Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

A handy point and shoot camera for capturing blog images

Some years ago I realized that my camera needs would be satisfied by a reasonably capable point and shoot camera and I discarded my cameras with multiple lenses for this Sony F828 which has been a reliable workhorse for about six years.

All good things come to an end and my Sony started failing intermittently. When I discovered how expensive the repairs were and how poor the official Sony service centers were, I decided it was time to change camera brands.

Doug Thompson, a professional photographer, spoke highly of Canon service and reliability and my wife Gretchen has had excellent results with her Canon cameras, so I decided that I would find a Canon model that would give me good low light performance and would provide a zoom lens with at least 10X magnification.

There are so many models that it was hard to choose between them, but I ended up with a Canon PowerShot SX20 IS which has all the features I need for less than $400.

I won't bore you with specifications, but this is like having a camera attached to a 20X spotting scope. The magnification can be pushed to 80X with 20X optical and 4X electronic.

I discovered that I can shoot photos that look almost like macro shots except these are shot at distant targets.

Here are two views of our ice-covered gravel driveway and both shots were taken from the shelter of the front porch. The ice-covered gravel in the right hand image is from the center of the frame of the driveway image. You are seeing what ice covered pea-sized gravel looks like from 25 feet away.

In the two images below, you can see two views of an ice-covered tree about 20 feet away, both shot from the shelter of the front porch. The branch detail is from the upper left quadrant of the tree picture.

 

Camera evolution is proceeding at such a pace that I fully expect that this camera will be obsolete in a year or so. I can't imagine what the next few generation of consumer cameras will look like, but I can guess that they will provide a Bluetooth connection so that one will be able to shoot and post the image online in one operation and they will capture images in much lower light levels.

New HP Wireless Printer is a winner

 The HP Officejet Pro 8000 Wireless printer handles one of the biggest problems of our home office. It prints high quality images from any computer in the house or shop and was available on Amazon.com last week for only $127.99. This is something that almost any home office can use.

With our multiple computers and laptops, it has always been a struggle to connect to a printer when we needed one in a hurry. With this new wireless printer we can print from anywhere in the house or workshop or even from the back deck.

This printer is fast (up to 35 pages per minute black and up to 34 pages per minute color) and the four ink cartridges give it a range of colors that our other printers could not achieve.

Installation was a bit unnerving at first because I am not used to peripherals that turn themselves on and perform a 20 minute setup procedure with no human intervention.

When I plugged in the power cord, the OfficeJet Pro 8000 went into a busy self-test cycle that produced lots of chirps and other noises, but no printouts at all.

I looked at the instructions but there was only a cryptic instruction to turn on the unit and wait for the alignment page to print.

After another five minutes of clicking and whirring and no printout, I was ready to turn the printer off and check for a paper jam.

At this exact moment, the printer spat out a brief instruction sheet in nine languages:

Do not turn off the printer; the printer is initializing.
During this process, you might hear some tapping sounds.
While waiting, install the printer software.

(It did not mention the whirring, machine muttering, and chirps)

I am not used to getting scolded by my printers, but I took its advice and installed the software on all computers within reach. By the time the computer software installation was complete, the printer had stopped muttering to itself and was ready for action.

We fired off print commands from one computer after another and the printer smoothly executed them at high speed. The wireless capability makes all the difference in the world. We have used printer sharing systems in the past, but the cabling makes for a time-consuming installation.

The designers at HP got this design right. For more information on this beauty, read on after the jump.

Do not believe in the trap of scarcity

Scarcity is an interesting trap. If somebody makes something "scarce", it can appear more valuable than it actually is. Your attention becomes riveted on the "scarcity" rather than looking for available alternatives.

(This was written a few years ago and it is even more true today. With the current state of the Internet, the barriers to self-publishing or starting a business are significantly reduced.)

When there is the prospect of getting your CD or book published, an artificially created scarcity can keep one fixated on something that is unlikely to happen. There are saner ways to proceed.

Look at the role of scarcity in maintaining control of traditional publishing. There are millions of people who write and only a handful of publishers who have figured out the keys to getting their books in bookstores.

Well, traditional publishers used to be the only real outlets for a writer, but that is no longer the case.  There is no shortage of publishers who can print an excellent quality book and ship it to customers on demand.

With a little work, you can see your work in print and on Amazon.com. You can generate sales without having to rely on traditional publishers or bookstores.

Bookstores are another example of scarcity. There is only so much room and they must stock what their customers will buy. As an unknown, your books will only appear in a bookstore if you or your friends bring books to the store.

If you sell online and offer free shipping, why would anyone need to find your book in a bookstore?

