B. Justin Shier's Blog, page 5

This video really jives with the scene I'm writing...


In fact, the whole  album has been a lifesaver.

B.

It is a happy week in indie publishing land. I feel like the folks over at Apple are finally starting to take us seriously! First, Apple their wonky iAuthor EULA. And now, in an Email sent to their vendors, Apple has announced some great new tools for small indie publishers:

We would like to make you aware of the following:

Promo Codes

Get up to 50 free promo codes for each of your books, which you can distribute for publicity purposes as review copies. Codes can only be requested by...

Remember Hironobu Sakaguchi?

Sakaguchi is the guy that was responsible for the Final Fantasy series through X-2. That makes him kinda a big deal in some circles. Well, Sakaguchi released a new game called  on the Wii. I hear the game is really good, but it looks like only you Europeans are going to be enjoying the English dub. Grr!

Anyway, a friend over at pointed me to a 2010  of this gaming legend. In the interview, Sakaguchi discusses The Last Story and his a...

So, you'll recall that in  I warned that Apple's new  application had a rather dodgy EULA. As worded, it could have granted Apple rights to authored works composed within the program. At the time, I speculated that this was a wording error and (along with many others) asked Apple to reconsider the EULA.

Well, they have!

The previous Section 2:

B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance...

So Hachette's Grand Central imprint currently holds the #1 spot for trade paperback bestsellers. They publish names like Stephen Colbert, Ted Kennedy, Mario Puzo, and Nicholas Sparks. In an interview on Media Bistro, Grand Central's head, , filled us in on where she thinks traditional big house publishers fit in the shifting paradigm that is the modern book industry:

There was much ado about the leaked that explained why publishers are still relevant. Some saw that as...

Announcing what I hope to be an irregular feature on this blog: Gloomy Sing-offs! That's right, let's take the gloomiest, most demoralizing songs in existence and force them to fight to the death!

And where better to start than with Tim Burton's dystopic Christmas nightmare. Yea, you already know where I'm going with this. Which version of Sally's Song is the gloomiest?
Catherine's



Yoko's
Time to mope.


B.

And in , no less!

Talking with the lower echelon employees of publishing reminds me of a description I once read about the mutual embarrassment of Western and Soviet biologists when they talked about genetics. Soviet-era scientists were required, on pain of imprisonment, to endorse Lysenkoism, a discredited theory of inheritance favored by Stalin for ideological reasons. Lysenko believed, incorrectly, that you could create heritable characteristics by changing a parent...

Sunshine I saw you through the hanging vineA memory of what is mine fading away
But this night heals the ground
And the moonlight steals the sound
I could leave suddenly unafraid
B.

I agreed so completely/entirely/emphatically with this post from that all my head nodding action began to feel like a workout. All indie writers need to read this post. In fact, all indie writers need to lazer-etch this post into their cortex:

We all know how traditional publishing ignores readers. But how do indie writers ignore readers?

By focusing on sales and "promotion" and "discoverability" and downloads and free to the exclusion of everything else.

Many indie...

] Don't usually see you at these things.

} *swig*  I hate crowds.

] Oh. What do you usually do after exams?

} *swig*  I go find a coffee shop and write.

] *blink*  *frown*  So you what, write essays and stuff?

} I wrote essays back in high school. Always hated them. Putting the thesis in the first paragraph was the worst idea humanity ever had. Rather swim a mile in bacon grease. I write books now. Books are fun.

] *squint* ... books?

} They're kinda like long essays without a thesis in the first pa...