Upcoming Book Reviews and Contest!

by Sheryl Tuttle

To help celebrate the success of two of our Humble Fiction Cafe writers, I will be giving away their newly published books on my blog, WordProverb. To enter to win the free books, just post a comment on the following blog post. It's that easy!

Upcoming Book Reviews and Contest!

Please visit and enter. You may be the lucky winner of a great new book! Good luck!

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Socializing Media (Stripping Down part two)

posted by: Victor

No, not THAT kind of socialization!  You hyper-sensitive Republicans... relax!

In part one, I talked about how I'm on the verge of transitioning over to an all-digital entertainment lifestyle.  Today, I posit the question of how it will affect those of us that aspire to create entertainment content (and hopefully make money at it one day).

Right now, we still live in a world that is mostly dominated by physical entertainment goods.  DVD's, books, magazines, CD's.  You can still go and purchase something and hold it in your hands and lend it to someone or eventually sell it in a garage sale for 50 cents.  We're still in a world where to be an author or a musician or a filmmaker, you are assumed to have produced some sort of tangible object that can be bought and sold.  But those days are quickly evaporating. 

Already, we don't think twice about music as a purely digital product.  When was the last time you purchased a CD and actually listened to that CD (as opposed to immediately digitizing it and burying the CD in a box with other CD's)?  The same is becoming more and more true with cable on-demand downloads, Netflix downloads, Hulu.com, Fancast.com (a great sites that collects all the free TV and movies that are available online) and on and on.  The only thing we're waiting on is the one uber-device that makes all of this seamless.

And when that device or technology arrives (in the next few years, at most), what's next for the content creators?

While the works you create will be instantly available to ANYONE in the world, how do you put your work in front of them?  And by the same token, EVERYONE's books and movies and music will be similarly available to everyone in the world.  How does one stand out in this new world of media democratization?  As many of us here on Humble Fiction Cafe have learned, it's HARD to make yourself heard when everyone else is squawking at roughly the same volume.  It's a lot of work.  And it's by no means foolproof.  It takes a lot to convince someone to part with their hard-earned money for whatever article of entertainment you have created.

One solution is pricing I think.  I think twice about purchasing something for three dollars.  Five dollars.  Twenty dollars.  The fifteen to twenty-five dollar range is reserved only for the best of the best.  Those authors or artists who I will buy sight unseen.  But how much am I willing to risk on someone I've never heard of or that doesn't have any sort of track record?  Ten dollars?  Nope.  Five dollars?  Still too risky.  A dollar?  Maaaaybe.  Fifty cents?  Now we're talking.  A quarter?  Sure!  At that price, even if it's the stinker of all time, I haven't made an investment that I'll regret.  I'm sure most people would fall into this category.

So with that in mind, how many of you would be willing to sell a digital copy of your book or song at ten cents?  A nickel? Who wouldn't be willing to buy a book for a nickel or a dime? What if selling it at that price point gets a million people to try it?   That's $50,000 or $100,000.  How many of us would be satisfied with $10,000?  That's selling your book for just a PENNY. Granted, you have to find a way to get your book in front of a million people, but with the internet, this sort of thing isn't impossible.

The record companies and movie studios are still hung up on the big price points for their products.  99 cents per song is a nice price point, but it's still only going to be songs that I WANT.  I'm still reluctant to just try out new music at that price.   But for a nickel per song?  I'd happily by a new band's album.  I'd buy a bunch of new artists albums. 

The key to all of this is the socializing of all this content.  We're already a good chunk of the way there, with the explosion of social websites like Facebook and Myspace.  There are tons of other niche social websites, like Goodreads, and Flickr and YouTube.  These are all great at what they do, but the sticking point is that for the most part, these sites still don't talk to each other.  It's not yet a seamless experience.  I have to leave Facebook (where I have dozens of friends) to go to Goodreads, where I have a much smaller circle of friends, who are unlikely to be on the site at the same time I am.  While I can post a review of a book on Goodreads, or attempt to start a discussion about it, it will usually go unseen for the most part by the vast majority of my online-capable friends.  Unless I post a link to my Goodreads review, no one on Facebook or Myspace even knows I did so. 

