Roy Miller's Blog, page 314
December 26, 2016
GIVEAWAY: Win a Writer Emergency Pack
We get it. Facing a new year – and your new writing resolutions – is hard.
That’s why we’re hosting a special two-week giveaway of a Writer Emergency Pack. This fun set of cards offers everything you need to claw your way out of a block, and it’s petite size means it’s ultra-portable, too.
The pack began as a Kickstarter campaign started by screenwriter John August in 2014. The campaign was a smash success, backed by 5,714 donors and fully funded by 1,756%.
The deck is comprised of 26 Idea cards (“If your hero and the antagonist had an honest discussion, what would they say to each other?”) and 26 Detail cards, which provide concrete tips for story-building (“Heroes won’t always beat the clock. Work through what might happen if they fail.”).
We’re giving away one Writer Emergency Pack to one lucky reader. Enter by 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday, January 5th to win.
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A Dull Holiday Season?
The hoped for post-election and holiday season sales bounce does not seem to be materializing. Unit sales of print books were down almost 6% between Thanksgiving week and the week ended December 18, 2016 compared to the similar period in 2015 at outlets that report to Nielsen BookScan.
Perhaps the most worrisome for booksellers and publishers is that the worst sales week was the most recent, with units off 11% in the week ended December 18, compared to the week ended December 20, 2015. Sales in the most recent week were weakest in the mass merchandiser channel, falling 24%. Sales through the retail and club channel were down 8%.
The lack of a big book or hot category (like last year’s adult coloring books segment) appears to be hurting sales. Unit sales were down in all four major segments last week. The juvenile nonfiction category had an 18% decline in unit sales compared to a year ago, while sales of adult fiction were off 12% in the week. Unit sales of juvenile fiction were down 9% and adult nonfiction unit sales were off 8%, according to BookScan.
The bestselling print book last week was Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Double Down by Jeff Kinney, which sold just under 126,000 copies. Killing the Rising Son by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard was the top seller in adult nonfiction last week (and #2 in the country), selling 104,000 copies.
John Grisham’s The Whistler sold 71,000 copies to top the adult fiction category last week and had a 31,000-copy lead over second place A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman. First 100 Words by Roger Priddy was the top seller in the juvenile nonfiction segment last week, selling about 31,000 copies.
Last year at this time, five books sold more than First 100 Word‘s 31,000 copy figure, including First 100 Words itself, which sold over 70,000 copies a year ago. The top-seller in the segment in the week ended December 20, 2015 was Laugh Out Loud Jokes for Kids by Rob Elliot, which sold nearly 108,000 copies, while two Johanna Basford adult coloring books combined to sell almost 150,000 copies.
In adult nonfiction, adult coloring books took nine places among the top 20 bestsellers in the category for the week ended December 20, selling a combined total of about 350,000 copies in the week.
Even with the so-far-disappointing holiday season, total unit sales through December 18, 2016 were still up about 2% over the same period a year ago.
The post A Dull Holiday Season? appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Pantsuit Nation Book Deal Raises Questions
The founder of the Hillary Clinton-inspired Facebook group Pantsuit Nation, Libby Chamberlain, announced this week that she had signed a deal with Flatiron Books to publish a book based on the group’s posts. But news of the deal sparked a backlash among many of the group’s members, and raised questions about both the legality and the ethics of the deal.
In a post to the group Monday, Chamberlain said she was “beyond excited” to share news of the deal, telling members it was “a book of YOU. A book BY YOU.” Many of the group’s 3.9 million members are failing to see it that way, however—instead seeing the deal as profiteering, and a betrayal.
“This group is bigger than her,” one member succinctly noted in a comment. “It isn’t her unilateral decision to make!”
So, is Chamberlain within her legal rights to create such a book? According to lawyers PW spoke to, and details released thus far, she is on solid ground. There is nothing in Facebook’s terms of service that precludes Chamberlain from using posts to the group in a book project. And Chamberlain has stressed that she will secure permission from individual posters, and that participation in the book will be strictly voluntary.
In a post to the group, Chamberlain promised members that: “No post, image, comment, name, or other information shared in the group will be used in the book without explicit, written permission (and a legal release to use the material) from the author and/or photographer.” She added that she will “personally be in touch with every potential contributor” to “clarify this process, answer any questions, and make sure that permission is being given with a full understanding of how the post and any accompanying information will be used.”
That actually clears a higher bar than is likely legally necessary, and lawyers said that an author would have a pretty solid fair use argument for using portions of posts for which permission is not secured, even though Pantsuit Nation is a “secret” group, meaning that only members can view the posts on Facebook. Although, experts agree, it would be unwise for the project to rely on fair use.
