If you’re keeping your hands under the table because you don’t want to wave your arms around or send knocks through the table into the microphone, make sure you keep your hands utterly, utterly still. If you don’t, it really looks like you’re having a wank.
Author: Carrie
-
“I used to think that the answer to piracy was to jail all taxi drivers.”
When I was young, a truck full of chocolate bars lost its load a few streets from my house. By the time the police turned up – which was, annoyingly, long before I found out about it – the cargo had gone. People didn’t take the chocolate because they were forced to; they took it because, hey! Free chocolate! The rewards were so attractive and the risk of being caught was so remote that half the town went on a three-day Wispa binge.
-
Magic-powered joy machines
A wee column I wrote for PC Plus has made its way online:
Buying a PC online often feels like you’re playing the world’s worst text adventure. Do you want the new Argonomicon 15, or the Mongrolodian F2? Would you sacrifice a half-gig of RAM if it meant getting the F9321A processor instead of the F32321?
It’s all about specs.
Shouldn’t it be about sex?
I don’t mean sex in the horrible, local newspaper advert “SEX! AHAHAH MADE YOU LOOK! BUY A FRIDGE!†sense. I mean in the sense of possibility, of excitement, of the sheer joy of doing amazing things that make everyone think you’re amazing too.
-
Reviews: it’s the middle ones that matter
Whether you’re selling ebooks or giving away MP3s, designing T-shirts or creating iPhone apps, if you’re creating something for public consumption then sooner or later somebody’s going to criticise it.
How you feel about that will depend on the mood you’re in at the time, the way it’s expressed and the critic’s grip on reality — iOS app reviewers in particular often appear to come from different, more stupid planets — and even the nicest criticism can sometimes feel as if somebody’s ripped your heart from your chest and stomped on it as you stand there jetting blood – but it’s important to separate the reviews that matter from the ones that don’t.
As a rule of thumb, if the review’s at either end of the scale — if it’s one star out of five, or five stars out of five — then the review doesn’t matter. As nice as they are, five star reviews often mean that the reviewer knows you and likes you, or quite liked the thing you did and wanted to give you a big thumbs up. Similarly if it’s a one-star review, the reviewer may have decided in advance to hate what you’re doing, and only paid attention to it to confirm the initial prejudice and give you a good shoeing.
Sometimes — I’ve been guilty of this — the score is pushed in one direction or another because nobody reads or cares about two and a half star reviews, so you try and entertain with fulsome praise or a devastating slagging. I once wrote that Feeder were the best live band in Britain when what I really meant was that of all the British bands I’d seen that week, a list that began and ended with “Feeder”, Feeder were definitely the best.
The ones that do matter are the ones that say “but”. This looks good, but. The story is believable, but. The drum track is amazing, but. That’s criticism you can use. You might not agree with it — your response to it may well be “You BASTARD! How dare you suggest that my description of thirteenth-century dentistry was irrelevant to the wider narrative! I am AWESOME!” — but if you choose to pay attention to it, it can be a really big help.
-
On torrents
Andy Ihnatko has published a great post about piracy. He’s no fan of the studios, as he makes clear in his post, but the idea that everybody who pirates is a freedom fighter is risible. Here’s part of an imaginary conversation about torrenting Game of Thrones:
What’s wrong, Scrumpkin?
Oh. You want it right now.
But — umm — the release date is only, like, two or three weeks away. Just hang on a bit. You’ll be fine.
Yes, I heard you (please, sir, there’s really no need to shout). I understand that you want it (and I hope I’m not misquoting you) right the ****ity-**** NOWWWWWWWW. But you can’t have it now. You can have it on March 6. It isn’t even as far away as you think. Remember? February is the super-short month?
(Sigh)
You’re already torrenting it, aren’t you?
Annnnd now you’re also calling me a d*** because I expected you to wait two weeks, and you’re claiming that you’re “forced†to torrent it because the video industry is bunch of turds.