Today there are tens of thousands of writers who write well enough to command a following of readers. The vast majority of them seem to be caught up in the maddening hamster wheel activity of writing, submission, and rejection by companies that have no way of profitably publishing their work.

I've been following the literary efforts of some dear and talented friends for some time and have wanted to whack them gently alongside their heads to get them to wake up and see the possibilities they are ignoring. Some are online, some are not, but they all are transfixed by the traditional dream of being "published".

There are some incredibly persuasive reasons to look outside the resource-limited world of traditional publishing, if your writing is more interesting and thought-provoking than most of the material you read in "mainstream" publications:

1. When you publish your own work, you gain an immense amount of real experience as to what your market is. You also get honest feedback that helps you determine what to do to get more people reading your work.

2. Blogging is the first step in becoming a self-publisher. The feedback you get in your comments and from watching website visitor logs is instant and brutally or refreshingly honest.

You can use this to good advantage in developing a public awareness of your work and a community of people who are interested in seeing that you succeed. They will buy your book and, more importantly, they will tell others about your writing because it is interesting information that they are the first to hear about.

3. There is nothing so psychologically destructive as inviting unnecessary rejection.

Applying for a job when the company cannot pay what you are worth is ludicrous. Submitting manuscripts to companies that are frantically searching for a viable business model is worse.

If a publisher is doing well, it is because it has found a customer base for whatever it is currently publishing. The only works that will interest them are clones of what they are already publishing.

4. THERE IS NO SCARCITY OF OUTLETS FOR YOUR WORK!

Get over the idea that your piece is only valuable if it appears in a traditional magazine, collection or whatever. The only value of appearing in a well-known publication is the immediate visibility. Once it is published, it becomes old news by next month. 

Traditional publishing is a zero-sum game (If someone else gets published, you don't get published). If a known author with a track record of sales has something to release, a traditional publishing house would be crazy to publish something by an unknown instead.

If you were publishing, you would do the same. With limited production capability, you would choose the popular "brand" to sell, not the "unknown" brand.

As a self-publisher, you can publish your work in small quantities as I did, or you can use a POD publisher. Either way, your work will be available for people to buy it and you will do the same promotional actions as if you had published through a main-stream publishing house. There are unlimited outlets for your writing, all you have to do is use them.

There is unbelievable satisfaction in having people say, "I heard about your new book!"

Sometimes they even say, "Where can I get one?"

If you really want people to read your work, please take a hard look at self-publishing. You owe it to yourself to do so. There is no justification for a good piece of writing to remain unpublished. I have also proved to my own satisfaction that self-publishing caused a traditional publisher to license my work after I proved that a market existed for it.

This article applies to almost every form of publishing including music on CDs or MP3 files and artistic works of all kinds. You can reach customers all over the world if you use the Internet wisely.

Beyond Books - the future of self-publishing?

What if you could give away your ideas and still derive income from them?  What if this unconventional form of distribution could expose readers to your books who would otherwise never see them?

I am not quite there yet, but I think that day is fast coming, due to the power of context-sensitive advertising.

I was busy building an online book reader when I discovered that Google has already provided this service and my book is available on it now through the power of Google Book Search.  If you go to that site and enter "advice for whistleblowers", you will see this:

Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day - Page 82 by David St Lawrence Whistleblowers are people who tell it like it is, even if they suspect that they will lose their jobs and be attacked by people they consider to be friends. ... Full view - Table of Contents - About this book

You can scroll through the table of contents or to search the book using the "Search in this book window" for hot topics like "nepotism" and "why your manager lies".

You can amuse yourself by entering these unlikely search terms: sex, interviews, fear, integrity, seduced, seduction, and job satisfaction. You will be amazed at what you will find.

If you bookmark this site, you have an instant desktop reference to use in everyday work situations.

In the meantime, my book, Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day, is available as a free download until further notice. This is the complete book in PDF format.

I am offering this data as a public service to all who are in danger of receiving a termination as a corporate Christmas present.

It is, after all, the end of another quarter and companies jettison employees at this time in hopes of surviving. I hope you are not in that unhappy situation, but if you know of someone who is, send them a link to this article.

Beyond Journalism

YouTube Video has become the premier launching pad for new movies, new ideas, and propaganda. From brash, raunchy, and sometimes touching amateur efforts, YouTube has become the arena for sophisticated efforts at communicating the news that networks seem unable to handle.

This YouTube Video: Flight Club: Being Naughty on a Plane is a musical documentary which shows you the rules for "manufacturing" a security incident. It is worth watching for the music alone.

For a text treatment see this article in The Washington DC Examiner.  Which presentation conveys the situation more effectively to you?

