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shadowkat1. I don't believe this...Governor Abbott of Texas sent several bus loads of migrant workers to NYC, which has neither the means nor space to house them.
Mayor Eric Adams is Furious After Governor Greg Abbott Bused Dozens of Migrants to NYC
These poor people. They were seeking asylum. And that asshole put them on a bus and sent them to a huge city where there's no room for him, while he lives in a huge state with a much smaller population.
2. Niel Gaiman's Sandman is on this weekend on Netflix - at last! I'd been eagerly anticipating it. And it was taking forever - there was a point in which I wondered if it would ever get an air date. Netflix is frustratingly slow about airing things.
But I'm saving it for tomorrow. I'm a third of my way through my listen of Act II Sandman - Season of Mists. The Netflix series is focusing on Preludes and Nocturns, and Dollhouse.
I'm also re-reading the comics on comixcology. I borrowed them. I did own some of them back in the day - but I got rid of those ages ago.
It is horror, by the way. I mean I just listened to a section in which a living boy is stuck in a boarding school with the dead.
3. Ugh, I went on Twitter to hunt for something else (which I'll eventually find..) and ran into this insanity from the Warner/Discovery Merger.
If you can't see it - it states that men prefer HBO content, and women prefer Discovery.
I guess I must be male? And so are most of my female friends? And my male friends must be female?
And sigh this..
Uhm, I wonder if they realize that it is called the Cartoon Network not Lifetime Channel, not Hallmark and not the dumb situation comedy network? (Can we fire market research people? Bankrupt them? Send them to the Sahara desert or maybe just an Indian Reservation in Arizona - no, the Navajho do not deserve that - send them to Death Valley. Exiled until they give up their evil marketing ways.)
I hate situation comedies, reality shows, and most if not all the content on Discovery. I love animation, serials, scripted content, and longer films. Also you couldn't pay me enough to watch American Girl specials and Degrassi.
If they do this - I may have to cancel HBO, which is ultimately okay with me, because, it's expensive. Disappointing. But it will save me - $14.99 a month, so ...
Note to dumbass television content programmers and marketing people out there? We can live without you. It's possible.
And you might want to check out how many women went to the last comic con?
Ugh.
4. I asked Twitter if I want to know who Alex Jones is - they resoundingly told me that I do not and that they envied me for having no clue who he was. From the little that I saw? I agree with them.
5. Ah, found the thread that I'd been following yesterday and today on Book Twitter.
John Maher tweets about the Penguin Random House / Simone & Schuster Merger trial
Apparently the Federal Government didn't like the fact that Penguin decided to merge with Simon & Schuster, and is calling a halt to it under the Anti-Trust act. [ I'm interested because I almost ended up working for the Director of Contracts at Simon & Schuster in 1996, and interviewed at both Random House and Penguine in the 1990s, also knew people who worked at them. Sisinlaw's step-mother had an editor at Random House.]
It's a not-so-nice insightful look inside the publishing world. And a reminder that I'm very happy to not be embroiled in it. I'm not letting it stop me from writing, revising, and potentially self-publishing my own books some day.
Snippets from the tweets (which by the way are proof that the media is definitely camped out on Twitter - and it bodes well to be very careful on the bird app - too many frigging journalists hiding out on it. Crazy workplace has told us not to - under any circumstance - to tweet about work on it. Don't worry - I won't or not explicitly.)
Basically proof - that the devil is in the marketing. It truly is. The big houses have the money to launch marketing campaigns, the smaller ones, do not. And the books that get the marketing campaigns are the big ones, with the money.
I had an art teacher in college tell me that the difficulty with the art world was worst artists were good at business and marketing, while the better ones sucked at it. Nagel - excellent at marketing, Van Gough sucked at marketing. Same with writers - you don't have to be good to get published. Collen Hoover is horrid, but she is excellent at marketing herself. It's all about the branding, marketing, and selling. And knowing how to do it, and how to work the logarithm on social media marketing platforms.
I'm hoping the merger fails. I agree with Steven King, and the worried Jon Irving. It hurts us all, and only benefits the already rich assholes.
6. It's been a week. I'm glad it's over. For my trouble - I'm going to binge watch The Sandman on Netflix all weekend in air conditioning.
I might jump out for food. I might also clean the apartment. Laundry does need to be done at some point, I suppose. But there's no immediate rush.
Mayor Eric Adams is Furious After Governor Greg Abbott Bused Dozens of Migrants to NYC
These poor people. They were seeking asylum. And that asshole put them on a bus and sent them to a huge city where there's no room for him, while he lives in a huge state with a much smaller population.
2. Niel Gaiman's Sandman is on this weekend on Netflix - at last! I'd been eagerly anticipating it. And it was taking forever - there was a point in which I wondered if it would ever get an air date. Netflix is frustratingly slow about airing things.
But I'm saving it for tomorrow. I'm a third of my way through my listen of Act II Sandman - Season of Mists. The Netflix series is focusing on Preludes and Nocturns, and Dollhouse.