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Perhaps Chamberlain’s biggest mistake was a failure to communicate.
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Legal questions aside, the thornier question is whether Chamberlain breached the group’s ethics.
”As long as the book’s inclusions are being published with permission, then everything is cool between Chamberlain and the original posters,” explained James Grimmelmann, Professor of Law, Cornell Tech. But, he acknowledged, “there’s something a little off-putting about the way she turned around and sprung this on the community without discussing it and made it her book deal, rather than a chance for the community to speak. It’s problematic because it misunderstands the nature of the community, and the relationships of people in and around it.”
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, who is writing a book about Facebook, agreed. “I would hope that she is taking into account the fact that the members of Pantsuit Nation were not posting with any sort of understanding or assumption that their work would be used in another context or outside the group,” he told PW. “If she wants her movement to have credibility in the future, she will have to understand and be sensitive to the special relationship that members of that group had to that moment in history, and to the group.”
Perhaps Chamberlain’s biggest mistake was a failure to communicate—specifically, her failure to first discuss with members the possibility of a book deal and other future plans for the group. In her follow-up post, Chamberlain said that proceeds from the book “will support Pantsuit Nation and the causes that are central to the group,” and that she is setting up nonprofit organizations. But that those plans were not firmed up and the nonprofits were not yet set up, helped to sow confusion and suspicion among members.
Still, that doesn’t have to be a fatal mistake. “I think the ethical issue is something that [Chamberlain] can repair with good dialogue and expressions of good faith,” said Grimmelmann. “By showing the right kind of respect for the members of the community, and recommitting to the values that brought them together, it becomes the kind of thing for which forgiveness and healing are possible.”
Vaidhyanathan agrees, and said that Chamberlain’s book can be a positive development. “If she can tell a good story, and can promote the efforts and hopefully the ideals of the group, then she can add value to the movement.”
Flatiron said it plans to release the book next May.
The post Pantsuit Nation Book Deal Raises Questions appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Bopardikar to Succeed Bacon at B&T
Chitra Bopardikar, v-p and general manager of B&T’s global publishers services, will take over responsibility for B&T’s international retail business as well following John Bacon’s retirement at the end of the year.
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December 2, 2016
FurtiveDalliance: A News Aggregator
For those of you that are looking to follow some independent news outlets that are trustworthy and have good reputations, I’ve collected some of them and added them to an aggregator. Posts are kept for 10 days.
Feeds from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, The Anti-Media, The Free Thought Project, It’s Going Down, Mint Press News, The Fifth Column / Podcast and CommonDreams are included.
Visit http://furtivedalliance.co.
November 28, 2016
Oh, hey.
So I haven’t been around in a while and the site was down for a bit, but I’ve recently rectified the latter and will work on the former again shortly. Maybe I’ll get inspired again when it snows.
September 5, 2016
Market Saturation & You
I’ve never had anyone give me a satisfactory answer to this question in my regular Facebook dealings, so I’m going to present it openly for anyone that would like to try.
One of the most common things people say when it comes to entry-level jobs is that they’re made for teenagers. It’s also something to do while you go to college and figure out how to pursue your career path. Whenever someone mentions how those jobs are low-paying and high stress, the former person will say, “get a better job. Go to school, learn a trade, better yourself.” Sure, okay. That’s a whole nother conversation in itself, but for the scope of this post my question is about market saturation and will be presented as a hypothetical scenario.
If you take 100 people right now, you’ll most likely have a pretty good mix of work. I’m just going to throw out some numbers for the sake of the scenario and say that maybe half work entry-level jobs such as food service, hospitality, and retail. 20 work office jobs at the base level. 10 work office jobs at an executive level. 5 are small business owners, and 5 are corporate CEOs. In this scenario, pay will stretch from around minimum wage hourly ($7.15 federal) to millions per year salary. Think of this as the situation we have now. A good mix of workers in different areas, different levels of pay and a (somewhat) median cost of living in between.
Now, consider a drastic change in the world. All of a sudden, everyone starts taking this “advice.” Our half entry-level becomes a quarter or less. The top 10 increases dramatically. Think of it something like this; 15 are entry-level, 10 work office jobs at the base level, 25 work office jobs at an executive level, 25 are small business owners and 25 are corporate CEOs. What happens when this scenario becomes a reality?
Well, for starters our productivity as a society would become disastrous. If entry-level jobs were actually only held by teenagers, can you imagine what would happen to business in this country? How many teenagers do you know that actually work a real job? I don’t mean part-time in the summer, I mean full-time after school and on weekends. I knew more teenagers that weren’t allowed to get jobs than that because their parents wanted them to concentrate on school.
