Money Category
You may have noticed I haven’t been here much lately. There are a few reasons for that, but I’ll spare you. Following is a series of picture galleries chronicling the project that A) forced me to admit that Bob Vila lied and B) released me from three years of guilt I didn’t know had weighed so heavily upon me. Out of my humiliation came peace and a life-changing epiphany.
I did not do this myself!!! I gutted most of it myself and couldn’t go on. Dude knew who to call to finish the job. It was a Mike, although it wasn’t (*sob*) Mike Holmes. Roll over the pics with your mouse and it’ll tell you the story.
OCTOBER 2005
APRIL 2007
SUMMER 2007
MAY 4, 2010
The beginning of the end.
MAY 10, 2010
End of week 1.
MAY 15, 2010
End of week 2.
MAY 22, 2010
End of week 3.
MAY 29, 2010
End of week 4.
JUNE 2, 2010
Almost there…
JUNE 3, 2010
And…victory. At last.
Next month…our front porch.
June 3rd, 2010
I’m in the middle of writing Magdalene, book 3 in my series.
If you’re passingly familiar with Christian myth, it should be quite clear where I’m going with this.
But let me tell you a little about my main characters.
Mitch Hollander, PhD, metallurgical engineering; founder and CEO of Hollander Steelworks, headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is also a widowed Mormon bishop who served half an 18-month mission in Paris, France. He likes fast cars and ZZ Top.
Cassie St. James, MBA; Vice President-Restructuring Division, Blackwood Securities. In a previous life, she was a high-dollar hooker. She is divorced, lives in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, has four adult children (all of whom live with her), engages in strategic revenge, and possesses a latent penchant for silliness.
So I was on the search for a special little gift that Mitch could give Cassie that meant something but was not expensive. After all, what do you give a woman who can buy anything she wants?
Naturally, I turned to books because I have a vested interest in people buying books (product placement!). I decided that Mitch might have a special book that he may have acquired on his mission and is probably in French. Naturally, I googled, and then headed over to Wikipedia where I stumbled upon a list of French novels. I doggedly worked my way through them one by one, read the synopses, then picked one based on a vague similarity of the plot to Cassie’s past.
I wrote it into my book as if I’d read the thing (but hadn’t), then decided I probably should read it. And it freaked me out. Big time.
The book? Angélique, the Marquise of Angels by Anne & Serge Golon, first published in 1958.
Unbeknownst to me, this was a huge hit in Europe and apparently a big hit here. I’d never heard of it, never stumbled across it in the intellectual drunkenness of my youth (that actually amazes me).
The book is heroine-centric, so it’s all about Angélique. The parallel I found between Angélique and Cassie was that they both had arranged marriages. The similarity stopped there.
Angélique didn’t know her contracted husband, feared him at first, then grew to love him.
Cassie knew the man she was to marry, adored him from afar and was eager to marry him, and then quickly realized that her marriage was a sham.
Cassie is familiar with the story via film, so she has no problem making this parallel and had, in fact, written a paper on it during her undergrad years.
What doesn’t show up in the plot summary is a description of the hero’s “unusual way of life.” Joffray (the hero) is described as “scientist, musician, philosopher.” I didn’t think much of it. Mitch is a scientist with his own lab, true, but he’s also a CEO and I’ve always thought of him in those terms. He’s not a musician. He’s not a philosopher. At heart, he’s a blue-collar steel worker who loves steel enough to reinvent himself and the industry; steel is his life’s work.
Turns out that Joffray’s science is metallurgy. That was freaky.
Turns out that Joffray is hung out to dry, religiously speaking, for reasons that have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with power, politics, and money. That was even freakier.
As I got deeper and deeper into the book, I felt like I’d entered the Twilight Zone.
Then I got to the end. Angélique plunges out into the cold night, penniless and powerless, to exact revenge. That is so Cassie. I nearly expired from the freakiness the universe had perpetrated upon my person.
I couldn’t have picked a better novel if I’d written it myself.
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PS: Yes, I know Mary Magdalene wasn’t a prostitute.
PPS: In the mid-1980s, missions were, in fact, only 18 months long for men.
February 24th, 2010
Tags: Dunham series, Magdalene
The Pareto Principle.
Also known as the 80/20 rule, wherein 80% of sales are generated by 20% of the customers. When applied to the way publishing gambles on blockbusters to subsidize its titles that lose money, it might be more or less 20% of the authors make 80% of the sales.
Publishers look for and sign new authors in a neverending search for the next blockbuster book that will sustain the 20%. Very often a new author will be taken on in favor of renewing a current author’s second or third book if the sales don’t meet expectations (which could mean that it did, in fact, make money, but not enough to satisfy the bean counters).
Last month, I was involved in a rigorous discussion on Dear Author, wherein author Courtney Milan likened publishing’s ability to support this model to pooling risk or, more precisely, flood insurance. I found the flood insurance specificity to be flawed and said why, but really I found the whole “risk pooling” argument flawed, but couldn’t articulate it, so I remained agnostic on the subject for the moment.
Now, after having stewed on it for a while, the better (read: more polite) analogy would be research and development—except without so much the development part.