The second YouTube Video you might want to check out is Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth.

Regardless of what you feel now about these two disparate issues, you will find it hard to forget these videos after watching them.

Every side of every story is now available on YouTube. No longer do we wait for pundits to explain the news to us. We can check several different sources of information and decide for ourselves.

Many times I watch mainstream media fumble with a story for several days before dealing with the realities of a situation. Some, like CBS and AP end up using blogger articles without any attribution. They plagarize and it is catching up to them every day.

Perhaps the new future of journalism is sending out reporters with digital video cameras so they don't get scooped by bloggers. Meanwhile, if you have an idea you want to promote, think about how it might be presented on YouTube.

Beyond Books

I'm fascinated by the increasingly widespread transition from printed media to online, on-demand media and am trying to pick an entry point where I can get a little of this action for myself.

I think there is another twist to this self-publishing game and it may further lower the barriers to getting the word out and making money at the same time.

I proved to my own satisfaction that the traditional publishing arena had little to offer a beginning author that self-publishing could not accomplish faster and more efficiently.

Any new work that lies outside a formulaic genre (mystery, romance, how-to, etc.) has a hard time getting the attention of a traditional publisher, and for good reason! Publishers need product that is readily salable, which means they favor commodity writing by name brand authors (Cussler, Crichton, King...)

Up to now, the most satisfying way to get your ideas into other's hands is to control the entire publishing and distribution process with sales help from online giants like Amazon.com.

Fred First's lyrical discussion of life in a quiet valley in the mountains (Slow Road Home) has an enormous amount of charm for those who long for simpler days and quiet pleasures, but no traditional publishing houses recognized the long-term potential in this book. I think they will eventually, but by then he may have decided that he likes being in control of his book and its future.

My book on surviving corporate employment (Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day) is still attracting readers from all over the world as they recognize that corporate life and corporate careers are increasingly short-term propositions.

However, this is a niche book targeted at those who are losing or have lost their jobs and while the market is more universal than I expected, it is not a bookstore item and never will be.

It is a reference work that one should read and reread as needed and it should ideally be available at no cost to help the people who need it most. More than 45,000 free copies have already been downloaded since the book came out in June 2005 and they are still being downloaded so I know the demand for it continues.

This brings me to present time where I see the ubiquity and usefulness of unobtrusive Google text ads becoming the possible opening to a new future for online publishing.

A book might be published online in chapter-sized chunks with a discreet advertising sidebar that provides context sensitive ads which might provide an income stream for the author. Cory Doctorow did this with his novel Themepunks on Salon.com, but the advertising was overpowering and offensive.

More recently, Tom Evslin serialized his Internet bubble novel hackoff.com and distributed it chapter by chapter via emails through Feedburner. He didn't put ads in his email, but I read his chapters on gmail with a running accompaniment of context sensitive ads and it was not distracting at all.

Non-fiction books might fare quite well with this model. In fact, I could see authors writing works specifically tailored to generate maximum ad revenue, because the ads might serve as additional reference material for the reader.

In celebration of this eventual possibility, I am once again making my book, Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day, available as a FREE DOWNLOAD until further notice. This is the full book in PDF format. 

When I come up with a version that provides bite-sized reference information in a more easily downloaded format, you will be the first to know.

Talent Developer Jane Chin and I had an early discussion about sharing ideas instead of hoarding them which you might find interesting. We both tend to share first and sort out the financial aspects later.

There is always a price for striking out in a new direction

One of the first things you learn about doing something new is that there are some people who will disapprove of the way you are doing it. These are "yesterday's experts" who are threatened by the changes that you represent.

My good friend Fred First, bemoans the fact that a literary magazine and a book fair have recently turned him down because his excellent book was not produced by a "reputable publisher".

It makes me want to whack him up the side of his head because he still doesn't get the fact that his work is valuable because of what he has written, not because of his publisher.

He seems to think that a "reputable" publisher's name on a book is an imprimatur that means something to prospective book buyers. It only matters to literary critics and they don't buy books!

Publishing houses do not set standards. They are desperately trying to defend their existing markets from incursions by self-published upstarts.

Another argument for self-publishing

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine. wrote The Long Tail, a brilliant article which first appeared in Wired in October 2004 and will become a book, published by Hyperion, on July 11, 2006.

The concept was elegantly captured by this graphic:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. ...In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

Chris has been developing the concept on his blog and now is ready to publish his work as a book.

Because the publisher feels that the above long tail graphic will be off-putting to prospective readers, they have come up with a cover graphic which is non-offensive, non-challenging, and non-informative!

Does anyone else feel that the use of an enter button is trite, banal, and utterly clueless?

