Simon Duringer's Blog, page 26
August 12, 2014
It looks so wrong but it feels so right!
Well, it’s possibly the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. Helen Mirren you are a superstar and the fact you can twerk just makes you more so…
By the way, since you starred in The Queen you have absolutely blossomed…. If ever one could fancy a pensioner you would most certainly be that girl!
August 11, 2014
Depression
It’s a real sad day today as we discover Robin Williams has ended his life…
What’s the bigger picture and what can we learn from this travesty? Depression… hmmm… well, we’ve all been there haven’t we… I know I sure have. An end to a marriage, a career, feeling alone when all those around continue on. It makes one feel isolated, nobody understands, nobody cares…
But they do…
There is help out there… great charities. I suppose one may feel they are patronising, OMG what? charity? I am a charity case… There’s a stigma attached to it. But they are great, they are honest, they are helpful… Nobody should be alone, nobody needs to feel alone… there are people out there who want to help, who understand, who have been there…
The passing of an awesome actor, Robin Williams, comedian and character reminds us that nobody is immune to the effects of this horrible condition. Rich or poor, depression can hit us all…
But there is help out there… I am saddened by Robin’s passing… let it not be in vein. If you are or know of anybody suffering from depression, help them… help them get help… there is help out there…
http://www.thepsychologyteam.co.uk/si...
http://www.thewellnessshop.co.uk/
http://www.pandasfoundation.org.uk/?g...
Buzzfeed
Who are these guys that call themselves BuzzFeed?
1. Well it would seem they’re rather popular with traffic that draws 150 million average monthly viewers.
2. They created Numbered lists and this is what the site is most famous for and drives much of its audience.
3. But lastly, unhappy with their current status, BuzzFeed wants to be known for much, much more.
Can you believe BuzzFeed just closed a new $50 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. The investment values the company at about $850 million, “according to a person with knowledge of the deal”. Horowitz should look around… Hey what about Simon’s 10Q Interviews… Ok perhaps not!
Now the question is can BuzzFeed maintain the agility and skills of a tech start-up while building the breadth of a large media company. I am guessing the answer is yes but only time will tell.
“As we grow, how can we maintain a culture that can still be entrepreneurial?” said Jonah Peretti, the company’s co-founder and chief executive. “What if a Hollywood studio or a news organization was run like a start-up?”
So, BuzzFeed Hires Greg Coleman as President… Makes sense, he’ll probably make it all go viral…
BuzzFeed Politics Writer Is Fired Over plagiarism… Ooops!
BuzzFeed, based in New York, started in 2006 as a kind of laboratory for viral content — It produces highly shareable lists and videos that pepper social media sites. But way back when it began adding more traditional content, and therein began creating a track record for delivering breaking news and deeply reported articles, and it has tried to marry its two halves in one site.
But what has really set BuzzFeed apart, Mr. Peretti said, is its grasp of technology. The company, which now has 550 employees, has been especially successful at distributing its lists and content through mobile devices and through social sites like Facebook and Twitter.
The photo-sharing site Pinterest, in particular, now drives more traffic to BuzzFeed’s Life section than Twitter does, Mr. Peretti said. Social media accounts for 75 percent of BuzzFeed’s referral traffic, according to the company.
Chris Dixon, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who will join BuzzFeed’s board, said: “We think of BuzzFeed as more of a technology company. They embrace Internet culture. Everything is first optimized for mobile and social channels.”
Still, the company faces the same problem that more traditional publications do — rates for traditional online advertising, on general interest sites like BuzzFeed, have dropped consistently from year to year.
To keep up, sites must either perpetually increase traffic at a steady clip, or innovate and move into new and potentially more lucrative areas like so-called native advertising and video.
Already, BuzzFeed’s revenue is largely derived from BuzzFeed Creative, the company’s 75-person unit dedicated to creating for brands custom video and list-style advertising content that looks similar to its own editorial content. Mr. Peretti declined to share financial details, but he said BuzzFeed’s revenue for the first half of 2014 was twice as much as the first half of 2013. According to Mr. Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz, BuzzFeed is expected to generate revenue in the triple-digit millions of dollars by the end of 2014.
Nice work if you can get it…
Some analysts consider BuzzFeed’s continued reliance on social media sites for traffic as a major liability. Way back in in 2011, The Washington Post introduced its Social Reader application, a major initiative that allowed their users to read and share articles from the newspaper within Facebook’s News Feed. Initially this appeared to be a great idea and created loads of web traffic for the publication. But when users complained about bring spammed by constant notifications of what their friends were reading, Facebook changed its News Feed settings, and traffic plummeted.
“If Facebook decides to tinker with its algorithms tomorrow, these viral publishers could be gone in the blink of an eye,” said Nate Elliott, an analyst with Forrester Research. “They’re putting their entire existence in another company’s hands.”