So the key is all of these sites talking to each other constantly.  When a friend posts something in Facebook, for instance, it shows up in my 'friendfeed' almost immediately.  Nearly every item is clickable or able to have a comment posted on it.  This feature makes a simple posting able to become a discussion thread.  And now, not just me and that one friend, but me and everyone else I know will be able to see that discussion and also contribute to it.  It's always fascinating when a friend from one of my social groups interacts with a friend from another group, such as when an old school friend from grade school in Canada responds to a comment that a recent filmmaking friend made. 

In the same vein, social networking will become the new shopping mall.  We are all influenced by the items our friends buy or recommend.  Things like postings and comments in Facebook will soon become (I believe) the greatest form of word-of-mouth advertising ever created. 

Already on Goodreads, it's possible to immediately click on any reviewed or recommended book and purchase it from Amazon.com.  But like I said earlier, at the current price points, I balk.  But if when reading that review, (and even if it only kind of sounded like something I might be interested in),  if it only cost a nickel or a dime or a quarter, I don't think I'd hesitate to click BUY.  I may never actually read it, but it didn't hurt my wallet to purchase it.  If it only cost me a quarter or so to immediately get in on whatever all my friends were suddenly talking about or downloading, I'd be crazy not to. 

We're still a few years away from the final seismic media shift, but it's coming.  The whole pricing and distribution structure for media will collapse on itself and then be reborn.  Instead of studios and publishers telling us what to watch or listen to or read, we'll be telling each other.  And the media we recommend to each other will be entirely different than what those corporations would be shilling.

And I believe that's when all of us will finally have a chance to be on equal ground with the 'big boys.'

Stripping Down (part one)

Submitted by Victor

No.. it's not that kind of post.  Get your head out of the gutter!

What I'm talking about it stripping down and streamlining one's life.  Reducing the clutter.

This has been on my mind increasingly over the past few months and lately it's directly intersected with the realm of entertainment, including reading and writing.  Specifically, I wonder if we NEED to have all of these books, DVD's, comics, CD's etc in our physical possession. 

We are pretty close to realizing all-digital experience.  For me, it started with my music collection.  I digitized it years ago and haven't seen one of my actual CD's since (I've got upward of 500 CD's).  I used to love putting the CD's on shelves in my media room and just LOOKING at them.  I loved seeing the vast collection.  But... I haven't seen those CD's in years.  And I have to say, I don't miss them even remotely.  I have all my music on my computer and my Ipod, every single song is available to me at a moment's notice.

A good friend of mine is in the process of setting up a home media server at his house, with one central computer that holds all the music and photos, and allows for the digitization of DVD's, and the recording of TV shows.  And then through his home network, any computer or XBOX can access any of that media content in any room, and even remotely through the internet.  If you have enough hard drive space, ALL of your movies, CD's and photos can be captured digitally, allowing you to dispense with having your physical DVD's or CD's take up any space. 

Likewise, I've discovered digital versions of my entire comic book collection.  As much as I have always loved looking at the physical comics, and flipping through my longboxes, I have to say that the experience of reading the comics on my laptop computer (on a screen that's actually significantly bigger than a comic book) is a superior experience.  I've been looking askance at my comic book collection lately, which is taking up a lot of space in my "library", and wondering if it's time to pack them up and put them in storage, or more extreme yet, SELL them all.

So now we come to where this intersects with this blog's primary focus, books.  I love my books.  More than CD's or DVD's or comics, I love seeing my book collection on my shelves.  I love seeing entire series with matching covers all lined up.  But I've got a lot of books (not as many as SOME members of Humble Fiction Cafe, you know who you are), and unless I find room for more bookcases, I'm going to have to start going two deep on some shelves.  And that, of course, is bringing me to the question:

Is it time to get rid of my book collection?