I'm also re-reading the comics on comixcology. I borrowed them. I did own some of them back in the day - but I got rid of those ages ago.
It is horror, by the way. I mean I just listened to a section in which a living boy is stuck in a boarding school with the dead.
3. Ugh, I went on Twitter to hunt for something else (which I'll eventually find..) and ran into this insanity from the Warner/Discovery Merger.
If you can't see it - it states that men prefer HBO content, and women prefer Discovery.
I guess I must be male? And so are most of my female friends? And my male friends must be female?
And sigh this..
Uhm, I wonder if they realize that it is called the Cartoon Network not Lifetime Channel, not Hallmark and not the dumb situation comedy network? (Can we fire market research people? Bankrupt them? Send them to the Sahara desert or maybe just an Indian Reservation in Arizona - no, the Navajho do not deserve that - send them to Death Valley. Exiled until they give up their evil marketing ways.)
I hate situation comedies, reality shows, and most if not all the content on Discovery. I love animation, serials, scripted content, and longer films. Also you couldn't pay me enough to watch American Girl specials and Degrassi.
If they do this - I may have to cancel HBO, which is ultimately okay with me, because, it's expensive. Disappointing. But it will save me - $14.99 a month, so ...
Note to dumbass television content programmers and marketing people out there? We can live without you. It's possible.
And you might want to check out how many women went to the last comic con?
Ugh.
4. I asked Twitter if I want to know who Alex Jones is - they resoundingly told me that I do not and that they envied me for having no clue who he was. From the little that I saw? I agree with them.
5. Ah, found the thread that I'd been following yesterday and today on Book Twitter.
John Maher tweets about the Penguin Random House / Simone & Schuster Merger trial
Apparently the Federal Government didn't like the fact that Penguin decided to merge with Simon & Schuster, and is calling a halt to it under the Anti-Trust act. [ I'm interested because I almost ended up working for the Director of Contracts at Simon & Schuster in 1996, and interviewed at both Random House and Penguine in the 1990s, also knew people who worked at them. Sisinlaw's step-mother had an editor at Random House.]
It's a not-so-nice insightful look inside the publishing world. And a reminder that I'm very happy to not be embroiled in it. I'm not letting it stop me from writing, revising, and potentially self-publishing my own books some day.
Snippets from the tweets (which by the way are proof that the media is definitely camped out on Twitter - and it bodes well to be very careful on the bird app - too many frigging journalists hiding out on it. Crazy workplace has told us not to - under any circumstance - to tweet about work on it. Don't worry - I won't or not explicitly.)
John Maher
PRHvDOJ Day 1: Lots of baseball metaphors—indie publishers are "farm teams," the government is "swinging for the fences" with its argument—which is very funny because most people I know in publishing couldn't tell you what borough the Mets play in.
DOJvPRH Day 1: PRH's legal counsel is officially aware of my tweets. Wow, it really IS the best time to publish since Gutenberg!
2:05 PM · Aug 1, 2022 from Washington, DC·Twitter for Android
9
John Maher
·
Aug 1
DOJvPRH Day 1: Pietsch: "it's my expectation that having these two extremely, extremely large entities merge will limit high advances in many cases.... The combination of PRH and S&S will blow up one of the major houses and decrease the number of rounds an auction goes through."
John Maher
·
Aug 1
Replying to
DOJvPRH Day 1: It's getting feisty, pals. Defense: Would you or would you not be concerned about a 5 to 4 merger? Pietsch: "My concern is not about a 5-4 merger. My concern is about creating a publisher that would be so far out of scale with the rest of the business."
DOJvPRH Day 1: Pande explains how standard payout of advances went from thirds to quarters. Says approximately 20% of her authors earn out the advance, which can take 3-4 years to happen, forcing authors to teach, "work in coffee shops," do journalism (poor saps), nonprofits, etc
John Maher
·
Aug 2
DOJvPRH Day 2: "My name is Stephen King. I'm a freelance writer."
John Maher
·
Aug 2
DOJvPRH Day 2: Going for the kill here. Government: Did you come here on your own? King: Yes. Govt: Why? King: “I came because I think consolidation is bad for competition. That’s my understanding of the book business, and I’ve been around it for 50 years."
John Maher
·
Aug 2
DOJvPRH Day 2: Stephen King: "When I started in this business, there were literally hundreds of imprints, and some of them were run by people with extremely idiosyncratic tastes, one might say. Those businesses were either subsumed, one by one, or they were run out of business."
John Maher
·
Aug 2
DOJvPRH Day 2: Karp impeaches himself over his deposition, as per official court records, while trying not to state that he believes Big Five publishers have a market advantage, over a defense objection.
ohn Maher
·
Aug 2
DOJvPRH Day 2: Quoting from an email from Jon Karp to Jon Irving (OMFG), govt reads (I think I got this right): “Thanks, John. I’m pretty sure the Department of Justice wouldn’t allow Penguin Random House to acquire us. That’s assuming we still have a Department of Justice.”
