The real problem with Star Trek Into Darkness‘s bungled Blu-ray release

I saw someone mention plans to live-tweet a Star Trek: Into Darkness rewatch and I thought “Oh, yay! It’s out!” In hunting it down for purchase, however, I stumbled into this article and all I could do was sigh. REALLY?

Dear Media Companies:

As a hardcore fan of a great many things, particularly SciFi, Fantasy, and related genres, I’d really appreciate it if you gave me an opportunity to purchase your wares within some sort of PACKAGE that is – if not REASONABLY priced – at least not going to skin my wallet alive and force me to purchase multiple copies of the same crap I already own. What I want is ONE copy of the film itself and ONE copy of every special feature you care to share with the public at large for a fee.

I do not need, nor do I want, FIVE COPIES of the same movie, which each come with half of a featurette or every other word of the commentary track. Please tell your marketing guys to make some sense. Because instead of getting me as a $$$ customer, purchasing a MegaPlusSuperAwesomeExtraSpecialAllInOne boxed set, I’m just going to pick up whatever is most easily accessible for me at the most reasonable price, which will probably not be any of your special store affiliates.

No thanks,

~Me

Gigaom

If you’re not a hardcore DVD/Blu-ray enthusiast, you may not be aware of an interesting kerfuffle that’s just arisen. But while it might only seem to affect your more devoted variety of Star Trek fans on the surface, it serves as a case study of what’s going wrong with the physical media world at this moment.

This summer, the Paramount (s VIA) film Star Trek Into Darkness managed an impressive thing for a major blockbuster released in 2013 — not only was it critically popular for the most part, but it actually managed to make some money at the box office, as well.

But the site Trekcore.com last week ran an extraordinarily thorough review of the upcoming Blu-ray release of Star Trek Into Darkness — one that rated the Blu-ray transfer quality at five stars, but the special features at 0.5 stars.

Why such a dramatic difference in…

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Mini-Review Roundup: The Personal MBA, Platform, & Indie/Small Press #BookMarketing (#AmReading)

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The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business by Josh Kaufman

I’m a fan of the bootstrap approach to education, even as I also appreciate formal credentials and the work that often goes with them, so I was excited to find this book. It is truly encyclopedic without getting bogged down in (or, at least, without under-explaining) business jargon. It does feel a bit like a hodge-podge and like surface comprehensiveness sometimes trumps useful depth, but it’s a nice addition to a home set of business reference books. If you’re looking for accessible depth on key business topics, I’d again refer you to “Understanding Michael Porter” by Joan Magretta, which I mentioned in my post on competition and the business of writing.

Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World by Michael Hyatt

I know why this book is lauded. There’s some great content in here. It does, however, read rather like what much of it is – a collection of blog posts. It could have just been called “50 Things You Need to Know About Platforms,” a single blog post that would index the rest by topic. Now, maybe I’ve just been reading too much in this topic and often related startup advice these days, but most of this info is already discussed in so many places – for free. It makes me wonder if Hyatt is somewhat a victim of his own success with these ideas. Maybe he was the chicken who laid the whole platform egg, I can’t tell. At this point, though, I’d say that if you are only going to pick up one book on this topic or if you are unlikely to wander the internet, reading even just a handful of related blogs, then absolutely get this. If you are already hip deep in these issues, you can probably skip it, but, for the completists out there, since it’s kind of a classic in the field now, it’s worth picking up.

Indie & Small Press Book Marketing by William Hertling

This is actually a small but mighty little book that encapsulates both the key strategies and more detailed tactics of successfully marketing a book. True, it sometimes reads like an ebook-first text (complete with a few links that you obviously can’t open in a paperback version and some spots in need of copy editing), but the information that many other books take 20 pages to provide, this book does in 2 or less. I can’t say yet whether it is “The Book to Buy” on this topic, since I still have a whole stack of related books to go through, but I can say that NONE in my stack are this concise (less than 100 pages) while remaining informative. So, if you want a quick, logically structured, super-handy little marketing book, or even just want a great place to start, then this is an excellent book to pick up! I was excited about this book and it didn’t disappoint!


Current Reads: I’ve picked up some classic and fresh new fantasy books, which I’ll discuss in an upcoming post, as well as both Stephen King’s “On Writing” and Sol Stein’s “Stein on Writing.” (Yes, I do tend to read multiple books at once, switching based on my mood.) Everyone keeps recommending the King book, but the Stein one feels more readable and enjoyable for me right now. Am I missing something? Is this about me being more of an editor at heart and/or not actually being much of a Stephen King fan? (This is actually the third time I’ve tried to get into the King book and I still don’t know if I’ll finish it!)

~A23
@Aequanimitas23

Building Utopia?: Fiction on Perfection (#MondayBlogs)

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“This world of ours … must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.” – Dwight D Eisenhower

One of the stories in my queue of “maybe-novels” is my exploration of a utopian ideal put forth by a particular philosopher, infused with radical modern sensibilities taken to their logical ends. As someone who largely reads more dystopian texts, however, I always have to ask: “Utopia how and for whom?”

Even without devolving a utopic world into the elite vs dregs situation of many dystopian texts (e.g. Harrison Bergeron, Hunger Games), is it possible to imagine a utopia that seems logical and sustainable, that takes human imperfections and understandable conflict into account? As writers, can we strip humanity down to the bare essentials of assent and dissent, personal independence and societal order, and still have enough to make a story move forward?

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Writer on the Ledge: Identifying with “Risky” Writing

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WRITER OR WRITING?