Again, make no mistake.  I love my books.  But the allure of streamlining and no longer having to own and store and haul hundreds of books is becoming almost too tempting to ignore.

The recent advent of book-readers like the Amazon Kindle is making the need for having a physical book in your hands almost obsolete.  That technology isn't entirely there yet, but it's close.  And for that matter, reading a book on my laptop isn't the headache it once would have been.  I've already got dozens of great free books that publishers have made available and they are releasing more and more free e-books every day.

One of the rationales for owning and collecting so many books is to be able to have them at one's fingertips should one suddenly need to read them or flip through them.  Or perhaps because of the fear that if we don't keep this copy, that we might never see another copy of it again.  These were all reasonable concerns back in the day, but now, thanks to EBay and Amazon and all the myriad online booksellers, I challenge you to go to any book in your collection and not be able to find a copy available online.  If you REALLY need a book, it can be in your hands overnight.

And if the internet still scares you, there's always the library.  With its system of inter-library book loaning, there's hardly any book that's not available to you with only a minimal wait. For FREE!

So DO we need to own books (or any media for that matter)?  If, like me, you're about at overload with clutter and STUFF, the thought of totally streamlining and going all-digital with one's media collection is so so so tempting.  As I've found with my CD collection, I ultimately don't miss SEEING them.

So where does this lead for those of us that desire to CREATE content?  I'll discuss that in part two later this week.

Most helpful writing books - Linda

There has been much talk within the group and in some writing blogs lately about helpful writing books. There are thousands of them out there, so what is a wannabe writer to do other than wade through them spending lots of cash? Why, ask other writers for their opinions, of course.

Here's my list of four must haves:

1) "On Writing" by Stephen King - Beyond being rather inspiring, the book is full of advice on "how to be a writer." Mr. King is pretty blunt in this book about what it takes to be successful. His advice is sensible, his examples of his own failures are encouraging, his examples of his successes are inspiring. He explains that writers have to read and write. You need to read in the genre you want to write in constantly. You need to sit down every day and put words on a page. He discusses his personal writing schedule and setup and talks about how different it is now than when he started out with a typewriter in a corner of the laundry room. He talks about his collection of rejection letters and how he almost threw one of his biggest novels away. And, he talks about how valuable his wife is to his writing career. Every wannabe writer should read this book and think about whether or not they can do what it takes to succeed.

2) "The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers" by Christopher Vogler - I almost left this book off the list. It's valuable, but damn it's long. This book spells out the steps in the heroes journey. Every story, no matter what length, is about the journey the main character embarks on. The journey may be physical, emotional, mental or a combination. Most people write these journeys without understanding what they are doing. This book explains it, gives examples from modern and classic movies, and breaks everything down into easy to find/easy to understand sections. It's a long read, but it's one of those "aha!" books where you read along and recognize the elements the author is talking about. Definitely worth the time.

3) "Writing the Breakout Novel" and the associated workbook by Donald Maas - I warn you now, keep a notebook by your side as you read the main book. Every page has something on it that you will want to include in your novel. I suggest reading the main book before or as you are writing your novel and then break out the workbook before you begin revising. This is probably the book that I consider most valuable to me as a writer. It goes beyond things like, "make sure you include all four senses in your scenes," or, "don't let the middle of the book fall flat." This book shows you how to do that by using examples from real books and stuff he makes up on the fly. He takes you through every element required in a story and shows you how to pump them up. It will take a plain story and turn it into a phenomenal one.

4) "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White - Okay, this one could compete for most valuable book. It's small, easy to navigate, easy to understand, and include just about any grammar or punctuation issue you will come across in general writing. Yes, "The Chicago Manual of Style" contains more, but chances are you won't need most of it. This simple, inexpensive, little book will save you much embarrassment.

My writing library contain probably twenty books or so, but these are the four that are most worn. I constantly go back to them. You know that scene in "The Time Machine" where the main character jumps out of his machine, runs into his library and grabs a couple of books before jumping back on his machine? If I could only grab four writing books, these would be the four I would grab.

Linda Lindsey