I’m working on a fantasy romance novella centered around a computer role-playing game, and my first set of critiquer comments started me thinking about how we conceive of a book’s or story’s target audience. Specifically, what can we assume the audience knows prior to reading the piece of fiction? I don’t know much about computer RPGs myself. I play Dungeons and Dragons, tabletop version with dice, but my knowledge of fantasy video games comes from overhearing my husband playing them and listening to his discussions with our sons about games they’ve played. So I thought the terminology I included in the first draft of my story was the sort of thing almost anyone would be familiar with.
Specific example: “VR” for “virtual reality.” The hero and heroine are both computer geeks. In her POV, she naturally thinks “VR,” not the longer phrase. To my surprise, the commenter didn’t recognize this term. I’ve often been chided for over-explaining in my fiction, and I thought this was one point that didn’t need explanation.
In a case like this, can the writer figure that anybody who’d pick up a story whose action occurs mostly inside a computer game would already know such things? Or should an author always write for a general audience that needs explanations for anything non-mundane? Spelling everything out might annoy the target audience, but failing to spell out enough could lose potential casual readers who might otherwise enjoy the story. Nowadays, of course, nobody writes like the erudite authors of past centuries who often quoted long passages in foreign languages with no translations, on the assumption that their readers, being (of course) university-educated, wouldn’t need translations. On the other hand, explaining things most readers already know feels like talking down to them, as well as leading to unnecessary wordiness. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain historical novels lean toward less explanation where background details are concerned. She uses period-accurate terms for clothing, etc., letting the reader infer what kind of garment is being described instead of defining it.
Yes, I know, when in doubt, we should work in bits of information in subtle ways that don’t disrupt the flow of the story. Still, is there a guiding principle on how much background one can reasonably expect of a reader? For instance, murder mysteries have different generic expectations from romance novels, and the author usually expects a reader who picks up a book in one genre or another to be at least somewhat familiar with the genre’s conventions and not balk at, say, a dead body in the library in a mystery or a “cute meet” in a romantic comedy. And I would have expected a habitual reader of fantasy to be familiar with the shade of meaning fans assign to the word “mundane” (another point that puzzled my commenter).
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Sizing Up The Competition Part 4 Futurology
This is Part 4 of the series of posts titled Sizing Up The Competition.
Part 1 http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/sizing-up-competition-part-1-tigress.html
Part 2 http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/12/sizing-up-competition-part-2-winning.html
Part 3 http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/12/sizing-up-competition-part-3-romancing.html
Last week I ended off describing how I'd upgraded my household tech starting with my TV.
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I upgraded my household tech this year starting in January with my TV. I got a Panasonic Viera and hardwired it to my router. I got a Sony google-tv blu-ray player, and plugged the HD DVR from Cox into one HDMI plug of the TV and the SONY into another of the 3 HDMI plugs on the TV. And I hardwired the Sony to my router separately from the TV. So now my router has a wireless connected computer and 2 wired-connected computers on it plus a blu-ray google-tv device plus a Viera TV. (Viera doesn't offer google TV - this is a hugely complex market but you need to understand it to solve our master puzzle subject here, raising the prestige of Romance genre among the general public.)
The Viera offers access to Netflix (as does the Sony) and some other things I don't use, but Viera's business model is to provide more kinds of online access with time -- I haven't seen any additions this year.
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Here's part of what I learned before, during and after this upgrade, after which I upgraded my computer.
Each one of these accesses provided by Sony or Viera is a business deal, and online Web content providers are really reluctant to cut these deals.
Almost all the bizmodels of content providers doing business with Viera or Sony are "subscription based" -- like Netflix. You need to make an account with a user and password, and use that to access your netflix account which then charges your credit card for whatever you get from netflix.
That's why I got both the Sony and the Viera access for my TV. Nobody offers everything.
The Sony has google TV which uses a built in Chrome browser. Other than that browser which cruises the internet, your only access is what they provide by contract.
I can access Amazon Prime and all its streaming movies and TV shows, with the Viera TV (you do that by registering the TV's online ID number with amazon so their computer recognizes your logon.) It seemed complicated to me.
The google TV is the powerhouse device, the one you should watch carefully -- though for bizmodel reasons, google-TV is being out-competed at the moment, and not making enough money yet.
So I didn't think I needed a ROKU device or any of those headaches. I'd already ached my head enough to understand that I can see on my TV a lot of what is available on the web but not everything unless I hook up a laptop to the TV (I got the cable to do that).
GOOGLE internet access via the Sony blu-ray player hooked to the TV has certain commercial stations blacked out -- you can't use google search to get into the TV network URLs that provide access to proprietary TV shows they deliver on the web because those networks wouldn't do deals with google. I also had tech issues with the Sony blu-ray switching back and forth to Google Chrome. It crashes and has to be rebooted.
And as I mentioned above, Cox Cable has gotten into this web-delivery model to compete with Viera and Google TV.
In other words, Cox sized up the competition in the way that the big publishers have not (yet). At the moment, Cox Cable has an "app" for the iPad that lets you access a small handful of stations on the iPad, but only when it's on your home internet connection. It doesn't work on the iPhone or iPod.
So when Beck offered 2 weeks free to test out his new network, gbtv.com, I fired up my Sony and googled up gbtv.com and to my surprise I was able to WATCH A REAL-TIME WEBCAST!!! (nevermind what antics he was up to! It's irrelevant. It's the fiction delivery system that's being remade here.)
I should post here an iPod photo of me with my jaw on my belt-buckle but I was too stunned to make one.
Since Beck was selling the Roku headache, I really didn't expect the Google-TV connection to work, just the way Google tv users can't get at the USA network TV shows online.
But it did work. The webcast is HD, but doesn't fill my 42" screen side to side -- it's a squarish patch in the middle like the non-HD channels. It's good color, movements don't blur, the picture is in every way acceptable though the sound is a bit dimmer than the cable sound. But the TV's sound tuner was able to bring the sound up to comfort levels.
The picture didn't jump and lag as streaming often does. He's carrying some commercials already, and will probably add more with time. The really big bucks he invested was in that smooth-HD picture delivery, and he has a couple of cameras and a very competent crew, but in the first week they had a number of snafus and gliches like microphones and teleprompters coming unplugged. The set he had built also cost more than the one he had on Fox, but that's a one-time investment he'll monetize.
My best information at the moment indicates it cost him about 25 million to launch this venture, but within the first week he was out-drawing Oprah. Yeah, Glenn Beck bigger than Oprah. Think about that very hard because Oprah's audience is far closer to the typical Romance readership than Glenn's. Oprah's stuck on cable, Glenn isn't. Where did that marketing consultant (read the previous parts of this series) say his contemporaries are? The web, not cable TV.
Can you write a Romance novel using ONE set? 3 or 4 characters, 1 set, webisodes. That's the toe in the door our project to elevate the perception of Romance needs.
So I'm warning you, get yourself some sort of hookup of your TV to your internet, unless of course you really prefer your computer screen or tablet screen. Another alternative is to get a really big computer monitor and hook that up to TV (lots of people doing that).
Oh, and with both the Viera and the Sony I can access YouTube directly. Do you see the POTENTIAL for Romance writers? Do you remember the coffee commercials that told a little story about neighbors borrowing coffee, getting to know each other? Study the delivery system evolution carefully.
Beck has gbtv.com rigged to deliver to iPods, iPhones, and iPads -- I downloaded the app for my iPod and it works just fine to bring up an episode of the Beck show (don't try to sit through the whole thing). Do you see the potential?
I think he'll expand the delivery modes and methods as budget allows -- he's going for the big time here, and I suspect he can become bigger than he ever was on Fox, considering how shrewd a businessman he is (again, nevermind WHAT he says, watch what he does.)
But BIG is no longer the bizmodel. CUSTOMIZED is, just like Toffler predicted.
Beck is customizing his product for a very specific, narrowly defined audience and pleasing that audience beyond their wildest expectations. It's the narrowness of his focus that causes that intense pleasure.
His audience is not our audience (mostly, anyway). But that doesn't matter. If he gets people to hook up their TV's to the internet, he's giving us all the other members of that household, isn't he?
I'm telling you, watch what this guy is doing! Pay attention to how he frames his message to his audience, figure out the business model and watch it morph over the next year.
Compare that, if you can find the time, to what Oprah is doing and how well she's succeeding at it.
Now, go back and check the beginning of Part 1 in this series on Sizing Up The Competition and tell me if I made my point. Do you understand what I'm talking about and why I'm talking about it on a blog about writing craft techniques?
Can you now write an essay on what studying Glenn Beck's business model has to do with succeeding in the future of the Romance field, all aside from the concept that if you study his content you'll have plenty of firey inspiration for rich, deep, complex themes. That inspiration would be useful only if you're not too tongue-tied by what he says to articulate the components of those themes.
Another attribute of Beck's impact on his audience is the way he slices and dices a subject. He admits he's trying to make the bits and pieces digestible for his audience. I seriously doubt that's his own work. He's got someone working for him who creates these essays or monologues. That person's thinking style (not conclusions) is the key discipline behind creating novels with complex themes so deep that the reader doesn't know the novel even has a theme.
Deep and rich thematic material is already native to your thinking. But there's a writing craft trick to taking your own rich thinking apart into its components, then restructuring the ideas so you can hang a story on them without the skeleton showing. We'll get at more of that next year.
And don't forget to sign up for notification of what the twitter founders are doing.
http://lift.do/
And I'm assuming you've investigated http://fora.tv/ and know all you want to know about Apple TV. I've heard Apple will be coming out with an internet-ready TV set, no device to attach. At this time, people use these things mostly to access movies (or old TV shows) on Amazon or Netflix which are Apple-TV's competition. Again, each of these sources owns proprietary rights in certain products (movies, TV shows, originals). Beck is producing his own original stuff you can't get anywhere else. (News shows, kids shows, comedy shows, Features, new originals by subscription only).
Netflix reported a larger drop in DVD-only subscribers than they had expected after raising prices steeply this year. They're after the "streaming" customers, but aren't really getting the growth they expected. They are on Viera and Google TV and Roku.
The bottleneck as demonstrated by comments on Beck's trying to sell Roku devices to his audience, is the technology.
The slim percentage of tech-savvy won't stand for being locked away from the functionality they desire.
They hack their cell phones to get the kind of device they want onto the network they want to subcribe to.
Here's a YouTube video of how to hack the current Apple TV (a device like Roku that you attach to your TV; you can buy the device on Amazon for about $100, but like cell phones and Google TV, it comes with "blocks" that keep you away from some information streams) in order to get to your Hulu streaming TV show account.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSSAxEYaGJQ
You do subscribe to Hulu.com, don't you? There's a free level and a Plus, or fee based level of Hulu subscription.
Hulu links with the Roku device -- so you can indeed get to your Hulu que via Roku and watch your shows on your TV without cable or satellite subscription. But, you see, the Roku/Hulu connection is a "deal" they make behind the scenes, and in order to get Hulu on Roku, you have to subscribe to Hulu Plus, which costs a continuing fee.
