Sam Landstrom's Blog

Website re-design

My niece Ellie Knapp, re-designed the art and styling of my website to be more sci-fi. She's a cool modern youth. They aren't all on meth!

http://samlandstrom.com

Pre-orders for MetaGame in Barns and Noble and Borders!

Wow, Barns and Noble and Borders each pre-ordered 400 paperbacks of MetaGame. 800 right there, baby! Noice (that's Australian for "nice").

I totally assumed that B&N and Borders would give AmazonEncore the finger when asked to order books *published by* Amazon.com, their hated enemy. But they were bigger than that.

And now I can walk into a brick-n-mortar bookstore and see my book. Check that dream-come-true off the list. Really noice.

Gamepocalypse Now!

In MetaGame, the future of our world economy, social structure, and even religion is dominated by gaming. Well, that's sci-fi for ya--crazy, entertaining, maybe even thought provoking, but not reality.

But wait! There are serious people out there who not only think this future is possible, but even inevitable!

Check out Jesse Schell's blog "Gamepocalypse Now". Jesse's a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon university and the guy who wrote the bible on game design. Also, check out a video of his short lecture on world gamification: Beyond Facebook. There are a lot of parallels between his talk and MetaGame.

That would be awesome of MetaGame could become a futurist business book. I could use the cash. :)

Hedonic Adaptation is a great term

"Hedonic Adaptation" is what happens to you a few weeks after you buy that new car--you adapt to your new toy and it loses it's luster. Or if you move from drizzle Washington to sunny California. You'll be pumped for a while, but gradually you'll level out.

Maybe this is why rockstars and actors seemingly kill themselves more often than the general public. Can you adapt to getting everything you want all the time? Become numb to pleasure?

On the positive side, this term also refers to when life takes a turn for the worse. For instance, if you cut your finger off with a pruning shears, you will be severly depressed at first, but over time you will adapt to it. Yes, the loss of your finger will continue to suck; however, the suckiness will gradually decrease over time, and although you will never look back on your accident with fondness, you will learn to type, play tennis, etc, with four fingers.

Apparently, you can slow down this adaptation by taking breaks. So if you were Caligula of hedonic Rome, it would behoove you to take breaks during feasting, orgies, gladiatorial battles, and the like. Or in the modern day, take a break during a massage, between episodes of "Dexter", whatever.

For stuff you hate to do, on the other hand, just knock that out all at once. The pain starts off more intense, but as time goes by, decreases, right? Taking a long break in the middle of yard work or taxes is going to make the whole process that much worse... or so the theory goes.

BTW, I learned about hedonic adaptation from the book I just finished: The Upside of Irrationality

People are "experience goods"

I'm reading a book called The Upside of Irrationality that's about behavioral economics. The author talks about online dating services providing a service for buying and selling "experience goods"--also known as people!

LOL, that's cold. I love economic theory because it's so reductionist in it's approach to humanity that it reminds me of distopian sci-fi. Great place to get material.

The English Language Blows

So my book got handed off from what I'm calling my "in-depth" editor to a copy-editor. My wife and two other editors have scoured my manuscript for grammatical errors and so you'd think I'd be sitting pretty, but noooo! Or is it "no-ooo"? Or just "NO"?

This new editor is finding issues on every page! Small stuff, mostly, but come on!

I was born in the United States, write for a living, and have lived for 36 years. Why can't I master this language?

The English must have had a lot of time on their hands and been really anal-retentive to come up with so many rules. I can see why Roger Waters didn't "want no education". Cripes!

Anyway, thanks to Jessica for being so thorough. It's like she has x-ray vision. Soon my book will be sparkly clean and, furthermore, will comply with the Chicago Manual of Style. Does every city have their own version of English? Did we just pick a city in the middle to split the difference?

Everyday is science fiction.

Sam

MetaGame getting published by AmazonEncore

Ding! Ding! Ding! First blog post on here!

My book MetaGame has been selected to get published by AmazonEncore, a new publishing division of Amazon.com. They'll release it in Sept. Pre-order here, baby!

Isn't it interesting that an online bookstore publishes their own books?

It's kind of like a grocery store selling their own brand of bread, milk, and yogurt... Oh, wait they already do that. In my neck of the woods there's a chain of grocery stores called Safeway which has their own "Safeway Select" brand of all kinds of typical food items. Same thing with their competitor down the road, Fred Meyer.

So why not do the same thing with books? The bookstore publishes it's own books and keeps a larger share of the profits. Good stuff.

Here's how it works: As you may know, anyone can publish a Kindle book on the Amazon store at no cost to you and you can charge whatever you want for the book. These folks are called "indie authors". Amazon takes a cut of anything sold this way and so you'd think it would end there, but the company did something clever. Because they're Amazon, they can analyze their own sales, ratings, and other data to determine indie books that show potential. An editor That's when AmazonEncore gets in there. The author gets free editing, new cover art, some promotion, etc and then their book is re-released.

Hey, it works for me!

But wait, AmazonEncore is evolving. It has only existed for about a year and it has already outgrown it's name. They're not just re-releasing successful indie books, they're now taking on some new unpublished manuscripts, just like a traditional publisher.

Ask any economist and they'll tell you competition is good and so I suppose AmazonEncore is doing their part to keep costs down and maybe enabling a few extra authors (authors like me) to sell a few extra books.

Your comments welcome, of course.

Sam