This is not Mr. Peretti’s first media enterprise, however. He was a co-founder, along with Arianna Huffington and the venture capitalist Kenneth Lerer, of The Huffington Post. That online media start-up, which relied heavily on showing up in Google search results for traffic, was sold to AOL in 2011 for $315 million. Mr. Lerer, also a BuzzFeed co-founder and investor, will soon take a more active role at BuzzFeed as executive chairman.
The company also plans a fast expansion into international markets, already a major driver of the site’s new-user growth, with plans to open offices in Japan, Germany, Mexico and India this year.
And the future of BuzzFeed may not even be on BuzzFeed.com. One of the company’s nascent ideas, BuzzFeed Distributed, will be a team of 20 people producing content that lives entirely on other popular platforms, like Tumblr, Instagram or Snapchat.
Initially, it will not be a direct revenue stream for the company. But Mr. Peretti says he thinks it will ultimately give the company a much larger reach than traditional counts of web page views can measure.
“We’re organizing ourselves to be a media company for the way people consume media today,” Mr. Peretti said.
Watch out Murdoch you have company… 
August 9, 2014
The Amazon vs Hatchette Debate
OK… So I asked but people decided they wanted to know…
What I would like you to do is read the email below and let me know what you think. After all, shouldn’t I have an opinion of my own, is this a threat from my beloved amazon bosses? Personally I think amazon has been a great way into publishing our books and eBooks, it has allowed me to get books out there which, perhaps, would otherwise have never made it to market. But now we are talking about pricing…
Amazon have come up with a great marketing strategy for our books and/or eBooks. But they are now being sued by Hatchett who do not agree with the amazon strategy…
In rebuttal Amazon have outlined their argument, indeed they have emailed KDP members requesting not only their views, but additionally requested positive action towards or against Hatchett.
As far as I can ascertain the Amazon argument is sound… they have analysed book sales over an extended period of time and discovered that less is more. However, whilst you will see from their email that the figures are balanced in the author’s favour, one must step back and look at the bigger picture…
Should Amazon have a monopoly on book pricing, indeed if the likes of Random House authors wish to charge £10+ for an eBook, why shouldn’t they? After all it is their sweat and blood up for sale…
If nothing sells then so be it, we all live in a competitive world where authors live or die by the pricing policy. It’s our choice, our work… and whilst all the amazon analysis in the world may be correct, as individuals, surely we have the right to calculate the price of our work and run with it i.e. this is how long it took to write and therefore this is what we need to accrue in order to make a living… If that does not work we then only have ourselves to blame.
I must admit I think there must be something more to the argument as it surely can’t be that straightforward! But to me, it would seem that the underlying issue is choice, Hatchett want one, but Amazon is so hooked up on the revelation of finding the perfect marketing strategy that they believe everybody should jump aboard without a second thought.
Truth is… you’re both right but it seems to me working together is the issue. You guys at amazon are real clever, but step outside of the box for a moment and look at the bigger picture, from the point of view of us lesser authors. Really, We are never going to sell 1,000,000 copies of our books and therefore your great decimalised analysis doesn’t apply to the majority… If it ain’t broke don’t fix it!
I think amazon are great, but I also think they may have missed the boat on this one… Back to basics guys, we all love you, that’s why you are so successful!
Here’s the email they sent me which, I might add I find rather misguided….
Dear KDP Author,
Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year.
With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.
Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.
Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers.
The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books.
Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.
Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We’ve quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.
But when a thing has been done a certain way for a long time, resisting change can be a reflexive instinct, and the powerful interests of the status quo are hard to move. It was never in George Orwell’s interest to suppress paperback books – he was wrong about that.
And despite what some would have you believe, authors are not united on this issue. When the Authors Guild recently wrote on this, they titled their post: “Amazon-Hachette Debate Yields Diverse Opinions Among Authors” (the comments to this post are worth a read). A petition started by another group of authors and aimed at Hachette, titled “Stop Fighting Low Prices and Fair Wages,” garnered over 7,600 signatures. And there are myriad articles and posts, by authors and readers alike, supporting us in our effort to keep prices low and build a healthy reading culture. Author David Gaughran’s recent interview is another piece worth reading.
We recognize that writers reasonably want to be left out of a dispute between large companies. Some have suggested that we “just talk.” We tried that. Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store. Since then Amazon has made three separate offers to Hachette to take authors out of the middle. We first suggested that we (Amazon and Hachette) jointly make author royalties whole during the term of the dispute. Then we suggested that authors receive 100% of all sales of their titles until this dispute is resolved. Then we suggested that we would return to normal business operations if Amazon and Hachette’s normal share of revenue went to a literacy charity. But Hachette, and their parent company Lagardere, have quickly and repeatedly dismissed these offers even though e-books represent 1% of their revenues and they could easily agree to do so. They believe they get leverage from keeping their authors in the middle.
