John Cleese is Pinin' for the Fjords

I wasn't planning on posting this morning (only got 700 words in last night and need to make up for it), but I wanted to hit this while it's rattling around in the dusty, moldy-cheese-laden hamster maze that I carry around on my neck. So, I'll make it quick (yeah, right).

My thesis:

Surviving as a Producer of Popular Consumer Products in the New Economy; or: How Not to Use the Internet to Make Fans and Friends.

Some folks have it figured out; some are clueless; most of us are trying to get there, I think.

Amanda Palmer has it figured out. She tweets regularly. Not just tweets in a PR-heavy buy-my-shit kind of way, but really makes an effort to connect to fans. She has over 272k followers on Twitter, but actually talks to people who tweet her questions, comments, fan art, etc. She has responded to my lowly questions at least twice. She holds impromptu get-togethers before many of her shows and appearances, planned and announced sometimes an hour prior, always via Twitter--it's a little reward system for her followers. She tweets and blogs about her life, her problems, her victories. Zits on her ass (unfortunately, that's a true story). She helps her fans feel engaged, and part of her team, not just consumers of her products. She uses what often borders on over-communication to help her fans feel like they are truly integral in her successes and failures--the same behaviors you would find in highly successful managers at companies like Google.


Neil Gaiman has it figured out. Neil, who just happens to be making the two-back beast with Ms. Palmer, is a good Twit and blogger as well, but tends to be a little more private than Amanda--but that probably has as much to do with his British sensibilities as it does the sheer size of his following and respect for his own family. But, nonetheless, he keeps fans engaged at a good level, and it helps him stay at the head of his pack. Of note with Gaiman is that he was a relatively early adopter of this model--he started blogging his adventures while writing American Gods, sometime in 2000 I think.

Some other front-runners: Brian Keene, Adam Savage, Weird Al Yankovich, Cory Doctorow, Marian Call. They all seem to have their sea legs on the internet, for many of the same reasons as Palmer and Gaiman. You have to engage your fans, bring them into your circle (just decide which band of your circle to let them into), make it known that you recognize that your success requires a new kind of--to use the legal term--consideration. Quid quo pro. Tit-for-tat. This isn't the sheltered world of only seeing your heroes in magazines and TV. The wall is now paper-thin. Connect regularly and effectively, or get left behind.

John Cleese doesn't have it figured out. He tweets very rarely. In fact, there is strong evidence that John Cleese doesn't tweet, or at least pretends that it's not him behind the keyboard. He gets one point for trying, but the only time you hear from John's Tweetbox is either a random blip that makes no sense, or, more often, it's a direct and intrusive shill for a t-shirt. It doesn't work because he isn't taking the time to re-connect with his legions of fans, nor to open himself up to kids too young to remember Python, Fawlty, Wanda, or any of the other brilliant things he's done over the years. Cleese is the reason for this post, in fact--I just got a tweet from him asking me to click over and see what he's been up to. Well, he has been up to hiring a webguy to build a form on his website to capture my personal info so he can send me spam from third-party advertisers, as well as more t-shirt shills from his camp. Again, that's OK, but make it worth my while to continue to be a fan and give up my info--my time and patience aren't endless, and they certainly aren't free. Don't rely on your decades-old work to coerce me to open my wallet to buy a t-shirt.

Poppy Z Brite gets it, but she doesn't care. She has a good-sized following, she tweets regularly, connects with her followers, answers questions--but she isn't writing anymore and doesn't talk about writing much, and most of her tweets are either grouchy, angry, angry-grouchy, moody, or about football. But, such is genius, sometimes. I guess.

Danny Devito...Jesus, I don't even know what to say about this guy. I can't decide if he's a brilliant Twit, or just freaky-wrong. His tweets are random and often nonsensical (every time I read one of his wackier posts, I think about his drunken morning TV interview earlier this year, and the fact that almost every twipic he posts has a bottle or glass full or booze in it). Almost every post has a reference to his feet. It borders very closely on creepy. 90% of Devitos's tweets are like being drunk-dialed over the internet. But, goddamit, I can't bring myself to unfollow him, because he regularly tweets, he reveals details about his personal life (more in picture form than sentences that make sense--him and his wife in Paris, him behind the scenes at some play he's producing, him at the Venetian gondolas this morning). It works, I think, because it's intimate, it's voyeuristic, and it's like watching a slow-motion train wreck. I guess that counts as a win.

So, here's the challenge to all of you writers and new-media folks: after the books are written and the songs are recorded, what lessons will you take from these folks to help take your hobby and make it a career that actually pays the light bill?

Because your odds of getting that big book/record deal are getting slimmer every year.

Twitterly We Roll Along

Twitter certainly is an odd little bug, isn't it?

You can follow some arbitrary threads of people's lives, people that you've never met, probably will never meet, and may be in drastically different stations of life than yourself. One of my new hobbies is following people's tweet-threads (tweads? sigh...) and watching their collective discussions unravel and re-connect with other people in their lives, online and off. Do you all remember party lines? How some communities had shared phone lines, and you could pick up the phone and listen to your neighbors chatting, if you picked up the receiver quietly and didn't giggle?