John Maher
·
Aug 3
DOJvPRH Day 3: Karp gets the chance to talk about Colleen Hoover and a hot backlist bestseller. Hoover "has published with both Amazon and S&S, and her Amazon book was on the independent bestseller list. What that says to me is that a Rubicon has been crossed."
John Maher
·
Aug 3
DOJvPRH Day 3: Karp argues that Amazon has become a real competitor because, he says, indie booksellers will now stock Amazon titles, as evidenced by Colleen Hoover. There is no discussion about how Hoover's books became bestsellers—i.e., TikTok.
John Maher
DOJvPRH Day 3: For clarity, he means Amazon has become a competitor to S&S as a publisher; that it is a competitor (to put it lightly) to the book business as a whole is a given.
John Maher
·
Aug 3
DOJvPRH Day 3: Defense asks Karp to elaborate on terms he used yesterday when the judge was asking him about marketing, and how often authors use their own funds to bolster their publicity, even when they are published by the Big Five houses.
John Maher
·
Aug 3
DOJvPRH Day 3: Karp says many authors of books with big advances hire their own publicists, etc., because they can afford to. He cites Colleen Hoover as an example of an author who "does not take up most of S&S’s resources" because "she’s the queen of TikTok" and doesn't need to
John Maher
·
Aug 3
DOJvPRH Day 3: There is no example, in this conversation, of the sorts of marketing budgets midlist authors receive, or mention of whether they do or do not have to hire their own publicists, or book their own book tours, to get their books adequately publicized/marketed.
Basically proof - that the devil is in the marketing. It truly is. The big houses have the money to launch marketing campaigns, the smaller ones, do not. And the books that get the marketing campaigns are the big ones, with the money.
I had an art teacher in college tell me that the difficulty with the art world was worst artists were good at business and marketing, while the better ones sucked at it. Nagel - excellent at marketing, Van Gough sucked at marketing. Same with writers - you don't have to be good to get published. Collen Hoover is horrid, but she is excellent at marketing herself. It's all about the branding, marketing, and selling. And knowing how to do it, and how to work the logarithm on social media marketing platforms.
I'm hoping the merger fails. I agree with Steven King, and the worried Jon Irving. It hurts us all, and only benefits the already rich assholes.
6. It's been a week. I'm glad it's over. For my trouble - I'm going to binge watch The Sandman on Netflix all weekend in air conditioning.
I might jump out for food. I might also clean the apartment. Laundry does need to be done at some point, I suppose. But there's no immediate rush.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-06 10:34 am (UTC)And, I've tended to find that the art I like is in the less fancy exhibitions rather than the big prestigious venues. Maybe that's much to do with marketing.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-06 07:36 pm (UTC)HBO is probably skewed male both because of all the male pandering so many shows do and also because if anything brings in even equal numbers of male viewers (especially if under 50) then it will be considered a male platform.
Also a "live action movie shorter than an hour" is an episode of TV, not a movie. It may be part of an anthology series or collection of shorts, but it's not a movie.
What I'm wondering is how they're going to brand this newly merged streamer. Discover HBO?
The merger (as is the case for many mergers) is a bad idea. "There is no example, in this conversation, of the sorts of marketing budgets midlist authors receive, or mention of whether they do or do not have to hire their own publicists, or book their own book tours, to get their books adequately publicized/marketed."
Exactly. Publishers exploit the authors they sign and do less and less for them, other than control outlets for distribution. And if it weren't for Amazon we still wouldn't have the eBook because they would have killed it, buried it, then dug it up to sink it in the ocean.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-06 10:46 pm (UTC)Also this view that fandom is a male thing is ludicrous - most of the people in the fandoms that I've lurked in or participated in are women. Buffy was certainly mostly women. Look at the Twilight fandom. Or the Supernatural fandom. It's kind of the same stupidity that thinks women don't like animation or comics. Some women don't. Just as some women hang out in nail salons, most women don't.
If it weren't for Amazon and their "publishing model" we wouldn't have the e-book or the audio book. Barnes and Nobel kind of created their own to compete, as did many others.
I tend to buy most books through Amazon now - and do audible credits. (I'm that pissed off with the traditional publishing world).
Simon & Schuster and Random House deserve to get kicked.
The lesser imprints, not so much.
**
The problem with the gender thing and HBO, is an assumption that women don't watch certain shows and men don't. (It's complete BS.) They go by marketing algorithms which aren't that reliable. I know a lot of men who watch daytime soap operas for example, and the Supernatural fandom was 85% women.
HBO does tend to pander to men, but True Blood which had a large female audience, was very popular, as was Game of Thrones, and various others.
You really can't predict what folks will like. If you could - you'd make mega bucks. They want to go the traditional model, but it's out of date, and viewers are more eclectic than that.