Here's a page where you can see all the devices that can connect you to Hulu, including Apple.
http://www.hulu.com/plus/devices?src=homepage-roku
But it doesn't include my Viera Panasonic TV or my Sony/Google-TV.
This is so reminiscent of the beginnings of AOL when it was a dial-up service with local numbers everywhere, but once you got online, all you could access was items AOL itself provided to you, not the whole internet that was outside AOL's sandbox.
Now, remember the question we started with, a deep, far-reaching philosophical question that can generate limitless numbers of rich, complex themes to hang a Romance on:
It can be argued that the whole animal kingdom is at war, and it's all based on sexuality. OK, it's a stretch to blame microbe-wars on sexuality since they don't have any, but still they eat each other.
The thesis is that violence is inherent in primate nature. Violence is necessary to ensure that the strongest among us mate and proliferate the most.
Is this format/contract game of keep-away and the violent fighting back (hacking your this to make it do that) an example of human sexuality properly expressing itself in competition to the point of annihilation of another group's (corporation's) physical resources so its own progeny will survive and proliferate?
Wars, throughout primate history, have centered on resources such as water, food, forests, then minerals like copper, iron, tin, finally oil. Is information the next resource to trigger wars?
Have you been following the Middle East conflicts at all? Do you know that the Israeli/Palestinian border conflict over the "West Bank" is about water aquifers? If the Palestinians win, Israel hasn't enough water to support it's population and they die or leave. If the Israelis win, Israel has the water and the Palestinians don't. If they try to co-exist in the same area, they end up killing each other. Is that human nature that can't be changed, or a problem to be solved by Love (as in Love Conquers All)?
"Water" is a wonderful symbol for "fiction" or "entertainment." Or even for "information."
"Water" is a symbol for emotion, and fiction or entertainment both deliver an emotional charge. Laughter is often proved to be "the best medicine" -- and it's an entertainment commodity.
"Information" is also a "water" symbol because getting information produces the satisfaction of curiosity, an emotion.
So these "proprietary devices" which limit your access to this or that stream of fiction, entertainment, or information, are an opening gambit in hostilities against the consumer -- and the answer is to hack the device and make it deliver what you want from it. The counterstrike will be more hack-proof devices, or escalating legal penalties -- or some hostile regulation that requires companies to give away their product instead of getting paid for it.
It's "White Collar" violence (like the TV Show White Collar instead of, for example, the TV show Alphas or Burn Notice) but it's definitely a violence of a kind, a sublimated violence.
The Business World and the world of Games reflect each other. People say business is based on Football, but I wonder if Business and Football are both rooted in that zero-sum-game competition for water, food, forests, etc: the competition for the means for survival of me, mine, and my progeny.
The Romance writer knows the power of raw, violent sex scenes. There is something very primal there. But is that primate-primal or Human-Love-Primal? Or is one dependent on the other?
Questions like that lead to "rich, deep, thematic structures" as you apply "show don't tell" to them.
According to that marketing guru's consultant I pointed you to earlier in this Sizing Up The Competition series, the internet and the Web have significantly changed how younger people assess the threat of another person - how they size up the competition.
At the same time, there's been a cognitive shift away from using the mental shortcuts our ancestors always relied on to identify another human as a threat - race, color, village of origin, or just plain stranger. That's a survival shortcut, kill first ask questions later.
You, as a Romance writer in SFR or PNR or any sub-genre, must write for the children of the current twenty-somethings, using that rapidly changing method of sizing up the competition, of identifying and nullifying threats.
To understand them better than they understand themselves, you need to experience their interface with the technological platform on which they are building tools to assess or nullify threats.
That's why I'm talking about Roku and Hulu and Amazon Prime and Apple TV and Netflix and this next venture by the founders of twitter lift.do
These ventures and a half a dozen others I've encountered (maybe more than that) are all duking it out for the direct channel to you, the potential subscriber.
One of them will be willing to carry a dramatic product of yours (a story in pictures, video, screenplay) to their subscribers.
But so far none of them reach "everybody" - not even Facebook! People get leery and shy away.
So we look at this field and we see "competition" to the level of escalating white-collar violence. But are we really seeing something else? Is this actually not competition at all but rather Customization of the sort Alvin Toffler described in his non-fiction book Future Shock?
Is it delivery-systems competing for audiences? Or is it audiences competing for delivery systems?
Are audiences competing against each other for the scarce resource of fiction-delivery or information-delivery?
That gbtv.com thing I talked about delivers video of Glenn Beck sitting before a big microphone doing his RADIO show. Lots of "radio" shows these days do a video posted to the web which consists of the talk show host talking into a (super-huge) microphone. You even see such "radio" on TV, (Imus In The Morning for example).
Why is Beck joining these people, web/podcasting an image of himself (and others in the room) doing a radio broadcast, webcast?
Well, it's drawing an audience WATCHING him talk on the radio.
Why? Whywhywhy? Is it his content?
It doesn't seem so to me because I've recently seen a big increase in the number of podcasts and videos of exactly this same format of radio show on a huge variety of subjects including talk shows about books.
Here's one source created by a friend of mine, Lillian Caldwell:
http://www.internetvoicesradio.com
That's a web-radio station she started but it's undergone a number of name and URL changes, tech upgrades, proliferation of shows MC'd by different people, and an ever growing number of "hits" or downloads or life streaming listeners. The focus is on talk about books, author interviews, and listener interactions.
Currently, the statistics stand like this:
Total listener base is 760,000. Up 200,000 since 2010. The station receives 34,000 downloads per day. 196 countries listen to the station on a daily basis. Youngest listener is 13. Oldest listener is 97.
And it delivers a quality product much appreciated by the listeners, creating growing fame. The radio station was invited by the 2011 International Miami Book Festival in late November to do remote streaming & interviewing of their authors, publishers, & agents, and other activities going on. PWRTALK (or Power Talk -- one of the newest names of this endeavor) is the only Internet talk radio station invited.
Passionate World Radio, Inc. is another way this same endeavor is known. That name changing happens because as it grows, it needs more succinct URLs and references. The work Lillian Caldwell has been doing has been gaining prestige.
Lillian was in Miami November 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, & 21st. for the Festival, and they also invited her to participate with the delegation from China, take part in their Comic & Graphic Novel Section, and with their youth group. She's took an intern to work with her crew which includes a videographer plus one other host from Washington, DC to help interview. Plans included an interview with Al Gore as well.
If you have a published book and would want to be interviewed on this web-radio station, email LSaraCauldwell@gmail.com
Somehow radio - especially via the web now - has burgeoned, and the most popular shows are talk-shows, information shows, discussion and opinion shows that consist not of actors telling a story but of a few people sitting before over-sized microphones doing a words-only presentation.
What do the people doing discussion table video podcasts know that we don't know?
They are usually start-up entrepreneurs -- not well funded like Beck -- who enter the fray of massive competition and painstakingly gather an audience, customizing their product to the audience rather than trying to be all things to all people.
But they compete for audience-share, for advertising revenue, and try to create a viable business in a field that's changing as fast as the 20-somethings become replaced by the former teens.
Study this roiling turmoil of shifting delivery system channels carefully. Study the multimillion dollar start-ups and the $200 start-ups. Study the few-thousand-dollar a year operations.
As the marketer's consultant pointed out, young people are assessing threats in new ways, using new tools, drawing new conclusions.
Many of these twenty-somethings don't own a television set, a landline telephone, or cable or satellite service and have no ambition to ever do so. The significance of that has not been adequately assessed by the traditional publishers.
I suggest you assess it.
"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer."
If you're the canary, you stalk that tiger.
Wellll -- so I talked myself into it writing this and bought a Roku. It displays the Beck show FULL SCREEN on my HD TV. Full screen, not a patch in the middle of the screen. It also has a few channels of offerings the other services don't have. It has a channel that offers low-budget amateur films, Vimeo, which doesn't require another subscription as Beck's GBTV.COM does. Vimeo may be on the other services too, but I didn't notice it. It has a classical opera/symphony channel. You just buy the Roku ($50-$100). You don't pay a subscription to use the Roku, but still Netflix and the others all require a subscription which you sign up for and activate on your computer, then go to your TV and enter a code into the Roku connection.
The competition in this biz is cut-throat and ferocious - more tiger than canary. Very hungry tiger.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Part 1 http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/sizing-up-competition-part-1-tigress.html
Part 2 http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/12/sizing-up-competition-part-2-winning.html
Part 3 http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/12/sizing-up-competition-part-3-romancing.html
Last week I ended off describing how I'd upgraded my household tech starting with my TV.
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I upgraded my household tech this year starting in January with my TV. I got a Panasonic Viera and hardwired it to my router. I got a Sony google-tv blu-ray player, and plugged the HD DVR from Cox into one HDMI plug of the TV and the SONY into another of the 3 HDMI plugs on the TV. And I hardwired the Sony to my router separately from the TV. So now my router has a wireless connected computer and 2 wired-connected computers on it plus a blu-ray google-tv device plus a Viera TV. (Viera doesn't offer google TV - this is a hugely complex market but you need to understand it to solve our master puzzle subject here, raising the prestige of Romance genre among the general public.)
The Viera offers access to Netflix (as does the Sony) and some other things I don't use, but Viera's business model is to provide more kinds of online access with time -- I haven't seen any additions this year.
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Here's part of what I learned before, during and after this upgrade, after which I upgraded my computer.
Each one of these accesses provided by Sony or Viera is a business deal, and online Web content providers are really reluctant to cut these deals.
Almost all the bizmodels of content providers doing business with Viera or Sony are "subscription based" -- like Netflix. You need to make an account with a user and password, and use that to access your netflix account which then charges your credit card for whatever you get from netflix.
That's why I got both the Sony and the Viera access for my TV. Nobody offers everything.
The Sony has google TV which uses a built in Chrome browser. Other than that browser which cruises the internet, your only access is what they provide by contract.
I can access Amazon Prime and all its streaming movies and TV shows, with the Viera TV (you do that by registering the TV's online ID number with amazon so their computer recognizes your logon.) It seemed complicated to me.
The google TV is the powerhouse device, the one you should watch carefully -- though for bizmodel reasons, google-TV is being out-competed at the moment, and not making enough money yet.
So I didn't think I needed a ROKU device or any of those headaches. I'd already ached my head enough to understand that I can see on my TV a lot of what is available on the web but not everything unless I hook up a laptop to the TV (I got the cable to do that).
GOOGLE internet access via the Sony blu-ray player hooked to the TV has certain commercial stations blacked out -- you can't use google search to get into the TV network URLs that provide access to proprietary TV shows they deliver on the web because those networks wouldn't do deals with google. I also had tech issues with the Sony blu-ray switching back and forth to Google Chrome. It crashes and has to be rebooted.
And as I mentioned above, Cox Cable has gotten into this web-delivery model to compete with Viera and Google TV.
In other words, Cox sized up the competition in the way that the big publishers have not (yet). At the moment, Cox Cable has an "app" for the iPad that lets you access a small handful of stations on the iPad, but only when it's on your home internet connection. It doesn't work on the iPhone or iPod.