We will never give up our fight for reasonable e-book prices. We know making books more affordable is good for book culture. We’d like your help. Please email Hachette and copy us.
Hachette CEO, Michael Pietsch: Michael.Pietsch@hbgusa.com
Copy us at: readers-united@amazon.com
Please consider including these points:
– We have noted your illegal collusion. Please stop working so hard to overcharge for ebooks. They can and should be less expensive.
- Lowering e-book prices will help – not hurt – the reading culture, just like paperbacks did.
- Stop using your authors as leverage and accept one of Amazon’s offers to take them out of the middle.
- Especially if you’re an author yourself: Remind them that authors are not united on this issue.
Thanks for your support.
The Amazon Books Team
P.S. You can also find this letter at www.readersunited.com
OK… So I asked but people decided they wanted to know…
Wh...
OK… So I asked but people decided they wanted to know…
What I would like you to do is read the email below and let me know what you think. After all, shouldn’t I have an opinion of my own, is this a threat from my beloved amazon bosses? Personally I think amazon has been a great way into publishing our books and eBooks, it has allowed me to get books out there which, perhaps, would otherwise have never made it to market. But now we are talking about pricing…
Amazon have come up with a great marketing strategy for our books and/or eBooks. But they are now being sued by Hatchett who do not agree with the amazon strategy…
In rebuttal Amazon have outlined their argument, indeed they have emailed KDP members requesting not only their views, but additionally requested positive action towards or against Hatchett.
As far as I can ascertain the Amazon argument is sound… they have analysed book sales over an extended period of time and discovered that less is more. However, whilst you will see from their email that the figures are balanced in the author’s favour, one must step back and look at the bigger picture…
Should Amazon have a monopoly on book pricing, indeed if the likes of Random House authors wish to charge £10+ for an eBook, why shouldn’t they? After all it is their sweat and blood up for sale…
If nothing sells then so be it, we all live in a competitive world where authors live or die by the pricing policy. It’s our choice, our work… and whilst all the amazon analysis in the world may be correct, as individuals, surely we have the right to calculate the price of our work and run with it i.e. this is how long it took to write and therefore this is what we need to accrue in order to make a living… If that does not work we then only have ourselves to blame.
I must admit I think there must be something more to the argument as it surely can’t be that straightforward! But to me, it would seem that the underlying issue is choice, Hatchett want one, but Amazon is so hooked up on the revelation of finding the perfect marketing strategy that they believe everybody should jump aboard without a second thought.
Truth is… you’re both right but it seems to me working together is the issue. You guys at amazon are real clever, but step outside of the box for a moment and look at the bigger picture, from the point of view of us lesser authors. Really, We are never going to sell 1,000,000 copies of our books and therefore your great decimalised analysis doesn’t apply to the majority… If it ain’t broke don’t fix it!
I think amazon are great, but I also think they may have missed the boat on this one… Back to basics guys, we all love you, that’s why you are so successful!
Here’s the email they sent me which, I might add I find rather misguided….
Dear KDP Author,
Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year.
With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.
Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.
Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers.
The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books.
Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.
Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We’ve quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.
But when a thing has been done a certain way for a long time, resisting change can be a reflexive instinct, and the powerful interests of the status quo are hard to move. It was never in George Orwell’s interest to suppress paperback books – he was wrong about that.
And despite what some would have you believe, authors are not united on this issue. When the Authors Guild recently wrote on this, they titled their post: “Amazon-Hachette Debate Yields Diverse Opinions Among Authors” (the comments to this post are worth a read). A petition started by another group of authors and aimed at Hachette, titled “Stop Fighting Low Prices and Fair Wages,” garnered over 7,600 signatures. And there are myriad articles and posts, by authors and readers alike, supporting us in our effort to keep prices low and build a healthy reading culture. Author David Gaughran’s recent interview is another piece worth reading.
We recognize that writers reasonably want to be left out of a dispute between large companies. Some have suggested that we “just talk.” We tried that. Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store. Since then Amazon has made three separate offers to Hachette to take authors out of the middle. We first suggested that we (Amazon and Hachette) jointly make author royalties whole during the term of the dispute. Then we suggested that authors receive 100% of all sales of their titles until this dispute is resolved. Then we suggested that we would return to normal business operations if Amazon and Hachette’s normal share of revenue went to a literacy charity. But Hachette, and their parent company Lagardere, have quickly and repeatedly dismissed these offers even though e-books represent 1% of their revenues and they could easily agree to do so. They believe they get leverage from keeping their authors in the middle.