It's like that.

For example, an average celebrity twead chase (following one tweet to a thread to a follower's tweets etc etc):

Amanda Palmer makes kissy-face tweets with her boyfriend Neil Gaiman >> Adam Savage from Mythbusters tweets about hanging out with Penn Jillette at TAM7 >> Trent Reznor complains about scary women who now chase him in his middle age >> Weird Al twitpics Seth Green riding a segway in Al's front room, and then asks his wife where left his shoes, who reminds Al that he left them by the hammock where he napped that morning >> Clive Barker and Peter Straub try to out-story each other with (supposedly...probably) true tales of back-room shows in Amsterdam and Mexican girlie bars...

And so on. Bizarre. Not sure how much longer it can hold my interest, but it certainly is a new thing. Takes the fucking varnish right off of celebrities, which lies in stark contrast to how famous people were "supposed" to behave when I was young. I prefer this way--more natural. They seem human. Celebrity is a weird, artificial shell anyway.

Also, I've seen Clive Barker tweet-up Felicity Dowker a few times, which is very cool.

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Here in about ten minutes, the wife and kids are off to visit family on Montana for a week or so, and I (and my Malamute) have the house all to ourselves. I'm taking a few days off next week, and my plan, among other things, is to pretend to be a Professional Writer. Which means, I suppose, writing for the majority of the work day, instead of doing the DayJob™ all day and writing at night. It will be a fun little fiction...see what It would be like, if It paid enough to do It full time.

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And now, the new Zombieland Trailer (NSFW, zombie bewbs and all that).

Hiss Pop

I have a recurring dream (partially based on real-life events) where I abandon my apartment, and then feel too detached from it to return; when I eventually do, the refrigerator is full of moldy food and the plants are spindly, dead things. Unpaid bills are stacked on the table. Insects and rodents have moved into the cupboards. Etc etc.

In reality, I have just felt too overwhelmed by information and work and life to log in and post anything to this blog. I will try to do better, honest. I like doing it, but sometimes it seems more like work than fun, and I needed a break. Also, and I think this is a big part of it, I don't think I have as much to say as most of you do; my goal is to finish a novel-length MS this year, and to discuss that on a blog is boring as all shitfire...so I don't, but I quickly run out of things to say. Unfortunately, that kind of led to not reading other people's blogs either, and that's really what I missed the most. So, I'm going to renew my efforts to keep in touch.

And that's all I'm gonna say about that.

Θ

I hit the 50k mark on Aquarium, but it got too dark, so I put it aside. No, not dark: just depressing. Kind of mopey. The characters were all in a bad way, and everything was going to shit, and I didn't have a good direction to take it except more suffering and whining. With everything going on in my life this year, I don't need depressing.

I have spent the last couple of weeks outlining a new story that I hope will be more light and fun to write, and I knocked out the first 1k last night. I hope it goes better. I will probably revisit Aquarium, but I needed to get my head out of that space for a while.

I did take a break and knock out a 4k short for an Esquire magazine contest. That was fun. My odds are probably better winning a progressive jackpot with one pull than winning this one, but, what the hey...if writers paid any kind of attention to those kinds of things, there wouldn't be any of us.

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As a few of you know, I have been outed as a Facebooker and Twitterling. Despite my protests and bashing, I kind of get Twitter now. Kind of. I'm still pretty averse to talking about my goings-on randomly (because, in my mind, that assumes that someone gives a rat's ass what I'm doing, which may not be the case). Twitter is a great stalking machine, though. I know more about Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer's lovefest than I care to, I know where Adam Savage is at all times, In know when Zoe Keating is mixing tracks for her new album, and I know Peter Straub is kind of an old goofball, but in a good, funny way.

But on the other hand, it also helps me keep up with some good folks I know from the blogosphere, like Cate, Robert, Nat, and Mercedes. So, there you go. If you are in those clubs, friend/follow me, and I'll stalk you, too.

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Since my last post, I finished King's Cell on audiobook, which was OK, started Elmore Leonard's Mr Paradise on audiobook, which is kind of funny because the narrator sounds like Dennis Farina and uses the same NYC gangster voice for all of the characters, even the cheerleader/prostitutes.

Also, I read and did kind of a critique for Barry Napier's Darklights, a published ebook that he is looking to re-write and re-release. If you haven't done a critical read of a book like that, I would recommend that you do, at least once. It was very insightful to read my own notes about the things I kind of stumbled on in the story, or points that seemed to be missing or scenes that weren't believable (not to publicly trash Barry's work...but that's what you have to do in a critical review...nitpick), and then apply that same criticism against my own work. Very insightful and useful. I had the opportunity to do the same on Cate Gardner's Poison Apple last winter, but I blew it...I think I was too afraid of being critical of someone else's work when I had no confidence in my own. But, I sucked it up for Darklights, and it was worth it.

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