So when Beck offered 2 weeks free to test out his new network, gbtv.com, I fired up my Sony and googled up gbtv.com and to my surprise I was able to WATCH A REAL-TIME WEBCAST!!! (nevermind what antics he was up to! It's irrelevant. It's the fiction delivery system that's being remade here.)
I should post here an iPod photo of me with my jaw on my belt-buckle but I was too stunned to make one.
Since Beck was selling the Roku headache, I really didn't expect the Google-TV connection to work, just the way Google tv users can't get at the USA network TV shows online.
But it did work. The webcast is HD, but doesn't fill my 42" screen side to side -- it's a squarish patch in the middle like the non-HD channels. It's good color, movements don't blur, the picture is in every way acceptable though the sound is a bit dimmer than the cable sound. But the TV's sound tuner was able to bring the sound up to comfort levels.
The picture didn't jump and lag as streaming often does. He's carrying some commercials already, and will probably add more with time. The really big bucks he invested was in that smooth-HD picture delivery, and he has a couple of cameras and a very competent crew, but in the first week they had a number of snafus and gliches like microphones and teleprompters coming unplugged. The set he had built also cost more than the one he had on Fox, but that's a one-time investment he'll monetize.
My best information at the moment indicates it cost him about 25 million to launch this venture, but within the first week he was out-drawing Oprah. Yeah, Glenn Beck bigger than Oprah. Think about that very hard because Oprah's audience is far closer to the typical Romance readership than Glenn's. Oprah's stuck on cable, Glenn isn't. Where did that marketing consultant (read the previous parts of this series) say his contemporaries are? The web, not cable TV.
Can you write a Romance novel using ONE set? 3 or 4 characters, 1 set, webisodes. That's the toe in the door our project to elevate the perception of Romance needs.
So I'm warning you, get yourself some sort of hookup of your TV to your internet, unless of course you really prefer your computer screen or tablet screen. Another alternative is to get a really big computer monitor and hook that up to TV (lots of people doing that).
Oh, and with both the Viera and the Sony I can access YouTube directly. Do you see the POTENTIAL for Romance writers? Do you remember the coffee commercials that told a little story about neighbors borrowing coffee, getting to know each other? Study the delivery system evolution carefully.
Beck has gbtv.com rigged to deliver to iPods, iPhones, and iPads -- I downloaded the app for my iPod and it works just fine to bring up an episode of the Beck show (don't try to sit through the whole thing). Do you see the potential?
I think he'll expand the delivery modes and methods as budget allows -- he's going for the big time here, and I suspect he can become bigger than he ever was on Fox, considering how shrewd a businessman he is (again, nevermind WHAT he says, watch what he does.)
But BIG is no longer the bizmodel. CUSTOMIZED is, just like Toffler predicted.
Beck is customizing his product for a very specific, narrowly defined audience and pleasing that audience beyond their wildest expectations. It's the narrowness of his focus that causes that intense pleasure.
His audience is not our audience (mostly, anyway). But that doesn't matter. If he gets people to hook up their TV's to the internet, he's giving us all the other members of that household, isn't he?
I'm telling you, watch what this guy is doing! Pay attention to how he frames his message to his audience, figure out the business model and watch it morph over the next year.
Compare that, if you can find the time, to what Oprah is doing and how well she's succeeding at it.
Now, go back and check the beginning of Part 1 in this series on Sizing Up The Competition and tell me if I made my point. Do you understand what I'm talking about and why I'm talking about it on a blog about writing craft techniques?
Can you now write an essay on what studying Glenn Beck's business model has to do with succeeding in the future of the Romance field, all aside from the concept that if you study his content you'll have plenty of firey inspiration for rich, deep, complex themes. That inspiration would be useful only if you're not too tongue-tied by what he says to articulate the components of those themes.
Another attribute of Beck's impact on his audience is the way he slices and dices a subject. He admits he's trying to make the bits and pieces digestible for his audience. I seriously doubt that's his own work. He's got someone working for him who creates these essays or monologues. That person's thinking style (not conclusions) is the key discipline behind creating novels with complex themes so deep that the reader doesn't know the novel even has a theme.
Deep and rich thematic material is already native to your thinking. But there's a writing craft trick to taking your own rich thinking apart into its components, then restructuring the ideas so you can hang a story on them without the skeleton showing. We'll get at more of that next year.
And don't forget to sign up for notification of what the twitter founders are doing.
http://lift.do/
And I'm assuming you've investigated http://fora.tv/ and know all you want to know about Apple TV. I've heard Apple will be coming out with an internet-ready TV set, no device to attach. At this time, people use these things mostly to access movies (or old TV shows) on Amazon or Netflix which are Apple-TV's competition. Again, each of these sources owns proprietary rights in certain products (movies, TV shows, originals). Beck is producing his own original stuff you can't get anywhere else. (News shows, kids shows, comedy shows, Features, new originals by subscription only).
Netflix reported a larger drop in DVD-only subscribers than they had expected after raising prices steeply this year. They're after the "streaming" customers, but aren't really getting the growth they expected. They are on Viera and Google TV and Roku.
The bottleneck as demonstrated by comments on Beck's trying to sell Roku devices to his audience, is the technology.
The slim percentage of tech-savvy won't stand for being locked away from the functionality they desire.
They hack their cell phones to get the kind of device they want onto the network they want to subcribe to.
Here's a YouTube video of how to hack the current Apple TV (a device like Roku that you attach to your TV; you can buy the device on Amazon for about $100, but like cell phones and Google TV, it comes with "blocks" that keep you away from some information streams) in order to get to your Hulu streaming TV show account.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSSAxEYaGJQ
You do subscribe to Hulu.com, don't you? There's a free level and a Plus, or fee based level of Hulu subscription.
Hulu links with the Roku device -- so you can indeed get to your Hulu que via Roku and watch your shows on your TV without cable or satellite subscription. But, you see, the Roku/Hulu connection is a "deal" they make behind the scenes, and in order to get Hulu on Roku, you have to subscribe to Hulu Plus, which costs a continuing fee.
Here's a page where you can see all the devices that can connect you to Hulu, including Apple.
http://www.hulu.com/plus/devices?src=homepage-roku
But it doesn't include my Viera Panasonic TV or my Sony/Google-TV.
This is so reminiscent of the beginnings of AOL when it was a dial-up service with local numbers everywhere, but once you got online, all you could access was items AOL itself provided to you, not the whole internet that was outside AOL's sandbox.
Now, remember the question we started with, a deep, far-reaching philosophical question that can generate limitless numbers of rich, complex themes to hang a Romance on:
It can be argued that the whole animal kingdom is at war, and it's all based on sexuality. OK, it's a stretch to blame microbe-wars on sexuality since they don't have any, but still they eat each other.
The thesis is that violence is inherent in primate nature. Violence is necessary to ensure that the strongest among us mate and proliferate the most.
Is this format/contract game of keep-away and the violent fighting back (hacking your this to make it do that) an example of human sexuality properly expressing itself in competition to the point of annihilation of another group's (corporation's) physical resources so its own progeny will survive and proliferate?
Wars, throughout primate history, have centered on resources such as water, food, forests, then minerals like copper, iron, tin, finally oil. Is information the next resource to trigger wars?
Have you been following the Middle East conflicts at all? Do you know that the Israeli/Palestinian border conflict over the "West Bank" is about water aquifers? If the Palestinians win, Israel hasn't enough water to support it's population and they die or leave. If the Israelis win, Israel has the water and the Palestinians don't. If they try to co-exist in the same area, they end up killing each other. Is that human nature that can't be changed, or a problem to be solved by Love (as in Love Conquers All)?
"Water" is a wonderful symbol for "fiction" or "entertainment." Or even for "information."
"Water" is a symbol for emotion, and fiction or entertainment both deliver an emotional charge. Laughter is often proved to be "the best medicine" -- and it's an entertainment commodity.
"Information" is also a "water" symbol because getting information produces the satisfaction of curiosity, an emotion.
So these "proprietary devices" which limit your access to this or that stream of fiction, entertainment, or information, are an opening gambit in hostilities against the consumer -- and the answer is to hack the device and make it deliver what you want from it. The counterstrike will be more hack-proof devices, or escalating legal penalties -- or some hostile regulation that requires companies to give away their product instead of getting paid for it.
It's "White Collar" violence (like the TV Show White Collar instead of, for example, the TV show Alphas or Burn Notice) but it's definitely a violence of a kind, a sublimated violence.
The Business World and the world of Games reflect each other. People say business is based on Football, but I wonder if Business and Football are both rooted in that zero-sum-game competition for water, food, forests, etc: the competition for the means for survival of me, mine, and my progeny.
The Romance writer knows the power of raw, violent sex scenes. There is something very primal there. But is that primate-primal or Human-Love-Primal? Or is one dependent on the other?
Questions like that lead to "rich, deep, thematic structures" as you apply "show don't tell" to them.
According to that marketing guru's consultant I pointed you to earlier in this Sizing Up The Competition series, the internet and the Web have significantly changed how younger people assess the threat of another person - how they size up the competition.
At the same time, there's been a cognitive shift away from using the mental shortcuts our ancestors always relied on to identify another human as a threat - race, color, village of origin, or just plain stranger. That's a survival shortcut, kill first ask questions later.
You, as a Romance writer in SFR or PNR or any sub-genre, must write for the children of the current twenty-somethings, using that rapidly changing method of sizing up the competition, of identifying and nullifying threats.
To understand them better than they understand themselves, you need to experience their interface with the technological platform on which they are building tools to assess or nullify threats.
That's why I'm talking about Roku and Hulu and Amazon Prime and Apple TV and Netflix and this next venture by the founders of twitter lift.do
These ventures and a half a dozen others I've encountered (maybe more than that) are all duking it out for the direct channel to you, the potential subscriber.
One of them will be willing to carry a dramatic product of yours (a story in pictures, video, screenplay) to their subscribers.
But so far none of them reach "everybody" - not even Facebook! People get leery and shy away.
So we look at this field and we see "competition" to the level of escalating white-collar violence. But are we really seeing something else? Is this actually not competition at all but rather Customization of the sort Alvin Toffler described in his non-fiction book Future Shock?
Is it delivery-systems competing for audiences? Or is it audiences competing for delivery systems?
Are audiences competing against each other for the scarce resource of fiction-delivery or information-delivery?
That gbtv.com thing I talked about delivers video of Glenn Beck sitting before a big microphone doing his RADIO show. Lots of "radio" shows these days do a video posted to the web which consists of the talk show host talking into a (super-huge) microphone. You even see such "radio" on TV, (Imus In The Morning for example).
Why is Beck joining these people, web/podcasting an image of himself (and others in the room) doing a radio broadcast, webcast?
Well, it's drawing an audience WATCHING him talk on the radio.
Why? Whywhywhy? Is it his content?
It doesn't seem so to me because I've recently seen a big increase in the number of podcasts and videos of exactly this same format of radio show on a huge variety of subjects including talk shows about books.
Here's one source created by a friend of mine, Lillian Caldwell:
http://www.internetvoicesradio.com
That's a web-radio station she started but it's undergone a number of name and URL changes, tech upgrades, proliferation of shows MC'd by different people, and an ever growing number of "hits" or downloads or life streaming listeners. The focus is on talk about books, author interviews, and listener interactions.
