Been a bit buried with a few things lately, but I wanted to slip in a quick bit of news. For those of you who prefer your words in the spoken form, the third Garrison Gage book, The Lovely Wicked Rain, is now available for download at Audible.com, Amazon.com, and iTunes. It also happens to be narrated by the fantastic Steven Roy Grimsley, who narrated the first two Gage books. If your weather is anything like the weather we’re getting here in Oregon —cold, gray, and rainy— this book might be a fitting read.
Book Recommendation: Blockbusters by Anita Elberse
If you want to make money as an artist, or at least understand what’s happening to writers, musicians, and other entertainers in the age of Amazon, iTunes, and Netflix, you really need to read Anita Elberse’s book, Blockbusters. A professor at Harvard, her conclusions are grounded in plenty of evidence and ten years of research. I can’t stress enough how much this book has changed how I look at the publishing industry. At the very least, you should watch her twenty-minute interview with Charlie Rose, where she hits most of the high points of her book.
I had originally planned to write a much longer post about what I learned, particularly the middle chapters about the digital disruption, but it’s not much different than what I wrote a year ago with a few exceptions. You should read this book if . . .
- You want to know why Chris Anderson was wrong about “the long tail,” and that there is even more concentration toward bestsellers than the pre-Internet days (and increasingly so)
- In most digital marketplaces 85% of the income is made by 1% of the products, 95% by 5% of the products, and that the bottom 75% make virtually nothing
- That publishers, studios, and music companies are absolutely correct to bet big on blockbusters
- And why simply putting out a lot of products, at least by itself, is not a winning strategy for any artist
She does not lay out that strategy. That’s not her target audience. If you’re a writer, musician, filmmaker, or any kind of artist working in the digital age, that’s up for you to decide. I’ll just say this: It’s not getting any easier. If you want to make more than pizza money, you need to take the long view, constantly striving to get better at both the craft and the business, and do what you can to give your work maximum visibility.
I’ve recommended this book to a number of writers already, and when I told them about some of the conclusions, they’ve all said it sounded pretty depressing. I don’t think it has to be. Yes, the bad news is that it’s probably just as hard, if not harder, to make money as an artist as it was before there were so many ways to go direct to an audience. The good news is that the playing field is more open to newcomers than ever before. There are no gatekeepers except the fans themselves, and they will give you their attention — the most precious commodity in the modern entertainment era — if you earn it.
Postcards from the Garage: Cape Blanco and More
I made a quick jaunt down to Crescent City, California for the North Coast Redwoods Writer’s Conference over this past weekend, staying an extra day so I could hike for a day in the Humboldt Redwoods State Park area. I was one of the guest speakers, and I spoke a little about craft and quite a bit about the changes in the business. I met some great folks. On the drive there and back, I mostly stuck to the California and Oregon coasts, which took longer but of course makes the trip much more fun. Here are a few pictures from my trip.
The Redwoods are always hard to photograph and do them justice, but here’s one shot from my 10 mile hike of the Bull Creek Loop south of Eureka, California. I often walked for an hour without seeing a single person.
Here’s one more:
On the way home, I stopped for coffee. The place was a bit drafty, but the view wasn’t bad:
That’s a shot from Cape Blanco. There was hardly anyone there anyway, but I still hiked out a bit on the bluff to have a bit more of an isolated feel. Gotta love my little hiking chair, which collapses into a bag and weighs under two pounds.
On the way down, I stopped at the Umpqua Lighthouse and took the tour, which allowed me to poke my head up into the lens itself and take this shot:
Here’s a close-up of the lighthouse itself:
And one last one, of a lonely sailboat out on one of the many lakes around the Florence, Oregon area. It was a quiet spot to stretch my legs and have a snack.
Postcards from the Garage: McNeil Point at Mt. Hood
Hiked to McNeil Point on Mount Hood yesterday, just under 11 miles round trip. Still feeling it a little today, not from the miles or the incline, but mostly the uneven terrain. Here’s a shot about halfway to our destination. Gorgeous day.