Recently, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Jonathan Galassi, wrote an extraordinarily unorganized, incohesive rant op ed piece in the New York Times concerning whose rights are whose once the publishing house has put its resources into a manuscript to make it a salable product. Quite frankly, other than the amusing fact that he (an editor) wrote an essay not worthy of a high school freshman learning the basics of English composition, I don’t give a shit about what he thinks the publishers’ value-added rights are.
It was his exemplar of an author long dead, into whom marketing resources were invested to make him that success, that struck me as disingenuous. And a non sequitur. Or ignernt. Dude. You do realize that very few new authors are given these kinds of resources, right? Publishers throw new authors at the wall to see who sticks. There is no “development” counterpart to “research.”
Given that, I’ve moved on from a publisher’s resource allocation to be “risk pooling,” to “research and development,” to “shotgun approach.”
Hang with me—I know I’m only about the 1,537th person to say this, but I do have a point.
So yesterday on Teleread, Rich Adin from An American Editor opined that the way to save publishing is to kill the paperback. When the usual suspects (me) broke out with the usual reaction (Are you out of your fucking mind?), he shot back with, “Well, do you have any better ideas?”
Never mind I have no interest one way or another whether publishing remains profitable, and it’s not my job to put little slips in the suggestion box that will be ignored, and people (readers) have been screaming their fool heads off about what they want which would keep publishing profitable and publishing’s just not paying attention, I will tell you how to keep publishing profitable:
Do less research.
Put a little more development into your research.
Quit getting caught up in auction fever.
Embrace the e-book and treat it as deferentially as you do your other formats and respect those people willing to pay for it. Court them. Cultivate them. They have money to spend on books. Really.
The point is to make every title profitable, or as close to it as you can get.
But I don’t really think you care.
January 9th, 2010
Tags: epublishing, publishing
You have probably realized by now that the link on the iTouch image from The Forbidden Apple post is broken. I did that. On purpose.
I don’t care if you take the images from this site, but take the time to save them to your own box and upload it to your server yerowndamnself.
You’re costing me bandwidth, with no return on my investment.
Fucking looters.
January 8th, 2010
Want an ebook reader but can’t stomach the prices either for the devices, the data plans, or the ebooks?
See, we all know the biggest objection to all the other devices on the market: Too expensive for a one-trick pony that you’re not even sure you like the trick anyway.
There are the lesser-known problems (until you encounter them): Kindle (could get your library taken away from you, and what if you really don’t like reading on an eInk device?). Nook (apparently shittastic all the way around—if the device can’t read EPUB, it’s an epic fail, trust me). Sony (I’ve heard various and sundry objections to this, so I’ll let you do the googling).
Then there are the people who are waiting on technology to work itself out before they pop for any device, and some of these people are waiting on the iTablet or MSCourier. They still might like to have an ebook reader, but can’t stomach the cost:limitation ratio of any current devices, so they’ll wait until technology catches up to their needs.
Now, it is true that LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of people read ebooks on their BlackBerry et al and iPhone/iTouch. It’s my opinion most people don’t want a one-trick pony device. They want a multifunction device. Why? Because *I* want a multifunction device and EVERYBODY is like me, right?
So you know what’s so lovely about my little workhorse? It’s $90. That’s right. Know what you give up for that $90? You have to spend a little time learning A) which formats to buy for it and B) perform a few software gymnastics to get it on the device. I mean, for little more than a tarted-up text file, it’s absolutely the most perfect device ever, especially for the price.
Want a starter ebook reader that is ergonomically divine? Backlit so you can snuggle under the covers in the dark and read while staying all warm and toasty? That you can eat and read at the same time? That has a bunch of the same bells and whistles all the expensive devices do, like highlighting, notetaking, mp3 capability (audiobooks), search, long battery life, and the ability to put your own documents on it.
Get the eBookWise.
Really.
I don’t care how sophisticated it’s not. It’s a dream.
I have no connection to this company other than I love its product. I very rarely get so excited about a product and if I do, I very rarely maintain that excitement because eventually its flaws will make me pissy. I’ve had my eBookWise going on 2 years now and I love it more now than I ever did.
I swear, until such a time as A) the iTablet/MSCourier actually appears and B) ebooks cease to be little more than tarted-up text files, I see absolutely no reason to pop for anything else. I’m not anti early adopter. I’m anti early adopter of very expensive but ultimately deficient products in the very thing they are created to do.
And yes, I still have and love my Asus Eee PC, but um…it kinda sorta got appropriated by Hero, which is perfectly okay.
UPDATE: Mike Cane’s mockery continues.
He sent me to this picture:
The eBookWise is the one on the far right. It is a blimp, isn’t it? That is exactly why my hands love me for using it instead of anything else (including print). It’s also why it can stand up on the table, propped against a drinking glass, to enable me to read while I’m eating.
December 11th, 2009
Tags: eBookWise
I don’t know this woman from Eve. What I do know is that everything about her online presence screams master craftsman and überprofessional.
Got a scene? A masquerade party? A Labyrinth con? A Venetian extravaganza? Mardi Gras? Need some sleep? Want something exquisite to hang on your wall? This is only a sampling. Visit her gallery to get the full effect.
Then buy something from her. This kind of exquisite craftsmanship needs to be rewarded.
(I may make this a regular feature.)
November 19th, 2009