Currently, the statistics stand like this:
Total listener base is 760,000. Up 200,000 since 2010. The station receives 34,000 downloads per day. 196 countries listen to the station on a daily basis. Youngest listener is 13. Oldest listener is 97.
And it delivers a quality product much appreciated by the listeners, creating growing fame. The radio station was invited by the 2011 International Miami Book Festival in late November to do remote streaming & interviewing of their authors, publishers, & agents, and other activities going on. PWRTALK (or Power Talk -- one of the newest names of this endeavor) is the only Internet talk radio station invited.
Passionate World Radio, Inc. is another way this same endeavor is known. That name changing happens because as it grows, it needs more succinct URLs and references. The work Lillian Caldwell has been doing has been gaining prestige.
Lillian was in Miami November 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, & 21st. for the Festival, and they also invited her to participate with the delegation from China, take part in their Comic & Graphic Novel Section, and with their youth group. She's took an intern to work with her crew which includes a videographer plus one other host from Washington, DC to help interview. Plans included an interview with Al Gore as well.
If you have a published book and would want to be interviewed on this web-radio station, email LSaraCauldwell@gmail.com
Somehow radio - especially via the web now - has burgeoned, and the most popular shows are talk-shows, information shows, discussion and opinion shows that consist not of actors telling a story but of a few people sitting before over-sized microphones doing a words-only presentation.
What do the people doing discussion table video podcasts know that we don't know?
They are usually start-up entrepreneurs -- not well funded like Beck -- who enter the fray of massive competition and painstakingly gather an audience, customizing their product to the audience rather than trying to be all things to all people.
But they compete for audience-share, for advertising revenue, and try to create a viable business in a field that's changing as fast as the 20-somethings become replaced by the former teens.
Study this roiling turmoil of shifting delivery system channels carefully. Study the multimillion dollar start-ups and the $200 start-ups. Study the few-thousand-dollar a year operations.
As the marketer's consultant pointed out, young people are assessing threats in new ways, using new tools, drawing new conclusions.
Many of these twenty-somethings don't own a television set, a landline telephone, or cable or satellite service and have no ambition to ever do so. The significance of that has not been adequately assessed by the traditional publishers.
I suggest you assess it.
"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer."
If you're the canary, you stalk that tiger.
Wellll -- so I talked myself into it writing this and bought a Roku. It displays the Beck show FULL SCREEN on my HD TV. Full screen, not a patch in the middle of the screen. It also has a few channels of offerings the other services don't have. It has a channel that offers low-budget amateur films, Vimeo, which doesn't require another subscription as Beck's GBTV.COM does. Vimeo may be on the other services too, but I didn't notice it. It has a classical opera/symphony channel. You just buy the Roku ($50-$100). You don't pay a subscription to use the Roku, but still Netflix and the others all require a subscription which you sign up for and activate on your computer, then go to your TV and enter a code into the Roku connection.
The competition in this biz is cut-throat and ferocious - more tiger than canary. Very hungry tiger.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Announcing the SFR Holiday Blitz Winners
Congratulations to the winners of the great reads offered on this (alien romances) blog. They are, in no particular order:
Anna
Peta
Andrea
Ayla
Winners, if your profile does not link to an email address (Peta, Ayla) please post a comment marked PRIVATE and write in your email address. All comments on this blog are moderated and your address will not show up.
Thank you to everyone who entered, and good luck with the other contests in the SFR Holiday event.
Anna
Peta
Andrea
Ayla
Winners, if your profile does not link to an email address (Peta, Ayla) please post a comment marked PRIVATE and write in your email address. All comments on this blog are moderated and your address will not show up.
Thank you to everyone who entered, and good luck with the other contests in the SFR Holiday event.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Colonizing Other Planets
In the December LOCUS, author Charles Stross pours ice water on a well-established SF trope, extraterrestrial colonization. In his view, colonization (as opposed to simple exploration) of other planets is almost impossible. After a comment about the lethal qualities of even the terrestrial environment for most of Earth’s history, he remarks, “Even now, if you dropped an unprotected human on Earth in a random location, then 90% of them would die. This is because you will have dropped them on an ice cap, or in the ocean. Only about 10% of our planet’s surface area in the current epoch is habitable—even with protective clothing, equipment, and techniques.” I’m reminded of the conversation in Heinlein’s FARMER IN THE SKY where the young narrator tells his father about skeptics who maintain that Ganymede shouldn’t be colonized because it’s not a natural habitat for human beings. His father replies that neither is Los Angeles. Without advanced technology, southern California would support only a tiny fraction of its present population.
Stross denies the common fictional assumption that a colony on another planet could support human life, even in an enclosed habitat, with only a source of oxygen and a way of growing food. He highlights the fact that the micronutrients in the plants and animals we eat depend on the nourishment those organisms absorb from the life forms they consume, and so on all the way down the food chain. To ensure our long-term survival, we couldn’t just raise a select group of plant and animal species in a greenhouse; we’d have to bring along their entire ecosystem. We don’t know enough about the micronutrients we need for life to take short cuts. He contrasts biosphere experiments that have run for a year or less with the demands of supporting a civilization for centuries.
I’d never thought of the colonization problem in these terms. Here’s one of his essays on the topic, although most of it deals with the sheer difficulty of getting people to habitable planets in any reasonable time span. There are lots of interesting comments below his post:
High Frontier Redux
What do you think? Is Stross’s pessimism justified?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Stross denies the common fictional assumption that a colony on another planet could support human life, even in an enclosed habitat, with only a source of oxygen and a way of growing food. He highlights the fact that the micronutrients in the plants and animals we eat depend on the nourishment those organisms absorb from the life forms they consume, and so on all the way down the food chain. To ensure our long-term survival, we couldn’t just raise a select group of plant and animal species in a greenhouse; we’d have to bring along their entire ecosystem. We don’t know enough about the micronutrients we need for life to take short cuts. He contrasts biosphere experiments that have run for a year or less with the demands of supporting a civilization for centuries.
I’d never thought of the colonization problem in these terms. Here’s one of his essays on the topic, although most of it deals with the sheer difficulty of getting people to habitable planets in any reasonable time span. There are lots of interesting comments below his post:
High Frontier Redux
What do you think? Is Stross’s pessimism justified?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Sizing Up The Competition Part 3 Romancing The Web
As you can see, from most of my blog entries here, but especially Parts 1 & 2 of this Sizing Up The Competition series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/sizing-up-competition-part-1-tigress.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/12/sizing-up-competition-part-2-winning.html
...I obviously spend a lot of time thinking about Love and Romance and how they relate to each other. One place I study this relationship is on Amazon, among the reader commentaries.
On amazon, I see a generational divide gaping wider.
Now, please remember the essence of the science fiction/fantasy fan is the retention of the Child-like Sense of Wonder far into adulthood. That's CHILD-LIKE not childish. It's a canary attitude. Remember the canary from part 1 of this "Sizing up the Competition" series.
So we can't really parse this readership by age-group alone. The science fiction/Paranormal Romance reader can be any age -- and each age contains all the other ages.
Many SF/F fans are extremely mature even as pre-teens, and many middle aged fans love to read YA novels. They may not get the same charge out of it that they once did, but from an older perspective they get a different, equally potent, affirmation of life.
That demographic fact has confounded the major publishers ever since I can remember. As far as I can tell, they're more confounded now than ever, and amazon is just making it worse for them. Do read that "sleeping with the enemy" blog I linked in a previous part -- here it is again:.
http://kianadavenportdialogues.blogspot.com/2011/08/sleeping-with-enemy-cautionary-tale.html
On the other hand, there is a definite shift in the way huge numbers of people look at the world, at each other, and at the relationship among people.
Here is a blog entry that defines the generation gap in terms of age and experience of Relationship.
This marketer, John Carlton, asked a young friend how young people size each other up these days -- what they look at among a person's possessions and connections, their choices on how to spend money, and their preferences in music, to tell whether to establish a relationship with that person.
http://www.john-carlton.com/2011/09/cross-cultural-exam-9-boomer-v-xer-with-prize/?link1
The generational difference that the young consultant pinpointed was simply being "at home" on the web.
The internet, more even than the cell phone and texting, has caused a major shift in how people evaluate each other.
Your online footprint reveals as much, maybe more, about you as was once revealed by your book shelves and record collection.
I noted that in sizing people up before entering a relationship, there was little emphasis on how a person dresses, their physical attractiveness or ethnicity.
Now, the marketer was after a general impression, but here we're focused more on how people size up another person with respect to possible romantic, love-and-marriage, relationships and/or sexual potential.
"First impressions are lasting" as they say (which is very true) and apparently today's first impression is your web-presence, what sites you interact on, and who you "friend" or connect with in circles.
The consultant pointed out that the world has changed in such a way that young people don't have what I call a "universe of discourse" in common now. There are no particular songs or singers that "everyone who is anyone" follows. There are no books or authors that everyone knows. There's just nothing that "everyone" has in common to create an "everyone."
As I've pointed out in previous posts this lack of the common experience is a stealthy but major change that few are taking seriously enough.
I've been thinking that a lot of this fragmentation is not so much due just to the Web or Cable TV with hundreds of channels, plus games. I've begun to suspect it's simply a result of population growth. I recall a statistic from a study of Twitter that indicated that humans just can't solidify associations with more than about 1,000 people, and even that's a stretch. 500 or so is a real inflection point.
The world of 3-TV-networks that don't even broadcast all night, so that "everyone" watches one of the 3 eight-o'clock shows, is gone. Long ago, studies of rush-hour highway traffic and the cost of building more lanes or more roads caused businesses to "stagger" work hours so people don't all hit the road at the same minute. Even so, we still waste gas and health on traffic jams. Maybe that's just population growth.
Our entire economic system depends for its health on "growth" -- if the economy doesn't "grow" we are in dire straits. Why is that? Are we alligators or sharks that we never stop growing until we die? Statistics indicate the number of new jobs that must be created because of the number of new people entering the workforce, and so the economy must grow or there won't be enough jobs for everyone. But now we've reached an inflection point where the baby-boomers are retiring. Will the workforce shrink rather than grow despite the number of young people looking for jobs? Has our population (in the USA) topped out at 308,745,538 (census bureau as of 2010)?
That's double 1950's statistic of 1950 152,271,417
Here's a portrait of 1964 which I assembled while working on my Memoirs for a publisher who wants the book sooner rather than later.
Color television makes its way into U.S. homes.
April 24, 1964, Socorro UFO sighting by a Policeman makes folks wonder anew. Forgotten Roswell incident resurrected.
India Mourning Nehru, 74, Dead of a Heart Attack
June 1964 Civil Rights Bill Passed, 73-27
July 1964 Ranger Takes Close-Up Moon Photos gaining data on Landing Site for Man
Gal of gas costs 30 cents
USA Pop 191,888,791 (that's from a website http://www.npg.org/facts/us_historical_pops.htm )
More has changed than just the number of people crammed into the same USA borders. We now import about 60% of our food supply (I heard that on TV last year; it might not be accurate now).