I’ve been inside for a long time and I have no wings and no safety harness, but life’s presented me with a window, just big enough for me to fit through, and I’ve decided to step out. Even if there is nothing to hold me up but the ledge, I know that I’ll see and experience things that playing it safe will never give me. I’d like to say it’s not the first time, but if I’m honest, it really is. I’ve poked my head out, here and there, to look around the place and I’ve stuck my hands out, once or twice, to feel new things, even while still bunkered inside my walled up home base. Yet, I have never taken any real – public – risks, never gone beyond the cozy and largely safe spaces of my own heart and mind, a tribe of close friends and colleagues, and the pseudo-anonymity of niche communities where no one asks you to exit your bunker. Hence, I have never really tried to be a writer.

No, that’s not exactly true by traditional definitions. I’ve written countless things, shared many of them, published some, and dealt with both praise and criticism, though I’d certainly like to do more and better with all of these things. In that sense, I’ve more than tried to be a writer, I am one. For me, though, that’s all about process, not identity. I write, therefore I am? Maybe. What I haven’t tried is being a writer, walking in the world as a writer, saying the word out loud to someone else as a way of referencing who I am and what I do – being, as it were, “out” as a writer. As someone who has never been “straight,” it’s a situation I know entirely too well and don’t like for many good reasons, but unlike the dance I did for years over what to say or not and to whom when the question of relationships came up, I didn’t realize that I was so closeted about my writing until two weeks ago.

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The Business of Writing: On Envy, Competition, and Value

The Business of Writing: On Envy, Competition, and Value

Recommendations in this post:

One of the things I appreciate about this article, “Jealousy Among Writers” by Anne Emerick, is that it is honest without being accusatory and encourages us all to focus on learning, rather than whining, wallowing, or sniping. I’m naturally a very chill person – hence, the handle – but it’s always good to be reminded about the “how” and “why” of channeling problematic emotions into more productive activities. I remember reading somewhere (and I unfortunately don’t recall exactly where) that feelings are not facts, so feeling something doesn’t inherently make it true. When I feel rubbed the wrong way or frustrated, overlooked or just plain covetous, I remind myself that feelings are not facts and whatever’s going on probably has nothing to do with me and will ultimately affect my path very little or not at all.

Writing, as with much of life, isn’t a zero-sum game. Many of us can win, even if we win different things, at different times, or in different ways. I feel like no one will believe me if I say that professional writers (and artists and other striving-to-be-self-employed folks) should pick up Understanding Michael Porter, a business essentials book by Joan Magretta, as well as The Go-Giver, a business-oriented teaching tale by Bob Burg & John David Mann. I will recommend them here anyway, though. The Go-Giver is an easy, quick read, so I will understand if that’s the only one you pick up. If you can concede that writing is a business for you (or you would like it to be), however, then the way Magretta sums up and synthesizes core business concepts in Understanding Michael Porter will be deeply relevant to you too – even if you have to think outside your creative (un)box!

The point of any business is not to “do better than the Other Guy” (whatever that might mean) or to “crush the competition.” The point is to provide value to customers or clients, consistently and at a price that they are able and willing to pay. Regardless of the way you publish or distribute your writing, it has to be something in which readers find value, something that fulfills a need or want and does so well – by their standards, not yours! Whenever possible, you want to make your work the best mix of “unique” and “familiar” that you can manage so that readers want to turn to you again and again to meet that need/want, to be “topped up” with the value you provide. I go to certain writers when I want smirk-worthy wit and wordsmithing, others when I want lush worlds to get lost in for days, and still others when I want to contemplate humanity in its darkest as well as its most beautiful moments. That’s value, for me. No competition necessary.

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Review: The Well-Fed Self-Publisher by P. Bowerman

Review: The Well-Fed Self-Publisher by P. Bowerman

The unfortunate reality with many otherwise great “get yourself published” or “do-it-yourself publishing” books is that they rapidly become outdated if they’re not repeatedly and regularly revised. Talking about e-reader technology as “electronic gizmos” that haven’t really “caught on in a big way” and how to market to now defunct booksellers will do that to you. I state that upfront for folks who might be looking for a book wherein the definition of “self-publisher” is probably going to *mostly* be about ebooks and POD. This is not that book.

What this book DOES offer, however, is a profoundly comprehensive (sometimes maybe a little *too* comprehensive) look at how every step in the self-publishing process – from the idea to write a book in the first place to collecting checks over a lifetime – actually WORKS. Now, I know you’re thinking … “How can it do that if it’s out of date?” To that, I would say, “Think of this book less as a place to find THE singular answers to your questions about publishing and more as a place to find A) the right kinds of questions to ask, because there are far more you need to ask than you probably think, and B) effective ways to think through, research, and strategize toward the answers you need.” The author has opinions, of course, and discusses a variety of his own experiences and those of his clients and friends, but ultimately it is very much a book focused on helping the reader develop a detail-oriented frame of mind when it comes to this process.

My major takeaways from this book:

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Parable of the Sower (Review): Gorgeous, Gripping, Dark but Hopeful

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

It’s a journey that you take along with the main character, as she grows and changes, struggles and learns, and as the people around her do the same. I love how poetic it is, how honest it is in its darkness without tending toward sensationalism. As a reader (especially with Lynne Thigpen’s fantastic audiobook performance), you become as horrified and as cynical as the primary characters at times, but you (like they) can never fully let go of that hope that there must be something more to find, to build, at the end of all that hardship and suffering, a way to survive, even thrive. And even through all the challenges and the loss, there are still those moments – of laughter, of beauty, of communion … of positive humanity, It is gorgeous, a masterfully written and authentic-to-humanity work and world.

It reminds me why I fell in love with Octavia Butler’s writing in the first place.
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