I like Andy’s no-harm-done test – if you torrent it because you love it so much you can’t wait a single second longer to get it then you should buy it when it finally does come out; that way, there’s no harm done – but come on, if there’s an ideology behind piracy it’s usually “I want free stuff”.
-
10,000 copies of Coffin Dodgers
Somebody bought the 10,000th copy of Coffin Dodgers last night, and I thought I’d provide a breakdown of the numbers for those of you interested in the whole self-publishing thing. As you’ll see from the figures, it’s clear that giving copies away for free is a brilliant marketing strategy, except when it isn’t, and that it works exceptionally well, except when it doesn’t.
-
Our radio rocks
A true story: when I used to have a day job, I’d listen to BBC Radio Scotland during my morning commute. I’d listen to the people on comedian Fred MacAulay’s programme and think “that must be a laugh to do. Imagine if that was your job.” These days, I’m one of the people going on Fred’s programme, and I’m thinking “this is a laugh to do. I can’t believe this is my job.”
Radio’s a magical thing. I have fond memories of listening to Irish radio under the covers when I was supposed to be asleep as a child, trying and failing to get into the bands on John Peel’s playlist as an adolescent, drunkenly calling late-night phone-in idiot-fests as a twentysomething, hearing my own band played on an indie rock show in my late twenties and damn near falling out of my car laughing at various programmes – some of them serious – today. It’s a fantastic medium and I feel very privileged to be even slightly involved in it.
It’s World Radio Day today. As UNESCO director general Irina Bokova says:
“In a world changing quickly, we must make the most of radio’s ability to connect people and societies, to share knowledge and information and to strengthen understanding. This World Radio Day is a moment to recognise the marvel of radio and to harness its power for the benefit of all.”
UNESCO explains:
Since the first broadcast over 100 years ago, radio has proven to be a powerful information source for mobilizing social change and a central point for community life. It is the mass media that reaches the widest audience in the world. In an era of new technologies, it remains the world’s most accessible platform, a powerful communication tool and a low cost medium.
-
Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a £500 copyright licensing fee
From time to time I get a wee panic about Coffin Dodgers and I have to go and check that I took the U2 lyrics out: there’s a scene that revolves around a U2 song, and in the first few drafts of the book I quoted a couple of lines from it. That’s a no-no, as Blake Morrison explains:
For one line of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”: £500. For one line of Oasis’s “Wonderwall”: £535. For one line of “When I’m Sixty-four”: £735. For two lines of “I Shot the Sheriff” (words and music by Bob Marley, though in my head it was the Eric Clapton version): £1,000. Plus several more, of which only George Michael’s “Fastlove” came in under £200. Plus VAT. Total cost: £4,401.75. A typical advance for a literary novel by a first-time author would barely meet the cost.
The linked article is two years old. I very much doubt the fees have gone down since then.
[Via Lexi Revellian]
-
A wee update on that whole free-ebooks adventure
I’m buried up to my neck in deadlines just now but I thought I’d post a very quick update on my Coffin Dodgers freebie adventure. The sales figures for the last seven days, not including the freebies, are:
UK: 1,547 sales
US: 45 sales
Germany: 5 sales
France: 1 saleSo that’s 1,598 sales in a week. Last month’s total sales were 875.
Incidentally, I’m messing around with print-on-demand at Lulu.com for an article I’m writing. It’s not cheap – at pocket paperback size Coffin Dodgers works out at around 320 pages, which means the cheapest you can sell it at (with zero profit margin) is £6.98 plus shipping, but once you figure out how it all works the results are pretty impressive.
-
“Really, Jim, respectfully, you’re worrying about very stupid shit”
In the US, magazines employ (employed?) fact-checkers to go through every line of a piece before publication. This is a dialogue between one such fact-checker and a writer. It made me laugh a lot.
FINGAL:Â Do you have any documentation of that, like notes from your trip?
D’AGATA: You’re asking for evidence of a rumor?
FINGAL: If you’re saying that there was a rumor, I have to find out whether there was in fact a rumor, even if I ignore the truth value of the rumor.