This has been sitting in my drafts folder for a couple of months… a profile of my favorite fiction mentor Steven Galloway by the CBC. The piece talks about The Cellist of Sarajevo and has a brief but interesting Q&A with Steven. A good length for whiling away a coffee break, I think.
Rock.
Last night was the Vancouver launch of Steven Galloway’s new book, The Cellist of Sarajevo. I’d like to thank Steven for inviting me to the event, which featured a reading, a massive book signing queue, an open bar, a live performance of Abinoni’s Adagio, an open bar, amazing food by the Blue Water Cafe, a cake in the shape of a cello, and an open bar. I got home at midnight and decided to read the first little bit of the novel. One hundred pages later, I forced myself to sleep. Recommended by litfarm.
A lot has been written about the long tail, and how internets is workin’ for businesses like Amazon, who make a good deal of their money off niche sales that are possible because of the large number of customers they can reach with internets. Good old internets.
But you’re probably wondering, What Can Internets Do for Me? Kevin Kelly’s recent blog post 1,000 True Fans aims to find out. The short version:
A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.
His argument is compelling. He says that the True Fan is someone who will read everything you write, go to all your concerts, buy the t-shirt, everything. If you figure that a True Fan is going to spend $100 per year doing this, that’s $100,000 of income for you, the artist. This works especially well for musicians, who have concerts, t-shirts, mp3s and related swag, but check out the angle for an author. Say your novel is selling for $15. Whether you’re providing a print-on-demand title or have a publisher, if you can get the word out to your 1,000, that’s $15,000 in sales at the cost of keeping a blog, an email list or a forum. That’s enough to make a first-time author significantly more attractive to a potential publisher.
And one thousand is a relatively small number. If you managed to get a few hundred a year, you’d have your thousand in under five years. As I mentioned in an earlier post, word of mouth is still the number one way publishers sell books. That’s 1,000 words. Of mouths. Or just mouths.
It’s a lot, is what I’m saying.
The article also talks about Street Performer Protocol (a term I was familiar with as “ransomware”) and other alternate methods of funding creative projects, including Fundable, a site built to handle the tricky business.
Keith Thompson’s latest book, Gus Openshaw’s Whale-Killing Journal, started out as a couple of blogs (one on tripod and one on mindsay) and turned into a real-life dead-tree book. It’s a cool idea–drumming up readers for your project by releasing excerpts and supporting material and parlaying that into publisher interest (very possible, considering that your server logs record the number of unique visitors). It also mimics what’s been done for other popular media with ARGs (Cloverfield and Halo to name a couple) and similar ideas.
Loads of possibilities for self-promotion beyond the venerable chapbook.
. I’d like to thank Steven for inviting me to the event, which featured a reading, a massive book signing queue, an open bar, a live performance of Abinoni’s Adagio, an open bar, amazing food by the Blue Water Cafe, a cake in the shape of a cello, and an open bar. I got home at midnight and decided to read the first little bit of the novel. One hundred pages later, I forced myself to sleep. Recommended by litfarm.