Before World War II, we were net exporters of food and energy. When war hit, we invented nylon and other synthetics because we couldn't import enough rubber to field our war vehicles with tires and gaskets and provide silk stockings for the women who marched out to fill in the work force as the men left to be grunts for the military. So women wore nylons (with seams up the back and garter belts).
We invented synthetics (mostly made from our abundant oil) because the natural sources of materials couldn't keep up with demand. Then the baby boomer population continued to increase demand, so more synthetic materials (plastics in particular!) became marketable to fill the demand for buttons (formerly made of ivory or bone).
It's all about competition, the Tiger and the Canary. Tigers and Canaries are two different species, one living on the ground the other in the trees. They could get along fine. We humans are all one species and we all want the exact same living space, climate, easy abundant food and energy -- and materials for satin sheets and sexy clothing. And we're competing hard for jobs and mates!
Is the rise of infidelity (if there is a rise) due to that competition for a mate in close quarters, but in a teaming mass of people where it's hard to tell one from another? Is Romance being killed off by sexuality? If so, why? If not, why? (lots of novels in those essay questions)
Now go to imdb.com and look up the popular films from the 1960's, check out the way Romance was portrayed. See if you can find sales statistics and box office statistics on the Romance genre. And all the while, takes notes for your next novel.
The internet and the web 2.0 interactivity that I've discussed many times here is the real dividing line not just in the skills people bring to the workplace, not just in how people buy books or consume film and TV, but in how people actually choose a mate.
And I don't mean computerized dating services. As this young marketing consultant pointed out, people raised with Facebook and Twitter, with blogs and texting, and social networking aggregators, with "feeds" and google, look at each other differently.
That difference has to be affecting what seems plausible in a romantic encounter.
I wrote about the now classic film You've Got Mail here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/04/youve-got-mail-1998-award-winning-film.html
And there's more to come. In fact, it's happening as you read this. There is an explosion of creativity being unleashed by the web, connecting people, engaging people in cooperative endeavors during which they "hook up" one way or another.
The co-founders of twitter want to back a new web-based venture that they envision, according to an interview with them I saw on television during Worldcon 2011, will connect people in new ways that twitter could not.
Here's where to sign up to be notified when they launch this thing -- which they aren't discussing yet in detail.
http://lift.do/
Note that it's not a "dot-com" URL.
The biggest surge of life-altering, perception-altering change that I'm seeing now is in the online video community.
YouTube was the ground-breaker, like twitter, and it's still going big time. The most popular videos now approach professional quality production.
On twitter, and LinkedIn, and other social networks I've found a large number of folks "crowd-sourcing" the financing for low budget films. Yes, I know you know about all that, but the significance of this development is much bigger than anyone has guessed.
The significance for the romance and science fiction market is huge. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and the young people who have grown up with this new method of assessing new associates from afar are the ones poised to exploit this opportunity.
There's a new application to all this as well. For five or even ten years there has been a growing presence on the web of video presentations. Now, though, we are seeing the launch of professional scale ventures using the web as a platform.
The 2008 and 2010 election cycles saw web-sourcing of funding and Facebook page "like" counts for candidates burgeoning. I expect the 2012 cycle will find the web even more significant. Already, the primary candidates are dueling on YouTube.
Every product imaginable (including novels) are now pitched with short YouTube video advertisements. They're on every commercial page you visit - just roll your mouse over and a little video pops up.
But here's the big development of major significance to Romance writers, especially those just starting out and enthusiastically mixing other genres into Romance.
WEB-BASED-NETWORKS.
Not just little videos or advertisements, not just a movie or TV type Star Trek episode. I'm talking about the genesis of an entire "network" -- or maybe "station" or "channel" -- but I think it's going to become a network with lots of channels carrying the network shows and presenting "local" shows.
I'm talking about gbtv.com -- yeah, the Glenn Beck exclusive subscription only channel.
Before you start jumping around and screaming, take a deep breath and dismiss the nature of the content from your mind.
We're business people here, and we're talking business model in a world where the 1964 writer's business model has collapsed (maybe because of population growth; maybe not). Nobody missed the collapse of Borders bookstore chain this year, did they? You've all bought a Kindle Fire or Color Nook? Now Amazon Prime (film/TV/fast-delivery) has added a free!!! ebook borrowing opportunity. Publishers have to opt-in and get an advertisement or two tossed into the package -- and authors get paid if their book is borrowed -- but free for an annual fee for Prime. Think business model, competition, and don't forget to think mating. Mating spawns new growth.
Publishing is poof-gone! The traditional publishers are dinosaurs and, judging by the major, pro-active discontent among widely published authors, the publishers are finally getting the message.
Amazon's growth, proliferation into publishing, diversification, and international footprint have made that insignificant little online bookstore called Amazon the worst enemy and darkest nightmare of Manhattan's paper-based establishment.
Think again about that change in the way younger people assess others for potential relationships. Amazon allows you to "share" wishlists and purchases, gossip in forums, every social tool there is!
Think hard about that generation gap and the economic woes as the baby boomers retire. The baby boomers didn't grow up on the web, they grew up with it. Heck, they invented it.
A new generation is finding uses for the Web that shatter the very foundations of society, maybe our entire civilization.
"When you have a tiger by the tail, there's only one thing to do. Swarm aboard and ride it."
Almost at the same time that Glenn Beck launched his gbtv.com venture (it's not only his show; he's doing children's programming, comedy, and a huge charity venture too!) the Oprah Winfrey cable network lost some major stars and reported dismal quarterly results. Beck now has a bigger audience that Oprah. When the goosebumps that idea gave you subside, think hard about what it means in terms of the mating game and competition.
Cable TV in general has been falling off drastically in the number of viewers who watch any given show. Cox Cable now provides (for no additional cost) access via the web for subscribers to watch TV episodes and movies -- pretty much trying to compete with Amazon Prime streaming TV, but only some content is available via the web.
Now think about the 16 year old's "Coming Out Party" from the Steampunk/Victorian era. Girls have traditionally been "marketed" on the "marriage market" and competition has always been fierce.
Re-read that young marketing consultant's comments. People who live on the web, just don't have any given piece of fiction or music in common -- there's too much, the audiences have scattered. Yet marketers continue to try to use "social networking" to get these loosely interlaced circles to tell each other about products, to create or unify a market.
The "Christian Mingle" online dating service advertises they gained more than a million subscribers last year.
Did you see Microsoft unveiling their Windows 8 platform, designed to compete with touchscreen Apple devices such as iPod, iPhone and iPad? It makes your desktop more like your hand-held. The iPhone 5 is reputed to be designed for a larger screen. Consumer's Reports feature article on Cell Phones indicated none of them are good at voice. Texting and Data is how people communicate now.
Did you see how schools are equiping kids with iPads? Schools are raising money for this technology upgrade by asking kids to solicit donations from friends and relatives.
You're a writer. Your task in this life is to connect the dots and make a picture of the world for your readers. In SF or Paranormal Romance, you need a dash of futurology. Extrapolate where these trends are going next. Keep an eye on that population statistic.
Connect the dots I've highlighted in these 3 parts of Sizing Up The Competition.
There are lots of dots, and no two writers will make the same connections, display the same picture.
Broadcast networks are GONE. Blockbuster Video is GONE. Borders bookstore chain is GONE. Large scale conglomerate-owned publishers are GONE or going. Mass market is GONE, sales shrinking while e-books sales grow (and I haven't even talked about audiobooks, which my novels are now entering).
Listen to that marketer's consultant -- young people will not now and probably never will, form a "mass" of anything.
Mass production may be GONE as Toffler predicted. We are moving to customized production, not mass production -- though the statistics don't show that yet. If you wait until they show it to write your novel, you'll be too late!
Mass EMPLOYMENT is likewise a dinosaur. This generation coming out of college this year is the second generation headed for a life where "career" is not "get a job, keep it, retire." This is a generation of job-hoppers raised by job-hoppers and ladder-climbers, and it will become the "self-employed" generation.
Remember "climbing the corporate ladder" meant moving your family from place to place for 20 years, so your kids had no continuity of associates, schools, or even state-requirements for graduation from high school. Those corporate kids are now raising kids.
So we have a second rootless generation now getting set to raise a generation that lives on the Web!
What do you want to bet "marrying the boy next door" will become "marrying my best Facebook bud?"
Homeschooled kids best friends are web-acquaintances -- oh, yeah, and iPhone now makes facetalk a generally available way to associate, though the sound isn't so good.
If you are going to write Romance with rich, deep, complex themes so that the novels you produce become cross-generation classics that last a hundred years and gain vast respect among non-Romance readers -- then you must write for this next rootless generation of Web-buddies, and for the kids they will raise, and for the next generation those kids will raise.
You must make the past of the Victorian era, the 1930's and the 1960's etc accessible, comprehensible, and respectable to those raised in the 21st century.
Even if you wrote such a masterpiece, or a series of them, how would you reach this fragmented generation?
Observe what happens with Glenn Beck's gbtv.com venture -- NOT the content, the business model. He's leaving Manhattan for the lower-tax, more business friendly Texas. Could it be Manhattan is too expensive for web-TV? Could that be the deathnell of the BIG CITY living-model?
Watch what works, what doesn't, what they're copying, what they're emulating, and how they make money at it. Especially watch where they advertise and how much they spend on that.
Watch what happens to Oprah's cable venture, and figure out why.
Watch for things like this:
http://webbeat.tv/
I met one of the fellows behind that one on Facebook through the actor who's reading the Sime~Gen novels for audible.com production -- whom I met on twitter. It's ALL social networking, folks!
Here's what I'm seeing right now.
Beck beat the drum on his Web TV launch for months, with a subscriber price of $100/year (about the same as Amazon Prime) for access to all he presents. ($50 for about half what he's doing online).
But as the launch date approached, all of a sudden he started offering a gadget to connect your TV to his show via the internet -- assuming you have high speed internet at home.
http://web.gbtv.com/roku/index.jsp -- he's pitching the Roku device.
I tried it. It's the same kind of deal as google-TV or Viera -- you see a screen full of little squares with logos of subscription services, click from your remote control, find a list of programs offered by that subscription service. Some are free with ads, some cost an additional annual fee (most all require a signup routine using a computer or suffering through a signup using the half-assed remote control). Netflix, as you've all heard, raised their fee and lost subscribers. Now it's tottering on the stock market. Find out where those subscribers went. (Amazon Prime is one possibility, Roku another, Hulu is on most of the services that Netflix is on). They're all "competing for a mate" now!
If you read the comments on the roku installation somewhere on that website, you'll see not everyone can master it, make it work -- a lot of people were disgusted with the tricky-tech. I didn't like it, but it only took me about an hour to make it work. It produces good HD, better than Sony's service.
I'm not ready to drop cable TV yet, but I can see the economic squeeze making people choose, and they will choose to maintain an internet connection rather than both TV and internet, if they must.
You have to understand the desperate fervor among Beck's followers. They are starving for more of the kind of show he put on Fox at 5PM eastern -- so he's now doing 2-hours instead of 1 hour, and he's starting at 5PM eastern, complete with studio audience, replicating the show that drew the largest cable audience and made everyone who follows audience-share statistics panic (which is why they attacked him, not really for his content, but because people listened to that content in preference to other advertising supported content -- business model, remember?)
