I heard a podcast recently that was themed around “How to Ask for Money”. I don’t think there’s any podcast that doesn’t ask for money or promote a Patreon or live ads or whatever. But as I listened, I thought these are crossover skills with author promotion. If you’re an author doing a book signing or during a release, you have to do a lot of marketing by yourself. You have to be a salesman, at least that’s what I’ve observed. And I hate being a salesman. Selling is convincing people to do something they didn’t want to do in the first place. And that often involves, if not outright…
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Why Movies are Underperforming — The Obvious Answer
This is more of an addendum to my earlier rant about why all media feels disappointing these days. But focused on movies. But that’s a big chunk because pretty much all eyes are on movies these days. Aren’t you sick of headlines that say “XYZ Underperforms at the box office”? Napoleon was out for two days and it was labeled as underperforming. I don’t know if these movies are good or bad or simply not interesting, they’re just underperforming and I don’t know what I’m supposed to take from that. The Marvels, Trolls: Band Together, The Little Mermaid, Fast X, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Elemental, Oppenheimer, Killers of the…
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Do I Want It Enough?
Pardon me while I show my straight white male privilege. One thing holding me back from being a true writer (with a capital “A”… I mean “W”) is that I am well-off. By day, I am a computer programmer. That’s an in-demand position. I get a near $100K salary and comfy benefits. And the reason I’m a computer programmer is because I went to college. And the reason I went to college is because my parents paid for it (so add “no student loan debt” to that list of reasons to hate me). And the reason they paid for it is because they could, by saving and being smart with…
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Disney Movies: Male vs. Female Protagonists
I was thinking, when it comes to Disney movies, what characters come to mind? Cinderella, Elsa, Snow White, Tiana. So why is it then that male-led Disney movies outnumber female-led by two to one? Do they make more money? I decided to run the numbers and take a look. MOVIE YEAR BUDGET GROSS NET The Little Mermaid F 1989 40 211 171 The Rescuers Down Under M 1990 37 47 10 Beauty & the Beast F 1991 25 424 399 Aladdin M 1992 28 504 476 The Lion King M 1994 45 987 942 Pocahontas F 1995 55 346 291 The Hunchback of Notre Dame M 1996 100 325 225…
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Riddle Me This, O Change Machine
Okay, let me know if this makes sense to you, because it doesn’t to me. I need some quarters so I can put 25 cents into one of those gumball machine apparatuses and get a handful of Reese’s Pieces. I like Reese’s Pieces, but my supply of metallic tender gets limited, since I don’t like to jingle when I walk. But I have dollars and a change machine. So I put the dollar into the change machine. It gleefully accepts the paper with a sonorous buzz and deposits… one coin. At first I think “uh-oh, the machine broke, and I’m out 25 cents”. Then I look at the coin. It’s…
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Yearly Rant Against Scalzi
Seems like everyone’s talking about John Scalzi’s rant against Black Matrix press – a short story junket that pays $0.005 cents per word. In one corner, Scalzi calls this a pittance, an insult, and encourages his followers never to submit your work to such a magazine that values your words so poorly. In the other corner is everyone else in the world who is not John Scalzi. It seems like Scalzi says one stupid thing each year, like he’s handing out judgement to the commoners. Last year it was his justification for blog tyranny, and his idea that his blog was private property. This year, it’s like Van Halen declaring…