I question what this publisher adds to the project except for possible distribution assistance. I think this cover will not attract any new readers and will make the book a much harder sell than one with the original graphic.

Read the whole story of the cover with comments from readers who have been following the long tail story from the beginning.

Those of you who are self-publishing can add this to your list of questions to ask yourself. Does the cover communicate my ideas to the people I want to reach?

Look at this cover and judge for yourself. The text is fine, but the graphic is aimed at a knee-high culture which probably thinks the long tail is something you order to go.

Tag: The Long tail

Setting expectations correctly is harder than it seems

After all that I have written about the vital necessity of setting expectations correctly, I belatedly realized that I have missed the mark in terms of preparing readers for what they would find in my book, Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day!

Many readers have been trying to tell me about this, but it took recruiter Jim Durbin to put it into words that I could clearly understand.

Jim Durbin: The first three chapters define conditions where a person's career starts to head the wrong direction.  They represent accurate descriptions of dysfunctional workplaces, not a harangue against former employers and co-workers.

DUH! I knew that the first three chapters are very painful reading for many hard-working professionals, because they bring up experiences which were major setbacks in their careers!

I tried to prepare them in the book, but I failed to set expectations properly in my ad copy and on my Danger Quicksand website.

People who were ready for the grim realities of employment scarfed up the information and gave me rave reviews. These people had been chewed up and spit out by corporations and they were tickled pink to find out they weren't crazy, they weren't alone, and there was something they could do to put it all behind them and get on with life!

On the other hand, people looking for an amusing book on surviving corporate employment, but with no real idea of what a dysfunctional workplace is, found my descriptions disturbing. This was true of the book reviewers who had not been exposed to a career-threatening workplace.

By setting reader expectations properly, I would have warned off the casual browsers and would have attracted those with serious career difficulties. I am addressing this now by saying that this book contains graphic data unsuitable for young impressionable minds.

The money quote is:

If you are a typical hard-working professional, the first three chapters are going to be painful because they deal with some of the worst experiences you have ever had.

The payoff comes when you realize that what happened was not your fault, and that there is a brighter future ahead if you can put this behind you.

We'll see how potential readers respond. I think it will be interesting.

Have any of you writers experienced any difficulty in matching your book promotion to the reader's experience in reading your book?

Tag: self-publishing

Self-publishing is a continual learning experience

The most interesting thing about self-publishing is that each book is like a virtual micro-business. Everything I have written about micro-businesses applies to self-publishing almost without exception.

For example, micro-business success on a limited budget usually requires identifying a niche market in which people communicate about products which they find useful or entertaining. In this kind of a market, a valuable product or service at the right price will benefit greatly from word-of-mouth advertising.

Successful self-published books generally begin in a niche market, although they can spill over to a general mass market if enough word-of-mouth buzz gets generated and there is enough entertainment value to appeal to a broader market. The Harry Potter books are the best-known example of this.

Until you find that niche market, you spend a lot of time and money promoting your book to people who are interested, but don't recommend it to others. The ideal niche market would be people for whom your book is a solution to a problem. Reaching them may take a little doing and may involve finding other people who deem your book useful.

I self-published Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day almost a year ago to help level the playing field for hardworking people who were trying to support their families and maintain their sanity in a troubling and uncertain working environment.

The gritty, no-nonsense advice appealed to those who had been blindsided by career-shattering discoveries, but it turned out to be a quick test of a person's willingness to confront unpleasantness. This statement I made about HR was a typical example:

Page 83: ...Human Resources, contrary to your expectations, is not your friend. HR is there to protect the company and its executives against employees like you.

Some of my book reviewers were incredulous that I would make such a statement. On the other hand, I got rave reviews and thanks from people who were driven to the point of doubting their own sanity because of insane work situations and lack of support from HR.

Thanks to word of mouth, people kept on buying the book, but I did not feel I was reaching opinion leaders for the target market I was trying to reach.

Recently, I have gotten my book in the hands of people in the career management/recruiting/outplacement fields and book sales are trending up.

It appears that my book may help these professional recruiters when they deal with candidates who have not been job hunting recently and have unrealistic expectations.

I felt especially validated when I saw this review by Jim Durbin, of the Durbin Media Group. 

My takeaway from this experience is to find those who my target audience pays attention to and get my book into their hands. I will send a free review copy of Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day to any professional in the recruiting, headhunting, outplacement, and career counseling field. Just send me an email and I will send you a copy within 24 hours.

I have also been helped in great measure by my good friends in the blogosphere who reviewed my book on their weblogs and by friends who have continued to promote my book through ads on their sites. You can see their names listed on my left sidebar.

Tag: self-publishing