Based on several standing meeting cancellations and trip pics on social media, I have deduced that Spring Break is in the air for many people. And Spring Break often means travel. And travel often means reading material. And such reading material is often… pulpy. So thanks to Open Culture, I now know that the Internet Archive has thousands of issues of the pulp magazines available for your reading pleasure. And now so do you. Use…
Hey, it’s not just future TV I’m interested in, I find all sorts of creative industries of interest. In this case, one of the “big five” publishers, HarperCollins, recently reached a tentative agreement with its union. So right about now, you might be asking: Well, to learn more, you can check out: It’ll be interesting to see what changes this has on the other publishers in the “Big Five.”
Given the sheer numbers of self-published books, it statistically unlikely that someone will make a living via self-publishing… except that given the sheer number of self-published books there’s a non-trivial number of writers who make a living via self-publishing. So with that caveat in mind, take a look at Sam Haysom’s article on Mashable about three self-published authors who have succeeded.
I’ve mentioned author and indie published Russell Nohelty a couple times on the blog, both specifically about his book on selling your work and in his detailing his efforts to build his business. So, as a bit of follow-up, all last year he did a monthly income and expense report about his business, often detailing what worked and what didn’t, what his predictions were, and what the basis of those predictions was. It was wonderfully…
Back in March, I had a longer post discussing the notion of comics as “idea incubators.” This isn’t my brilliant idea, it’s coming from comic veterans. Now as a storyteller is general and a fan of comics in particular, I’m perhaps predisposed to like this argument. However, I think it’s important to remind the bean-counting set that humans like stories. Audiences flocked to Avengers: Endgame because they had invested in the story and characters, not…
It’s no secret that Mad, the steadfast satirical magazine that’s been on newsstands for the past 67 years is all but ending, as per these pieces in the Washington Post, New York Times, and a personal one from The Week. I learned about it first from Mark Evanier’s blog, as he’s not only a pop culture historian, he regularly works with one of Mad’s most storied illustrators, Sergio Aragonés. Technically, Mad is not completely dead:…
One of the biggest issues plaguing independent entrepreneurial creators (authors, artists, filmmakers, etc.) would be how to find an audience — and even if that nut is well and truly cracked: how do you maintain or even grow it? That’s a topic for many another post, but amid forums and social media I follow where people discuss the topic, there’s the inevitable discussion of what Faustian bargain should be made with Amazon, the everything store…
I know author Kristine Kathryn Rusch mainly from her short stories in various science fiction magazines, but the truth is she writes across multiple genres and –apparently because sleep bores her or caffeine works particular wonders on her nervous system– she also edits, publishes, and shares all sorts of insights about said writing, editing, and publishing. So when someone posted her thoughts about state of publishing in 2017, I thought it was worth a read……
As I mentioned last week, I’m giving a talk tonight for actors on mass auditions and indie casting. And I’ve previously written a lot on my company website about indie casting. So, it probably comes as no surprise that I’ve thought about distilling and refining those thoughts into book form (and several people have suggested it — leading me to believe it’s a decent idea). Enter Joanna Penn’s exhaustive article about how to write a nonfiction…
There is a theory that placing two coat hangers in a closet produces more coat hangers through some frenzied yet illogical process of inorganic reproduction that’s best left unexamined outside of a Philip K. Dick short story. If someone suggested that placing two web articles in the Internet equivalent of a closet would produce an article about writing, I would believe them (whether or not the person suggesting it was Phillip K. Dick). This may explain the overwhelming amount of articles about…