even-numbers bit. Screw the calendar. …that would have been nice but this is a really good idea and I’m going to start doing it now.

• The retailing column I promised is still coming; I’m busy actually working retail and right now it is rough for reasons we all know about though my employer would likely prefer I not share specifics — anyway, it’s exhausting and I’ve barely found time to blog, let alone read comics.

• The statistics porn [2009 Q1(Winter) Charts] we all know and love will post as soon as I’m able, but don’t expect them next week. Or the week after.

• 8am Monday if it kills me.

original post follows:

I’m going to attempt a new posting schedule starting next week;

the first upshot of the effort (and the most noticeable change) is the breakup of the usual suite of reports — the Manga 500, New Releases & Preorders, Emerging Trends Report, and the weekly summary will no longer be posted as a block.

The Manga 500 — the longest and most complete of the weekly reports — is also actually the easiest to compile (once the requisite mountain of data entry is accomplished, of course) and so instead of making you wait, I’ll just rush that out. Mmmm… numbers… fresh from the red-hot spreadsheet.

That’s what I did today. Managed to slip that report in during my lunch break. Took a half-hour.

(and the Executive Summary email newsletter went out at the same time. Yes, there are benefits to subscribing.)

Not that the other reports are all that difficult, but there is a lot of block-selecting and the sorting and the formatting, oi, so I’ll take an extra day before committing those to electronic print.

And then with the commentary: After living with the numbers for a couple of days I’ll see about attempting some analysis, which I am hopeful I will be able to post weekly (& on Wednesdays, before the USA Today and NYT charts come out.)

And then we’ll see what else I have time for.

It’s the First Day of Spring. I feel it is time for a change.
And I’ve a lot of writing (& data entry) to do before Monday. Excuse me…

OK, so someone stumbled upon RB, apparently because I mentioned DJ Milky and suddenly they thought this poor source had something to contribute to the greater DJ/Mixing professional music community.

Yeah. About that. “DJ Milky” is a affectation of Stu Levy when he changes hats from publisher to ‘author’ [*cough*] and it has nothing to do with music, and when I reference him as Milky I’m not crediting him as an actual DJ or supporting his efforts, but rather making fun of both Stu and his Whelming and Overwhelming Pretension. Using the tools available to me I can’t reconstruct the original link but dudes: sorry. This isn’t the blog you’re looking for.

I appreciate the traffic, and maybe one of you will stick around to read what’s next, but I didn’t ask for the additional traffic and it’s not my fault:

Hi. My name is Matt. I’m a big nerd/Otaku/geek/fanboy/insert-derogative-label-here and I don’t have the fly/flash original content you’re looking for, I just link to what I can find — and My Original Content begins and ends with drunken-rambling-opinion-columns and the damn charts.

[jedi hand wave] *this isn't the blog you're looking for* [/jedi hand wave]

If you’d like to receive the Executive Summary and Index to the Manga Rankings (it looks a lot like the post below this one) in your email inbox every week, you should probably subscribe to the new email newsletter.

No more compulsive checking of the site, no more grumbling about my perpetual inability to post to a regular schedule (actually, that’ll probably still bug you, but…) — the rankings newsletter will go out just before the same information posts to the blog. As you can see below, it includes links to all the other weekly charts and nicely encapsulates each.

Yes, I’m trying to sell you on this. No, it doesn’t cost anything.

Our Privacy Policy:
(we didn’t need one, but now we do, and here it is)

I take your email addresses with me to the grave. I share nothing. I sell nothing. I just have this very odd hobby (ref. 19+ months, and counting, of manga rankings) and the only return I will ever get for the time wasted invested is the validation I receive after sharing the fruits of that effort with others. The email newsletter is just the latest extension of that. If I were at this to make money, I’d have picked something besides manga…

The button to subscribe is in the sidebar, left, but here it is again:

Sign up for the weekly Manga Rankings Newsletter:

Thank You for voting in the recent poll. I appreciate your input.

the Question: What Feature Would You Most Like to See Added to RocketBomber? In no particular order, let me address each of the points that actually garnered voters:

• More Drunken Ranting 23% 3 votes
• Opinion Columns and Analysis 15% 2 votes

I’ve resurrected the 5by8 column, and plan to write longer essays once a month, maybe a bit more frequently — one posting every three weeks. A lot depends on what is going on in the industry, what odd thoughts occur to me with Beer Five (it’s usually the fifth beer that does it; I have to start writing right away or I tend to lose it) and also what the on-going conversation of the internet chooses to focus on. I don’t always respond in a timely manner (I usually show up two weeks late) but seeing topics on other blogs will often set my own gears spinning.

The Opinion Columns and Drunken Rants are the same thing, actually. I included drunken ranting as a joke (and voted for it myself) so I’m not sure if it’s gratifying or disturbing that two other people agreed that beer is the muse for my best[sic] work. David? Simon?

The 5by8’s will be joined by a weekly column on book publishing and retail (when I get around to starting those) and the occasional analysis of the online sales rankings. I’ve this HUGE pile of data now (growing incrementally bigger every week) and I’m starting to get some odd ideas about how to use it.

Speaking of Charts:

• Online Anime DVD Sales Estimates (to match the manga charts) 8% 1 vote

I will continue to post a DVD chart but I’m only going to run it every other week

• Podcast 15% 2 votes

A Podcast… is problematic. It’s only worth doing if I can do one each and every week, like clockwork, uploading it at the same time each week for the delectation of subscribers. I can talk about manga and anime for hours, but there is a difference between gushing and journalism — even half-assed internet-grade podcast style journalism.

I have the hardware and software, and it works — I’ve actually put together a 5 minute sample podcast (it’s rough, but I’m sure I’ll improve with practice). (No, you don’t get to listen to it.)

I tell you what: I’ll try it. First one in March, maybe?

• Regular and Timely Updates 15% 2 votes

How about more-or-less-daily posts?

You know, I could put the manga charts on a regular schedule but it would mean shoving it all the way to the end of the week. As it is, if the charts are ready on Monday, I’ll post ‘em on Monday. I think it works better that way.

To address the ‘regular’ part, I’ve already added one new feature that should significantly contribute to the raw output of the blog.

I’ll never be able to manage regular-and-timely though. Shouldn’t have included it in the poll…

Finally:

• Manga Reviews 23% 3 votes

Here’s the thing:

I’ve done reviews before (…I’m working on getting all of the reviews written for Comicsnob.com ported over but it’s not a high priority) and the thing is, they take a lot of time: Four hours to read and re-read a couple volumes of manga, a couple of hours of beer-and-thinking-about-the-manga time (at least two hours; I’d often give it a week to settle in) and then a couple of hours to write it up.

The other thing is that there are a lot of other people already writing reviews. I can add “Oh, I like that one too” to the general noise on the internet or I can keep my own counsel and spend some time thinking about manga, maybe writing columns, or researching retailers, or finishing up the weekly charts. Others are writing reviews, but no one else has anything like my manga chart.

I do have an idea, though. I’d like to surprise you with it.
But I’ll have that podcast up first, I think.

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I Open the Floor To Your Comments. No need to be constrained by the radio buttons of a pre-formatted half assed poll — with what you know about me and about the blog and my strengths and limitations, how should I be spending my time? Tell me.