So even this audience of younger people and older people who just can't cut the tech of installing Roku, want this content, but were not subscribing in sufficient numbers for computer-only apparently. (or why would he offer a headache like Roku?) Sales statistics last Christmas were showing "flatscreen tv" as a big item moving briskly and most of them have a plug to connect you to the internet via your household router.
I upgraded my household tech this year starting in January with my TV. I got a Panasonic Viera and hardwired it to my router (it's now on wireless to my router). I got a Sony google-tv blu-ray player, and plugged the HD DVR from Cox into one HDMI plug of the TV and the SONY into another of the 3 HDMI plugs on the TV. And I hardwired the Sony to my router separately from the TV. So now my router has a wireless connected computer and 2 wired-connected computers on it plus a blu-ray google-tv device plus a Viera TV. (Viera doesn't offer google TV - this is a hugely complex market but you need to understand it to solve our master puzzle subject here, raising the prestige of Romance genre among the general public.)
I now have a Roku plugged into the "Game" plug for my TV. This is called market-research for a reason -- you have to look at markets and figure out what flies where.
The Viera offers access to Netflix (as does the Sony and Roku) and some other things I don't use, but Viera's business model is to provide more kinds of online access with time -- I haven't seen any additions this year. Roku has a variety of offerings I don't see elsewhere.
Next week we'll explore the fragmentation of the "audience" and the way content providers (like you, the writer) are spinning in bewilderment but boldly and heroically chasing that audience, or attracting new audiences, out-building or maybe out-competing their forebears.
The Fiction Delivery System has changed.
You must understand those changes to take advantage of them to deliver your stories to your specific audience.
But better yet would be to anticipate (as in the science fiction writer's mainstay, futurology) the future changes, so you can position your fiction where it can't be missed by the evolving system.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/sizing-up-competition-part-1-tigress.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/12/sizing-up-competition-part-2-winning.html
...I obviously spend a lot of time thinking about Love and Romance and how they relate to each other. One place I study this relationship is on Amazon, among the reader commentaries.
On amazon, I see a generational divide gaping wider.
Now, please remember the essence of the science fiction/fantasy fan is the retention of the Child-like Sense of Wonder far into adulthood. That's CHILD-LIKE not childish. It's a canary attitude. Remember the canary from part 1 of this "Sizing up the Competition" series.
So we can't really parse this readership by age-group alone. The science fiction/Paranormal Romance reader can be any age -- and each age contains all the other ages.
Many SF/F fans are extremely mature even as pre-teens, and many middle aged fans love to read YA novels. They may not get the same charge out of it that they once did, but from an older perspective they get a different, equally potent, affirmation of life.
That demographic fact has confounded the major publishers ever since I can remember. As far as I can tell, they're more confounded now than ever, and amazon is just making it worse for them. Do read that "sleeping with the enemy" blog I linked in a previous part -- here it is again:.
http://kianadavenportdialogues.blogspot.com/2011/08/sleeping-with-enemy-cautionary-tale.html
On the other hand, there is a definite shift in the way huge numbers of people look at the world, at each other, and at the relationship among people.
Here is a blog entry that defines the generation gap in terms of age and experience of Relationship.
This marketer, John Carlton, asked a young friend how young people size each other up these days -- what they look at among a person's possessions and connections, their choices on how to spend money, and their preferences in music, to tell whether to establish a relationship with that person.
http://www.john-carlton.com/2011/09/cross-cultural-exam-9-boomer-v-xer-with-prize/?link1
The generational difference that the young consultant pinpointed was simply being "at home" on the web.
The internet, more even than the cell phone and texting, has caused a major shift in how people evaluate each other.
Your online footprint reveals as much, maybe more, about you as was once revealed by your book shelves and record collection.
I noted that in sizing people up before entering a relationship, there was little emphasis on how a person dresses, their physical attractiveness or ethnicity.
Now, the marketer was after a general impression, but here we're focused more on how people size up another person with respect to possible romantic, love-and-marriage, relationships and/or sexual potential.
"First impressions are lasting" as they say (which is very true) and apparently today's first impression is your web-presence, what sites you interact on, and who you "friend" or connect with in circles.
The consultant pointed out that the world has changed in such a way that young people don't have what I call a "universe of discourse" in common now. There are no particular songs or singers that "everyone who is anyone" follows. There are no books or authors that everyone knows. There's just nothing that "everyone" has in common to create an "everyone."
As I've pointed out in previous posts this lack of the common experience is a stealthy but major change that few are taking seriously enough.
I've been thinking that a lot of this fragmentation is not so much due just to the Web or Cable TV with hundreds of channels, plus games. I've begun to suspect it's simply a result of population growth. I recall a statistic from a study of Twitter that indicated that humans just can't solidify associations with more than about 1,000 people, and even that's a stretch. 500 or so is a real inflection point.
The world of 3-TV-networks that don't even broadcast all night, so that "everyone" watches one of the 3 eight-o'clock shows, is gone. Long ago, studies of rush-hour highway traffic and the cost of building more lanes or more roads caused businesses to "stagger" work hours so people don't all hit the road at the same minute. Even so, we still waste gas and health on traffic jams. Maybe that's just population growth.
Our entire economic system depends for its health on "growth" -- if the economy doesn't "grow" we are in dire straits. Why is that? Are we alligators or sharks that we never stop growing until we die? Statistics indicate the number of new jobs that must be created because of the number of new people entering the workforce, and so the economy must grow or there won't be enough jobs for everyone. But now we've reached an inflection point where the baby-boomers are retiring. Will the workforce shrink rather than grow despite the number of young people looking for jobs? Has our population (in the USA) topped out at 308,745,538 (census bureau as of 2010)?
That's double 1950's statistic of 1950 152,271,417
Here's a portrait of 1964 which I assembled while working on my Memoirs for a publisher who wants the book sooner rather than later.
Color television makes its way into U.S. homes.
April 24, 1964, Socorro UFO sighting by a Policeman makes folks wonder anew. Forgotten Roswell incident resurrected.
India Mourning Nehru, 74, Dead of a Heart Attack
June 1964 Civil Rights Bill Passed, 73-27
July 1964 Ranger Takes Close-Up Moon Photos gaining data on Landing Site for Man
Gal of gas costs 30 cents
USA Pop 191,888,791 (that's from a website http://www.npg.org/facts/us_historical_pops.htm )
More has changed than just the number of people crammed into the same USA borders. We now import about 60% of our food supply (I heard that on TV last year; it might not be accurate now).
Before World War II, we were net exporters of food and energy. When war hit, we invented nylon and other synthetics because we couldn't import enough rubber to field our war vehicles with tires and gaskets and provide silk stockings for the women who marched out to fill in the work force as the men left to be grunts for the military. So women wore nylons (with seams up the back and garter belts).
We invented synthetics (mostly made from our abundant oil) because the natural sources of materials couldn't keep up with demand. Then the baby boomer population continued to increase demand, so more synthetic materials (plastics in particular!) became marketable to fill the demand for buttons (formerly made of ivory or bone).
It's all about competition, the Tiger and the Canary. Tigers and Canaries are two different species, one living on the ground the other in the trees. They could get along fine. We humans are all one species and we all want the exact same living space, climate, easy abundant food and energy -- and materials for satin sheets and sexy clothing. And we're competing hard for jobs and mates!
Is the rise of infidelity (if there is a rise) due to that competition for a mate in close quarters, but in a teaming mass of people where it's hard to tell one from another? Is Romance being killed off by sexuality? If so, why? If not, why? (lots of novels in those essay questions)
Now go to imdb.com and look up the popular films from the 1960's, check out the way Romance was portrayed. See if you can find sales statistics and box office statistics on the Romance genre. And all the while, takes notes for your next novel.
The internet and the web 2.0 interactivity that I've discussed many times here is the real dividing line not just in the skills people bring to the workplace, not just in how people buy books or consume film and TV, but in how people actually choose a mate.
And I don't mean computerized dating services. As this young marketing consultant pointed out, people raised with Facebook and Twitter, with blogs and texting, and social networking aggregators, with "feeds" and google, look at each other differently.
That difference has to be affecting what seems plausible in a romantic encounter.
I wrote about the now classic film You've Got Mail here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/04/youve-got-mail-1998-award-winning-film.html
And there's more to come. In fact, it's happening as you read this. There is an explosion of creativity being unleashed by the web, connecting people, engaging people in cooperative endeavors during which they "hook up" one way or another.
The co-founders of twitter want to back a new web-based venture that they envision, according to an interview with them I saw on television during Worldcon 2011, will connect people in new ways that twitter could not.
Here's where to sign up to be notified when they launch this thing -- which they aren't discussing yet in detail.
http://lift.do/
Note that it's not a "dot-com" URL.
The biggest surge of life-altering, perception-altering change that I'm seeing now is in the online video community.
YouTube was the ground-breaker, like twitter, and it's still going big time. The most popular videos now approach professional quality production.
On twitter, and LinkedIn, and other social networks I've found a large number of folks "crowd-sourcing" the financing for low budget films. Yes, I know you know about all that, but the significance of this development is much bigger than anyone has guessed.
The significance for the romance and science fiction market is huge. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and the young people who have grown up with this new method of assessing new associates from afar are the ones poised to exploit this opportunity.
There's a new application to all this as well. For five or even ten years there has been a growing presence on the web of video presentations. Now, though, we are seeing the launch of professional scale ventures using the web as a platform.
The 2008 and 2010 election cycles saw web-sourcing of funding and Facebook page "like" counts for candidates burgeoning. I expect the 2012 cycle will find the web even more significant. Already, the primary candidates are dueling on YouTube.
Every product imaginable (including novels) are now pitched with short YouTube video advertisements. They're on every commercial page you visit - just roll your mouse over and a little video pops up.
But here's the big development of major significance to Romance writers, especially those just starting out and enthusiastically mixing other genres into Romance.
WEB-BASED-NETWORKS.
Not just little videos or advertisements, not just a movie or TV type Star Trek episode. I'm talking about the genesis of an entire "network" -- or maybe "station" or "channel" -- but I think it's going to become a network with lots of channels carrying the network shows and presenting "local" shows.
I'm talking about gbtv.com -- yeah, the Glenn Beck exclusive subscription only channel.
Before you start jumping around and screaming, take a deep breath and dismiss the nature of the content from your mind.
We're business people here, and we're talking business model in a world where the 1964 writer's business model has collapsed (maybe because of population growth; maybe not). Nobody missed the collapse of Borders bookstore chain this year, did they? You've all bought a Kindle Fire or Color Nook? Now Amazon Prime (film/TV/fast-delivery) has added a free!!! ebook borrowing opportunity. Publishers have to opt-in and get an advertisement or two tossed into the package -- and authors get paid if their book is borrowed -- but free for an annual fee for Prime. Think business model, competition, and don't forget to think mating. Mating spawns new growth.
Publishing is poof-gone! The traditional publishers are dinosaurs and, judging by the major, pro-active discontent among widely published authors, the publishers are finally getting the message.