We will never give up our fight for reasonable e-book prices. We know making books more affordable is good for book culture. We’d like your help. Please email Hachette and copy us.
Hachette CEO, Michael Pietsch: Michael.Pietsch@hbgusa.com
Copy us at: readers-united@amazon.com
Please consider including these points:
– We have noted your illegal collusion. Please stop working so hard to overcharge for ebooks. They can and should be less expensive.
- Lowering e-book prices will help – not hurt – the reading culture, just like paperbacks did.
- Stop using your authors as leverage and accept one of Amazon’s offers to take them out of the middle.
- Especially if you’re an author yourself: Remind them that authors are not united on this issue.
Thanks for your support.
The Amazon Books Team
P.S. You can also find this letter at www.readersunited.com
July 16, 2014
Marilyn Holdsworth Interview
#RT A descendent of President James Monroe, The Marilyn Holdsworth interview is now live! http://simonduringer.com/latest-news/... #ian1 #wkbpromo #books
July 12, 2014
YouTube Videos... Do they work?
You're sure to like the books if you give them a go... Many have already, but always love to speak with new readers :-)
http://youtu.be/XzKw0g54ZeM
http://youtu.be/bHk8hhcnvZ8
http://youtu.be/hF7AVjEI06o
Enjoy...
July 7, 2014
Matt Pallamary
http://simonduringer.com/?p=2888
June 25, 2014
Alex von Tunzelmann Interview
http://simonduringer.com/?p=2874
June 19, 2014
Bernard Cornwell OBE
It is little wonder the gentleman below is looking totally at ease with the world, for he is the idol to many idols and regarded by some as the most successful Historical Fiction writer of our time, perhaps… Ever!
His writing repertoire comprises 54 Novels of which 16 have been converted to film. One of his biggest fans is none other than George R R Martin, author of Game of Thrones and it is possible that HM QEII could be a fan given that she awarded him an OBE in her 80th Birthday Queen’s Honours list.
I think he needs no further introduction…
I am absolutely delighted to announce that the amazing Bernard Cornwell
has agreed to run the gauntlet of Simon’s 10 Q Interviews…
It could be said that the wider reading public have to thank ‘love and politics’ for Bernard Cornwell’s
rise to literary fame, for it was the love of his wife that lured him to foreign lands and the red tape and bureaucracy of politics that prevented him getting a working visa, hence leading him to raise a quill and create a new path from an already established and successful career.
In fact it might seem to some that success is a pre-ordained and deep seated characteristic of Bernard
as prior to leaving the U.K. his career was established within the BBC, indeed he became the head of current affairs at BBC Northern Ireland before moving to Thames Television as the Editor of Thames News… I have a feeling he may just turn my desert island into a metropolis before we are done!
Whilst Bernard
has lived with fame for a number of decades, he remains grounded, regularly answering questions from his readers about his books and often giving lectures. He still conducts the vast majority of his research alone and 100% of the writing, though he has previously mentioned that he has been forced into this predicament due to the fact both his wife and assistant refuse to help! His website message is one of encouragement for readers, writers and visitors of all genres and he happily publishes his visitor’s reviews on his site for the benefit of fellow visitors and readers.
On his days off, Bernard
is a regular guy, a thespian, who can periodically be found at his local theatre, on stage. In fact, he takes part in two plays later this year; Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
and The Man Who Came to Dinner
by Moss Hart
& George S. Kaufman
. If you would like more details about tickets for these shows, you can find them at the website of The Monomoy Theatre in Cape Cod… Aside from that we’re in the dark, but hopefully not for long!
So, readers, whilst I prepare myself to deliver some of the most difficult questions yet, to the most acclaimed interviewee to take part on Simon’s 10 Q Interview’s, why don’t you scroll down to the bottom of the page to watch a; short, sharpe
(pun intended!), video scene starring Sean Bean
in one of Bernard’s
highly acclaimed Sharpe novels and then perhaps visit Bernard’s
pages on Amazon for more information about his gargantuan library of works. Either way be sure to bookmark this page, spread the word and join us soon for the full Bernard Cornwell
Interview!
Amazon (U.S. Readers) – Bernard Cornwell
Amazon (U.K. Readers) – Bernard Cornwell
The Bernard Cornwell interview is due to take place during June/July 2014.
Simon Duringer © 2014.
Simon Duringer is both a Goodreads author and Independent Interviewer. His multiple Amazon 5 star thriller Stray Bullet is available to buy on Amazon using the following US or UK Link;
UK Link
Stray Bullet
US Link
Stray Bullet
Simons 10 Q Interviews was a Finalist in the U.K. Blogging Awards 2014.
Pay attention and watch it twice! It’s a goose pimple moment, isn’t it?