So what we’ll do first is take away the majority of adults from things like fast food and cash registers (gas stations, coffee shops, etc.) During the week, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a place that isn’t overly packed and understaffed, which would lead to a host of problems. Next, we’ll saturate the more well-paying careers since our esteemed adults are now all college grads or tradesmen. The local unions go from a few hundred people to thousands. A dozen new dentist offices open and the patients become so spread out amongst them that none of them can make enough money to operate their businesses comfortably. The hospital has so many doctors that some of them aren’t getting many hours.
Do you see what I’m getting at?
If the median income goes up, the cost of living will go up. The cost of living goes up anyway, even without income raises. But now in this exercise, we have 75% more people making over say $60,000+ a year, so the price of movie tickets will go up. Eating out at restaurants will go up. Groceries, gas and home necessities will go up. Luxury items will probably triple. While our esteemed adults start getting hours cut because of market oversaturation and not enough business due to too much competition, after a period of time we’ll be back in this exact same situation. Twenty-somethings with college degrees will end up bagging groceries because they can’t find a job in their field. Feelings of hopelessness and depression rise in the general population, because the thing they’ve been taught from a young age is a lie: if you work hard and better yourself, you’ll get what you want out of life.
It’s not a difficult thing to understand. Every job that is done in this country is important. Custodians, housekeepers and chefs are vastly more important than some random company’s 3rd-floor Marketing exec that makes six digits a year coming up with one-liners like, “I’m lovin’ it.” Telling people to “just go to school” or “get a better job” will always contribute more to the problem than it will to solving it.
August 30, 2016
What Are We Mad About, Again?
Ebola came out of nowhere and exploded in the media, and then it disappeared overnight. Then Zika popped up, and that has disappeared as well. Brock Turner was a hot topic for a couple weeks, and then, you guessed it, he vanished. Ryan Lochte was the talk of the town for a little while, but then his fire died down to make way for Colin Kaepernick. (Let me not forget to mention that Feminist garbage heap Jezebel wrote an article about how sexy he is while shitting on him the whole time. Hooray, feminism?)
So, what are we mad about today? Actually, there are two things:
The DEA is starting a new war against Kratom. From the linked article:
Kratom is made from the leaves of Mitragyna speciosa, a Southeast Asian tree related to coffee, and has been consumed in Asia for millennia, typically as a tea or powder. The herb contains alkaloids that appear to activate opioid receptors in the brain and reduce pain. Although most opioids have sedative qualities, low to moderate doses of kratom serve as a mild stimulant.
Kratom has been used by a lot of people for everything from analgesia to anxiety maintenance, and more recently as a tool to help combat opiate withdrawal symptoms. Of course, if there are fewer people using drugs the DEA won’t have anything to make money off of, so that can’t happen. Kratom has also been used recreationally as a mood elevator, and we can’t have that, either. Happy people are less lucrative.
So what do we have? Another leg of the failed drug war that will cost taxpayers money and not do anyone any good. Not to mention, they plan on categorizing it as a Schedule I drug alongside heroin and marijuana, which is supposed to be reserved for the most dangerous substances. Cocaine, oxycontin, and meth are Schedule II for contrast.
Are you tired of throwing your money away, yet? Tired of Big Brother keeping natural remedies from you? If so, sign the petition to keep this from happening.
I’m also pretty upset that Brock Turner is getting out of jail on Friday. You remember him, right? The upstanding athlete that “raped” someone and got away with it? Yeah, that guy. Sentenced to six months for ruining a person’s life, and only did half that time for good behavior. I put raped in quotation marks because of the way our laws are written. As of now, technically, he’s not even a rapist. There’s so much about this case that just screams what the actual fuck, but apparently, it doesn’t matter.
Although Turner was convicted by a unanimous jury, Persky decided his punishment: six months in county jail and three years of probation—far less than the six years prosecutors had asked for, in line with the two-year minimum guideline for each of the three felony counts.
This judge, who said he believes that Turner’s recollection of events was true, also said that a prison sentence would have “a severe impact” and “adverse collateral consequences” on Turner.
So for the next however long you’re upset about Colin Kaepernick expressing his first amendment right in a way that he is legally allowed to, just remember that your misplaced outrage is helping a real monster walk free.