Amazon's growth, proliferation into publishing, diversification, and international footprint have made that insignificant little online bookstore called Amazon the worst enemy and darkest nightmare of Manhattan's paper-based establishment.
Think again about that change in the way younger people assess others for potential relationships. Amazon allows you to "share" wishlists and purchases, gossip in forums, every social tool there is!
Think hard about that generation gap and the economic woes as the baby boomers retire. The baby boomers didn't grow up on the web, they grew up with it. Heck, they invented it.
A new generation is finding uses for the Web that shatter the very foundations of society, maybe our entire civilization.
"When you have a tiger by the tail, there's only one thing to do. Swarm aboard and ride it."
Almost at the same time that Glenn Beck launched his gbtv.com venture (it's not only his show; he's doing children's programming, comedy, and a huge charity venture too!) the Oprah Winfrey cable network lost some major stars and reported dismal quarterly results. Beck now has a bigger audience that Oprah. When the goosebumps that idea gave you subside, think hard about what it means in terms of the mating game and competition.
Cable TV in general has been falling off drastically in the number of viewers who watch any given show. Cox Cable now provides (for no additional cost) access via the web for subscribers to watch TV episodes and movies -- pretty much trying to compete with Amazon Prime streaming TV, but only some content is available via the web.
Now think about the 16 year old's "Coming Out Party" from the Steampunk/Victorian era. Girls have traditionally been "marketed" on the "marriage market" and competition has always been fierce.
Re-read that young marketing consultant's comments. People who live on the web, just don't have any given piece of fiction or music in common -- there's too much, the audiences have scattered. Yet marketers continue to try to use "social networking" to get these loosely interlaced circles to tell each other about products, to create or unify a market.
The "Christian Mingle" online dating service advertises they gained more than a million subscribers last year.
Did you see Microsoft unveiling their Windows 8 platform, designed to compete with touchscreen Apple devices such as iPod, iPhone and iPad? It makes your desktop more like your hand-held. The iPhone 5 is reputed to be designed for a larger screen. Consumer's Reports feature article on Cell Phones indicated none of them are good at voice. Texting and Data is how people communicate now.
Did you see how schools are equiping kids with iPads? Schools are raising money for this technology upgrade by asking kids to solicit donations from friends and relatives.
You're a writer. Your task in this life is to connect the dots and make a picture of the world for your readers. In SF or Paranormal Romance, you need a dash of futurology. Extrapolate where these trends are going next. Keep an eye on that population statistic.
Connect the dots I've highlighted in these 3 parts of Sizing Up The Competition.
There are lots of dots, and no two writers will make the same connections, display the same picture.
Broadcast networks are GONE. Blockbuster Video is GONE. Borders bookstore chain is GONE. Large scale conglomerate-owned publishers are GONE or going. Mass market is GONE, sales shrinking while e-books sales grow (and I haven't even talked about audiobooks, which my novels are now entering).
Listen to that marketer's consultant -- young people will not now and probably never will, form a "mass" of anything.
Mass production may be GONE as Toffler predicted. We are moving to customized production, not mass production -- though the statistics don't show that yet. If you wait until they show it to write your novel, you'll be too late!
Mass EMPLOYMENT is likewise a dinosaur. This generation coming out of college this year is the second generation headed for a life where "career" is not "get a job, keep it, retire." This is a generation of job-hoppers raised by job-hoppers and ladder-climbers, and it will become the "self-employed" generation.
Remember "climbing the corporate ladder" meant moving your family from place to place for 20 years, so your kids had no continuity of associates, schools, or even state-requirements for graduation from high school. Those corporate kids are now raising kids.
So we have a second rootless generation now getting set to raise a generation that lives on the Web!
What do you want to bet "marrying the boy next door" will become "marrying my best Facebook bud?"
Homeschooled kids best friends are web-acquaintances -- oh, yeah, and iPhone now makes facetalk a generally available way to associate, though the sound isn't so good.
If you are going to write Romance with rich, deep, complex themes so that the novels you produce become cross-generation classics that last a hundred years and gain vast respect among non-Romance readers -- then you must write for this next rootless generation of Web-buddies, and for the kids they will raise, and for the next generation those kids will raise.
You must make the past of the Victorian era, the 1930's and the 1960's etc accessible, comprehensible, and respectable to those raised in the 21st century.
Even if you wrote such a masterpiece, or a series of them, how would you reach this fragmented generation?
Observe what happens with Glenn Beck's gbtv.com venture -- NOT the content, the business model. He's leaving Manhattan for the lower-tax, more business friendly Texas. Could it be Manhattan is too expensive for web-TV? Could that be the deathnell of the BIG CITY living-model?
Watch what works, what doesn't, what they're copying, what they're emulating, and how they make money at it. Especially watch where they advertise and how much they spend on that.
Watch what happens to Oprah's cable venture, and figure out why.
Watch for things like this:
http://webbeat.tv/
I met one of the fellows behind that one on Facebook through the actor who's reading the Sime~Gen novels for audible.com production -- whom I met on twitter. It's ALL social networking, folks!
Here's what I'm seeing right now.
Beck beat the drum on his Web TV launch for months, with a subscriber price of $100/year (about the same as Amazon Prime) for access to all he presents. ($50 for about half what he's doing online).
But as the launch date approached, all of a sudden he started offering a gadget to connect your TV to his show via the internet -- assuming you have high speed internet at home.
http://web.gbtv.com/roku/index.jsp -- he's pitching the Roku device.
I tried it. It's the same kind of deal as google-TV or Viera -- you see a screen full of little squares with logos of subscription services, click from your remote control, find a list of programs offered by that subscription service. Some are free with ads, some cost an additional annual fee (most all require a signup routine using a computer or suffering through a signup using the half-assed remote control). Netflix, as you've all heard, raised their fee and lost subscribers. Now it's tottering on the stock market. Find out where those subscribers went. (Amazon Prime is one possibility, Roku another, Hulu is on most of the services that Netflix is on). They're all "competing for a mate" now!
If you read the comments on the roku installation somewhere on that website, you'll see not everyone can master it, make it work -- a lot of people were disgusted with the tricky-tech. I didn't like it, but it only took me about an hour to make it work. It produces good HD, better than Sony's service.
I'm not ready to drop cable TV yet, but I can see the economic squeeze making people choose, and they will choose to maintain an internet connection rather than both TV and internet, if they must.
You have to understand the desperate fervor among Beck's followers. They are starving for more of the kind of show he put on Fox at 5PM eastern -- so he's now doing 2-hours instead of 1 hour, and he's starting at 5PM eastern, complete with studio audience, replicating the show that drew the largest cable audience and made everyone who follows audience-share statistics panic (which is why they attacked him, not really for his content, but because people listened to that content in preference to other advertising supported content -- business model, remember?)
So even this audience of younger people and older people who just can't cut the tech of installing Roku, want this content, but were not subscribing in sufficient numbers for computer-only apparently. (or why would he offer a headache like Roku?) Sales statistics last Christmas were showing "flatscreen tv" as a big item moving briskly and most of them have a plug to connect you to the internet via your household router.
I upgraded my household tech this year starting in January with my TV. I got a Panasonic Viera and hardwired it to my router (it's now on wireless to my router). I got a Sony google-tv blu-ray player, and plugged the HD DVR from Cox into one HDMI plug of the TV and the SONY into another of the 3 HDMI plugs on the TV. And I hardwired the Sony to my router separately from the TV. So now my router has a wireless connected computer and 2 wired-connected computers on it plus a blu-ray google-tv device plus a Viera TV. (Viera doesn't offer google TV - this is a hugely complex market but you need to understand it to solve our master puzzle subject here, raising the prestige of Romance genre among the general public.)
I now have a Roku plugged into the "Game" plug for my TV. This is called market-research for a reason -- you have to look at markets and figure out what flies where.
The Viera offers access to Netflix (as does the Sony and Roku) and some other things I don't use, but Viera's business model is to provide more kinds of online access with time -- I haven't seen any additions this year. Roku has a variety of offerings I don't see elsewhere.
Next week we'll explore the fragmentation of the "audience" and the way content providers (like you, the writer) are spinning in bewilderment but boldly and heroically chasing that audience, or attracting new audiences, out-building or maybe out-competing their forebears.
The Fiction Delivery System has changed.
You must understand those changes to take advantage of them to deliver your stories to your specific audience.
But better yet would be to anticipate (as in the science fiction writer's mainstay, futurology) the future changes, so you can position your fiction where it can't be missed by the evolving system.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Alien Romances Is In The SFR Holiday Blitz
Once again, the alien romances blog supports The Galaxy Express (.net) Science Fiction Romance
Holiday event which encourages lovers of science fiction romance to revisit favorite sites and discover new sites and authors in the genre who might be new to them.
This year, the emphasis is on e-books, and anyone who leaves a comment on any participating site has the change to win free science fiction romance e-books (choice of format).
Please note (and this is a personal comment), no one is going to win the copyright of the e-books. What is on offer, unless any author personally tells you otherwise, is a license to read the e-book.
HOW TO ENTER
Entering is free and easy: Just leave a comment here, and on every other blog that is participating.
By leaving a comment here, you’ll be entered for a chance to win one (1) of the ebooks seen here.
Then visit the other participating blogs, which are listed below for your convenience.
The deadline to enter (by leaving a comment) is midnight at EST on Friday, December 16, 2011.
By leaving a comment here, you’ll be entered for a chance to win one (1) of the ebooks seen here.
Then visit the other participating blogs, which are listed below for your convenience.
The deadline to enter (by leaving a comment) is midnight at EST on Friday, December 16, 2011.
Winners can choose from the following formats: PDF, Mobi, or ePub unless otherwise stated.
Event details:
*The contest will start at 3:00 pm EST on Sunday, December 11, 2011.
It will end at midnight EST on Friday, December 16, 2011.
It will end at midnight EST on Friday, December 16, 2011.
*After the contest ends, each blog host will pick the winners—1 winner per book.
Each blog will announce the winners for their blog by Monday, December 19, 2011.
Winners will provide their emails to the blog host, who will contact the authors who will then distribute their prize to their winner.
Each blog will announce the winners for their blog by Monday, December 19, 2011.
Winners will provide their emails to the blog host, who will contact the authors who will then distribute their prize to their winner.
*Winners can choose from the following formats: PDF, Mobi, or ePub except where otherwise stated.
E-book prizes being offered (1 randomly chosen winner per e-book) on this blog:
Hero and Border Dispute (Kindle format only) - Jacqueline Lichtenberg
Sealed in Blood (PDF format only) - Margaret L. Carter
The Slipstream Con (PDF, Mobi, ePub) - S. Reesa Herberth & Michelle Moore
The Limit of Desire (PDF, Mobi, ePub) – Nico Rosso
Participating blogs to visit, and comment on for a chance to win e-books.
Thursday, December 08, 2011
Shadow Work
According to this article, “shadow work” is unpaid, unrecognized labor that makes it possible for society to function:
Shadow Work
Examples: The “second shift,” as the chores around the house typically done by women have been called. The time required to commute to one’s paying job. The trend toward making the customer do the tasks traditionally performed by staff. We’ve been pumping our own gas and getting cash from ATMs for decades. Now the frequency of such practices as self-checkout in grocery stores is increasing. The article makes the cogent comment that “self-service” really means “no service.”
Particularly interesting from an SF viewpoint is the idea that instead of technology liberating us from work, as so many robot stories have predicted, our technology is forcing more work on us (without increasing our income).
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Shadow Work
Examples: The “second shift,” as the chores around the house typically done by women have been called. The time required to commute to one’s paying job. The trend toward making the customer do the tasks traditionally performed by staff. We’ve been pumping our own gas and getting cash from ATMs for decades. Now the frequency of such practices as self-checkout in grocery stores is increasing. The article makes the cogent comment that “self-service” really means “no service.”
Particularly interesting from an SF viewpoint is the idea that instead of technology liberating us from work, as so many robot stories have predicted, our technology is forcing more work on us (without increasing our income).
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
Sizing Up The Competition Part 2 Winning A Mate
Last week http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/sizing-up-competition-part-1-tigress.html
we ended off with this observation:
It can be argued that the whole animal kingdom is at war, and it's all based on sexuality. OK, it's a stretch to blame microbe-wars on sexuality since they don't have any, but still they eat each other.
The thesis is that violence is inherent in primate nature. Violence is necessary to ensure that the strongest among us mate and proliferate the most.
This is exactly the sort of science-philosophy that science fiction (and by extension science fiction romance) exists to challenge, dissect, discuss, and speculate about.
But as we noted last week, we must practice the stagecraft adage Don't speak for the moment, let the moment speak for itself.
If you have characters expounding philosophy or beating their political drums at each other, baring their metaphorical fangs (or real ones), the reader will not be entertained.
The writer of science fiction or Paranormal Romance is the one who has to challenge, dissect, discuss, and speculate. The reader should not be aware that this happened offstage. The writer sets up a "moment" and then just stands silently and lets that "moment" speak to the reader who never knows all the work that went into defining and constructing that moment.
It is up to the writers of Romance novels to ask these difficult and unsavory questions -- not to find answers, but to engage readers in thinking and feeling, aspiring and finding peace, creating the Happily Ever After ending, the HEA.
So here's a question:
If this "violence-is-inherent" thesis about human nature and human reproduction is true for humans, does that mean it necessarily must be true for any non-humans we might come across in this galaxy -- or another galaxy?
Would this thesis hold true across time-lines or across "universes?" Would human ghosts exhibit the same tendency toward competition, violence, winning? Think paranormal romance.
What would humans who do not function along the lines of competition/winning/violence create in the way of civilization?
What would happen if one of "us" met one of "them?"
Perhaps "we" arose from such a cross-fertilization? Way back?
If we humans contain all the animal attributes of the creatures behind us on the evolutionary ladder, then we contain the canary as well as the tiger, don't we? How do they get along together?
It's hard to imagine Darwin's thesis holding validity without the concept of competing for mates, with the best and the strongest winning.
The drive to grow up strong, and the need to win at everything, really does seem to function as a mating game dynamic. But how much of that is cultural and how much inherent?
Is "winning a mate" actually related in any way to Romance? Or is "winning" antithetical to "romance?"
Is "winning a mate" about the tiger while Romance is about the canary?
Could that be the source of the Battle of the Sexes?
I recently read some reviews on amazon of modern Fantasy novels published by the Big 6 publishers mentioned in the blog article I sited in Part 1 last week:
http://kianadavenportdialogues.blogspot.com/2011/08/sleeping-with-enemy-cautionary-tale.html
These recent novels I've read have become heavily laced with violence (the kickass heroine falls in love). But they are marketed to romance readers.
Some veteran romance readers balk at the hatred and violence portrayed as a vision of the world through the first-person heroine's eyes.
I'm not talking about just one book here; there's a trend afoot though you may not have noticed it yet. I'm the canary in the coal mine when it comes to trends in fiction!
Some modern romance readers are disappointed at the lack of, or at the low-quality of, the sex scenes.
The consensus seemed to me to lean in the direction of "violence/hatred and Romance don't mix."
Hatred and the resultant savage violence somehow spoil the Romance mood (which is not news to me!)
But apparently there are some editors at the big publishing houses for whom the violence fulfills the Romance in some way, or their sales numbers are telling them that a growing segment of their customers look for the dark, ugly portrayals amidst the Romance.
We can all relate to the idea that the tiger-in-human-form is sexy. But is he sexy covered in the blood of the canary?
I have long had a screeching complaint against film makers, TV shows, and publishers for the way they present only what I term "upside down" or "inside out" fictional structures.
You can see this very clearly today in TV shows. The one that hit me between the eyes recently is a lovely show titled THE GLADES, about a detective relocated to Florida, who is ridiculously good at solving murders.
The reason I watch THE GLADES is the mixed-up love-story/romance between the detective and a nurse who wants to be a doctor. Her husband was in prison, and she was raising her kid alone working as a nurse, taking courses to become a doctor. The detective mentors the kid, really likes the boy just for his personality, falls in love (resisting all the way) with the mother, and the father gets out of prison. Trouble ensues, and now the story is progressing (well, I hope it'll return).
But this is also the reason I watch several other shows of that sort. I endure the murders and ugly side of human nature dealt with in order to follow the Romance.
But the Romance is always frustratingly secondary. The relationships or love story are just complications, while much more air time is spent on chase scenes, fight scenes, night club scenes, bleeding people, dead people, filthy alleys. Those are the "moments" left to "speak" to us.
Now, it's good to have some of that "reality" jazz for artistic contrast, for thematic high relief, and I always have that dimension in the stuff I write. But for me, as writer or reader, all that stuff is background.
The important thing is Love Conquers All, and the arduous path to the Happily Ever After (and yes, I do sometimes show how many novels worth of drama and how many lifetimes a soul must live to achieve that Happily Ever After, but it's the main point of the whole thing.)
In the modern TV show formula, (as in times past), the main point is the ugly death, the more violence the better, and love is just a complication.
You can find no better lesson in the difference between foreground and background than in studying the TV series (say ALPHAS for example) vs. a really nice Romance.
One of the reasons I like the TV Series WHITE COLLAR so much is that it is depicting the converging pathways of the life of crime vs. the life of a solid marriage. WHITE COLLAR is showing us the transformation of a fine upstanding criminal into a champion of law and order. Or maybe that's not the gameplan that the producers will eventually pursue. It depends on the ratings.
Fascinatingly, this transformation of character (called in screenwriting "arc") is from criminal to cop, while in Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series we're watching the transformation of a cop into a criminal. Anita's story involves a whole lot more sex of incredible variety, a considerable amount of loyalty, lust and even affection, but not a great deal of actual Love. Without Love I can't see an HEA in her future.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Thursday, December 01, 2011
Darkover 2011
Over Thanksgiving weekend we attended the Darkover con, just north of Baltimore, as we have been doing for years. We got lucky with the weather, so we had a pleasant drive each way and didn’t shiver on the short walks between parking lot and hotel. The hotel had some problems this year. The elevator nearest our room didn’t work all weekend, the restaurant ran out of major food groups (notably shrimp and pasta) and never got restocked, and I heard outraged comments that the bar was closed for several hours Saturday afternoon. The con itself, though, was great, as always.
I appeared on two panels: One on the recent trends in vampire fiction and the other on the “two poles of SF,” Pygmalion and Frankenstein and “where are we now?” We all puzzled a bit over where that topic was supposed to go! The consensus emerged that we were meant to talk about whether technology is seen as good or bad, beneficial or threatening, in current literature. Not surprisingly, the panel came up with examples of both attitudes in today’s SF and fantasy.
I also participated in my first Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading. Broad Universe exists to promote speculative fiction by women. At a Rapid Fire Reading, several members get the chance to read from their works for less than ten minutes each. It was a fun experience, which I hope will be repeated at future Darkovers.
Guests of honor were Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner. I was thrilled to be able to get a new book by Sherman, THE FREEDOM MAZE. Several years ago I read a preview excerpt from it in an anthology and was disappointed to find out it didn’t have a publisher scheduled at that time. Now, at last, it’s in print. Sophie, a thirteen-year-old girl in 1960 Louisiana, wishes to have an adventure and gets sent through time to 1860, where she meets her own ancestors back when the family had wealth and a sugar cane plantation. However, because she’s deeply tanned, barefoot, and scruffy looking, with no sensible account to give of herself, she’s mistaken for a mixed-blood slave sent from the home of the master’s brother in New Orleans. Gradually she adjusts to this life and makes a few friends, as the magical Creature who sent her back decrees that the adventure won’t end until she does what she came for—whatever that is. Then Things Get Worse. Fascinating story, reminiscent of Jane Yolen’s THE DEVIL’S ARITHMETIC, although less dark.
The main thing I miss at present-day Darkover (well, in addition to the Sime-Gen celebrations we had back when Jacqueline attended) is the costume contest, which they abolished because participation had fallen so low. However, with the addition of a steampunk programming track, there are lots of costumed fans wandering the halls.
And of course the Clam Chowder concert on Saturday night continues to be the major highlight, followed by a midnight singing of the Hallelujah Chorus in the hotel atrium. I make a point of getting a room overlooking the lobby so I can listen to it in my nightie.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
I appeared on two panels: One on the recent trends in vampire fiction and the other on the “two poles of SF,” Pygmalion and Frankenstein and “where are we now?” We all puzzled a bit over where that topic was supposed to go! The consensus emerged that we were meant to talk about whether technology is seen as good or bad, beneficial or threatening, in current literature. Not surprisingly, the panel came up with examples of both attitudes in today’s SF and fantasy.
I also participated in my first Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading. Broad Universe exists to promote speculative fiction by women. At a Rapid Fire Reading, several members get the chance to read from their works for less than ten minutes each. It was a fun experience, which I hope will be repeated at future Darkovers.
Guests of honor were Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner. I was thrilled to be able to get a new book by Sherman, THE FREEDOM MAZE. Several years ago I read a preview excerpt from it in an anthology and was disappointed to find out it didn’t have a publisher scheduled at that time. Now, at last, it’s in print. Sophie, a thirteen-year-old girl in 1960 Louisiana, wishes to have an adventure and gets sent through time to 1860, where she meets her own ancestors back when the family had wealth and a sugar cane plantation. However, because she’s deeply tanned, barefoot, and scruffy looking, with no sensible account to give of herself, she’s mistaken for a mixed-blood slave sent from the home of the master’s brother in New Orleans. Gradually she adjusts to this life and makes a few friends, as the magical Creature who sent her back decrees that the adventure won’t end until she does what she came for—whatever that is. Then Things Get Worse. Fascinating story, reminiscent of Jane Yolen’s THE DEVIL’S ARITHMETIC, although less dark.
The main thing I miss at present-day Darkover (well, in addition to the Sime-Gen celebrations we had back when Jacqueline attended) is the costume contest, which they abolished because participation had fallen so low. However, with the addition of a steampunk programming track, there are lots of costumed fans wandering the halls.
And of course the Clam Chowder concert on Saturday night continues to be the major highlight, followed by a midnight singing of the Hallelujah Chorus in the hotel atrium. I make a point of getting a room overlooking the lobby so I can listen to it in my nightie.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
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