August 29, 2016
Seven Day Story: Conclusion
Marcus Colvin for BBTV 7, Brantleberry
In the early morning hours of Tuesday the fourteenth, the body of a missing cave diver was discovered about forty miles north of Exit 87. Caleb Dorne of Brantleberry was out on a solo survival hike when the worst of the worst happened; a troublesome encounter with nature ended in a broken leg.
We recently visited Dorne’s home and spoke with his girlfriend, Siobhan Clemens, about how things will change for her in the wake of this tragedy. As we made our way to the home neighbors waved cheerfully and kids shouted and played without worry. It never seems to get less unsettling that the world around us can be so utterly unknowing and carefree when one person’s existence has been shattered just next door.
We were invited in by a somber-yet-smiling woman who looked as if she had been interrupted while trying to sleep. She led us quietly into a sitting room with a sectional couch and two recliners of muted colors, and as we sat she retreated into the kitchen to grab drinks. A quick glance showed a familiar scene of family photos and nice end table ornaments, but nothing kid-related.
“I always expected him to come home when he left,” she starts. She sat glasses of water on the table in front of us before sitting down. She kept her eyes down on the floor as they welled with tears. “He had gone out dozens of times and always came back like it was easy. I don’t know what went wrong this time.
The first few days after the day he was supposed to be picked up were absolute panic. I didn’t sleep at all and spent most of the day at the police station waiting for answers.” She sipped some of her own water and focused on the glass in her hands. A nervous shift and clearing of the throat. “I had been waiting for him to come back since before he even left.”
Why was she so anxious for his return?
“I found out I was pregnant two days before he was scheduled to leave.”
Rescuers sifted through the remains of Dorne’s gear after his body was airlifted out of the forest to Brantleberry Medical. The sun continued to rise and the brisk morning temperature was subdued to a comfortable level. Brantleberry PD and Rescue were on scene as the immediate area was combed for clues as to how he had come to expire in what was supposedly an all-too-familiar situation for him. During the search of his belongings, detectives uncovered a notebook Caleb had been using to document his final days.
“I was wrong,” he states, setting an ominous tone for the rest of the pages contained in the notebook. The entries are short and sweet, but they depict his actions in trying to stay alive long enough to make it home. Unfortunately, he wasn’t so lucky, but it wasn’t for lack of skill.
“He was really good at what he did,” Siobhan says, smiling at the thought of her significant other in his element. “From what the ME’s report said it was septic shock that eventually took him over, which came from his wound getting infected. They told me that with the situation he was in, even the best of the best wouldn’t have had much better luck making it.
It gave me some peace.”
As you can see in the second scan, the fever of Sepsis began to take him over. His writing gets nearly illegible and blood is smeared on the page. It’s unclear whether the blood came from his initial leg wound or from elsewhere, but the examiner’s office was able to provide another comfort for his suffering partner in a time of agony.
“Once the fever hit, the pain from the leg would have mostly subsided. There was surely some discomfort from the heat and itch, but once it got down to the wire the delirium of the situation would have canceled out most of his pain.”
We sat and watched as Siobhan looked around the room at photos of her and Caleb together. She wiped tears from the edges of her eyes and put her hands on her stomach; on her and Caleb’s baby.
“It’s too early to tell the sex,” she said, noticing my eyes on her hands. “I didn’t tell him before he left because I wanted him to concentrate on his safety and health out there.” Her eyes filled once again and droplets of memory-laden salt spilled to the hardwood. “At least I know he would have been happy about it, from what I read in his notebook. At least some part of him will carry on even though he can’t.”
We didn’t want to press too much so with that, we thanked her for her graceful hospitality and made our way back to the station.
Once again this is Marcus Colvin for BBTV 7 Brantleberry. Be good to each other.
(An obituary for Caleb can be seen on our sister site under the Obits link.)
August 27, 2016
Seven Day Story Part 6
I’m losing time. It’s been hard for me to write. I don’t know what time it is. My watch is still going but I can’t see it very well. Everything is blurry and I don’t have any strength left. Even holding the pen is hard. I’m doing the best I can to document all of this but I’m not sure if it’s good or not. I can’t even tell if this is legible. I hope it is.
Siobhan is probably worried. I don’t know if I’m past the time or not but if I had to guess I’d say she started being worried days ago. It’s so hot. My body is burning up. It’s hard to concentrate and I just want to sleep more than anything. I haven’t moved from the tent since the last time I wrote and I can’t even tell you how long ago that was. Everything is slipping away.
I wish we would have had a girl. I said I wanted a boy so he would do the same things as me, but I really want a girl since she would be more like Siobhan and she’s the best person I’ve ever known. I hope she finds someone new and has her princess.
I don’t feel pain anymore.
